They spent that last undisturbed set of cycles using two and a half tanks of air, hours in a row, combing through the areas they knew by instinct held the small treasures that were sometimes the best.
For instance, under a heavy set of robes at the bottom of a crew member’s locker there was something they hadn’t seen forever. It was drinking alcohol. In bottles. With labels that shone brightly after being uncovered for the first time in hundreds of years.
Drinking alcohol isn’t done on the main worlds, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a set of people with means and a complete disregard for rules they know don’t ultimately apply to them. Those people have the cash and they eat this sort of stuff up. Figuratively, of course. Anything in a bottle probably has been spoiled for a thousand years but you would never unscrew one of those caps with the bright holographic excise tax unbroken. They know more than a few people that would fund the next six years out in the farlights.
There were also some food items, personal hygiene products, some physical stationary, and all of it in very good condition. They hadn’t really sat and thought about the fate of the crew because they were so focused on the puzzle of the device pulled from the heart of the Phoenix Rose. But it’s sort of weird that there were still foods uneaten. And there aren’t any marks of weapon fire in the hallways or the crew quarters. So they must have left at some point, hopefully saved, or all the food would be gone. And they hadn’t expected to see any corpses – or perhaps better said they would have preferred not to – because so many of the panels of the hull had been bounced away by errant garbage or asteroid – but there wasn’t anyone anywhere. Even when they got into the inner corridors that had remained largely intact.
The phrase “their loss is my gain” very quickly flashed through their mind. And then they felt like a douchebag. One can be a respectful grave robber.
The carryon came back and forth several times with loads of seemingly mundane products and knickknacks, books and clothes, records of another time.
Abneil should be here in twelve or so hours so I might as well stow this stuff, cataloging it to make sure that light fingers didn’t take advantage of their hospitality, and bed down for a cycle.
As they laid their head on their pillow, they realized they hadn’t checked on her diagnostics running on the device. They slipped feet into slippers and a robe around them and they padded into the test bay.
On the screen was a single line in a language that looked very much like theirs but somehow not right. As if it had been written by a child in a foreign language class.
“What took you so long?”