Punched In: Wreckmass

Pitched space battles are not common in Section 99, even amidst a setting of interstellar corporo-fascism, and the reason for that is simple: they strain the sanity of even the oldest and most stoic sapient species, because they're a window to the very best we are at doing the worst to one another. They don't escalate to but rather require the most terrible weapons we as a collective intelligent species can create: beam batteries that can spiral-cut a city like a ham, plasma cannons that unleash small suns at fractions of lightspeed, Gauss rifles that can turn a moon to powder with a single burst of fire, torpedoes that are disposable displacement drives designed to unmake matter at the molecular level, and rains of nanite acid that eat starframes like flesh. Tens of thousands of lives can wink out of existence from a second's lapsed concentration at a station or a single tactical AI error, because shields and polarized armour can stop single direct hits and blunt away glances, but they cannot stop a full volley of firepower with correct and true firing solutions. Blink, and a stadium's capacity is dead.

Most of the time, warships just show up and stare at each other, and wait to see if the war will stop on its own, because for as many guns Freelanders keep, they still believe in diplomacy; sometimes, someone's finger will slip, and a ship will explode, and everyone will realize how stupid what they're doing is, at least in the Freelands, which has a way of making deserters out of naval astronauts. But some people are just wilful. They'll push the fight, and worse, they'll have the systemic clout to make their underlings follow them into an abstract, laser-filled Hell. Even in politics, there's always someone knuck enough to buck. That's when people die, and ships with entire cities of material value in them are lost.

In short, it takes a real asshole to shoot at someone with a starship. Even the captains who do it in self defense frequently feel terrible afterwards.

But this story isn't about that. This story is about what happens in the aftermath of the Consortium trying something stupid and losing a bunch of ships to Freelander defense forces. It's about what happens when people gotta make something of all the exotic trash left floating in the void, heated into exotic matter by a forge made out of catastrophic weaponry. Because not only is that stuff dangerous to ships that have to vector through it, it's also really valuable. In fact, it's probably the most valuable non-natural resource in the galaxy, because it's potentially every resource in the galaxy, crushed in on itself a thousand times over and melted into high density chunks. It's called Wreckmass, and this is about the people who recycle it for a living.

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Wreckmass

Day one of week four formally on the job, and Carter Goodwin was feeling like he had found a working rhythm. As he straightened the outer layer of his EVA suit and let the tighteners dial it in around him, he ran his check: plasma cutter, fully charged, on his right lanyard, hooked to the quick detach; spare gas magazines, on his right-side chest; kinetic impeller and brake, attached to left arm, all systems green; spare battery, on his left-side chest; manuever pack, gassed up; loot bag, belted and ready; drink canister, lemon lime and ice cold. He was wired, but for the first time, in a good way. Nerves that had thrown him off his training, made tasks he’d handled with ease in the simulator seem impossible, were tamed; now, he was actually anticipating stepping through the softlock, and jumping out into open space. He was ready.

“Carter,” a voice said behind him. “Gum.” They said, simply.

Right, he wasn’t ready. He spat a wad of flavour-depleted sour cherry gum into his suit’s glove, then whipped it into a nearby bio-recycle slot.

“Thanks, Aluis,” he said, turning to the lanky arissiyan that stooped over him in the interior of the Packrat.

“Trust me, don’t make that mistake,” said Aluis, palming Carter’s helmet down onto his head like a basketball, then securing it around his collar. “I once went out chewing nurophis, one of the worst times of my life.”

“That’s basically dip, yeah?” Carter said.

“It is dip, just from a different planet,” Aluis said, wincing at the thought of a habit he was glad he dropped.

“Yeesh,” was all Carter had for them.

“Yes, exactly, now you’re glad you didn’t swallow that gum,” Aluis said. “Dear sister, have you done saying your prayer for the greenhorn this day?” They turned their attention down the corridor.

