"There is a disturbance before us. We should turn back, Malik." "Not yet, Nloquia. We have found so little, we will go even deeper into debt from this trip." "But we make break apart, if you persist in this foolishness. If we encounter even a lesser Carossian battle bot, it will damage our ship beyond its structural capacity to maintain flight worthiness."
Malik took a deep breath. Nloquia, the artificial intelligence running the old salvage ship 'Seeker', was right, of course. They had been at this job for more than two decades, and he knew the AI was getting nervous, if such a thing was possible. She would use more complex words before starting with exact probabilities. There were more complex and vastly more expensive AI systems which could completely emulate a human person, allowing for banter, jokes and long conversations about the nature of the universe, but Nloquia had been in the family for decades, and he was accustomed to "her" quirks now. Of course the AI did not have a gender per se, but it was impossible not to anthropomorphize it a little due to the female voice it used.
She continued "There is a only a 3% chance of finding something to make the risk acceptable. But a 66% chance of taking even more damage than we already have." Malik grinned - there it was. Numbers, probabilities - at least those were better than the hurtful silence should he choose to ignore her.
"You are right, it is a greater risk than I normally would like to take. There have been more Carossian ships lately, and some of them are still acting with kill-on-sight commands. But there, a couple light seconds before us, protected by the flickering force fields - that’s not a Carossian frigate. It's something else."
Nloquia: "My visual sensors show an 82% likelihood of this being a frigate. What does your appraisal skill tell you?" Malik activated his System overlay to take a second look.
Table 1. Skill result: Appraisal (Level 7)
Type Level Status Alignment
?
?
damaged
neutral
He said "It’s a ship. The System does not tell me type or level." "That is unusual. In all our previous encounters with the remnants of the cataclysm you have been able to identify the base type of all wrecks with 100% accuracy since you bought the Helfry Scouting Association’s memory crystals."
Malik: "Another 500K credit cost - I am still paying the monthly installments on those, don’t remind me." He had been loath to spend the money, but the memory crystals had boosted his appraisal skill by two levels and helped him to remain in business. Ever since the arrival of the System in the 21st century, humanity had been able to keep up with AIs and robots as only living organisms had the ability to level and develop their skills in ways science still sought to explain.
A new screen appeared before his mind’s eye. The System did this occasionally of its own volition. The incomprehensible magical technology gave all intelligent creatures attributes, classes, skills, abilities and levels. A godlike accountant, always present, mapping out a being’s progression from the mundane to the exotic in minute detail. Shaping the universe’s destiny by offering enticing upgrade paths, allowing one to advance further and unleashing their true potential. You could ask the System, and it would project your current status right into your mind. Often with strange comments, as if the System had a twisted sense of humor.
Malik had not had a relevant popup for two years, ever since he graduated from [Scavenger 3] to [Scavenger 4]. He had disabled most of the messages, since he felt it would never amount to anything worthwile. Sure, when the System was new, hundreds of years ago, everyone had raced to get the 'first' achievements. Some people achieved the power of demigods, founded guilds of like-minded people and set out to conquer the universe. But for the majority, the System quickly became part of their boring, everyday lives. A mechanic would choose the [Mechanic] class, do a few introductory quests, and level up. But then? They would be adequate at what their job demanded. And they would slowly make progress. But unless they did an endless succession of demanding (and dangerous) tasks to collect enough experience to ascend into the master levels, their normal day job was where they would stay for the rest of their lives.
As a child, Malik had watched adventure vidcasts and played in virtual worlds, dreaming of being a [Space Explorer] or [Mecha Engineer]. But he had to settle to follow in his parents footsteps after they gave him the Seeker when they went to spend their old age on a retirement world. He was thankful, no question about it - without their help to set him up, he would still be a [Mechanical Assistant]. But pulling apart wrecks in a far away star system for the meagre scrap value was a far cry from being a hero of the galaxy he had wanted to become.
