Aspen watched Captain Marcus and the Marine’sSecond Lieutenant Washington stand side by side as they watched the screen displaying Tara’s helmet camera feed. Tara was currently idle in the bridge of the mystery ship, walking around and poking at random things strewn about on desks as she waited for her next order. 

 

Captain Marcus scratched his beard as he looked at the screen, “So… A ship suddenly appears in front of us - completely out of nowhere, not even on the best sensors the Federation of Sol has to offer - and is miraculously devoid of all life, has zero power, with no hull identifier numbers, and was left as though everyone aboard simply just walked away from their stations.”

The Second Lieutenant nodded, “If I weren’t seeing it for myself I’d call anyone who told me this story a liar to their face. This is some straight up sci-fi book shit.”

 

Captain Marcus laughed, “Being on a spaceship a whole star system away from Earth was ‘sci-fi book shit’ a couple hundred years ago, Second Lieutenant.” Wiping his eyes, Captain Marcus turned and noticed Aspen standing behind him, “Oh, well if it isn’t our new SRT.” 

 

Aspen’s back straightened immediately and she snapped a crisp salute, “Captain! Sorry for eavesdropping sir!”

 

Captain Marcus blew a raspberry, “Oh come on, now. You look like you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar! You were gonna find out about all this eventually,” His eyes glancing back to the screen showing Tara’s helmet cam, then back to her, a smirk alighting on his face, “Weren’t you?”

 

The pit that had been slowly forming in the bottom of Aspen’s stomach suddenly widened by what felt like a mile and she stammered a response, “I, uh, I’m sure I would have heard it around.”

 

Captain Marcus gave her a wink and turned back to the Marine Second Lieutenant, “Well, standard procedure for wrecked ships is to mark them for recovery and salvage, but I  don’t think that applies since we can hardly call this a wrecked ship.”

 

The Second Lieutenant nodded, glancing back at Aspen, “I agree. We should pull the black box and mark it with a transponder and let the Federation deal with it. We can’t really tow it back in-system and there’s no one to rescue.”

 

Captain Marcus picked up his microphone, the crackle of the instrument’s movement causing Tara’s motion to stop on the screen above, “Captain Marcus here, grab the black box and come on back. The black box ought to be under the captain’s workstation.”

 

“Understood,” Tara’s camera view spun around as she turned to look for the captain’s seat as instructed.

 

Aspen, noting that she wasn’t in immediate trouble for snooping on the bridge, turned her attention back to the screen, watching the captain and Marine officer as they watched the camera feed.

 

Tara’s camera feed stopped in front of a desk with multiple dark terminal screens and knelt down awkwardly, the bulk of her vacuum suit making the maneuver difficult. Tara’s hand appeared in view and opened a hatch at the bottom of the desk. 

 

Tara, Captain Marcus, and the Second Lieutenant all swore at once. The area behind the hatch was empty. 

 

Captain Marcus recovered from his shock first, “How the fuck is the black box missing!?” 

 

A susurration spread across the room, various crew members looking up from their own terminals to the camera feed. Aspen frowned, knowing the situation just went from weird to downright outrageous - the black box of a ship is literally welded into the metal of the ship’s deck and not removable - the fact that it was gone and without any obvious damage to the hatch or the space where it should be was ridiculous. 

 

 Typically retrieving a copy of the information off of a black box was trivial, any of them could interface with some one’s tab if they had the proper permissions. The information contained literally everything about the ship it was inside of. Route in space, crew, cargo, even benign information. Crew member flushed a toilet? The exact time of the flush, volume of the flushed contents, and how much pressure that crew member used with their finger to push the flush button were all noted. The Federation of Sol as a whole had the mindset that if there was data to be tracked, why not track it? 

 

The contents of the abandoned ship’s black box would have answered many questions, many the crew of the Meili probably wouldn’t even think to ask. Lacking this box, the unknown ship would remain unknown. 

 

Unless Captain Marcus decided to scour the entire ship for information, of course.

 

“Fuck it,” Captain Marcus threw his hands in the air, the irritation he was experiencing obvious, “throw a transponder on it and let some one else deal with it!”

 

Second Lieutenant Washington raised an eyebrow at this, “I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with that course of action, Captain. Why don’t you want to poke around in there a little longer? It’s not like anything more interesting is going on in this part of the system, no?”

Captain Marcus turned to the Marine and narrowed his eyes for a moment, his lips thinning, “While our border patrol mission may not seem like the most important thing to you, Second Lieutenant, some watchful eyes in the darkness of space could be all it would take to keep another abandoned ship like that one from popping up out of nowhere.”

 

The Marine shook his head, “I understand that, but I don’t think we have anything more pressing than figuring out why or how that ship became abandoned in the first place. Slapping a transponder onto it and waiting a month or a week or who knows how long it would take for someone to come to recover it to drag it back in system isn’t going to help us here.”

 

Captain Marcus sighed, his shoulder drooping, “Fuck. It’s just frustrating, is all. But, you’re right.”

 

Captain Marcus turned to Aspen, “Aspen, I’m going to have Tara collect samples from around the ship, I want you and Dr. Holt to analyze them immediately for any signs of… well, anything. I want to know literally everything about every sample obtained, is that clear?“

 

Aspen nodded her understanding, “Yes, Captain Holt! Permission to inform Dr. Holt on the current situation?” 

 

Captain Marcus waved a hand dismissively, “I’ll send out a page with all the details shortly, for now stand by.”

 

Aspen nodded and pulled her tab from her pocket, the digital kitten on her lockscreen wearing a fishbowl style space helmet as it floated about her screen, and shot Dr. Holt a quick message informing him of her location and to expect some non-medical work soon. 