“Lelethiamo aleselma pheos, hann eya ephla, vetzruk,” came Rusi’s reply from the hardware shack. ‘Scare him to death, you’re replacing him, asshole,’ in reconstructed Esmyr-dialect Ios.

There was a clicking sound, heavy and tuned, that of a plasma cutter’s trigger breaking clean, but no cutting arc firing. It clicked again, and again, faster and faster, punctuated by a grunt of “yustak!”, fuck you, and the hard bang of a metal workbench. A moment of silence; then click, FOOM, and the sound of a piece of scrap falling in half.

“YU-HAA!” Rusi’s voice was jubilant. “Nuhar nueh yesphi, haramei yuruma hophar munis, muzyustaki!” ‘Burn for me like that normally, you wouldn’t be so dented, cushionfucker!’

She rounded the corner into the staging hold, smoking plasma cutter held triumphantly in the air, its rear housing looking as though it had been mugged for its shoes with a multitool. “Hello, comrade workers, I’m ready to begin shift!” Rusi said.

“Are you certain you’re not high?” her sibling asked.

“Extraordinarily high on this morning: have you seen what’s in our bay?” Rusi said, her violet eyes bright, her ears twitching.

“A fresh 3000 tonne block of wreckmass?” said Carter.

“Yes, exactly. And also, it’s wreckmass that has a great big hunk of the SIN Jacksonville’s forward fire control citadel nestled at the center, like jam in a pastry. That probably means a lot of precious and semiprecious is waiting for us, after just a few hours of work,” Rusi continued, fingers twitching like she was snatching at a rain of falling coins only she could see.

“A few hours? That’s a bit optimistic, isn’t it?” asked Carter.

“I intend to work very quickly,” Rusi said, pulling her helmet on, its ear-slotted antenna looking like something from a sentai-show. “At the very least, if I can find a smashed lasing lens, I’m making myself a necklace out of artificial ruby,” she said, as her comms check.

“That seems a very good way to cut your throat,” Aluis said, stepping behind her to double check the seal on her helmet. They patted out an a-ok on her back when satisfied the lock was void-tight; she breathed to them a quiet ‘thanks’.

“Whatever the case, the quicker we peel the layers, the quicker get at the gold, platinum and superconductors. Carter, ready to go swimming?” said Rusi, polarizing her visor to a soothing sapphire hue.

“As long as my comms are good?” Carter said, tapping the side of his helmet.

“If you didn’t scream that, they’re working fine,” Rusi said. She broke into a run, her lootbag tailing behind her as she went, hurling herself through the softlock like a middle linebacker spearing down a stunned halfback.

“She’s going to hurt someone doing that,” Aluis said of their younger sister. “Probably herself.”

Carter polarized his visor- green, and not because of his level of experience, but because he found it soothing. Then he worked out his system of stepping through the softlock, which was to think about doing everything except the part where he was going to step out into the void of deep space and are then at the mercy at his ability to manuever by jetpack. He thought about each of the steps he took towards the glowing amber of the softlock, across the slate-gray rubberized grit-paint of the deckplates. He thought about each of the breaths he took in and out as he counted to five in his head, and focused on the soothing forest green and faux-wood panels of the Packrat’s bulkheads. As he saw the stars beyond the amber gate, he repeated in his mind: ‘keep your eyes forward, and not up or down; you know that out there, it’s all the same direction, because there’s actually no clear direction, but your brain can’t handle that horrible fact, so keep your eyes forward.’ One last step, and try not to notice the jarring change of pressure through the EVA suit’s outer skin from that last step through the softlock, and…

…Carter was in deep space, free floating. Free flying. Just, free.

He cleared his throat, and opened a channel to the security tower: “Osowiec scrapyard, bay 9 is inhabited and in operation; repeat, tower, bay 9 is underway and cutting.”

