Jett had been knocking around the far reaches of Xi’an space for almost a year, now. He wasn’t…technically…there legally, but local authorities mostly tolerated him since he had a knack for finding mildly interesting things to sell. They were far from central authority and he was amusing. It kept him in fuel and food and doing what he wanted, which was finding new things and hanging out with Xi’an. He liked the grave, serious Xi’an, truth be told more than humans. He enjoyed their long view of history as well as their fastidious cleanliness in person and in their cities. He was moderately fluent in Uo’aXy’an and enjoyed tweaking his acquaintances with puns in their language. The Xi’an were no angels, but he felt more at home here than he ever had in human space, or with human history. And really, what had humanity done for its child Jett? After his Navy service he was qualified to be a low-level technician, but there really weren’t opportunities for someone like him to go any further than that, even with Citizenship. He had always had an interest in science, even as a kid, but it wasn’t like he was ever going to be an expedition leader or captain of an Endeavor. At most he would be one of the nameless lab techs down it its bowels, and that life held no attraction for him. So, he took his mustering out pay and bought a second-hand Reliant Sen and headed out to see what the universe had in store for him. That was around six years ago, and so far, so good. Jett was positioning for his next sensor sweep. He had found a small, uncharted jump point to the Khabari system and was exploring and looking for interesting bits to trade. This could keep him in credits for some time to come, and he wasn’t going to miss this opportunity. He parked the Sen and fired up the sensor suite. So far, it was an unremarkable system, but in his experience, every place had something intriguing to find and, maybe, to sell. He set the scan to auto and headed to bed. He woke to the blurping of the sensor. It had found something that deserved a second look. He got up, made a cup of coffee (his one human vice) and headed over to see what it had found. Hmm, it looked like a small derelict ship out at the limit of his sensor range. A salvage location would be worth some credits. He dropped into the pilot’s seat and set the course. As he closed, he wondered what the ship was doing out here and how long it had been here. If it was derelict, something had happened, so he kept the sensors burning and his finger on the q-drive. If that “something” had been an external threat, it wasn’t going to claim him as well. The craft looked like a life vessel. It was clearly of Xi’an manufacture, the characteristic vertical orientation his own ship shared. Maybe something from a medium freighter, but it was hard to tell. It had been dead a long time, or at least its rescue beacon was out of power. If it had been working, he would have known shortly after entering the system. Using caution, he positioned his ship close to the lifeboat in preparation for an EVA. Jett forced open the exterior door of the airlock. He could feel the grinding of the mechanisms damaged by vacuum and time. It was dark inside, so he switched on his helmet light. The inner door was ajar for some reason, and with some effort he was able to push that open as well. Inside he saw the freeze-dried bodies of three Xi’an. Poor guys. One of them had the markings of a captain, but he didn’t recognize the uniform. He felt some affinity for him – maybe he was out here too looking for credits to keep body and soul together, exploring the unknown when disaster hit. He was surprised to see that the lifeboat did have some residual power. That meant that it wasn’t as old as he thought it had been. The rescue beacon was reporting that it was working, but clearly it was not sending out a signal. Usually those things were pretty reliable. He thought back to the propped open airlock door and wondered if the crew had decided to go out that way rather than die of thirst or starve. Either way, not a pretty way to go. He found himself sad for this crew and their doomed mission. With the lifespan of Xi’an, maybe there would be relatives or loved ones back home who would find some closure when he reported their fate back to the authorities. He hoped so. Jett was a bit of a sensitive soul. If they were on a lifeboat, that meant that the mother ship would be around as well, unless it had been destroyed by whatever had caused them to abandon ship. There wasn’t enough power for reading a log and he didn’t have the equipment to decipher the black box, so he would have to find it the old-fashioned way. This was now a grave, so of course he wouldn’t be taking anything with him. He headed back to the ship, making doubly sure to mark the location of the lifeboat in his records. He now had the pretty problem of trying to find the ship they had abandoned, if it even existed anymore. He set up a search pattern intended to overlay his sensor range with each pass in a sphere with the lifeboat as its center. Chances were pretty slim that he would find it that way. Each pass massively increased the volume of space to be scanned as well as the area he had to cover to scan it. Still, he might get lucky, so he set the Sen on automatic while he tried to figure if there were a way to deduce where the mother ship had been. A couple of hours in he was still trying to figure out where the ship had come from. Had they been coming from one of the planets or moons? Were they travelling from one old jump point to another? He was startled out of his reverie when the sensor blurped again. There it was – a one-in-a-million find! Some sort of larger ship, also adrift. Maybe some sort of exploration vehicle? As he got closer, he was puzzled to see that the ship did have power. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said aloud, startling himself with his own voice. If the ship was whole and with power, why had the crew died in a lifeboat a short jaunt away? Itching with the need to figure out this mystery, he positioned the ship alongside. No docking to abandoned ships! He grabbed his sidearm and his old energy shotgun. He would be prepared for whatever was over there, and if he had to fire the shotgun it probably wouldn’t do much, if any, damage to the hull. This airlock was powered and fully functional, so he was inside within minutes. He took out a hand scanner and set it to sample the atmosphere. Breathable, no known pathogens. Well, forgive me if I leave my helmet on for a while yet, he thought. He made his way past a closed bulkhead door and was startled by some movement down the corridor. He brought up his shotgun but didn’t fire. Something small skittered away from his presence. He glanced around and saw rice-sized animal droppings hosting tiny green plant sprouts scattered around the hall. Lowering his gun, he followed the corridor, seeing increasing evidence of a novel ecosystem struggling to create itself in the abandoned ship. Bigger plants here or there with a “soil” that looked to be mostly excrement and the occasional corpse of some small animal. Life finds a way, he guessed. He had a momentary vision of this ship floating through the void, undiscovered by him or anyone else. Maybe by the time the air system broke down or ran out of consumables, there would be enough plants to make oxygen for the animals. He wondered if there was enough light to keep them alive when the lighting panels finally failed, and amused himself thinking about some long-future race of hyper-intelligent mice that had just discovered their world was an abandoned spaceship. He shook himself and realized all this would come to an end once the thermal regulation stopped working anyway. No future mousetronauts after all. Back to work.