“Do you think this might be the bow?” xe asked Kym Byrd. She covered her mouth casually with one hand, pulling on her chin a little. The engineer ambled around the vehicle, bending, stretching, looking under and over and in the hulk of what appeared to be metal but not any metal they could fully identify. She stopped after making a complete trip around the shuttle sized space craft next to Quixote.
“I think you’re right, this must be the bow. It’s hard to tell being so smashed up.”
“We have to get the hatch opened so we can make the determination of its origin. Maybe the answer to our quantum daters’ malfunctions will be inside.”
“I could get a torch,” she said.
“Ms. Byrd, do you think perhaps we can consider a less destructive option in order to preserve the integrity of this artifact?”
“Artifact? Quixote, it’s a space ship, not a butterfly.” Kym smiled and turned to get something that would no doubt break open the door.
“I’m concerned about what we may find inside, not about damaging the hull,” xe told her.
“Whatever’s in there ain’t alive, sir, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Kym came around a bulkhead with a laser torch in one hand, fiddling with its settings, focused intensely on the tiny readout. “Okay, let’s get this party started.”
Ms. Byrd’s colloquialisms puzzled Quixote but they provided some levity in dire and serious circumstances that the other humans seemed to appreciate. He waved her to the hatch inviting her to commence the procedure.
His electrical engineer aimed the small device at a round protrusion one meter by one meter in the center of the port side. Of course, the damage prevented the door from simply opening when they manipulated the latches. Black, carbonaceous scorch marks covered most of the exterior and the entire bow section. The aft seemed relatively symmetrical and undamaged but the bow had crumpled upon itself in an apparent impact.
The green pinpoint of light from Kym’s laser torch didn’t easily penetrate the hull. She tapped a few controls to shorten the wavelength and intensify the beam. The beam shifted slightly from greenish to greenish blue. A faint trickle of smoke began to rise from the contact point.
A shocking pop followed by a protracted hiss came from the craft when the seal broke. Kym stopped her surgery and stepped up to the door but it held fast, the hinges frozen into position, guarding the secrets inside.
“Cut the supports,” xe told her. She aimed her torch and fired another long beam precisely down the joint of the door to the hull, and then the second one. As the weight of the hatch began its toll the metal groaned and the panel dropped to the deck with a resounding CLANG that caused both engineers to jump.
An odd odor wafted out of the black hole, an odor of decayed mammal, of ancient sweat and earth. They both hesitated as lifeless dust floated out and down to the floor.
“Sir?” Kym said, stepping back from the possibilities. Quixote’s curiosity trumped his anxiety; he stepped up to the dark hole and flipped on the headlamp atop his hat, lighting the interior like a sunbeam. His broad spectrum vision failed to reveal any warm bodied creatures or overheated circuits. He aimed his beam fore and made out the backs of two chairs made for bipeds, humanoid bipeds. To the aft some laboratory equipment of sorts filled the space. Looking again at the bow, the conning station seemed extraordinarily confusing and complicated, almost byzantine.
“Kym, you need to come and gander at this con.” She stepped up and peered in over his scaly shoulder. “Have you ever seen anything like that?”
“It’s like a command center,” she mused. Quixote crawled through the aperture and pulled himself between the two chairs to get a good look at the myriad of buttons and switches and readouts.
“Oh, my, Kym, look at this!” He turned his head to beckon her inside. He wanted her to see for herself his discovery written on the helm.
“What is it?” She couldn’t get past his hulk but tried to see what he was tapping with his claw. Her eyes turned to black pools and Quixote thought the bright red spots in her pupils might actually be her retinas. “Oh my God. It’s English.”
“Bridge to Quixote.” The commander climbed backwards out of the space capsule leaving his engineer to ponder the implications of their discovery. He tapped an intercom button.
“What are you reporting?”
“We’re half way to Cuatro, sir.”
