The Vagrant pushed through the debris like a remora looking for scraps from a shark’s meal. The small asymmetric ship gently slid past the larger pieces of debris in the massive ring of it that surrounds the desolate exoplanet below, the massive moon loomed on the other side of the field as they passed between the two. The moon was as red as blood and the exo-planet white with snow, except for directly below the moon, something about it made the snow there full rich in iron, dying the glacier that covered this side of the exo-planet red as well. The tidally locked astral bodies hung in the sky like an ill omen. Smaller pieces bounced off the dull pock marked hull. Inside the rust buckets captain stared intently at her monitors. Visuals were the only way to navigate here, sensors would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of debris in the area. She had a quarterer of her cargo bay full of salvage and components, enough for food but not yet enough for fuel, rent, and most importantly not enough for a clip gate jump. Her hands cupped the weak tea in its self heating tube. She raised it to her lips, allowing a bubble of the hot liquid to release and float in the air in front of her before she sucked it in. Her ship was old, older than her, the consoles blinked with an outdated operating system from thirty years ago, green gauges and dials, screens flickering with camera footage from the half dozen scattered across her converted light hauler’s hull. The Vagrant had once been a courier ship, carrying light cargo between stations and the occasional passenger, now it was a scrapping ship, makeshift grapnels and mag clamps attached to the ships main cargo bay, one bedroom turned into a makeshift workshop while the other two remained in their shabby state.
Sable adjusted a camera, fixing it onto a large section of hull just visible between two gutted frigates. The magnification allowed her to read the words Artemis Striker in white below the emblem of the old earth government. She pushed through the debris towards it, the hull, in this section at least, seemed intact, and old earth gov ships were always better pickings than the cheap corporate wrecks that floated, scattered across the old battlefield. The pickings here were plentiful but most were twenty years out of date, a fully functioning datacore could get a few hundred Byts, barely enough for half a tank of fuel. She used the ships single robotic arm to carefully grab a torpedo that drifted towards the Vagrant, she carefully inspected it through the cameras before discarding it, a hole through the warhead proved it was a dud and worthless.
As she grew closer to Artemis Striker she saw more, three Ballistic Accelerated Magnetic Cannon Armament turrets, mounted as triple barreled turrets placed upon rails allowing them to rotate around the axis of the dead battleship, they seemed frozen in the act of aiming. She drew closer, no marks of boarding pods or any major damage on this side. The other must be a mess for this to be still adrift, but still. The ammunition from those old battleships alone could pay off a month’s rent. She closed the distance slowly, careful to check for drifting ordinance. The ship seemed nearly completely intact, as she came closer she could see hull breaches in the rear near the sublight engines, the conning tower where the primary navigation bridge likely was, ended in a jagged mess of metal. Most of the missile tubes had clearly been emptied during the battle but at least four were still sealed. She could feel the excitement building inside her and suppressed it, this seemed good but it wouldn’t be her first disappointment, another scrapper probably found this before her, it has been drifting for twenty years by now. She carefully pulled alongside an airlock that seemed undamaged. Slowly she extended her ships docking umbilical, not bothering to pressurise it. She set the ship to drift with the wreck and pushed out of the bridge into the cargo bay. She passed the quarters door and moved to the airlock, leaving her tea drifting. She donned a light space suit with the deftness of the experienced. It’s umbilical connected to the suit, by a long reinforced cable, to the ship working as primary air, power, and a tether. She grabbed an air tank and attached it as a backup before grabbing her toolkit and beginning the long process of depressurizing the airlock.
After nearly half an hour the outer door unlocked and she opened it with care. The docking umbilical was dark and menacing, her helmet light flickered to life, cutting away the darkness with dim grey light. She pushed forward to the opposite airlock and punched in a standard opening command on the small exterior panel. No success, even emergency power would have run out years ago. She returned to the ship and connected a power lead to her reactor. She returned and placed the parasite-like cord onto the ship. It did its job and jump started the airlock, the heavy metal vibrating to life and slowly the door unlocked, allowing her to pull it open, she could hear the metal groaning through her contact with it as it opened.
The airlock was larger than standard, likely due to the grand nature of this ship, it was clearly a battleship, not just a frigate or destroyer she could pick clean like the vulture she felt like. This was something grand and powerful, it was like staring at the bones of a predator, an ancient lion that prowled the savannahs of old earth. With the outer door open the inner refused to obey her attempts at opening it despite her reading showing the other side was depressurised. With a groan she pulled a small tool, shaped like a fat pen, she loaded a tube into the top and began to slowly trace the outline of the door, leaving behind a thick viscous gel. As she finished she cleaned the pen with the door itself and then clicked it, as it clicked the gel heated to a white hot and melted through the door, making the old steel melt and form floating blobs of red hot molten metal.
