The Story
Three centuries off course and no contact home. The destination reaveling to be something they didn't prepare to face.
In 2198, Kira Marshal leads the Expondus on a thirty-year voyage to mine a distant exoplanet. Something stalls them in transit and they arrive three hundred years late, to a star system that had been quietly developing in their absence.
The planet is no natural iron mine. It's an ancient artificial construct, scattered with half-finished construction sites, dormant machinery, and structures on a scale that implies a civilization other than of human origin.
They find a foreign AI still tending the empty facility. It seems to be holding on a secret of which the ships' System AI is refusing to translate.