The Abednego was the fourth and final ship of the Revelation class.
By the time of her launch, it was already well understood that the Revelation class was not seen as the way forward for League ship design. As a result, the Abednego's three sister ships had been relegated to largely shadowy roles on the edges of League space and she joined them immediately upon her christening.
The four ships enjoyed meritorious, though not glamorous, service in their assigned role and held their posts for 15 years. During that time, the Abednego had four different people in the Captain's chair, each one elevated from within the existing command staff. While people outside the Revelation family saw assignment to a Rev as a punishment detail, those given such an assignment would eventually grow to understand that the tight-knit crews of each ship looked out for their own in a way that went beyond the fraternal bonds of being a soldier.
Abednego enjoyed a posting closer to freelancer space than any other Rev, and as a result, their mission profile often included diplomatic excursions to Freelance worlds. It wasn't uncommon to see the Abednego docked at Highland Station over Gaelia or at Gold Star in Antilles. In fact, the last time she was seen was departing the Antilles system.
As with all Revelation class ships, the Abednego carried two Mk. 2 Archigos class heavy destroyers. While nominally their own chains of command, the crew of the Abednego took extra strides to include the crews of the Parthenope and the Himerope. Even amongst Revelation classes, the intermingling of the Abednego crew and those of her two escorts was unparalleled.
After 15 years of continuous service on the frontier, the Abednego was scheduled for a full refit along with the rest of the Revelation class. For a brief, four month period, all four sister ships were in dry docks adjacent to each other. It was the last time all four would be in the same place in their operational life times.
The refit was a disaster from the drop. The Abednego completed her refit and was given two shakedowns. The first, a direct response to what happened to the Meshach, was through systems relatively close to the dry dock, and she had a logistics cruiser escort the whole way. After successfully completing her first shakedown, she was sent on a longer one back towards her usual operations area. She made it to three of her four planned stops, including two in friendly Freelance space, but somewhere between Antilles and Point Delta, she vanished. Her subspace route took her through deep space, and as she had done on every other leg of the shakedown, she would have dropped out of subspace several times for diagnostics and sensor tests. None of these points were pre-planned, and as a result, finding her became the equivalent of finding a ceramic needle in a haystack the size of Miami.
A year before the Fall, McKenzie somehow acquired the coordinates of the Abednego in deep space. Presumably warned about a potential danger by the same source who provided the coordinates, McKenzie did not pass this information along to League Naval Command, electing instead to contract Walker d'Ardenne and the West Isles Company to investigate the derelict ship and, if possible, return it to a secure quarantine site known as the Anchorage.
d'Ardenne, his crew, and their ship, the Chilkoot, arrived at the coordinates and discovered the Abednego dead in the water. Both escorts were still docked, no escape pods were missing, and there was no distress signal active.
There was, in fact, no signals active of any kind. The ship was on minimal power and internal sensors were down. Hails went unanswered and the crew of the Chilkoot was unable to detect any life signs. Despite the unease felt by most of the crew, including d'Ardenne himself, they went ahead and boarded the ship.
Onboard the Abednego, the West Isles crew was initially met with an empty ship in standby mode. Once they secured the bridge as their basecamp, they found that all of the ships systems came online immediately, except for observation and sensor systems in the primary cargo hold. Understanding the definition of "trap," the crew locked down all access in and out of the main hold and proceeded to check and clear the rest of the ship.
In most situations, this would be the exact right call.
However, d'Ardenne and his crew (and most of humanity) were unaware of the nature of the threat they were facing: a Jyse.
The actions of a coopted cell of Terran Intelligence agents meant that when the Abednego departed dry dock, a new addition to her crew, amongst many, was an instinctual Focus user who was a deeply unstable individual on top of that. This same cell also arranged for a post-hypnotic suggestion in the navigator to drop the ship practically on top of an asteroid that contained a Jyse, one that had once been active and wanted to be again.
The asteroid appeared to give off a unique energy signature, and as per standing orders, it was retrieved and brought on board. The instinctual Focus User was drawn to it and within a matter of hours, the entire crew had been drawn to the main hold and ritualistically slaughtered.
It wasn't enough.
The Focus User was untrained and simply not powerful enough to grant the Jyse the freedom they craved, and so they retreated back into their prison.
The Abednego was what happened when a ghost ship was needed for a story.