Salvage Rights: BlackSky Protocol Book 1
A last ditch effort, a final gasp for life. However will their emergency landing put them in more danger than they were before
The shriek of stressed metal was the only music they had left.
Inside the cramped cockpit of the Nomad-class scavenger ship Magpie, red alarm lights strobed across every surface, painting the space in rhythmic, pulsing shades. Selene could taste the metallic tang of electronics giving up the fight.
Her hands were steady on the control yoke, her knuckles white. Her gaze was locked on the impossible storm of wreckage that filled the forward viewport.
Every piece of debris was a killer. Meter-wide chunks of armor plating, the skeletal remains of ancient satellites, and a million smaller fragments all spun in a chaotic, lethal dance. The debris field was hungry today.
Just another Tuesday in the Kaliyon Expanse.
Her lips formed a thin, hard line. She nudged the lateral thrusters. The ship groaned, a protest from a machine pushed far beyond its limits. Their battered vessel slid between two colossal rotating girders. They cleared the spinning metal with barely a meter to spare on either side.
In this business, a meter was as good as a mile. Another day, another bill coming due.
“How are we doing back there, Kai?” Her voice was tight, but the practiced calm held. She didn’t need to turn around to picture the scene. It would be a mirror of the view in front of her. Controlled chaos, with an emphasis on the chaos.
“Doing fantastic!” Kai’s voice crackled through the internal comm. The sarcasm was so thick it could have been used to patch the hull. “The primary power coupling is holding together with prayer and spit. Life support is fluctuating like a politician’s morals, and I think the aft stabilizer just filed for divorce. Apart from that, we’re golden.”
He was crammed into the narrow access space behind her seat. His lanky frame was a mess of sharp angles, contorted around an open maintenance panel that was vomiting wires. A shower of hot yellow sparks rained down on his shoulder. He ignored them as he worked a multitool with the desperate precision of a surgeon.
He was trying to coax another few minutes of life from a system that was already dead. He was a miracle worker with failing tech, a true artist of the jury-rig.
Even miracles had their limits. This rust bucket was their home. It was also their only source of income. At the moment, it felt more like a coffin waiting for the right piece of high-velocity scrap to slam the lid shut.
Selene banked the ship hard to port. The frame screamed in protest as a shattered antenna array the size of a ground car tumbled past the space they had occupied a second before. Her flight suit pressed against her skin. It was a constant, uncomfortable reminder of the paper-thin defense between her and the hard vacuum.
We push our luck. We push the ship. And for what? The thought was a familiar, bitter companion. Rella Pax.
The name alone was enough to make the recycled air in the cockpit feel colder. Pax wasn’t the kind of creditor who sent polite, automated reminders. She sent hunters. Professionals with clean ships and high-grade munitions.
Running from hunters in a ship held together by hope and Kai’s spit was a fool’s game.
It was the only game they had.
“Any more good news for me?” Selene tracked a new swarm of smaller, faster debris that looked like a cloud of angry hornets.
“Funny you should ask.”
As Kai wrestled with a sparking power coupling, his gloved hand snagged a datapad clipped to the console beside him. Its cracked screen flickered to life. The display illuminated his panicked face in a hellish crimson glow.
A stark message dominated the screen.
PAX – FINAL NOTICE – 72 CYCLES.
He shoved the datapad away with a curse. The brief flash of red text was a more immediate threat than any piece of spinning metal. “Just the usual love notes from our biggest fan.” He yanked a fused wire free with a satisfying grunt of effort. “She’s getting impatient.”
“Pax is always impatient,” Selene countered, her focus absolute. She assessed a new vector, calculated a new path through the junk. “It’s her primary business model. Find a flat surface, Kai. Something, anything. We need to set this bird down before it comes apart around us.”
Seventy-two cycles. Three days.
That wasn’t enough time to scrounge for pocket change, let alone the kind of score that would get Rella Pax off their backs. Not even close.
It meant this run was it. This suicidal trip into the most treacherous debris field in the sector was their last shot. Their only shot.
No pressure.
“I’m trying.” Kai’s voice was strained with effort. “But the long-range scanner is a paperweight and the short-range is only picking up… Well, this.” He gestured vaguely at the tumbling chaos outside. The gesture was full of a mechanic’s disgust for a problem he couldn’t fix.
Then a shadow fell over the cockpit, like the universe had blinked.
Selene’s head snapped up as a gargantuan slab of twisted, skeletal hull plating spun directly into their path. It was a remnant of some long-dead dreadnought from a war nobody remembered. It blotted out the distant stars.
It was too big to dodge. It was too close to outrun. Instinct took over. There was no time for a plan.
Selene jammed the thrusters down. She threw every last ounce of the ship’s failing power into a desperate, bone-jarring dive. The Magpie screamed, a tortured howl of metal fatigue and overwhelmed engines. They were going to miss it. Barely. They were going to skim right under it.
The massive plate’s gravimetric wake caught them. It was an invisible hand that seized their ship and shook it like a child’s toy. A violent, shuddering tremor ripped through the cockpit. Alarms, already a deafening cacophony, escalated into a continuous, mind-numbing shriek.
A spiderweb of cracks erupted across the hull to Selene’s left.
