Shadows and Dust
05 Jan 2019Gatimũ Kamau
CMDR’s Log, 3305.01.05, Sol Calendar; At least once a week, just when I’m settling into the monotony of space travel, something out of the ordinary happens and I’m reminded of why I fell in love with exploring in the first place. Especially when it’s so lucrative.
Today, we found a dead couple on board the remains of an unregistered derelict. Or, more accurately, we found a duo of grave robbers who were unlucky enough to attempt to scour a dead ship whose security protocols were still active. Yet that, by and large, was not what made this happenstance interesting. What made it interesting was the condition of the long abandoned vessel in question.
We came across a listening post in orbit of the second planet of Lupus Dark Region JY-Q b5-1 which contained a broken and garbled message which pointed us to nowhere in particular. All we could make out was that there was apparently an abandoned ship somewhere nearby in decent condition that begged exploration. Now normally, we’d pay very little mind to such things because who has time for treasure hunting?
Apparently we did.
So, since my wife had a wild hair about this one, we triangulated the signals source from what we could dig out of the satellite’s guts and after getting topography scans of no less than ten planets across four systems which bore no fruit, we came across planet AB 2 A in HR 5906. Where we picked up ship which we identify by on scanners solely by significant mass and its shape. Once we dived into atmo on the barren planet’s dark side over the wreckage, it was easy to see the battle-scarred remains of the hulking Anaconda lying awkwardly in the sand to one side which had apparently been converted into a makeshift settlement by its survivors; realizing that (apparently) their transponder and commo equipment were destroyed in the forced landing.
(Finally, a real use for our rarely utilized night vision sensor suite.)
I’ve no idea what conflict landed her there, but the ship’s pilot must have been VERY good indeed to get the beast of a ship down in one piece as they did.
We did our best to work through the ship deck by deck as safely as possible to get to the bottom of the ship’s history, but after seven hours of searching, the only thing that we found were ghosts. We couldn’t even find the ship’s name. The paint on the hull had either been weathered away by time or ripped off in the crash and the ship’s dedication plaque, which should have been on the bridge, had been purposefully removed from the bulkhead. There was no indication of who the crew was, who they were fighting, or what happened to them afterwards; outside of my speculation that they were Alliance Soldiers; seeing as how we found a bulk of astrometric data that I estimated to be worth nearly 1M CR (lucky day) and a data packet that was sealed with Alliance encryption.
Naturally we secured it for Federation Intelligence.
From what we could tell from the state of the wreckage, the survivors (of which we surmised by the belongings left behind were about 43) lived at the site for nearly a year by Sol reckoning then…vanished. They took nothing with them. Entire meals were left in place. Clothes were hung in their closets. There was no sign of disease or struggle. And the ship herself, as was discovered by the would-be scavengers had almost been repaired to a nearly space worthy state. No small feat given the circumstances. But despite all of this, there were no logs to be found. No holos. No written word. Just nothing.
The ship gave us the creeps. So we downloaded what information we could, gathered the salvageable material and equipment stockpiles from the holds and we left the unnamed ship behind as fast as we possibly could. We’ll leave the deep diving to the Federal Navy eggheads.
But at the end of the day, even though I'm no friend of the Alliance and we chose to put distance between ourselves and the ghost ship, my mind can’t help but continue to wonder “Who were those unfortunate souls?”…