So, a popup. Really, a quest? And not just any old quest, like "Change the air filters; +5 Experience Points (XP).":
Type Description Difficulty Reward
Chain
Gain access to the ? (unidentified ship)
Easy
50 XP
For a moment, he dared to entertain the thought of rising to higher and higher levels through a legendary chain quest, before the reality settled in: 50 Points meant growing from 1350 to 1400 of the 5000 he needed for level 5.
Still, he smiled. "Wow, look at that. A chain quest! It offers 50 points of XP just for gaining access to the wreck!" "Congratulations. My database indicates that chain quests are quite uncommon. Also, this seems like a suprising amount of points just for getting a drone in the air lock. Perhaps it is more dangerous than you think?"
He said "Nah, it’s rated as easy. But it is a quest start. Perhaps this wreck will contain some real treasure! Just think about it, a ship type even the Helfries know nothing about." "Perhaps because this type of wreck is so dangerous, no one has survived exploring it yet." He thought about it "Hmmm. We could just log the wreck’s trajectory and sell its location data to one of the scavenger clans. But that would mean losing out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And the potential payout will by a 0.1% of the recovered value, if they are honest about what they find. Yeah, I am so not wasting this chance. Let’s match their direction and velocity, we got work to do."
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
An hour later, Malik groaned in frustration. They had deployed their three ancient energy siphoning drones to destabilize the wreck’s energy field, and one of them already had failed with some kind of malfunction. "Remind me why I did not buy some more shield draining drones?" Nloquia: "Because drones cost money. And we have never needed them. But we are making progress. At the drone’s current speed this will take 1.32 weeks, unless ESD-2 and ESD-3 also break down."
Malik: "Shouldn’t it go much faster? I heard of Scavengers disabling a Lorisal freighter in a couple of hours with two drones. Okay, those were a bit more advanced than our junkers, but still… " The AI took a moment to respond. Then her synthetic voice began: "I have re-calculated the fluctuations which the drones have to inject into the force field and re-calibrated them again. The field had adapted its frequencies to counter our manipulation. This is highly unusual."
"Could it be that there is still someone alive inside?" "Negative. In the last 100 years, the Harvesting Alliance only found dead personnel of a large variety of known and unknown species on board. Active electronics were almost always destroyed, but some re-activated, sometimes due to chemical or solar backup systems. Whatever is responsible for the cataclysm, it seems to be inimical to all forms of life, both biological and artificial."
"Yeah, I know." For a moment, Malik looked at the panorama display of his salvage ship’s bridge. When the cataclysm started, space in the little known system of Mina Stellasum CE-432 had been empty for eons. Then came the wormhole, accompanied by a short, intense gamma burst. The inhabitants of the science station died within an hour, but an automatic distress call went out.
Then the wrecks appeared. Hundreds. Thousands. A million. More ships than any space faring race had ever seen in a single system. And still more were coming every day. Showing signs of heavy battle. Broken into pieces, their crews dead or disintegrated. The wormhole settled into a wobbling orbit, disgorging ever more ships and debris. Subsequent collisions turned the inner system into a Kessler syndrome area, filled with unpredictable stuff moving at high velocities. By now only the outskirts were somewhat safe for scouts and scavengers like Malik. Further outwards, the great recyclers orbited Mina Stellasum and gobbled up any wreck that drifted into their reach.
A gold rush, or more properly a trash rush had ensued. Several empires had created space stations, both for science and profit, and the intergalactic council had taken over the administrative aspects and policing of the system. A hundred years later and they still had no real clue on where the ships came from or what caused the cataclysm.
Malik directed his attention back to monitoring the drones. "Bring back the broken one, I will repair it." Better than doing nothing for a week - and with a little luck, he would be able to level up his repair skills a bit. If there was one thing the System rewarded, it was struggling against adverse conditions. And man, did he have those aplenty. Keeping the Seeker going, tinkering with hardware and software onboard the ship day in and out, always a couple of unlucky moments away from fucking things up and dying, this had allowed him to raise his [Space Mechanic] skills to a respectable tier.
