The sight of the shuttle's slightly ajar hatch sent a jolt of adrenaline through Alex, a feeling more potent than any fear. Someone survived the crash. Someone was here. He swam towards the shuttle, Maximus close behind him, a silent, grim shadow in the dark water.
They reached the smaller vessel. The hatch was indeed damaged, its edges slightly warped from the force of the impact, preventing it from sealing completely. The gap was just wide enough for a man to squeeze through. Alex looked at Maximus, his eyes wide with a question. The general nodded, his own expression one of stern, unwavering resolve. He would follow his emperor, even into the belly of a star-fallen god.
Alex took a deep breath from his air-bag, the taste of stale leather filling his lungs, and pushed himself through the narrow opening. He emerged from the water with a great, gasping heave, his body suddenly heavy as he half-fell, half-clambered into the interior.
He was in an airlock. A small, dark, cramped chamber. And it was dry. Miraculously, the shuttle's inner seal had held for millennia, preserving a pocket of ancient, alien atmosphere. The air was thin, stale, and carried a strange, sterile scent like ozone after a lightning strike, mixed with the faint, dusty smell of immense age.
Maximus squeezed through the gap behind him, landing with a soft thud on the metal deck. For a moment, they just stood there, breathing the thin, dead air, their lanterns cutting sharp, dancing beams through the darkness. They were inside.
A second, circular hatch stood before them. It opened with a soft hiss at Alex's touch, the mechanism still functional after two thousand years of silence. They stepped through and found themselves in the cockpit.
It was a small space, designed for a single pilot. There was no grand throne, no complex array of levers and dials. There was just a single, elegantly designed chair facing a smooth, black console that wrapped around the front of the cockpit. And in the chair, they found what was left of the pilot.
It was not a body. Any flesh and blood would have decayed into dust centuries ago. It was a skeleton, perfectly preserved in the dry, sterile environment. It was slumped in the pilot's chair, held in place by what looked like a series of safety restraints. The skeleton was humanoid, but Alex, with his 21st-century knowledge of anatomy, could immediately see the subtle differences. The limbs were slightly longer and more slender than a human's, the ribcage a different shape, and the skull was subtly but noticeably more elongated. This was not a human from his own time. This was something else.
The skeleton was clad in the tattered, rotted remains of a strange, form-fitting suit. The fabric, once likely as strong as steel, had mostly decayed, but patches of it remained, a silvery, fibrous material that seemed to shimmer faintly in their lantern light.
Alex's gaze was drawn to the console in front of the skeleton. There, resting where the pilot's hands would have been, was another device. It was a thin, black, perfectly smooth rectangle of the same material as the ship's hull, about the size of a large book. It looked like a more advanced, impossibly sleek version of his own laptop. A data slate. It was dark, seemingly as dead as its owner.
He reached out a hesitant hand, his fingers tracing the cool, smooth surface. He felt a surge of desperate hope. If he could power it, if he could access its secrets… He pressed on the surface, tapped it, but nothing happened. It was as lifeless as the rest of the ship.
His eyes scanned the cockpit, searching for any kind of power source, any switch, any clue. He then noticed a thin, almost invisible black cable running from a port on the side of the data slate. It snaked down to the pilot's suit. Alex followed the line of the cable and saw where it connected: to a small, crystalline object embedded in the chest of the rotted, silvery fabric.
The crystal was about the size of his palm, cut in a complex, multi-faceted pattern. It was a milky, translucent white, and deep within its core, a tiny, faint light seemed to pulse with a slow, rhythmic beat, like the last embers of a dying fire. A power source.
An idea, a wild, improbable hunch, sparked in Alex's mind. He looked at the crystal, then at his own dead laptop, which he had brought with him in a waterproofed leather satchel. He gently, reverently, reached out and worked the crystal free from the rotted fabric of the suit. It was cool to the touch, and it seemed to hum with a faint, low-frequency vibration. He looked at the base of the crystal and saw a series of metallic contact points.
