by Tim Lebbon
“Huh?” Zoë asked.
“Combative origami,” Wash said. “She’s really quite good.”
“Just watch those scopes,” Mal said. “First sign of anything approaching, we haul ass out of here.”
“This is quite something,” Jayne said. It was dark and cold inside, and they turned on their suit lights, the combined illumination flooding the space before them. It had sustained damage from the blast, but the corridor leading away from them was intact, walls scarred and scorched, ceiling blackened by fire. Their suit lights penetrated partway along the corridor, swallowed into darkness further in.
“There’s hardly anything to see,” Zoë said.
“We all feel that?” Mal asked.
“Yes,” Kaylee said. “How can we not?”
A sense of wide, deep space. The sheer scale of the ship crushing in around them. Unknown potentials ahead, depending on which turning they took, which levels they explored. And surrounding it all, a humbling sense of history, time stretched and experienced, centuries long-passed impressed into the structure of the ship.
“Gives me the rutting willies,” Jayne said.
“Let’s stay sharp,” Mal said. “Anything amiss and we head back here. Kaylee has the airlock’s codes, right, Kaylee?”
“Right. Maybe it’s best you all have them.” She sent the codes to their suits. Mal heard a soft chime as his acknowledged receipt.
Jayne ran his hand across a sign set into the wall, smearing off a fine layer of frost and dust. “Huh—this sign’s in English too— only it’s different.”
“Old Earth-That-Was English. Guess they still had to write in both languages back then,” Mal said. “Anyhow let’s head out. Jayne, Kaylee, you two go aft. Only bring back things small enough to carry in a hurry, and manhandle out through those new airlocks. We’re lookin’ for old collectible stuff, anything we can sell to those interested in such things.”
“Why we headin’ aft?” Jayne asked.
“Because that’s where the engine room is!” Kaylee said, slapping his shoulder.
“Engines,” Jayne said. “Shiny.”
“Kaylee has an eye for tech that’s worth somethin’. We don’t know much about the ship’s layout,” Mal said. “Zoë and I will try to work our way around or beneath the damage and head forward, see what we can find. Keep comm channels open and check in every ten minutes. No risks.”
Jayne grunted.
“No risks, Jayne.”
Jayne flipped open his faceplate and then slid off his helmet, letting it hang down his back by its straps. He took in a deep breath. When he exhaled it condensed before him in a shower of tiny ice particles. “No risks.”
Mal was about to berate him when Zoë interrupted.
“Well, he ain’t dropped dead. I’d say we’re good, Mal.”
“I knew that,” Jayne said. The others took off their helmets and let them fold and hang behind their suits. They took a few deep breaths to adjust to the cold. They were nervous, turning on every suit light and shining them around at the damaged and scorched surroundings. “I knew that!” Jayne insisted.
“We’ll meet back here in two hours,” Mal said. “In that time we should get a feel for whether it’s worth stayin’.”
“Two hours ain’t nothin’,” Jayne said. “You’ve seen the size of this ship. We could spend two days on board and barely scratch the surface.”
“Two hours, Jayne,” Mal said. “Wash says there’s no life signs aboard, so we ain’t gonna stumble into any Alliance troops. But this is just a recce to see what’s worth takin’, gather up a few bits an’ pieces. Then we’ll reconvene and decide how to proceed. Pointless just blunderin’ about without a plan, and we need a real picture of what we’ve found here. I know they’re cumbersome, but keep your suits on. There’s no tellin’ how unstable this ship’s structure is. And watch out for each other.”
“Don’t worry,” Kaylee said, “I’ll look after him.”
“Right,” Jayne said.
They headed off, and at the end of a short corridor they came to a junction. Jayne and Kaylee turned left, and Zoë and Mal took the right passageway. Mal kept one hand on the gun in its waist holster, because something about this ship definitely wasn’t right.
Maybe it was the icy darkness, old and heavy. Maybe it was the sense of deep, turbulent history contained within these steel walls, echoes from humanity’s mysterious past, and the idea that people from Earth-That-Was had walked these corridors long centuries ago.
