I raised my bracelet in the air, illuminating the cavern. My light reflected off something ahead of me. Metal? Maybe one of the water pipes?

I walked toward it, and it took my brain a moment to realize what I was seeing. There, nestled into the corner of the cavern—surrounded by rubble—was a ship.

4

It was a starfighter.

An old one, of a design completely unfamiliar to me. It had a wider wingspan than DDF ships, and was shaped like a wicked W. Straight, razorlike wings at the sides framed an old dust-covered cockpit in the center. The acclivity ring—the thing that gave starfighters their lift—was buried in the rubble underneath the ship, but from what I could see it looked whole.

For a moment, I forgot about the test. A ship.

How long had it been here to collect that much rubble around it, and that much dust? One wing had been bent almost to the ground, probably by a cave-in, and the rear boosters were a huge mess.

I didn’t know the model. That was incredible. I knew every DDF design, every Krell ship, and the roving tradeship designs used by nomadic human clans. I had even studied old ships we’d flown during the first decades after crashing on Detritus.

I could rattle off each of these practically in my sleep, draw their silhouettes from memory. But I’d never seen this design. I dropped my pack and climbed—gingerly—up the wing that had been bent down. My bracelet provided light as my boots scraped off caked-on dust, revealing a scratched metallic surface. The right side of the ship was particularly banged up.

It crash-landed here. I thought. Long ago.

I climbed up near the circular cockpit, which had a glass—well, probably fusion-plastic—canopy that was remarkably intact. The ship was generations past having enough power to open its own cockpit, but I found the manual release panel right where I expected it. I brushed the dust off, and found letters—in English. They said EMERGENCY CANOPY RELEASE.

So the ship was human. It must be old, then. Likely as ancient as the apparatus and the rubble belt.

I yanked on the release lever to no avail. The thing was stuck. I put my hands on my hips and considered breaking in—but that seemed like a shame. This was an antique, the sort of thing that belonged on a pedestal in the Igneous ship museum, where we celebrated warriors of the past. There was no skeleton in the cockpit though, so either the pilot had escaped, or it had been here so long that even the bones had turned to dust.

All right, let’s be delicate about this. I could be delicate. I was incredibly delicate. Like, all the time.

I attached one end of my light-line to the release lever, then walked across the top of the ship to the rubble at the rear, where I attached the other end of the light-line to a boulder. That separated the energy rope entirely from the bracelet, which stopped glowing. The rope could function for an hour or two once separated from its power source, but would remain stuck at the length it was when released.