Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who fell asleep in the cockpit
The Ancients' FTL network consists, essentially, of a bus service. Vast carrier hulks, impenetrable and inscrutable, jump around the universe on a mostly predictable schedule; in their pauses, latter-day fleets of opportunists fly in and out. Nobody's even sure if that's their intended use; long-term archaeological teams hop aboard and establish base camps for years on end, trying to decipher iconography, architecture, technology, anything. It's all largely inconclusive.
Also, occasionally, without any warning — just like a bus service — the fucking things just mysteriously don't stick to schedule.
Between one stop and next, instead of sticking to the route, Adelaide wakes up to the controlled panic of a whole busful of other passengers in their various ships; the hulk jumped, and it's...inside a vast megastructure. Dyson-scale, filled with traceries that look delicate in comparison, until you realise for scale that they're studded with smaller nodules, each of which is the huge and distant bulk of another Ancient hulk.
Everyone among them will be set for life on their recollections of this place, if they ever get to go home.
"Fuck," she says over the radio, still half asleep and holding off a meltdown. "It just — we never stopped at Eridani?"
"Eridani? Oh, honey," drawls the radio operator on another ship. "Oh, honey. We stopped at Eridani, this was the jump after. Was that your stop?"
"Oh fuck," Adelaide says, scrabbling for her phone. "Oh fuck. I had a nap! I swear I set an alarm, I swear—!"