Or maybe it was the feeling that they were being watched.
* * *
Kaylee was excited and afraid at the same time. It was a combination she’d become used to traveling on Serenity. It was also a sensation she often felt when she was alone in River’s company. Experiencing it now, on this amazing old ship, was no surprise.
As she moved forward, though the fear and cold remained, they also made room for something else—a true sense of wonder. Until this moment all her concentration had been focused on approaching and entering the ship, and their mishap at the airlock was still fresh in her mind. Now, she could let that restrained fascination root and take hold. She was on the Sun Tzu, and all around her was a deep sense of an incredible, almost legendary past.
For her, any real treasure on board this ship would be the Earth-That-Was technology. She felt surrounded by a history that might take her a lifetime to examine in detail. She saw old screws with tool marks on their heads, and wondered who had affixed them. She saw bolts with their edges sheared, and thought about the person who had last turned them, and their hopes and dreams and fears. They were centuries away from her from a world she could barely comprehend, yet in some ways she felt close to those people—mechanics, builders, workers, and engineers with scars on their hands and grime beneath their fingernails. Sheets of metal walling held firm together. Lighting and ducted services speckled and lined the ceilings, dead now, but still filled with a potential of life. The surface facade of this vessel was visible and solid, but she wanted to undo these screws and bolts, dig deeper into the ship, and make sense of the old technologies that had brought the Sun Tzu so far.
Jayne didn’t feel it. That was obvious, and she was not surprised, but she didn’t think any of the crew felt quite the way she did now. Agendas were different, she knew that, and though making money was what it was all about for most of them, for her, coming here had been all about the Sun Tzu. If she tilted her head and half-closed her eyes she could almost hear the voices of those who had come before. “Our ancestors walked these corridors,” she said. “Ain’t that thrilling, Jayne?”
“I’d want a quiet word with mine,” he said. “Ask ’em why they didn’t set me up better.”
“Huh?”
“With more money, and position, and such.”
“But can’t you feel it? A sense of wonder?”
“Sure. Wonderin’ where all the good stuff is.”
The corridor jigged left and right. They passed several doors, all of them closed, and they tried every one. Locked. Jayne tried kicking one open, grunting as he bounced back against the wall.
Kaylee stared at him. “Plenty more places to explore.”
“Locked doors means there’s something worth taking inside,” Jayne said.
“Or maybe it just means ‘Private, keep out.’”
“Same thing.”
By the time the corridor opened out into a wide, circular area with other corridors leading off, most signs of damage from the explosion were behind them. The fireball had not reached this far, and the bulkheads were no longer rippled and deformed. It was still dark and cold, their suit lights causing shadows to jitter and dance in hollows in the walls or along some of the mysterious corridors leading away from this junction. The ceiling was domed, and as Kaylee glanced up and around her lights picked out designs carved into the curved metal. There was no uniting feature or style in these names and symbols. They were not instructions or official diagrams. It was graffiti pure
and simple, people from half a millennium ago having left their marks, perhaps as a way to pass time on their long, incredible journey. She found it melancholy, and quite beautiful.
“So which way now?” Jayne asked. “I could spin a coin.”
“That way,” Kaylee said, pointing across the hallway. “Toward the engine room.”
The next corridor was wider, with doors more regularly spaced on either side. Some of them hung open, shadows slinking back inside as they approached, and at the first few they paused to peer into the rooms. They were small crew sleeping quarters, not much larger than those aboard Serenity, with beds and cupboards, tables and chairs. They were sparse and mostly empty of personal belongings.
At the end of this corridor the space opened up into another domed, circular room, but this one was different. Larger than the first, it was still filled with furniture, and its purpose quickly became surprisingly familiar—a saloon. Curved around the wall for a quarter of the room was a genuine wooden bar, behind which dusty, faded mirrors clung to the walls, and empty liquor bottles were fixed upside down, contents long-since evaporated through dispensing optics.
