I do go to Sepres Prime, and set up a network node there. I'd planned for it, was already on the way, and have months, so there was little reason not to.

After that, it's straight to the listed coordinates (in the Vast), and the trip takes just two days, four hours, and forty-eight minutes… we ignore some Teleliths we pass on the way, as they can't even tell we're there.

At the listed coordinates… there's basically nothing. There's a nearby white dwarf star, but that’s it.  

Of course, I'm more than five months early, and planets move. Just because there's nothing here NOW doesn't mean there won't be later.  So I go into survey mode; I need to find and plot what will be here, rather than what is here. I spend a week mapping gravity wells, while I have Patricia using the computer to analyze them. It works pretty well; by the time the week is up, we're reasonably confident we have found everything big in the system… which includes a very massive irregular world (that basically means “not a spheroid” in Starfinder… but it's big enough that it should be such) that will intersect our current position at about the right time… and whether it's their destination or not, that makes it a suitable place to set up an ambush.

So we plot an intercept course, engage the drift drive, and just twenty-four hours later, I'm looking through the ship's sensors at the ‘planet’.

It's definitely artificial construction. A rough cube made of some kind of black metal, it has a hole in one side big enough to stuff Earth into, with room to spare.  Also what looks like they might be thrusters… it looks like it's not a planet: It’s a ship that's bigger than a planet.

Which is, of course, ridiculous. Planets are round because the mass of the materials they're made of (generally rock and iron) produces enough gravitational force to exceed the crumble strength of said materials, so it all collapses into one big ball.  In order to get something like this… you need super-strength materials, super-light materials, antigravity, or more likely: Someone’s cheating.

Besides me, I mean.

Still… my approach is the same: I start by hailing it.

“Greetings, this is Alex Abrams, captaining the…” Oh, I still haven't given this ship a name, so… “Retcon,” because I used it to turn a lie true, that's why. “Is anyone aboard?”

I give it a good five minutes, repeat the hail, and get a good three more cycles of the same in… with no response at all.  So either there's nobody home, they can't answer and need help, or they're sufficiently alien that they don’t recognize the hail. Whichever, my conscience is clean enough.

“Patricia, please take us around a few times so we can get a good look at this thing, then see if you can find a landing site.” I think this is our battleground… or at least why the Rendalairns will have a way to breed: They're magic constructs, they shouldn't be able to do so on their own.  But if they found the right tools....

Patricia flys us over the sides of the cube, swinging in close… and up close, the surface is a forest of evenly spaced metal towers with large flat “leaves” that I'm… guessing are radiators?  But they’d just be radiating heat into each other, so the design doesn't really make sense unless they're planning on outgassing and having the gas pick up heat on the way… which still doesn't really fit, as they could just put the heat in the gasses they're releasing in the first place.  Still… until I have a better explanation, I'm going to think of them as radiators. The entire exterior surface seems to be covered with them, whatever they are.

We find what looks like insanely huge thrusters at all eight corners… as in, big enough to accidentally lose Australia in their exhaust ports… I guess it matches the rest of the ship, though.  The break in pattern comes at the hole in the side: It's smooth. Perfectly so, as nearly as we can tell… except for one very large structure on the rim of the hole, with a nice flat spot perfect for landing a Large ship… which is, of course, the biggest ship that can actually land.

The Retcon, being Tiny, has no problems setting down.  We get out, and I have the Retcon take the form of an eagle and sit on my shoulder.  She’ll even be able to fly via those wings: This place is massive enough that it has collected a thin atmosphere… it isn't breathable, but that doesn't bother any of us, whether due to buffs or base nature.  Given that this seems to be a landing pad, I look around for a door… and find exactly one at the edge of the landing pad… which I head towards, watching for surprises along the way.

The door itself is a circular airlock in the floor, made of the same black metal as the rest of the place, a good sixty feet in diameter; big enough for me to fly the Retcon through. The controls are dead; seems it doesn't have power.  I do find a manual wheel for opening it… that's a good ten feet in diameter. I don't bother with it, taking advantage of Ironguard to simply walk through.

Ironically, there's LESS atmosphere inside the airlock; it’s a rather pristine vacuum, from what my body's environmental sensors tell me.  The Retcon will still be able to fly in bird form, but that’s because I loaded her up with a Fly spell when I was setting her up to spec a little while ago. Which is good, as this place was clearly built for people forty or fifty feet tall, based on where everything is located. It's tempting to cast the Giant Size spell on Patricia to make her fit, then just possess her.

Eh, maybe later.

The inner airlock door is also metal, and windowless.  And this place seems completely unadorned… I'm not even seeing an entry number or anything. So either the paint boiled away, or there never was any.  I get past the inner airlock door the same way I did the outer one.

Past the inner airlock door is more hard vacuum, and a huge room sixty feet tall, sixty feet deep and… oh.  It’s a hallway that stretches in either direction farther than I can see.  This place is going to be annoying to explore, isn't it?

At least I'm fast when I want to be.  Between the spells Mythic Haste, Winding Key and Borrowed Time, plus Dual Actions from Freelancer, I can act three times as often as I should, and have a base move speed of eighty. At a dead run, with Light Body Technique, I can get well over a hundred miles an hour… on foot.  Mind you, that's still basically nothing compared to something bigger than most inhabited planets.

But I probably don't need to explore the entire cubeship: I just need to find whatever passes for a bridge.  And anything particularly large is going to have maps; I just have to find them.  Given the scale of this place, though, I'm going to need some help.  Fortunately, that's easy.

I open up a Keyhome for my storage demiplane, and fetch several dozen spare summoned crewmembers. I then add some sensory buffs so they can search better, cast enough Prying Eyes spells to give each of the summons a sensor (the spell produces little floating eyes that can take minor commands and record what they see; I can read off said recording quite quickly by grabbing one... and in my case, they come out pink, with long, thick lashes), and put them to work going down each side of the hallway, with instructions to split the group evenly every time they encounter a choice of direction until such time as they can't do that anymore; to send one of their number back each time they find a map, computer terminal, data run, or similar; and to come back and wait for me here if they're still looking six hours’ time.

I get my first results in just thirty minutes, but stick around for the entire time limit and collect all the information, sending the summons back into storage as they report. By taking the information from the Eyes, I actually get a nice mental map of the area for a good three or four miles around… and there are no markings of any kind on anything that aren't strictly necessary for the item's function.

Also, nothing has POWER.  The place is completely dead.  And did I mention hard vacuum inside? Which is weird, as this place has enough mass that it accumulated an atmosphere, apparently from cosmic dust and solar wind… the airlocks are obviously doing their job, just… backwards. It's like the place was sealed up and then drained of all air somehow?  But that's a mystery for later: The lack of air harms neither me, my companions (who, granted, aren't here except for Patricia), nor my servants, nor the prey I'm going to need to either kill or control.

But if I want to do anything with this place, I am going to need to do something about the power problem: The Cube has a computer network, but everything is completely dead, and that just won't do.