“Hull breach!” The professional calm in Kai’s voice finally cracked, shattered by the sudden, real possibility of death. “It’s a slow leak, but…”
The slow leak became a roaring hiss.
The spiderweb exploded into a network of jagged fissures. The air in the cockpit began to mist as it was violently, inexorably sucked into the void.
The piercing shriek of the depressurization alarm was the sound of their final moments ticking away.
So this is it. Choked out by a rust bucket over a debt I never should have taken.
Selene wasted no time on regret. Regret was a luxury for people with a future. She whipped her head toward Kai. Her eyes locked with his. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. The question was plain, stripped of all bullshit.
Ready?
Kai was already fumbling with his flight helmet, his movements clumsy with adrenaline. He saw her look and gave a sharp nod. His face was a mask of stark terror, but his eyes were clear. He was with her.
He slammed his visor shut. The thud was a dull punctuation mark in the chaos. Only then did Selene turn back to survival. With one hand, she slammed the emergency seal for her helmet. The reinforced collar hissed as the magnetic seals engaged. The world outside plunged into isolated silence. All she could hear was the ragged, amplified sound of her breathing.
With her other hand, she fought the controls. She wrestled the dying ship through its death rattle. The control yoke felt loose in her grip, disconnected. The engines sputtered, their last gasps of power fading into nothing.
Through the viewport, she saw a platform.
It was a vast, impossibly large stretch of flat, scarred metal. An island of stability in the storm of scrap and death. It was ugly, pitted, and ancient. It was also their only chance.
It was their only port in this particular storm.
“Hold on!” Her voice was a muffled, distorted echo inside her helmet. She wasn’t sure if Kai could even hear her. It didn’t matter. He knew what was coming.
She aimed the ship’s nose like a spear. She used the last dregs of their forward momentum to guide them in. There was no finesse left. There was no power for a gentle, controlled landing. This was a controlled crash. It was a brutal exercise in hitting something solid without vaporizing on impact.
The proximity alarms blared a useless symphony of automated panic.
While Selene fought the ship, Kai moved with desperate, surprising grace. He launched himself from the maintenance panel, his body a blur of motion. He grabbed the emergency sealant patch kit from its wall mount.
He ripped it open and pulled out a strip of obnoxious yellow high-adhesion polymer. It was a beacon of hope in the dying cockpit.
The world outside the viewport was a blur of spinning metal. He ignored it. His world had shrunk to the fractured bulkhead and the hissing, expanding cracks.
The ship hit. The impact was a brutal, grinding crunch that seemed to last an eternity.
Metal shrieked, buckled, and tore. Selene was thrown forward so hard her vision spotted. Her harness dug deep into her shoulders, the force of the collision rattling her teeth in their sockets. One of the landing struts sheared off with a percussive bang that she felt through the deck plates.
The main console exploded in a brilliant shower of orange and blue sparks.
Then every light, every alarm, every sound, died at once.
They were plunged into a sudden, deafening silence. It was broken only by the ragged, harsh sound of their breathing inside their helmets.
Kai was already there. He slapped the yellow patch over the gash in the hull. He slammed his palm against the activator stud in its center.
Sealed inside her suit, Selene could only imagine the familiar, sharp chemical odor that filled the cockpit as the patch expanded and thick gray foam filled the cracks. It hardened, sealing them off from the hard vacuum of space. He slumped against the wall, his chest heaving with exertion.
They were alive and would be breathing their air again once the ship repressurized.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. The adrenaline drained away, leaving a hollow, trembling exhaustion in its place. The silence was oppressive.
Selene slowly, painfully, unclipped her harness. Her muscles screamed in protest, every part of her aching from the violent impact. Her neural implant flared with a phantom ache, cross-referencing the ship’s last diagnostic telemetry with a dozen damage control schematics in the span of a heartbeat.
The cockpit was a wreck. Dead screens stared back at her like vacant eyes. Smoking wires dangled from the ceiling. But it was intact, and it had air.
We’re alive. The realization was slow to dawn, filtering through the shock and the pain. We’re stranded and our ship is a pile of junk, but we’re alive.
It wasn’t much of a victory, but it was the only one on offer today.
She looked at Kai. He gave her a weak, shaky thumbs-up from his position on the floor.
She ran a gloved hand over her faceplate, the grit of dust and sweat a grounding sensation. They were immobile. Stranded on some forgotten piece of celestial garbage in the middle of nowhere. They had a debt that could get them killed and a ship that would never fly again.
Their problems, she realized with a sinking feeling, were just beginning.
The shuddering groan of tortured metal faded, replaced by the silence of the dead. It wrapped around them, a heavy blanket of isolation.
However, as the dust began to settle in the dead cockpit, a new sensation started.
It wasn’t a sound, not at first. It was a feeling. A low, deep, rhythmic thrum that vibrated up through the ship’s mangled landing gear, through the deck plating, and into the soles of their boots.
A steady, powerful pulse like a giant, sleeping heart.
Selene and Kai exchanged a look, their shared exhaustion instantly replaced by a new, creeping dread.
This platform wasn’t derelict at all.
Is this dead space station actually dead? What mysteries will they find when they step aboard? Find out on October 17th when Salvage Rights: BlackSky Protocol Book 1 is released. Until then head over to Amazon and pre-order it today.
