Chapter 8
A Window to the Past
Several hours had passed. A regulated cycle of the bridge's new ambient light had dimmed and brightened, simulating the passing of a day they could not see. Jax had forced himself to eat two of the bland ration bars and drink an entire pack of water, and the dull throb in his head had finally subsided into a wary stillness. He felt rested, but not recovered. A deep, lingering weariness remained, a phantom of the energy he had expended.
During his rest, Zana and Kael had not been idle. Kael had managed to jury-rig a connection from one of the salvaged power cells to his datapad, where he was meticulously analyzing the fragmented data he'd recorded from the ship's 'log.' Zana, for her part, had secured the main door. She hadn't been able to make the ancient mechanism work again, but she had used the plasma torch on Jax's multi-tool to strategically melt parts of the frame, effectively welding it shut from the inside. It was a one-way solution, but it made their fortress secure.
Finally, she approached Jax. Her tone was different now; the sharp edge of a commander was softened by the caution of a project manager overseeing a delicate and vital asset.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
"Better," Jax answered honestly. "Tired."
"I need you again," she said, her gaze flicking towards the dormant viewport. "But we're doing this differently. No more deep dives. No more asking for memories. The effort nearly broke you. This time, we need something simple. We need to see outside."
Jax nodded, appreciating the new caution. He understood the stakes better now. This power was a part of him, and its well had a bottom. He stood up and walked to the Nexus Core, the air around it humming with a silent, waiting energy.
"I need to ease into it," he explained, more for himself than for them. "Rushing it last time… hurt."
He placed his hand on the pedestal. Kael watched from his console, datapad ready. Zana stood back, observing everything.
This time, Jax didn't ask a question or issue a command. He simply connected, letting the cool, humming presence of the Force within the ship fill his senses. He didn't try to grasp the whole system at once. He focused on a single strand of the web. He remembered the diagram of the ship he had summoned, and he focused on the part of it that would logically connect to the massive viewport. The ocular system. The ship's eyes.
He imagined a trickle of energy, a single thread of the Core's power, branching off and flowing gently towards the front of the ship. He didn't force it. He coaxed it, guiding it along pathways he could feel but not see. It was like trying to solve a three-dimensional puzzle with his mind, gently nudging tumblers into place.
He felt a connection click into place.
The massive, obsidian viewport shimmered. The perfect blackness wavered, then resolved into a breathtaking, crystal-clear star-field. It was a view of the Rykon Belt, but rendered with a clarity and depth that was almost overwhelming. The asteroids drifted in a slow, majestic dance, and distant, colorful nebulae glowed like celestial clouds.
"He did it," Kael breathed, frantically tapping at his datapad. "Visuals are online."
Zana stepped forward, her eyes wide with awe, but her mind was already working. "Kael, cross-reference the primary constellations with the star-charts from the log we recovered."
"On it." Kael's fingers flew across his screen. After a moment, he looked up, his face a mixture of triumph and confusion. "It's a perfect match, Zana. The star positions are identical to the logs from fifty thousand years ago."
The excitement on the bridge died instantly. Zana stared at the beautiful, serene star-field, and a new, cold understanding dawned on her face.
"It's a recording," she said, her voice low. "Or a static image. We're not seeing what's out there now."
Jax felt it, too. He reached out with the Force towards the viewport and felt the energy of the image. It was a perfect, but finite, loop of data. It was a screensaver.
"The sensors are active," Zana deduced, turning to face Jax. "But they're not… current. They're stuck on the last image they saw before the ship went into hibernation."
They had succeeded, only to find a deeper, more complex layer of failure. They had opened the ship's eyes, but it was blind to the present, staring eternally into the past.
Zana looked at Jax, and the new, impossible question hung in the air between them. It was no longer just about turning things on.
"Can you wake them up, Jax?" she asked, her voice quiet. "Can you make it see now?"
Zana's question hung on the bridge, heavy and absolute. Can you make it see now? It was a question aimed at a god, not a man. Jax felt the weight of it, the sheer impossibility. He was not a programmer or an engineer; he was a terrified man fumbling in the dark with a power he couldn't begin to comprehend.
"I… I can try," he said, his voice barely a whisper.
Kael, ever the technician, chimed in. "The problem might not be the viewport itself. It's likely a data buffer. The screen is displaying the last image cached by the external sensors before the ship went into hibernation. To get a live feed, you wouldn't just need to activate the screen, you'd have to wake up the sensor arrays themselves and re-establish the data stream to the Core." He looked at Jax with worried eyes. "That's… that's a much more complex process."
Jax understood. He couldn't just turn on a light; he had to perform psychic neurosurgery on a 50,000-year-old ghost.
He sat back down, the ache behind his eyes returning with a vengeance. He took a few deep, centering breaths, ignoring the intense scrutiny of his companions. He placed his hand on the pedestal, the cool metal a familiar comfort, and reached out with the Force.
This time, he ignored the viewport. He focused his sense outward, beyond the hull of the ship, trying to feel the sensors themselves. He could feel them, scattered across the ship's exterior—cold, silent, dormant. They weren't broken, just asleep. And the connection between them and the Nexus Core was like a dead nerve; the pathway was there, but no signal was passing through it.
He decided to focus on a single array, one located on the ship's dorsal side, which he reasoned would give them a view of the chasm they were in. He poured his will into that one specific, dead connection. He imagined his own energy flowing from the Core, down the invisible conduit, and into the sensor array. He pictured the sensor's crystalline lens waking up, gathering the faint starlight, and sending that information back to the bridge.
