“Fstjae?”

“Guhnre… Emnjkn!”

“Finmse. Yho trai it then.”

“Where are you guys?” we all hear over our comms.

“Just outside that star system with the four ringed planets,” I say, “One of them has the 122 moons.”

“And you found what?”

“A chunk of metal,” Idra says.

“You’re cleaning space scrap?”

“No. No, no. This isn’t space scrap,” I say,” Try to find us on the viewport. You’ll see it.”

A moment passes. “What is that?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Idra says.

“By going into it?”

“We’ll be fine.”

“Are you insane? What is it with all of you and—”

“Permission to cut comms, captain?” Malkus asks.

“Granted,” I say. We all tap the control on the side of our helmets.

“No! Don’t you da—”

Malkus hooks both hands into the fracture and plants both feet on the metal monolith. Orbitless, geometric rocks aren’t new. If it weren’t for its low velocity we would’ve just flown on by. Things don’t just break orbit and then stop moving.

“What was it you said?” Idra asks, ”122 moons?”

“Yep.”

“Bit much if you ask me,” Malkus says with strain in his voice.

“Could you hurry up? My space-phobia’s making me itchy.”

“Idra, you chose—” he peels the metal back a bit. “— the wrong damn profession.” The fissures give. The plate of metal breaks off and drifts away with Malkus clinging to it. He lets go and presses the controls on his belt. His steam pack returns him to us.

“Right,” he says, “Into the abyss we go.”

I turn on the light on my chest and float into the darkness. Idra and Malkus follow. The tunnel is a perfect circle, with no end in sight, no light other than ours and wide enough that it still feels like we’re out in space.

Idra shakes her head, shining her light at the distant white walls. “Space at least had stars.”

I use my steam pack to propel forward. It’s not long before we can’t see the hole we entered through. After drifting through the darkness for a while we reach an intersection.

“First sign of intelligent design,” Malkus says, “Perfect 90-degrees.”

Forward, the tunnel continues as is. To our sides, the tunnel has circular, black metal panels scattered across its walls.

“Second sign of intelligent design. Doorways. Very obvious aperture doorways.”

“Malkus, shut up!” Idra yells.

“Why? Scared I’ll alert the aliens? You know how sound works in space, right?”

“Malkus,” I say.

“… Sorry.”

The steam pack takes me down the left tunnel. Most of the doors are shut, but one of them is open enough to slip an arm through. I look at Malkus and nod to the door.

“On it,” he says and drifts forward. He puts each hand into the opening and pulls until its wide enough for each of us to go through. I go in first. A square in the ceiling struggles to light up when I enter… Third sign…

It gives up. The room is small and cubic, with only what seems to be a large cushion in front of us.

First, I thought it just a pile of fabrics resting on the cushion. Then I processed what I was seeing – skeletons in clothing.

Skulls look back at us.

“Wait,” Malkus says, “…What?”

We all stare and stay in silence.

I kick myself up and float over the skeletons. The bones of their hands and feet are in pieces that lie around them. Their skulls are like ours. They hold each other like one would hold a partner, lying on their sides with their foreheads touching.

“Is this from home?” Malkus asks.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“No way,” Idra says. “There’s no way something this big leaves home’s atmosphere without base knowing about it.”

“Unless base didn’t want us to know about it.”

“This isn’t us,” I say. “This isn’t our tech.”

“It doesn’t look like tech at all.”

“Exactly. Our tech looks like tech.” I push the wall and float towards the door. “Whatever tech they used is advanced enough that it’s non-invasive. This isn’t us.”

“So, alien species that coincidentally looks like us?”

“Yes.”

We make our way deeper into the ship. The rooms we can get into are just more dimly lit cubicles with more skeletons. The rooms that don’t have skeletons don’t have anything we can understand. This place is a job for anthropologists, not explorers like us. We know what to make of the corpses, not of their strange tools.

It’s unnerving, seeing how organized everything is. There was no… catastrophe… At some point they unanimously decided to die in each other’s arms.

This place is the celestial graveyard of a species that chose to kill itself.

Approaching what I think is the centre of this ship, we encounter a door much different from the rest. All of the others were round apertures. This one is an arch as wide as the tunnel. A blue light flickers at us from the door’s centre. It’s the brightest light we’d seen since we came here. The three of us approach it. We all flinch when the door begins to slide up, disappearing into the top of the archway. It reveals a hall so deep and black that it seems like we’re exiting back into space.

Then lights come on; square panels like those in the rooms.

Some of them go out shortly after, but we can see enough. We float into the hollow cavity at the core of this ship and look all around us. Above us is a ceiling. Beneath us, an endless empty space lit by the panels.

The door closes. A distorted sound like metal scraping screeches from all around us. I float to the ceiling and my head presses on it. I feel the weight of my body pressing on my neck when I realise what’s happening.

