One of the things about running freight in space – you see the same things everyone else does, but at a lower speed.
Not that looking out of the window at Warp 6.5 is significantly different than looking out at Warp 9; the human eye stops being able to keep up with objects passing by at speeds far below the speed of sound, to say nothing of the speed of light.
The difference about running freighters instead of fleet starships is routes; we go in and out of more star systems, and more planets per star system on average. We commercial captains see less of the galaxy in general, but we see more of what we do see.
Which brings us to the always sad sight of ghost starships – old wrecks, abandoned, still floating through space, and often of local commercial or travel vessels that, for whatever reason, faced a situation above their stress tolerance.
However, the above vessel was unique in the history of Kirk and Dixon Shipping.
Clearly, the vessel had been made of steel in its heyday, and was once upon a time a fighter vessel – a sleek and dangerous piece of work that had fought its last fight at least a century before it drifted into my ship's view.
At first glance, one wondered who and what in the world had made the vessel into Swiss cheese drawn in blue and regular steel – one had the feeling of NEVER wanting to meet that particular opponent.
One looked at the top of the vessel, and how it had been made a convertible – had it been an ejection, had the pilot escaped, or had the top of the vessel just been blown off and peeled back?
At this point, those commercial captains who did some salvaging on the side would have shut all of that down and begun the process of securing the vessel – not too much attention paid to speculative history of the beings to whom this horrifically damaged vessel had once belonged when there was money to be made.
However, Kirk and Dixon Shipping does not do salvage, and so I had a chance to consider the matter more … and, that was a blessing.
The holes and the other damage was not that of phaser or photon torpedoes – there is a melt pattern in metal destroyed by either of those.
The ship, also, appeared to be rusting.
One has to consider: rust requires iron, some form of water, and some form of oxygen.
Space is a vacuum, and therefore does not contain oxygen.
So, that could not be rust at all, but some other kind of discoloration, created by whatever was eating that ship – but again, space is a vacuum. It would take some kind of acid or microbe to operate in that environment.
Salvagers would have cut that ship up and put it in their holds in no time flat, not realizing what I had time to pay attention to.
Instead, I did what all freighter captains on the frontier are asked to do – when confronted with an unknown risk, I dropped a buoy to warn fellow travelers and alert the fleet that it needed to send a ship out to take a look at the wreck. I then went about my business, not willing to be near to the wreck for any extended length of time, because who knows how the type of contagion that can make Swiss cheese out of steel moves through space?
In the end, the scenario turned out to be a design flaw in the steel, a design flaw on the molecular level that had spectacularly manifested in micro-sharding in space. This ship was the last surviving model of a 22nd-century embarrassment for a particular civilization, and thus, by the 23rd century, was a floating museum exhibit.
My crew and I were credited with the discovery, but by that time, we had no idea what people were going on about, and it has taken me this long to remember one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen and forgotten!
This fractal made in Apophysis 2.09 reminded me in its basic shape of a lot of starship fighter vessels I've seen, but, badly damaged ... lots of holes, lots of fun thinking out how we should take that!