She approached warily, keeping the Dragon's sensors on full-spectrum scan, streaming the telemetry into her own brain. Inevitably, there was a chance this was another lure left by Concordance. At least there were no significant masses nearby to block an emergency jump into metaspace: the local sun was a distant spark of light. Ondo's preferred protocol was to watch and listen for a day when approaching an unknown object. In the end, she lasted an hour before instructing the Dragon to move in under reaction drive.
The hulk seemed to grow as she neared it, swelling to dwarf the Radiant Dragon. A cargo vessel? A warship? Perhaps it had been both: some interstellar craft repurposed when Concordance commenced their attacks upon galactic culture. From the lines of its nose, she thought she'd seen something similar in the brief video Ondo had shown her: the whale-like ship breaking orbit from the planet he claimed was Coronade. Had it been this vessel, jumping off to meets its end in a battle on the edges of this backwater system? She would never know.
She scanned the wreck and picked up nothing: the ship was dark, no energy patterns running through it. Its drive sections were gone; it would have had no power for three hundred years. It was dead metal and carbon, little different to the tenuous cloud of rocks and snowballs it drifted among. There were a few decks and bulkheads left, gaping open like mouths of jagged teeth, so it was conceivable some localized system might retain a memory chip or fleck she could salvage.
She nuzzled the Dragon as close to the hulk as she dared, then shrugged on her EVA suit to investigate in person. One of the suit's monitor circuits refused to synch with her flecks the first time, suggesting a malfunction, but the second time it locked on. She would know if any enemy ships appeared.
Her left eye and her suit had lights, but it could be awkward to keep them pointing in the right direction while she worked. “Shine a light onto the wreck,” she said to the ship. “Manoeuvre around it so I'm not working in the dark.”
“Understood.”
“Same orders as usual: if you're attacked and there's no time for me to get back, run for metaspace. I'll stay hidden for you to pick me up later.”
“You have oxygen for four hours, perhaps double that if you drop into artificial torpor. I might not be able to return in that time if Concordance come.”
“Just do what you have to do. You know the score: it's better that you get back to Ondo with something than us both getting killed.”
“Understood.”
She paused at the outer airlock door, scanning local space once again for possible threats. All she got from the void was white noise. She pushed herself off towards the hulk, an observation port in its hull like a single round eye, watching her warily as she neared. Her control of the suit's thrusters was good, now: she could manoeuvre where she needed to go without thinking about it. She passed across the smooth voidhull of the ship and pulled herself through a ragged rip to reach what had once been the ship's interior. She began to study the bulkheads using her suit's faint directional light. After thirty seconds, the Dragon manoeuvred around to bathe her in its illumination, and she saw what had been hovering near her in the darkness while she worked.
The head of a dead crew-member lolled above her, little more than a mass of ice-crystals, its mouth open wide in a scream that would last until the end of the universe. This far from any heat, a body exposed to the void might well not decay, sterilized of its microbes by the vacuum and extreme temperature. She panned around and picked out five of them, hanging by their seat harnesses like weird fruit from some alien tree. They'd been operating the craft, controlling its systems, when it was blasted into fragments. Most likely it would have been a quick end, although they must also have known, as the Concordance ships bore down on them, that they were going to be destroyed. She wondered who they were, what worlds they were from, what sights their eyes had witnessed.
Trying her best to ignore them, she spent the next five hours pressing probes and sensors into whatever fragmentary remains of ship's mechanism she could find: shattered comms arrays and the entrails of nav control systems. It was all dead. She'd hoped there might be some residual ghost image of a control message frozen within the ducts of the fuselage, but there was nothing.
More than once, she had to close her eyes to let the nausea that flooded through her subside. It wasn't just the corpses, although they weren't helping: it was also the disorientation of moving through three-dimensional space. Born and raised on a planet, she was still learning to handle not having gravity to hold her in place. She was still fundamentally a two-dimensional being. Her current location didn't help much, either. She turned to consider the gulfs of space opening out in front of her. The Dragon was temporarily distant, arching around to give her light. For a few seconds, it was only her and the endless void, the staring stars impossibly distant.
Ondo had warned her about the psychological effects of prolonged time spent within the vacuum, the sense of panic or despair that could overwhelm you. Void psychosis, he'd called it. She'd shrugged