“Cpl. Burak receiving you, bay 9. You’re clear to begin, we’re sending the recyclers your way,” said a voice that was friendly, but tinged with a sinister wheeze. The man on the other end of the line was terran, true, but one of a particularly frightful sort of artificial mutation, one that made Consortium supersoldiers that were also chemical warfare delivery vectors. Many of these refugees from the so-called Project Toxicant made Osowiec home, an environment made to be comfortable for those with their volatile and deleterious condition. The militant among them that defended Jump Point 3 were among the most feared militia unions in the Freelands, the Osowiec Terrorcorps. Composed mostly of Toxicant soldiers, they were as much a high-effort horrorshow as they were elite troopers, clad in BDUs made to make them look like reanimated casualties, strewn with nightmarish glowing tubing and fitted with breather masks like half-rotted faces. Because of them, JP3 had become infamous, a ghost story among fascists and a supernatural safe harbour for those fleeing for their freedom.

But like all good ghost stories, every now and again, someone has to test if it’s real. And just like nobody ever expects to have their eyes put out and their throat cut by Bloody Mary, no Consortium captain ever expects to have their ship get swarmed by assault cutters made to look like black bats, which deposit marine boarders in frightmasks and spiked armour, all of whom exhale glowing aerosol bacteriophage, sweat fallout and bleed acid.

“Thanks Aleks, how’s things looking from there?” asked Carter.

“Clear skies and a relaxed mood,” Cpl. Burak replied, and he held back a cough. “And soon I will have hot tea, so that will be fixed as well. Is that Carter on mic?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Same deal as ever, you find an officer’s sidearm in one of those chunks, I’ll pay you better than the recycle cost for it,” said Cpl. Burak, the excitement in his voice making his rasp build into a cough.

“I thought the whole soldier thing was, you shoot the officer, and you take the pistol as a trophy?” Carter said, easing on the forward accelerators to approach the wreckmass, playing catchup. Rusi had laid vapour trails all the way to the chunk, and was already magnet-walking on the outer layer, laying down pre-torch lines with her cutter.

“Well, yes, typically,” Burak replied. “But who wants to wait around? Especially given how fast they run in the opposite direction when they see us coming. Besides, I’m bored, and a new shooter would fix that for a while.”

“We’ll see how things shake out, then,” said Carter, reaching for the surface of the wreckmass with the points of his toes, waiting for him to be close enough to the magnetic latches to kick in. A few meters closer, and then a surge of electromagnetic-induced motion carried Carter as he fell sideways onto the mass; he landed 3-point, a dull clang vibrating through the reinforcements of his EVA suit. “You have a good one, tower.”

“You too, bay 9.”

Rusi’s voice instantly dominated the line line. “Okay Fairlane, we’ve got the treasure, have you got a map?”

The glowing HUD of Carter’s helmet expanded a new element from the top left corner of his field of view, a structural onionskin rendering of the wreckmass in 3D.

“This is a third pass rendering of my structural analysis,” the calm voice of the AI calling herself Fairlane spoke up. “It’s as good as I can make it, so were I in your shoes, I’d start with a peel of the first four layers, as those plates seem to have fused fairly loose and monolithic, and should come away quite easily. Beneath them is some compressed and tangled spaceframe, presumably from the Jacksonville, and whatever bits of the gun citadel you want should be wadded up in the tangle.”

Wreckmass: what happens in the aftermath of a space battle. Specifically, what happens when pieces of starship that have been drastically compromised by unimaginable weapons collide and compress when drawn together by their own mass and other anomalies, all while filtering through a Trans-Galactic Jump Point. That’s how many Consortium ships met their end, coming through JP3: they went through a semi-stable spatial anomaly that acted as a portal between arms of the galaxy, only to find it was a meatgrinder of cannons, beams and torpedoes on the other side. As the back ends of the ships would slowly thrust them forward through the portal, dauntless and unaware of what was happening at the front of the ship all the way across the expanse between galactic arms, the heads of the ships would frequently signal a frantic reverse and full power to shields and armour polarity as they came under fire and died burning. These commands would go unheard, issued from an impossible distance away from those meant to receive them, and so the combination of the Jump Point anomaly’s hyperlight conveyance, the ship’s own engines and the planet-smashing amounts of firepower hitting it from the front end would cause it to melt into itself, like a chocolate bar pressed to a hot griddle. The matter left in the wake of this, would be nothing more than mass wrecked into itself and made indistinct and strange, yet still recyclable- Wreckmass. It was the galaxy’s largest, most impure, yet most valuable precious gem.