“Reckon I’ll find some unopened bottles behind there,” Jayne said, and he went for the bar. But as Kaylee looked around and saw what hung on the walls around the rest of the room, she gasped. She forgot Jayne, and the bottles he sought, and pretty much everything else. For a few seconds when her heart beat in rhythm with those who must’ve talked and drunk and laughed here so many years before, she took in the images, and felt tears at the corners of her eyes.
“Jayne,” she whispered. “Look.”
He looked. “Pretty pictures,” he said.
“Paintings of Earth-That-Was,” she said.
“So?” He went back to leaning over the bar, searching for his precious bottles.
So… Kaylee thought, but she couldn’t answer, and saw no point attempting to. You either felt it or you didn’t, and Jayne didn’t.
“Amazing,” Kaylee breathed. She walked slowly around the edge of the room, like someone looked at paintings in the finest gallery on Londinium. Every image was amazing. Each world shown was wondrous, and gave an idea of the incredible star system Earth-That-Was had been a part of.
A tall spire, speckled with lights that looked like stars, set in a wide, flat city.
A massive stone pyramid in a desert, sand-colored and tattered from exposure to the elements.
The sprawl of a vast city with buildings reaching for the sky; the endless spread of a jungle, with trees taller than any she’d ever seen, flocks of birds spotting the deep blue sky, a moisture misting above it to form clouds.
A boat on a vast ocean. A winged aircraft, surfing the clouds on one of the Earth-That-Was worlds or moons. People on a beach, smiling at the sun. People everywhere, so many people, all of them now dead. Something niggled at her mind as she walked from image to image, reaching out but never quite touching the paintings. As she came to the final picture—a photograph taken from space, showing the blocky mass of a Generation ship with the gorgeous blue and white jewel of Earth-That-Was in the background—the truth hit home.
“These are all one place,” she said.
“Huh?” Jayne said. He was sitting on the bar, an upturned, empty bottle in his hand.
“All these pictures, Jayne. Earth-That-Was wasn’t a system, like I always thought. It was just one planet. It was all our worlds in one, and every place in the ’verse started there.”
“So?”
Kaylee smiled and shook her head. He’d never understand. She stared at that final picture and felt a sadness tugging at her insides. Even if Earth-That-Was remained, in whatever poisoned and damaged form it existed in now, she’d never see it.
She placed her hand flat against the wall next to the picture, and the cool metal pressed back.
“Let’s go,” Jayne said, heading off into another corridor. “This hũn dàn place is empty.”
Kaylee sighed and followed him. She felt the weight of the Sun Tzu heavy all around her, and even though she’d never see what those pictures represented for real, the ship was still here. She’d like to take it apart bit by bit and revel in the way it was put together, delve down into its mechanical guts like a tapeworm.
They passed along another narrow hallway and Jayne stepped through the second open door into the small room beyond. Kaylee followed, and while Jayne rooted around for loot, she took a picture frame from the wall. It showed a tall woman in a strange uniform, a man standing beside her, and two small children. The woman rested a hand on each kid’s shoulder and the man’s arm was around her waist. They looked happy. The photograph had been taken in a garden, and behind them was a wide vista ending in a range of low hills. Perhaps just over those hills was the city with the tall spire. “You think this is worth anything?” Jayne held up a coffee mug that was half a millennium old. On its side was written, Dangerous If Empty.
“This is amazing,” she said, showing him the picture.
“What’s with you an’ all those pictures? Seen their like before.”
“Not like this. We’ve seen holos and approved pictures, but this is… personal. This is love, in the place we all came from.”
“Maybe I can trade it on Jubilee,” Jayne said. “I know someone who knows someone who runs an old restaurant, all their crap’s from back in the day. Tables, plates, all from Earth-That-Was. Or so he claims.” He turned the mug back and forth in his hand. “I think he’s talking niǔ shi.”
“They might be our actual ancestors,” Kaylee said. She held the photo up and compared Jayne to the man and woman. They looked somehow more proud and more sad at the same time. She wondered who they had been, what they had done, and whether their dreams and ambitions had been realized. The Sun Tzu had reached the ’verse, after all. Maybe these peoples’ descendants were alive and thriving.
