Ancient Legacies part 6
Commander Vance drifted in the centre of the infirmary, a solitary ghost in a room full of them. Her magnetic boots were disengaged, allowing her to hover above the deck as she sifted through a sheaf of frost-dusted papers recovered from the desk of the ship’s Chief Medical Officer, Charles Adams. In the harsh, clinical light of her helmet’s lamps, the handwriting on the pages felt like a voice from the grave. The early entries were mundane—routine physicals, a few cases of radiation sickness from the shakedown, a minor fracture during a training exercise. But as Vance flipped toward the end, the script transformed. The neat, disciplined cursive of a career officer had devolved into a jagged, frantic scrawl. “The thrum is getting louder,” one entry read, the ink smeared as if the hand had been shaking. “Adams says it’s just the Displacement Drive settling, but the men are seeing things in the shadows of the vents. I performed three sedations today. None of them are sleeping. They...
