[h1]Starship Liberty[/h1]
[h2]Engineering[/h2]

	The device felt familiar. It was certainly comprised of parts that could be identified. A long springy antenna, wires wrapped in a protective coating, a shell that had been shiny, but through untold years of moisture and brine had long lost its luster. A white coat of oxidation had enveloped the part of it that had been found over ground. That which had been buried was dark and rough. Nothing living had made an effort to stick to it, no lichen, algea, or some alien barnacles. Its seemless exterior showed no crease or indication of an access point, except at one point. At the top, or what was presumed to be the top where the antenna protruded was a hatch, a hairline separation between it and the rest of it.

	“Hell, it has to be human.” one of the engineers said, leaning into the machine with all his weight. His arms were heavy set and pitted with scabs and scars. Bony growths protruded from under his skin and ran along the length of his arm, meeting at his shoulders to where his back was almost a shell under the dirty cloth of an oily wife beater. His face, afflicted by the same biology was like a hammer head: blunt, flat, unattractive. His beady eyes focused intently down at the machine.

	“And why is that?” Marcus said from below. The entire device stood taller than he. By width it was the size of a large minivan and could have been near a story tall. Shaped like a pill it lay on its side, the long antenna probing the far wall and bowing upwards, opposite the floor at the base of the antenna sat the hatch, and leaning up against it a bright yellow ladder where the alien mechanic stood, his short stubby legs leaning against the rungs and knees set against the rungs.

	“Because...” the mechanic grunted. There was the sound of metal popping and he threw down his screwdriver, “It's philips headed and I just stripped it out.” he protested, “The screws probably weren't the same metal as the rest. They're fucked to hell.” he grumbled, climbing down.

	A human kid came racing around from the other side of the machine, a young girl. She wore a one piece jumper and her long hair was done up in a bun behind her head. She looked to be no older than eleven. Cradled in her arms was a large drill. She handed it up to the mechanic who was down to the last rung, and reaching down with his long arms thanked his assistant. She smiled, and darted off, her rubbed shoes plodding against the steel floor.

	Checking the bit the mechanic grumbled under his breath. He didn't have a mouth like a man, it was stiff and hardly as roundly articulate. Each breath and sound he made came out almost as if a grunt or a low rumble. He changed out the bits on the large yellow drill, sliding a new own out from a belt around his hip and dropping the old one into a pocket in his cargo pants and headed back up.

	At the top he began assaulting the screws holding the hatch down. The drill rolled and tore at the steel and the room was filled with a harsh, loud whine and roar. During whence Dan came strolling in, his hands in his pockets he looked up at the work in progress. “Guess it's not open yet?” he said, shouting over the noise.

	“No, screws stripped open.”

	“Damn, if a Gjorn can't open it then it must be in tight.” Dan shouted back.

	One by one the mechanic popped out the screws. As the drill came out, so did they at the bidding of the extraction bit at the end. In minutes the plate was removed and he through it down to the side. As it clanged to the side he looked in.

	“Ahh- USB type E-class, maybe. Don't know the number.” he said shouting.

	“Wait, so this might be human?” Dan said.

	“Think so.” Marcus said.

	“E-class?  How old is this thing then? You think it's still working?”

	“It was broadcasting.” Marcus said, and looking up the mechanic shouting, “G-L, what do you think it was doing?”

	“Hell if I know. An exploratory probe? A beacon left behind? If anything, it's not working well if you only caught the signally while on top of it.”

	Again from around the corner the little assistance came plodding. With a box in her hand she climbed up the ladder and worked herself around the master mechanic until she was seated cross legged next to the hatch. When she opened the box she began taking out chords and drives. From a pocket she took out a small tablet computer.

	“No. No. Not this.” G-L muttered as they went through the drive adapters. At each one used it was handed back and replaced. But with every one tried, came on that didn't work.

	“Looks like it could be F-series.” the girl said.

	“Really? What makes you think that?” G-L asked.

	The girl shone a light on something through the screen of her tablet. “There's a little tongue there, next to the plates. Could also be a safety.”

