Chet Rogers sat at the helm of his ship, staring blankly into space. Him and his crew had spent days sitting in high orbit of a star, a few dozen kliks from a nav beacon. Their ship, a SSTO transport, was most certainly not meant for sustained deep space travel, and they had been forced to run on minimal power the entire time to avoid running out of fuel. Meaning no internet, no gravity, and, thought Rogers as he pulled his blanket up, no heat.

However, Rogers reminded himself, it would all be worth it. The beacon they were loitering around was used by military automated freighters, for transporting equipment and weapons between bases. They were unarmed, and aside from a weak gravity field to keep away micro-meteorites, unarmored, making them easy pickings, assuming you could find one in the vast depths of interstellar space.

Even then, they would usually travel in a straight line from base to base, staying at FTL the entire time. However, the one base on the outer rim was in orbit of a large gas giant, requiring a much higher orbital velocity than most other bases. So, the freighters would drop out of FTL in front of a large star, and let its gravity accelerate them to sufficient velocity before continuing on. However, they would be very venerable during this time, and a perfect target.

At least in theory, Thought Rogers. They had been waiting days with no sign of any freighters, and had been beginning to lose hope. Rogers reached out to the comms console, and considered calling the civilian transport that had brought them here to come get them, when half dozen signatures flashed into existence on his radar. A second later, his navigator shouted out the contacts. "Bring us to 5 kliks." said Rogers eagerly as he sat up in his seat. "We've got some loot to plunder."

The shuttle's engines roared to life, burning towards the freighters, before swinging retrograde to bring them alongside. Rogers glanced at the freighters. The were essential tubes with engines on either side and a alcubierre dive in the center with cargo pods clamped on around it.

"Careful" said Rogers as he watched a column of plasma exhaust nearly spear a freighter. "We don't want to destroy them just yet".

"Sorry sir, I'll try to be more careful."

"Don't worry about it to much" said Rogers as he reached for his console. " just don't do it again."

"Now, what have we got here". Rogers tapped the controls. With a whine like a flashbulb, the shuttle fired a burst of Xrays at the first freighter. "Looks like engineering equipment" said Rogers with disappointment. He repeated on the second freighter. More engineering equipment. The third through fifth yielded the same results. Well sixth time is the charm, right? Thought Rogers as he pointed the scanner at the last freighter.

With a whine, the computer processed the data, and it appear on screen. "Hell yeah, Looks like we've got ourselves a small fortune. Two shuttles, a few engines, some computer systems. Get this to port, and we'll spend the rest of our lives on Centaurus station."

"That's assuming we get away with this, pointed out his navigator. The navy won't exactly ignore a few million bucks of equipment disappearing. "

"Don't worry, I've planned it out. There's a freighter captain who owes me a few favors, and is willing to haul us to Rimmer station."

"Rimmer station sir? You do remember what happened last time we went there." Pointed out the navigator.

"Don't worry, Chris and his gang had a run in with a navy destroyer about a month ago."

The navigator let out an exasperated sigh as he turned back to the controls. "If you say so sir."

The shuttle's engines roared to life once more, moving them in. As they swung around, the navigator was careful to not burn into their target, but failed to notice the freighter in front of it.

A column of plasma sliced into the freighters side, melting away a cargo pod, part of the outer hull, and into the navigation system, damaging it, and causing it to malfunction. It's thrusters fired, causing it to spin, slowly at first, but soon accelerating to incredible speeds, and causing its hull to begin to come apart. The spin caused the freighter to register as having the correct orbital velocity, triggering its FTL drive.

From the perspective of anyone on Rogers ship, it would have looked like the freighter flickered red before disappearing, as its extreme velocity caused it to red-shift. The freighter, however, stayed slightly below the speed of light, it's computers incorrectly controlling its speed. At such a low velocity for an FLT drive, it was very efficient, barely draining its power, allowing it to cruise for a long time.

A very long time. One hundred six years, four months, and six days, to be exact, traversing nearly 90 light years, only stopping when the gravity of a nearby brown dwarf caused it to disengage it's engines, leaving it drifting in high orbit.

If the freighter was capable of thinking, it might have noticed that this brown dwarf was orbited by a earth like planet, which was in term orbited by a moon, suspiciously similar to Luna, albeit significantly smaller, and a similarly sized star, which defied the laws of physics and thermodynamics with its very existence. But, the freighter was not programmed to ponder these things, only to simply travel from point A to point B. Or, in this case, point W.

For another forty years, as micro-meteorites slowly ablated away it's cargo pods and hull as it drifted through space. Until one particularly large micro-meteorite punched through its hull and ruptured one of its coolant tanks, causing the freighters battered self diagnostic system to come online. It quickly ran a scan of the ship, and finding upon finding most of its systems nonoperational, put itself into power saving mode and activated its distress beacon, sending a signal echoing across the stars, and announcing the position of a very special star system.

Author's Note

Well, that took a tad longer than expected, and typing it all on a mobile keyboard didn't help. I'm still getting the hang of dialog and proper use of paragraphs, but at least it isn't a wall of text (I hope). Tell me what you think of this so far in the comments, and likes are appreciated. ~~Also, whats up with the chapter numbering system?~~ never mind, it fixed itself when I published.