Begin a Session(18)Flashback reveals an aspect of another character, place, or faction
10 minutes ago, aboard the Silver Rose.
Bri carefully considered the state of the jump drive in the engine room. Thoughts of the last time she went salvaging in a small group played through her head unbidden. They left her to die. She thought they were her friends or at the very least had some professional respect, and they just stole their prize and left her to die.
Her grim expression showed on her face as the blue holo orb popped up on the workbench nearby. Bri jumped slightly at the intrusion.
*"Greetings Bri. Captain Gamble believes we have almost reached our destination. You may wish to join him in the cockpit to surveil the situation."
*Bri, shutting out the dark thoughts, plastered a smile on her face.
"Thanks Meg, I'll be right over."
*The holo-orb blinked out, and Bri's smile left her face just as quickly. She ran the equation in her head again. Gamble wasn't a bad guy. A bit ambitious, absolutely, but not a killer...right?
*She turned and took a few steps towards the cockpit, then stopped and turned on her heel, returning to the jump drive. She attached a small device to it, toggling it on and checking her wrist computer.
"There's nothing wrong with a little insurance..."
Bri muttered to herself as she turned back towards the cockpit, a smile back on her face as though it never left.
The airlock door opened with a low hiss. The Silver Rose was lined up with the large breach in the side of the derelict Kilby. As Gamble and Bri stepped out of the airlock, they were greeted by the gaping wound in the side of the ship. Gamble idly found himself imagining it like a great maw, ready to swallow them whole.
The voice of Bri over the communicator snapped him out of it.
"Here goes nothing. Watch your thrust on the way over, you don't want to hit anything."
With those parting words of advice, she began to maneuver towards the wreck.
Gamble didn't wait long to follow, carefully avoiding some debris on the way. Suddenly, right between those two ships Gamble realized that this was his first space walk. He glanced around at the view of space between the vessels, taking it all in. The minefield beyond the small safe zone they were in almost helped measure him just how infinite the sprawl of space beyond his chosen path was.
He felt very small all of a sudden.
"Gamble, you good?"
Bri had reached the derelict already and was looking back with some concern.
Shaking his head, Gamble replied apologetically
"Yeah, all good. Sorry, just realized this was my first spacewalk. It's not so different from using my maneuvering jets planetside, but the potential drop is a bit of a doozy."
Bri's amused chuckled came over the radio loud and clear.
"Sometimes I forget how new to all this you are. Come on, all the good stuff is inside."
Gamble resumed his transit between ships at her urging, missing the subtle expression of guilt on her face as she turned back towards the interior of the derelict.
Upon entering the derelict proper, the faded signage, floating clutter, and scattered furniture made it clear this was a medical facility. Gamble noted multiple prosthetics attached to workbenches around the room, a few more floated freely. Clearly this was where the clan riggers worked.
A caustic chemical of some kind had been spilled, burning holes in the bulkhead where it touched. A not insignificant collection of its droplets hung near the only door further into the station.
Face Danger(Wits)—6 vs 7|5
Gamble took a moment to consider his options. Looking around he saw that Bri was already scanning the room and following her scavengers intuition, which meant this first problem was his to deal with alone.
His initial thought was to try to vent some O2 and blow it away, but that struck him as wasteful and potentially dangerous so soon into their exploration of the Kilby. Eventually he settled on using a fabric curtain, after all, he didn't need to contain them long, just long enough to move them out of the way.
Bri noticed what he was doing shortly after he started.
"A bit unconventional, but I suppose it works. Just be absolutely certain you don't get any on you or miss some. Patching suits in a hurry is neither easy nor reliable."
Corralling the droplets away from the door was tricky, and took longer than expected, but in the end the smoking curtain was left to melt off in a corner far from their path of travel to or from the rest of the ship.
Momentum:10 → 9
Finally, they could move on.
"Bri, would you do the honors?"
Bri took up position next to the door, unspooling a power cable from her backpack generator. Plugging it in, she set to work powering the door and getting it to open. She offered some light commentary as she worked.