	“Ah, perhaps. Can you go get those?”

	The girl nodded and closed her box. Leaving the diagnostic tablet behind she disappeared around the side of the machine again.

	“I have to give you humans credit. You say universal and I've seen nothing but.” G-L chided, teasing, “Maybe your race means a universe of all kinds.”

	“Maybe. I've been baffled about that too.” Dan commented. 

	The shop assistant came back around with another box, and resumed her seat next to the hatch. Again they went to work finding and matching drives until they found one.

	“It's in!” the girl exclaimed. She lifted up the tablet and looked at it, “There's something in there.” she added, and went to work tapping through interfaces.

	“What is it?” everyone else in the room asked, whether out loud or to themselves. She placed the tablet on the surface of the pod and it projected up into the air its user interface. She began reaching out to and moving information boxes and technical messages. Something flashed that the connected hardware was out of date and needed a software upgraded. She dismissed that. There was another message that said something about fifty years since last update. But that too was gone before anyone had a chance to read it. Finally coming to the program she wanted she activated something, and it all shut down.

	“I reboot it.” she said simply, “I need to boot it on both operating systems. It'll take a while.” she said, sliding to the side and stretching her feet off the side of the rounded hull, and begun drumming the heels of her feet.

	The three looked nonplussed. G-L shrugged. “Alright then.” he mumbled, “I'll go wash my hands and go find something to eat.”

	Marcus kicked at the floor, and turned to Dan, “So, you up to it?”

	“No, I already ate.” he said. “I was going to go catch a show, or head to Deck 15 and play some ball. The system is going to start issuing bulletins to ask where we're headed next. I think some refugee work was on that.”

	“What do you think of that?” Marcus asked. The two headed out the door.

	“Go ahead and drop myself off at a stockpile. Liberty's going to need some people to try and organize that and I need to get out of this tube. I'm really just hoping to settle down for a year, two, three. A stockpile would be a good place for that.”

	Marcus nodded noncommittally as they stepped out of the room.

	Compared to the gravity-less aft, Deck 1 was at the least far more open. Much more so than the other decks up to 14. But this much so for the purpose of moving much of the heavy components around. Here the major work that demanded the control of gravity was performed. Whether it was investigating abandoned debris, the repair of vehicles, fixing large or small components there were things best not performed in the weightless of zero gravity, in free fall. An infinitely small screw lost in the anywhere space of the chambers and passages of the hanger, engine bays, or power plant could end up destructive. If it could be removed, it was removed to Deck 1 and worked on. If it needed to be processed, it was in Deck 1. Many hundreds, thousands of automated systems performed the never ending cycle of keeping Liberty in perpetual voyage and sustained its nomadism to the root-most mechanical function. Repairs in the aft were to be large, dealing with large parts and the minimum of free-floating smaller bits. Deck 1 repairs were on those small minuteas.

	“What are you thinking?” asked Dan

	“What we're going to do now. I'd like to know what it is we found. But, we're going to have to wait until everything's all formatted. G-L said it's probably human. Who do you think it's from?”

	“Something built like that? I don't think I've ever seen anything like that for a while. But it must be old. It said it was fifty years out of date, you think that's true?”

	“Oh fuck no.” Marcus chortled. It wasn't filled with humor though. He was astonished, bewildered. He didn't know what to think of it. He chortled at the something unexplained, chuckled at the strange circumstance.

	“I suppose you'll be hanging around here then.” Dan said, “Maybe?”

	“I suppose I will.”

	“Tell me if you learn anything then.” Dan smiled, stepping away from Marcus as he headed down the hall. The door to the workshop sat closed between them. Down the hall was a shaft for an elevator. As he reached it he looked back and smiled, waving to him as he called the lift.

	Finding what they found there was something strange, Marcus thought to himself as Dan left. Even after the fact, there was a sense of confusion and awestruck mysticism for the beacon that they had stumbled across. Even as they delivered it to the ship there was chatter. Whose was it? Mars? The Ressurectionists? Perhaps some other further flung human polity. It might be a spy satellite. Or a navigation beacon. It was after all the sort of signal it had put out. It could have been a bread crumb. But where was the next crumb?

