I wish I could tell you that we landed without a hitch, that it was all plain sailing all the way down, but I’m not a dirty, dirty liar, and if you wanna try navigating for 48 hours straight by disco light, we'll see how you do?

Really, the best I can tell you is it went about as well as you would imagine, translation: we were almost there before the security systems pinged us again, and on getting no response (duh, our transmitters were down, and unsurprisingly nobody taught the defensive turrets morse code for some reason.) So we had no way of telling them to knock off the shooting, so instead, we settled for plan B. That being as soon as we were pretty sure we were clear of the mines, gun the engines, and hope Relly could hold together till we got to the planet.

So we arrived, not with a whimper, but with an almighty CRUNCH. OK, it was going to take even longer to complete repairs after that, but looking around it didn’t strike me that we would be short on materials.

“Everybody OK?” Jenel groaned, looking a little worse for wear after our landing, which seemed to have all the grace of a high board belly flop when you notice halfway down that somebody drained the pool.

“I’m alive, I think” I replied, "Nara, Reliance?”

“Reporting, some structural damage, but not as much as you would expect considering YOU SLAMMED ME INTO A PLANET CAPTAIN,” Relly replied, maybe it was just me, but I had the feeling she was just a little bit pissed about that. “Repairs estimated to take a month, assuming we can find the components.”

“Ugh, alive... ish Eileen, no injuries that aren’t fixable, also apparently the turrets stopped firing once we hit the atmosphere. Typical, they don’t mind shooting us out of the sky, but heaven forbid they damage the scrap heap. Nice to know we rate so highly huh?”

“Oh, shit” I muttered, as the realisation hit as to how screwed we really were. We really had to hope we could salvage a transmitter from this lot, or we were never leaving. Security AI didn’t give a toss if we were coming or going, without an authorisation code they recognised they would definitely shoot at us.

“OK Reliance, full status report, in text format, we need to know what we’ve got to fix.”

“Understood Captain, transmitting a full report on the damage sustained when you used my battered body in a game of chicken against a celestial body.”

“Ugh, I’m never going to hear the end of that am I?”

“With all due respect Captain, it was definitely a memorable experience.”

“Meaning you’re going to hold a grudge for a while” Nara chimed in helpfully.

“Alright, alright, then I’m going to give you a little time to cool off and try to get an idea of how the place is,” I muttered, stepping out of the ship, to good news, and bad news. The good news was the gravity controls on the ship were still working, the bad news is apparently this world had been managed by heavies, as upon exiting the ship I got a firsthand lesson in what it feels like to instantly gain a hundred pounds or so.

I looked up, eventually, and mustered my strength to stand, looking around, at piles upon piles of rusty hulks, surrounded by what had clearly once over being some sort of town. Empty buildings stared sightlessly back, some still projecting holographic ads, for the benefit of people who were never coming back, while piped music echoed hauntingly through the square. I just hoped that it had been triggered by the addition of visitors to the square. The alternative was it had been some piped one-hit-wonder endlessly for the last few centuries, and that thought was just depressing.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

My security augs flashed a few notifications too, as ad tech tried to display their products through my augs. (What kind of company even did that? I mean, if you successfully hijacked my senses to forcibly subject me to your product it really does not make me wanna buy your stuff.) Which made me incredibly grateful that modern companies had realised that all that crap did was add them to people's personal blacklist. Of course, the subvertiser who had hijacked Beg-Jarvis’s ad servers, and replaced every image in their entire data bank with images of flashing neon orange dicks edited onto blackmail worthy photos of the members of their board of directors may have had just as much to do with it, but history rarely mentions Wanksy for some reason.

Other than that, the place seemed relatively quiet, still, I had the unsettling feeling of being watched, so charged up my gauntlet. True I hardly knew how to use the damn thing, but better a weapon than none, right?

That done, there was something else I needed to do, we needed to carefully place beacons on salvageable parts, and finding ones compatible with Reliance in amongst practically half a fleets worth of hulks wasn’t so much finding a needle in a haystack, as looking for the flechette in a mountain of needles, and judging by the amount of rust here, even more likely to result in a nasty case of tetanus.

As I walked through the square, and in the direction of the massive scrap heap, I pulled any old maintenance drones I found from the old buildings. This was not time to be picky about what we used, we needed every ounce of muscle we could get our hands on, even if their initial code was for a fry chef, we’d take it and recode them.

I hadn’t even got that far when Jenel joined me, carrying her usual weapon of choice, some kind of cannon from hell, cobbled together out of the remains of an anti meteorite beam weapon, never did ask her where the hell she got it, figured it was one of those ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies kinda things. Still, it packed a punch, was configured to cut off if it hit the hull, and who doesn’t love a gal with a big gun? C’mon, be honest now.

“Well sweetie, looks like we have a hell of a search on our hands” I grumbled, as I looked at the horrendous heap in front of me, still as a salvager something in my heart was jumping up and down, making happy squee noises, as my augs started flashing up notices on what bits would fit where. This really was like a treasure hunt, but the augs were definitely not the cheat they should have been, I mean yeah, they could tell me that there was an exact match for the TX4 filter on that old embassy class cruiser there, but they didn’t mention that the TX4 filter was intended for the Reliance’s percolator, or that with a few tweaks to it it could also be used as a catchment tool for the crystal separator, which kind of allowed us to refuse them and gain more power from further fissions, rather than jettisoning them as we were expected to. Possibly because it resulted in all kinds of strange temporal and spatial shenanigans when, not if it inevitably went wrong, but those crystals weren’t as common as they were when Reliance was built, which was most likely because some assholes decided jettisoning was preferable to repair.

Other flags on the old heavy cruiser over there missed out on the fact, that with a little cobbling together was a pretty good fit for a massive hole in our hull. Oh sure it would definitely ruin the look Reliance had going on, but it would also mean a working galley, and no more multi-deck tube crawls to get to the head, which was a definite winner to me. But that repair was definitely out of our current ship repair capability, mainly because one does not simply lift sections of a heavy cruiser. Still, one for the wish list right? Especially as it really would up our firepower, something we were sorely in need of at this time.

As a bonus it would give us a secondary power core, taking some of the strain from our existing setup, which was definitely a bit out of warranty, considering ships of her type were supposed to be serviced every five years. So let’s factor in for them being a bit conservative on the number of checkups in case of the AI going rogue, and say every decade. That means 19 missed maintenance appointments before you even get into the issue of the gaping crater in the hull, or centuries of neglect.

That said, at the moment I was encountering a more pressing issue, as within the debris something organic looking moved. Whatever it was, it was big, and had more limbs than anything had any business having. I did my best to process what I was seeing, as behind me Jenel asked what I was thinking.

“What the hell is THAT?”