The Wreck at Pākihi Basin
25 years later.
Little was known about the exact cause of the Collapse. Theories swirled around the multiverse in the years that followed, some claimed it was a giant explosion, or divine intervention, others even blamed the Bazaar itself for the tragedy. Every one of these theories though, regardless of the world it came from, or the culture that birthed it, had one thing in common; they were all convenient answers to a truth that was altogether more complicated. Like many theories, there would have once been a fragment of truth to them, but now they were twisted and reshaped by oversimplification.
All that was truly known about the Collapse was that it had been a massive energy spike of some sort, lasting long enough to be noticed, and to devastate many of the known worlds in the process, but not long enough to be traced back to its source. What exactly had caused the spike, or why it had even happened in the first place, was a truth that remained unseen.
Even though Kelii was young during the Collapse, and her memory of the time had been consciously forgotten, she was often confronted with the impact it had had on all sentient life in the multiverse.
Travelling from world to world as she did, through tracks that had not long ago been closed off from the stars, she had come face to face with the damage the Collapse had leveled against these worlds. Worlds that were left cut off and isolated from one another. Stricken by famine or rebellion. Worlds that when their tracks to the Bazaar were eventually restored, were exposed to years more of conflict and war.
It had been two decades now, since the dusts of calamity’s wrath had settled and a thin layer of peace had covered the multiverse.... And yet, the pain was scarred into the corners of all these worlds.
Kelii was a biologist attached to a Harmony Recovery Unit, a mixed-speciality group, tasked with salvaging old technology and usable equipment from the wrecks of ships that had met their end during the Collapse. Resources were still scarce in the Junction of Worlds, even 20 years on, and The Harmony Fleet demanded an endless supply of recycled materials to maintain its reach. Kelii’s role on the team was not to help salvage these wrecks, but rather to measure and record the ecological mark they had left upon their final resting place. It was a largely thankless job, and numbingly routine, but it brought Kelii through many tracks, to all sorts of worlds. It also provided her with the perfect opportunity to study the make-up of these worlds and measure their similarities and differences, something which Kelii found to be a source of endless fascination.
In the vast, colourless expanse of a Tūporo-class track station, Kelii and her team were preparing to embark on their fifth such salvage expedition. The station surrounded the track entrance and sealed it in atmosphere. This particular station surrounded the track to Pākihi Basin, an uninhabited forest world, and the location of a recently discovered warship wreck from the pre-collapse era.
The team were spread across four matte grey vans, each adorned on their sides with a white logo of three stacked rings. The vans had been queued up in single file on the station floor, behind a tall, yellow wheel stop while they waited to go through the track.
Kelii sat on the backseat of the frontmost van, her knees pressed against her chest. Waiting to go through a track was always a nerve-racking exercise in patience and today’s traversal was made all the more intense when they were waiting from inside a giant metal box, floating in space. Sure there was atmosphere, and oxygen, and artificial gravity, but they were still in space. A bent steel sheet was all that stood between them and total nothingness. It was a disquieting thought, and the endless corridors of cold light in the track station did little to distract Kelii from it. Any moment now though, they’d be on the move, out of this creaking space station, and through the track to Pākihi Basin.
A hoarse siren scratched at Kelii’s ears and three orange lights spun ahead, indicating that the platform toward the track entrance was extending. The wheel stop that had held the vans in place had vanished into the station floor and the vans began to move. Kelii continued to peer out her passenger window, while she ran her fingers through her dark hair, rapidly twirling the errant strands that had escaped from her large silver hair clip. It was a nervous habit she had picked up as a child, and had carried with her to adulthood. It was always worse at the point of no return, just when she was about to cross the threshold between worlds, and go through a track. No matter how many world-to-world traversals she made, there was still a gnawing thought at the back of her mind that one day she’d pass through and not come out the other side. Even though the transition was instantaneous, she was always waging a silent battle to convince her brain that in that moment, she wasn’t going to be on the receiving end of doom.
It didn’t help that every time Kelii came close to a track her finger tips would prickle and her body would heat up. It was a hot, tingling sensation, that felt like a mixture of numbness and the burn of a mid-sky sun. It didn’t hurt but it wasn’t pleasant either. Strange was just about the only way Kelii could describe it, and no matter how many times she passed through the tracks, that strangeness never waned. After her first few traversals, Kelii had, to her relief, learnt that this was actually a known, and harmless, symptom of track travel called Travellers Touch. It was an unusual side effect that affected a very small portion of the population, and, due to its rare and innocuous nature, very little research had been conducted on the phenomena. Instead, it had simply been chalked up to a particular physical reaction that some organics experienced when moving between worlds. Learning about this didn’t make the sensation go away of course, but at the very least it gave Kelii a deeper understanding of her ailments that empowered her to fight back against her anxious feelings.
