Tomorrows - Chapter 1
Backstreet Boys - No Pairing - Tomorrows - Chapter 1
Okay, so I know that these are in no way the original chapter breaks. But they're natural breaks in the narrative at any rate. Thus, here it is after a long long long long long long (ad nauseum) time.
Just so you know, this is LONG. I'm posting rather large chunks and still gonna have to post 47 billion of them.
She sighed and stretched her arms above her head. It had been an extraordinarily long cycle. She deserved a break and she was going to take it. The ship could take care of itself for a while. That’s what it was designed to do.
Reaching behind her head, she disconnected her primary interface. She jolted slightly. Going on or offline was always weird feeling. She smoothed her hair back from her face and slid nimble fingers down her arms to pull the secondary interfaces. That done, she slipped her plugs into the sockets just above her wrists. Wouldn’t do to get something in one of them. Last time that had happened, some of her motor circuits had seized and she hadn’t been able to move her fingers until she’d gotten to a diagnostician. Her primary interface she’d had upgraded years ago. It was recessed slightly into her skull and had its own cover, so when it slid into place, no one was the wiser. Good thing too. It would truly suck to screw up anything attached directly to her brain. Stretching again, she rose.
“Layla,” she called. A warm, female voice answered her.
“Yes?” it replied, tone sliding slightly upward at the end. Ugh. She was gonna have to change that damn voice. It was gonna drive her nuts.
“Auto shut-down,” she told the computer. “I’m goin’ to bed.” Lights began winking out all along the console.
“Goodnight, mistress,” Layla called. Shut up you damn machine. She whacked a console as she strode from the cockpit. She stepped into the lavatory.
Leaning close to the mirror, she peered at her reflection. Gray eyes. Slate, right now, but they could flash to silver without warning. Her hair hung in literally hundreds of tiny, tiny braids. The tips brushed her shoulders. It was silver today, with red metallic highlights. Big, eyes set over cheekbones so high that when she smiled, her eyes almost looked slanted. But she didn’t smile much and didn’t care. Sighing at herself, she splashed water on her face. She stripped down; left her clothes on the floor.
Stepping outside the bathroom, she yanked a large, loose shirt over her head.
“Why do you do that?” she asked herself. Most spacers hardly bothered with clothes let alone nightclothes. What was the point when everything was climate-controlled and no one else was around for light-years?
“Too much time groundside,” she muttered, sliding into her bunk. She curled onto her side, foot idly scratching at an interface on her leg. She stared blindly through the viewport. God that was a whole lot of nothing. She smiled. That was why she liked it. She closed her eyes. Time to recharge, she told herself. And just that simply, she was asleep and dreaming.
***
Somewhere else . . .
A dark ship hung idle in space. It was enormous. Huge and black and completely cold. It gave off no heat, no light. It simply sat there. Those brave enough to venture close, would have seen burn marks on the hull and the occasional dent or scrape from a passing asteroid. But no one ventured that close. No one knew the silent behemoth was there. It had simply waited in the dark for so long that most had never known it had existed. And those who did thought it myth. And no one cared one way or the other. Who would care about an ancient, dead ship anyway? Except those who knew it wasn’t dead.
***
Halfway through her second dream cycle, she was awakened by screaming alarms and wailing claxons. And that damn voice.
"Alert. Alert. Aler-ert," it sang. She sat up.
“Dammit Layla! Shut up. All of it,” she snarled. Everything went dead silent. Except the voice.
“There is a proximity warning,” it stated sweetly. Grumbling, she swung her legs out of bed and shuffled into the cockpit again. She slumped into the pilot’s chair and plugged in her secondaries. Yawning still, she depressed the cover at the base of her skull and jacked into her primary as well. No sense in not being careful. And besides, now she didn’t have to listen. She could just know.
Display alert. she instructed. The computer flashed a series of images directly into her visual cortex. She closed her eyes as they streamed by.
Whoa, stop. The images halted. Back up. Obligingly, the information scrolled back.
Stop. She pondered a moment. What the hell is that?
