As he examined the Garage, Trak could feel the dead starships drifting around the Afterthought.
Awash in his vessel's bountiful-but-sometimes-faulty sensor data, he knew that he and his crewmates rested in a vast ship graveyard.
The wreckage didn’t orbit the Garage; the Garage generated no measurable gravitational pull. Instead, the ship graveyard simply rested around the Garage, like an egg white around a yolk.
Some of the debris had been there long enough to coalesce into small junk planetoids. The largest was a garbage moon of mostly toilets, starship fenders, food processors, and shatterwarp engines.
Despite the vast number of destroyed vessels surrounding the Garage, Trak no longer thought the Garage was a trap.
Three weeks earlier, Trak had believed that the Garage projected visions of valuable ships to lure in curious travelers and destroy them. But, after reviewing the data over the past three weeks, Trak had formulated a different theory.
Using the current size, age, and velocity of the debris in the ship graveyard, Trak’s mind — built to analyze and produce complex military maneuvers — had created models of what some of the destroyed ships looked like moments before their destruction.
He then mentally designed a theoretical recreation of the vessels’ final minutes.
Trak’s conclusion? The graveyard was the result of a stunning number of interspecies conflicts.
Small sections of the graveyard — the 20-mile sphere of space around Daniel’s ship for example — had been the site of thousands of skirmishes, according to Trak’s analysis.
And the ship graveyard was big. It extended from the edges of the Garage for more than 1,270,000 miles in some places.
Trak theorized that some of the battles had taken place as recently as three years ago and as far back as 2.6 billion years ago.
It had taken Trak three weeks of processing time to finish his study, and he finally presented his findings to Rachel-7 and Daniel two hours before they arrived at their current destination.
He asked them their thoughts on why so many battles took place in this area.
Rachel-7 said she didn’t care. Daniel said he wasn’t sure.
To Trak, the cause of the conflicts now seemed obvious—countless species had fought and died to possess the Garage.
A starship. A starship. My garage for a starship.