Derelict at Grid 7-Delta

More about Derelict at Grid 7-Delta

The charts mark it as an empty coordinate.
Sand. Wind. Nothing of interest.

But the hull is still there.

Half-buried in ochre dunes, the ship lies canted on its flank like an animal that simply ran out
of strength. Once, it was an outbound hauler on a pioneer contract—water recyclers, habitat
cores, seed vaults, a thousand tons of human intention packed into rusting alloy. Now its
drives are choked with sand, its antennae snapped and scattered across the desert like shed
bones.

No distress signal remains. No black box answers the call.

Just the long shadow of a vessel that made it almost far enough.

Salvage crews strip it with professional indifference: copper lines, reaction coils, memory
glass from the nav core. Each part is cataloged, tagged, and lifted cleanly into the present.
The work is efficient. It has to be. There are too many wrecks like this, spread too thin across
too much sky.

They don’t speak of the crew.

Officially, there were forty-six souls aboard when the ship dropped off the star-lanes and into
probability. Families. Contracts. Names that still exist in archives no one opens anymore.
Whatever finished them—system failure, radiation storm, a misjudged burn—has long since
been scoured from the metal by heat and time.

Only the shape of the attempt remains.

At local sunset, the hull turns the color of dried blood. Wind sings through torn docking ports
and broken heat vanes with a sound almost like breathing. For a moment, if you’re tired
enough, you can pretend the ship is only sleeping—paused in the middle of a journey that
will soon resume.

But the trackers don’t blink.
The engines do not answer.
And the desert keeps what it is given.

The derelict is officially cleared for reclamation.

Unofficially, it is a reminder:

Most of the pioneers made it.

Some of them became coordinates.