This post was inspired by a writing prompt in the Worldbuilding Community - Worldbuilding Prompt #1127 - Solo Wanderer
Enjoy !
"Just where I said it would be," Captain Varid stated with a triumphant grin.
"But.... how did you know ? And how could something so huge just drift around with no-one finding it for so long ?"
Zrami looked at his captain with admiration and not a little confusion. The derelict in their screens was massive, the size of a small moon. It was streaked and scarred, evidence of millennia drifting in the void subject to the whims of passing debris and meteorites.
"This," Varid said, smoothing the russet fur on his face, "If I've got it right, is the Rim city of Mandrey-Home. Parent-city of our very own Habrath-Home. Missing for nearly thirty thousand years, ever since the Tragedy. Now guide us in, Zrami-pilot. Find us a docking port."
Laying his four-fingered hands on the Deckmouse's control screen, Zrami started to guide the salvage cruiser slowly towards the monstrous floating wreck. Closer in, it didn't seem quite as bad as he'd first thought. Yes, it was a mess. But there wasn't that much actual damage, it was mostly surface markings and small shallow holes punched through the armoured hull plates.
"There's no sign of weapon damage, my Captain," Zrami called. "Just small impact damage. At least on this side. I can see a docking port now, just down there next to that cargo bay hatch with the three scrapes across it."
Half an hour later, the Deckmouse was clamped firmly to the surface of the dead city ship, debarking tube extended down to the docking port. Varid, Zrami, and half a dozen others were suited up and travelling down it. The lack of gravity didn't bother them in the slightest; they'd all been born on a Rim city, and grown up in an environment where gravity was somewhere between microscopic and non-existent. The only time they'd experienced the terrifying, crushing force of it was in planet-simulators, undergoing the hated but necessary dirtside acclimatisation training compulsory for all Rim children.
The hatch delayed them for a few minutes. The power source was long dead; Varid had to drill through the control plate and fix a temporary power unit. It drifted close, on twin umbilical wires fixed to the hidden circuit board beneath by conductive adhesive paste. With that done, Varid entered the code and the hatch slid open.
"Crazy that we've used the same entry code for thousands of years...." Zrami murmured under his breath.
Varid overheard him. "Not crazy at all, youngster. All Rim city-ships have always used the same code, and always will. Imagine crash-landing on a strange city and needing to get injured comrades inside in a hurry. No point creating an unnecessary delay."
Passing through the airlock, they started moving through the dead city. What they saw wasn't good. There was no power, no atmosphere, no light except what they'd bought with them. Evidence of fighting, close-quarter, nasty stuff. Weapon burns on doors and walls, locks punched through by explosive charges, scratches and scrapes that indicated fighting with actual hand weapons.
Then they started finding the bodies. Desiccated by thousands of years left in situ. The mummies of the city's inhabitants. Locked together in strife, or drifting partially dismembered in corridors and passageways. Few had suits on, and most were missing limbs. Limbs that had been hacked off after death. Faces like stretched masks of horror and desperation.
"What... what happened here ?" Zrami whispered.
Varid replied harshly. "The city died. Cut off after the Tragedy. No trade, no food. Discipline broke down. They fought each other to eat, winners eating losers, until the power failed and the winners died anyway. That's what the Imperials did to us when they destroyed the NexWeb.
His face grim with ancestral memories, Varid finsihed. "For every city-ship that is still with us, a hundred were lost. In those we still have, only one in a thousand survived the Tragedy. We've spent the years since then rebuilding what we can of our civilisation. You should know that, they teach it in every school in every Rim city."
Zrami nodded. He remembered the lessons, ones he'd tried to forget. How the Rim had lost and nearly been destroyed. Been allowed to live only by swearing eternal neutrality in the endless war between the Allied Imperiae and the Confederacy they'd once been a part of.
"What are we going to salvage ? It looks like everything is wrecked, all the food and water used up, anything that can be ripped free and used as a weapon scattered and useless. Anything good rotted to nothing after thirty millennia abandoned. And we're just one tiny ship, there's no way we can pick up even a fraction of what's here even if we can find something useful."
Looking squarely at Zrami for the first time since they entered, Varid said something that left the young Rim in shock.
"Who said anything about salvage ? We're here to start recommissioning her."