It’s a grab bag of reclaimable materials in various states of distress: here, some deckplates turned semi-molten by a plasma close-defense weapon and fused into a block of slag; there, some hull plating gone semifluid and pressed into layered metal paper by a direct beamstrike; all around, hunks of solidified and condensed elemental matter, rendered into unnatural deposits that are half crystal, half ingot via the electron-bond destroying and space-displacing properties of a distortion torpedo. In no uncertain terms, it was not the kind of thing a Freelander-built scrap-shredder could just eat whole, because there was too much to choke on, and too much to be lost in the process. It required a more delicate, more hands-on approach to ensure a minimization of waste. Which was why Osowiec Fortress Station also kept the Osowiec Recycling Field at a safe distance from the JP: they had a lot of expensive trash waiting to be unzipped, unfolded, peeled apart and recycled into newness. That’s what Aluis did, and that’s what Carter was learning to do under them and their sister.

“Also, be advised:” Fairlane continued, “You’ll encounter some bodysmash between layers two and three. You might want to cut those free in AR mode.”

Unfortunately, the hands-on approach carried with it some trauma.

“Ugh, how much bodysmash?” asked Carter.

“Nine terrans, near as I can tell,” Fairlane said, her voice taking on a conciliatory tone. Her mode of operation on the clock: be gentle, but be honest with the people on the line.

“Right, AR on,” said Carter, not even toying with the idea of looking directly at the mess. The interior lining of his visor went opaque, and for the briefest of moments, he could see nothing but for the glow of its HUD. [EXTERIOR CAMERA INITIALIZING] flashed, and was replaced with [INTERMEDIARY RENDERER INITIALIZING]. Then the opaque faded to a simulacra of his exterior view: there was Rusi at the other end of the chunk, outlined in her sapphire-blue call-colour, and behind her, the struts and fences of the scrapyard, the stars peeking out from the spaces between. But the mass was an abstraction of polygons, a model in a videogame upon which Carter could pre-project his cutting lines before running his arc. That way, when the massive, sustained spark of a bladed stream of hydrogen plasma began its blinding cut across the hull plate, he’d only be looking at hazard-filtered video of his line, the glare all but removed as the AR model blotted inward and around it..

When it came time to pull apart a sandwich of steel and crushed bodies, it ensure he’d only be looking at the steel, as an abstracted videogame rendering. A videogame rendering marked with textures reading very clearly: do not touch here, as you’ll regret it when you take AR mode off.

“Carter, you going to bother with pre-burns?” Rusi spoke in his ear.

“Should I?” he asked in reply.

“Don’t bother, this layer’s like bread crust, a medium burn should do it in easy enough.”

“Copy,” said Carter. “Box cut, and then a single corner to corner?”

“Good call, go ahead and start burning,” Rusi said, giving her cutter one last test shot into open space, a bright indigo flash arcing off into vacuum and turning to haze after a few meters.