	He had found it by following that beacon, its own bread crumb trail. Flying low he passed it the first several times, skirting over the volcanic island it was on and throwing up sand as he passed. He nearly nicked a giant knife of a rock that protruded from the volcanic ground there. But on his third pass he found it, sitting out in the extreme low tide. Had it been a few yards in one direction, it would have been under water. How long had it been there? For several decades? Was it washed up on high tide or revealed in low tide?

	But finding it he had stopped and landed, and called it in. At that time it was embedded in the sand and rocky mud it was resting it. All entirely white from salt water. It must have been made of aluminum, he thought. Aluminum oxidizes white, doesn't it? He didn't know how tall it was then, it was embedded so deep that it was nearly as tall as his craft was tall on its skids, exempting the antenna.

	Was it fortune it hadn't buried its antenna? If its signal was meant to be so strong, and it had weakened, then it would've been mute to him or anyone if it was buried wrong-side down.

	It was everyone else who had helped him get it out. With some fighting they pulled it out with chains and cables. Packed it aboard a heavy shuttle, and flew it back to the Liberty. They counted their stars they didn't need to deal with anything heavier.

	Now here it was, in Deck 1 aboard the Liberty. Probably built by humans, but by who no one knew.

	Several hours passed. His pocket buzzed. Reaching in he pulled out a small hand held computer. He had a message. He opened it, it simply read, “It's done.”

	Slipping it back in his pocket he made his way back to the workshop. Stepping back inside he swelled the renewed blast of ozone and mechanical chemicals; lubricants, hydraulics, and stored coolants. G-L's assistant, the human girl was still perched atop the beacon with the hatch off, her tablet computer plugged into the beacon. What had changed now though was the lack of user interface. Many of the normal windows, messages, and alerts had been moved aside and now there was a much more clear program being projected from the tablet's screen that the girl was playing with. It appeared to be a map, in rough form.

	“Well, I cracked it.” she said, “Only to find out someone had encrypted most of it. But I think Mr. G's right, whoever made it: we did.”

	“[i]We[/i] did?” Marcus asked, stepping up closer to the beacon as if he could see the map clearer. It was a 2D projection of the galaxy and the girl had it mostly facing her. She idly spun it, watching the static constant of the dots representing the stars orbit as if it were the galaxy.

	“Well, not [i]we[/i]. But [i]we[/i] as in, well, humans.” said she.

	“How's that?”

	“Our USBs worked.”

	“Well I'm sure anyone interacting with us would have picked up that. Why what else?” he asked.

	“It works on our computers. Computer things aren't entirely different, it's not written on a whole other language. Same thing we've been speaking for thousands of years!” she said, emphasizing this by spreading out her arms.

	“Also, Sol is at the middle of these two lines.” she added, pointing to two crossing axis faintly visible, “So it must be us. Not many other life puts Sol at the middle of their universe like we do.”

	“No, no they don't...” Marcus said, and almost distantly muttered, “The Geliuminens actually put the Galactic center at their middle.”

	“You say something?” the girl asked.

	“No, no. Nothing that's not important. So we have this, what then?”

	“Ahhh-” the girl started, looking up at the map, “Well this dot here must be it!” she pointed, picking out a red blip to the north-west of Earth, above the dividing line that would separate the galaxy if one were drawn left-to-right through the galactic center; which on the map was shown as a void filled with a checkerboard pattern. The red dot was just a few fingers north of that line, sort of mid-way across on that left-hand side.

	“OK, that's good. But do we know any more?” Marcus asked.

	“I want to work on it, but it's pretty hard.” she complained, “I'd like Mr. G to help out, but he's out to lunch. You know, he eats too much. It can't be helpful.”

	“Well he has a fast metabolism.” Marcus said, “But, hey... If you learn anything else can you keep me in the loop. I'm kind of curious.”

	“Sure thing.” the girl smiled, “I'll see what's going on with this.”