A: you salvaged a high priority package? In this desolate place? There’s barely any colony in 500 lights years. Surely you must be mistaken.
B: A, this is a human thing don’t worry about it.
A: I will, because this “high priority package” destination is tangentially 1200 LY of our original drop off point!
B: Look we’ll restock when we get there and you’ll listen to what I say, captain’s order.
Later in the ship A slip out of his post to inspect the “package”. Frustrated that it was in human writing they whip out their translator to read what it say
[ Lora Nala. Human Fellowship 42nd Captain of the Sidis Ultra ] -- Anon Guest
[AN: Changed a word or two to fit better into my universe]
This is space: it is automatically hostile to most known forms of life. Even those in the protection of a station or ship can come to an unfortunate end. For the wreckage, if there are not fast responders, there are scavengers. Salvagers. Opportunists.
Only lazy ones let the Hungry Caterpillar break a find down into stable molecular compounds. Some of the finds left on a wreck are more valuable in their existing state. If the crew of Naxzoprin had been lazy... none of the trouble would have happened.
This wreck was a courier, one of the low-budget ones that cut every corner until their business model was a perfect sphere. One casualty, the pilot. Killed by a slow leak of the air system while they were in stasis. They did what mercy they could, sending the body for identification, and gathering what had survived from the hold. Personal effects went from the body. Everything else... reclaimed for compounds.
The corporation responsible had already paid for its sins in full.
Like most such couriers, a majority of the packages had the same destination. Like most such couriers, the autonavigator had gone ludicrously off course.
Like few such couriers, this one had a small number marked Priority.
"Who the flakk would trust a shonky courier with priority mail?" asked Human Lais, moving the parcels into a special cubby.
"Maybe they didn't know they were shonky?" Human Zin was busy scanning the other packages. Trying to obtain forensic information from parcels that had been in null-g and hard vacuum since the day they launched.
So far, the information from the labels had been moot. The Archivaas were excited to try decoding it, but their services were slow and prone to devolve into esoteric arguments[1]. Therefore, scans of the contents might yet reveal salient information about where it had all come from and when.
So far... not so great.
There was only one thing left to do. Find the Sidis Ultra and hope the rest would fall into place.
Even with wormholes, it was a long journey. Well out of their way. On one hand, Humans loved nothing more than solving a mystery. On the other, the claim that the mail must get through could be a pain in the anatomy.
They found the Sidis Ultra, now a museum piece in a Terran colony that largely kept to itself. Captain Nala had passed centuries ago, remembered as the hero that saved the passengers and crew. The packages should have saved them if they had arrived. The Captain had found a way to make survival happen anyway.
Most of the parcels wound up in the historical archives, a few were on display with the associated story of the courier and what happened to them.
The tragedies of history told at last. One mystery solved.
The scarf that Captain Nala's grandmother had sent was laid in a special box on the hero's grave.
[1] Historians just get like that.
[Photo by freestocks on Unsplash]
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