Lights of a hundred colours flashed and pulsed in the infinite distance of space. Flickering signals danced along the lengths of shadows whose silhouettes formed in a momentary glow. The majority of these coloured flashes were the discharge of weapons of immense size, blossoming silent fire and deadly light. They were thousands of kilometres away judging by the brightness of the trails but that did not mean it was safe to linger. That kind of distance was akin to walking across a street for cruisers of that size.

Amara watched the distant scene unfold as she was clinging to a large derelict chunk of metal floating amongst the wreckage of a previous conflict. It was a strange feeling. She felt like she was straddling between two points of time, herself amongst the inevitable present and looking into the past that caused it.

She was fully encased in a grey space suit that, despite feeling large enough to fit four people inside, still seemed to close in around her. Even in the weightlessness of space the suit still somehow managed to weigh heavy on her. The maglock boots at her feet felt like concrete blocks and the reinforced curved dome of her helmet narrowed her vision and made her feel like her head was bandaged in lead. In one hand she held a C-shaped fusion cutter, in the other hand she held an impractically large conical torch the size of a human arm. She felt large, bulbous and yet simultaneously microscopic. She felt ridiculous. Amara brought up a small 3D model of the ship’s class and schematics on her wrist tool. She roughly pinpointed where she was and followed the corridor along to a wider, open area that supposedly housed the shield core and the one thing she had put herself through all this risk for. The ship’s BFR.

What a BFR was exactly was something Amara had a cautious understanding of. She knew it was integral to FTL travel but that’s where her knowledge of the millions of technological acronyms ended. The mechanics of the object were exceedingly complicated, but, more importantly to Amara, exorbitantly expensive.

A rapid beeping sounded inside her oversized helmet.

We’re n-now two kilometres from home b-base. We’ve gone a little far here, b-buddy. 

The words appeared in a dull orange script in the far corner of her helmet display and Amara read the words in the folksy accent she had come to associate with the text. The virtual intelligence pilot, or VIP, did not have a voice anymore. Amara had found it a little disconcerting to hear a voice coming from behind her head in what is normally a directionless silent void, so she had disconnected it years ago. The voice in her head was pleasant though. Warm and friendly, two things space tended not to be.

Enormous strands of scorched and tortured metal wound away from the wreckage like the tongues of flames frozen in time. Thousands of other fragments like this hung in the surrounding space, some glacially drifting in meaningless directions, others shattering slowly like glass under half-frozen water. The immensity of their form unravelled as a dozen separate gravitational forces acted unimpeded on them. Matter stripping away to smaller and smaller matter. Beneath Amara, tiny pinpricks of fire dotted the small, discoloured marble of a planet as wreckage was pulled inexorably down and ignited in the atmosphere. Lightning surged illuminating the underside of the clouds. Terrible shadows of mammoth geometries lurked beneath as grim-faced expressions in the flashes. 

The planet was not on any of Amara’s charts but that proved nothing at all. She had pirated charts, cheap ones at that, and the kind that couldn’t be updated without hooking into an official data packet which risked a monumental fine in overdue back payments. She had taken to naming them herself with a random word generator.

This planet was named Flourish.  She was finding it increasingly difficult not to believe this “random” word generator didn’t have some sense of irony.

Amara gave a short burst of thrust from her pack and dove up the hull fragment. She could make out signs of the work other scavengers had done before. There were burn marks along the metal sheets, broken toolboxes and tethering lines left hanging in zero gravity. These lines stuck out, bent at odd angles like the roots of an old tree reaching deeper into the void in search of something solid to hold onto. In the distance she could see wrecks like hers with tiny dots of scrappers swarming over them. The glints of blue and orange light from the other scrappers beams sent bizarre flashes of shadows streaking over the flat surfaces on the outlying drifting debris. Amara liked to make up names and stories for these little shadows, sometimes even whole imaginary conversations she would have with them about where the good scrap is, how their ship was doing or even what they had for dinner. This was a mental exercise she performed to help feel a little more at ease around the potentially dangerous strangers. It was better than the alternative, which was letting her mind imagine all the hundreds of ways the strangers’ tools could take her apart. If another scrapper actually tried to talk to her she would send a burst of static down her comm channel whilst shrugging and tapping her helmet in a “sorry, it’s broken” sort of way. That usually made them stop trying to reach out to her. It was generally safer that way, for herself and them. After all, there was always a risk that these other scrappers were Carrion.