She already knew Layla didn’t know. Hell, she knew everything Layla knew, that was the point. Sighing, she opened her eyes. What the hell was out there? She opened the main viewport. Her mouth dropped open.
Hanging in front of her was the biggest ship she’d ever seen. It was massive. And it was dead in space. Cautiously, she edged her little ship in closer. She was getting some power readings but not many. This thing might still be armed. Damn. But it was huge. And beautiful once. As she got in closer she saw the evidence of years of wear and tear that simply existing in space could cause. Where were the shields?
Initiate hail. The computer sent out a standard call. No response. Okay.
She’d try manual. She’d heard that some older ships didn’t do CPU to CPU. And that thing was definitely old.
Open frequency. The little-used radio chirped. She cleared her throat.
“Unidentified ship. Do you require assistance? Is anyone aboard?” Stupid question. If there were people, the would have noticed her by now, sitting right on their flank the way she was. She blinked. Faintly, she got a response. She cranked the incoming up as high as it would go.
Through bursts of static and squeals of interference, she heard . . . music?
What was this? The radio fell silent. A moment later, it rotated frequencies and the same snatch of song came through again. Her lips curved. It was a recognition signal.
Identify incoming transmission. Layla stuttered. It didn’t know. Well that was nice. How was she gonna talk to that thing now? She crossed her arms.
“Well, it certainly is huge. Larger than life. I mean just look at it.
“Damn,” she whispered to the air. The music cut off in mid-transmission.
Slowly the ship rotated towards her. Oh shit. This could not be good. A burst of static cut through her frantic preparations to turn tail and run.
Three words said in a calm, male voice.
“Welcome home boys.”
***
She gaped as the huge docking bay slid open. There were still no lights.
Hitting her spot, she angled it into the bay. God, it was huge. Everything about this damn ship was huge. Gulping, she thought. What should she do?
Okay, scratch that. She should tag this bad boy from a safe distance and get the hell out of Dodge. So what was she going to do? Eyes wide, she chose.
Initiate docking procedures. Slowly, her little ship glided into the bay and settled itself on the ground. As soon as the bottom of her ship made contact, the doors silently rolled shut. As the bay was plunged into absolute darkness, she wondered if maybe this hadn’t been such an excellent plan.
Suddenly, light blazed all around her. She began to hear sounds as if through a very thin tube. They slowly grew louder and fuller. It was that snatch of music again. The bay was being pressurized.
Twenty minutes later, she tentatively stepped out of the relative safety of her own little vessel and looked around. There were two exits. The huge external doors and a single, tiny door in the far corner. She started walking towards it. She wanted into the interior of this thing.
Reaching the door, she noticed a panel next to it. Delicately, she ran her fingers over it. It was cool and damp from the moisture that had condensed when the bay had been pressurized. Well, then. All systems were not quite operational were they? That damn snatch of a song was still playing again and again. She looked for the interface. Maybe she could plug in and make it stop. There wasn’t one. What the? She noticed the small squares on a slick piece of plastic. Each square had a symbol etched into it.
“Oh my Lord. Manual interface,” she breathed. “How old is this thing?” She stared at the touchpad. The symbols looked familiar. What were they? Slowly, a memory from her childhood surfaced. Her grandfather, bouncing her on his knee and singing in a language she didn’t understand. He’d been angry with her mother for not teaching her. So he was. But he died a few years later and the lessons had stopped. Her mother hadn’t seen a point in teaching her a dead language.
“English,” she murmured, clumsily wrapping her tongue around the foreign word. Come to think of it, that song was in English too. So why had the ship acknowledged her? Oh duh, she’d been interfaced. The computer had rebroadcast everything she said in every language it knew. And it knew English. That had been her last tip of the hat to a man she’d dearly loved.
She’d fed Layla an English language program. So what had she said to make the ship stop. Mentally, she rewound those few seconds. Nothing unusual.
Nothing out of the ordinary . . . She’d asked if anyone was home. Talked to herself. Repeated one of her grandpa’s little sayings.
She stopped. Not possible. If it was, she was going to go back groundside just to leave flowers on his grave.
