December Patreon bonus -- a story about Denish

Deepest apologies but this story is turning out far longer than expected. It's multiple chapters, apparently. This month: chapter 1.

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Denish #1

When you’re born into a vulture family, it helps to be good with engines. It can get fast-paced out there on salvage, and a knack for the mechanical can mean a difference between getting a haul back to port or having to abandon it to the authorities. That was my job.

It’s also handy, if you’re born to a vulture family, to have a gift for words and papers. That can be the difference between a clean getaway and an arrest. That part was Pasha’s job.

There’s a lot of other stuff a vulture family needs to be able to do – there’s the pilots and the sellers and someone with a clean enough record and a legitimately owned space that you can use as a stripdown port – and we had all that, spread among the seven people in the family. But Pasha was my kid sister, three years younger and a good deal smarter, and somehow we always ended up working together on the interesting projects.

“Denny. Check it out.” Pasha waved a handful of green glittering nails at me, beckoning me toward the computer.

“Ah, a new nail colour? And what grainy footage of ancient television did you see this one in?”

“Just come and look, you dolt.”

I took the viewer from her and slid it over my eyes. It was, of course, our periscope into the emergency service and salvage system, where people would report missing, stolen or evacuated ships so the authorities could go retrieve them. There were more missing ships than the official salvage crews could handle, which is where us vultures made our living. A legal living? Of course not. But a necessary one. Why should we have to pay fees to register with the authorities for a public service like cleanup? Spend years on little to no income working up to meet their basic training and equipment requirements, only to give the salvage back to the people who lost it in the first place and give half our finder’s fee to the licensing authorities? Ridiculous. A family business can’t survive in that kind of game.

The list was much longer than licensed salvagers could handle, and only they had official access to it, and official license to go track the ships down. The ships were prioritised on several factors – living people in need of rescue, of course, got top billing for as long as it was determined that they were probably still alive. We never stuck our toes in those ones – leave the lives in the hands of the people who know what they’re doing. (Also, trying to steal a ship from a living crew is how you go to jail.) The other ships – those safely evacuated or abandoned, stolen, or suffering disasters where the chance of survival was negligible – tended to be further down on the list, ranked in a complicated system based on the political importance and influence of the owners, the value of the ship and cargo, and, let’s be honest, how much the owners were willing to bribe the relevant services. Our job involved a bit of finesse – picking something far enough down the list that we wouldn’t be racing licensed salvagers, but high enough up that there’d be actual profit in the haul. Bad vultures go broke wasting time and fuel chasing down wrecks that don’t make their investments back.

The one that Pasha wanted to show me was some piece of junk third-tier report about a basic hauler stolen from a rich kid. One of those models that’s high value for party kids and low value as scrap because anything useful in it is either hard to reuse or hard to scrub the identity off for resale. The salvage services don’t bother scrutinising the individual parts of the ship unless they suspect fraud; they tally up the total value and charge for retrieval based on that, but for vultures, the calculations are different. What we can’t sell on is worthless. We check in advance.

Estrenium hull on this one. A pretty-looking composite that’s been in fashion for the past year or so; functional but heavy, not worth our fuel to haul home, and too distinctive to be worth trying to smuggle past any authorities. That means gutting the ship in the field and taking only what’s useful. Tegral engine, series ten – fairly old but reliable, something you would find in a small hauler but usually a less fancy ship. Not unheard of – the kid might have a basic ship with a fancy shell, trying to make it look more expensive than it is. A good, reliable engine, easy to resell if you know the trick to recoding the serial number, which means knowing what serial numbers are free because if you double up on one in use then it flags in the system of the first person to check it and the authorities will be at your door before you can say ‘I should’ve gone to a professional vulture instead of being a fucking idiot trying to incompetently DIY crime’. And knowing what serial numbers are free means having access to that list, which is another periscope into a system harder to look into than the salvage system, meaning only certain vulture deal in reselling Tegral engines to the public and any other vulture has to sell it to one of those vulture first. My family does have that access; I’d spent that very morning cutting a Tegral out of a wrecked miner that a family friend and accidentally torn to pieces and reported at an inflated value after tipping us off first so he could get more money from the insurance. (We assist with a lot of insurance fraud.) She’d been in service for six years before –

Okay, focus. This Tegral engine uses an ion injection system that…

That it’s not compatible with. Okay.

And the baffles are listed as being estrenium also, which is ridiculous, because estrenium baffles are ridiculous vanity pieces for light vehicles that can’t take the heat of that kind of engine. It was a Tegral, right? I check again. Yep: Tegral, series ten, serial #44123515EX98.

Wait, I know that number. I’d been looking at it on and off all morning on the engine I’d been cutting out of that miner. The miner that had been in use for years. The engine was legitimate, so far as I knew; presumably the rich kid’s engine was bought legitimate too, but even if it wasn’t, the double number would’ve been picked up immediately the first time they tried to park it in an upmarket port.

This report was lying about the ship’s engine. Why?

It wasn’t insurance fraud. If you want to do that, you have to make your lost property sound more expensive than it is, not less. They’d have lied about having a pricier engine. This lie would just the wreck sound cheaper, reduce the insurance payout, put it further down the priority list and make recovery less likely. It wasn’t even a good lie; any engineer looking through would see that the parts are incompatible. But the salvage services never bothered to look without good reason, and if Pasha hadn’t noticed the serial number being identical to one in our own shop, I wouldn’t have noticed the incompatibilities either. It didn’t need to be a good lie. Still, if you’re going to lie about a ship, why not do it right?

And why lie to make it seem cheaper?

“Huh,” I say to Pasha. “This is… interesting.”