Traveller Vignette 032

Power had long failed aboard the gutted cruiser, and her hull was open to space. Our flashlight beams threw sharp circles of light without atmosphere to scatter them. Here and there, crewmembers who hadn't got to emergency suits showed us the unpleasant things vacuum will do to a human body. Most had managed to get into suits, though, and had died in them when air and power failed long before rescue came. In engineering, tools hung in zero-G around suited figures tethered near open access hatches, techs still trying to fix ravaged life support systems to the last. Elsewhere, people had used the long wait for death to write last letters, addressed in glove-clumsy block capitals, hoping whoever found the dead ship would send them on.

(Author's note - This might be a random encounter with a derelict vessel, or PCs might have been specifically sent to find this vessel to retrieve things still aboard - secret experimental technology, computer cores, codebooks or even simply the remaining nuclear-tipped missiles from her magazines. Of course, it is likely that other groups may have designs on the same things; they may try to get them by simply seizure in space, either from the wreck or from the PC's ship, or they may have been planning this for months and have infiltrated agents aboard the PC ship)