Fixing the phrase in her mind, she peered at the touchpad. Hesitantly, she reached out and touched what she thought was the right symbol. And then the next. Half-forgotten lessons crept back. She said the symbols aloud as she typed.
“L . . . A . . . R . . .” she kept typing. It took her nearly an hour and four tries, but she finally got it. She pushed enter. The music stopped.
Thank you God. The door hissed open.
“I owe you, Grandpa. I owe you big,” she laughed, as she stepped through the door and into the past.
It was dead silent. The air on this side of the door was slightly stale. And the lights flickered. Clicking on her light, she started walking down the hall. She swung her lamp left and right. Up and down. Something had happened here. Carbon burns scored the walls. Lights had exploded and bits of glass still littered the hallways. Huge pocks in the walls showed where internal defenses, gun emplacements and the like, had exploded.
There were no bodies.
Lord where was the crew?
She stumbled against something in the dark. She turned her light to see. It was a boot. Next to a uniform. There was no body in the uniform. She nudged it with her foot. Something rattled. She leapt back. Oh ewww. Well, almost no body. Then it occurred to her. If that’s all that’s left, how long has this thing been here? Rubbing her boot on the back on her pants leg, she stared. Was this a crew member or an invader? Did it really matter? She started walking again. Every now and again, she carefully skirted a body or what was left of one. The farther she got from the door, the more there were of them.
She peeked in every door along the way. Most of the rooms had been ransacked. Furniture smashed and walls scorched. In one room the carpet was charred. It had been set on fire. She entered none of them. They weren’t the important part of this. She wanted to know what was.
She walked and crept and tiptoed down the hall and around remains. A seeming eternity later, she ran into a dead end. The end of the hall was burned beyond anything she’d seen thus far. The walls were completely blackened and there were the remains of at least four or five bodies clustered in front of it. A jagged piece of wall had been ripped out to use as cover. Assuming all these people she’d passed were members of the crew, then whatever they’d been protecting was here. She was pretty sure that these were crewmembers because she seriously doubted any invaders would have stuck around long enough to lose nearly a hundred people. She doubted there’d been that many raiders in the first place. So this was crew. And they’d died for whatever was down that hall. She gingerly made her way past the last few corpses to the wall. There had to be a door. No one would guard a dead end. Ahh, there it was. Recessed into the wall and nearly invisible, but there nonetheless.
Biting the tip of her tongue, she painstakingly poked in the same code as last time. She jolted back as the door hissed. Steam curled around the edges. She stepped forward again and a door slid open.
She stared. A long, pale blue hall stretched away from her. The lights were on full here and the air was fresh and circulating. The entire hallway was pristine. Not a single scorch or burn. The raiders hadn’t made it this far.
She slipped through the door, feeling like an intruder in a mausoleum. Once across the threshold, she looked back.
“I understand. You died for this,” she whispered to the dark hallway. “I promise I won’t hurt anything.” She felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. As if dozens of eyes stared at her, begging her to protect whatever had required that so many perish. She stood absolutely motionless until the sensation passed. She shivered and moved away from the door. It hissed shut.
She looked around at the untouched hallway.
Adrenaline rushed through her system, leaving her breathless and giddy.
Whatever was back here was vital. Or had been to these people. And she was desperate to know what it was. Gasping in a breath, she clutched her light in her fist and started walking. There was something to be found here. And she was going to find it.
She opened every door on the hallway. The first five were living quarters.
Almost identical, each one had a bedroom, lavatory and extra room. The extra rooms were where each differed. The first had a library with a huge black thing in the middle and honest-to-God books that she was pretty sure were printed on PAPER. Whoa. She inched toward the black thing. It had a long, low lid on one side. She gently opened it. Slender white and black pedals gleamed underneath. She stretched out a finger and depressed one. A low tone bonged from the thing. She jumped back, startled. Cautiously, she pressed another. A different tone sounded. It made noise! She was tempted to sit and play with the thing, but found herself leaving the room for the next. It too had a library, though minus the black thing. She fingered the books. Her fingers itched to touch everything.
