Detritus
10 ABY
Vast Empire Frontier - Mid Rim"Captain, confirmed no life signs aboard the vessel. How do you wish to proceed?"
Three weeks out of the repair yards after his last haul and now this.
Granted, if you were going to have a problem as a salvage hauler, this was definitely one to have. But he just
knew he was going to stress his frame on this job just like the last one.
Two weeks in drydock getting his support beams checked and hull recertified. Sixty-four crew members arrested for general misconduct while on shore leave. Two of those were off to hard labor for ganging up and shivving a fuge waiter who wasn't fetching their lum fast enough. One of
those was his Assistant Chief Engineer, and he'd had to promote a man and retrain him to handle the Besh shift duties - not to mention replace him with what he hoped was a diamond in the rough.
Then, of course, there was the fact that any day docked was a day he wasn't earning credits. To be fair, it was also another day he wasn't burning fuel, foodstores, or the occasional bit of ordnance. Plus, the last pay day was amazing.
Mostly? He was bored stiff sitting. He didn't care for people in general, and most spacers were either running from something or trying to commit suicide in vacuum without admitting it to anyone. Plus, in recent years, it always meant dealing with someone's military. And that meant everything from your high school jock with a gun to the most radicalized True Believers. The latter always seemed to be walking around with bandoliers of thermal detonators. Come to think of it, they were just more honest suicidal types.
Either way, you never found anyone normal in space. At least, anyone who chose to work in it. He included himself and his crew in that assessment.
Case in point? Their current contract, which they'd been on for almost 18 months now.
"Captain?" asked Raynal again.
Toolop Raynal was probably the best First Mate one could ask for. Tireless, considerate, yet with an eye for order, both physical and on paper. The
Aurora Marie was an old, old ship. He never bothered to rename it when he salvaged it, turning a perfectly good warship into a massive salvage tug. But Raynal kept the ship running more or less in military order. Toolop, it turned out, had once served on the
Aurorar and with his home destroyed, had fought like hell to crew the only other home he'd ever truly known.
Yep, an Alderaanian naval veteran serving a former Republic flag officer on a war frigate cum trash hauler doing gigs for the Empire.
You NEVER found anyone normal in space.
Because once he got drummed out of
his navy, Salomon Dantec just wanted a ship to command. And if he could take a junked ship from a dead world, strip the weapons systems down to meet BoSS regs, then turn her into a ship that would put credits in his pocket, then that's just what he'd do. And if the chipper yet haunted spacer that seemed to come with the ship just
had to fly her one more time, so be it.
"Well Toolop, why don't you remind me how we're 'supposed' to be doing this?" he finally answered.
His First Mate sneered at him. "
As you know," he began, "all licensed salvage teams are to immediately notify Fourteenth Fleet Command or any approved Imperial or New Republic agency in the vicinity.
They will come out to collect the relevant data, assess the status of the ship, weigh the salvage craft, then calculate our fee."
"Thank you. And what pitfalls come into this particular plan as we have experienced it?"
Toolop smiled. "First, once we file our position, we run the risk of every salvage team in the region knowing right where we are. Everyone has paid off someone at command. We can't fight them all off. So, someone
will take our claim. Two, we're wasting time waiting for whatever science team manages to make it out here. Three, a ship full of dead beings just frankly creeps out the crew."
Dantec stared out the viewscreen at the very, very huge sarcophagus that used to be a Dauntless cruiser. And not one of those conversions that the Rebels once used as battleships. A true-to-life luxury liner that became a refugee ship and then an incubator for who knows what kind of virus. Deep scans showed somewhere on the order of near five thousand corpses aboard the ship. According to her registry, she was the
Sacor Gem out of Saccoria. So, a mix of Humans, Drall, and Selonians for sure. Possibly some hard core prisoners, but probably just anyone who could afford a ticket. All dead, and judging by the concentrations of bodies, they didn't go peacefully.
The only reason they had even found the ship was that they had found a spread of escape pods where nothing else was and then tried to find the mother ship but following some logical paths. On the fourth try they'd gotten lucky. Very lucky. Aside from jettisoning the pods, the captain of the doomed ship had disabled the hyperdrive. It was still glowing half a system away, overloaded and toxic to the core. Personally, they'd have been better off it they'd overloaded it inside the ship, killing everyone instantly. It became kind of a procedure once the concept of a ship full of infected became a distinct possibility. But, the
Gem had met it's end late in 8 ABY so the mere idea of a rapidly mutating deadly contagion wasn't front page news on every world just yet.
