++Classfied Report Date 105:56:26:32 CST++

  ++Subject: Contact with Extrasolar Object 2120, codename Icicle++

  ++Preliminary salvage and recovery effort underway...++

  ++Contact confirmed with Icicle. Look at the size of her!++

  ++Cut the chatter Hans. What do you see?++

  ++Nothing we’ve ever seen before! It’s like... a long dagger, 1.2 kloms in length. Definitely artificial. Wow, I’m getting faint energy readings. Looks like you were right, it’s still functional.++

  ++Hooey, you boys owe me a drink when we get back!++

  ++No exhaust emissions. She’s adrift. Trajectory should take her within a megaklom of Janus.++

  ++I’m seeing... a lot of damage, looks like micrometeorite fragments. Whatever this is, it’s been out here awhile.++

  static

  ++Come again control?++

  ++... interferen... boos...++

  ++Bring us around to the other side Hans. We’re in its shadow++

  ++You see that? Could be a docking port.++

  ++We’re going to try docking with the alien craft control.++

  ++Acknowledged. Video feed is active. We see it.++

  ++Keep it steady Hans.++

  ++Would you relax? This isn’t my first time flying.++

  ++Seal confirmed. Alright everyone suit up. Let’s go say hello.++

  With a creaking groan, an ancient, meteorite pitted airlock door slid open, assisted by the judicious use of leverage, and four faces peered through armourglass helmets to look upon the ancient derelict. Magnetic boots disengaged as the astronauts swung through the portal, leaving their survey ship moored moored behind them, sealed to the docking port like a lamprey.

  The interior of the wreck was a mess. Fragments of debris floated silently through stagnant air, and huge panels hung loose from the walls, revealing masses of twisted wires and coolant pipes. Crawling vines crept across long disused computer terminals and equipment lockers, reaching out with spindly limbs towards the flickering lights.

  “Are you seeing this command?” The lead astronaut asked, sweeping his helmet mounted camera across the space.

  There was a burst of movement to his left, and Hans screamed as some sort of winged creature dove into his visor, flapping and screeching. The pilot flailed at it and it flew off, disappearing down a dimly lit passage chased by a torrent of expletives.

  “It’s some sort of alien jungle, or arboretum.”

  “Not so alien, Captain.” A female voice said. The Captain turned to see Valerian, his engineer, holding something round in her hands. A broken human skull lay within her palm.

  Slowly, the team made their way through the corridor, following the path of the bat or bird that had accosted them. Their boots hissed as they made contact with the cylindrical walls, magnetic seals engaging and disengaging in a steady rhythm. The Captain’s flechette rifle was raised ahead of him, on alert for threats, and his heartbeat pounded in his ears.

  The roars and howls of wildlife were their constant companions, echoing through the narrow passages. The walls were smeared with some sort of biomatter, and exotic plants and fungi had taken root there, drinking condensation from exposed pipes and misting valves.

  “This is incredible. How is this ship still functioning?” Valerian asked. The Captain didn’t reply. He felt an uneasiness grip him, and he suppressed a shiver that seemed to down into his bowels.

  “This could blow apart the entire field of history.” She continued. “To think that humans might of...”

  “Captain.” A low voice interrupted. Kores, the Captain’s right hand man. They’d been together for nearly a decade, and he didn’t think he’d ever seen the man so much as smile. “Movement ahead.”

  “It’s the centrifuge. We’re approximately a fifth of the way down the spine of the derelict now.” Valerian chimed in. “There should be artificial gravity in the next chamber.”

  The astronauts grunted as they stepped onto the slowly spinning surface, their boots gluing themselves to the floor without the need for magnetic assistance. The gravity was heavier than they were used to, especially after a month in microgravity aboard a survey tug, but it made it easier to move around.

  What made it difficult was the thicket of vegetation that had choked the chamber. From floor to ceiling, trees and twisting vines had sprung up, spreading across the ceiling and choking out all but a few narrow streams of light. The Captain switched on his shoulder lights. As he swept the beam over the tangled jungle, eyes glinted back at him, and furred wild things scurried away into the undergrowth.

  “Place is infested with rats.” He said.

  “Alien rats.” Hans emphasized.

  “A rat is a rat.”

  They stood awhile, taking in their surroundings. In spite of his gnawing sense of wrongness, the Captain found himself awed. How long had this vessel drifted through the interstellar void? During that time, a whole ecosystem had developed, and where he expected, so much as he expected anything, to find a dry, dead derelict, he had instead come upon something he could scarcely have imagined.

  “Control, are you getting this?”

  “Confirmed Captain Reynolds. We’ve decided we’d like you to venture deeper into the vessel, and attempt to gain access to it’s reactor.”

  “That wasn’t part of the contract.” Kores said.

  “Rest assured you will be well compensated. The eyes of the scientific community are on you and we’re eager to see your findings.”