The third room had a room full of large, weight bearing machines. She smiled. These she recognized. Well, not exactly, but the principle involved. These were direct-resistance muscle-building devices. Weight machines.
The fourth room had a soft room with muted colors. It seemed to be a room designed for sitting and thinking. Like something one would find in a groundside home. Not in space. Tearing herself away from the beautiful things that littered the shelves and tables, she moved on. She wanted to see everything.
The last room was a techie’s wet dream. There were screens and interfaces and what she vaguely recognized as at least four kinds of virtual gaming systems. Incongruously, an easel with a sketchpad was propped in the corner. She smiled a little. Someone had once spent a lot of time in these rooms. She left without touching anything.
She padded silently into the last room. The longer she stayed, the more she felt like she was desecrating a tomb, but she just couldn’t leave yet. She paused inside the door. An infirmary. A high-tech, glossy one. It looked as though it had never been used. Why? When all those people were dying out there, why had no one used this place to help them? Come to think of it, why was this place locked off from the rest of the ship? So many questions.
Turning slowly, she completed her survey of the room. There was another door. She walked to it. The door slid back revealing an elevator. Her heart jumped nervously. Was there more? She timidly stepped aboard. She stared at the number of buttons. At least four more levels. There was apparently a lot more. She pushed the first button. The doors snapped shut. Fighting panic, she braced for the worst, but the elevator only slid smoothly up a level.
The doors opened. Before her was a round, white room with an enormous machine in the center. It occurred to her to wonder briefly why, if this ship was as old as it looked, was everything so high-tech. She pushed that aside to be dealt with later.
She walked to the machine and peered at it. It had windows. Five, round, frosted windows. She gasped and rubbed at the first one. Oh holy. There was someone in there. Wildly, she scrabbled at the other four. She couldn’t see much through the fog and frost, but in each one, was a person. Laying a hand on her chest, she wheezed. Oh god. She knew. This was what those people had died for. This was what that infirmary was for. This was the secret this ship was hiding. And, she finished, eyes rounded with shock, the secret was still alive.
Okay, so I know that these are in no way the original chapter breaks. But they're natural breaks in the narrative at any rate. Thus, here it is after a long long long long long long (ad nauseum) time.
Just so you know, this is LONG. I'm posting rather large chunks and still gonna have to post 47 billion of them.
She sighed and stretched her arms above her head. It had been an extraordinarily long cycle. She deserved a break and she was going to take it. The ship could take care of itself for a while. That’s what it was designed to do.
Reaching behind her head, she disconnected her primary interface. She jolted slightly. Going on or offline was always weird feeling. She smoothed her hair back from her face and slid nimble fingers down her arms to pull the secondary interfaces. That done, she slipped her plugs into the sockets just above her wrists. Wouldn’t do to get something in one of them. Last time that had happened, some of her motor circuits had seized and she hadn’t been able to move her fingers until she’d gotten to a diagnostician. Her primary interface she’d had upgraded years ago. It was recessed slightly into her skull and had its own cover, so when it slid into place, no one was the wiser. Good thing too. It would truly suck to screw up anything attached directly to her brain. Stretching again, she rose.
“Layla,” she called. A warm, female voice answered her.
“Yes?” it replied, tone sliding slightly upward at the end. Ugh. She was gonna have to change that damn voice. It was gonna drive her nuts.
“Auto shut-down,” she told the computer. “I’m goin’ to bed.” Lights began winking out all along the console.
“Goodnight, mistress,” Layla called. Shut up you damn machine. She whacked a console as she strode from the cockpit. She stepped into the lavatory.
Leaning close to the mirror, she peered at her reflection. Gray eyes. Slate, right now, but they could flash to silver without warning. Her hair hung in literally hundreds of tiny, tiny braids. The tips brushed her shoulders. It was silver today, with red metallic highlights. Big, eyes set over cheekbones so high that when she smiled, her eyes almost looked slanted. But she didn’t smile much and didn’t care. Sighing at herself, she splashed water on her face. She stripped down; left her clothes on the floor.
