The Last Voyage of the Sakura. Part 2

Posted on 18 Apr 2018 @ 3:42pm by Ensign Miraj Derani

436 words; about a 2 minute read

Day 8

Well that was a wash. We found the ship, a DY-100! the SS Norfolk Island. An actual genuine antique from the time of the Eugenics wars. The scans showed the hull was intact, and the air was stale, but it was breathable. We beamed over and had a look around. I breathed four hundred year old air. It tasted of metal.

We were probably the first people to ever breath that air since it was blasted from Earth orbit.

The Norfolk Island was completely empty, no life pods, no bodies. Nothing. The reactors were cold, but Borgon says they were put in mergency shutdown. So someone switched them off. and then left. But there was no sign of crew. The life pods were all intact, but switched off, and empty. O'keefe says he thinks they were used once. There were organic traces in them. But no bodies.

Borgon says he needs time to get into the computer core. Its so prehistoric we've got nothing that can access it, so he has to find some plans for earlier tech and replicate it. O'Keefe said to put the Norfolk Island on tractor tow and we'll chug it to the Mars yards.

I'm glad he did that and didn't want to link up via docking ports for a fix point tow. The thing is giving me the creeps.


Day Nine

O'Keefe asked me to take a look around the ship. Said becuase I grew up doing salvage I might notice something. But I couldn't see anything that he couldn't.

I went back through the storage bays. All the colony set up bits and pieces were all intact. Lockers of equipment, supplies, rations, water purifiers, tools. Everything you need to create a dark age settlement from medieval technology. So there must have been people on that ship. But when did they leave? And how? The lifeboats are all there. It doesn't have shuttlebays. There's no sign of weapons fire, or forced boarding. No bodies.

There was personal stuff too.

Sets of clothing. Jeans, t shirts. flannel. Mid nineteen nineties. Undies. so much lace. Pyjamas. Make up. Not much, but some colonist couldn't bare not to take her lipstick. Books. Journals. Some artist's sketchbook. Musical instruments. Intimate things that no-one willingly leaves behind.

And toys. There was this teddy. A small white bear with a golden ribbon tied in a bow round his neck. Really soft. Sitting on top of one of the suspension pods. Some kid really loved that bear. What would happen that it would be left behind?

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