He resigned himself to the fact that he was missing something important and he probably wouldn’t find it here.


    It had been a couple of months since he had opened the central command room and his translating had hit a wall. At least he assumed it was a ‘command’ room. It was a room with ‘central’ in the name and a bunch of monitors, he didn’t really know what else it could be. His efforts had sped up at first, having finally gotten access to a lot of disparate information that he could cross-reference. It helped him figure out some of the basic things he was having trouble with and gave him a great deal of data to note down. He now had an average for power use and water use, according to the screens in the room. He had cross-checked the power numbers and they seemed close, so he was willing to trust them for now. The command room also had a couple of consoles that were in future english, numbers and all. That was a huge find, though they didn’t seem to be controls he was familiar with.


    It had taken nearly a month and the discovery of more rooms on both levels to really understand what they were showing him. Between discovering the cleaning facilities like laundry and automated bots, which seemed to clean the floor when no one was present, and the living quarters on the deck level he had realized that this place was completely self-sufficient. He still refused to see what was on the hold level, now with even more conviction, as he had discovered where everyone had gone.


    Something he would never tell the poor girl.


    He had found a group of decomposed bodies in what could only be described as an airlock. An airlock he promptly confirmed led to space.


    That had been a harrowing experience. He had stumbled his way through the panel with a makeshift mask on his face in an attempt to find what had killed the people. He could see the bodies and that they were mostly just piles of bone and a mess of biomass from the small window in the airlock, but that didn’t tell him why they were there or how the died. If they had been locked in, he wouldn’t find much, but if they had been killed elsewhere and dumped, he might need to know.


    He never would now though, his poor understanding and the strange wording had seen him vent the bodies. He stopped touching the panel after that. If he accidentally opened both doors and didn’t know how to close them, it wouldn’t really matter what had happened. Fortunately, the outer door seemed to be on a timer and closed by itself while he was still coming to terms with the fact that the outside pressure wasn’t going to be a problem. Er, wouldn’t be a problem so long as they didn’t step out of the door themselves at least.


    That, alongside the self-sufficiency and lack of other people, meant they were either on a ship or a station in deep space. That was the only other clue he needed to figure out the remaining panels. One panel was clearly automation of some kind for the outer hull. Or maybe just in general. With the size of the ship’s insides, there was no practical way that the number of bunks he had seen would hold enough people to keep up with repairs. There were robots inside, it only made sense that there were some outside as well. He knew it was a ship because of the second panel. Now that he knew what to look for, he somewhat recognized gravitation and orbital equations. The symbols for the math were a bit strange, but math was math, he could figure it out. There might be some definition he wasn’t aware of, but as far as he was concerned, if it could move enough on its own to change orbits, it was a ship.


    The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    Even if it was the size of a small city.


    Which meant he was now in charge of a massive ship. Probably somewhere out in deep space.


    There was a map. Something he also didn’t recognize at first but made perfect sense now. He couldn’t read the thing, but it made sense. They seemed to be in some sort of dead zone between stars, but he only got that from looking at the graphics, he had no idea the distances or times involved in moving anywhere. It would take him a lot of time to figure things out.


    Time and attention.


    One he had in abundance, now that food and water weren’t going to dry up anytime soon. Attention, not so much. Once his erstwhile companion had discovered she enjoyed talking now that it didn’t hurt, she demanded attention quite often. She also only responded to ‘Kitty’ of all things. He had no idea how that had become a thing, but he was willing to accept it was probably his fault somehow, considering it was an English word. Not that he could really change things now.


    ‘There’s nothing to it but to hunker down and get to work I guess.’


    <hr>


    The ship seemed to have a great deal of automation. So much so that he wasn’t really comfortable saying he was flying it. Fly it he did though. After working out what the symbols were in the math, he could pretty easily follow the computer through the various calculations it did for travel. It also helped him check his translations for the future english numbers. A few stars later and he had a pretty good idea of how to work what he was calling the ‘navigation’ panel, though it seemed to involve everything about moving the ship, not just FTL travel. Which was indeed happening, if the map was to be believed. He doubted stars were that close together, even in unknown parts of space. He didn’t do much flying, the panel doing most of the work. He had found maneuvering systems, but they only seemed to work close to a star.


    Considering the massive change in power he saw when they were in a system, that made a lot of sense. He practiced maneuvering while in each system, alongside the automated things the ship had on offer. It seemed to be able to take in and refine asteroids, a panel showing scans of things he targeted. He didn’t know what the scans found or if it was any good, but he liked the practice and it helped him figure out the repair and other automated systems outside the ship.


    Well, he figured it out so long as he wasn’t being fooled into a false sense of competence. It’s pretty easy to fly a plane if you don’t have to land or interact with anything else. Anything… like the new ping the map system had picked up. The one that looked suspiciously like another ship.


    ‘Welp, time to put all that practice into, uh, practice.’