“It’s artificial gravity,” I say to the others. We all lie on the ceiling— I mean the floor. I feel myself gradually become heavier, then settle at a weight slightly less than what I’m used to.

The three of us stand up.

“Complete!” a sound comes from everywhere. We look around us trying to figure out what made it.

“Woah,” Idra says, looking at the graphic on her wrist. “Getting an oxygen reading.” She looks at me.

I look at mine… There’s air – breathable air. No impurities. Nothing unusual. Oxygen and nitrogen.

“Feel like gambling, captain?” Malkus asks.

I reach for the neck of my helmet and unclip it. I cautiously lift it up, anxious that the readings are wrong, but no. Fresh, cool air flows into my helmet. It’s the freshest I’d breathed since leaving home. I lift my helmet and put it under my shoulder. Idra and Malkus watch me for a few breaths. I nod at them with a smile.

They look at each other, then take off theirs, revealing their blue skin and horns.

“I’m getting lightheaded,” Malkus says, “Not from the air. Just… this.” He holds his arms out to the side and looks up. I can’t help smiling. Neither can Idra.

I look to the centre of the circular platform we stand on. There’s one more. A skeleton sits at a table. I walk to it, catching my crew’s attention.

“Sad,” Idra says, “The others we saw weren’t alone.”

The bones of its arms and hands lie on the floor. A blue sphere sits on its lap. A silver, elliptical shaped device rests on the table in front of it. We’ve come across a few of them. They all have a small white dome on top; this one’s dome is flashing red.

Malkus and Idra inspect the sphere, without touching it or the skeleton and being careful of its bones.

“Wait isn’t this… That planet?” Idra asks, “Third one from that star nearby.”

“Can’t be. Looks nothing like it. The pieces are all funny. And its blue.”

“Yeah, I know, but take tectonic shifts and bad resource management into consideration.”

Malkus leans in a little closer. “… You might be right. Captain, what’s this one’s name?”

I look at them. “Something in the G three thousand range. I don’t know. Catalogues got harder to learn when we stopped naming and started labelling.” I look back at the device.

I touch the red light. It wiggles. I press it.

The air lights up above us, showing the face of the alien; a moving picture made of light. Where we had only seen bone, it has flesh and skin. It has a transparent circle over each eye, held by a wiry frame. Where we have horns, it has hair. It sits in the seat that it sits now. It hugs the blue sphere on its lap. It has five fingers on each hand; a finger less than us.

It stays silent, looking down at the ball, with its second finger tapping a spot on it. Malkus and Idra leave the skeleton to stand beside me. All three of us stare at the image that floats above its latter self.

It looks at us and it… it sighs. It sighs like I would sigh. It sighs like I have heard Malkus and Idra sigh before.

“My name is Captain Van Rooyen. I am the captain of vessel C3, but I suppose the label isn’t much when it’s the only surviving vessel.”

It sits in silence again, with its hand over its mouth. Its eyes turn red.

“I don’t even know what to say… We left Earth first. Then we left Mars.”

“What do you think it’s saying?” Malkus asks.

I shrug. “Last words, I suppose.”

“Humans, two; Solar System, zero. We killed two planets. What made us think a damn spaceship would survive us?” It takes off those two transparent circles and rubs its eyes. When it looks up, its eyes are redder and leaking transparent fluid. Its voice raises and cracks. “We killed Earth! We killed Mars! Then we were on to kill a new star system. The beginning of the march of the human infection across the goddamn galaxy!” It sobs with wet eyes and inhales through its blocked nostrils.

“…The look on those people’s faces as we blasted off without them… Some of them bruised or bloody because of enforcers. Don’t leave without us. Please. Don’t leave us to die here. And I knew some of them too. Just a bit away from being upper class enough to come with us.”

It holds the blue ball up and turns it slowly.

“We kept on running away thinking Earth was the problem. But we were the problem! All this cosmic horror mumbo jumbo, meanwhile we were the ones eating planets. This ship will be a derelict marking our failed attempt at escaping ourselves. Barely a lightyear away from the Milky Way. We could have at least died in a beautiful place. Now we’ll die in nothing, taking the euthanasia door out. Extinction by suicide…”

“I think it misses home,” Idra says. Her dry eyes look to the planet in the skeleton’s lap. “What happened to home?”

It shakes its head then looks at us. Idra begins to sob.

Its eyes are bright red. Its cheeks are wet with the fluid from its eyes. I had never seen a creature that looks like this. I have no idea what it is thinking about and yet I know exactly what it is feeling.

“We should have stayed,” it says, its voice cracking again.

Malkus begins to sob too. I feel my bottom lip start to shake. An ache in my chest puts a hollow feeling in my throat.

“We should have fucking stayed!”