Warning, complete ship decompression in two minutes...Warning, complete ship decompression in two minutes...
With a jolt, Julianne "Halloween" Gabriel sat up. She looked around and realized she was engulfed in fire.
"Oh, this is a nice change in scenery." she mumbled under her breath sarcastically.
Two years ago they had tested the first experimental jump drive. Since then, there had been nothing but problems. Oh, the jump drive worked, they just underestimated how far it would fling them across space and how much power it would require to operate. They had to be at a certain speed to activate the drive properly. Something in it's programming. So, the suggestion went out to use the binary star system of Tau-37 to sling slot around the suns to the proper speed. That worked, they got to the proper speed and activated the drive. The drive worked well...too well. The crew of the Tyche had been flung across light years and light years of space, almost entering the Sol system before the drive burnt out.
The crew debated with one another when the drive had burnt out, if to proceed to the Sol system and beg for the help of anyone who would listen to us...granted there were people who claimed that the Sol system was dead. That long ago the Earth had been destroyed by some violent aliens bent on mankind's destruction (Halloween had always laughed at that story). The crew all agreed, they would travel the rest of the way on regular cruise engines. The flight took about 4 months to reach the system...what they found was...
Nothing.
A massive asteroid belt hung just out of reach of a massive super black hole. Sol had seemingly exploded. Distantly, on the outer edge of the system hung Pluto, the systems soul survivor. The ruins of civilization stood resolute in silence on the planets surface. The sight was eerie in nature and the crew wasn't hell bent to hang around for too long...so the trip back to Sirius began. The drive would occasionally come back online from time to time and cause major issues for the Jinkusu class battleship. The Tyche was at it's breaking point and the crew was nearing Sirius...after two years of flying. When the drive would come back online, it would cause stress fractures throughout the entire ship and the structural integrity of the ship would weaken...each time it would get worse. Needless to say, it had just come back on again for a brief spurt and launch them another few hundred light years before burning out again.
Now, there they were, a few months outside of Sirius...when the crew of the Tyche came upon something interesting. A small planet in the middle of no where. No visible signs of life...but there were signs of it being there once before...a very long time ago...