Okay, update got delayed by my friend and I starting the sea block mod on Factorio, which has eaten up a lot of time. That and my work days are busier than normal because payment deadlines don't stop over Christmas and none of our students like paying.
Anyway:
You left the nameless black hole behind you several days ago, heading instead for the binary star system located to the north of it. Though your scan of the system showed that it possesses a planet covered in plantlife and at least one cold gas giant that should allow you to refuel your ship, you aren't expecting any form of intelligent life. The scans would have picked up any of the hallmarks of advanced sentient life if they had been on the habitable world - radio signals, orbital stations, FTL drive emissions - but they didn't. The only other thing of interest you saw with the scan was a fading wormhole signature, but that's most likely the result of your own journey to this galaxy. After all, even the most unstable wormhole lasts for thousands of years.
The journey between systems gives you time to properly assess the state of the ship and its stores, as well as your physical well being. All the food on the ship was spoiled or worse by your trip through the black hole, but you find it hard to care about the loss. You haven't been troubled by hunger since your first vision after all. Your hair fell out, presumably as a result of your exposure to exotic radiation from the black hole, but you've suffered none of the other symptoms of radiation poisoning.
Your mental awareness of the ship remains near perfect, despite the destruction of most of the psionic interfaces and instruments. You've jury-rigged a primitive manual interface from the backup systems, allowing you to steer the ship, but that doesn't explain your expanded awareness. The only explanation you can think of is that you've somehow become more psionically powerful, but you lack any true measuring apparatus to test that theory. You easily can and do test your telekinetic abilities, finding fine control easier though lifting anything heavier than your fist remains near impossible, but the only way you could truly test your telepathy would be to try and breach the Shroud alone.
You set such suicidal thoughts aside and consider your mentality. With detachment that comes to you surprisingly easily, you compare the fearfully fatalistic mindset you relied upon before entering the black hole to the general relief and dispassion you continually display as you consider your surroundings and future. What you saw, the things you remember the things you can't definitely changed you. From your studies on how long it generally takes psionics to recover after accessing the Shroud you know such a change is to be expected, and that with immersion in human culture you would rapidly regain your 'normal' outlook.
But there won't be any humans for you to socialise with, to help you with your recovery or even archives of the past millennia to answer your questions about the Shroud. You are alone and even if you find a civilisation it will consist of aliens. Aliens that should know nothing about humans or what they achieved. You can only hope that they are ignorant of that.
Your arrival in the system is a welcome distraction, stirring you from what feels like an eternal meditation on what you've become. It isn't the return to reality that grants you energy in urgency, nor is it the soft ping of the sensors as they start to scan the system. Its the sudden awareness of thousands of voices, calling out in a violent and turbulent storm of anger, sorrow, hope and frustration. You hurry to the controls and start accelerating into the system even as the sensors confirm your psychic impressions.
There is a
damaged ship, full of intelligent alien life, adrift in the system.
It will take several days for you to reach the ship and your options before then are extremely limited. The sensors are showing you the ship and it looks like their communications are limited to short ranged radio. You could broadcast a message to them anyway, but you'd beat it there. They also don't seem capable of knowing that you've arrived in the system. What appear to be their sensor arrays are destroyed, forcing them to rely on their eyesight through the many windows to see anything new.
How do you approach the aliens?
[ ] Contact them psionically. You aren't likely to reach anyone important on the ship initially, but it lets you start communicating with them now.
[ ] Contact them with the radio and wait for a response. If you take up a position of around 15 light-minutes from the ship you should be abe to start contacting them in a method they'll be familiar with. Hopefully they've got decent translators.
[ ] Contact them by flying directly in front of their ship and letting them see you, letting them take the lead.
