Apocalypse: My Battleship Has Rusted for Ten Thousand Years

[Starship story | Wasteland sci-fi | Survival in the ruins | Ruthless | No System]

He was the Empire's sharpest blade. After letting a group of "defective units" slated for disposal escape, he was sentenced to ten years in cryogenic imprisonment.

He couldn't be bothered to argue. Instead, he turned his ten-year sentence into ten thousand years.

The whole point was to sleep until the Empire went bankrupt.

Ten thousand years later, he revived in a galactic junkyard.

The good news was that the Empire really had died out while he slept, its ashes scattered by the Zerg.

The bad news was that humanity was on the verge of extinction too.

He had one broken ship to his name:

The onboard AI database was down to 9.7%, but its human-detection functions were still perfectly intact.

As for the crew, he had to pick them up. All 302 scavengers started their probation on the very first day aboard.

Their probation test: fight their way through a Zerg tide.

When people across the star system saw the Zerg tide, some abandoned ship, some dropped to their knees and prayed, and escape routes became so crowded that ships collided.

In the command room, he lounged in his chair, calmly watching the main screen.

"Why run? Get in line. Don't damage my ore."

From then on, the whole crew cared about just one thing: How much would this month's Zerg tide yield?

Zerg corpses went into storage, carapaces were smelted into steel, and acid was refined. Every tide they fought through brightened the hull and made the crew stronger.

Other survivors burned incense and prayed that the Zerg tides wouldn't come.

He marked Zerg nests on the star map as if they were his own mines.

He led a bunch of rookies in getting the ship running again.

They fought Zerg, picked up people, and pieced together fragments of the old world from the ruins. Only when they had nearly finished did he realize:

The Empire hadn't been destroyed by its enemies. It had destroyed itself. And the ten thousand years he slept through just happened to be the entire process of humanity being disposed of.