The Whore from Space

Just... Shameless, Self-Serving Smut

People would call you a junker, though never directly to your face. Others would call you a scavenger, some would stoop to call you a rat. You prefer to call your profession something like astral archaeology, since you are in the business collecting (and selling) curiosities from an era long passed. Thousands of ships float, wholly abandoned, circuits fried and computers dead from the Great Purge. All of them are just begging to be boarded and stripped of everything that holds value.

You aren't a rescue ship, so typically, you don't go after any kind of distress signal unless there's a monetary award attached to the message. This one doesn't, though, before you dismiss it and continue on to a promising B-Class Destroyer, your eyes happen to glance down at the size and make of the ship in the message. You have to do a double take, placing your finger on the line to read it once more, slowly, just to make sure that you aren't seeing things, because goddamn.

What is it? And what exactly is it doing in the Kuiper belt?

You have seen a lot of different ships. Big boys. Little speeders. Military vessels made to swallow resistance like hard liquor, pieces of science ships dusted from accidents, but none of them, none of them, are anything like this. Huge, circular, and from the info your com unit picks up, it looks to be the size of a dwarf planet. Any radars bouncing around in the Kuiper would automatically gloss over it, you think, unless there's a human like you at the helm to visually confirm something is off. No Sol registration, it wasn't built here.

Without further thought, you copy and paste the coordinates into your ship's internal positioning system and fire up the engines. The Persephone might as well be an artifact itself, the ancient craft from the time before warp cores. Her nuclear engine barely keeps itself in one piece with every day that passes, you've long since forgotten the sheer amount of patchups you've conducted just to keep the sputtering thing going. But she's good, she's reliable, and she's literally the only thing you can afford, so you don't dare complain in case she decides to die just to spite you.

It takes a few hours to get there, especially since you have to slow down significantly to properly navigate through the asteroids, and by the time you lock onto the goliath's dock, you are practically shaking with anticipation. No one tries greeting you over the coms, which is another sign that this completely abandoned. The distress signal itself could easily be explained away by its position, it might have not been lined up for the emergency solar panels to properly receive power until just now.

You can't plug Persephone's systems to the new ship, for one thing, the parts entirely different, and for another, the goliath's internal systems are, as you expected, completely dead.

No, wait.

It looks like it has another set of systems, all separate from the primary circuits. That is usually only the case with military vessels, though often has to be requested right as the ship is being built. The secondaries are in the case of a weaponized pulse like the Great Purge, though most people didn't have the foresight to be equipped that way until way after the fact. The secondaries have to be manually activated, but the diagnostics read fine.

You slip on a portable breathing apparatus, double checking once more to be sure there are no ugly leaks in the hull letting in an ungodly amount of radiation, then open your airlock. First thing's first; turn off the distress signal, no need for it to scream this goldmine's position. That might prove to be a problem, though, because as previously observed, the ship is... huge. Though it's not what you would call compact, and that might make all the difference in your search. You have already tried downloading an interior blueprint, but the cheap-ass translator you have can only filter out speech, it's going to take the Persephone's computer at least an hour to take in all the necessary documents, sort them, and then run them through to your native tongue.