January 2939
Osiris System
Gedion reached his right arm across his visor to shield his eyes from the explosion. Quietly as he could, he worked his jet pack, maneuvering himself into a crack in the closest asteroid.
"I hope they fall for it," Gedion thought to himself as he placed the remote back onto his belt clip.
He had a hot tip that there was Kr'Thak ship wreckage in this asteroid field, but the pirates had tracked his Aurora ever since he entered the Osiris system. He knew he stood no chance with two cutlasses in hot pursuit, so he gunned it for the asteroid field. Once inside, he slipped out the hatch and remote piloted the Aurora back out, a little invention he had cooked up in his last years in the UEE.
He had had second thoughts about flying into Osiris, a mostly lawless system, alien relic hunting no less, with just a stock Aurora, but it was all he could afford from his UEE savings, and the thought of asking his wealthy but distant father for a loan made him cringe.
Debris from Gedion's wasted ship slowly drifted past him into the asteroid field. He waited for twenty more minutes just to be safe. The two Cutlasses never came. He breathed a sigh of relief and tried to wipe the sweat from his brow with his forearm, instead awkward scraping his flight suit across his visor. He twitched and squirmed uncomfortably. He hated spacewalking.
Just then, a large, slowly rotating asteroid dipped in just such as way as to allow the light from the system's binary star to shine past him and into the asteroid field. The white ray pierced through the foggy debris of the asteroid field like a field surgeon's laser through flesh. Gedion's eyes tracked it until it passed along a formation and glimmered in an unusual way.
"Bingo" He said aloud.
Gedion pressed off of the asteroid at his back and fired his jet pack a few short bursts, propelling him towards the glimmer. The light from the sun was now blocked again, but Gedion held the position of the reflection firmly in his mind.
After a few minutes of drifting, he began to note small chunks of metal he was floating past, obviously machined. The chunks grew in size as he progress, and when he reached objects about his size, he fired his jet pack again and came to a halt.
Pressing a button on his left wrist control panel, the light on this chest sputtered and lit up, a narrow beam straight in front of him. Tweaking a few more controls, the beam widened to illuminate a wide swath directly in front of him.
It was the wreckage a ship, no doubt. And it definitely wasn't Human, Xi'an, or Banu, from what he can tell. And in this part of the 'verse, that meant you were out of options.
"Jackpot!" Gedion exclaimed with excitement. "It's gotta be Kr'Thak!" He eased forward on his jet pack controls, maneuvering to survey the wreckage.
Large chunks of dark grey metal floated around him, spinning softly, the inertia from the explosion that cast them into the void still acting on them. Gedion noted the sharpness of the angles, the hard edges of the lines. There was something... cruel looking about the shapes floating before him. Much of it was twisted by the blast that destroyed the ship, so it was difficult to know how much was design and how much was aftermath.
For a moment Gedion lost himself in a daydream of getting most of the debris into his cargo hold and starting to try to put the pieces together. Then of course, by now the debris from his own ship had caught up with him, and was starting to mix with the alien wreckage, pulling him out of his fantasy. He couldn’t salvage anything now, but he could still explore it.
Pressing further into the wreckage, a blinking blue light caught his eye. It was
coming from a larger chunk, floating behind several other sizable pieces of dark grey, twisted metal. He jetted over to the first large piece of debris, rode its rotation around to the other side, pushed off, and caught the next chunk. Repeating this three times, Gedion found himself staring at what could only be the cockpit of the ship, torn off of the ship in the blast and open from the back side.
Suddenly, two large floodlights lit the area. Gedion clung to the nose of the cockpit and ducked underneath. Looking up, a Cutlass passed overheard slowly, visually scanning the debris field.