  “Good to know.” The Captain said, deadpan. He sighed. “Knives out. We cut our way through.”

  Traversing the tangled indoor jungle was as much of a slog as the Captain had imagined it would be. Every branch they cleared was quickly replaced when another tensioned piece of flora sprung back to fit the empty space. The entire hallway seemed spring loaded, decades of growth having filled every available space in their desperate search for light.

  Almost every space. Between the branches were a warren of small tunnels, through which animals darted and scurried. A few of the holes seemed large enough to fit a human form, but the explorers didn’t dare get on their hands and knees to crawl through, lest they meet the source of the growls and hoots assailing them firsthand. After all, where there were small animals, there were likely larger predators to hunt them.

  And so they continued hacking and slashing. Kores had returned with a fire axe from the survey ship, and he made quick work of the spindly trees, his arms rising and falling with the repetition of a machine.

  As they made progress along the circumference of the spinning gravity ring, they noticed side passages leading out toward the outer ring. Stairs and ladders led away into a stygian abyss from which no root or shoot emerged.

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  Making little progress in clearing the jungle, the decision was an easy one. Selecting a promising ladder, they made their way down into the unlit sections of the ship, hoping to bypass the blocked passages. As their boots clanged on the dirty polymer floor, Hans pointed at their feet.

  “Look. Tracks, in the muck. Something big by the looks of it.”

  Captain Reynolds crouched down, the harsh beam from his lamp throwing the footprint into relief. It was about the size of his palm, with what looked like three avian talons, two in front and one at the rear.

  “Keep your eyes open. It might still be around.” He said, rising.

  “When I signed up to be a deep space scrapper I thought I’d seen the last of nature.” Hans quipped. The Captain didn’t reply. His attention was focused ahead of him, to where the tracks led.

  Ahead of them were row upon row of what could only be holding pens, inset in the walls. They had been thrown open and emptied of their contents, many of the barred doors bent and twisted. Control panels and instruments were smashed, their circuitry disgorged from the walls to hang in grim testimony to the fury of whatever came through there.

  “Guess that explains why the lights aren’t on.” Hans remarked. “Looks like a charging ozrik came through here. What a mess.”

  “This technology looks similar to our own.” Valerian said, crouching next to a ruined instrument panel of some kind. “I think this must have served some kind of scientific function.”

  “I thought everything you don’t understand had a ‘ritual function’?” Hans joked. Valerian began to lecture him on the intricacies of science, and the Captain tuned it out. It was his good fortune that he did so, because when he turned his head he found himself face to face with a monster.

  A massive beak lunged at him, and he reflexively turned it aside with a smack from the butt of his rifle, long ingrained training moving his body before his mind could even react. An enormous flightless bird recoiled back, a shrill call piercing the air and immediately silencing his arguing crewmates. It raised its huge, hooked beak for another attack, but the Captain ended its life with a shower of magnetically accelerated flechettes. The beast toppled over in a spray of blood, letting out its final sad cry as it hit the deckplates.

  “Well then.” Hans said, his voice cracking in his throat. “W-Who’s up for barbecue?”

  The team made their way more cautiously from that point on, but they encountered no more animals. Whether it was the loud eruption of the rifle scared them off, the smell of the blood smeared on the captain’s hardsuit, or some other factor they couldn’t say, but they were all glad for the fact.

  They passed empty cell after empty cell in silence, sweeping their weapons over long abandoned nests and piles of detritus. In some dim part of his mind the Captain wondered if his employers would be upset at his use of questionably legal weapons aboard their prize, and he realized he didn’t care a bit. The lives of his crew were more important to him than the intactness of the alien ship and its contents. Its crew? He still grappled to explain why a high tech, ostensibly human spacecraft had turned into a zoo, and his science officer had no explanations. He put it out of his mind, and focused.

  “Captain. A way back up.” Valerian gestured with her weapon. “Looks clear of foliage.”

  As they pulled themselves up out of the narrow ladder well, which had clearly not been designed for exo-suits, they were greeted by a peculiar sight.

  “Captain, is that...”

  “Yeah.” The captain responded, glancing around his surroundings. “Looks like we found the crew.”

  They stood at the mouth of the ladder well, throwing light over a cluster of crude huts constructed from plastic panels and animal skins. Strange markings were daubed all over them and the surrounding corridor, crude glyphs made in dripping red paint. In the centre of the cluster of structures was a firepit, still smouldering, with some dead animal suspended over it on a spit. Over their heads, a broad window looked out into space, the spine of the starship spinning slowly above them.

  “What in Niflheim is this...” Hans breathed, making a hillsman’s gesture over his head, some relic of the man’s past life.

  “The crew? Did they build this?” Valerian asked. The Captain shrugged.

  “Wasn’t animals.”

  “Have they decivilized?”