Before receiving the final go ahead to enter the track, Kelii’s team were driven through a maze of waves and whistles. Station marshals, in turquoise overalls and white headset radios, fed back echoing calls to a central control room, embedded somewhere high in the station walls, as they directed the research vans down invisible paths. Eventually, after a few stops and starts, they had made it through this elaborate triage and reached the final clearance, toward the Pākihi Basin track. The Track’s giant sphere glowed in hazy auroras before them, warming the cold steel of the station floor and reflecting beams of coloured lights through the van’s windows. Ngaio, who was driving Kelii’s van, leant back over his seat and said “everybody buckled up!? Safety first, danger second!” with a sly breath to his voice. Charr, who was sitting next to Kelii, made an audible “tsk” and rolled all four of her eyes. Everyone had heard it before. Many times. Ngaio was a fan of repetitive humour, especially when it got a rise out of Charr. After the briefest of pauses, Charr bashed her fist twice on the inside of the door and shouted “get on with it man, let’s go!” Before kicking the seat in front of her, eliciting a grunt of disdain from the grave-mannered electronics specialist, Brow. Ngaio said nothing, but smiled, and turned around to face the track. The auroral light that he’d been blocking moments ago, shined into Kelii’s face and started to kaleidoscope as the vans accelerated towards their target. Kelii inhaled, taking one last gasp of the recycled, metallic air of the station as it rushed through the open windows. She closed her eyes as she exhaled and Charr grabbed the top of her hand, squeezing it affectionately.
In less than an instance, the convoy of matte grey vans had left the dark expanse of the track station behind, and were now blustering along a worn dirt road away from the Pākihi Basin side of the track gate. The next breath Kelii took was humid and loamy. She peered out the window in relief, and caught the final moment of a large weta jumping from a rotted log, now covered in dust, into a damp fern grove down the surrounding bank. The low valleys and thick bushland that lay before her clearly kept the undergrowth wet here in Pākihi Basin. Kelii imagined that this would even be the case through the summer months. There was one exception to this however. The dirt roads they drove on, that skirted the tops of the valleys, had no shade to protect them, or roots to bind them, and were a dried, fractured mess. The suspension on the vans was ill equipped to parry the blows it received from the large cracks and holes that littered these roads, making for a very bumpy ride. The shuddering also caused the mess of research equipment that was fixed to the roof of the vans to clash in a grating sonata, adding little to the comfort of Kelii’s already tumultuous journey.
The van hit a large fracture in the road, and Something hard slid between Kelii’s feet from under the seat in front of her. She reached down and picked up a thick, yellowed plastic block with a central screen no bigger than her palm. On the screen was a book titled “A Brief History of the Junction of Worlds”. It was no surprise to Kelii that the author of this work had been conspicuously left off. They always were with these things and the small three ringed logo that glowed white at the bottom of the screen, was the answer as to why. It was a reminder to Kelii that this book belonged to the Library of the Exchange. It was the same black stitched logo that adorned the loose-fitted cream overalls she was wearing for the journey, and it was the same three ringed silhouette that would glisten against the stars as they made their way back home after this job. The three rings were the symbol of a place that Kelii had called home for nearly 20 years of her life. They were the Rings of the Exchange, the largest, most populous superstructure in the Junction of Worlds, second only to the Bazaar itself.
With only a short journey left to the warship wreck, Kelii placed the book beside her and gazed out the window again. She could faintly see the wreck in the distance now, jutting out from a large clearing, in a giant cluster of Kānuka trees, about 10 kilometers north of the track entrance. As the vans crested over the top of one valley, and down the next, toward their destination, a flock of brown and white mātātā joined the convoy, their frayed tails waving as listlessly in the wind as their shrill songs. The birds followed the vans all the way to the wreck, before vanishing into the trees and, as swiftly as they’d come, they were gone.
Coming closer to the wreck now, Kelii realised just how tall some of these trees were. It wasn’t just the cluster of trees surrounding the clearing, but the trees that surrounded them. It seemed as though the wreck site was flanked by trees that were themselves flanked by larger trees, that were themselves flanked by trees that were yet bigger again. They formed a circular gradient of protection around the clearing, with the wreck firmly positioned at its center. Surrounding the cluster of kānuka trees that Kelii had noticed earlier, were 50 meter high rimu with saggy needle-like leaf stems and unhuggable trunks covered in wisps of beard lichens. Endless spirals of rātā stems wrapped around these ancient rimu boundaries like wooden snakes, and crept their way along the forest floor, through the clearing to the base of the wreck, where they climbed again, dividing the wreck into parts. The clearing itself now decades old, was not so much a clearing anymore than it was merely an area with newer growth. The silver pine and mānuka shrub that appeared to have filled the space in the last few years created a sparse canopy that brushed the tips of the engine on the listed wreck.
