Ellie tensed, jumped and grabbed hold of the lip of the access hatch. Malachi reached down from the shadows above and gave Ellie his hand. Ellie took it, Malachi pulled her up and Ellie wriggled through the opening. Once through the hatch she sat on the dirty floor and dangled her legs through the hole.

Tila flashed a light around the cramped space while Malachi scattered glowcubes around the cabin.

‘Is this the right place?’ Ellie asked before climbing to her feet. ‘I didn’t see a name outside.’

‘This is it,’ said Malachi. ‘Well, the right location anyway. Looks like the name got scratched away when they shoved it in here. There’ll be a nameplate somewhere in here, anyway.’

Tila scanned the room by flashlight while the cubes slowly came to life.

Malachi pulled two more flashlights from his pocket. He gave one to Ellie and clicked on the other.

‘Do you carry spares of everything?’ said Tila.

‘You can’t be too prepared,’ he replied as he ducked underneath a console to inspect it.

‘It’s a bit small for a cargo ship,’ said Ellie, calculating the ship’s volume from what she could see.

‘It was a hauler, not a transport,’ said Malachi. His voice came back muffled beneath the console. ‘This is just the rear cabin. A hauler is basically a tug which pulls a shipping spine full of cargo pods. They stick thrusters on the other end to make it go. That hatch we came through would connect to a habitation module for longer journeys.’

Ellie smiled to herself in the dark. It amused her that Malachi was always ready to teach. ‘I love that you know everything,’ she said.

‘Some things,’ said Malachi.

Tila leaned over a console and wiped the sticky dirt from the display with her fingertips. The cabin wall above the desk crumpled inward, as if the hauler had been forced into a hole that was too small.

‘He doesn’t know everything,’ she said. ‘Ask him how to cook.’

‘Hey!’ Malachi protested. ‘I can cook.’

‘You can’t,’ said Tila, without looking up.

‘She’s right though,’ said Ellie. ‘You cooked for me once.’

‘Just once?’ said Malachi. He tried to remember when that happened.

‘Mmm hmm. I never let you do it again.’

Tila smiled into her shoulder and pressed switches at random. Maybe there was still some life in the batteries. They were real switches, not smooth glass touch panels. Nothing worked. She straightened up. ‘So, all we have is a cockpit?’ she asked.

‘This is just the rear cabin. The main cockpit is through there,’ Malachi replied, and pointed at a door Tila had assumed was a closet.

Ellie touched a finger to the door control mounted in the frame. ‘There’s no power.’

‘Can we force it open?’ said Tila.

‘Try the manual release,’ suggested Malachi, pointing to a spot over her head.

Tila reached up and unclipped a panel covered with faded instructions. Inside was a red handle. She yanked it sharply and something clunked inside the recessed mechanism. The cabin door opened an inch.

She tugged at the lip of the door with her fingertips but could barely move it any further.

‘Can you help me?’ she asked Malachi.

Malachi edged his way past Ellie, squeezed one hand into the gap, took hold of a grab handle with his other hand and pulled hard. The door shot open with a loud crack. More dust billowed up from the door frame, which made them cough.

The cabin was a standard commercial design. It was practical, efficient, and entirely lacking in imagination.

Two chairs, once white and new but now covered in the same fine dark powder as everything else, sat before a cracked command console which filled the width of the cabin. The three-paned view-port had smashed open when the ship had been wedged into its final home.

The impact had crushed and twisted the nose of the hauler. Evidently, an air-tight seal still existed somewhere or the cabin would have de-pressurised and they would all be breathing vacuum by now. Even deep inside the city people had to be alert to leaks.

What remained was damp and surprisingly cold, most likely the result of an old coolant leak nearby.

The madescent air chilled them through their clothes and made dusty surfaces become grime to the touch.

The moist atmosphere had corroded any wiring exposed by the impact. Broken electronics hung from the underside of the console. A myriad of electronic and mechanical crumbs littered the dirty floor.

