Really, it’s not that unusual.

Just last year: “A hundred and twenty-one found aboard lost colony ship.”

High-grade medical coma cylinders are made to keep their patients healthy for many decades, and these ones can’t have been here for more than one. It’s illegal to sand off the serial number on cylinders but these ones don’t seem to have ever had them in the first place. No way to know who manufactured them, or for whom.

There also aren’t any user manuals readily available but you’ve been around the block once or twice, all of these machines work on the same basic principles, you can figure out how to roughly operate it with some work.

There’s just one thing.

Augments are an expected but subtle part of modern life, most are biological, internal, and hardly immediately notable. Even biomechanical implants are made to be small, as unintrusive to the body and life of the user as possible. Your parents, when they were still around, had managed to get you a pretty heavy complement of them. Compared to the average you were heavily and visibly modified.

But this took it to a whole other level.

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2.05 meters tall, with nerve connection and fluid exchange ports in every joint and every limb as well as in front and behind every major organ, brain included, considering the metallic protrusions at her temples. What little access he had to the cylinder diagnostics reported weight of 213 kilos despite the opaque frontal glass showing a fairly slender feminine physique.

Weight like that on a body of these proportions would imply an enormous increase in density, quick calculation showed her body to be over three times as dense as the human average.

With data like that and every single port in her body connected to the cylinder, there was no way getting her out and awake was going to be an easy task.

There was also no way to pull her out without full and detailed knowledge of her coma pods functioning, and with no manuals and no serial number, the only way to find that information was the hard way: taking apart the incredibly sophisticated and incredibly valuable unused pods, in ways that would quickly leave them irreparable, to deduce their functioning from first principles.

All that work and all that lost value to wake some sort of years asleep, incredibly dangerous, augmented soldier. Aboard a covert ship that saw mutiny. A week away from professional medical care.

You could just sell her, along with all the other pods. The profits from that would let you hire a few trustworthy people to bring back and completely strip the ship with. That would bring in enough to acquire a very respectable salvager ship, hire a crew, and have enough left over to pay wages for a good long while. Captain Alba, once and for all.

“Fuck that.”

You weren’t about to take the easy road out. What self-respecting captain would choose to hire normies from port over shooting their shot at the super soldier?