“You know, those fused transistors…,” Ground Sample Specialist Pv-tor-fel-mak began wheuro First Mate Bouchard. “You said they were fuzzy,” he tinued, nodding to indicate he was referring to Tech Specialist Murray’s previous statement about the weird looking chips.

  “It reminded me of something. There’s a reason for the uniformity of the fuzziness you saw: entropy. Time, aropy.

  “The chips have been lying around for so long that quantum effects ihem have, over time, moved atoms tiny distances within the substrate. It’s pletely random and takes a lot of time, but the transistors themselves are only a few atoms wide, so it doesn’t take muent for them to stop w. Eventually, they will bee 'smeared out,' so to speak.”

  “So you’re saying the ship is older than we first thought?” Bouchard asked, curiosity and greed equally mixed in her voice.

  “Yes,” Pv-tor-fel-mak replied. “Much older. Which is why I did some sampling of the sili substrates the chips are made from.

  “So, the substrates are more or less like any we would make. You start with sili—in this case, the aliens have used pure sili-28, to be exact. Then you dope it with certais like boron, arsenic, ermanium to enhas properties. In fact, there’s a long list of elements you add to it to tweak the sili to your needs. But you never add magnesium to it. It doesn’t improve the chip substrates in any way. If you find magnesium in them, it’s from ination, not from deliberate doping.”

  “I take it that’s what you found, then?” the first mate asked, not really seeing what all the excitement was about.

  “Yes, I did. Not a lot, but enough,” the ground sample specialist expined. “And all of it is magnesium-26. Which is exactly what I expected to find, if the ship was old. Like, really, really old.”

  “That ’t be a ce,” Murray interjected, starting to see where Pv-tor-fel-mak was going with this. “You’re saying the ship is old enough to have undergone ic ray spaltion?”

  “That’s right. When sili-28 is exposed to ic rays,” he tinued, indig with his hand the missing wall of the puter room, “some of those rays collide with the sili atoms and knock arotons from them. A small part of the sili in the chips have been verted into aluminum-26.”

  “Yet you found magnesium, not aluminum,” First Mate Bouchard remarked.

  Tech Specialist Murray spoke up. “Aluminum-26 is radioactive. Over time, it has decayed into magnesium-26,” she interjected.

  Pv-tor-fel-mak nodded.

  “So if we sum up the aluminum-26 and magnesium-26 we find in the chip substrates, we calcute how long they have been exposed to ic radiation,” he stated. “Within a margin of error of a few million years or so.”

  Laura Bouchard hovered in astounded silence.

  “The margin of error is a million years?” she finally asked.

  “Indeed,” Pv-tor-fel-mak replied. “The ship itself is at least eight million years old. Or the tear in the hull is,” he corrected himself. “The room is radiation shielded, so before the hull was torhere wouldn’t have been any ic ray spaltion. But for the past eight million years, these chips have been exposed to deep space. How long the ship drifted out here before that, I ’t even begin to guess.”

  “That’s…” Her mind raced. She didn’t know what to say.

  Finally, she found her words again.

  “I take it that means there’s no ce of ever rec any data from the ship?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Pv-tor-fel-mak firmed. “Not even a theoretical oropy has long since erased everything they recorded here. The information has already been gone for millions of years. So no payday for us, eh?”

  “Well, it’s not like we were in this for the money anyway,” Bouchard said with a ugh, c up her disappoi with forced joviality. It was a big setback to their pns, but not quite disastrous. They could still report their findings to the Terran Federation and hopefully collee sort of finder’s fee. But it was now doubtful that further exploration into the wreck would yield anything of value. It was ohing to expect to find artifacts to sell off whehought the ship was a thousand years old, and ahiirely when they were talking about eight million years—or more. This was really archaeology on paleontological timescales.

  And as far as First Mate Bouchard knew, her archaeologists nor paleontologists teo have the means to live lives of luxury.