The Carrion were a loose confederacy of militaristic mercenaries acting under the guise of scavengers waiting for those with the expertise to pick the choice parts from the corpse. Then, they’d dive in and make scrap of any scavengers still there. This was why Amara saw no sense in taking the risk of trying to communicate with other scrappers. She told herself she was doing some sort of civic duty by answering comm hails with static, perhaps it might teach some of the less guarded scrappers to be a bit more cautious about who they speak to. At least, that’s what she told herself.

As Amara continued up the sheer metal of the frigate, the decaying name of the hulk appeared, emblazoned in thirty-foot-high letters stamped in chipped dark green paint. Eurydice.

In the scrapping world, even intact frigate armour in a vast enough quantity was valuable as raw material to someone, somewhere, she had an extremely specific piece in mind and hoped no one had gotten to it first. 

Letting the immutable laws of motion take the wheel, Amara let go and drifted towards where the scans had told her to go, through the dark bowels of the Eurydice. She coasted along winding corridors, pushing aside floating fragments of metal and, as she moved into the next room. The corridor had opened into a wide semi-circular room Amara presumed had been part of an arming chamber for the cruiser’s cannons. A large hole had been blasted through it; the walls rippled inwards from the impact. Something else was floating amongst the expected detritus in this room. Amara grabbed a railing to stop her momentum as she took it in the grisly sight. Bodies. Drifting, frozen corpses. She closed her eyes as she floated into the room, tentatively pushing the stiff cadavers aside with the butt of her torch. Even with her suit protection she still didn’t want to risk touching them. They spun and bumped into the corridor walls, limbs staying rigid and thick sparkling bubbles of blood trailing after them. Some were hardly recognisable as human, just fragments of shrivelled, chemically burnt flesh and bone. She hated this. She found it impossible not to wonder who these bodies once were, what they were doing here so far from wherever they were born. She wondered if they could even remember what they were fighting for, or whether they even cared. An enemy cannon had caused this. Amara wondered if the person in the other ship knew this would happen when they locked onto the target? Did they care? It was a difficult truth to accept that wars tended not to stop just because neither side could remember what they were fighting for anymore.

Oh, b-boy. I’m fitting to be asking myself what leads us to be in a place like this? I suggest moving swiftly a-along now, said the VIP. 

Amara opened her eyes to read the text and came face to not entirely a whole face. She screamed, her breath leaving and not returning. She closed her eyes tightly again and waited till she felt the soft impact of the thing bounce off her helmet and behind her. She felt like she could smell it, like bits of it had managed to crawl inside her suit and were floating about in there with her.

Just b-breathe there, missy. In and out, like we p-practiced. 

Blocky images of smiling clouds emerged from behind the text. The text faded, the clouds parted and the word BREATHE limped through the gap.

Amara appreciated what VIP was trying to do but she didn’t want to breathe, not yet. She didn’t want to open her mouth and risk bits of that body to get inside her. She froze, eyes shut, waiting for the corpse to move further away. With every inch the corpse’s shape drifted down the corridor, the feeling returned to her fingers and toes. She opened her eyes, took several long, deep breaths and moved on.

There we g-go, just like that.

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” She repeated. Once for VIP, once for herself. This was a thoroughly unpleasant reality of her job and one she figured was why so many didn’t last in this line of work.