“Very well. Change course one eighty degrees and return to Cinco. Take up a geosynch orbit on the dark side of the large moon and maintain com silence. If you hear from the surface, contact me immediately.”
“Aye, sir.”
Quixote stretched a little and looked over at the wall chronometer. He didn’t need sleep as much as his human companions nor the woman in the sick bay, but he did need to stop every twenty hours or so and reduce his metabolic functions for a couple of hours. He stepped back to the capsule hatch.
“Kym, would you like to take the lead on this? I need time to reset my metabolism.” She turned at his voice, her complexion rather more pale than normal, her surface temperature cooler than normal. “Are you feeling well?”
“Quixote, this is…” she turned back to the helm and then to face him again. “It’s…yes, but I’m going to need help.”
“I’ll have Ms. Stone come down here, unless you prefer Mr. Harchett.”
“The steward?” Kym snickered at Quixote’s suggestion.
“We don’t have a lot of available personnel. I could send Ms. Wallace.”
“That tootsie only has one thing on her mind, and it ain’t science,” the woman muttered. Quixote cocked his head. “Never mind, no, she’s more trouble than she’s help. Zoe will be great.” The reptile twisted on his feet to leave. “Quixote?”
“Yes?”
“I’m not a history buff, not even of Earth. But I can tell that this craft isn’t of Earth. This technology is beyond anything I’ve ever seen, but, well, the writing is English, more or less, not quite, but Latin based, most of the alphabet. And I’ve never seen technology like this. It’s beyond quantum computing and I’m not sure exactly what it is.”
“This could be evidence of human time travel, Byrd. We know of it in other civilizations. We’ve suspected this outcome since before we left Earth last year. I think perhaps you should keep an open mind and do your best work to put forth an explanation of our quantum readings.”
“Both positive and negative.”
“Tear this vehicle from stem to stern and have a report for me before we get back to Cinco’s moon.”
~~~
“Shuttle bay to Quixote.”
The reptile opened one eye and glanced at the readout on his timepiece. Five hours had passed. The humans would be in orbit of Cinco’s moon and planning dinner by now.
“Quixote here.”
“We are ready with a report, sir.”
“Meet me in the doyen’s office in thirty minutes.” He rose and donned a soft cape that fastened from his keel to his knees. Upon awakening a little extra protection from the human temperatures in the mid-twenties got his bones moving quicker. While waiting in the doyen’s office, he brought up a schematic of their position around the moon. Maria Mitchell was veiled by the giant moon which protected them but also kept them from contacting the crew on the planet. It would have to do while the Pegasi were hovering around Cinco.
“Sir?” came a feminine voice with a knock at the door.
“Come in.” Both Zoe Stone and Kym Byrd entered with small plastic components in their hands; Kym also carried a large data pad that she promptly handed to Quixote. He examined the data and looked up at the two women. They nodded.
“Commission date 2575. It quantum dates four hundred eleven years in the negative, and also eight hundred twenty six in the positive,” Kym explained.
“We found these data modules in the helm, at least we think they’re data modules. We weren’t able to ascertain what’s on them, but the digital encoding is clearly a recording,” Zoe said.
“You’re saying the ship is 800 years old today but it’s commission date is more than 400 years in the future?” Both women nodded, glanced at each other, then turned back to Quixote. “And the text is in a human alphabet?” They nodded again. “I’d venture to say this confirms our suspicions. It also ties the mummy to this capsule since it has similar temporal properties.” He paused and looked at both Kym and Zoe, then out the window at the heart of the Milky Way.
“While we wait to hear from Captain Jackson and the rest of the team, I need you both to work on those data modules. Go get Watson to help; he’s excellent at figuring out this sort of thing. See what you can extract. This might be the greatest discovery in your human history, even bigger than germ theory, exobiology, FTL drive, or quantum technologies.” Quixote shuddered, tasked with the knowledge of the human time travel discovery. “It could be colossal, dogma shattering, and treacherous. We have to be careful here. Exceptionally, unusually, careful.”
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