Prosperous Turnip - Hortus; A stranded ship was found in the orbit of Hortus. Its crew was found alive and well, though slightly dehydrated and emotionally distressed. The following report is from the last entry of the captain’s journal:

Aritsts rendition of what the journal could have been. ¹

From the journal of Captain Frank

• DATE: 3021-08-07 04H 21M 09S.
• NAME: Captian Frank U.
• SHIP: AVI-00JJX (The Erebus).

I can’t believe it, they set us across the universe to get a shipment of beans, which is already ridiculous because a planet in a system next to OT-627² is really agriculture-heavy and they grow beans likes there’s no tomorrow, but of course, corporate has a feud with that company, and every company in our close vicinity for that matter, so they sent us to the only planet that was willing to sell us beans, NG-574³, which is in the opposite side of the universe.

Oh no, but that’s not the ridiculous part, they told us to use as little fuel as possible, so the entire trip is 380 days long, but they only gave us enough fuel for 9.5 days because those egg-heads at corporate made some incredible calculation errors.⁴

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there! Since we are running out of fuel, we thought we would be allowed to refuel at Hortus, but we aren’t allowed to go anywhere near it because corporate has a feud with them. So we are running out of fuel, and we are not allowed to refuel at Hortus, nor do we have enough fuel to reach another place and refuel there.

I don’t care how much corporate yells at me over the communications system, I am going to go on Hortus orbit and sound the distress signal. I don’t get paid enough to care about hurting corporate’s feelings. “You can’t engage on communications with Hortus. This is your fault for not running the calculations yourself. It’ll be the end for us if you don’t get us those beans”. That last one is truly amusing, because they only gave us fuel for 9.5 days, so those clowns must have truly believed that we could have gone from one edge of the universe to the other in less than 10 days with minimal fuel usage.

We don’t even have enough rations to reach our destination, so we are going to run out of food and water soon. We are about to lose power soon as well. Here goes nothing…

Editor’s followup

Prosperous Turnip reached out to several liason groups on Hortus, and was able to discover that the ship in question was towed to the planet’s orbit. The crew was apparently transported to hospitals (or the morgue, reports are sketchy). None of the crew were available for comment, so we still don’t know what disaster of a company sent ships across the universe. We suspect that they had to COLIQ anyway.