Part 5 Chapter 18 Refugee

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Deep space, 361 light years from Elysia.
Near H6TX1 Nebula

Probe Droid GX6P3 arrives near a fork in the hyperspace lane. This Droid probe was dispatched to find class M artificial planets, which are thought to be abundant near the hyperspace lane.But apart from that, the GX6P3 probe droid is also looking for genuine M-class planets. One good target is the nebula, where many stars were born from the nebula's material.

Suddenly, the probe droid detects an artificial energy emission within the nebula. The source of the energy emission is in deep space within the nebula, not in a star system. Also, the energy source appears to be moving, but only at subluminal speed. The probe droid then contacted the controller, and the controller ordered the probe droid to investigate the source of the energy emission.

The probe droid changed its trajectory towards the source of the energy emission and again made a hyperspace jump towards the source of the energy emission. In moments, the probe droid arrived within 70 million kilometers of the source of the energy emission. It can be seen through the medium scan that the object that is the source of the energy emission is an artificial structure that is quite large in size. It appears that the object is a large starship. From the scan, the length of the object is more than 10 km.

This droid probe slowly approaches the object while transmitting data in real time to the controller. When the distance has reached 20 million km, there are no energy emissions related to signal transmission, both for communication signals and scan signals for navigation. This was very strange, because by now the probe droid was close enough that the energy beam from the probe droid should have been detected by the ship.

The probe droid then moves closer to be able to perform a detailed scan via a short-range scan. Even so, the probe droid continued to move cautiously and started to activate its shield system. Gradually, the distance between the probe droid and the ship began to decrease.
Finally, the probe droid reached a distance of 5 million kilometers, which is enough distance to perform a short-range or detailed scan. It can be seen from the detailed scan that the ship suffered quite severe damage on the engineering side. No active superluminal propulsion system was seen. It appears that the source of the energy emission was actually the secondary energy system of the ship, while the primary energy system was badly damaged a long time ago. The energy source seemed to be some kind of fusion reactor. Even though there is an active low-level shield system, the hull is still subject to erosion from the impact of the nebula material. From the pattern of erosion of the nebular material against the ship hull, it is estimated that the ship is thousands of years old.

Although most of the engineering systems have been damaged, it appears that there is an active ram scoop system, siphoning material from the nebula to fuel the ship. Because of this, the ship can still be active even though thousands of years have passed.

But the most surprising thing was when the probe droid scanned living things. There were so many life forms on that ship! Probe droids counted 10,461,326 life forms on board. Most of the life forms appear to be in suspended animation, only 16,371 living things are active. There also seem to be a number of droids onboard the ship. There are 12,371 active droids based on calculations based on their power source emissions.

Because the probe droid is close enough, it attempts to communicate by transmitting a first contact packet. But after repeating it many times over a period of several hours, there was no reply from the ship. It is unknown why the ship did not respond. Even so, the probe droid continued to make communication attempts as it slowly approached the ship.

The probe droid continued to approach the ship and kept observing it. The results are reported in real time to the controller.

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