Carter put his head down, and turned the background audio in his earpieces up, a swell of smooth but thoughtful jazz-hop beats complimenting the abstracted view from his visor into something of an at-work puzzle game. Luxurious as it sounded, it was a matter of safety through control of worker stress: not blinders, so much as it was a different kind of safety goggles, one that filtered out sources of panic instead of blocking flying matter. As Carter disengaged the safety on his cutter and began his burn, he began running through the theory in his head again: that in a spacewalk, the worst places for a person to be is either deep inside his own head or out in the void of space, because either will make them either freeze up or lose their composure, because space is too big, too much of everything and nothing all at once. Instead, keeping the astronaut in the mental state of the ‘helmet-shaped office’ was posed as the optimal alternative, and that came with giving them as much working comfort in a small space as could be afforded. It was the science of creating a literal positive headspace, the least claustrophobic helmets in the known galaxy: airtight collars that are also as soft, supportive and warm as neck pillows, micro-climate control regulation systems, AR sensory rendering, morale media systems, even the simple addition of a drinking straw, these were all methods of keeping working astronauts effective at work, rather than simply exhausted and terrified.

He came to the corner of his burn, then drew in toward the center of the plate, running his cut as he went. Carter could hear the cutter roaring through the vibrations in his suit, a sound he knew that was deafening in atmosphere, that instead sounded like a the screw of an aquatic engine churning underwater. He could feel it seething in his grip, through layers of insulation, padding and protection, and his hands sweated as he held it steady. His suit did what it could to wick the moisture away- it’d work for a while, but a long shift could get a little dank. As he drew toward the center, his HUD blinked a proximity warning, showing that Rusi was coming toward him, slightly on his left, her own cutter engaged; a secondary camera locked onto her and showed him picture-in-picture as she drew in her own cut with strong arms and steady strides. Standing well away, they ‘crossed the X’ and finished the cut. Like a tiny quake, the plating layer rumbled and came loose in microgravity. The two held magnetized to their slabs of the plate, and instead put thrust through their MMUs, giving just enough power to lift them up and off the wreckmass. Far enough clear from the chunk, they inverted the slabs like junkyard ballerinas, using the kinetic brakes on their hands to halt their tumble and come to a controlled stop.

Lights from the Packrat beamed overhead, as Aluis tipped the thruster nacelles of the ship at the two of them as they approached from above. Beneath the ventral hull, a carpet of spatial distortion rolled out and roiled, becoming a like a sheet of funhouse glass framed by glowing amber hololiths: the Millipede system, a sheet of coherent gravitons moving like a conveyor belt. With it, Aluis could either scoop fine materials into the Packrat’s hold, or manuever it into the little ship’s mag coils, to launch it toward the nearby recycler barge.

In a motion Carter had practiced hundreds of times in simulation, and had learned firsthand was a complete natural at in the field, he planted a gecko-gripped glove to the surface of the slab and released the mag-locks on his boots, inverting himself in a spinning, leaning, one-handed handstand. As he twisted, he took aim toward the Millipede, and when he was satisfied, he triggered the impulsor setting on his kinetic brake and slammed enough push force into the slab to send several tons of steel flying at 40 kilometers per hour through zero-G. Carter keyed both this kinetic brake and his MMU’s hover trigger, holding himself still in space against the recoil as the massive chunk of metal tumbled away from him, seemingly in slow motion. As it broke the surface of the Millipede field, it came to an unnatural halt, as though the slab landed in invisible clay. Rusi’s slab came augering in beside it, clanging soundlessly against it and sending sparks into the void, yet it stopped stiff all the same, as the two pieces moved slowly toward the Packrat’s forward coilguns, orienting themselves flat like arrowheads. Aluis steadied off the Packrat, took aim with the coilguns, and put two low-energy shots toward the recycler, peeling them away at 150kph, hurling the two steel masses directly into the open mouth of the barge, which seized them for a controlled feed into its shredder-teeth.

Down, done, onto the next one, is what Carter reminded himself as he focused on his AR visor. Nothing different about the next layer, nothing terribly wrong happening just beneath his feet.

“Okay, box cut, but then we do two corner-to-corners as well on this one,” Rusi said, manoeuvring back down to the mass.

“How so?” Carter asked.

“Keeping it as clean as I can: that much bodysmash… it can be like a, uh, glue,” said Rusi, the cringe in her voice apparent.