Emerging from the arming chamber she found herself in an adjacent corridor with a single door at the far end. A small green light still pulsed like a weak heartbeat in the centre of the door. As Amara reached into her pack for her tools the door shuddered and opened a crack as old servos resurrected to greet her. 

The old b-bird still ticks! commented VIP as a pixelated orange image of a small bird juddered and fluttered in the bottom of her display. Occasionally a square of text emerged from its blocky beak that read “TWET, TWET”. The accompanying sound was little more than a blast of pitched noise but Amara appreciated the spirit of the action. 

Beyond the door, the corridor started to spiral. The metal had twisted with impacts from every angle making the way ahead a confusing kaleidoscope of cabling and walkways. She found herself crawling through tight gaps, squeezing the giant suit into spaces that caused it to compress and constrict her limbs. More than once she felt wires grasp her arms or legs as she passed. Images of the frozen corpses returned, decaying, skeletal limbs reaching out to drag her into the darkness. Amara took a deep breath and shook her head to clear the visions. Eventually the corridor disappeared entirely, twisting in on itself to form a grotesque pile of innumerable parts like balled up paper. She started cutting, the flash of her tools blinding in the dark corridor and throwing frightening shadows across the walls. 

Wowee! You sure do like spinning here now! 

The words appeared in her helmet display accompanied by a blocky cartoon of a simian creature doing several cartwheels. She didn’t feel like she was spinning and offhandedly waved away the orange text. The monkey let out a surprisingly disgruntled-sounding holler of static and in their place a small but equally orange pyramid rotated in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree space. The diagram was moving erratically, interference from millions of dying sensors and arrays in the floating graveyard wreaking havoc with the helmet’s display. Amara’s equipment could never be considered ‘well-tuned’ in the best of times, but she came to the realisation that the wreckage around her was indeed starting to spin. No time left to waste, Amara worked harder, pushing the cutter to its heat limits to break through the blockage and continue.

The nearby planet, Flourish, met Amara’s gaze as she looked through a chasm in the wreckage. Across a short stretch of emptiness was another opening, lit up by a pulsing light still trying to guide its crew to the emergency exit. She gripped onto a stray section of burnt metal to adjust her position before making the leap across the void. She planted her feet, angled the jetpacks thrusters and set it for a powerful burst to launch her across the gap. Just as she felt the force of her jump and the weightlessness enveloped her, VIP chimed in. 

You don’t want to get caught in that. B-better be careful now, ya hear? 

To emphasise the point, VIP sent an image of a pixelated shelled creature repeatedly poking its head in and out of its shell.

“Caught?” Amara said, distracted by the surprisingly detailed shocked expression on the shelled creature’s face. “Caught in what-”

She turned just in time to see a sparkling cloud of metal and glass fragments hurtling towards her. Amara scrambled away in panic, her jetpacks thrusters at full power, violent red warning signs filling her helmet’s display. She reached the door and clawed her way inside as the last of the piercing detritus ricocheted off the metal wall beside her. Larger pieces of the storm struck the hull mere meters away, bursting through the thick metal plating which cascaded outwards from the exit points in long twisted strands. She watched it tear through a gigantic wall of loose bright red fabric that could have once been part of an officer’s quarters decoration. Within a second the chamber opposite her was torn to pieces, exploding in a cloud of metal and red mist that joined the momentum of the storm slowly spiralling ever downwards to the planet below. 

The scrap-storm passed. It would be a little while till it returned from its orbit, and Amara made careful note of it. She’d seen clouds like that shred scavengers in seconds. Their bodies all but liquidised by the millions of tiny edges slicing into them at unprecedented speeds. She had realised a while ago that space travel was mostly about not dwelling too long on the inexhaustible list of things trying to destroy you in awful ways.

