The People of the Stars, they called themselves in the tales. Well, if they had come from the stars they must have come in something.

It had been months after Rial’s departure from his village that Mead had mentioned something called a starship, a chance utterance when discussing an unrelated topic.[1] In this case the topic had been the range of Mead’s power when at full charge, which apparently included limited destructive potential against an unshielded starship in low orbit. Rial had listened with half an ear to this gibberish until realisation dawned that the target Mead was describing was utterly different to all he had heard before.

To Mead a target was a target, but these things sailed across the skies.

Rial didn’t set out to find one until many suns later, long after the years he spent roaming the mountains with the khiladri pack and watching as the leaves and water turned slowly crimson, as humanity was pushed back into isolated enclaves with no lines of communication between themselves, as Mead calculated population figures and extinction rates.

He hadn’t even admitted to himself what he was searching for, not really, but some part of him was always looking, always hunting for the ancient vessel or vessels that had carried his species here, even as he told himself his travels across the lands were to monitor the progress of the competition between nature and homo sapiens[2] and find some way to end it.

He found what he was looking for several suns before he first came to the city, after a long and arduous trail that too frequently led to diversions and dead ends. It had been hidden all this time from sight and memory, buried beneath a mass of rock and earth so great that no power of this planet could have moved it. Fortunately, Rial had a power not of this planet.

The starship was junk.

At least, that was how it seemed to Rial at first. Rent and scorched bodywork split inwards in evil-looking, jagged spikes that threatened to slice and cut an unwary explorer of its pitch-black passages. Unidentifiable and inexplicable shapes lay scattered across its floors, thrown there by some ungodly impact that had also thrown up the hills and carved out the valleys around the area.

Rial searched the ship by torchlight, the flames casting shadows that danced and crawled over the alien surfaces, unrecognisable features attached to incomprehensible names as Mead listed each room’s probable use. It ran for kilometres; Rial hadn’t thought there was so much metal in the world.

They camped the first evening at the mouth of the gaping hole they used as an entrance, back beneath the stars that were a comfort to Rial after the purity of the darkness inside, and he spent the night quizzing Mead again for any information he could glean about the ship beneath.

The first few days were spent like that, Rial gradually exploring further and further into the interior of the craft, Mead mapping it carefully, finding only the trashed and broken remains of a technology far more advanced than anything Rial could dream. Everything was still, inert, not merely inactive but dead. Nothing of value had been left behind by those who must have evacuated its burning skeleton, long ago. Nothing of use.

They found what Mead termed, for want of a better name, the ‘engine’ room at the end of the first week, though there was no engine as Rial understood it within the wide, low-roofed area. Instead, the back half of what would have been the largest room on the ship was taken up by what Mead termed supermass engines, row upon row of dark monolithic blocks stood tightly next to each other. Several had toppled, cracked and leaning against their fellows. Numerous indentations and even small holes were cut into their sides at seemingly random intervals, with strange markings inscribed above or besides them in a language Rial did not know but Mead assured him were almost exclusively warnings not to approach. The weapon also assured him he could pay no heed to these warnings as long as he listened to Mead's advice.

It was another day before Rial decided to listen to Mead’s assurances and advance down one side of the blocks, a narrow gap between engine and wall through which he could barely fit.

At the end of the gap was a hole Mead had told him he would find, a fist-sized gap in the smooth metal from which 4 long prongs projected outwards. All Rial had to do was slide the weapon in and the ship hummed to life

The power this restored to the ship was only electric, Mead explained. The dark monoliths[3] that had once carried the ship across the interstellar gulf were slag, irreparable even at the civilizational standard they had been built under, but such basics as life support and bio filtration were well within current capabilities. All that had been needed was a slight jumpstart.

Rial spent the next few days using the now well-lit corridors to further explore and investigate the wreck.

He could use this place. It was like the mountains, in a way. Everything you could need was here; clean water and food, though instead of taking it from the ground it was produced through these strange valves and pipes that could be found dotted around the ship; fresh air and sanitation, though Rial didn’t think he would ever get used to the strange sucking things Mead assured him were toilets; and security. Nothing would get passed these walls.

He could see it. It would be sparse in the beginning, but with pure water and the artificial lights it should be possible to establish real, fresh crops in one of the rooms. Whatever was needed could be brought in from the outside world, and the ship would become an ark[4], a shelter from the storm outside.

The major difference was, where the mountains provided security for Rial, the starship could provide safety for others.

[1] It helped to think of Mead as a spyglass, Rial said. It would focus on what you pointed it at, giving great clarity to what you asked but blurring everything around it.

[2] Tala required another explanation at this point. The idea of divisions of human species was a novel one.

[3] Non-baryonic WIMP engines, apparently. Rial stopped asking for a while after that.

[4] Many cultures of the world had their own myths of an ark. Generally, these told the story of a man who chose to save wild animals from a flood rather than his own people. He and his family were inevitably consumed by the hungry beasts some months in. Rial did not intend to repeat the mistake.