“Warning, ten minutes until arrival at the SS Deep Space Transport Craft Lucid.”

  Jett Knight eased back the throttle of his Corvette transport as the giant city-sized transport with a gaping hole in its side floated listlessly through space. Jett’s ship was the equivalent of the ancient shipping trucks of Earth with a spacious trailer to load a few valuable items, a tier two exosuit to do the heavy lifting, and a cryotube for sub-light travel, which he did most of the time to save money.

  “Thank you, Angie,” he said to his on-board AI assistant, though he didn’t have the money yet to truly give her the intelligence side of AI. Jett mostly used her to monitor, run preset programs, and wake him from cryo.

  Jett rubbed his hands together, “Alright, let’s see what we are working with. Angie, run a quick scan.”

  “My programming requires that I remind you this ship is in quarantine, and it is strongly recommended you do not board.”

  “Got it, dismiss notification. Every ship worth salvaging is in quarantine; they just say that so the companies can buy time to get their own salvaging teams.”

  “As part of the safety protocols, I must remind you about the last quarantine where the research vessel transporting specimens-”

  “Yeah, yeah. Acknowledged. That was a research vessel; this is just a regular sub-light transport ship. No alien buggers to try to eat me on this vessel. Now tell me the good, what does the scan say?”

  “The ship shows no signs of life. The ship is holding structural integrity. The main engine is down, but reserve power is still active.”

  “That’s great!” Reserve power meant the ship AI operating at reduced capacity, somewhere around Angie’s level. Structural integrity meant he could land and would likely have many goodies for him to harvest, and reserve power also meant he didn’t need to cut his way in.

  “Set the auto landing sequence, I’m going to don the exosuit. If we make it quick, we might be able to get two runs out of this before the shipping company gets its act together.”

  Jett unbuckled himself and floated to the back of the crew area, turning the hatch lock to the storage section. Inside sat a space suit covered in metal webbing. One of the few items he splurged on, but it was worth every penny. A tier one was little more than an exoskeleton that doubled the user’s strength.

  A tier two increased the operator's strength by four, included a propulsion system, emergency oxygen, and he upgraded it with a few add-ons. He bought a wielder, a fission cutter, a rudimentary scanner, and even a remote shoulder turret attachment after too many run-ins with creatures who liked to make floating remains of space ships their new nest.

  He donned his space suit with half a day’s oxygen and then put on the exosuit right as he felt the deep thump of the ship landing.

  “The ship has landed. Landing bay has breathable oxygen.”

  “Ok, let’s save the suit’s oxygen until we dive deeper. The asteroid that hit this ship looks like it went pretty deep. It's lucky the whole ship didn’t go critical.”

  Jett paused as he stretched his limbs. “Time to pay the bills, play ‘salvaging playlist’.”

  Guitar began playing through his suit, pumping him up for the hours of salvaging, as he had the suit begin scanning for anything expensive. The landing bay was sparse, but he still found a few items that would fetch a few hundred credits.

  “Alright, Angie, let’s start digging deeper. Start running the door cracker scripts. Let’s see what they were transporting.”

  If the ship were active, he would need to use his suit’s cutter, but with the AI on low power, the automated hacking scripts Angie had were enough. He started scanning corridors or shipping pods, looking for anything valuable. Most of the items were bulk goods.

  Anything truly valuable, like high-tier exosuits, would be using light-speed freighters. Despite being bulk items, Jett found salvaging quite lucrative. He had made close to eight hundred thousand credits since he started, though most of it he had spent on his mother’s medical bills before she passed, or buying better salvaging supplies.

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  He grabbed low-tier drones, basic exosuit mods, and replacement parts for ships as he went container to container. He even found a few parts to give Angie more memory so he could upload more programs for her to run. After three hours of salvaging fifty thousand credits' worth of material and only filling up a fifth of his container, he was feeling good.

  As he trekked to the next area, Angie came over his comm, “Warning area you are trying to access has lost atmospheric compression.”

  “Thanks, Angie.”

  The next part was going to be tricky. Venting to space could be quite violent, and most ships weren’t built to vent their internal hulling. Instead, they had bulkheads that would fall to prevent any venting.

  “Alright, I’m headed back to the ship. Let’s see if there is anything valuable in this asteroid. If it has any rare metals, maybe we can make a few more creds.”