Her wrist torch scanned over the scarred surface of the cruiser’s hull catching reflective exposed metal and sparking malfunctioning shield generators. Stairways and corridors had been sheared in two like a twisted cross-section straight out of a technical manual. The cone of her torch caught remnants of red warning signs marking the ruins. Painted chevrons were peeling away from where fires had torn through every deck, the highly oxygenated interior of the cruisers only fuelling the blaze more. She had to be getting close to her prize now. She tuned a tracker in her helmet display to the BFR’s energy signature and a countdown of metres appeared in the bottom right of the display. The countdown was accompanied by a pixelated orange image of a squat, long snouted mammal who performed a jittery dance alongside the descending numbers. However, the more she drifted the more erratic the dancing became and the more unreliable the countdown appeared.

100m, 256m, 730m, 117m. Amara sighed then whacked the side of her helmet with her torch. The dancing mammal vibrated and distorted and the countdown rattled through a range of figures then held steady.

238m, 235m, 234m. 

Repairs c-complete!  Typed VIP.

The core was a mess. The bulbous glass housing had shattered and the trident-shaped valves that powered the shields were drooping streams of viscous, sparkling material. The bell-shaped harmonic resonators were cracked, floating adrift in the room with thick cables trailing behind them. Fortunately, the box containing the BFR appeared to be in reasonable condition. Amara locked her boots on a nearby platform and began disconnecting the device. It was a little larger than a backpack, an oval black box with the initials of its namesake raised along the edge and several ports along each side. It seemed a small thing but without it, shields could not attune to the harmonic resonance needed to deflect reality itself from tearing you apart during a jump. A ship of this size would have several at every shield core nexus point but even just one in good condition would be plenty enough for her. But what if she got back to her ship and there was some internal damage to this unit?The whole trip would be a waste. She stared hard at the unit, squinting as if she could pierce through the layers of metal and plastic and see the wiring and circuits in perfect condition inside. Was it worth the risk to try and get another unit when she literally had what she had come for in hand? 

“Don’t be a greedy gal!” VIP had said to her once, and as much as it pained her to admit it was right. She sighed and knocked the broken lid back over the box, whirled about, and began retracing her path out of the room back to the blinking door light. She peered outside and checked her ship’s threat scanners. No subspace blips, no attempted entry and most importantly, no sign of The Carrion. This was her lucky day.

Like most scavengers, at her hip, Amara carried a compact self-sealed and pressurised projectile weapon in case she encountered the Carrion or just an opportunistic scrapper. Using leftover components and some scrap cabling, she’d managed to give the weapon a lethal outward appearance that belied how pathetic it actually was. Having only ever needed to fire it at a real target once, the universe did not need to know that it only held a single bullet and she didn’t carry spares. She started picturing herself opening doors to rooms full of armed Carrion, or floating helplessly down corridors as some alien creature barreled toward her with teeth bared, or…

Your hearts-a-thumpin’ like a kraxhound in heat! You good? VIP said. Amara let out a breath she didn’t remember drawing in. 

“I’m okay. Right as rain, thanks VIP.”

All gravy, b-baby. 

“Excuse me?” She snapped. A distant flash threw her image briefly across the curved surface of her helmet. The warped reflection squashed her features, made her seem small and childlike. This was what she was, wasn’t it? A child playing in the aftermath of a conflict between powers far greater than her own. She didn’t need the reminder, especially from VIP. 

“VIP, don’t call me that again. Please.” She said.

Roger that, lips are sealed. A pair of pixelated large, zipped lips appeared on her display, attempted to talk then faded away into the dark of space.

Amara’s ship loomed into view, at this distance the main body was a patchwork of field repairs and factory grey parts. A long fin protruded from the top of the ship, two wings jutted like arms from the flanks, and the cockpit hung like a long drooping nose. It was indistinguishable from the scrap metal surrounding it and fitted with enough heat scramblers, radio jammers and other such devices to make it just another ghost in the graveyard.

####

I’ll fire up the g-grill! VIP chimed.

