SSS rank Mother-In-Law to an Invincible Family-Chapter 483: Dakarra

Above the stars, a few galaxies away from Nexara, a massive ship drifted through space like a ghost with nowhere to go.

Its once-shining hull was battered now. The outer plates were dented, scorched, and cracked.

Several panels were half-melted, revealing tangled cords and burned-out systems that had long since ceased to function.

Engines that were once praised for their precision now sat frozen, cold, and useless.

Inside, the ship was quiet.

Too quiet.

The crew that once filled its halls with movement and chatter was mostly gone. Over three-fourths had died.

During the initial impact, during the fires, the systems sometimes failed, and life support would drop without warning.

The rest had stayed alive.

Barely.

No one knew how long the ship had been drifting. Several hundred years since the storm hit. That much they could agree on. But anything before that felt distant. Blurry.

They’d once been an exploration vessel with advanced equipment and tools, their home galaxy trusted them as one of the most successful ships to find new planets.

They were armed with the latest weapons so that they could deal with anything possible during their travels, sent out not just to find new planets, but to assess them.

Judge them, decide if they could be taken—and if their inhabitants could be turned into workers, tools, or worse.

And they had found one—a promising world.

Lush terrain. Steady atmosphere. Intelligent but manageable life signs. Everything was looking perfect.

That was when the crew had relaxed.

They thought it was done, that they’d made it.

Some had started writing home, others had begun drafting deployment maps and plans for orbital deployment.

Laughter had returned to the mess halls. Security checks became slower. Smaller faults in the system were ignored. Everyone thought the hard part was over.

Then the storm hit.

It didn’t appear on sensors. It didn’t give a warning. It swallowed them.

The curvature engine ruptured first. No one knew why—only that containment failed before anyone could seal the breach.

Then the lights went out. The propulsion system followed, exploding through engine room seven. Three mechanics were gone in seconds.

Everything after that was chaos.

The crew ran from the fire. Life support flickered. Gravity tilted. Doors jammed.

And through it all, the worst part wasn’t the noise.

It was the silence that came after.

Now, the ship floated, with no direction, no thrust, ando control, the spaceship was just barely enough energy to keep the lights on in the main halls and run minimum life support.

The crew called it "drifting," but none of them knew where they were going.

They didn’t even know if they were still in the same system.

Inside the bridge, Commander Orak sat slumped in the main chair, staring at a dead console, his eyes were tired, and bloodshot.

His uniform was half-buttoned, and the right sleeve was burned. He hadn’t changed it. There was no point.

He didn’t know how to fix the ship as the actually people who knew how to fix this died during the cosmic storm leaving them with no way to fix the spaceship or even contact their home galaxy.

Ane for some reason he always felt that this was not random, as they had checked the route before they set sail and they found no signs for these kinds of storms but here we are.

All he only knew was that nothing made sense, not the storm, not the timing, not how fast everything went down.

A few had whispered about sabotage. But no one said names. Not now.

There weren’t enough of them left to argue.

Down in the crew lounge, a few survivors sat around the table, lit by the dim glow of a backup panel.

The main screen no longer worked. It flickered now and then, frozen on the last recorded image—an incomplete topographic scan of some unknown planet.

No one believed it anymore.

An older excavator who was sent as someone who can deal with any new minerals found during the trip named Drell picked at a ration bar with chipped fingers.

"They said we’d be home in under a year," he muttered.

Across from him, Kesa leaned her head against the wall. She didn’t answer. Her eyes had been locked on a scorched corner of the ceiling for several minutes now.

Drell kept picking.

"First, it was discovery. Then it was excitement. Then it was nothing."

Kesa blinked once. "Do you think we’ll land anywhere?"

Drell didn’t look up.

"I think we’ll crash somewhere. That’s different."

Down the hall, another tech collapsed near the reactor wall during a power check. No one screamed.

Two crewmates picked him up, carried him to the secondary medbay, and laid him down. They didn’t stay. They didn’t explain.

The medic nodded and moved on.

Everyone knew the rhythm by now.

They were just floating. Waiting. For something. Anything.

In the sleeping quarters, dozens of beds sat empty. The rest were filled with men and women lying flat on their backs, neither sleeping nor talking.

Just staring. Counting time by how often the lights above flickered.

In the observation deck, one of the remaining pilots, Renn, leaned forward against the glass, arms crossed.

His face was pale and unshaven. His uniform jacket hung open. Nexera—still distant—floated quietly ahead.

No one knew the name. The ship’s system had picked it up weeks before. Before everything broke.

Now they didn’t even have a name for it.

Just a pale blue shape growing larger every day.

They didn’t know if it was habitable. They didn’t know if it was dangerous. And they didn’t know how close they were. There were no active scanners. No maps. Just stars and silence.

Renn whispered under his breath.

"We came to take a world. Now we’re just hoping we don’t fall apart before we hit the ground."

Behind him, the walls hummed. A relay was resetting again.

The sound meant the ship was still alive. But just barely.

It kept drifting forward. No way to change course. No way to stop.

And in the back of every survivor’s mind, one truth sank deeper each hour.

They were not explorers anymore.

They were not conquerors.

They were just a broken ship in a sky that didn’t welcome them.

And whatever waited on the surface...

Had no reason to forgive what they were.