So, the captain - or whoever took his place - had made it impossible for anyone to leave or to overtake the ship and take the whole damn mess somewhere populated. Which is why Dantec still had plenty of work to do.
Once the Empire and New Republic stopped butting heads with large capital ships after Thrawn's gambit, he was kind of out of work in the "kindly haul my heavily damaged ImpStar to the nearest shipyard" business. He and a million other respectable tug owners and masters of ad hoc craft such as his.
Then the Plague Wars began. Every ship spaceworthy with a place to lay down a sleeping mat became a missionary vessel, a hospital ship, a transport, an escape from the dozen forms of instant death each side was throwing at each other. If combined Imperial and New Republic statistics could be believed, only 85.6% of those vessels had ever been accounted for. Sure, some probably had bad astrogation data and had flown right into a gas giant. But not all of them.
No, the rest were like the
Sacor Gem, chock full of very, very dead people and carriers of diseases no one wanted to see unleashed on any population ever again.
So Dantec's job was now to find these ships, then tow them to the nearest sun.
If only it were so simple.
No one wanted to let a sample of a bioweapon into a faction's hands, so the first hurdle was to call it in. Then wait. If the news didn't leak - which it always did - you got a task force from at least one Imperial faction and another from the New Republic. Each would send a med team to verify the cause or causes of death of the majority. Take a few sample, verify the demise of all aboard, and sometimes enforce it, though those days seemed to be long gone.
Then someone would assess the value of the ship, ALWAYS undercutting it somehow. Then you'd haul the thing to the nearest local hot, shiny object while everyone watched, let it burn, then jump through a series of hoops that eventually got you paid for doing your duty to the greater good of the galaxy from a slush fund set up, administered, and pilfered by the best greedy, shady, and criminal accountants in both the Empire and New Republic.
You could almost make a living that way. As long as you knew a way around it.
And that meant Hutts.
It was shady business, no doubt. But it kept his ship in the stars and his crew fed. And this particular derelict looked like easy money.
"Gonna have to do this the hard way, I reckon," he muttered. He really didn't have a choice this time around. Bills needed paid and he just
knew he'd lose this big of a prize.
His bridge crew nodded as the realization of his plan came to them. "Plan B?" asked Raynal.
"Plan B," he replied. "Make the call and prep for our end of the deal." Raynal gave a small grimace and began the process.
Two teams launched from the
Aurora Marie. Both used fairly disposable sleds that they'd not take back aboard. The crew themselves were in disposable three hour evac suits they'd pitch when returning to ship. No one wanted to face any possibility of infection. Let that danger pass to someone else. The first team took samples of the ship's atmosphere. Sometimes in situations like these, the crew vented and let everyone suffocate. In this case there either was no time or thought given to it. A positive for Candorian Plague was reported. Fatal enough, but not to Hutts. Raynal gave their contacts a second confirmation holomessage.
The second team had the grisly task of orbiting the ship and disposing of any bodies that had either been dumped or had chosen suicide over full system failure. While they were now in essence violating both Imperial and Republic law, they maintained decontamination protocols where they could. Technically hard exposure in vacuum would kill any agents but it was good to be sure. Plus, it gave the crew something to do. Raynal kept his lips pursed through the whole process. Better to target them with the ship's guns and hope for the best than endanger the crew and lose a sled, but Dantec overruled him. Let the men set the plasma charges, poke them out to the bodies, and then light them up from a safe distance.
Meanwhile, he was doing all the paperwork of the discovery, including the coordinates of the dropped escape pods. He'd file the full report anonymously down the road so everyone had the details right, if not the complete picture. The part that would get folks paid, he'd hand over to the Hutts.
In essense, they claimed credit for the discovery, and made sure the authorities paid. He got a subcontract for the towing job - usually from the Empire in this region of space - and then hopefully a generous enough finder's fee from the Hutts. In return, the Hutts got to salvage what they could from the derelict, using Klatoonians or Nixto convicts that they'd off, decontaminate anything of use and call it a good day's looting. Then they'd fight for the salvage fee, doing far better than Dantec could by himself.
In this case, they'd easily get away with it. Dantec would tractor the overheated hyperdrive reactor core over to the liner and let the still extant radiation cook the ship to where it would appear no one had boarded it. Then he'd tow the whole mess to the local primary with everyone watching and be done with the job.
Maybe next time he'd play it legit. But bills had to be paid, and if the Hutts wanted to rob graves and pay him to look the other way, he'd do it on occasion. If the Imps paid on time and with more generosity, maybe he'd grow some more morals.