Malachi dropped into the pilot seat and blew hard at the dirt covering the controls. Only a few particles danced free from the damp film which trapped them on the glass and metal surfaces.

Tila surveyed the scene with doubt. ‘Nina was right, someone did get here before us after all.’

‘They can’t have,’ said Malachi. ‘The hatch was sealed. We must be first.’

‘So why is it such a wreck?’ asked Ellie as she poked her head into the room. Her breath misted faintly in the chill air.

‘I don’t know, but not all of this damage was accidental.’ He waved a hand over the console. ‘Maybe the screens, but not this.’

Tila slumped into the co-pilot seat. She didn’t know what she had expected to find here. Part of her fantasised about opening the door and finding all the answers she wanted neatly wrapped up and awaiting her arrival, but life was rarely so accommodating. Even so, she had hoped for more than a battered old cabin that had been squeezed into the pock-ravaged skin of the Juggernaut.

It’s not like anyone could even have piloted the ship in here, she thought. The ship had simply been forced into a hole to be forgotten.

Ellie and Malachi were by this time deep in the underside of the main flight console. Tila could tell what they were doing from the noises. She heard Malachi pushing through a mass of dangling wires, then call for Ellie’s flashlight. They swapped places. Malachi passed Ellie a tool and directed her smaller hands in some task his own hands were too big for.

She heard wires being snipped. Then a component of some kind, unrecognisable to Tila, appeared on the floor next to her.

‘Keep this,’ said Malachi.

She picked it up and placed it on the empty seat beside her. She heard another snip, then a tearing sound as Malachi or Ellie ripped something free from the console. This appeared on the floor too.

‘Junk,’ said Malachi.

Tila placed this on the chair, too. Over the next few minutes, more things appeared. Malachi said ‘keep it’, or ‘junk it’, and Tila placed it in the correct pile. Malachi was obviously taking care with the items he wanted to keep. That pile of components had been neatly trimmed away from their housings. The items he didn’t want had simply been ripped out to make room.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Tila stared blankly at the heap of discarded electronics. Frayed wires sprouted from each item like a rooting seed. Like her, they were useless now. Malachi and Ellie were doing the work. She just had to sit here and wait. She half-smiled to herself. Hopefully I have more to offer than a frayed wire, she thought.

She dragged a fingertip over the filthy console without realising she was tracing out letters.

‘How did this place get so dirty, anyway? It hasn’t been here long, and it doesn’t look that old,’ she asked.

Malachi’s hand appeared from underneath the console and his fingers wiped through the dirt. The hand vanished again. Malachi sniffed the dirt and rubbed the residue between finger and thumb. ‘It looks mineral to me. Maybe this was hauling rocks or soil? It gets everywhere if the crew are sloppy. All these surfaces should be sealed during normal operations.’ He threw an old rag at her leg. ‘Here, use this, and see what else you can find in there.’

Tila wiped the worst of the dirt from her fingers as Malachi returned to his work. In truth, there wasn’t much to see. The row of small lockers at the back were empty. Any items in there had been removed long ago.

The first-aid kit was gone, which was a shame. Medical supplies of any kind were always in demand. Even the fire extinguishers had been removed from their bright orange plinths. The high visibility signs above them pointed to nothing.

Tila used the rag to wipe the console clean for something to do, grateful that some things were as simple as they appeared. The dirt gave way to reveal the perfectly smooth glass surface beneath. Almost perfectly smooth. Her actions revealed a shallow, oval indentation at the top of the console. At each side was an empty screw hole. They even took the name badge.

‘Ow!’ Malachi’s exclamation jolted Tila from her thoughts.

Ellie pulled her head out of the console desk. ‘You okay?’ she asked.

‘It’s nothing, just a sharp edge.’

‘Let me look,’ said Tila.

