No Flag, No Country

The wreck was a League destroyer, or had been.

Jossa Pell could tell from the hull plating before the Vael's sensors finished their sweep. ORI ships used a heavier alloy than anyone else, thicker by a third, with a reddish oxidation pattern where the thermal coating burned away. This one was dead. No power signature, no transponder, no reactor output. A gash ran from the engine section to amidships along the port side, the edges melted glassy by sustained beam fire. Someone had held a weapon on that hull for a long time.

"Four days, maybe five," she said, reading the residual thermal profile on her screen. "Recent."

Tomek brought the Vael in slow, nosing through the asteroid field with the caution of a pilot who'd learned to distrust open space. The Gravity Well was unclaimed. No faction infrastructure, no Supply Nodes, no Listening Posts sweeping the perimeter. Just rock and dust and the corpse of a brown dwarf at the center, too small to warm anything, large enough to anchor a Gravity Well that the survey databases listed as Splinter Field, no strategic value.

The survey databases were wrong about that, in Jossa's experience. Every Gravity Well had value to someone.

The Vael was a ship in the way that a coat stitched from three other coats is a coat. Her forward section had come from a Federation cargo shuttle decommissioned six years ago. The midsection was from a mining tender so old that the hull stamps had worn illegible. The engine assembly was Compact surplus, acquired through channels that nobody on the crew discussed in specific terms, and it ran hot because the cooling system had been designed for a reactor half the size of the one they'd installed. Jossa had welded, bolted, and in two places literally wired these sections together over the course of a year on a station that didn't exist on any map. The Vael flew. She wasn't pretty or fast or quiet, but she flew, and out past the patrol routes that was the only credential that mattered.

Tomek matched velocity with the wreck at thirty meters distance. Close enough to see the details. The destroyer's name was still legible on the stern section: Kowalski. Hull number partially obscured by blast damage. The gash along the port side had vented the interior compartments, and through the opening Jossa could see the layered structure of an ORI warship, the thick outer plating, the honeycomb reinforcement, the secondary hull beneath. Two layers of armor. The beam that killed her had gone through both.

"Caps, we're in position," Tomek called over internal comms.

Haruki's voice came back flat and measured, the way it always did. "How's she look?"

"Dead," Jossa said. "But intact enough to be worth our time."

She was already pulling up the salvage checklist on her tablet. Not a real checklist, just a priority list she'd written herself years ago and updated after every job. What to look for first, what to grab, what to leave. Weight limits for the Vael's hold. Time estimates for extraction. The math of what they needed versus what was worth the risk of staying in one place too long.

Top of the list, always: weapon hardpoints.

A League destroyer carried four turret mounts, two dorsal, two ventral. Laser emitters with independent tracking systems, each one bolted to the hull through a standardized mounting plate that every faction used because Nakamura's original shipbuilding specs had become the industry default. If the turrets survived, they were worth more than everything else on the ship combined. A working hardpoint could be pulled, refitted, and installed on another hull in about six hours with the right tools. Jossa had the right tools. She'd been doing this long enough.

She suited up in the Vael's cramped airlock with Davi and Fen, the two crew members who'd done enough EVA salvage work to be trusted with a cutting torch near a pressurized compartment. The suits were mismatched. Jossa's was a military model, Federation surplus, the helmet visor scratched from use but the seals still good. Davi's was industrial, designed for asteroid mining, heavier than necessary but built to take impacts. Fen wore something that had been two different suits before someone combined the torso of one with the limbs of another.

They crossed to the wreck on tethers.

The dorsal turrets were gone. Jossa saw that immediately and felt the familiar dip in her chest. The blast that had opened the port side had taken the forward dorsal mount with it. The aft one was still attached but cracked through the mounting plate, the emitter housing shattered. Useless.

She pulled herself along the hull toward the ventral side, boots magnetized to the plating, the brown dwarf's faint glow casting long shadows across the destroyer's underside. The ventral turrets were intact. Both of them. The forward mount had scoring on the housing from a near miss, but the emitter lens was whole, the tracking servo responded when she tested it with a hand light, and the power coupling was undamaged.

"Two ventral hardpoints, both viable," she said into the comm. "Forward one's cosmetic damage only. Aft is clean."

"Pull them," Haruki said.

Davi was already setting up the cutting frame. The standardized mounting plate meant you could unbolt a turret from any ship and bolt it to any other ship, provided you had the adapter cables for the power feed, which Jossa carried four sets of in a bag clipped to her suit. The cutting frame went around the base of the mount. Twelve bolts, each one requiring a powered driver that Davi handled with the slow precision of someone who'd learned that rushing a salvage job was how you cracked a component you couldn't replace.

While Davi worked on the forward turret, Jossa and Fen went inside.

The breach in the port hull was wide enough to enter without cutting. The interior was vacuum, everything loose long since drifted or blown out. Jossa moved through the darkened corridors by helmet light, reading the ship the way she'd been taught to read ships twelve years ago, before her colony on Luyten's Star had folded and the company transport had left without half the workers it had brought. She'd spent eight months on a station near the system's edge after that. Then a Riftborn ship had docked, needed repairs, and offered her a ride. That was six years ago. She hadn't been back to civilized space since.

The Kowalski's shield generator was in the engineering section, a sealed unit the size of a storage crate, bolted to the deck behind the reactor housing. The reactor itself was slag. Whatever had killed the destroyer had hit the reactor last, probably after the crew was already dead or evacuated. But the shield generator was upstream of the damage, protected by a blast partition that had done its job. Jossa ran a diagnostic with a portable tester she'd built from parts of three other testers. The generator responded. Charge capacity at sixty percent of factory spec, the degradation of a unit that had been through too many combat cycles, but sixty percent of League spec was better than what the Vael currently carried, which was a Compact model running at maybe forty.

"Shield gen is viable," she told Fen. "Help me unbolt it."

It took them ninety minutes to pull the two turret hardpoints and the shield generator. They also grabbed a crate of fuel rods from a storage bay that the blast hadn't reached, three undamaged sensor modules from the forward mast, and a box of atmospheric filters that the Vael burned through faster than any other consumable. They left the engines. Too heavy, too integrated, and the Vael's hold was already near capacity.

Back aboard, Jossa stored the components in the hold and ran a manifest. Two laser turret hardpoints, one shield generator, eighteen fuel rods, three sensor modules, forty atmospheric filters. Enough to keep the Vael operational for three months, or to trade half of it for food and water at one of the stations that didn't ask where your cargo came from.

Tomek was already warming the engines when she reached the cockpit. Haruki wanted to be out of the Gravity Well before anyone noticed the Vael's thermal signature against the cold background of the asteroids. Unclaimed Gravity Wells didn't stay empty forever. The factions were spreading, claiming territory, building Supply Nodes on every asteroid worth the investment. In a month, maybe two, Gravity Well Splinter Field would have someone's flag on it.

The Vael would be somewhere else by then. Somewhere past the next Gravity Well, past the patrols, past the places on the map where the names ended and the empty space began.

Jossa sat in the hold with her back against the crate of fuel rods and pulled out the portable tester. The shield generator sat across from her, strapped to the deck, its housing scuffed and dented and worth more to her than anything the League or the Federation would ever know. She powered on the tester and began the full diagnostic, checking each subsystem line by line while the Vael's engines pushed them toward the rim of the Gravity Well and the dark beyond.

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