He took out his own laptop. He looked at its charging port, then at the crystal. The configuration was different, but the fundamental interface looked… compatible. As if one was a direct technological ancestor of the other.
With his heart pounding, he carefully touched the contact points of the crystal to the charging port of his laptop.
The effect was immediate and spectacular. His laptop, which had been completely dead, flared to life. The screen didn't just glow; it blazed with a brilliant, full-power boot sequence, a cascade of light and text that filled the small, dark cockpit.
A clear, confident voice—Lyra, at full power—spoke from the speakers. EXTERNAL POWER SOURCE DETECTED. CHRONO-CRYSTAL ARRAY AT 7% CAPACITY. RECHARGING MAIN BATTERY. ALL SYSTEMS RETURNING TO 100% OPERATIONAL CAPACITY.
He had found a battery. A two-thousand-year-old alien battery that was perfectly compatible with his 2030-era laptop. The implications were staggering.
"Lyra," he breathed, his voice filled with awe. "Can you… can you interface with that data slate?" He gestured to the alien device on the console.
The device is powered down, but it appears to share a root operating system architecture with my own, albeit several centuries more advanced, Lyra stated. Connecting via local induction. Attempting to access its log files.
The screen of Alex's laptop flickered, displaying lines of flowing, incomprehensible alien script, which Lyra began to translate in real-time. He was about to get his answers.
The story she pieced together from the ship's logs was both wondrous and tragic. The traveler had not been a time traveler at all. Their ship, the Stell-Aethel, which Lyra translated as Star-Seeker, was a xeno-archaeological research vessel. The pilot was not human, but from a peaceful, highly advanced civilization thousands of light-years away, and, relative to Alex, from far in the future.
Their ship had been studying Earth from a high, stationary orbit when it experienced a catastrophic failure of its temporal drive during a solar flare. The resulting explosion didn't just throw them through space; it threw them through time. They crash-landed in the mouth of the Tiber river not last year, not last decade, but around 800 BC, during the semi-mythical era of the Roman Kingdom, when Romulus himself might have been a boy.
The pilot, the skeleton in the chair, was the sole survivor. Her name, as Lyra translated the flowing script, was Elara. Her final logs were a heartbreaking account of a scientist and explorer marooned in a primitive, savage past. She wrote of her loneliness, her despair, her failed attempts to cultivate her native plants in the hostile alien soil of ancient Italy.
"Lyra," Alex whispered. "Access the final log entry. Read it to me."
The text scrolled across his screen, and Lyra's voice read the translated words.
LOG ENTRY 734. The main reactor is dead. The ship is a tomb. My own life support is failing. I am the last of my kind, marooned in the dawn of a world that is not my own. I have one final option. My shuttle contains a secondary, short-range temporal drive, powered by my suit's chrono-crystal array. It is not powerful enough to bridge the chasm back to my own time. But I may be able to re-purpose its energy. I can create a small, localized, and persistent temporal distortion… a targeted lifeboat. I have programmed it with my own biometrics and the specific temporal signature of my technology.
The words hit Alex with the force of a physical blow.
My hope, Elara's final log continued, is that if another traveler, another soul lost in time, is ever stranded here with technology derived from my own civilization's root code, the distortion might act as a beacon. It might pull them to this specific location, to this time, to find my ship, my logs, my knowledge. It is a message in a bottle, thrown into an ocean of time.
Alex stared at the screen, his mind reeling in stunning, absolute realization. His arrival was not a random accident. The "freak temporal anomaly" on his flight was not a freak event at all. It was a distress beacon, a desperate, two-thousand-year-old message that had honed in on the future-tech signature of his laptop and pulled him from his own time, to this exact place. He had been summoned.
The final translated line appeared on the screen, a ghost's last whisper across the millennia.
I am activating the beacon now. I do not know if it will work. My final act will be to place my data slate here, and to hope. My hope is for you, whoever you are. Elara, out.