You pop out of between-space about two hundred million klicks from a fiery red star, immediately start to comb the space around it with active, sweeping scans. Dust, bacteria, ice and rock, all the usual things– but there's also something else. A chunk of steel, curved, part of a housing, weathered and beaten by heat, micrometeors and a century or so of time. Curious, you home in on it, drift closer, catch a flash of green light from the inside as it turns slowly end-over-end before you.
The mote-probe you dispatch darts in, tracks the light. It's a flight-recorder, something like a flight-recorder, but rewired and reprogrammed to hold something other than flight data. It's old, abused, strapped down with friction-tape and iron rivets, but the janky, homebrew software interface comes alive when you query it, opens with a blank pass-entry. There's no indication of what the code is, what to enter, but a piece of magnetic tape on the box seems to offer some hint. In indelible marker, someone has written PROJECT and a blank line after that. Nothing else. No other hints.
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