2-In The Elephants Graveyard

A mind wrenching spectacle was laid out before me, and all I could do was look on stupidly in a mix of awe and horror. The majesty of the colossal bone yard was ominous and didn't bode well for my current mission. For as far as my sensors could see there where the strange almost animal shapes of the humongous bones. They had been bleached by radiation and solar wind of deep space. These remains weren't new at least, that is, if the damage to the surface area of the bones was anything to go by. They had been pot marked by meteor strikes and space debris. My hope was that debris didn't included the remains of the ship I was searching for.

I couldn't be sure of the age of the bone yard. Sure I had been trained as a healer per my family wants and that provided me with a certain understanding of biology, but the remains of some kind of giant space fish was well outside of my wheel house. It would take real scientific experts to puzzle that out the age or what the bones had once belonged to.

Why had I come here, and why had I found myself staring at these bones?

Simple I was tracking a long shot. On the day Corey had been take from my arms some couple thousand vessels had left the orbit of Aesculapius. The home planet and main settlement of one of the five founding families that had fled the Starfall that struct our home universe. It was the political center for my family, the House of Urkanlan. The house best know for keeping and hording, the few medical secrets that had survived the exodus.

Myself and Kali Waliwia my former hand maiden, and the only person within my house I still trusted, had taken up an almost impossible mission. We were attempting to find the ship that had taken Corey off world. Through hard work and using the small wealth I had squirreled away we had found some success. The money greased the palms of doc hands and shipping officials. Much of our efforts had to be run in secret, but by running our inquiries through back channels we had received a full list of the ships, their reason for visiting Aesculapius, and their proposed flight plans. Kail and I had operated under the assumption that if my family had let Corey live, then they would have only chosen from a few available paths to deal with her.

It's important to know that my family deals very very poorly with things that interrupt their political machinations, even if that thing is their daughters love life. They had planned my betrothal to House Farmigain of the five families. They had polished me like a rare jewel, and my inborn abilities had made the deal irresistible to the other family...but I digress.

If my parent's were petty enough to punish Corey for falling in love with me, then instead of buying her off and simply sending her back to her home settlement, they would try to send her so far away it would be hard to make it back. For that reason, I had crossed any ship that was moving about in local space or the empire of House Urkanlan from the list. I was also able to cross off any ship that would be heading for Corey's home settlement. My parent's wouldn't want it to make it easy for me to find her. No most likely, my family had either sent her to the front lines of a battlefield, sold her contract to another family, or conscripted her as labor on a merchant vessel.

Of the couple hundred of ships that were left on my now much abbreviated list, only one caught my attention. A missing research vessel by the name of Endurance. I had pined a desperate hope that the Corey of my visions had been trying to lead me to that ship. Sure the message was clipped and parts of the message unreadable on her lips, but the first word had always been endure.

"Endure.....Death.....Saft.....Wreckage." was my only clue, and I was putting a lot of faith in my dreams, but they had never steered me wrong before.

There were a few other reasons I suspected the endurance. One was that it was common for families, smugglers, and intel agencies; to comport and report there ships as research vessals...it was a pretty opened secret. Just one more political game the wealthy played for power.

The ships proposed flight plan would have taken it right through the debris field that I was referring to as "The Elephant Grave Yard". If I was to find the hopefully not wreckage of the Endurance, then I would have to take my time, and it would take a lot of time to search the yard. Flying with precision all day and then landing and anchoring to the largest most steady piece of bone when I needed rest or sleep. I had a limited amount of spare supplies, so at some point regardless if I found the endurance or not, eventually I would have to give up and head back to a settlement to resupply. I wasn't going to starve myself to Death out here.

The days and nights began to blead together as I searched the remains. There were some near misses and the bones drifted on the strange background radiation that existed in this new galaxy we had colonized. It was almost as if the very fabric of spaces was a rippling ocean of waves and currents, and with waves and currents you also got storms and whirlpools.

I didn't work hard to hale or notify anyone of my presents as I search, hell for all I new this space belonged to brigands. Since the missing Endurance was technically registered to the Stargazers, a scientific research group, know for having its own language and hale patterns...of which I knew none it was unlikely they would even answered if I tried to hale them.

On day six in the Elephant Graveyard, I finally found something...and that something was combat. After picking up something on my long range sensors, I rolled up to the scene of the missing endurance being attacked by some sort of scrap raiding vessel. They were small and fast. Like an army of hornets they buzzed dangerously close to the research vessel and striking hits as they flew by.

My breath caught in my throat. I was not equip for a fight...neither physically or emotionally.

The my ship had been purchased at a law enforcement auction and was rumored to be haunted. By the time it had been offered for auction the weapons had already been decommissioned. I had rushed in my preparations to find Corey, I didn't want the trail to fall cold due to my in action, but that meant that the current fighting capabilities were neutered. I had been trained in some basic hand to hand and weapon combat to protect myself, but my training had been primarily focused on watching others fight and patching them up as need. It had been Corey's job to fight and protect me in a dire circumstance. I was all but useless in this kind of situation. If Corey was indeed on the Endurance, then she was about to die if the situation didn't change soon, but I didn't know how to react.

I was frozen and hyperventilating as the spectacle unfolded in font of me.