  The Captain shuddered at the suggestion. It was amongst the worst fates that could befall a society. A road to barbarism and death.

  As they picked through the camp, they found crudely fashioned cutting tools hacked out of hull plates and locker doors, mixed together with higher tech devices of familiar make. Spanners, electric screwdrivers, a power saw, sat side by side with bone arrowheads and crude choppers streaked with dried blood.

  “What the hell happened to them?” Valerian asked.

  “Uh, Captain?” Hans exclaimed, slowly reaching for his weapon. The Captain turned his head as a shuffle in the bushes caught his attention.

  “I think we’re about to find out.”

  Hulking figures detached themselves from the undergrowth, their skins as green as the dark jungle that birthed them. Their musclebound bodies and grotesque faces were smeared in the same paint as their camp, but they were otherwise completely nude. In their hands were gleaming spears tipped with sharpened plastic, steel, and bone.

  The Captain turned himself around, unsure where to point his weapon as more and more of them emerged, their sharp white tusks and speartips glistening in the flickering lights.

  “Captain, we’re...” Kores began.

  “Surrounded.” The Captain finished for him.

  A massive alien followed behind the others, towering head and shoulders above his tribesmen. His muscles shone with sweat, and he wore the pelt of some hairy beast over his shoulders like a cape. In his hands he brandished what was unmistakably a gun, which he held in the easy grip of someone who knew how to use it.

  He roared at the explorers in a guttural, alien language. While the words were alien, the menace transcended the barrier of language to make itself abundantly clear. Captain Reynolds watched his crew finger the triggers of their rifles nervously, looking to him for command.

  The Captain switched on his helmet transmitter.

  “Control, we have made contact with an alien force. Please advise.”

  Static greeted him. He grimaced. They must have rotated into the shadow of the ship again.

  “Fraggin, little green men man! What do we do?” Hans asked in a panicked voice. He swung his weapon from green alien to green alien. The creatures began to cautiously move in closer to him, seeing him as the most obvious threat. Their leader raised his gun and fired it into the air. The bullet whizzed over Han’s shoulder to ricochet off a bulkhead, before burying itself in the floor. He shouted something in his strange tongue.

  “Not so little. Alright boys, nice and easy now, put your rifles on the ground.”

  “Captain...”

  “They’ve got us surrounded. We’re in hostile territory. We can’t win this.”

  Slowly, the astronauts knelt down and placed their weapons on the floor, before raising their arms non-threateningly. The huge alien grunted, and directed his people to take the weapons and restrain them.

  The next half hour was a blur, as they were shoved and hurried along through twisting passages cut through the jungle, down torch lit corridors, and through crude encampments all adorned with strange glyphs and fetishes. Brutal alien features leered at them as they passed, a mix of curiosity and hunger drawn upon green faces.

  Eventually they were pushed into an open hall which blazed with the light of naked braziers, sending smoke up into ventilation fans in the ceiling. The skulls of animals and humans were hung from painted bulkheads and dangled from spears and totems, and beyond those frightening displays of power, was a throne. A great chair that might once have been a couch sat on a raised platform at the far end of the hall, draped with animal furs and flanked by banners and grim faced warriors with guns swung over their shoulders. On that throne was a massive, black bearded greenskin, lounging in his seat with a relaxed posture. The astronauts found themselves pushed to the knees before the green tyrant, who eyed them warily.

  The alien king grumbled something, and made a hand motion indicating that the interlopers should show their faces. The humans complied, a nauseating smell of smoke and animal dung assailing their nostrils as the seals on their helmets broke. As they removed their headgear, the king snorted and fixed them with a piercing gaze.

  He held it for some time, staring at them unblinking, his cheek resting upon a hamlike fist. Eventually he spoke a few words, which the humans didn’t understand. Noticing their incomprehension, the king summoned forward a wrinkled elder from the gathering crowd that was slowly filtering into the hall, and spoke to him in a low voice.

  The elder turned, and began speaking a different language, one that sounded strangely familiar to the ears of the astronauts.

  “What’s he saying Valerian?” The Captain asked his companion in a hushed voice.

  “I think it’s... ancient imperial. I learned about this at the academy of archaeology.”

  “Can you understand it?”

  “He’s asking... if we came in a sky ship? A spacecraft I assume.”

  “Tell him that we did, and that we mean him no harm.”

  Valerian stuttered out something in the ancient dialect. The king’s face slowly split into a wide toothy grin, and he broke into a terrible laughter, which spread to the other aliens filling the hall.

  “Your ship...” the bearded warlord began, leaning forward on his throne as he spoke in gutteral imperial. “No.”

  He paused, sucking in breath between jutting yellow teeth.

  “My ship.”

  The laughter in the hall roared to a new height, and the humans shook, wondering what terror they had unleashed upon their unsuspecting world.