The ship tumbled out of the wormhole like a dying animal. Its white, brick like, shape was studded with glowing craters from the broadside of fusion torpedoes it had endured from the recent conflict. The wormhole had spat it out in a lonely piece of forgotten space, well away from the galactic hub and the vicously fought over shipping lanes. A single solitary planet turned in front of the ships blunt and battered bow, the cold light of a dying dwarf star illuminating the scene. As the 600 metre length of the ship slipped away from the wormhole terminus, which had already begun to close, its uncontrolled spin began to improve. Jets of internal atmosphere spouted where its hull had been punctured and arcs of electricity silently leapt across the remains of its hard light drive. The ship still towed the tattered remains of its sensory array, the two kilometer long tensile strands of carbon now tangled and useless.

As the ship drifted towards the planet the running lights on its starboard hull flickered and then went out. Navigation lights on its forward arrays continued to blink quietly but there was no other outward sign that the ship was still alive. The short, but fierce conflict the ship had endured had also taken its toll on its human crew. Heavy metal virus bolts had been fired into the punctured hull. When the superheated metal had impacted into the ships bulkheads the viral load it carried had been injected through the metal and into the still habitable portions of the ship. Skin mange, once thought irradicated hundreds of years ago had spread rapidly through the ship, airborne and silent, killing slowly and with deliberate, genetically engineered, malice.

On the bridge, deep within the ships central core, there was almost no activity now. The frenetic minutes of the ambush, the struggle to activate the damaged hard light drive as the crew began to choke on their own blood, and the nausea of unscheduled faster than light transit was over now. Most of the bridge crew were dead, drifting gently at their posts as lights flickered and died in the cramped spherical enclosure. What had been a cosy haven of quiet control and efficiency was now a slaughter house. Globules of blood floated in the air, and eddies of smoke drifted randomly in the zero G environment. In the centre the captain slumped in his command seat, emergency medical equipment strapped to his dying body. Such was the level of medication pumped into his body that he did not recognise the scabbed bloody hands which still, automatically, authorised commands and procedures. Prerecorded messages echoed around the silent ship, the soft voice of the tannoy filling the lifeless corridors and rooms. He took over helm control, calling up a schematic of the remaining online thrusters, and eased the ship back into a steadier flight path. Using all his experience, and with a little help from the ships half mad AI, he layed in a course which would deliver the ship into a centuries stable orbit around the planet. This last effort exhaused both him and the ship, and as he slumped deeper into his seat the lights on the bridge failed entirely. He fumbled in his flight suit pocket, his slick fingers finding a small sheet of battered plastic which he clutched for a while, before it escaped his limp hands and drifted into the dark.

The photograph, of a man, a woman and their children, drifted into the centre of the silent bridge where it hung, motionless.