Lt. Commander Reilly and the Quantum Paradox (Lt. Reilly Book 5) by Matthew O. Duncan

Author:Matthew O. Duncan [Duncan, Matthew O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

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The ship we had found had been cold and buried under mud and rocks for nearly a century. As large as it was, I didn’t expect to find anyone. The crew complement would have been very small, a dozen people or less. Back in the day of these freighters, they had very limited crews as the trek would take them months and sometimes years. And because they were moving at speeds that exceeded the speed of light, time would pass slower for them than back on Earth. The result was years of lost time with friends and family. Finding qualified people who were willing to lose that much time back home was difficult, which was why these ships were often staffed with couples or small families.

When we found the crew quarters, we got our answer which combination that was. Pictures on the walls in the mine living space told the story. A family of six comprised of two parents, two adult children, a teenage daughter, and a younger son. It wasn’t clear what had happened to them. There were no bodies, and each of the five quarters was full of personal items. The likelihood of them having been rescued was very slim. Earth had just started to push out to deep space then, and our alliances with other species were very limited. Colonies were just being established. Even if they could have gotten a signal out past the moon’s constant electrical storms, it wouldn’t reach a human outpost for a few years. A rescue ship would eventually be dispatched if someone was willing to pay for the mission, but the odds would have been the same as a lost expedition to the south pole in the 19th century being found and rescued.

With the cargo holds all empty, they would have been heading for their next job, most likely back toward the Sol system. If that was the case, no one back home would have started missing them for at least three or four years after the crash. I hated going through their personal items, but we needed to see if there was anything that could help us in the here and now.

I started in the captain’s quarters, which was the largest and most comfortable. Being a family-owned business, it was where the parents bedded down. Walls had been taken down to the next two quarters to make a common living area. Looking around, I couldn’t see anything that struck me as useful, and I didn’t feel comfortable digging through their belongings. I could always come back if there was something specific that I decided I needed. That left ten other living spaces. Two that were not used as private bedrooms were used for storage, one as a workshop for fixing parts of the ship, and the last had been set up as an art studio. I had hoped to find something in the workshop, but all the tools were electric and long rusted. The storage rooms were full of empty food containers and dry water jugs.

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