Amara was back aboard her ship and in the middle of taking off her suit. With her helmet off, VIP’s words now appeared across a variety of screens around the ship’s interior. Beneath a pile of garbage in the corner of the room a burner clicked repeatedly but failed to do anything significant. 

Amara’s ship consisted of three rooms, the cockpit, living quarters and the largest space, the cargo bay. The living quarters was little more than a rectangle a few metres across and just tall enough for her to stand in her suit without brushing the ceiling. Signs that an attempt had been made to make this a more homely place were everywhere. Numerous faded cushions, rugs and throws were piled in the corners with tatty runners covering scraps of the bare metal floor. Covering the walls were dozens of screens, wind up clocks and strip lights, some working, others flickering and fizzing. Any space left on the walls was taken up by movie posters and scraps of flags she’d picked up and liked the look of. There were some gaps on the walls where she had recently taken a couple of posters down. She didn’t watch zombie movies anymore. Something about coming face to face with real bodies on a near daily basis put her off wanting to see that in her free time. Taking up the centre of the room was a raised platform with multiple mismatching buckets filled with scrap and some dirty food bowls. This could politely be referred to as a workbench but in truth it was more of a “Everything Bench”. The BFR sat, still in its casing on the table awaiting inspection.

Now fully out of her suit, the glaring disparity between its size and her own body was revealed. Too long in artificial gravity had wreaked havoc on her making her thin, gangly and in dire need of a shower that her ship didn’t have. Her eyes were dark and sunken, her copper skin was tight and dry, and her hair clung to her scalp like it was glued down. Amara had removed any mirrors from her ship some time ago. There wasn’t much that could be done about her current state so she had stopped trying. She ran a finger along her jutting collar bone, sighed and drowned herself in a threadbare sweater that reached down to her knees and began preparing dinner.  

With a rehydrated somewhat-warm protein gruel in her stomach, Amara stood at the Everything Bench to inspect her findings. She had opened the BFR’s casing exposing a kaleidoscopic mixture of cabling and circuitry. She breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing was broken. 

“What do you think, VIP? Worth it?” Amara asked out loud. She glanced at the wall, three screens displaying their answer. She noticed one of the screens had been installed upside down.

A m-mighty fine haul! Taurus station market lists a w-orking… Beeee-Eff-Arrgghh… to sell for t-thirteen t-thousand credits.

Was that enough? Amara wondered. VIP’s estimates were usually correct despite their information likely being outdated. In a drawer beneath the Everything Table, Amara pulled out a dimly lit holo-pad and punched in a set of coordinates onto the display. VIP dimmed the lights and a holographic orange orb of a planet drifted up from the pad and hung surrounded by three smaller moons. Amara smiled, her face lit by the holographic planet. Amara ran her fingers along the curvature of the planet, tracing the contours of its mountains and valleys. It was empty. No bases, stations, cities, or ports. She was building a home there. Away from everything. A list of costs floated next to the planet’s image. 

Oxygen Scrubbers – 2394c

Backup Generator – 3495c

Plasteel Roofing – 156c per square metre

A long sigh tumbled out of her. Finding the BFR was a huge step in the right direction, but there were always more wrecks, more scrap, more to buy and more to sell. She was well aware of her situation, what that made her. A parasite by definition and occupation. Her road home was paved by the bones of sunken leviathans. 

Her future in a whale fall.

She put the BFR on the floor and went to open up her navigation when a loud ping burst from the communications panel. 

Someone’s knocking. D-Do we answer? VIP asked.

Amara wheeled her chair over to the comms panel. The colour drained from her face as she read the hail.

++-How’s that BFR unit treating you?-++ 

Amara’s heart raced. How did they know she had a BFR?

“Oh crap.” She whispered. Rushing back over to the BFR she snatched it up and turned it over, her hands shaking. She threw it open, scanning every inch of it until… There it was. On the inside lid of the casing, hidden beneath a safety sticker was a tiny silver nodule the size of a poker chip. A tracker.