“Gotcha, two corner-to-corners,” Carter said, tightening his throat and concentrating on his music as his mag-locks clanked him back down onto the mass. He ran the box cut, keeping his eyes working the center line as he thought about how nice and soft the head lining of his helmet was. He took a sip of his energy drink as he worked, and the sour-sweet shocked some extra focus into him.

“Y’know, cutting into a starship hull and having it bleed is the kind of thing I’d expect to happen if I was in Naskavar,” Rusi said, speaking of the dream realm some arissiyans hold all people to descend into when they have nightmares.

“Yeah, saying stuff like that doesn’t really help the AR mode, Rusi,” said Carter, trying to focus on the calming green interior of his helmet-shaped office as he ran his burn from edge to edge of the wreckmass- the basic straight line box cut, the first thing the union teaches you after they let you actually ignite a cutter. The definition of the phrase ‘remember your training:’ remember the classroom, so the field isn’t quite so unnerving.

A curl of fluid matter drifted up from Carter’s cut, his AR view painting it green as it arced off into space. The HUD read simply: [DO NOT TOUCH; BIOHAZARD]. He shuddered, as he finished off the edge, then crossed corner to corner, waiting for Rusi to pass as she went in front of him.

When the cuts finished, the slabs of the plate buckled, then ceased and clung to the mass, hanging together softly and loosely.

“Okay, Carter, don’t judge me here, this is the ugly truth of the matter,” Rusi said, the cringe on her face even more apparent in her voice. “This is stupid and gross, but it works.”

Raising one heavy, magnet-soled boot, she stomped down, again and again, applying the Rusi method to several tons of fused starship-grade alloy. She gave one good hard heel to the slab, and as she cocked her arm as if she was about to run a charge through her kinetic impulsor to blast it loose, the slab came away, and she hopped clear of it, holding stable with her MMU. As it peeled loose, the other cuts pulled away with it.

“Mala Asuma-a, Carson, get off of that, you don’t even want to look through AR, staa-aak,” Rusi said, her voice practically croaking as she enunciated every syllable of her fuuuuuuuck.

Carson kicked off and took a peek as the slabs peeled away: a lot of textured polygons urging him to not directly touch this part of the mass, seemingly with depth and coarseness.

“It’s not the worst I’ve seen, but it’s not great either,” Rusi continued.

“Fuck,” Carter said- he’d just noticed the long tendrils the slabs were trailing behind them as they went. “What about this isn’t the worst?”

“You want me to answer that honestly?” asked Rusi.

“Well, don’t lie to me, lady,” Carter said, his eyebrows so far raised, he felt like they were about to start an invasion of his hairline.

“Well, I’m only seeing Consortium officer uniforms in this… mixture, so there’s a very good chance they all deserved it.”

Carson only wretched loudly into his mic. He focused on his music, and took another sip of his drink, letting the taste replace the flavour he was starting to imagine in his mouth.

“Don’t bother folks, I’ll get those. It’ll save you time in decontam,” Aluis said from the helm of the Packrat. Grapple cables fired from the forward dorsal hull, lancing like harpoons as the ship came about, then broke to a halt and became coaxial, tentacle-like as they locked to the hull slabs.

“Recycler, respond: activate sanitization measures, maximum power, maintain until my cutoff,” Aluis said, reeling the cables into the Millipede. Along the length of the recycler, plasma fires lit and blazed to blinding life. They put four shots through the Packrat’s coilguns, sending the gory bits careening into a stellar crematorium.

“I suppose this is a bad time to bring up that if you see anything that’s archivable material, you need to flag it and send it aboard,” Aluis said, their voice taut and tight.

“Please tell me we can just get a Sparky to pick it up for us?” Carson asked.

“I’d never make a Sparky do that,” Rusi said. “That’s drone abuse. Besides, I don’t know that anything could survive this that’s readable. If it wasn’t crushed, it was… coated, and saturated.”

“Well unless AR mode can see intel,” Carter said, “I’m just gonna say I couldn’t find shit.”