"We're lucky this is an internal door, the external ones tend to have access codes you need in order to open them from the outside. Those can take hours to crack on even small a clan ship. For an interior door it only takes this long."
Gamble could practically hear her smile over the radio as the door opened, granting them access to an unassuming darkened hallway. Gamble flicked on a light clipped to his maneuvering rig, casting long shadows as it illuminated the path ahead. The hall was utilitarian but not ugly. There were no exposed wires, but there also wasn't any wasted space; the accessway could fit two people snugly shoulder to shoulder but no more.
Spooling her cable back into her backpack, Bri gestured towards the interior of the ship.
"After you: part of my compensation is getting to see you brave a spooky derelict for the first time."
Gamble was decidedly not thrilled by the unwelcoming atmosphere ahead. Shooting Bri a look, he passed her and entered the ship proper. He snarked "I'm so glad I brought you along for your salvaging experience."
Bri just chuckled at his discomfort
"There's no teacher quite like firsthand experience and I won't be here to hold your hand forever. Think of this as a learning opportunity."
The pair came to a split in the hallway, according to the signage in one direction was the living quarters, in the other was marked as equipment storage. Gamble turned back to Bri and asked
"Storage might have what we want to work on the Silver Rose, but the living quarters could have either the crew manifest or some credentials for accessing more secure areas of the ship. Got a preference?"
50/50(53)No
Bri shook her head
"No, those both seem equally useful. Take your pick."
Gamble waffled a moment, then settled on storage. He set off, explaining his choice on the way
"The way I see it, there's a chance we'll find something else that could help us with the rest of the ship."
Bri nodded, agreeing with his logic.
"Minimizing backtracking is a good idea. We may be alone in this derelict but not many wrecks have such an effective barrier to competition. If you do this anywhere else you'll want to be watching both the clock and your back just as much as your oxygen."
Gamble took the advice in stride, shooting Bri a smile.
"Fair enough, I'll try to keep up."
The door to equipment storage opened with a grinding noise.
Inside the center of the room was dominated by long floor-to-ceiling shelves, each shelf bore dozens of crates behind a transparent panel. At the end of the row of shelves, an automated system was integrated to allow the remote retrieval of a crate, provided you knew the ID of the crate you wanted. The outer walls of the room were home to shipping container sized cargo crates with a lifts to allow access to higher crates.
Gamble let out a low whistle.
"Wow, that's a lotta equipment. There must have been hundreds of people on this ship at its peak."
Bri offered a little speculation
"Clan ships are some of the biggest out there, this ship and its crew would have been sorely missed after it went dark. Weird we haven't seen more bodies already, but I'm guessing that's what's waiting for us in the living quarters."
Gamble grimaced at the thought of all those bodies waiting in the cold dark confines of the ship.
"Lets save that unpleasantness for later and distract ourselves with finding something useful, shall we?"
Bri approached the retrieval system, giving it a look over.
"Bad news, there's no external power hookup for this thing. We aren't going to be able to get much from this without getting the ship's power back online, if we can even do such a thing."
Gamble sighed.
"Yeah, that seems about right. Guess we'll have to come back when we have an idea what we're looking for in particular."
He eyed the still sealed door on the other side of the room, but ultimately decided against it.
"Alright, lets check the living quarters. Maybe we can find a map to engineering or something."
The living quarters door was already partially jammed open, presumably due to some kind of malfunction.
Crouching down to get through the gap, Gamble was struck by the sight of what almost felt like a planetside settlement's street crammed inside of a ship. The main path through the middle on the hab was open with the occasional bench flanking it but on either side of the path monolithic steel block style buildings were built into the walls. Far above him, a huge black screen covered the ceiling. In its prime Gamble imagined this was likely a nice communal space with a simulated earth-like sky, but at the moment it felt more like a grim mockery of the communities it wanted to emulate.
Their footsteps echoed slightly in the large space as they looked around with flashlights.