Stepping outside the bathroom, she yanked a large, loose shirt over her head.
“Why do you do that?” she asked herself. Most spacers hardly bothered with clothes let alone nightclothes. What was the point when everything was climate-controlled and no one else was around for light-years?
“Too much time groundside,” she muttered, sliding into her bunk. She curled onto her side, foot idly scratching at an interface on her leg. She stared blindly through the viewport. God that was a whole lot of nothing. She smiled. That was why she liked it. She closed her eyes. Time to recharge, she told herself. And just that simply, she was asleep and dreaming.
***
Somewhere else . . .
A dark ship hung idle in space. It was enormous. Huge and black and completely cold. It gave off no heat, no light. It simply sat there. Those brave enough to venture close, would have seen burn marks on the hull and the occasional dent or scrape from a passing asteroid. But no one ventured that close. No one knew the silent behemoth was there. It had simply waited in the dark for so long that most had never known it had existed. And those who did thought it myth. And no one cared one way or the other. Who would care about an ancient, dead ship anyway? Except those who knew it wasn’t dead.
***
Halfway through her second dream cycle, she was awakened by screaming alarms and wailing claxons. And that damn voice.
"Alert. Alert. Aler-ert," it sang. She sat up.
“Dammit Layla! Shut up. All of it,” she snarled. Everything went dead silent. Except the voice.
“There is a proximity warning,” it stated sweetly. Grumbling, she swung her legs out of bed and shuffled into the cockpit again. She slumped into the pilot’s chair and plugged in her secondaries. Yawning still, she depressed the cover at the base of her skull and jacked into her primary as well. No sense in not being careful. And besides, now she didn’t have to listen. She could just know.
Display alert. she instructed. The computer flashed a series of images directly into her visual cortex. She closed her eyes as they streamed by.
Whoa, stop. The images halted. Back up. Obligingly, the information scrolled back.
Stop. She pondered a moment. What the hell is that?
She already knew Layla didn’t know. Hell, she knew everything Layla knew, that was the point. Sighing, she opened her eyes. What the hell was out there? She opened the main viewport. Her mouth dropped open.
Hanging in front of her was the biggest ship she’d ever seen. It was massive. And it was dead in space. Cautiously, she edged her little ship in closer. She was getting some power readings but not many. This thing might still be armed. Damn. But it was huge. And beautiful once. As she got in closer she saw the evidence of years of wear and tear that simply existing in space could cause. Where were the shields?
Initiate hail. The computer sent out a standard call. No response. Okay.
She’d try manual. She’d heard that some older ships didn’t do CPU to CPU. And that thing was definitely old.
Open frequency. The little-used radio chirped. She cleared her throat.
“Unidentified ship. Do you require assistance? Is anyone aboard?” Stupid question. If there were people, the would have noticed her by now, sitting right on their flank the way she was. She blinked. Faintly, she got a response. She cranked the incoming up as high as it would go.
Through bursts of static and squeals of interference, she heard . . . music?
What was this? The radio fell silent. A moment later, it rotated frequencies and the same snatch of song came through again. Her lips curved. It was a recognition signal.
Identify incoming transmission. Layla stuttered. It didn’t know. Well that was nice. How was she gonna talk to that thing now? She crossed her arms.
“Well, it certainly is huge. Larger than life. I mean just look at it.
“Damn,” she whispered to the air. The music cut off in mid-transmission.
Slowly the ship rotated towards her. Oh shit. This could not be good. A burst of static cut through her frantic preparations to turn tail and run.
Three words said in a calm, male voice.
“Welcome home boys.”
***
She gaped as the huge docking bay slid open. There were still no lights.
Hitting her spot, she angled it into the bay. God, it was huge. Everything about this damn ship was huge. Gulping, she thought. What should she do?
Okay, scratch that. She should tag this bad boy from a safe distance and get the hell out of Dodge. So what was she going to do? Eyes wide, she chose.
