Salvage Rights

The Essen was in three pieces when Nika Sorel found her.

The largest section was the stern, reactor to aft thrusters, still mostly intact. It tumbled slowly through the debris field in Graveyard Reach, catching the faint light of the brown dwarf every nine seconds as it rotated. The bow section had separated cleanly along the ventral seam where the hull had split, and it drifted four hundred meters away, trailing cables and conduit like torn muscle. The middle section was gone. Vaporized, or scattered into fragments too small to register on the salvage scanner.

"USF Essen, Destroyer class," Nika read from the registry lookup on her console. "Commissioned 2146. Last assignment: Third Fleet, Task Force Saratoga." She noted the hull designation and logged the position. "Reactor status?"

"Cold," said Poul from the sensor station. He was chewing on a protein bar and reading the thermal scan with the same expression he used for grocery lists. "Been dead at least seventy-two hours. No residual output. Safe to approach."

Nika brought the Marten alongside the stern section. The Marten was a converted cargo hauler, sixty meters long, with a reinforced hull, two cutting arms, a cargo bay that could hold eight hundred cubic meters of salvage, and a transponder that identified her as a licensed independent recovery vessel operating under Frontier Commerce Authority regulations. The license cost Nika twelve thousand supply credits a year and entitled her to recover derelict material from any Gravity Well not currently designated as an active combat zone. Graveyard Reach had been redesignated forty-eight hours ago, after the USF fleet withdrew and the ORI consolidated their position around the central cluster.

The battle had been five days ago. Nika had waited three days for the redesignation, then jumped in from the staging Gravity Well where she kept the Marten between jobs. She was not the first salvage operator on site. Two other ships were already working the debris field when she arrived, their cutting arms visible as bright sparks against the dark. One was a Frontier Commerce vessel she recognized, the Kolya, run by a crew out of Barnard's who specialized in reactor components. The other she didn't know.

"Weapons array on the dorsal section," Poul said. "Two turret housings, looks like one is intact."

"Mark it."

An intact turret housing from a USF destroyer was worth between eight hundred and twelve hundred supply credits depending on the buyer. The ORI paid more for USF hardware because they liked to study the targeting systems. The NEC paid less but paid faster. The USF would buy back their own equipment at a premium if it still had classified firmware in the control modules, which it usually did, because the self-destruct protocols on weapons systems failed about thirty percent of the time. Nika had learned this in her first year of salvage work and had built a business model around it.

She suited up and took the cutter out to the dorsal section. The turret housing was bolted to a mounting plate that had partially separated from the hull. Four bolts, standard USF naval specification, two of them sheared by whatever had killed the ship. Nika cut the remaining two with the plasma torch, attached a tow cable, and pulled the housing back to the Marten's cargo bay. Forty minutes of work. Nine hundred credits, give or take.

While she worked, Poul scanned the rest of the debris field and catalogued what he found. The remains of a frigate, too damaged to identify, its hull peeled open like a can. Scattered armor plating from what the spectral analysis said was an ORI cruiser. A sensor array, USF manufacture, floating free with its mounting bracket still attached. Two escape pods, both empty, both with their transponders still pinging. Someone had been picked up. Or someone had climbed in, activated the beacon, and died waiting. Nika logged the pod positions and transmitted them to the Frontier Commerce registry in case anyone was still looking.

The real find was deeper in the field, close to the central asteroid cluster where the heaviest fighting had happened.

"Module housing," Poul said. "Big one. Looks like it came off a Mobile Shipyard."

Nika looked at the scan. A rectangular structure, six meters by four by three, with mounting brackets on three sides and a power coupling on the fourth. The housing was dented and scorched but structurally intact. Inside, if the module was still seated, would be whatever system the Shipyard had been running in that bay. Production accelerator, fleet coordination array, supply processing unit. Any one of those was worth more than everything else in the cargo bay combined.

"Can you read the module type?"

"Negative. Housing is closed. We'd have to cut it open or bring it back whole."

"Bring it back whole."

They spent two hours maneuvering the module housing into the Marten's cargo bay. It barely fit. Poul had to reposition three turret housings and a stack of armor plates to make room, and even then the cargo bay doors closed with less than ten centimeters of clearance. The module housing sat in the bay like a coffin, dark and heavy and full of someone's investment.

Nika thought about who had installed that module. Some logistics officer on a Mobile Shipyard, probably ORI given the location, allocating supply credits to fill a bay that would boost production or extend sensor range or improve fleet coordination. They had built their ship around these modules, bay by bay, decision by decision. Each module represented a choice: this capability instead of that one, this advantage at the cost of that flexibility. Weeks of supply income locked into hardware bolted into a ship that was supposed to be the most important asset in the fleet.

Now it was in Nika's cargo bay, and she was going to sell it to whoever offered the best price.

She ran the numbers while Poul guided the Marten through the rest of the debris field on a final sweep. The turret housings would sell quickly. The sensor array needed cleaning but was functional. The armor plates were bulk material, low margin, but they added up. The module housing was the variable. If the module inside was intact and operational, it could fetch fifteen to twenty thousand credits. If it was damaged, she'd sell the housing for scrap and the components for parts.

The Kolya passed them on a parallel course, its cargo bay visibly full. The pilot, a woman named Dessie that Nika had shared drinks with twice at the commerce station in Mercator Line, waved through the cockpit window. Professional courtesy. There was enough wreckage for everyone.

That was the thing about the Outer Line now. There was always enough wreckage.

Poul finished the sweep and logged the remaining items they couldn't carry: hull sections too large for the Marten's cutting arms, a reactor housing that would need a specialized crew to handle safely, and the bow section of the Essen, which contained the bridge and the combat information center and the personal effects of however many crew had been aboard when the ship broke apart. Nika didn't salvage bridges. She had done it once, in her first year, and the things she'd found bolted to consoles and tucked into storage compartments had stayed with her longer than the credits had.

She set course for the commerce station in Mercator Line, where the buyers waited and the market board updated in real time with prices for every component class the war produced. The Jump Drive charged. The Marten shuddered as the field engaged.

Behind them, Graveyard Reach kept turning, the debris field spreading slowly outward as the objects cooled and drifted and waited for the next salvage crew or the next battle, whichever came first.

Poul finished his protein bar and started on another one.

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