Malachi rolled his eyes at her concern. ‘It’s nothing. Really. Look, see? Just a little cut.’ He presented his wound with a flourish.

He was right, it was just a minor cut. Mollified, Tila sat back in her chair. Just a little cut. The thought gnawed at her brain. She mentally shook her head to clear her mind.

‘What are you going to do with those?’ She pointed at the pile of broken electronics with her toe.

‘That’s what I asked him,’ said Ellie. She stood and stretched to work out the kinks that had developed in the cramped workspace.

‘No, you asked what was I going to do with all this junk,’ accused Malachi.

‘Same difference.’

The familiar sound of good-natured banter between her friends relaxed Tila.

‘So, what is it for?’ she repeated.

‘Some are spares, some are just for fun,’ said Malachi.

‘Isn’t this too old to be useful?’

‘Some of this tech is less than fifteen years old. We’re getting by with parts much older than this. We couldn’t buy this tech in the city no matter how much money we had. And it’s not like anyone cuts their prices especially for us.’

Tila frowned. That word again. It wanted attention. ‘Be honest with me, Mal, do you think this ship came from the colony mission?’

Malachi thought for a moment before answering. The truth wasn’t always welcome. ‘I don’t think so, Tila. I’m sorry. I wish I could help, but I just can’t be sure. The thing is, anyone could register a commercial ship with the same name as one of the colony ships as long as they used a different port authority. The transponder chip would confirm it for sure either way, but I haven’t found it yet.’

‘Is that unusual?’

He shrugged. ‘I guess.’

Ellie brushed her hair from her eyes with the back of her hand to avoid touching her face with dirty fingers.

‘What does a transponder do?’

‘It IDs the ship for navigation and fleet comms,’ Malachi explained.

‘You know, the nameplate from the console is missing too,’ said Tila.

‘But we know what the ship is called,’ Ellie pointed out.

‘The nameplate I took from Orion had the port authority on it.’

‘So?’

‘So, the nameplate would link this ship to a specific port. We would know which Far Horizon this is,’ Tila replied.

‘Okay, that’s unusual,’ Malachi admitted.

‘Not if someone is trying to hide what this ship is, or where it’s been,’ she pointed out.

Malachi hesitated, then said, ‘Maybe.’ He returned to the underside of the console with Ellie and continued to look thoughtful.

Tila watched them start another argument over how best to reach the remaining innards of the console.

Ellie protested that she couldn’t reach anything while Malachi continued to insist that she could. He collected more small cuts and scrapes every time Ellie challenged him to reach something she said was too difficult, and then the moment he agreed with her she plucked them out for him, anyway.

It dawned on Tila that Ellie made a fuss just so she could prove to Malachi how indispensable she really was. It was obvious now she saw them working together like this. Ellie couldn’t do anything apart from win races and look pretty, so when she had the chance she made a big deal about how essential she was. As Tila listened to them bicker, she also realised that Malachi knew. He was kind enough to indulge her.

After declaring at last that there was nothing else of value in the console, Malachi took his tools back from Ellie and began to carefully pry tiny components free from the circuit boards they had cut out. He neatly trimmed back the wires Ellie had cut.

‘Sorry, Tila, all the good stuff is gone. The transponder’s not there. We looked, but…’ He left the sentence hanging.

‘We?’ said Ellie, wiping her dirty hands on the upholstered seat-back. Without looking, Malachi threw some small, useless part at her which bounced off her forehead.

Tila sighed. This was going nowhere. She wanted answers, but most of all she wanted hope. So far, all she had gained from their expedition was more questions. But somehow the ship felt wrong. It nagged at her, this little hauler buried so far inside the city. It should have been at the surface.

But what reason would anyone have to hide it? It was just a hauler. It had no value.

So why did it bother her?

Tila stared at the blade in Malachi’s hand.

‘Mal.’

‘Yeah?’

‘How come there are so many chips missing?’

‘Probably because another salvage team went over the ship before it was abandoned here.’

