Chapter 81 — The Ship That Never Looks Back

Old Notebook and Map

Khe Lam spread Bui Dac Sinh's notebook on the metal table in the familiar technical niche. Her headlamp shined directly on the yellowed page, where the last line he wrote was still there, the ink had not yet faded over the years like the previous pages. Bach Van sat opposite, his hand flipping through each page in front, trying to piece together the entire nineteen-year journey of a man who spent the rest of his life silently watching over a woman he could not fully save.

"Dong Sang is very large." Bach Van said, his voice was both hopeful and cautious. "We can't just go there and ask everyone one by one if they've seen a mobile repairman. We need to narrow the scope before we act, otherwise we'll just make her more wary and disappear again."

"I know." Khe Lam replied, her eyes never leaving the page. "But I can't wait another week to make the perfect plan, Bach Van. Every day that passes is another day she can move to another area, just like she has done for nineteen years."

She stopped, closed the notebook, hugged it to her chest for a moment as if seeking the last remaining warmth from the person who wrote it. Then she put it down, opening up another issue that both of them had been avoiding these past few days.

"But there's something else we need to do first, or in parallel." she said. "I've been thinking about it since that night in the hospital, when Mr. Sinh hadn't yet passed away. We spent nearly a year trying to prove that Lam Chu was the real destination, to follow my mother's footsteps, to understand the Night of Broken Roots. But we never personally verified the most basic thing — whether Tinh Vong was really alive or not, or whether it was just a hastily drawn up promise, the same way Lam Chu was drawn up, to keep everyone from panicking."

Bach Van was silent for a moment, feeling the weight of that question on his shoulders. As a navigator, almost his entire training program was built on the assumption that Tinh Vong was a verified destination, which, although imperfect, was reliable enough for a ship carrying eleven thousand two hundred and forty lives to rush towards over two hundred years.

"We do not have access to the original monitoring data." He said finally. "Everything we know about Tinh Vong goes through the Department of Instruction, through the curriculum approved by the Council. Even I, as a navigator student, can only see selected data sheets."

"That's why I thought of this." Khe Lam said, pulling out a small folded piece of paper from her pocket, a handwritten copy she had made from an old note in the file Vuong Khac Hien had revealed to them many months ago, but at that time they did not fully understand its meaning. "There's a phrase that appears repeatedly in early technical documents, before cruise year forty-one — the Telemetry Station. I looked it up in the public maintenance records, and it's listed as 'permanently out of service due to irreparable structural damage,' from cruise year sixty-two."

"An observation station." Bach Van repeated, a new light flashed in his eyes. "Not for navigation, but for remote viewing. If it had existed before Starlight became the official destination..."

"Then perhaps it was used to observe both of them." Khe Lam completed the sentence for him. "Lam Chu and Tinh Vong. And if it really was just structurally damaged, not completely dismantled, then the raw data it once collected, or at least the machine itself, might still be lying around somewhere, waiting for someone desperate enough to restart it."

They sat there for a long moment, both realizing the scale of what they had just proposed—not just an archive incursion as daring as the night at the Founding Archives, but an attempt to restore a technical system that had been abandoned for sixty years, deep in an area perhaps more heavily guarded than the Primeval Core, if only because no one remembered how important it had been.

"We'll need someone who knows how to operate it." Bach Van said. "Not only do we need a key to open the door, but we need technical knowledge that neither of us have. You're a survival systems maintenance engineer, I'm a navigation student. Neither of us has ever studied ancient remote sensing optics."

Khe Lam nodded, stood up, and walked to the corner of the technical alcove where she still kept a small box containing loose pieces of papers she had collected over many months. She searched through it, pulled out an old personnel list, a copy she had taken from Vuong Khac Hien's file to show her briefly but never explained clearly.

“There is a name that appears many times in the Telemetry Station maintenance reports before the year sixty-two.” She said, pointing to a faded line of writing. "Chieu Bach Tuyen. There is no note about whether he is dead or alive, just one last line, stating that he was 'transferred' to a low-level maintenance position at the Root Layer, the same year the observatory was officially declared irreparably broken."

Bach Van looked at the name, then looked at Khe Lam, both understood the meaning of that coincidence without having to say it out loud - an engineer who was once attached to an important machine, disappeared from official records just as that machine was declared useless, and was pushed to a job much lower than his expertise. It's a pattern they've learned to recognize all too well throughout their journey.

"If he's alive," Khe Lam said, her voice filled with new determination, "he must be very old. But if he's alive, he may be the only person on this ship who still remembers how to operate that machine."

"So we have two things to do at the same time." Bach Van said, standing up, a new fierceness in his stance. "Find this man, and find a way to get to Dong Sang, all while Ton Khac Du is still monitoring any unusual movements after the incident at the Central Regeneration Station."

Khe Lam looked out the small door leading to the dark hallway, thinking of the distance they had traveled since the day she discovered a coordinate mismatch during a seemingly routine maintenance shift — from the initial fear of keeping that discovery hidden, to the journey that had taken her through the Founding Archives, the Silent Tunnel, the death of Bui Dac Sinh, and now, to the threshold of what could be the final answer to the question that had haunted her since the first days.

"We're going to need more help." she said. "I don't think just the two of us can do both at the same time, not while keeping up the facade of our regular jobs."

"Uong Khac Tram." Bach Van said immediately, without hesitation. "She offered to help weeks ago, and I trusted her. She's better at calculating orbits than any of the students in her year, including me. If the Telemetry Station is truly recovered, we'll need someone who understands astronomical data to read what it collects."

"What about Bright Bronze?" Khe Lam asked.

"Trinh Yen My." Bach Van replied. "I already told her part of the truth. She can ask for a shift to the agricultural area, which is completely normal for a multi-skilled maintenance engineer like her, no one will suspect anything."

Khe Lam nodded slowly, feeling the circle of those who knew the truth expanding once more, each expansion bringing with it both new hopes and risks. But she also realised, looking back at all that had happened since the Night of the Broken Roots, that it was isolation, the fact that each generation had to face this truth alone, that had kept it buried for so long.

"Okay." She said, folded up the old personnel list, stuffed it into her pocket along with Bui Dac Sinh's notebook. "Tomorrow, I will start looking for Zhao Baiquan. If he is still alive, we will find him, even if we have to search every corner of the Root Layer."

Out there, the Origin ship continues its silent journey through the endless void, carrying a machine that has been forgotten for sixty years, waiting for the hand of someone brave enough to wake it up again, and with it, awaken the greatest question anyone on board has ever dared to ask: is the light they are aiming for, the light they have been taught to trust absolutely since they were cradle, is really what they still believe, or is it just an illusion? another version of the same lie that has shaped an entire drifting civilization.