Initiate docking procedures. Slowly, her little ship glided into the bay and settled itself on the ground. As soon as the bottom of her ship made contact, the doors silently rolled shut. As the bay was plunged into absolute darkness, she wondered if maybe this hadn’t been such an excellent plan.
Suddenly, light blazed all around her. She began to hear sounds as if through a very thin tube. They slowly grew louder and fuller. It was that snatch of music again. The bay was being pressurized.
Twenty minutes later, she tentatively stepped out of the relative safety of her own little vessel and looked around. There were two exits. The huge external doors and a single, tiny door in the far corner. She started walking towards it. She wanted into the interior of this thing.
Reaching the door, she noticed a panel next to it. Delicately, she ran her fingers over it. It was cool and damp from the moisture that had condensed when the bay had been pressurized. Well, then. All systems were not quite operational were they? That damn snatch of a song was still playing again and again. She looked for the interface. Maybe she could plug in and make it stop. There wasn’t one. What the? She noticed the small squares on a slick piece of plastic. Each square had a symbol etched into it.
“Oh my Lord. Manual interface,” she breathed. “How old is this thing?” She stared at the touchpad. The symbols looked familiar. What were they? Slowly, a memory from her childhood surfaced. Her grandfather, bouncing her on his knee and singing in a language she didn’t understand. He’d been angry with her mother for not teaching her. So he was. But he died a few years later and the lessons had stopped. Her mother hadn’t seen a point in teaching her a dead language.
“English,” she murmured, clumsily wrapping her tongue around the foreign word. Come to think of it, that song was in English too. So why had the ship acknowledged her? Oh duh, she’d been interfaced. The computer had rebroadcast everything she said in every language it knew. And it knew English. That had been her last tip of the hat to a man she’d dearly loved.
She’d fed Layla an English language program. So what had she said to make the ship stop. Mentally, she rewound those few seconds. Nothing unusual.
Nothing out of the ordinary . . . She’d asked if anyone was home. Talked to herself. Repeated one of her grandpa’s little sayings.
She stopped. Not possible. If it was, she was going to go back groundside just to leave flowers on his grave.
Fixing the phrase in her mind, she peered at the touchpad. Hesitantly, she reached out and touched what she thought was the right symbol. And then the next. Half-forgotten lessons crept back. She said the symbols aloud as she typed.
“L . . . A . . . R . . .” she kept typing. It took her nearly an hour and four tries, but she finally got it. She pushed enter. The music stopped.
Thank you God. The door hissed open.
“I owe you, Grandpa. I owe you big,” she laughed, as she stepped through the door and into the past.
It was dead silent. The air on this side of the door was slightly stale. And the lights flickered. Clicking on her light, she started walking down the hall. She swung her lamp left and right. Up and down. Something had happened here. Carbon burns scored the walls. Lights had exploded and bits of glass still littered the hallways. Huge pocks in the walls showed where internal defenses, gun emplacements and the like, had exploded.
There were no bodies.
Lord where was the crew?
She stumbled against something in the dark. She turned her light to see. It was a boot. Next to a uniform. There was no body in the uniform. She nudged it with her foot. Something rattled. She leapt back. Oh ewww. Well, almost no body. Then it occurred to her. If that’s all that’s left, how long has this thing been here? Rubbing her boot on the back on her pants leg, she stared. Was this a crew member or an invader? Did it really matter? She started walking again. Every now and again, she carefully skirted a body or what was left of one. The farther she got from the door, the more there were of them.
She peeked in every door along the way. Most of the rooms had been ransacked. Furniture smashed and walls scorched. In one room the carpet was charred. It had been set on fire. She entered none of them. They weren’t the important part of this. She wanted to know what was.
She walked and crept and tiptoed down the hall and around remains. A seeming eternity later, she ran into a dead end. The end of the hall was burned beyond anything she’d seen thus far. The walls were completely blackened and there were the remains of at least four or five bodies clustered in front of it. A jagged piece of wall had been ripped out to use as cover. Assuming all these people she’d passed were members of the crew, then whatever they’d been protecting was here. She was pretty sure that these were crewmembers because she seriously doubted any invaders would have stuck around long enough to lose nearly a hundred people. She doubted there’d been that many raiders in the first place. So this was crew. And they’d died for whatever was down that hall. She gingerly made her way past the last few corpses to the wall. There had to be a door. No one would guard a dead end. Ahh, there it was. Recessed into the wall and nearly invisible, but there nonetheless.