“Good call,” said Rusi. “We’re going to box cut this layer, and if it won’t come loose, we’ll chisel it lengthwise. I am not walking through that.”

Carter acknowledged with distant uh-huh. His HUD gave him a gentle warning that his heart rate was slightly elevated, and to either use crisis breathing or authorize a release of Lucid into his helmet’s air supply. Before he’d started his career as a professional industrial astronaut, Carter would seldom augment himself with stims, he felt it was cheating. Now that he’d felt what a real EVA suit facing the void was like against his own body, understood how utterly disconcerting and exhausting a spacewalk actually was, he knew that they were an advantage made for him to help himself to freely. He okayed the release in his HUD, and the next breath he took carried with it a rush that was also relaxation.

Blink. His name was Carter Goodwin, and he was running a plasma cutter with a steady hand. Blink. It was Wednesday, 1st shift, and everything was fine. Blink. For breakfast, he’d had roasted tomatoes and basil on turuma frybread, with a side of bacon, and it was delicious. Blink. The music playing in his helmet was great, the vibes exceptional. Blink. Nothing was wrong in his immediate world, ergo, nothing was wrong anywhere.

As he cut to the edge of the wreckmass, he shook off the initial rush of the calm-stim. Carter hated the initial rush of Lucid, how it tended to make him a dull robot; he appreciated how quick it made a frazzle of panic melt away into nothing. The HUD read his heart rate as normalized, and he found it easier to breathe. His hands had stopped sweating. He was fine; shit was awful, but he was fine.

“Alright, Carter, touch this as little as you can,” Rusi said from her end. “Do a me, instead.” She gave a good hard stomp, and her end popped up.

Carter followed suit, and his end kicked loose farther than he was expecting, enough that he bent backwards from the lip flying up toward his face. He caught it with his left as it passed, punching a kinetic impulse into it and blowing it toward the Packrat. As it flipped free of his personal space, dread dropped off him like sandbag weights.

“So I can imagine that it’s really bad if you throw up inside of your helmet, huh,” Carter said.

“It is actually one of the reason why Lucid is in the air supply, yes,” Rusi said. “Very little kills that reflex as reliably across the known species.”

“Oyuei Asuma-a,” Aluis said, their voice low. ‘Be reborn by the Creator’. “You people were fascists and you died invading my home. And terribly you died, so this astronaut empathizes with your last moments.” They winced, getting a glance through an exterior of what the tremendous pressures of the hull collapse had done to them, turned them into a mashed carpet of meat, bones and fluids. They bid their spirits on to a better go around next time, and send their remains to a fiery, foundry grave. “The ugly, sombre part is done,” they said. “Are you still quite so hungry for treasure?”

“Hungry is not a use I’d word to describe anything right now,” said Carter, okaying the shutdown on his AR mode. As his visor turned back transparent, he immediately regretted it.

“Oh my God, there’s so many bits hanging in the fucking void, what the fuck,” his voice squawked into the comms, trying to hold in his urge to scream. Instantly he opaqued his visor again, and initialized AR mode again.

“You had it on framerate priority, not resolution, eh?” asked Rusi.

“The framedrops fuck with me otherwise,” said Carter, deciding to switch the mode’s priority to display a higher fidelity overlay, instead of a faster one. Sure enough: pieces of terran, like crumbs on an invisible breadboard.

He shivered, and took a deep breath of the Lucid-laced air. A dose of alleviating serotonin, nanite mood-modulation, the relaxing comfort of being in bed with the dialed in alertness of reading a good book, only at work and on the job. Carter was aware of the mess hanging in space directly in front of him; he also could look to the fact that he was also spacewalking while listening to rap music, so his life couldn’t be all that bad either.

That’s when he noticed something, floating between the chunks of pulverized tissue and pulled strands of gore, tumbling end over end. The AR was painting it as another biohazard, but Carter could tell it by the outline what it was.

