A duet sung solo
History can surprise you. When Garth and Shira gut an ancient spaceport, they find more than they expected.
The decommissioned spaceport was silent, the air thick with the dust of untold ages. Every now and then a cosmic shard pinged off the hull before ricocheting into the vast expanse of space.
“We’re not here to admire the acoustics.” Shira’s voice crackled over the comms, made staticky and harsh by the poor reception.
“But just think of the reviews,” Garth said as he spun with arms wide in the middle of the cavernous central hall. His feet clipped a discarded power redoubler and sent the pitted, rusty component spinning away from the watery beam of his helmet light and into the shadows that crouched beneath the piles of ancient detritus.
As he bent back to the pile of old mechanisms, warped from time spent in the uncontrolled, erratic environment of the port, Garth hummed under his breath. Halfway through the second stanza of the recent showtune hit ‘And Over the Hills of Perdu I’ll Find You’, his comms fizzled back into life.
“I swear to Bis, Garth, I will come down there and murder you.”
Biting back a smile, Garth snorted. “Crotchety old bitch. No taste in music,” he smiled as he flicked the comms off and continued humming.
By the time he’d finished dismantling the old centurion manifold, a piece of art in and of itself and worth a mint to the right buyer, he was used to the creaks and groans of the station as it settled its old bones. He’d hummed ‘Verily Forsooth That Shard of Bone Broke My Tooth’ and ‘Gerry Gander’s on a Wild Meander’, even belted out the opti-pop ballad ‘Vergence of the Heart’, which he thought the station appreciated because of how it gave his voice just the right amount of reverb on the low bass, and was just starting to hum ‘Into the Wonder of Lastali’ when he heard the sound. Ears pricked, he tilted his head to one side as he turned the plasm-cutter off. As the ion blade fizzled into silence, Garth held his breath.
Somewhere, something made a tapping noise.
“Shira? Is that you?”
Tnk. Tnk. Tnk.
It sounded like metal on metal, but not the heavy tread of mag-boots. The sound echoed strangely in the space, winding its way through tangled coils of wires and fracturing in the honeycomb frames of crumbling chrono-clusters, only to reassemble on the other side to find its way to Garth’s straining ears. He took a few cautious steps in one direction. The other. With soft footfalls, he tracked the noise, triangulating it with precise movements as his hearts pitter-pattered to its erratic beat.
It led him away from the service corridor he’d pried open, his grav-pull still wedged in its rusted jaws to keep it ajar. Shadows clustered away from the dim orange glow of the emergency lights that managed to shed barely enough light to stop him walking right into a low bulkhead. It always amazed him that these old derelict stations had any juice flowing through their circuits; most looked barely sturdy enough to stay in one piece, let alone produce power, but they often did. Just one of the many mysteries that these ruins held.
“Shira, stop dicking around.” He flicked his helmet beam from side to side, sending shadows skittering away from its light only to crowd back in its wake. His HUD flicked a few warnings his way – radiation was a little on the high side of ambient, but nothing much to worry about. A discarded Swarm cocoon flickered green, highlighted by the navi-sys, but it was old and empty. Not even the voracious Mandis could live if there was nothing to eat but rust and stardust. A little red speaker blinked in the lower left of the screen.
“Moron,” Garth muttered as he flicked his comms back on. He’d been talking to thin air, and he wouldn’t be surprised to hear Shira pissing herself laughing at him. But all he got was dead air, and his HUD showed no signal to the main base, or even his booster relay. Garth frowned. Was he imagining a tinny, high-pitched tune tinkling in the background?
He shook his head, but by then there was no sound except the distant tapping.
Tnk. Tnk.
Definitely close by.
He huffed an annoyed sigh, wondering if he should keep going. There shouldn’t be anything in this port that was alive apart from him and Shira, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything mechanical. The emergency lighting was indication enough that some systems were still in working order, and there was always a chance that some rogue sec-bot or corrupted maintenance-sweeper might be rattling through the halls. If he had been watching himself in an optic, he knew he’d be screaming at the screen and telling his character that he was a colossal idiot.
Tnk. Tnk. Tnk.
It didn’t sound like it was getting closer, or moving at all. Just an occasional tap-tap noise that was starting to tug at his curiosity harder than it was pulling at his caution.
“And just think how boring it would be if the characters always did the smart thing,” Garth grinned to himself and poked his head around a doorframe. The chrome doorplate was crooked and bent, jammed half-open, and the runners were crusted with a thick layer of grime and grit mixed with what looked and smelled like lubricant dripping from a fractured duct overhead.
Tnk.
The strangely pitched music was back, playing in bursts like supernovae exploding across an epsilon-void mining operation. Garth’s light played over the wreckage, worn down by centuries of disuse. A large metal plinth stood centred in the room, but there was nothing on it. One wall was collapsed, struts and piping standing out like mangled ribs torn apart to expose the soft belly of a metal beast and rust spread over the walls and floor like a fungus. His light illuminated old fusion couplers, the bulbous shape of a shattered Belle-Higson jar, the curve of a strange arm stretching upwards, the gleam of teeth held in a rictus.
Garth backed up the corridor. Shira had to see this.
***
“Cool, isn’t it?”
Shira stared thoughtfully up at the slowly rotating statue, watching as its long, strangely-jointed limbs as they spun through the gentle curve of the figure’s orbit. A tinny, annoying song was playing in the background – the original music, a plaque said, but Shira would have preferred something less piercing.
Garth nudged her, expecting an answer, and she flicked his tail with her own to get him to stop. The refurbed spaceport was interesting, she supposed, but Garth’s find… With its odd, flared skirt and the curve of its arms, the way one leg was held so that the knee pointed to the side and the foot rested on the other calf…
“Let’s get out of here; that old spaceship in the Vermun stellae isn’t going to gut itself.” She shrugged and flicked her ears in amusement as Garth wrinkled his snout at her and stuck out his tongue, irritated by her non-sequitur.
“I mean, yeah, but it’s still amazing to have found a little bit of ancient history just lying around.” Shira just sighed. They worked with ancient history every day; it didn’t matter to her what historians or collectors thought about what they pulled out of old ruins, so long as they paid them for it.
As she nearly dragged Garth out the door, she cast one last look back at the statue, caught forever in a dance she didn’t understand. Shira sniffed, and turned away. “Human stuff’s weird.”
