“Space is big, so throwing bad stuff into it wasn’t such a terrible idea, as far as terrible ideas go. But that’s not a waste container – our sensors sniffed it thoroughly. No toxins or bad radiation. Besides, your boy Shall just identified the vessel.”

“He’s not my boy,” she said, but she was too interested in the wreck to put much growl into the ritual denial. “So what is it?”

“Once Shall filtered out all the weird stuff welded to the ship’s ass, the profile matches a model in the historical database.” Ashok lifted his chin, which, unlike the rest of his head, still looked like a baseline human’s. “That, captain, is a goldilocks ship.”

Callie frowned. He might as well have told her it was a Viking longboat or an Apollo module. “From the bad old days? Before we had bridge generators?”

“A genuine old timey antique. It’s gotta be about five hundred years old.” Ashok gave himself a little spin, changing his orientation so she was looking at his feet, because actually being still for any length of time was outside his considerable skillset.

“A goldilocks ship. Wow. Weren’t they propelled by atomic bombs?”

“Pretty much, yeah, at least the first wave, and this was one of the earliest models launched. Looks like it’s had some modification since then, though. The goldilocks ships were no-frills. They didn’t go in for decorative S&M spikes.”

“Maybe a pirate crew found it and tried to make it look more badass?”

“That ship is old, cap. No pirate would want it for anything other than scrap, or to sell to a collector.”

“So what’s it doing here? Goldilocks ships aren’t supposed to come back. That’s the whole point. They took one-way journeys, way out, trips of desperation and exploration. Now five hundred years later it’s just floating in trans-Neptunian space? By cosmic terms it’s practically back where it started.”

Ashok nodded. “That’s the big juicy mystery. No way that ship came back from anywhere, right? It’s not like they had Tanzer drives back then. They weren’t zipping around the galaxy. Unless they found a bunch of plutonium lying around on their colony planet and built more bombs to stick up the ship’s butt, there was no coming back.”

“No mystery at all, then, Ashok. This is just as far as they got. The crew took off on their brave voyage, reached the edge of our solar system, suffered some critical failure, and… that’s it. Nobody ever expected to hear from the goldilocks ships again, so no one went looking.”

“You think that ship spent the past five hundred years drifting among the iceballs out here and nobody noticed? With all the surveys and mining vessels tagging everything even halfway interesting?”