  As the team started to pack up their equipment in preparation for leaving the puter room, Bouchard swept her fshlight across the alien data ter one final time. She didn’t expect to find anythihat the team hadn’t already discovered, but this was more about getting closure. They had ied so much emotion during their trek here, and now they had to return home empty-handed.

  The crew members took turns ferrying the equipment through the narrow access tube back to their staging area in the feren. Gradually, the puter chamber was emptied, until she was the only o. With a sense of reluce, she positioned herself in the opening and started to drift forward, her mind transf the long tunnel into a deep, dark chasm.

  Eventually, she reached the familiar feren.

  “You’re the st one, ma’am?” Yevgen Suwannarat asked as she ehrough the doorway, evident in his voice. “There’s no o behind you?”

  Bouchard shook her head inside her helmet, the a visible through the visor in the harsh light of the helmet-mounted lumen torch. She had a sinking feeling i of her stomaot again, she thought.

  “We ’t find Sawhney,” Suwannarat tinued.

  “He was right behind me wheered the tunnel,” Est-mar-kort pointed out. “Between me and the captain.”

  First Mate Bouchard turned around and drifted over to Captain Balmar, h in his usual er of the room.

  “Did you see anything?” she asked him.

  The captain stared back at her, his eyes vat once again. There was no answer. Whatever he had seen in the shadows of the long corridor must have pushed his mind over the edge once more. Now, he was either unable or unwilling to unicate the experieh the rest of the crew.

  “Alright,” she said, realizing Captain Balmar was less than useful in his current state. “You know the drill, people.” She was exhausted from having to do the seard-rescue maneuver again, and was sure the rest of the crew didn’t like it any more than she did.

  Together with Mission Specialist Suwannarat, she again took point in the search. This time, they had one advantage over the st time a crew member had gone missing: they knew—more or less—where Sawhney had goray. The long, dark access tunnel, with its many twists and turns, was something of a maze, but they knew he had e, and never emerged from it again. Meaning, finding him shouldn’t be too difficult.

  About halfway down the shaft, they reached a jun point where two other access tunnels crossed the ohey were using—one going from left tht and the other from above to below their current level. Not that “above” and “below” really meant anything in the weightlessness of the wreck, Bouchard mused, but it was still easier to think in those terms when talking about dires retive to her own position. And besides, whoever had built the ship had clearly been using artificial gravity, and had desighe rooms and corridors of the vessel accly.

  As she floated into the middle of the jun, she called out to Sawhney on the radio, but once again, there was no response. Bouchard hadn’t expected ohe tunnel walls had blocked radio unication with Murray when she had disappeared there earlier, and there was no reason to expect they wouldn’t do the same thing this time. But it would still be irresponsible of her not to try.

  She waited in the jun for close to a minute, calling out to the missing navigator several more times. Every time, the result was the same: total and plete silence. Slowly, she turned around to let her fshlight shio the dark crevices of the joining access tunnels. The one going from left tht seemed to be identical to the one she was in now. It ossible Sawhney could have e by mistake, and with the walls blog radio signals, he would quickly have gotten lost in the darkhere.

  Deg which dire to search was the harder question. There was always the danger she herself would bee disoriented when leaving the area they were more familiar with. The shaft was narrow, dark, and looked identical in every dire.

  Not quite succeeding in making up her mind about where to go, the beam of her fshlight drifted to the access tunnel eg from above. At first, she didn’t notiything out of the ordinary, but something begged her mind for attention as she swept the beam past the dark cavity in the ceiling. She doubled back to peer into it again.

  There was color ihe hole.

  Ever sihey had first ehe wreck, the ck of color had been both a mystery and something of an oppressive presehat grew stronger and strohe further into the gloomy depths of the wreck they had peed. With the discovery of the age of the ship, she now knew why everything i—apart from the gleaming gold of the ubiquitous alien alloys—was either bck ray. Through the eons, every pigment onboard would have been broken down, leaving the ship and everything i a unifray color.

  But the color on the walls of the chasm in the ceiling was red. Blood red.

  MvonStz