Chapter 1

The 30 meter long wedge-shaped dull grey ship silently drifted in the inky backdrop of innumerable hard pinpoints of light facing the massive engine block of a centuries old shattered spacecraft hull. The only decoration on the Scout craft besides the Hull ID-02461 was a partly abraded white swan logo on the prow encircled by the cursive letters UCSA White Princess. Just below the left side of the cockpit window was a black stencil of a robed figure pushing a raft along with a long pole next to 27 tick marks. The only sign of humanity was the slowly strobing running lights, red and green directional lamps, and the bright light pouring out of the curved cockpit window. The miniscule pressurized cockpit took up less than a tenth of the ship's volume as the rest of the hull was reserved for salvage storage bins, the antimatter reactor and its currently idle hyperdive. Inside the cluttered, cramped interior, a tall disheveled man with tousled brown hair, a five day growth of stubble and an eyepatch concealing the missing eye and the faint scars on the right side of his face sat on a futon in his black boxers and grey sleeveless undershirt. He swore under his breath as his only remaining sienna brown eye was intently focused on hooking up the severely damaged data event recorder from the hulk outside to his portable computer tablet. Ugly, exposed chromed mechanical limbs replaced his right arm past the elbow, and both legs above the knees.

Music from The Police blared inside the closet-sized space. Monty smirked and sang along to Sting's falsetto, "Roxanne…you don't have to put on the red light! Roxannnnnneee…"

The master terminal chimed once, cutting off the music, and interrupting his train of thought. His handsome face furrowed and he threw the connecting cord at the holographic keyboard, cutting off the incoming call. He muttered in annoyance, "Fuck off Mason!" He stretched out and yawned. "Computer, skip to track 284!"

He scratched absently at his incipient beard and bathed in the opening instrumental. He sang off-key with abandon, "There's a little black spot on the sun today…it's the same old thing as yesterday…"

The console chimed again, and Mason's baritone twang intruded on his day again, "Nice pipes there Sutton!"

Monty walked over and slumped in the padded console chair in sullen defeat. It seemed Rex Mason wasn't taking no for an answer today. He was glad that he had disabled the cockpit cameras so his dispatch officer couldn't see his maimed wreck of a body. He snapped, "What the fuck do you want?"

"Was that the Beetles you were listening to? Why do you like that two millennia old crap for anyway?"

Monty refused to take the bait, but his tapping metallic finger gave away his irritation, "What's the job? I'm still downloading the Lorelai's black box that I just spent 3 hours EVA to extract."

"That can wait! I've got you a juicy one! One of our probes just RADAR pinged a true beauty!"

"Get to the point," the field investigator growled.

"Such an eager beaver, aren't we?" Mason laughed uproariously, "Lucky for your antisocial ass, this one's a surefire derelict. No need to waste those charming interpersonal skills of yours with no one living to talk to. It's a Korean generation ship in a decaying orbit of Antares B called the…the UKSPA Mu-Mug-gong-wha-what? What the hell kinda name is that?"

Monty acidly cut in, "UKSPA Mugunghwa. It's named after the Unified Korean national flower, the Rose of Sharon."

"Good memory there, buddy! I forgot your grandma was Korean sometimes! Poor bastards never made it to their new home. Anyhoo, the Saeju Colony Historical Society will pay top credit for the ship's data logs. Its 600 years overdue, any data that old is worth a lot. Also they want to see if there are survivors or technology."

"Tech for sure; but there's no one left to save. A distress beacon has had ample time to spread many light years out. It'll be nothing but corpses." He remotely powered up the ion thrusters to send the hulk of the nearby Lorelai to its fiery doom in the nearby gas giant. Charon the Ferryman had just sent the long deceased crew of the cargo ship to their eternal rest. Then he calmly typed in the downloaded coordinates as the whine of the hyperdrive capacitors powering up caused the ship to shudder. A metal shroud unfolded and shielded the cockpit canopy, "I'm on it. Bye."

Mason's voice turned somber, "Yeah, you're probably right. See if you can get their security AI *Mute or navigation AI *Star online. Either one should have the encrypted files. Happy huntin'!"

The Starship White Princess screeched into an alternate dimension like it was being tortured.

…

Five days later the ship phased back into normal space, shivering as the fabric of space-time was neatly folded back into the familiar starscape. The shroud over the cockpit neatly bifurcated and retracted back into the hull. Just ahead, bathed in the eerie two tone light from the nearby blue-white giant and its red supergiant twin many AUs away was a massive, white oblong ship that was layered like a submarine sandwich. Its blocky fission reactor deck took up the rear quarter of the vessel. All the windows, running lights and navigation beacons were completely dark. The active and passive scanners were still working as his ship was pinged as soon as he had entered the system. Monty grimly scanned the ship as his nimble scout swooped into a parallel orbit. His worst fears were confirmed when he saw all the bulkhead seals were fully opened indicating that the ship was in vacuum; life signs were equally absent. It was truly a ghost ship. "Fuck me," he murmured to himself as he noted the reactor had obvious external stress fractures in its shielding, although it would take decades for a colonist to absorb a fatal radiation dose. It was operational however, as it was powering critical subsystems and the micrometeoriod deflection field.

Here goes he thought to himself as he toggled the communications array open. "Mugunghwa ujuseon. M nae mal deullini?" He waited but heard nothing but cosmic background white noise. He repeated his query, "UKSPA Mugungha. Do you read me?" The only reply was the hissing static. He tried one last time, "Artificial Intelligence *Mute or *Star please respond!" After hearing no reply he sighed in mild exasperation. It looks like it was time to do this the hard way.

