I had not even thought about what the personal logs might contain. How many people might have recorded final messages for their loved ones, how many tears and goodbyes, how many last words spoken in fear and despair. I did not tell Ariana not to do it, because I knew she was right, but part of me wanted to stop her. The families had suffered enough. The dead were dead, and their voices should not be dragged from this crypt, for no solace or comfort would come from hearing what they had suffered at the end. I said nothing. It was not my decision to make. I had my mother’s final message, though it was not directed at me. I had my father’s final words echoing in my mind. Others deserved the same, even if it brought them no peace.

“What I don’t understand is, who would want to do something like this?” Ariana said suddenly. “What possible reason could they have?”

“I know SPEC had reasons for blaming Dr. Lago, but they don’t make much sense anymore,” Xiomara said. “This doesn’t look like revenge that got out of hand.”

“Unless there was something way more fucked up than data theft going on,” Baqir said. “Can we—”

“Find the data he was hiding? Yeah, I’ll look for it,” I said.

Only two fragments of recovered and restored data from UC33-X had been released to the public before the massacre. The rest, the parts of the data Lago had hidden from his colleagues and worked on in secret, had been held back pending the results of the investigation into his actions. But only two days had passed between his dismissal from the ship and the massacre, and Lago died by suicide only a few days after that.

In the archive I found five additional restored fragments that had never been made public. They were short passages, no more than a couple hundred words each. I read them quickly one by one.

Then I read them again, more slowly.

“Fuck,” Baqir breathed, reading over my shoulder. “This is about the planet they found.”

“We already know they found a planet,” Xiomara said.

“We didn’t know there was an archaeological excavation.”

Xiomara started to reply, then turned to look at us. “But that means—”

“It means they found the ruins of an alien civilization.”

For a moment, none of us spoke. The claustrophobic closeness of the ship faded away, and with it the dead, the persistent red light, the blood.