The staircase groaned but ultimately cooperated. The walls had been repainted several times—civilian white over military gray, which itself probably covered something older, darker, and fond of writing things in old, forgotten, Alliance languages.
At the top, Schmidt found the bridge.
It had the faded grandeur of a ballroom now used to store broken chairs and bad memories. Consoles sat dormant, heavy with dust. The air smelled of burnt circuitry, ozone, and that strange metallic hint of historical regret.
Then he noticed the damage.
Scorch marks along the starboard bulkhead. Plasma scoring, precise and purposeful. Three projectile impacts at the central column—tight grouping, chest height. The kind of marksmanship that meant either commando or someone with a deep personal issue.
And by the navigation station, the floor had buckled inward—evidence of a concussive blast. The sort that happens when someone loses an argument with a grenade.
There were no bodies. No shell casings. Just silence, the kind that comes after something very loud, and very final.
He moved to the captain’s station. Beneath the main console: a terminal. Recessed. Unpowered.
He tapped it once. Twice. Nothing.
Then he saw the nameplate—charred, scorched, and clearly not filed with the usual bureaucratic ceremony.
"…gernstern"
Schmidt stared at it. Then he opened comms.
“Neer. Belck. I’m on the bridge. Found a terminal—dead. Might be ship logs. Bring tools. And optimism.”
A crackle. Then Belck’s voice: “On my way. Found some power relays on the mid-deck. Might be able to reroute. Unless it’s all ghosts and copper dreams.”
Neer chimed in. “Found the labs. One’s astrogeology. The other, advanced cartography—heavy-duty stuff. This wasn’t a party ship.”
Schmidt kept his eyes on the damage.
“No,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t.”
Moments later, Albert Neer and Hans Belck stepped onto the bridge. Neer carried a portable diagnostic scanner, a device famous for offering only two distinct outcomes: “Yes” and “Oh dear.” Belck, by contrast, wore a tool kit across one shoulder with the effortless confidence of someone who sincerely believed that circuits were people too.
They exchanged the kind of nod engineers reserve for entering rooms with uncertain structural integrity and a high chance of irony.
“There she is, Hans,” Schmidt said, gesturing toward the inert console with the air of a landlord pointing out a tenant behind on rent. “All yours.”
Belck crouched with the solemnity of a man about to invalidate several warranties at once. “Power leads are... mostly intact. Bit of oxidation. Could try a manual bypass. Might fry the board. Or boot it into legacy mode. Possibly in Old Rheinlandic.”
As Belck murmured a string of gentle threats at the wiring, Schmidt turned to Neer. “What did you find?”
Neer wore the expression of someone who’d just rummaged through a museum curated by pessimists. “Science deck’s loaded. Geological survey kits, sample analyzers, some exploration gear. And a set of star charts where someone’s definitely scrawled ‘Hic Sunt Leones’ in the corners.”
“Passenger ship?” Schmidt asked, though he already knew the answer.
“Not even close. Looks like a government survey vessel. Badly disguised. Some of the gear’s Rheinland-issue. Stamped and everything.”
Belck paused. “Not Orbital?”
“Not unless Orbital’s started dabbling in state secrets and forgot to update their brochures.”
“And the name?”
Neer nodded. “One of the consoles still had a partial identifier. Fragmented, but readable: Morgenstern. Definitely not Serendipity.”
Schmidt folded his arms and let out the kind of sigh used exclusively when the universe reveals it’s up to its old tricks again. “So the Serendipity is a fake. Survey ship in disguise. Abandoned. Plasma-scarred.”
“Don’t forget the minor gunfight in the foyer,” Neer added. “Lends a certain charm.”
Schmidt gave a dry laugh. “And here we thought this was a paperwork error".
The console blinked.
Once.
Then again.
An amber light pulsed gently — not quite urgent, but definitely suggestive. Like a polite ghost clearing its throat.
Belck exhaled with quiet triumph. “She’s waking up. Give her a moment to remember what century it is.”
A low hum spread through the bridge — not threatening, just... present. The sound of forgotten systems shaking off the cobwebs of bureaucracy. Screens flickered. Panels sighed. One or two auxiliary displays lit up just long enough to question their purpose before giving up again.
Then the main terminal blinked to life. Static washed across the screen, followed by an initialization prompt — the sort written by engineers who suspected anyone reading it deserved to be judged:
Neer leaned in. “Looks like we’ve nudged something important.”
The three men gathered in front of the console, their faces lit by the glow of old secrets and mildly passive-aggressive user interfaces. The ambient hum was now accompanied by the faint crackle of static and the sound of ancient red tape rolling over in its grave.
Schmidt broke the quiet. His voice was firm, calm, and carried the peculiar tone of someone who suspected the next few hours would be filed under Complicated.
“All right,” he said. “We start at 710 A.S. We work forward. Every log, every broken timestamp, every footnote that says ‘see appendix F’ and never defines what F is — we comb through it. Somewhere in this archive is the truth. Or at the very least, a spectacularly worded lie.”
