Breaking the Axion

Chapter One

Kal pushed her goggles up onto her forehead and then past into her hairline, comfortably out of the way. The ship had just crashed, flagged as having been already claimed by Harper, but she didn't think that having a quick peek before he got his crew in to completely strip her bare was going to hurt anyone. Tugging the scarf away from her face, she moved carefully through what had been the engineering section, eyes peeled for anything that might be worth something for her to grab first.

For a ship that was marked up as small-time salvage, it had a lot of data cores on board. Those, at least, would fetch a decent enough price once they had been wiped and cleaned up. There were more parts here she could strip, too, and stuff into her backpack and carrier so she could get out before she was caught poaching on other junker's territory. But for the most part it was just a ship filled with the same unremarkable - but good for a quick, cheap sale - items that all the ships were. What Kal couldn't understand was why Harper had chosen this cutter, targeted this one as it breached the atmosphere. He'd laid a claim on it over the ScavNet before it had even hit the ground. Usually, he had better taste.

She huffed out a breath, poked an empty toolbox with her shoe. Its contents had been vomited everywhere during the crash. She bent down and scooped up a couple of items that she had, but had begun to succumb to wear and tear. Besides, a girl could never have too many wire strippers.

Still, she thought, as she picked her way across the access corridor, it's not a total waste. There was plenty of things that she could make a quick credit on, so that was better than nothing. Still, she wasn't entirely sure that it was worth the risk of nearly getting caught trespassing.

"Fuck," she grumbled, closing her dark eyes for a moment and just breathing. Around her, even though it was still and bereft of power, the ship hummed. It sang to her. It all did. She supposed it was only natural after having lived on T'Lesh for all of her life. She'd been crawling around in broken hunks of metal looking for parts to salvage since she was a toddler. And she was good at it, too. But then again so was everyone else on this godsforsaken planet at the ass-end of the Helix. If you weren't good at it, you didn't eat. If you weren't good at it, you didn't survive.

Gently kicking a set of bolts that had popped loose from the inside of the hull, she listened to the echo as they skittered away. The access corridor led to the bridge, or what passed for the bridge on a retrofitted cutter anyway. Kal pressed her hand against the rough steel wall as she used it to help her balance while she took a large step over fallen crates that had spilt their cargo over the walkway. She wasn't interested in fabrics, not really, though she did eye up a swath of dark grey material that looked like it might be warm.

She could hear the hammering of the rain on the outside of the ship, battering the metal with unforgiving drops that seemed to fall continuously from the sky slowly, inch by inch, flooding the land. Science wasn't something she understood all too well, she was bitterly reminded, but she was pretty sure with how much rain fell from the sky it had to go somewhere, encroaching on the land seemed as good a place as any for it to go. Water was still officially rationed, so it wasn't filling up reserves or... whatever. She often wondered if it was rationed purely as a control mechanism or if it really was as expensive as it was made out to be and near impossible to filter it from the natural state it was when it fell from the sky to be drinkable. Regardless, trying to take fabric out in this rain with only her hover-skiff wasn't going to keep it in a sellable, or even usable, condition.

Pushing a stray strand of dark hair out of her eyes and behind a delicately pointed ear, Kal picked her way over the debris and continued towards the bridge. As she did, she couldn't help but notice that there was only one missing escape pod. Did that mean that just one person had managed to get off the ship? Even on a cutter of this size, intended purely for salvage and reclamation, it would need more than just two crew. Poking her head into one of the escape pods, Kal saw that there was only a comfortable amount of room for one person. Maybe two. Even then, the second person would have ended up intimately acquainted with the first after a trip through space pressed together so tightly. So if there were no bodies - she certainly hadn't seen any - and only one escape pod, something about this wasn't right.