The vans went as close as they could to the wreck before the undergrowth became too thick. Once they’d stopped, and Ngaio had turned his “seatbelt sign” off, Charr slid the door of the van open and jumped out, pulling out a sack of tools along with her. Kelii followed and took a few squelching steps away from the van and towards the wreck. Even as a wreck it was impressive. An artifact of a more prosperous era. The warship’s carved armour would have once glistened in polished copper, but had now formed an inconsistent patina that blended in with the mosses and lichens that had made their homes in every free gap and tear of the hull. Eight holes in the side of the ship collected a mixture of ferns and vines that used the darkness left behind by the life pods to thrive. Four rotund engines pointed out towards the sky at the rear of the ship as the warship’s cockpit buried itself in the dirt. Unlike the rest of her team, It was precisely the dirt that Kelii was here for. While the others scuttled and scrapped this vessel, Kelii would be analysing the ground around the crash sites, in order to study the effect this abandoned machine was having on the soils of these worlds.
The first two days of the salvage had proved uneventful. Brow had found some pre-collapse electronics only he was excited about and Ngaio had told three more jokes, if you could call them that, that had set Charr down a path of less than friendly suggestions, including one that involved Ngaio taking a nap inside one of the engine bays while Charr “tested” the thrust. Kelii hadn’t found anything out of the ordinary in her analysis so far, outside of the usual; minor fuel leakage, trace elements of heavy metals, evidence of a burn off some years ago (probably triggered from the crash). On their third morning at the site, Kelii had planned to take some scans near to the front of the ship, where perhaps some of the more precious cargo may have unwittingly caused some damage to the world’s ecology.
Kelii set out early from the small camp they had erected around the vans. The ground was damp under foot from the morning dew and the air was thick with the morning chorus of birdsong. Though they were camped only a short walk away from the wreck, the morning’s mist obscured all but the faintest hint of the warship’s brown-green shell. Arriving at what was likely the remainder of the oblique warship’s bridge, Kelii pulled a small black rod from a velcro pouch on her vest. She pressed it firmly into a bulge of ground. It buzzed in quiet effort as it’s tip glowed white, and the rod extended deep into the ground. It immediately began feeding information about the soil back to Kelii’s data pad, its very history reduced to numbers on a screen.
Kelii worked this way into the afternoon, placing more of these rods around different parts of the wreck. She bowed up and down, removing and reinserting them until the sun had reached its zenith and the birdsong had been replaced by the cuts and scrapes of the team working the wreck.
Kelii was about to call it a day and return to the vans, once again empty handed, when a triple beep sounded. One of the rods buried underneath a winglet was prodding up and down, as if striking something firm. She removed the rod and replaced it with another, checking for the sound. Sure enough, it too was stuck. According to the readings on her data unit both rods had detected an anomaly, the soil in this small section was many times more fertile than any of the other readings Kelii had taken so far. She tapped the data unit on the side a few times, creaking its plastic casing, but the reading was still the same. A nervous excitement welled inside of her. This was her team’s fifth site now, on as many worlds, and yet she hadn’t come across a single abnormality until now. Given the general readings reports from some of the first tracker teams, she was expecting some anomalies but of all the samples she’d taken this was the first one that had shown any kind of meaningful variance. Kelii wasn’t about to take any risks or make any assumptions though. She knew she had to verify the readings with another data unit and then dig out a small sample to take back to the lab for further study.
Kelii walked to the other end of the wreck and shouted out to Charr, who was abseiling off the back of the ship and laser cutting a big chunk of something from the side of one of the engines. Charr’s figure was a site to behold, she was almost twice as tall as Kelii, and equally as broad shouldered, with sun-dried skin and a cheeky grin that came as much from her four eyes as it did from her mouth. Where some found Charr’s strength and confidence imposing, Kelii found it comforting, and inspiring. She was a woman who cared for everyone, but didn’t care what others thought of her. Kelii admired that, largely because she exhibited what she’d consider as some opposite traits. Kelii’s constant fear of giving people the wrong impression defined much of her behavior in social situations and she wished she could carry herself as freely as Charr. Kelii wondered if this lack of confidence had led to her feeling how she had been feeling over the last few months. Everyone had been lovely to her so far, and she couldn’t have asked for a better team when it came to field work, but even though she wasn’t made to feel out of place, quite the opposite, she thought she wasn’t deserving of such kindness.