  Jett walked back to the ship, got in the pilot seat, and gently lifted off. Angie could do a lot, but he wasn’t going to risk her accidentally running into the freighter and scratching his Corvette. He gently controlled the thrusts to angle him out of the landing bay to the giant hole, a fourth of a mile wide. He turned over control to Angie to hold the ship in place as he donned his exosuit, tethered himself, and had the storage container vent.

  He kicked off, allowing himself to gently float as he examined the wreckage.

  “Ok, Angie, set the ship to scan every ten seconds.” An overlay appeared on his visor as the ship’s scan created a three-dimensional model of the hole.

  “I don’t see any asteroid metal or rock here.”

  “Scans do not indicate any rare metals within the proximity of your tether.”

  He pulled on his strap, pulling himself back into the cargo bay.

  “Ok, reverse at point zero one two percent thrust for ten seconds, then maintain position.”

  The ship started moving toward the dark hole that ate the beams of the spotlights so he couldn’t see anything. He felt his pulse rise as he moved into the depths, with flashes of light from sparking wires and twisted metal that looked like claws ready to shred him.

  Jett had the ship continue reversing and scanning as they moved deeper.

  “I have detected foreign matter in the ship. Providing location on overlay now.”

  His eyes flicked to the projection showing the asteroid taking a hard right, and it was a fourth of a mile in.

  “That’s weird, I don’t see anything that would cause the asteroid to change course. Start warming up the sub-light drive. I want to be ready to go at the first sign of trouble.”

  He reeled out the line as he made his way through the giant hole in the hull. He came upon a large opening where the core used to be, and inside was a massive black rock. Jett’s mouth hung open at the sleek black surface. He walked around trying to figure out what to cut when he saw a group of smaller oval stones, two feet wide and three feet tall. He went to the base of one and gently applied his cutting, trying to keep as much of the rock as he could.

  His servos whined, and he freed one piece. The sound of the rock being freed was silenced by the lack of atmosphere, but he could feel it in the vibrations of the hull when it came free. With careful movements, he trekked back through the hull and had the wench pull him into the cargo bay.

  He secured the rock by wrapping it in numerous layers of foam and cable.

  “Warning! Movement detected in the hull.”

  Jett looked back and saw the hull shaking under the force of whatever was causing it.

  “Close the bay, start thruster acceleration. Let’s get out of here.”

  The doors closed, and the storage bay started undergoing atmospheric compression as he exited his exosuit. He sealed off the bay and got into the pilot chair.

  Then he felt the ship shake violently.

  “Angie start sub-light thrusters. I want to be gone now.”

  “Warning! Sub-light thrusters are not responding.”

  Jett cursed as he flicked the cameras to view the damage. His cameras showed… nothing. The thrusters were just gone. As he flicked through his cameras, he found the back third of his ship was just… gone. In one camera, he saw movement.

  “Engage the sun drive now.”

  “Warning! The sun drive does not-”

  “Override! Now!”

  Pressure enveloped his entire body as he burned fifty thousand credits of fuel to power the sun drive, traveling at the speed of light in an unknown direction. In the back of his mind, he cringed as he burned up half his haul on the emergency escape. Worst of all, he would need to burn the rest to make another jump to a station. With his sub-light thrusters down, he was out of choices.

  Once the pressure relented he decided to get a sense of the damage before jumping to the station.

  “Angie, go ahead and plot a course to the nearest salvage station. Don’t engage the sunlight drive yet.”

  He checked his cameras cycling through and found, indeed, something had ripped off the back third of his ship. He was fortunate that whatever it was had crushed the back, sealing the storage area, and his sunlight drive was located between the storage and pilot section.

  He desperately wanted to see what that rock was, but his ship didn’t contain the scanners for more than a basic material analysis. He would need a deep scanner, which he could rent at the salvage station.

  So as the ship slowly rotated to aim for the nearest station, he cycled through camera recordings. The rear cameras were long gone, but he still had the recordings he could watch.

  He saw a murky black shape emerge from the opening as his ship began accelerating away. The black shape launched forward. His grainy camera feed saw twin red orbs in the black shape, then he saw what looked like giant wings spread out. As the black shape neared, he saw a reflection off the light of his thrusters, what looked like giant teeth.

  He shivered as he thought about what the creature could be. There were plenty of creatures that lived in the abyss of space, but most of them kept to the places between galaxies. It was strange to find something so large so close to a system.

  “Alright, Angie, take us to port.”

  He felt the pressure return and winced as he knew another fifty thousand credits were going down the drain.