Outside the bridge window, the stars began to shift. The sky was turning a bruised, familiar violet.
"Probably just old schematics for a cooling vent," Elara muttered, her fingers dancing across the haptic interface. She was a "data-miner," a polite term for someone who sifted through the digital wreckage of abandoned colony ships. Sector G-232-B had been a mining outpost on the edge of the Perseus Arm that blinked out of existence during the Great Silence.
She initiated the extraction. The progress bar crawled with agonizing slowness. 3,000 files. High resolution.
