A chance discovery

The next day we ran some patrols of our home space.  Thaeddin, a director, and I scanned down the
new C4 wormhole exit.  It turned out the Deepari link was unusually durable and still existed today,
but the C4 and its mysterious inhabitants and shifted away from Veronica and something new awaited. We flew through in our covert ops dual fleet.  He found several Sleeper sites we could attack and pillage later, but also something curious: A lone Zephyr, parked dangerously close to the C4 system's bright yellow Sun.  IT was equipped with that prototype ship's specialized probe launcher and 36 probes.

I didn't want to leave my CovOps ship adrift in an alien system while I piloted our discovery home.  It was also conceivably a trap. A ring of cloaked destroyers might appear when I took the bait;  I found this unlikely, however.  The solar radiation at that proximity to a hot star would have fried their cloaking circuits over time.

Blasting back after parking my Anathema, I warped to the heart of the system.

Alarms met my arrival; my pod was being damaged.  Panicky scans told me that without armor and proper ship shields the solar radiation was frying me alive. Instead of warping out a did a quick thruster burst and barreled toward the podracer-style probe ship.

My circuits locked on and the pilot-installation process bega, but the heat in the pod, the snap and sizzle of electronics burning out and sparking into vacuum, overcame me and my sight went dark.

I came to in a marvelous, alien ship.  It was unlike anything I'd seen before, the controls pencil thin but unbrittle, readings all acute angles, a steely grey, uncomfortable interior.  The ship was designed around the large probe machinery that appeared to be this ship's function.  Engineering later explained that it seemed to be designed for solo wormhole exploration.  It was powered by enhanced solar sails, a sort of flexible steel parachute that lead spidery main hull through anomalous space.  As I caught a solar wave and hurtled back toward home, we could only wonder what had become of the pilot.  Had he been stranded,unable to scan down an exit, and ejected into space to end the starving torment?  The ship storage had no food, no personal possessions.  OR was it something stranger still some rip in space-time that aligned the stars such that I would find this majestic relic of a lost race?  As I'd decided to devote my life to Wormhole study, it seemed apre pos that the Zephyr also turned out to have an enhanced signature ID masking system that meant no Sleeper ship would ever attack it first.  It was a piece of this strange environment, home to it more than I.  I would learn from it.