Three Hunters

They slid down the service ladder one at a time into the deep below. At work with their power tools and crowbars they broke open the rusted hatch with a tremulous cough that echoed into the breach. Landing on the metal floor and training the barrels of their weapons to the abject darkness of the keep before them. Three. Three to face the long and uncharted journey as one. The last to land did so with a thud, the hull of his body broad, square, and itself metallic. An engineered carapace housing an artificial intelligence no inferior to any organic. The lion's share of their supplies he bore on his back, his shoulders stamped in auburn the designation RDD. The second was a small and lithe creature who upon entering readied a machine which suspended in midair in front of them and spoke to a weathered terminal she operated. The drone would map the surroundings as they traveled and it hummed with a light that illuminated especially the white linen wrap she wore about her neck. In the dark it seemed almost to glow. The last of them and first in their column had on a green flak jacket outfitted with ammunition and gear. His auto-rifle was pointed forward as the tip of the spear leading the procession and the beam of his flashlight extended out into the corridor they were in. Tight and rounded. Corrugated at the sides and textured. Empty. Hopefully. An artery of this great beast of a derelict craft. It was old, older than they anticipated. Their contact neglected to mention neither the state of the ship nor the difficulty in locating it. Some abandoned scrape of rock in the middle of an ocean and the ship crashed and partially sunk. Weeks they spent searching. Combing the grid of coordinates they received over biomes of desert and plain and mountain until at last they zeroed in on this hunk of junk nearly indistinguishable in color from the rockface around it and the flat languid water. But the prize inside, guaranteed. The pearl for which they'd mine any depth to drag, exhausted, to the surface and claim for themselves. The promise of the job sounded nearly too good to be true, and surely would have been had the contact not been the reliable north star they had depended on so often before. Their little triad trained well from so much work, so many jobs to hone their skill and role and process. A machine now well-oiled, a machine within a machine. The mechanical form of Red took up the rear and guarded as a sentry checking with his particle cannon each corner and entry-way they passed behind them. The slow movement forward, inching with each pulse of the drone unveiling new passages and causeways in the ship. They didn't know precisely where it lay, the prize, but they knew the first order was to find the main deck and hopefully there be able to turn the ship's power back on. To relight this artificial cave and have some pretense of a concrete route. 

They came to a large and vacuous chamber in the interior where there were two levels connected by stairs and arrayed with many openings to an untold number of passageways. Crossroads. They stopped, rested. How long had it been? Hours upon hours already, the time tracked by the drone as White recorded it on the terminal. Green unloaded his rifle, cleared the chamber, and loaded it again. Almost underwhelmed that he hadn't had to use it. Silence in the auditorium. Each surveyed the surroundings of the room for any indication of what path they ought to take. Their flashlights and torch lamps shaded the contours of the walls and ceiling and they perceived what seemed like etchings, like engravings along the rims of the vaulted walls as they sloped down to the floor. Strange symbols with a curvature and oval shapes with indented pupils in the center of them. Eyes. Rows of eyes that populated the high ceiling as a constellation staring unblinking down at them. And suddenly they weren't alone. The inner architecture of this ship was watching them the whole time, and it flowed toward a particular path. White filled a ledger with notes as the drone scanned the glyphs. More data, but with it more questions unanswered. Cursory carbon dating suggested the craftmanship was ancient, at least hundreds of years old. Green chuckled to himself. This had gotten into legend, passed the threshold of reason into a realm of hearsay and rumor and tall tales. They could guess the stories, based on what the contact had told about the job and the nature of it. Almost beyond belief, yes, but with the shape of a familiar mythology. Some long foretold treasure stepped out of history into the here and now, and this ship bearing the marks of that prophecy. They could have turned back, and they deliberated about it for a while. Green's skepticism matched White's curiosity. It was Red who finally made the deciding vote, reckoning what they all already knew. They had come too far to turn back, and if there was even an infinitesimal chance this was true they owed it to themselves to go all the way. And so they continued, tentative explorers bound by precarious belief. 

A tight and winding passage they weaved through, the drone leaving a thread behind them and a hope of a way back to the surface. Trudging through this dungeon, where the dark and creaking cold steel enveloped them. They were voyagers of experience, but this was testing them. Not for the faint of heart, nor the claustrophobic. There were stretches where the walls seemed to narrow around them but when one would comment they would stop and White would go through the log and reaffirm that the width and diameter had not changed. Long they traveled, with no exit in sight. And still the eyes engraved round the tunnel beckoned them forwards, away from where they had entered this place, away from any semblance of the familiar anatomy of a ship. The bridge which they had attempted to find seemed very far from them now, as was the engine room and airlock and cargo hull, where one uninitiated might assume the bounty would lie. It seemed this were the bowels of this vessel, like a subterranean catacomb leading perhaps ultimately to nothing. But the passage did meet an end eventually, in the form of a door that halted them. It was rounded, almost completely, with no perceivable way to open it. The engravings leapt from the walls onto the face of the doorway and swirled in concentric circles until they met at the center in a larger symbol of a lidless eye, this one flanked by several feathered wings. A thing strange, foreign, alien. Their questions remained, but the only one that mattered was not the hatch itself but what might lie behind it.