“Crap!” Amara shouted and thumped the nearest console. How had she not seen it? She should have been more careful, checked it more closely before taking it. Of course she couldn’t have been the first to find it. This was a classic Carrion tactic. Plant a tracker in the salvage then jump the scrapper that took it and take everything else they have. How had she fallen for this?

A dull purple light cracked into life in the centre console. Her scanners had detected several energy signals and space-bending ruptures near her position. Her ship’s drive gave a deep metallic growl in response as it began warming up in response to the intrusion. Everything about her craft was geared to escape when needed, the second it detected rogue entry it was already halfway to jumping away.  

B-BAD B-BOYS INBOUND! VIP wrote in all capitals across every screen in the ship.

Distortions of space began to flash into existence across the gulf of the wreckage. Flashes of blue, red, and white light appeared, lighting up the view like a violent storm.

“VIP, jump!” Amara yelled.

Jump where, miss b-bossy boots? 

VIP replied with an image of pixelated jumping shoes with wide and angry eyes that filled the screens of the cockpit.

“Anywhere! Run escape sequence Amara Alpha One, now!” She slid her chair into the console so hard it slammed into her chest knocking the wind out of her. Amara’s trembling fingers danced over the controls as the entire ship shuddered and groaned as engines roared into life.

Five. 

The countdown to jump began. The numbers appeared across the viewing window in tall, flickering letters. Carrion ships started to burst into reality like bees from a shattered hive. 

Four. 

Dozens of small black ships bristling with spines and  shuddered into existence in silent explosions as reality tried desperately to piece itself back together. The distant ships of the other scrappers began attempting their own escapes as the red glare of tractor beams ensnared the smaller ships while plumes of laser fire struck the engines of the larger craft.

Three. 

Two larger, angular vessels tore through the wreckage, forcing it aside and causing blooms of orange fire to flash across her viewport. 

++-Cool your engine, scrapper. We want that BFR and everything else you got intact-++ 

Wooo! It’s getting hot out there!

Two. 

Distant explosions silhouetted the scrappers’ ships as the Carrion cut down escaping ships and began boarding others. Her ship jolted as ballistic fire hammered into her shields. New warning signs lit up across the consoles. Shield readings, rapidly declining.

++-Is it worth it? Don’t be an idiot. Jettison your cargo or you’re toast-++ 

“Please. Please.” Amara whispered.

++-Take her down-++ 

One. 

Blast shields instantly surrounded the viewport, plunging the cockpit into complete darkness. Her jump drive pitched into a crescendo of distorted metallic screams. A warning bell sounded behind her; another began to blare out of sync from the cockpit. Amara was thrown forward by the force of the jump, then shoved violently back into her chair by the force of the translation. Her ship rattled violently, deep creaks and the tearing wails of metal bending and flexing echoed around the cockpit. The disgusting smell of rotten eggs and ozone rose from the engine room, flooding into the cockpit. The noise outside the ship railed against her, an awful wet sound of reality tearing and reforming as she forced her way through the very fabric of the universe. Her ship’s BFR sang discordantly above the noise, its wail becoming a haunting dirge. 

Lights and chaos. 

Sound and fury.

Silence.

####

The engines wound down in long, rattling sighs. The blast shields remained down. Amara opened and closed her eyes in sync with the blinking red emergency lights. Her chest was a steel box. Her blood was an unmoving river of ice. Breaths came in slow, heavy heaves. 

Phew looks like we’re in the c-clear! Who’s for a cup of tea? 

The words crawled across the blast shields, projected from the main console. The orange simian creature returned, cartwheeling after the words but keeping a cup and saucer precariously balanced on its rolling limbs.

A ping sounded, a pipe slithered from the cockpits roof, hissed and rattled for a few seconds but produced nothing. An empty cup emerged from behind a panel in her chair a few seconds later. The empty cup then immediately clattered to the ground and rolled under the console never to be seen again. 

Enjoy!