War Angel: part thirty-two

The ride across Saturn’s upper atmosphere was extremely unpleasant.

Jack wiped the sweat out of his eyes as the War Angel careened through layers of gases and debris. The temperature inside the ship had risen past 130 degrees as the shields were sucking in power from multiple ship systems including the environmental controls.

“I’ve had worse days than this!” Jack yelled over the cacophonous sound that the heated metal of the hull was making as it was buffeted by high winds and combustion. “This is nothing!”

Sarah yelled back at him. “Your motivational skills are terrible!”

“You may have had worse days, Jack, but I haven’t!” Gina screamed, and then leaned over to vomit on the floor next to her station.

Seeing the nasty puddle on the ground, Jack began to re-think what he had just said.

“So how did this thing wind up here?” Sarah asked Jack as they completed their first tour of the War Angel. “Hard to believe it sat here all this time with no one knowing it.”

He nodded. “I was baffled by that, too. I read through the archives, and all they said was that the War Angel and her crew were lost in battle in 2035.”

“How many crew?”

“42.”

Sarah found herself impressed. “That’s pretty small for a ship this size. They must have worked really hard to keep this old bucket going.”

Jack stopped to look at a dead computer terminal. “From what I read in the family journals, that’s about right. I think they’d have loved to have more people on board, but the population had taken a pretty big hit at that point and qualified bodies weren’t easy to come by.”

“So how many do you think we’ll need for our little adventure?”

He scratched his chin. “Good question. If we throw a bit of modern computer equipment in here, we can automate most system functions. I’d say a small crew- maybe a dozen. Assuming we get it flying, of course.”

Sarah walked over to stand next to him. “What’s so interesting about this dead terminal?”

His hands slid across its face and down the front of the wall where the computer had sat lifeless for over a century. Jack’s fingers left a trail in the dust as he allowed his curiosity to guide him. “I don’t know. Doesn’t something about this seem… wrong… to you?” He knelt down on the floor.

Baffled, Sarah sat down next to him. “Wrong how?”

Jack stared at the wall. “I… this computer station. What did it do?”

“It could have done any number of things.”

His eyes went wide. “That’s just it. It really couldn’t have. Comm controls are elsewhere, and besides that, internal communications equipment wasn’t computer based. There are no real systems in this area of the ship. Nothing about this area suggests that it was of any importance except that it was on the way to being or doing something else.”

“Big deal. Ship design is full of redundancy and oddity.”

He turned to look at her. “Not back then. In that era, equipment and supplies were at such a low ebb that nothing was ever wasted. These things were only built with the necessities. They were stretching it pretty thin to get eight of them built.” Jack began probing the wall again with his fingers, tracing along until he stopped with a sudden jerk.

“What?” Sarah asked.

Jack’s face lit up and he began wiping away the dust from what appeared to Sarah to be a natural seam in the wall’s construction. As he did, though, she noticed that it didn’t quite match completely. “Is that seam raised?” she wondered. Jack nodded and began blowing dust out of the way to expose it. He stood as he went along, Sarah following his lead, until he had it completely wiped clean.

He pointed toward an area of the wall near to where the seam and the wall met at the floor. “See that?” She nodded. It was slight, but there was no mistaking that not only was the seam raised- more prominently as it got closer to the ground- there was also a small dent in the wall. A dent that pointed outward instead of inward.

“Jack, what the hell was inside this wall?”

“The better question,” he said quietly, “is who was inside this wall?”