A light in the dark
Starting situation:
Party is the crew of a detached Type S, Jumping into Mewey/District 268 (SM 0838) on a routine low-priority message run that started at Collace/District 268 (SM 1237) and will continue into the Five Sisters subsector.
The Jump Bubble collapses and stars show up on the display -- and ALL the alarms go off. The ship is under attack; it's just taken a grazing hit from a laser.
This should be impossible. Anything that could fire on them that quickly would have to be within a couple of light-seconds, and Jump exit points are not predictable enough for that prompt an ambush. As the bubble of sensor coverage expands at lightspeed (that is, after one second you can see things one light-second away; two seconds, two light-seconds, and so forth) it becomes clear there's nothing at all in range.
A quick check of the control boards indicates that it wasn't a grazing hit after all, just an extremely dispersed turret laser beam. It's flickering -- three long pulses, three short pulses, a pause, and a somewhat faster flicker of pulses that lasts for two minutes. It then reverts to three short pulses, three long pulses, three short pulses, and repeats the 3-3-3 sequence for two minutes before switching back to the fast flicker. This alternation repeats for twenty minutes then stops.
Yes, it's an SOS in Morse Code (the Imperium uses the old Solmani code, go figure...) coming from interstellar space, and the fast-flicker pulses are data in a standard text format.
The data is a ship's name and registration number, a location, a date/time stamp, and a vector, followed by "Eight souls on board in low berths. Please help."
The date/time stamp is three years old, the location is three light-years into deep space (explaining the beam attenuation -- the ship in distress modulated this message onto one of its turret lasers, and over the nearly one parsec distance, the beam spread out and probably covers most of the Mewey system).
The ship is the Shuugushag, a 600-ton Far Merchant registered out of Collace.*
If the party chooses to investigate:
Jumping to the projected location of the derelict and running a scan will detect a radar return at the extreme limits of sensor range, but no radio signals or neutrino emissions from a powerplant. Going to that point, the party will discover the derelict accompanied by a large radar reflector made from crudely cut and welded standard intermodal cargo containers. The ship is stable in space, not tumbling or rolling.
There is a light frosting of ice on the hull, likely from opening the cargo bay to eject the cargo containers. The former contents of the containers are floating near the ship -- but aren't worth recovering. The ship appears to have sustained some laser burns (minor damage) to the aft end of the hull, and a missile hit on the engine bay that appears to have severely damaged the Jump Drive. The power plant is cold, and there are only trace signals of electrical power use. Notably, the ship is slightly warmer than background so it's not completely dead.
Entry points are a personnel airlock and the cargo bay doors. The personnel airlock is probably easiest, as either one will need to be opened manually.
As the personnel airlock is opened, it will reveal six human-sized bundles wrapped in blankets. They are, in fact, neatly-arranged corpses, frozen and desiccated by vacuum. One of the six is less-neatly wrapped, and is wearing an oxygen mask connected to a tank of nitrogen gas. There is an electronic timer jury-rigged to the inner airlock control panel; close examination will indicate that it was set to open the airlock after a delay.
The interior of the ship is coated in frost, as the atmosphere has frozen and precipitated to the bulkheads (once power is restored, normal environmental conditions will eventually return). Inside the ship are two crewmembers in low berths, and six empty low berths. They're passenger berths, not survival ones, and thus do not have redundant power supplies. The party arrived just in time -- the ship's batteries are almost dead and when they fail so will the two occupied low berths.
The powerplant has failed and must be repaired to restart it. There is evidence of a failed attempt to repair it (scattered tools and a tablet computer that when powered up displays troubleshooting and repair information). Someone could run jumper cables from the scout ship...
The Captain's Log (available once power is restored) explains what happened. Pursued by pirates, the ship sustained a Jump Drive hit just as they attempted to Jump, and misjumped into deep space dozens of parsecs away.
Realizing that they were stranded and ship's power could only last a month between recharges, the crew built a radar reflector and turned the turret laser into a message laser. They then set the ship to power up once a month to recharge the batteries and beam out a distress call. If the power plant didn't start, the medic would be awakened and awaken one of the engineers (in rotation) to repair it, then both would go back into cold sleep.
The medic, of course, died after a few repair cycles -- but her sacrifice gained the remaining crew almost a year. Over the course of the next two years each of the engineers eventually failed to revive, and when the last one died the Captain was awakened. Despite being unskilled, he did manage to restart the powerplant once, but not the second time. At that point, he chose to suicide by nitrogen inhalation so as to preserve power for the remaining two crewmembers's low berths as long as possible. It just barely worked.
Challenge and Threat:
The first decision is whether to turn pirate by letting the two remaining crew members die. (Hopefully, the preceding story will lead the players to be sympathetic -- if not, the referee can remind them that they're acting as representatives of the Third Imperium and piracy is a bad look... and even just the recovery reward will be substantial.)
The first challenge is how to get the derelict operational enough to Jump; the second, how to get enough fuel to it to enable a Jump. (Hint: Really Big Drop Tanks.)
Worse, there's a time constraint: in addition to beaming its SOS to Mewey, it was also sending one to Singer/District 268 (SM 0940) which has regular traffic from Kuai Qing (SM 1040) which is aligned with the nefarious Trexalonians (Trexalon/D268). Due to the derelict's location, the first signals will reach Singer in less than two months. At that point, others will arrive to contest the rescue/salvage...
A variant of this has the party starting from Collace after the IISS receives notification of the SOS (delayed by slow Jump communication from Mewey). They, the Type S, a team of engineers, and loaded modular fuel tanks, are transported in a J-4 freighter to the derelict. The freighter moves on (it's on a tight schedule) after dropping off the personnel and supplies. Trexalonian spies find out about this at about the same time as Kuai Quing's message arrives stating that they've received the distress call and are sending assets to recover the derelict. Trexalon doesn't know what Kuai Quing sent, just that they also need to send ships to back Kuai Quing's play against the Collacian salvage effort. A standoff ensues when the KQ ships arrive (they won't attack unless they can get a sure kill on the Type S first to eliminate witnesses, and the scoutship can hide behind the derelict).
*The key points here are that the derelict is a high-value prize, and that there is a sufficiently large engineering crew that the attrition from reviving them in turns from low berth will kill the last of them off at approximately the three-year mark.
