The eternal junkyard was always a place of battle. Countless races fought and died in the system from the times before the known history. First for something valuable, then as a traditional place to fight and a good waypoint for jumps to other systems. Fleets, star bases, entire asteroids brought and thrown into the mix.  The massive interstellar wars have died down as of late. There was no galactic conflict for several thousand years. Now orbiting the lonely star in the system is an unimaginably gigantic and dense cloud of debree, space rock, dust, mines, radiation and sometimes dangerous but mostly useless and obsolete elder technology. Obviously quarantined as the galaxy doesn't need another gray goo event getting out of this mess. Sifting through garbage is an entire industry, sometimes very profitable and equally dangerous and all sorts of people come to the eternal junkyard to get rich. It's tough living. Tougher still when your only choices are to help a gaggle of AI's bring an ancient barely functional ship to a working condition - or slowly asphyxiate. Worse than that - the only way to accomplish this goal is to connect to the starship's systems directly, and ancient derelict starships don't support plug-n-play.