The antechamber of the airlock still held the benches and six EVA suits it must have been fitted with, no sign of scavenging here yet. Without delay she pushed back to her ship, starting the process of depressurizing her cargo bay she began to push the space suits through the umbilical, letting them drift slowly into her airlock on the other side. Her breath and the sound of her hands working was the only thing she could hear in the cold vacuum. After several hours of work the antechamber was stripped clean and its goods stowed in the cargo bay. She had learnt from personal experience to always strip what you could as soon as possible. Scrappers had no honour, they were grave robbers. If another scrapper found her they wouldn’t attack – that would risk damaging her ship, something far too valuable to risk destroying – but they would board and take her goods or at the very least start racing her to the best scrap in this hulk. She surveyed her work, finding it complete she decided to move ahead, if she could jumpstart the ship’s diagnostics perhaps she could ascertain what precisely would be functional and worth stripping, if she could plan and prioritise it would make the job infinitely easier.
She pushed down the corridor slowly, if she could find engineering or the combat information centre, CIC, she could jump start power with her ship’s reactor and hopefully bring up the ship’s self diagnostic.
After several hours of spartan corridors lined with doors labelled as barracks, cleaning closets, maintenance, and various other miscellaneous parts of battleship operation she came to an end of her tether. With a sigh she closed its valve and switched to her tank, she left the tether drifting with a short range locator beacon clipped to it by a heavy carabiner. She had a couple hours on the tank, not enough to fully strip the ship but hopefully enough to start, this ship was in nearly perfect condition, it was a miracle and her hopes were rising. This might finally be the big one, the one to pay off her debts. If it’s clip drive was still intact she might even be able to… not now, thinking about that will get you too excited and sloppy. She came to a heavy bulkhead that hadn’t closed fully, a body was partially crushed in it. She pulled a tool similar to a jack from her toolbox and leverer the door open, carefully removing the body. Blood crystals drifted from the crushed torso and the mouth, frost had formed across the body, the eye sockets were bloody and the eyes were glazed over, but otherwise they could have died mere minutes ago. She held in her discomfort and carefully placed the body against the wall of the corridor, after a second she pulled the dogtags from the young man’s collar and stowed them in a pouch on her suit. She pushed through the widened gap in the door and retrieved her jack. Ahead she could see the heavy door of the CIC. It was ajar, perhaps that young man had been running from it when he passed… she dismissed the thought and opened the door more fully. The air glittered with red crystals, drifting in the room and some magnetised to the deck plating were a dozen corpses. She carefully moved through them, collecting their dog tags until she reached the engineering console. She carefully pushed the man that had stood there to the side. From her toolbox she took a cylindrical power cell, about as long as her forearm and twice as thick. She connected it via a thick corded cable to the electronic board beneath the console’s maintenance panel. With a flick of the switch the console came to a dim blue light. She swiped through the options until she found diagnostics. The ship’s operating system seemed to be similar to her own, or in other words old and outdated. She ran the diagnostic. After several seconds lights flickered on around her. As she looked around the now well lit room she fell, hitting the deck hard, her breath leaving her. She could feel the dull thumps of bodies hitting the floor around her and watched the crystalline blood scatter across the ground.
The ship must have had some form of untapped auxiliary power still, this could make her job interesting if there were any security protocols. She pushed herself up and looked at the console. A diagram of the ship, colour coded with system status was displayed, showing the ship from a variety of angles. Sublight engines were dead as she expected, and it seemed that one of the ship’s fusion reactors had breached containment, yet had not detonated… that was odd. Residue radiation filled the ship, not enough to be dangerous but a little more than standard background radiation. That didn’t make sense, the reactor’s emergency ejection had never been triggered, something had stopped the ship protecting itself… other than that the only major damage seemed to be to the electrical systems, they must have overloaded, most of the ship was non-functional and whilst it might be salvageable it would take an army of electricians months to get the internal systems back, and then the sublight engines were just a fractured wreck, by the look of the diagnostic they’d been hit hard there. Other than that the hull was largely intact. The ship just… died? Lost propulsion and power and drifted? It had a few hull breaches in some peripheral compartments but nothing major. Only two of the lifeboats were launched; on a ship of this size it would have had a crew of nearly 2,000 officers and marines.
The ship’s registry came across the screen as the final diagnostics came to a close – Artemis Striker – Gemini Class – Tactical Assistant Intelligence System: Castor – Captain: Avery Bail – XO: Cherry Sabre – Chief Engineer: Jilbia – Armoury Chief: Guo Yating – Communications Officer: Nupur Tavade – Marine Sergeant: Naihi Tame – Flight Deck Commander: Dante Cotilla – Helmsperson: Nicholas Cellier – Operations Manager: Karver Garrett. She looked around the room, she really wished she hadn’t read that. She didn’t like knowing the names of the people whose tomb she was looting. She flicked through to the list of ship system reports. She started to scroll through the functioning systems slowly, noting down the most valuable pieces for prioritisation.
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