 

\\\

 

Aspen sighed as she watched the screen showing Tara’s helmet camera. She’d been roped into assisting Tara remotely should she need assistance with collecting samples, stuck at a spare terminal in the corner of the bridge out of the way. Captain Marcus and the Marine Second Lieutenant both were both off doing other, undoubtedly more important things. 

Luckily, or unluckily, Tara was a professional. She needed no direction from Aspen and thus, the SRT was bored. Sucking her teeth in boredom, she flicked the feed from Tara’s camera through the other Marines aboard their so far unnamed mystery ship. 

 

One person was digging through footlockers in the ship’s hunk area, a small stack of tabs next to them. Another was poking through the kitchens, looking through the freezers, and cabinets.

 

Raising an eyebrow at this last feed, she activated the microphone and hailed the Marine, “This is SRT Conway, Marine.”

 

The Marine stopped their search and their voice crackled back to Aspen, “Hello SRT, PFC Chase here. What can I do for you?”

 

“Marine, have you noticed any items in the fridges, freezers, or cabinets that you would describe as being derived from an animal?”

 

The Marine hummed to himself for a moment, then moved back to a fridge and opened it up, moving aside containers as he looked around, “Uh… The only thing I see in here is old rotten veggies, some tofu… and like sauces and stuff. Nothing like a meat container or anything like that.”

 

Aspen frowned and made a note, “Thank you, PFC Chase.”

 

Looking at her notepad, Aspen underlined the words she had just written. No non-plant based materials found in kitchens. Aspen admitted to herself that she wasn’t extremely knowledgeable about what materials were kept in the kitchens (or cooking in general), but she figured she’d at least see some kind of dairy products or something… Margarine and non dairy coffee creamers may be a thing, but she knew for a fact that the Meili carried real butter and cream and assumed any other ship in the Federation of Sol’s Navy would as well.

 

Cycling through the feeds again, Aspen watched as the Marines collected their samples. They rubbed various surfaces with swabs, used fancy looking particulate monitors to gather air samples, and used syringes to suck up liquid samples wherever they would be found. Watching a Marine suck toilet water into a syringe was oddly not the weirdest thing she had seen today. The Marines were efficient and meticulous, the samples quickly filling a vacuum sealed container that would be kept sealed until placed in a special isolation chamber inside Sick Bay to be tested by herself, David, and Dr. Holt. 

 

Running environmental tests like these was not Aspen’s area of expertise, but she was knowledgeable on the equipment used for these tests and felt confident that with Dr. Holt’s instruction she would be able to obtain whatever information Captain Marcus hoped to find. 

 

Tara’s voice crackled over the radio channel, “Alright Marines, group up. We have all the samples we can get for now. Chou, put those tabs in an airtight container before we bring them over and then get them to engineering.”

 

Scattered responses confirming their understanding came back to answer Tara and Aspen watched as the Marines made their way back to the Meil. 

 

\\\

 

About three hours later, Aspen stood with Dr. Holt in sick bay as he manipulated the controls for the claw-like metal appendage hanging from the ceiling inside of the isolation chamber. The controls were extremely simple despite the complex movements the appendage made. Removing a surface sample, a water sample, and an air sample, Dr. Holt had the arm place each inside their respective testing machine receptacles and activated the machines.

 

When Aspen had imagined herself helping Dr. Holt with this project she had envisioned herself wearing an isolation suit with her eye to a microscope, but isolation protocols dictated that tests on materials like this be done autonomously. While the A.I in control of these machines and tests was damn good, the human eye and intuition were both something that couldn’t be replaced by machine learning. 

 

Dr. Holt stepped back from the controls and looked to Aspen, “So, what did the interior of that ship look like?”

Aspen shrugged, “Honestly, the same as the Meili. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same class ship - but I never saw the exterior lit up, so I’m not super sure.”

 

“And it was completely empty? No bodies, nothing?”

 

Aspen shook her head, her hair bouncing slightly, “None that the Marines could find, no. It was like everyone just… I dunno, walked away from what they were doing and disappeared.”

 

Dr. Holt scratched his chin, “That’s pretty fuckin’ weird. Excuse my language.”

 

“No, I agree. It’s super fuckin’ weird.”

 

Aspen and Dr. Holt shared a smile, then their attention turned back to the testing machine as the water test results came back first.

 

Reading the text output onto Dr. Holt’s terminal, Aspen was unsurprised to see that it was water. Just water. But - reading closer, she cocked her head.

 

“Dr. Holt, wouldn’t there be at least some bacteria or something in the water there? Thats like, literal pure H2O.”

 

Dr. Holt squinted at his screen, “You’re right. There are no microscopic microorganisms present in the liquid.”

 

Aspen and Dr. Holt read the air and surface samples as each resulted, their unease growing as each output popped up onto Dr. Holt’s screen. There was no sign of any non-plant based life form detected from any of the samples. Typical dust that could be found anywhere would have dead skin cells, small particles of hair, and bacteria, but the samples collected showed none of that.

 

Aspen recalled her note from before, when she was watching the Marines and told Dr. Holt, “There were no animal based products in the kitchen. Only plant based products.”

 

Dr. Holt frowned, and rubbed his temples, “How can there be an entire ship completely devoid of any organic material beyond plants? Hell, just the presence of a person would ensure there would at least be skin cells floating about - we shed them like dogs shed fur.”

 

Aspen held her chin, her eyes flicking back and forth at the different windows open on Dr. Holt’s screen, “Maybe… Maybe there were never any people on that ship in the first place?”