Two hundred units of Industrial Mode in cargo shelves rattled, riding the vibrations in the wall. There wouldn't be enough to trade to get him where he needed to be. It wasn't that they were cheap, he just knew he'd never find a buyer. The best he could do was sell them individually, marked down of course. There were maybe another three days until the ship had to dock, even then it would take an ambitious technician to attempt to fix the drives so he didn't leak an entire week of fuel every time he docked. It was only by avoiding docking until he was out of fluid that he managed to avoid fines for spilling over the the docks.
The walls thrummed from the movements the engines made. The inner workings twisted and the modular outer pieces swivelled and punched the air so fast they made threatening whooshing sounds when you got too close.
The bunk clicked and creaked under the weight of the Captain as he shifted to raise a knee into a more comfortable position. The cabin had been much bigger in the past but he'd made a few changes since acquiring the beautiful Rusalka. She had been a cargo shuttle, disposed of before her time but salvaged by her new owner to swim into the darkest depths of the galaxy.
The cabin had been shrunk to make room for a massive addition to the engine room, many other areas were also reduced or even removed all together to fit in many upgrades that would be better suited to a battleship. One at a time all of the frills and extra space were traded away or swapped out to make room for much larger equipment. At one time he even had some semblance of a crew but a man makes a point of flexibility when it comes surviving the unknown.
Perhaps it was paranoia, maybe it was just eccentricity. Whatever cost a man can afford for piece of mind should be paid, his fathers words tickled him. A man of many fine sayings, also a man with many debtors. A paranoid man.
He thumbed the pad, turning the page to a list scrawled on yellow lined paper, tiny doodle man included. Another to-do list. It seemed like there was no end to the things he needed to get done. More charts needed to be picked up, the files he had were ridiculously out of date and there was no way he was turning back for a refund; the seller was either gone or beaten to death for selling worthless wares.
The wall of the cabin was covered in sticky-notes and scribbles of white ink on the black marble interior. He really had trashed the décor in the name of brutal efficiency. There was little room in here for computers and he only had one tablet that had broken months ago and now served as an expensive food plate.
In the dull lamplight he read the first line written on the wall, the single destination on his list that would finally let him end this stupid journey, at least he hoped so, the rest of the destinations all had a purpose. He'd added to the list as he came across problems such as the incorrect scale and wrong turns many charts inevitably held. Not to mention the few short cuts that ended up causing damage and putting his ship off-course.
The Captain turned back to the trade list and put the pad down on the compartment just behind his pillow. Reaching into his shirt pocket he pulled out a matchbox and slid out the cardboard drawer to reveal a tiny white pill with blue tips and two blue lines running parallel across its length. He looked at it with furrowed brows, tilting the box to watch it roll along the insides. This could fund at least four months of travel if he could get a good price and a buyer worth his time. The poor bastards this side of the galaxy wouldn't be likely to have ever seen something of this strength. An S-class drug that makes changes on a genetic level. The tiny signature on the skin of the pill claimed the handiwork, Permatech. With their A-class drugs the effects would last years, until the body started replacing its cells with new ones, slowly lessening the effects until you were just another face in the crowd. S-class drugs became a part of the system and would replicate rather than degenerate, making you stronger with each passing day and giving you the ego of a Rockstar with it.
This drug was expensive and very rare in this end of space. So were buyers.
The hum of the engines on his wall had cut out and a little led bulb above his head started flashing green. He pulled himself up, knocking scraps of recycled paper and shortened pencils all over the floor. His bare feet touched the icy black floor and left ghostly footprints as he left the room, bumping into the wall as did. The steps up to the converted bridge were narrow and tended to trap a lot of heat as the vents were now used for other things. As he reached the top he'd already started to sweat and his thick black hair was getting itchy. Backing against the side and clutching a dull green jacket and cigarettes in one hand he scratched furiously for a moment before twisting and fumbling for the pack of thin white sticks as they left his grip and their container to scatter generously down the stairs.
This was never a bridge, just a large cockpit really. At one time it was a little bigger and could have about five people sharing the space but that was all over once the crew were taken out of the picture, only one other man ever seemed to come back to the ship every now and then and even so they would merely take turns in here. The room had been outfitted with many more systems to compensate for the lack of a crew and many of the upgrades to the inherent equipment were actually older and so needed a little more space to house.
One of the screens jumped to life as he sat down in front of it, smaller ones also popped up with little models of asteroids and bits of debris. The larger screen however showed a handful of images of a huge ship torn to pieces. His brows furrowed and his cigarette tilted down ninety degrees. It reminded him of something, the thick red lines running parallel down the hull gave away it's identity. The Firebird, it's massive drives striking out behind it like a fist-full of plumage and it's nose shaped like the beak of an eagle, now lay in two, it's innards spilled out for all to see.
There would likely be enough spoils left over to live like a prince for a few weeks, even fix up the drives. He pulled on the leathery brown suit and clipped on the helmet. A green LED patch lit up first as the helmet filled with a slightly smoky gas that twisted about in its fish-bowl prison. The wall next to the suit rack held two small pistols, metallic and purple in colour. As the captain filled his hands with them a second LED patch below his green life patch lit itself accordingly, glowing purple. He placed the two side-arms at his waist and moved toward the hatch. The dull orange of the door was scratched and chipped from years of abuse and neglect, the paint had never chipped but the scratched held fragments of items that were never secured properly or absent-mindedly left out as people came and went via the hatch.
One heave of the lever popped the hatch open, nothing moved in the airlock. The captain was one of the few who treated his ship right, did everything with a little love. As he stooped under the door a glitchy tag on his back lit up. Roman, it read.
The scene was quiet, small scraps tumbled about, knocking into other bits and pieces but otherwise mostly calm. He had a fairly good idea of what happened here and how long ago. If it were recent the firebird would still have a lot of momentum and the debris wouldn't have settled so soon. Glancing north of the ship he took in the trail of breadcrumbs that were it's innards. Too far out in the woods, no one's coming.
Pushing off the space junk was a little fun; Roman needed to stretch his legs every now and then. In his haste he knocked his ship with a bit of frozen dirt from one of the firebird's disembowelled gardens. He knew this because after the twenty seconds it took for it to float to it's target it thumped hard against the hatch and set off a siren in his helmet. Being alone in space makes you a little twitchy and Roman tended to act first rather than think; quick fingers had let off half a dozen shots of indigo fire that pounded on the hatch and spun the spaceman into the mess of debris and raised the alarms in his goldfish bowl of a helmet.
Fucking sirens, he thought, or at least tried to think but megaphone interrupted any ideas other than tearing off the glass sphere and breathing relief. He flung the apparatus forthwith and took in the silence of space. Fucking antique, he thought. Under the drop in pressure and temperature a micro-hexagonal mesh raised itself on his skin. A pattern within a pattern; tiny six-sided lines reflected like little glass scales. The hair on his head was already brittle. It had taken months to get it back to that length, a personal triumph. When he first realised the failings of the spectral mesh (all sales are final) he'd invested in a space suit. Unfortunately the many failings of cheap suits are a constant surprise.
The captain ran gloved hands through a frozen mane, brushing it off like a black diamonds.
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