There were no stars out here. Just the ones behind you.
Ka’pt’s vessel coasted with a slow momentum, propelled by any delta-v it had gained from firing its fusion drive in bursts and vectoring across the black. No engine flare. No comm chatter. Just a hiss from the bio-conduits and the murmur of the hull’s minds, dreaming in low whisper. They spoke in tandem with the ship’s frame, one sharing an old joke about telling stories in exchange for dried fruit or bolani if they were still human, another arguing with a ghost-thread sensor echo.
Then came the signal. Faint. Out-of-phase. Bouncing off nothing.
The remains of a Paktu corvette appeared like driftwood in the void. Bent. Frayed. A old Hiigaran design, light and fast, used to be. Its spine was snapped at the keel, and what was once a prow now folded backward.
Ka’pt halted the vessel’s momentum with a breath.
Thrusters whispered, barely. It coasted close.
The ship was long dead. Its systems were blank. Its IFF beacon a weak stutter-loop - old firmware, endlessly replaying a corrupted startup tone.
Kiith Paktu markings on the hull. Faded. Scratched by whatever event broke it. Something terrible. A gravitational anomaly, maybe. Maybe a tide too deep to sail back out of.
Ka’pt scanned. The pilot's body, or what was left of it, was inside the cockpit’s inner chamber. Pressurized at the moment of impact, depressurized in a second’s breath. What was once a person was now... something else. Folded in the wrong direction. Splayed through the cabin like a prayer unanswered.
Ka’pt said nothing for a long time.
Then, Ka'pt spoke through the open comms, quiet, barely above a murmur, a prayer for the dead in Kharakid:
“Sajuuk to ra hafz kand.”
The comm went silent again.
Ka’pt lingered. Another voice in the hivemind whispered something about Paktu traditions. Another corrected it. A third said nothing, only hummed an old tune from some memory, like the way sand used to sound under boots on Kharaki flats.
Then it saw it in the scan's data output: something in the rear hold. A crate.
No, a container. Jostled loose, buried beneath broken struts and emergency rations. Unmarked except for a single glyph, now half-seared by heat.
Ka’pt focused sharply on it and scanned.
Artifacts. Not one. Not five. Dozens.
They pulsed with readings its ship didn’t have words for. Ka'pt's sensors tried and failed to apply any frame of reference - thermal? Psionic? Temporal? What were they? One radiated a signature that looped back and registered as older than the ship itself. Another simply defied the notion of mass, and another was Beast-related, but it was alien even to Ka'pt's nature.
Together, they were worth more than anything. Not just money, but debt. The kind of wealth that reshapes the balance of entire fleets. The kind of wealth that calls in warlords, brokers, missionaries.
Ka’pt stared for a long time.
Then, flatly:
“Yeah.”
Nothing else.
The hivemind murmured louder. Suggestions. Theories. One joked about merchants that could take a planet as collateral. One, maybe Ka’pt’s own, wondered how many lives had already died just bringing these here.
Then it made a decision. No tug-beam. No retrieval. Just a final passive scan for radiation. For other wreckage. For other souls still clinging.
It found none.
Then Ka'pt turned its ship around and left.
No beacon dropped. No marker left.
Let the Zone take it back. Let the stars bury it.
It coasted back into the dark, voices in the ship dimming once more.
And behind it, the crate drifted - sealed, unreadable, untouched, as if it had never been seen at all.