A half hour later he set the controls on autoreturn, which would send his ship back to Earth if his biosigns dropped out. He wasn't about to waste his employer's ship if he croaked on an EVA run, or if this damn derelict blew up. Not that there was anyone to miss him if he never came back. After adding a 28th mark next to the cockpit window with his fusion torch he jetted across to his latest target. He finished closing the 1000 meter gap between ships, and magnetized his space suit boots on the airlock threshold. He frowned at the stylized pink flower decorating the hatch. He grumbled, "Computer, commence holotelemetry link." Even if he never made it outside alive, his data feed would provide valuable evidence to anyone that came after him. He used his backpack power fuel cell to activate the controls. Without any difficulty he got the door to open, and the inner hatch quickly followed suit after the outer doors closed. He was mildly surprised when his headlamps illuminated the pitch black deck. For a generation ship designed to carry 2000+ souls it defied sense that the corridors and rooms were completely stripped bare. Even wiring, lights, and equipment were torn away. The only functional devices were the security sensors, which were still obediently recording his every move. The situation must have been dire if they were cannibalizing the ship. He shook his head, "I know there must be bodies here!" He linked up with the base level computer interface and noted all the AIs were in maintenance mode. He conjured up a holographic display from his chest computer and a heads up display over his only functional eye. He typed in map at the command prompt and the 3D display was uploaded to his system. After using a hacking app to uncover the ship system control root menu, he typed in control_power gravity to restore an up and down orientation. All over the ship he felt and heard the faint thuds of heavy objects striking the deck after 600 years of Zero-G. The floor plan indicated that he was on deck 10 out of 12, which according to the Chinese-styled characters indicated that this was Zodiac Deck Rooster. Why did the inhabitants use a preindustrial writing system instead of the expected phonetic Hangul system?

He spoke in numbed disbelief, "Piece of crap ship. What the hell were they thinking?" He found the closest emergency trunk ladder, translated the inscription, and typed in escape_trunk lotus enable. The cylindrical door smoothly slid open, and he slowly made his way up to the next deck. His ultimate goal was the circular AI room holding the cylindrical casings for the 6 AI cores on Deck 4. It was a slow climb in a hard vacuum encased in a bulky spacesuit. The hatch above him opened, and out of curiosity he opened the trunk hatch for Zodiac Deck Monkey, only to see the same bleak scavenged deck as the one below. He went up another flight to Zodiac Deck Ram, and was shocked to see clouds of grey dust billow in obscuring his vision. He cursed up a storm and shut the hatch hastily. He brushed off the damned soil off his body and didn't open any more intervening hatches until he was trying to go between deck 5 and 4, and found it was welded shut! "You're shitting me," he spat out.

An hour later, his O2 supply was down to 72% and his cutting torch finally broke apart the crude welds. He got up to Deck 4 and found the Escape trunk hatch was also welded shut! "Fuck!" Another half hour he finally got out to Zodiac Deck Rabbit. He was astonished by what he saw. It looked like an upscale medieval Korean village, complete with period correct wooden architecture grafted onto the metal bulkheads! "Well I'll be damned!" He consulted the map, and found that right next to the AI room was a small alcove marked Egg Rebirth Chamber. He decided to check out to see if it was the prized tech the Historical Society was after, took another step, stumbled, and a sound like a twig snapping underfoot caught his attention. He looked down and saw he had just stepped on a freeze-dried body's forearm!

He eyed the body with contrition and mumbled, "Shit! I'm Sorry bro." He saw the man was dressed in traditional Korean guardsman attire that was over 3000 years out of date. His eye widened as he saw this corridor was littered with bodies. Well over fifty in this hallway alone; all were dressed as if they were extras in a historical drama holovid. He gingerly stepped over the corpses until he reached the rebirth chamber. He was sickened to see that three of the people in the corridor had wedged the bloodstained door open a bare centimeter apart with their bare fingers! He used his hydraulic vice to finally force the door completely open after 600 years. Inside, it was decorated like an old temple, complete with a formally varnished floor, and wooden beams. Centered in the room, inside a wooden railing was a hypersleep chamber pained black with only one Chinese-like character left uncovered. His computer dictionary translated the characters as ill daughter.

He had seen more than his share of dead bodies in his five years of service and thought he had been inured to the sight. It was part of the job of being a United Colonial Security Administration investigator with a sideline in derelict analysis. His human hand started to shake uncontrollably as he realized that what had happened on the UKSPA Mugungha was absolutely horrifying! He suddenly saw a vision from over a decade prior of that rat-bastard Nelson's shocked expression as he plummeted to the concrete below!

"Aaaarrgh! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" he banged his metal fist on the wall which crumbled into dusty fragments. After a few minutes of trashing the wall with over a hundred strikes he slumped to the floor, his fury and self-loathing temporarily spent.

He fumed, "What was so fucking important here? What the hell happened?" He angrily typed in stasispod1 enable open. The pod quietly hummed and powered up. Then the hatch with the shattered windows hissed upwards and his jaw dropped. Inside the pod lay the desiccated body of a teenage Asian girl with braided black hair and a look of absolute despair that Monty recognized in his bathroom mirror reflection too often to count. She was dressed in a traditional Korean hanbok composed of a white shirt tied off with red cords, and a light blue pleated skirt. He reached out and tenderly stoked her cheek with his gloved hand, with his eye misting up. "I'm sorry miss. I'm so sorry your life turned out this way. I will find out who did this to you and put your spirit to rest." His brown eye burned, "I swear it!" He shut the pod lid, whispered a brief Buddhist prayer for the departed and walked next door to open the AI room to face his own fate.