It was like trying to push water through a mountain. The resistance was immense. A sharp pain lanced through his temples, and the bridge around him seemed to waver. He gritted his teeth, sweat beading on his forehead. He could feel his own energy draining away at an alarming rate, a sacrifice being fed into the dormant machine.
"Jax, stop!" Zana's voice was sharp. "Your nose is bleeding again."
But he was too close. He gave one final, desperate mental shove.
He felt a flicker. A connection, faint and tenuous, sparked to life.
On the main viewport, a square section in the upper-left quadrant wavered. The ancient star-field inside it dissolved into static, then resolved into a new, darker image. It was a live feed. They were looking at the gray, pockmarked rock wall of the chasm just a few meters from the ship's hull. It was a mundane, terrifying, and beautiful sight.
"By the stars…" Kael whispered, tapping furiously at his datapad. "He did it. It's a live feed. Low resolution, but it's real-time!"
As the new image stabilized on the screen, Kael's scanner, which he'd left running, let out a sharp beep. "Zana, Jax… look." He pointed to his datapad screen. The "ghost" signal, the rhythmic pulse from deep within the moonlet, was back. "It's clearer now. Stronger. Waking up the ship's systems… it's making the ship's sensors more sensitive to it."
Jax, wiping the blood from his lip, looked from the live image of the rock wall to the steady, pulsing dot on Kael's screen. He had his proof. The internal feeling and the external data now matched. The strange energy he'd felt wasn't just a hallucination or an effect of the Force. It was a real, measurable phenomenon.
Zana stared at the two screens, her mind putting the pieces together. The "ghost" Jax had seen on the scanner wasn't a fluke. It was real. And it was somehow connected to the ship's power. Their quest for a simple conduit had led them to a ship that ran on space magic, which in turn was now pointing them toward an even deeper mystery.
Her gaze settled on Jax, and her expression was one of profound, calculated awe. He was more than a key. He was a Rosetta Stone, the only one who could translate between their world and the one they had stumbled into.
"Alright, Jax," she said, her voice quiet but firm. "Now we know it's possible. Rest. Then, I want you to wake up the rest of them."
After another forced rest period that felt far too short, Jax felt the weight of Zana's and Kael's expectations settle on him again. They had been whispering by the makeshift camp, their conversation stopping the moment he stirred. They were talking about him, theorizing, planning around the strange anomaly that was their new companion. He was the center of their universe now, and it was a deeply uncomfortable feeling.
"Time to get back to it," Zana said, her voice even. There was no pressure in it this time, just a statement of fact. This was their new reality. This was his job.
Jax nodded and approached the Nexus Core. He had learned from the last two experiences. The first attempt, asking for the logs, had been a brute-force query that had nearly flattened him. The second, waking the single sensor, had been a desperate, focused shove. Both had taken a heavy toll. He couldn't afford to keep bleeding his own energy into the machine.
He had to be smarter. He had to be a conductor, not the battery.
He placed his hand on the pedestal, the connection to the Force now familiar and immediate. This time, he didn't try to push his own will into the ship's dormant systems. Instead, he opened himself to the immense, sleeping power of the Core itself. He let its steady, rhythmic pulse become his own heartbeat.
He focused on the single, live sensor feed on the viewport. He could feel the thin, active thread of energy connecting it to the Core. Then he expanded his awareness, feeling out the dozens of other, silent sensor arrays scattered across the ship's hull. They were cold, dormant, but he could feel the pathways leading to them, like veins in a sleeping body.
He didn't try to fill them all with his own energy. Instead, he gently nudged the energy already flowing to the one active sensor. He coaxed it, persuading it to branch off, to send a small trickle down a neighboring, dormant pathway. It was like a game of logic and will, a psychic version of the drone-management he used to do. He was untangling knots, opening valves, and redirecting flow.
A second square on the viewport flickered to life, showing a different angle of the chasm. Then a third, and a fourth. Kael let out a soft gasp.
Jax found a rhythm. He wasn't expending his own life force anymore; he was merely directing the ship's own. It was still exhausting, requiring an incredible amount of focus, but the sharp, debilitating pain was gone. He was a switchboard operator, connecting calls for a sleeping giant. One by one, the sections of the viewport came alive, each one showing a different, real-time angle of their surroundings. The pockmarked rock, the endless black of space above, the deep shadows of the chasm below.
Finally, with one last mental push, the final sensor array came online. The grid lines dividing the viewport dissolved, and the entire, massive screen became a single, seamless, 360-degree panoramic view of their surroundings. They were inside a sphere of perfect observation, the silent, majestic, and terrifying landscape of the moonlet laid bare around them.
"Incredible…" Zana whispered, turning in a slow circle, taking in the full view.
"The power draw is stable," Kael announced, his fingers flying across his datapad. "He's… he's barely using any energy. He's telling the ship how to power itself. And the sensors… with all of them online, they're working in concert. I can triangulate that signal with much higher fidelity now."
As he spoke, the simple, rhythmic blip on his scanner changed. It resolved into a complex, cascading waveform, intricate and detailed.
Kael's breath caught in his throat. He stared at his screen, his eyes wide with disbelief.
"What is it?" Zana asked, walking over to him.
Kael looked up from his datapad, his face pale. "It's not just a pulse," he said, his voice trembling with the weight of his discovery. "I was wrong. It's not just an energy signature. It's too complex, too structured."
He turned the datapad for them to see. The elegant, repeating waveform scrolled across the screen.
"That's not a simple beat," he explained. "That's data. Layers of it. It's a transmission."
He looked at Jax, then at Zana, the full, terrifying implication of his words dawning on all of them.
"It's not just a pulse," he repeated. "It's a message. All this time, it hasn't just been beating. It's been talking. And now, with the ship's senses awake… I think it knows we're listening."