‘So they took out anything valuable?’

‘Yeah, they got most of it. I’m only taking what they left behind.’

She paused to think this through. There was a question she needed to ask, but she didn’t know what it was. It taunted her from just beneath the surface of her mind. Just out of reach. She asked another instead. ‘Why are you being so careful with that knife?’

‘Because I don’t want to damage anything, obviously. Ellie, can you hold that light a little higher for me?’

‘So how come everything else has been ripped out? I mean, if it was valuable, wouldn’t they have been more careful, like you are being? Why risk the damage?’

Malachi hesitated. He dropped his hands to his lap. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Maybe it wasn’t a salvage team, maybe someone was in a hurry and ripped those parts out so we couldn’t find them.’

Malachi sighed and waved his tool like he was teaching a class. ‘Tila, I see what you’re thinking, but they could have just deleted the data if they wanted.’

‘But they didn’t, did they? Deleting it wasn’t enough. You’re the engineer, Mal, why would they do that?’

‘You think this ship has been cleaned out, so no one knows what it is? That it’s from your Far Horizon, and someone is trying to hide it?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Come on, really?’

It sounded silly when she heard it from someone else’s lips. And yet.

And yet.

Ellie joined in for the first time.

‘We couldn’t find the transponder, and you said that was unusual. And I couldn’t find the navigation data chip you wanted either.’

‘Yeah, but—’ Malachi began.

‘Hold on,’ interrupted Tila. ‘This ship is hidden away, and it’s missing any sort of ID and now we don’t even know where it’s been?’

‘But not everything’s missing, look at all the chips I did find.’

‘What are they?’

He pointed them out one by one. ‘This one controls the fuel mix, this provides baseline calibration for life support, this one talks to the gyroscope—’

‘Which one controls navigation? Or comms? Or flight plans?’

‘None of these do, but—’

‘Malachi, have you found anything, anything at all, that tells us what this ship is, or where it has been?’

He hesitated.

‘Mal?’

‘You’re going to take this the wrong way. I don’t want to get your hopes up,’ said Malachi carefully.

‘Because?’

‘The comms buffer is missing, but this was a part of it. I think it got caught up in the wires when they pulled the rest of it free.’ He picked up a small black square the size of her thumbnail and held it out in his palm.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know exactly. It’s not one of the primary components. It could be a metadata store or a sub-processor.’

Tila turned the tiny chip over in her hands, looking for some clue, some piece of information that meant her journey didn’t have to end here.

‘So, it’s probably as useless as every other thing in this stupid shuttle!’ She made to throw it back on the floor in frustration, but Ellie stopped her and took the chip from Tila’s hand.

She held it between finger and thumb and examined it by flashlight. ‘Metadata? That’s like data about data, right?’ she said to Malachi.

‘That’s right, like the address or the timestamp, but not the actual message.’

‘So, it is useless,’ Tila repeated.

Ellie flapped her hand in Tila’s face to shut her up. ‘Wait!’ she ordered. ‘Does that mean you can find out where and when messages were sent?’

Malachi’s jaw dropped. ‘Ellie, you’re a genius!’

‘I am? I mean, I am!’

‘How does that help?’ Tila asked.

‘There’s nothing in this cabin that links it to the colony expedition but if we can find any evidence of messages sent to or received from the Far Horizon after the colony ship vanished—’

‘It would mean they survived the journey,’ finished Tila.

‘Maybe it’s not useless after all,’ said Ellie as she gave it back to Tila.

‘Come to the workshop tomorrow. I’ll see what I can find out,’ Malachi said.

Tila closed her fingers around the chip, not crushing it, but forming a tight protective barrier with her fist. She studied her knuckles as she folded her thumb over her fingers.

‘I know I saw two ships destroyed and one disappear. In the last twelve years no one has had any answers for me.’ She stood up and held out the chip. ‘If this even has a hint of an answer, I want to know what it is.’