After two days, Nloquia asked "How is it going, Malik?" "Meh. If I had the parts, I could fix this properly. But for the moment, it’s just another clunky hack." "You should rest some more. The force field has adapted further to the drone' manipulation." "Fuck." "We can stay here for two more weeks, but then we have to leave - a vortex is drawing near." "Double fuck." A vortex was a cloud of dense debris which clustered around wrecks with partially active gravity systems. Uncommon, and deadly. The Seeker only sported some low-grade force fields to deflect the occasional piece of space junk. Flying into a cloud containing several ships' worth of small high density fragments was suicide.
"The vortex is unusually large, it appears to be uniform to 92.4%" He thought about it. Unified vortexes meant a complete fleet of a single civilization had emerged from the wormhole. Those were rare, and could be worth a lot for those foolish enough to check the erratic cloud for loot. If you managed to find something valuable on one wreck, you could harvest a hundred similar ones. But that required strong shields to clear the outer cloud of debris, which the Seeker was lacking. Malik shook his head and put the vortex out of his mind for the time being.
He stared at the drone lying on the workbench. It had a volume of about one qubic meter, including thrusters and general support systems for semi autonomous positioning. The core module was a re-purposed energy modulator, originally engineered to create a protective force field capable of shielding a couple of square meters so a mechanic could work outside the ship without being hit by space junk. Given time, it could also be used to introduce fluctuations into existing shields, much like an unshielded microwave could emit electronic interefence to disturb nearby equipment.
"If a component on the wreck is still active and keeping the lights on and the shields up, perhaps we should approach it in a different way." Malik got to work. "You see, Nloquia, if I fix the drone to work like it originally was intended to, perhaps it will appear as a harmless, friendly repair drone instead of a burglar’s tool." "That could work. Provided you fix it without having it blow up like the last time you 'fixed' a component."
The next day, Malik sent the repaired drone to the wreck. His work had paid off - his [Drone Repair] skill had risen to level 5. The System overlay informed him that he had gained an additional 100 points towards level 6, which was about 14% of the required amount of experience. "Huh, quite a boost" he grinned. "I should do this more often." "Well, since we only have one more reserve cargo bot to plunder for spare parts, 'often' means 'once' in this case." "Shut up. It worked." "It may work."
Malik put the modified drone into the airlock. Nloquia launched it from there and both waited for it to reach the wreck’s force field. "Please shut down the other two drones. We do not want to send mixed signals." "Done." Once the drone hit the energy field, it started to generate an exact match for the foreign field. "How long is it going to take?" "Calculated time for adaptation is about 100 minutes. There is a reason something like this is rarely tried - it does not make sense during combat and in other cases the ship probably won’t have the shield up anyway."
Suddenly the barrier shimmered and the drone slipped through. "It worked! Do you still have contact?" "Yes, though the drone needs 185% more energy than expected to send data back through the barrier." Malik thought about it, but the energy consumption would only be a problem if they kept the drone active for a longer period. With the vortex approaching, they would probably have to fly away in a couple of days anyway.
The wreck’s main airlock did not present a problem - it was completely destroyed by whatever had attacked the ship. The drone had direct access to some kind of hangar. Inside floated the debris of a small shuttle, and several corpses. Whatever the journey through wormhole at the cataclysm’s center did, it killed almost all biological life as far as Malik knew. The dead spacers were humanoid and wore metallic armor. Malik ordered the drone to collect them and web them one of the hangar’s walls. Generally he did not like to fetch the dead, but an [Alien Analyser] paid a lot of credits for them. Once, out of curiosity, he watched his former captain open up one of the space suits. In his dreams, the face of the pale desiccated corpse had haunted him for months. The two pairs of large eyes in a face of a pointy eared girl much to young to be flying a spaceship had made him realize how different many of the crews were that came through the cataclysm.
Most arrivals were humanoid, and many had slight differences in height, number of limbs or bone strucutre. A whole new class of meta-antropomorphic science had been created practically overnight. Some scavengers, mostly with unsavory side classes like [Corpse Snatcher] and [Grave Robber] just cleared the wrecks of all the dead bodies, leaving the hardware to float away for the great recyclers or other scavengers to find.
A quest update popped up.