Recon

When I first built that little recon drone almost two years ago, I expected it to have a life span of maybe a week. Two tops. Instead, two years and dozens of refits and upgrades later, the little autonomous spacecraft is still obediently sneaking into harm's way to gather information. Unfortunately, while it's proven to be more than adequate for the tasks we've given it and is better than what a lot of military teams use themselves, it's not a cutting edge sensor platform. There were some tasks it simply couldn't handle.

Initially, when I'd gotten the report of the Derelict from x0, I'd tasked the little Recee drone with doing the initial investigation. The information it sent back was, surprisingly, somewhat enigmatic. Power and gravity were on. Drives were idle. Stabilizers were still active. The ship didn't look to have any damage beyond the normal wear and tear you'd expect with a deep space cruiser, but there also didn't appear to be any crew. Even flying right up to the flight deck windows and looking in with the floodlights on didn't elicit a reaction from the derelict.

Stranger still, the escape pods all seemed to be in place but none of the ship's auxiliary craft appeared to be docked. If the crew had abandoned ship, they'd done so in an orderly fashion. Very orderly. Almost as if they were transferring to an orbital or another, larger, ship, to leave their cruiser for some completely mundane reason.

Had she simply slipped her moorings at a repair facility?

That seemed very unlikely. Even if she had, someone would have gone out and quickly recovered her. Unless, of course, the repair facility or tender had suffered some sort of catastrophic failure of its own. There should have been evidence of that if it had been the case, but it made more sense than the ship just drifting off on her own.

The drone wasn't designed to probe inside a target. It wasn't even designed to take atmo. It's native habitat was the vacuum of space. Without gravity. Without atmo. It wouldn't come apart inside a live ship, but it wasn't going to be moving much either.

No, this would take the more personal approach.

Wave Equation had considerably better sensors than the drive did. She was also considerably faster. Which meant I could burn up to the derelict and do a quick reconnoiter in person before assembling a proper salvage team. I'd just have to let Sabrina know that our home might be a bit, well, absent, when she got back from her latest shift. Not that she'd be especially upset with my doing a solo recon on a derelict Alliance cruiser. It was just, you know, the polite thing to do.

Eight hours. Ten tops. Burn out. Look around. Burn home. Formulate a plan for later. Plenty of time.

Piece of cake.