She’d been experiencing impostor syndrome since joining this team a few cycles ago. Straight out of her doctorate, she was perfectly capable for the job and she knew that, but she couldn’t help but think they’d picked the wrong scientist. She had no field experience, and she felt like she had somehow cheated her way into this job. In the few seconds it had taken for Kelii to reach Charr, she had already stuffed these worries back into their box, and unhealthy though that was, at least made a mental reminder to talk to someone about it when the current job was finished.
“Hey Charr!” Kelii tried to shout over the high pitched laser whirring. “Charr! Can I borrow…”.
Charr shut down the laser cutter, flipped her steel face protector up and shouted back with the volume of someone whose own ears were blocked. “Huh? Kelii? What do you want, mate?” Clearly having recognised her teammate below but not having heard a word of what she said.
“Can I borrow your data unit? I want to get your computer’s professional opinion on these readings!”.
A weird joke. Kelii cringed a little but hadn’t much time to stew on it. Ngaio would have liked it at least. Before Kelii could say any more, Charr had already unclipped her data unit from her utility vest and threw it down to Kelii with a reckless nonchalance. “We’re almost done here, doc. When you’ve taken those readings we’ll meet you back at the vans. Ngaio said he wanted to make it to the track gate before sunset but these thrusters are stubborn little bastards, we’ll be blasting them into the night at this rate.” Charr never hit stumbling blocks when it came to words either, but luckily for Kelii, it never felt like they ever needed a response. Kelii clipped the second data unit to her own vest, gave a thankful motion and shouted an interjection that was drowned out by the whir of laser cutter, returning to its task.
Kelii made her way back to the mysterious patch and pulled out Charr’s data unit, which she noticed was significantly more worn than her own. The rim between the scratched screen and the plastic cover was compacted with dirt, as were the screw holes in the back. It even looked as though a mason bee had made a home in one such hole at some point. A rugged tool for a tough woman, Kelii mused. Definitely rugged. It worked though, and sure enough, Charr’s data unit fed back an identical result. An almost 300% increase in nutrients levels concentrated in this single area. She had to check if something underneath the soil was throwing off the readings. Part of the ship’s oxygen recycler perhaps. Kelii had known they could last for years without power, but this long? Surely not.
Kelli knelt down underneath the winglet and pulled a small handle from her belt. She flicked it in a downward motion causing two metal edges to emerge from tiny cuts in either side that then met in the middle to form a small spade that oscillated so fast you could only barely tell it was moving at all.
She didn’t have to dig far until the tip of her vibro-spade hit something rocky. She turned on her chest light and peered into the hole. Just below the soil glistened a metal rimmed glass tube with a top handle. Some sort of mobile battery unit she thought, or perhaps a storage container of sorts. She knew it wasn’t munitions as Bathel’s team had done a full weapons scan before starting the scrap. Whatever it was, it was still too dark and grimy for Kelii to see inside the capsule. She had to pull it out for a closer look. With her curiosity piqued and her patience limited, she put away her vibro-spade and tugged at the capsule’s handle. She twisted as she pulled, leaning back with the full weight of her body until the top of the capsule burst open with a rapid hiss. Kelii fell back onto the damp moss floor with the capsule contents in her hands. A translucent Jelly wobbled on the underside of the handled lid, skewered by a flock of kānuka needles that had flown into the sticky mass when she had fallen back. Inside the jelly was a splinter of wood, about 20 centimeters long, and of similar thickness to Kelii’s vibro-spade. It was clearly a shattered piece of a much larger tree but oddly its deep red and brown grain looked more like the flesh of a tree recently severed, and not a slice of wood that had been away from its host for at least 20 years. Kelii knew the crew would be done soon and she couldn’t miss her ride back to the track gate, but she had to find out what this was and why it was causing such errant readings.
She made a gut decision.
Kelii plunged her hand into the capsule and pulled the splinter out of the gel. Almost instantly upon contact the jelly melted away, and a hot sensation rushed up the back of Kelii’s neck, like a beam of sunlight had somehow penetrated the thick shaded canopy above and found its mark at the top of her spine. She used her free hand to grab her nape only to find it as cool as the air around her. All that was left was the splinter, its colour even more glorious now that it was exposed. While the jelly that had bound the splinter had evaporated, Kelii’s hand still had a thick coat of sticky residue. Oddly enough, none of this clear substance seemed to have wet or marked the splinter, which remained stubbornly dry. Kelii replaced the lid onto the buried capsule and pocketed the splinter in one of her jacket pockets. It was clearly more than any old piece of wood and it warranted further study but not here, and not now. It felt odd, almost secretive. Something that did not belong with the rest of the ship.