“Rusi, is that an officer’s pistol?” asked Carter. He painted it in his helmet’s HUD, sending its nearby coordinates to her her HUD so she could see it as clear as he could.

“...I mean, it’s a pistol, the kind an officer would use,” Rusi said. She had five years as a militia marine with the 5th Black and Reds naval union, one who’d seen a fair few enemy officers and the kinds of guns they kept handy. “Helsine revision number 96, Alleviator- that’d be the terran model, if my eyes are correct. Shame it’s all covered in dead fash, that thing would’ve been brand new four years ago, it was just coming into service as I was leaving it.”

Carter took a few steps closer. Beneath the thick red caking, he could make out a glowing amber glyph between the posts of its rear sights. Middle Ios, the sort Carter had learned before he defected to the Freelands: zanha - charged, loaded, armed. He reached for it.

“Okay Carter, do not fucking flag me with that, because I know you aren’t certed for defensive arms,” Rusi said, adopting the voice of an experienced journeyman in her trade, addressing her on-shift apprentice.

“How do you know I’m not certed?” Carter said, picking the gun out of the void, making sure to keep his finger off the trigger, whatever that was called.

“...how do you know if this thing’s off safe or not?” He continued, realizing he’d never held a real handgun before.

“Yeah, that’s how I know, zumti,” said Rusi. Dumbass. “You took it off primary safe by picking it up, index the trigger to take it all the way off. Into the fucking void please, if you’re going to risk that hand to curiosity.”

Carter pointed it off into space, pictured the face of his truant enforcer, the dead-eyed fuck with the misspelled tattoo of the word DUTY on his neck; the guy who broke his nose as a teenager with a folding baton because he really cared about education just that much. He dropped the trigger, and sent a microbarrage of crimson pulses cratering between his eyes.

“Carter, I would just like to state: I would not have done that. I would have at least checked the barrel first,” said Rusi, deadly and dry. Helsines worked well enough to rely on, but they weren’t extraordinarily tolerant to fouling, and she’d seen the effects of one going off in-hand from a complete failure state of repair. “Also, that’s your one shot, pull the cell-mag, ditch it in your bag, that thing looks disgusting anyway. Push down one of the levers on the sides, pull the blocky bit with the tabs up and back, like it’s an upside-down plasma cutter.”

Carter did as prescribed. Barely perceptible through his glove, he could feel a quick jolting vibration, as a very small yet unimaginably dense power source uncoupled from its well and the gun went dead. He stashed it in his loot bag, letting it float from his toolbelt.

He closed his eyes, took in a deep breath and leaned his head back inside his helmet. He focused only on his immediate surroundings, his helmet-shaped office, the music on his morale media system, the soothing glow of its lights against his eyelids. He was weightless, he was free, and he was digging for grim treasure on a hunk of metal in the mortally unimaginable ocean of the galaxy. Ahead of him, hours of hard work, cutting and picking and gathering among lonely stars, with no stable ground to stand on, and no clear direction that’s up. But at its end, who knows what the effort would yield in terms of pure recyclable wealth: overloaded gold heatsinks melted into bricks like cinderblocks, platinum cabling like balled yarn, chunks of artificial gemstone as big as footballs, and salvageable pieces of weapons-grade superconductors, iridium hyperalloys and other exotic materials that were the most valuable of all. Yet despite all that lay ahead, Carter smiled inwardly, for having endured something that expanded his own dimensions of the word terrible, he had claimed a smaller, more common, yet infinitely more improbable piece of treasure for himself: exactly what he was looking for to fill a request for a friend, in perfect working order, more or less.

He was dauntless, and in that moment, it dawned on him that his life was incredible, in the truest sense of the word.

“Bay 9, we’re picking up weapons fire in your vicinity,” a voice that was definitely not Cpl. Burak spoke over comms, stern and looking for an explanation.

“That’s you, apprentice,” Rusi said, her voice practically a hiss.

Incredible, he thought. In the truest sense of the word.