Chapter 4 - 4 A Lost Treasure

Chapter 4: Chapter 4 A Lost Treasure"Fifty-two meters long, thirty-one meters wide, and nine meters high."

Now that he had uncovered the majority of the ship, Avery's sensors were finally able to give him some readings.

Still, so far it had only come back with the ship's dimensions.

"It's on the larger size for what's classified as a small vessel. But I wonder what something like this is doing all the way out here. My sensors may be far from the best, but they should definitely be able to get more than simply its dimensions." Avery groaned.

What he really wanted to know was if the ship had power, and more importantly, an active defense system. Getting blasted into space debris because he got a bit too careless and greedy was not on his list of things to do today.

After a couple of minutes, he did finally find some useful information on the crashed vessel.

Every ship had a unique signature it used for identification. If one did not, or it was using cloaking technology to hide its signature, it became an immediate target for every Alliance Officer and mercenary that came across its path. Nobody hid their ship's signature unless they were up to no good.

"SCXD-011."

Avery read off the main component of the ship's signature, which was followed by a far longer series of numbers.

He knew that the SC stood for Storren Corp. which was one of the top three manufactures of high-end vessels within the Dramid Alliance where he resided.

"Don't know what the XD means, though. There aren't any records of such a vessel on my computer."

As a salvager, Avery had quite a bit of data on different types of ships downloaded and ready for easy access. To be successful at his job, he needed to be able to separate the trash from the treasure. Parts of certain ships were more valuable than others, and his cargo hold was not large enough to just pick up whatever he came across.

Still, he did not have even the smallest mention of the ship embedded in the comet below him.

"It's almost certainly a military ship. No one else is going to go out of their way for such powerful plating that also disrupts sensors." Avery said, assured of his assertion.

He had seen plenty of different vessels before, and this one looked most similar to cutting edge military fighters.

The fact that he had no data on it, though, meant it was likely either considered a state secret, or an experimental ship that was not in service yet.

"Well, whatever it is, it technically belongs to me."

Salvaging laws in the Alliance became quite lax around seventy years ago. The draconian statutes of the past had seen all lost tech still belonging to its former owner. This made salvaging lost goods in space practically worthless. In the best case you would receive a small reward, or at worst, accused of being a thief.

This led to only outlaws collecting the operational equipment left floating in space. Bolstering their power and numbers.


Eventually the Alliance realized how big the problem was growing and created new legislation to give whoever discovered salvage the rights to its contents. At the very least this lowered the amount of quality technology entering black markets, and returned it to circulation within the Alliance

Nevertheless, even though the ship below Avery belonged to him by right, it did not matter if he could not move it.

"The comet may not be moving particularly fast at only eight kilometers a second, but it's still moved fairly far from the nearest station. Towing it would take months and open me up me up to all sorts of dangers." Avery murmured, trying to think of a solution.

He would be unable to use his ships Hyperdrive to travel faster than light while pulling along another ship. There was also the matter of his dwindling resources. Forgot a couple of months, he needed to dock somewhere to refuel in the next few days or he would run out of pretty much everything necessary to keep himself and his ship running.

In the end, he figured that his best option was to free it from the comet and tow it to some out of the way location that he could come back to.

Having decided on his plan of action, Avery trained his pulse laser back on the ice and blasted it until the SCXD-011 was free.

Once it began floating away into space, he launched cables out from his own ship that adhered to the other vessel and began dragging it away.

Within around a half dozen hours, he had brought it to a nearby asteroid field.

"I suppose I should see if I can get inside. There might be some valuables that I can sell to earn enough funds to rent a vessel that can bring this thing back to civilization."

After retracting the cables, Avery lined up the two ship's airlocks and began the docking process.

There was a bit of shaking as the two vessels connected, but everything was seemingly going well.

"Okay, now how do I get it open?" Avery said, staring at the closed hatch of the ship he had found.

Normally, the door would have opened automatically after a successful docking, but the lost vessel appeared to not have any power.

"Come on, there has to be a way to open it manually in case of emergencies. It's a standard feature on most ships in the Alliance."

Avery was starting to feel frustrated when he finally located the panel that allowed him to access the door's manual controls.

Unfortunately, the mechanism was iced over, and in his frustration, he pulled out his laser pistol and fired it on its lowest setting.

Thankfully, he did not cause any damage to the controls, though, his actions had been pretty reckless.

While mentally berating himself for his hastiness and carelessness, Avery grabbed ahold of the lever that would release the lock on the hatch and pulled with all of his might.

A moment later the doors opened slightly with a loud whooshing sound from the change in air pressure.

Naturally, Avery was still wearing his environmental suit, since it was likely that the was no breathable atmosphere inside the SCXD-011.

'Just one last obstacle.' Avery thought, walking up to the airlock's inner door and removing the panel that would give him access to the door's manual functions.

Luckily this one was not frozen and opened with ease.

However, the moment he opened the door, Avery was in for a serious scare.

Floating on the other side was a corpse that looked to be staring right at him.

An unseemly yelped erupted from Avery's mouth, and he hastily jumped back and pulled out his laser pistol.

Of course, the body showed no reaction at all. Whoever they had once been, they were long gone now.

"F*ck! I should have expected this. If the ship crashed but stayed intact, or course the crew would still be inside." Avery grumbled.

Usually, he dealt with wreckage that was far from pristine condition. In the case of ships, the person or people that had been onboard were always long gone for one reason or another.

This time, however, what he had found was in pristine condition. There was nowhere for the deceased crew to go. Their bodies had been locked inside this ship like it was a coffin.

"One, two, three..."

Avery counted the number of people and found that there were seven of them in total.

Except as he looked more closely at them, it became apparent that this ship's crash was not due to an accident.

"They've all been shot but one of them." Avery mumbled, his face pale.

Everyone of the ship's crew members save for a single female officer had a hole in their bodies from a laser pistol set to lethal.

With a little investigation, Avery thought he had a good idea of what had happened.

One of the individuals was wearing an environmental suit and his gun was still gripped in his hand. Most likely he had shut down the ships power and attempted to kill everyone else onboard.

Yet, it seemed that the man had failed. The single crewmember without any signs of external injury likely shot him before he could get to her. Sadly, with the ship's systems disabled, she probably suffocated before she could get the power back on.

"I wonder what could have led to this?"

Avery could smell some sort of conspiracy surrounding this ship's circumstances. It was almost enough for him to want to abandon his find all together and forget that he had ever seen it.

However, he could not pass up on the score of a lifetime, no matter if it brought some trouble his way.

"Let's see if I can't get the power back on."

Continuing to roam around the ship's cockpit with a bunch of dead bodies floating around was not something that Avery particularly wanted to do. If he could restore the ship's systems, hopefully he could move them all to another room. Out of sight out of mind as the saying went.

There was a possibility that some automatic defense system abord the ship would detain him, but he found that unlikely. If such a thing existed, it should have stopped the fighting among the crew that so obviously occurred.

"This looks to be the main control. And this should start up the generator."

Pressing a couple of keys, Avery hoped to restore life to the long dormant ship he had found.

Of course, it could have run out of power, but if that was the case there was nothing Avery could do.

Fortunately, the ship's systems started up again, one after the other.

First the artificial gravity and life support functions were restored, and the main computer began a routine diagnostic to assess the vessel's condition after being shut down for so long.