Derelict - Upper Deck - Starboard Passageway
Six Four's fingers closed around the picture frame floating slowly through the corridor, and pulled it towards her. Its face was halfway covered mostly across the top in the same ice they'd seen in the mess hall, obscuring much of its surface. The frame itself was relatively simple, a wide silver square bordering a printed photograph of a family, faded slightly from exposure to the harsh extremes of space. The ice obscured the faces of the man and woman in the photo, but one of each of their hands rested on the shoulders of two young Nepleslian boys standing before them, neither of them appearing much older than seven or eight years old. The taller one had a mess of dark black hair that had clearly just been hand-brushed, and a dimpled smile warmed his face. The smaller one had an impish-looking grin that gave him away as something of a trickster, and a few freckles dotted his cheeks beneath short-cropped reddish-brown hair. The family was standing in front of a metallic, waist-high fence of some kind, and what appeared to be either a majestic mountain range graced the background, although the details were difficult to make out. Etched across the bottom of the frame was the phrase, "Happy 10th Anniversary! Love, Erin, Sean, and Chance."
The long hallway terminated less than a meter to the right of the shutter that Oreza had cut through, but to the left, it stretched out into the darkness, the other end too far away for their headlamps to illuminate. Along the right wall at regular intervals were identical-looking hatches, all at differing stages of ajar, like their actuating mechanisms had all failed at once, leaving them to drift along their rails as the ship was wracked with whatever had destroyed it. A few meters down the hall, the left wall changed from the industrial-looking metal bulkhead to a row of glass panes, possibly windows to something, although it was impossible to tell from where they stood what they were built to observe.
The corridor was sparsely filled with all manners of haunting reminders of the ship's former crew. Articles of clothing and undergarments, boots, coveralls, tool belts, coffee mugs, the occasional pack of cigarettes, datapads... all drifting amid the smattering of dust-like particulates suspended in the "air." Not a single one of the overhead lights showed any signs of even attempting to light their way; much as before, everything on this massive ship was dead.
Dead, that is, except for one thing: far off in the distance, on the other end of the hall, Oreza caught sight of what appeared to be a red light, plaintively blinking in the silence.