Kelli turned and started towards the camp site where the vans were set up. She could still hear Charr’s team working away and see the red glow of the laser cutters illuminate the shadowed wreck. Kelii thought about how peaceful this place was, or rather would have been before they arrived, and would be again after they left. There was a definite beauty to some of the crash sites they visited. Not because of the damaged ships or even the imagination of what they once were, but rather the half reclaimed state they lay in, as nature recovered it’s spent resource, and repurposed it in unpredictable ways. Just as the spent life of a creature was reabsorbed back into the forest here, imbuing its soil with new life, so too would the husk of this ship granting the forest a new opportunity to thrive.
Kelii let her thoughts wander a little longer before turning her attention to the splinter again. She wasn’t sure if she would tell the rest of the team about it yet, perhaps after she had conducted some further study. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the others, it just felt… complicated.
Back at the vans, Kelii washed the remaining gel off of her hands in a makeshift basin. A little handheld tap hung from a plastic pipe that ran to a small water collector that was bolted to the roof. She looked back after shaking the wet from her hands, to see three of the team walk towards the vans from the wreck with large roped sacks of electronics. In doing so, she inadvertently caught the attention of a tall man with kind eyes and dark features who, upon catching her gaze, immediately separated from the walking conversation and headed towards Kelii.
“What have you got yourself into now doc!” Said Captain Ngaio, a smile emerging from his dust-layered face.
“Just a bit of hydraulic fluid or something I think. Nothing out of the ordinary”
“Nothing ever is with you is it” “bizarre as the bazaar itself you are, sometimes!”.
Captain Ngaio clapped Kelii on the back and went to another wash basin attached to the adjacent van.
Anxious to change the subject before she had to provide any more deceptive answers, Kelii responded with a question of her own. “So have Charr’s team finished with the engines yet?”
Ngaio splashed water on his face and yanked a greasy towel that was hanging between the end of his van’s roof and the open boot. Kelii cringed a little, but smiled more, at the carefree attitude of the scrapper. “Not much left for them to do to be honest” Ngaio continued. “Looks like the ship burned hard towards the Track before crash landing here. I doubt they even knew where they were heading given how much of a straight shot it is between here and the track station.” Ngaio wiped his brow, replacing the dry dust with a wet streak of grease. “Anyway, the residual vapours completely calcified the thrusters but they did manage to get a few of the drive controllers at least. Old Casp will be happy about those, I’m sure!” Ngaio laughed. “Anyway! Let’s get something to eat, doc, we’ve earned it! I’m sure we can clear out the last of the good stuff before the rest of the team get back.” Kelii smirked at this as Ngaio reached into a nearby storage container and pulled out two generic tcp-issued protein sachets, the exact same protein sachets they had all been eating every day since arriving at Pākihi.
Of course. Casp.
Kelii had forgotten about Casp. If anyone would know more about the splinter it would be him. But she’d need to tell Ngaio first, he was the one who took the scrap to Casp. Another gut decision, then. She pulled the splinter from her vest and slid closer to Ngaio. “Ngaio…” Kelii said. “I found something today, in the wreck…”
Ngaio spun to face Kelii. “What’s that doc?” he said, with his signature smile. His eyes locked with Kelii’s and then to the splinter she was holding. The life in his face melted away and his expression turned stern. He took the splinter into his hands with a great softness and ran his index finger across the grain, shaking slightly as he did it. This scared Kelii for some reason, it was very uncharacteristic of Ngaio to act like this. With his changed demeanor unrelenting, Ngaio leaned closer to Kelii and with barely more than a whisper said “When we take the scrap to Casp, wait until he is alone and then show this to him. He’ll know what to do. Until then keep it safe and don’t show anyone else. Do you understand?” Kelii was at a loss for words, she’d never heard Ngaio talk like this. Before she could respond, Ngaio opened his mouth to speak again, this time more desperate. “Tell me you understand, Kelii”.
“I... “ Kelii stuttered. “Yes. I understand.”
This softened Ngaio’s expression somewhat, as if he had been holding his breath. He gently tapped the splinter and ushered Kelii to put it back in her pocket. Ngaio sat there for a few seconds longer, staring into the golden glow of the rimu horizon. Kelii heard Bathel’s crew arrive back from the wreck, at the same time Ngaio stood up and immediately switched back to his normal self. His jovial chatter trailed off as he moved towards Bathel and away from Kelii, leaving her in a combined state of shock, confusion, and fear.