“‘Made in the USA,’” Jayne said, reading the print on the bottom of the mug. “What the ruttin’ hell is a USA?” He dropped the coffee cup and picked up something else. It was a book with a faded cover and pages yellowed and stuck together by time. “Remember what the Shepherd said? This could bring a pretty sum.”
“What is it?” Kaylee asked, still holding on to the photo. The woman might have read it when she was trying to fall asleep at night. The man might have read it to his children.
“It’s a book.”
“I know that, silly. Which one?”
“What does it matter?” Jayne looked at the cover and frowned, turning it this way and that, then flicked through the pages. “Can’t hardly understand it, anyway. Rich folks on Anson’s World buy old books to line their walls. Makes them look intelligent. Don’t matter to them which book it is.” Jayne stuffed it into his backpack and started searching through drawers in an old wooden cabinet.
Kaylee felt suddenly sad watching Jayne sorting through this forgotten family’s belongings. She wasn’t sure why—they were beyond knowing, and she’d stolen her fair share of things in the past—but she felt unaccountably close to them, as if looking into their photographed eyes could make them see both ways.
“You’ll be carrying stuff worth next to nothing,” she said. “Leave it here. We’ve only just begun searching, and we’ll find plenty more.”
“Like what?”
“Old tech,” Kaylee said. “Engine room stuff. It’s said they used gold in some electrical units way back when, and that’d bring a pretty price.”
“You just want to get all gooey looking at the ship’s nethers.”
“Maybe, but could be I can salvage some bits and use ’em on Serenity,” she said. “And there’s a fast trade in old ships’ drive parts among collectors.”
“Where? In your grease-monkey conventions?”
Kaylee shrugged and left the room. She felt much better outside in the empty, featureless corridor, less of an invader, and Jayne soon joined her, backpack over his shoulder.
“You really love this old stuff,” he said as they star
ted walking.
“Don’t you?”
“If it’s worth somethin’, that’s shiny.”
“This is where we came from, Jayne. This is our history. Everything in the ’verse, all the wars and disputes, the settlements, the planets we’ve terraformed, the societies we’ve built up and seen fall by the wayside… all that started with these ships arrivin’ here hundreds of years ago.”
“Huh,” Jayne said. “Haven’t really dwelled on that side of things that much.”
“Why do you think it’s worth so much?”
“’Cause people like old stuff.” He looked around. “Guess ’cause they were clever too.”
“Clever how?” Kaylee said.
“To get here. Build these ships.”
“Right, yeah. So clever that they polluted their own planet so much, they had to flee.” She wondered what was left of Earth-That-Was. The ’verse had come into being because their ancestors had had to leave, but perhaps some of them had been left behind? Maybe Earth-That-Was really did still exist in some form, a poisoned, toxic place where only a hardy few survived. They’d never know of her, not like she knew of them. That was beyond strange. That was just plain scary.
Kaylee led the way along the corridor, ignoring the few doors that hung open because she didn’t like the feeling of being an intruder.
“I thought this was a ship full of sleepers,” Jayne said.
“Stop trying to spook me.” She thought of River, and the strange things the girl had been ranting about the ship.
“I’m not! I mean, everyone on board was all cozy and sleeping for the journey from Earth-That-Was to the ’verse. So why the cabins?”
“These Generation ships had crews,” Kaylee said. “The Sun Tzu is a mile long and ten million tons, so there’s plenty to go wrong, ’specially on a journey that lasts for decades or even longer. They needed people to maintain and work the ship and its systems, and look after those sleepers who’d only ’spect to wake when they reached a new home.”
“The ’verse,” Jayne said.
“Yep, the ’verse. It’s reckoned some crew were even born on board, worked, and died inside these walls. Never saw no sky but the Black. Never felt ground under their feet.” Jayne fell silent, and she hoped he was thinking about the same thing as her. Imagining being born on the ship, growing up here, serving your life as an engineer or computer technician, meeting someone and falling in love, having a family, growing old, dying. All on board. For some people, this ship had been their whole world. Their past, present, and future. Their forever.
