Read Online Pilgrim by S.J. Bryant - Free Book Online Page B

of the way open so that it slammed against the wall.
    The next room was completely black. No light
could get through the dirt-covered windows and the lights of the
ship had gone out long ago.
    She fished around in her bag until she found
the small orb. She squeezed the soft sphere and it glowed, casting
a circle of light, as she clipped it to her belt.
    A dim corridor stretched out in front of her
and every few metres there were doors leading off to either side.
She glanced into one such room and saw a simple bunk bed. These
were the sleeping quarters for the colonists.
    “Creepy,” Nova said as she took in the
neatly folded clothes. On the top bunk was a fluffy teddy bear. It
lay on its side with its eyes looking straight at the door, right
at her. The stitched-on grin looked more like a grimace in the dim
light.
    She shook her head and moved on. She needed
to get to the bridge of the ship, the best equipment and an
inventory of everything else on board was bound to be there,
including the warp converter. She tried to be grateful that with
the ship laying at such an angle, it was easy to tell which way she
had to go.
    After the sleeping quarters, there was
another dining area, and after that a gym. She moved from room to
room with her small glowing orb.
    As she reached for the door out of the gym,
something fell to the floor behind her with an almighty crash. She
jumped and turned with her pistol drawn. The noise came from
outside of her circle of light and she couldn’t see anything. She
held her breath but there was no other noise in the room.
    “I must have knocked something over,” she
reassured herself. To be sure, she held the glowing ball up high so
that the light reached all corners of the gym. Unused gym equipment
were the only ghosts in that room.
    The next zone was a tech station. Learning
pods were lined up in ordered rows. Usually, they would be lit by a
welcoming blue light, but now they were just empty glass shells
with wires and tubing. Creeping forward, she put her hand on the
glass dome and gazed inside.
    She drew back with a start. Inside the pod
was the skeleton of a small child; the grey-green bones stood out
against the white chair. The whole macabre scene was trapped inside
the glass learning pod. The child’s clothes were laid over the
bones and hung loosely from the thin limbs.
    Nova shook her head. There were supposedly
survivors from this crash landing. Did they just leave the bodies
of their dead lying wherever they fell? She looked around but she
couldn’t see any other corpses in the tech station.
    She hurried past the glass cubicles. A chill
went up her spine as she remembered the skeleton lying behind the
glass. The dark recesses where the eyes used to be stared up at
her.
    She clenched her teeth and kept moving.
According to the ship’s data logs, the tech station was right
behind the pilot’s quarters. She was nearly there, she just had to
collect the valuables and then get out of the ghost ship.
    The metal door leading out of the tech
station was different to the others, it didn’t have a knob.
Instead, there was a button pad with worn-down numbers and a blank
screen just above them. There was no clue as to what the code could
be.
    She slammed her fist into the wall. A
percussive ding rang out through the tech lounge and bounced off of
the nearby learning pods. There was usually some kind of pattern to
these security keys, a way for everyone to remember.
    Tapping her fingers against the doorframe,
she cast around for any kind of hint. As she looked up towards the
top of the door she saw it. A room number was stamped into the
metal of the frame. She punched the numbers into the pad and a
green light flashed on. The metal door slid away to reveal a dark
room beyond. One of the many benefits of colonisation ships;
self-contained and self-renewing power systems.
    The door slid shut behind her as she lowered
herself into the next corridor. Her glowing sphere revealed buttons
and leavers