The Junker

Chapter One

"Okay, here goes..." you mutter to yourself as you carefully step out of the airlock. You tweak your trajectory slightly with the thrusters on your oxygen pack and sail gently into the side of the derelict spacecraft.

The holes in the hull looked like a combination of meteor hits and fire damage; you guessed that one probably caused the other. Plasma fires typically burned super hot, and you knew of at least a few ships that had seen their end due to them. You sigh. Hopefully nobody had been harmed. Not the least because these old wrecks were spooky enough as it was without ghosts.

You check to make sure your electromagnetic boots were on, and begin the arduous task of trying to find and retrieve the ship's black box.

It was your job to investigate wrecked ships in order to find out what happened to them. You and your pilot worked for the system's transportation authority, but as a subcontractor; you were mostly freelance. Not every job was pleasant, and there were, more often than not, a lot of unhappy endings along the way. 

This ship was right on the edge of the system, and you were a little nervous about it; this was the farthest you'd ever had to go out, and you weren't exactly one hundred percent sure you knew how to get back. The drift of this old wreck was pretty dramatic, so you and your pilot wanted to get done with this job as fast as you could before you both REALLY didn't know how to get home.

As you walk carefully through a twisted, warped hallway, you feel a sudden creeping feeling at the back of your skull, and you twist to look behind you just as a large heavy chunk of I-beam soars at your head. You just manage to duck out of the way, and it collides with a pile of half-melted metal, sending a strong vibration through the floor and into your boots. Still one of the worst feelings in the world- you grit your teeth as you wait for it to stop.

You sigh as you look forward: the collision had knocked some wiring loose, and it was blocking the hallway you'd been travelling down. You could take the time to clear it, but it would just be simpler to go around. You check the blueprint you'd been provided and turn down an adjoining hall that looked relatively unscathed. It would be a little bit of a longer route, but it would still get you were you needed to go.

As you turn a corner further on, you feel a slight vibration travel through the floor before it disappears. While that wasn't uncommon, the following was: it repeated itself in a distinct pattern. It seemed almost like... footsteps? You slip your plasma cutter from its sheath and hold it defensively.

Dozens of thoughts race through your mind, but the first thing that fully comes to mind is the one you'd really been hoping against: Junkers.

Junkers were scavengers that raided derelict ships to try and get parts and scrap to sell. You'd never actually run into any before, but you'd heard stories from other spacers. You'd really thought them to be ghost stories until now, a story to trade over a synth-ale on the R&R deck. 

You feel your hands shaking as you slowly and carefully navigate toward the sound; so much for just ghost stories.

You check the blueprint once more, and stop outside the door to the flight deck. From the vibrations, it sounded like the Junker was in the one place you really didn't need them to be: the flight deck itself. The black box was located just near the navigation console, and that was toward the front of the room. 

You grip your plasma cutter and curse. 

Was there a way to get to it without being seen? You check the time and realize that you'd already spent too long on the ship; the drift factor was pulling you out of the system pretty quickly. You grit your teeth and peek around the door frame into the room. You can't help but gasp at what you see there.