第22章 The Derelict

The council voted to send a mission within the week. It was not unanimous — there were voices that argued the colony could not afford the fuel, the time, the people, and Kael recognized in those arguments the same prudent fear that had once kept the Aethelgard flying toward a dead world. But the settlement had been founded on a different principle, and in the end the principle held. A single shuttle, refitted for deep work and long silence, would cross the distance to the Somnium and see what could be seen. Kael argued his way onto the crew, and Elara did not argue at all. She simply looked at him across the council table and said, "I will prepare the shuttle." It was the same wordless understanding that had carried them through the broadcast and the vote and the wake-up and the landing — she would keep the machinery honest, and he would keep the record honest, and between the two of them very little would be missed. The crossing took eleven days. The shuttle was small and cold, and the two of them shared it with a young engineer named Amara, who had been a child in Kael's first archive tours and was now, at nineteen, the sharpest hand with cryo systems the colony had produced. She had volunteered before the vote was even finished, and she had brought with her a calm, deliberate focus that reminded Kael, painfully and proudly, of himself at that age. The Somnium grew in the viewport from a point of light to a shape — a long cylinder, smaller than the Aethelgard, its hull scarred by decades of micrometeorite impact, its running lights dark. It rotated slowly on an axis that had once been its artificial-gravity spine and was now just a slow, sad turning, as if the ship were still performing a duty no one had asked of it in sixty years. The shuttle matched that rotation over the course of an hour, circling the derelict once at a careful distance while Elara mapped the hull and Amara catalogued the visible damage, and neither of them spoke. There was nothing to say. The ship was dead in every way that mattered except the ones that were still dying. Docking was the hard part. The Somnium's guidance systems were silent, and the shuttle had to come alongside the derelict's main airlock in a careful ballet of thrusters that left Elara's jaw tight and her hands steady on the controls. When the docking clamps finally engaged, the entire shuttle shuddered with the impact, and for a long moment no one breathed. "Contact," Elara said. "Airlock seal is holding." They entered the Somnium in pressure suits, their boots ringing on decks that had not felt footsteps in decades. The air was cold and thin, the lighting running on emergency cells that cast long amber pools across the corridor floors. The ship smelled — not with the living smell of the Aethelgard's recycled air, but with the dry, mineral odor of a place where water had long since stopped moving through the systems. Ice crystals glittered on the conduits overhead, and every surface was covered in a fine red dust that the ship's filters had once caught and no longer did. The archive was the second thing they found, and Kael reached it before the others, drawn by an instinct he had spent a lifetime trusting. It was a small room near the bridge, lined with the same storage units he had tended on the Aethelgard, and it was there, in the careful hand of the Somnium's last archivist, that the ship's true story waited for them. The Somnium had known its destination was lost. Its observatory had transmitted the news fifty-seven years into the journey, when a survey of its target world revealed a catastrophic failure of that planet's atmosphere — a collapse no one had predicted and nothing could reverse. The Somnium's council had made a different choice than Miren's council had made. They had told the crew. And the telling had broken them. Kael read the records in the cold amber light, the last archivist's log spooling across his pad. There had been no revolt, no organized resistance — only a slow unraveling. Without a destination, without the shape of a future to hold onto, the awake crew had begun to leave the work undone. Some had refused to wake the colonists; the sleepers, they said, were the lucky ones. Others had argued for waking them anyway, to give the last years meaning, and the arguments had split families and friendships. The maintenance schedules had gone blank one by one. The navigation corrections had been skipped. And then, quietly, the records had stopped. The last entry was dated sixty-one years ago. It was short, and it was not written in the careful hand of the archivist but in a rougher, unsteadier one. "We are going to sleep now. Not in the cryo bays — there is not room. But we have decided, those of us left, that it is better to stop. The ship can carry the sleepers a while longer on its own. Maybe someone will come. Maybe no one will. Tell them, whoever finds this — we tried. We told the truth, and we still lost the way. I do not know what that means. I hope someone does." Kael read the entry three times, and when he looked up, Elara was standing in the doorway of the archive, watching him. "It's a mirror," she said softly. "That's what this is. It's what we could have been." "Not quite," Kael said. "They told the truth. They just told it to people who had nowhere to put it." He closed the pad. "The Aethelgard was lucky. We had a world to run to. They had nothing but the end of their world and a long way to fall." Elara nodded slowly. "Amara's gone ahead to the cryo bays. She's running diagnostics on the pods. The numbers are worse than we hoped — but not as bad as we feared. Maybe four thousand still viable, if we can get them out." Four thousand. Kael thought of the manifests he had read — the eight thousand names that had left Earth aboard the Somnium, each one a life, a story, a future. Half of them had been lost to the slow dying of a ship that had run out of purpose. The rest were sleeping still, waiting in the dark for a rescue that had almost not come. He stood and moved to follow Amara, then paused at the archive door and looked back at the shelves. "Mnemosyne, log this room. Full record. Whatever happens next, this story gets told with the rest of them." "Logged," the AI said. "Chief Archivist, the Somnium's cryo control reports a pressure drop in Pod Bay Three. Amara is requesting engineering support." Elara was already moving. Kael followed, the weight of the dead archivist's last words pressing on him as he ran — we told the truth, and we still lost the way. It was the fear he had carried since the broadcast, the fear he had never quite put down: that truth alone was not enough, that it had only ever been the beginning of the work. The colonists of the Somnium had learned that lesson the hardest way. Now it was the colony of Proxima Centauri b's turn to prove it had learned something different.