White worked with meticulous diligence to create a list of possible methods of opening the door, including an index of passwords that Red recited while Green sat, watched, and sighed. His trigger finger was itching, and after many unsuccessful attempts even White began to consider his more destructive option, if not only as a last resort. But it mattered little what other alternatives they toyed with as long as the central power remained inactive. They were hedging their bets that some centuries-old backup generator would spontaneously reanimate with the utterance of the right set of magic words. Of course, these things do not happen. This was the material universe, material and measurable. A reality of observable fact; matter and energy, water and fire. An entire solar system being slowly traversed, charted, and conquered by the strength of this science and nowhere found within it a defiance of those parameters, of evidence there exist such a thing as miracles. And yet that is precisely how this soldier, scientist, and engineer would classify the anomaly that they encountered behind that door in the heart of this antique vessel. 

Red had put his mechanical hand on the door, on the pupil of the eye centered, and leaned against it exasperated. They were tired, frustrated. A disillusionment set in from the hours of meaningless toil. Excavators digging, digging until their pickaxes dulled in the dimly lit subterranean crevices only to uncover nothing but dirt and emptiness by the end of their work. A fool's errand, is what Red called it. But then a shift was noticed in the door. A centimeter moved inward, he could feel it. Why? Red pressed again at the same place but could not gain any more purchase. By the time he pressed again White had already begun to run through her litany of passwords like a prayer, like a religious rite repeated again and again. When that didn't work she began mixing and matching each individual word in an almost frenzied hypnosis until her enumeration synced with Red's effort upon the lidless eye and the three all felt the thrum of the ship's power activate beneath their feet and the gears creaking and grinding as the round disc of the door rotated one revolution at a time to open the chamber it had kept hidden and secret and safe. It was a small room, they noticed almost immediately. Again with their weapons drawn, again with Green's flashlight skewering the dark. But as they approached they realized: there was light in this room. Warm light, spread out along the walls at about their head height. They were hung by a single strand that had been wrapped around the inner lining of what seemed to be a round room. The winged engravings continued in circularity all along the inner walls up until they concluded at a point in the middle of the ceiling. The winged eye there had taken on a greater star-like size and shape with eight points as it peered straight down to a small pod in the centerpiece of the room, the only thing in it. They approached slowly, cautiously. Green lowered his rifle as he neared and was the first to behold it. This was not another room. This was a bedroom. A nursery. 

The glass was thick and hazy with dust and condensation. Cold to the touch. It covered the top of the pod and was just clear enough to reveal what lay inside of it as it slept. An infant, a boy. Cryogenically frozen it seemed, as the data panel read on the side which monitored its vitals. It was alive, undoubtedly, but for how long it had slumbered White could not ascertain from her scans. The text was of a language older surely than any that had been spoken aloud in a millennia. Databases incomplete. On the front of the pod, near to the top where the child's head lay, were inscribed words translated "Be Not Afraid". White recognized them because they were those that opened the door for them. They stood transfixed, and confused. Every question they could conjure they knew were unanswerable save for the fact that this baby somehow was alive and here and hidden for an innumerable span of years, the purpose of which having the vague shape of great importance, great beyond reckoning. This was a human child, they deduced. A race of beings long believed extinct; the records of their civilization were nebulous shadows as was the history of their apparent self-destruction. What remained of the entirety of their narrative was a story distilled down to its bare elements. The story of one homosapien who was the ultimate paragon of what it meant to be an embodied sentient consciousness. The perfect lifeform; the apotheosis of existence itself incarnate in the humble mystery of this tiny mass of tissue and bone and blood. They beheld this revelation before them and they did not understand. A thing worth far more than any fortune or glory. At rest in their arms a true myth.

They hauled the pod back through the tunnels, following the thread White's drone had left behind them all the way to the hatch where they had first entered. The open air and vacant sky above them a blessing like they'd never appreciated before. Each of their triad felt some shift within them, some ineffable alteration they could not measure let alone verbalize. A deeper proximity to each other and to something else larger, greater, other. Goodwill. Contentment. Peace. They boarded their ship, a ship called Tannenbaum. On the horizon the sign of a comet was traveling across the bend towards Orion and the approximate home from whence they came. Before they followed after it they convened in the galley and sat and meditated. They spoke in hushed tones of what they ought to do and when the plan was formulated they readied their craft and made preparations in each of the ship's components and in their own quarters, leaving at last a place to safely house their new passenger. Though three had arrived at this lonely isle in the outer reaches of space, four were departing it, and all would be the better for it.