Null Sig
It was ancient already, in time measured by the lives that have passed since it was created. Massive, a standard gravity world would reckon it of a magnitude rivaling moons. Sleek, almost as an oil sheen on water, the predatory shadow that flits by, hiding amongst deeper darkness.
It was silent, save the occasional groan of the stressed metal, the constant pressure from the inside, pushing relentlessly and futilely against the hull. The stale environment inside was contained within the miles of curving metal as a writhing animal is buried within the coils of a python. An entirely enclosed ecosystem, waste being recovered at the molecular level, radiant energy from the dimmest lights of distant stars, heat from the warm bodies, all captured and used again. The loss was marginal, and easily replenished in the harvest of lifeless rock that the behemoth drifted through, the base elements taken for fuel and in creation of nearly all required substances on board.
It was the standard methodology for long travel through space, aided with the discovery of a sustainable stasis period. Often these vessels were explorers, crew awakened only when the equivalent of �land ho� was reported by the navigation systems. Sometimes, the mission was colonization, an expansion of the human species to other near-earths, as yet undiscovered. Search patterns were preprogrammed into the vessels, and the stasis induced would lift only when a hospitable planet was discovered. Six such missions had left earth, nearly three hundred years apart, beginning in 2490, and the last in 4261. Each mission, at specific and lengthy intervals, left behind relay beacons to chart the distance and direction of each portion of the journey.
None had, as of yet, reported a successful colonization of a near earth world, though collected data still routinely came in from those six colony ships, adding information and detail to otherwise uncharted regions of space.
