Not long after the altercation, Pv-tor-fel-mak finally reached the bridge of the derelict. The st leg of the journey had gone quicker than he had anticipated, with the corridors in the bow of the ship being er and taining less debris than those he had seen before.

  With a smirk of irony, he g Est-mar-kort’s oxygen ister in his hand. It seemed he hadn’t after all. But he felt for his as—his sce had departed with the loss of his soul.

  When he reached the entrance, he could see it was barricaded from the ihe same type of makeshift blockage they had entered time and time again as they vehrough the ship. Using anything they could get their hands on, the inal crew of the derelict had tried everything they could to block the way into the bridge.

  Tried—and apparently failed. Parts of the barricade looked as if they had been thrown away by some unimaginably strong force, with pieces of it floating all around him in the room outside the bridge. Slowly, careful not to rip his suit, he ehe passageway this event had created through the debris, his fshlight sing ahead of him for possible hints of danger.

  Just like the rest of the ship, the bridge turned out to be dark and gray. Somehow, he had expected things to be different here, though he didn’t quite know why. There were no windows in the room—clearly, the inal inhabitants must have depended on view ss instead, just like Peretti's Legacy had. Pv-tor-fel-mak felt certain there must be an observation lounge somewhere on the alien ship, but if there was ohey hadn’t found it. It didn’t matter, though. For navigational purposes, you didn’t want to depend on your own eyes anyway. Still, he had hoped to see the stars one more time before the end, and the ck of windows was disappointing.

  Gliding through the floating pieces of brokeal and gss that filled the room, he desperately searched for anything—anything at all—that could offer him a way out of this death trap. But just as he had expected, there was nothihat could help him. Every piece of teology was dead, rendered i by entropy over immeimescales. If the crew had left some form of log behind to tell their story, decay had erased its tent millions of years ago.

  That the crew had once been here, he knew. Floating among the debris on the bridge, he ted at least five desiccated bodies, of the same type they had seen before on the ship: tall, thin, and skeletal. They had all been cut into pieces by their unknown assaint.

  In the pale beam of his fshlight—now seemingly incapable of peing the pact darkhat enclosed him—their faces looked horrifying. The dry lips of the corpses had curled into grotesque grins, mog him across the eons. Deep-set eyes, freeze-dried from exposure to the vacuum of space, seemed to stare back at him wherever he looked.

  By now, he had little less than five minutes of air left—and perhaps an additional half hour if he used Est-mar-kort’s oxygen der—aeo make the most of that time.

  As he rummaged through the debris in the room, he started to get a feeling for what the bridge might have looked like long ago, when it was bustling with life. The chamber was quite rge—fifteen by eight meters, he estimated—and inid in its walls were bands and patterns of gold and ptinum. He could see no practical reason for their existence, leading him to believe they were just there for decoration. The gray walls, their pigments now eroded into dust, had probably once been painted in bright colors, he thought.

  He had known it from the very first time he had id eyes on the alien ship: its builders had valued beauty. The decrepit wreck the crew of Peretti's Legacy had entered was nothing like what the ship would have looked like before the disaster. Whatever force had attacked it—and ter his own team—had corrupted it, transf beauty and life into decay, despair, ah.

  Hidden in a er of the room, deep inside a pile of brokeal sheets and razor-sharp shards of gss, he found a sixth body. Perhaps shielded by the debris in which it floated, it was somewhat less decayed than the previous corpses he had seen, and uhe other bodies in the room, it had not been cut into pieces.

  Shining his fshlight across its skeletal face, he could now behold again the beauty of the race that once upon a time had built the immense vessel. At first ghey might seem grotesque—certainly not someone you’d like to meet in a dark alley—but the more he looked at the corpse, the more he came to appreciate the aesthetics of its anatomy.

  There was no muscle tissue to be found at all. The body was, literally, just skin and bones, driven by powerful sinews. Its unblinking eyes, dark and all-seeing, were like deep holes into the alieure’s soul. To Pv-tor-fel-mak, it was hauntingly beautiful. A silent voice at the back of his head begged him to worship the once-powerful being floating in front of him.

  In the light of his lumen torch, the long, spidery fingers on its hands—all six ending in sharp cws—waved slowly bad forth as the corpse drifted in the microgravity of the bridge.

  Had he been more alert, he would have realized something was very wrong with what he saw. All the other bone-dry bodies they had found had been frozen stiff.

  Without warning, the being in front of him suddenly turs head toward him, its eyes no longer vatly staring into space, but instead looking at him with razor-sharp focus, malice radiating from its gaze. The creature’s thin lips curled ba a snarl, silent like death itself in the vacuum of the ship, revealing double rows of sharp, triangur teeth.

  Pv-tor-fel-mak froze in fear, uo react, incapable of even thinking about a respohe only thought in his mind was the baffling fact that the alien wasn’t wearing a spacesuit.

  The being turned around to face him head-on, its movements quid precise, as if perfectly aced to the microgravity of the ship. As it did so, it grabbed one of the metal beams floatio it, hidden among the debris.

  No, it wasn’t quite a metal beam, Pv-tor-fel-mak thought. It was almost two meters long, thin and fttened into something resembling a sword, polished and sharpehrough the eons.

  Suddenly, a clig sound emerged from the speakers inside his helmet.

  A voice followed, an age-old voice, filled with hatred and pt.

  “So we finally meet, beloved Child,” it she irony of the epithet trasting sharply with the loathing in its voice.

  “I thank you,” it tinued, hatred evident in the words it spoke, “for letting me have this small measure of revenge on the Most High before the end.”

  As it delivered its final, mog words, it raised the sword and swung it in a wide arc with a strength far surpassing that of a man. The bde ected with Pv-tor-fel-mak’s waist, effortlessly separating it from his torso.

  With eternal darkness encroag on him, the st surviving member of the crew of Peretti's Legacy died with one final thought on his mind.

  No one will ever know what happeo us here.

  MvonStz