Biting the tip of her tongue, she painstakingly poked in the same code as last time. She jolted back as the door hissed. Steam curled around the edges. She stepped forward again and a door slid open.
She stared. A long, pale blue hall stretched away from her. The lights were on full here and the air was fresh and circulating. The entire hallway was pristine. Not a single scorch or burn. The raiders hadn’t made it this far.
She slipped through the door, feeling like an intruder in a mausoleum. Once across the threshold, she looked back.
“I understand. You died for this,” she whispered to the dark hallway. “I promise I won’t hurt anything.” She felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. As if dozens of eyes stared at her, begging her to protect whatever had required that so many perish. She stood absolutely motionless until the sensation passed. She shivered and moved away from the door. It hissed shut.
She looked around at the untouched hallway.
Adrenaline rushed through her system, leaving her breathless and giddy.
Whatever was back here was vital. Or had been to these people. And she was desperate to know what it was. Gasping in a breath, she clutched her light in her fist and started walking. There was something to be found here. And she was going to find it.
She opened every door on the hallway. The first five were living quarters.
Almost identical, each one had a bedroom, lavatory and extra room. The extra rooms were where each differed. The first had a library with a huge black thing in the middle and honest-to-God books that she was pretty sure were printed on PAPER. Whoa. She inched toward the black thing. It had a long, low lid on one side. She gently opened it. Slender white and black pedals gleamed underneath. She stretched out a finger and depressed one. A low tone bonged from the thing. She jumped back, startled. Cautiously, she pressed another. A different tone sounded. It made noise! She was tempted to sit and play with the thing, but found herself leaving the room for the next. It too had a library, though minus the black thing. She fingered the books. Her fingers itched to touch everything.
The third room had a room full of large, weight bearing machines. She smiled. These she recognized. Well, not exactly, but the principle involved. These were direct-resistance muscle-building devices. Weight machines.
The fourth room had a soft room with muted colors. It seemed to be a room designed for sitting and thinking. Like something one would find in a groundside home. Not in space. Tearing herself away from the beautiful things that littered the shelves and tables, she moved on. She wanted to see everything.
The last room was a techie’s wet dream. There were screens and interfaces and what she vaguely recognized as at least four kinds of virtual gaming systems. Incongruously, an easel with a sketchpad was propped in the corner. She smiled a little. Someone had once spent a lot of time in these rooms. She left without touching anything.
She padded silently into the last room. The longer she stayed, the more she felt like she was desecrating a tomb, but she just couldn’t leave yet. She paused inside the door. An infirmary. A high-tech, glossy one. It looked as though it had never been used. Why? When all those people were dying out there, why had no one used this place to help them? Come to think of it, why was this place locked off from the rest of the ship? So many questions.
Turning slowly, she completed her survey of the room. There was another door. She walked to it. The door slid back revealing an elevator. Her heart jumped nervously. Was there more? She timidly stepped aboard. She stared at the number of buttons. At least four more levels. There was apparently a lot more. She pushed the first button. The doors snapped shut. Fighting panic, she braced for the worst, but the elevator only slid smoothly up a level.
The doors opened. Before her was a round, white room with an enormous machine in the center. It occurred to her to wonder briefly why, if this ship was as old as it looked, was everything so high-tech. She pushed that aside to be dealt with later.
She walked to the machine and peered at it. It had windows. Five, round, frosted windows. She gasped and rubbed at the first one. Oh holy. There was someone in there. Wildly, she scrabbled at the other four. She couldn’t see much through the fog and frost, but in each one, was a person. Laying a hand on her chest, she wheezed. Oh god. She knew. This was what those people had died for. This was what that infirmary was for. This was the secret this ship was hiding. And, she finished, eyes rounded with shock, the secret was still alive.