The Bone Picker's Last Run

• Chapter 1 Ghosts of the Boneyard
• Chapter 2 Scrappers' Luck
• Chapter 3 The Leviathan's Ribs
• Chapter 4 Sealed in Lead
• Chapter 5 The Black Box
• Chapter 6 Playback Zero
• Chapter 7 A Fabricated Triumph
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Dark
• Chapter 9 Shadow of the Vanguard
• Chapter 10 The Dead Flagship
• Chapter 11 Static and Sabotage
• Chapter 12 Scuttled Truths
• Chapter 13 Boarding Signals
• Chapter 14 Fractured Loyalties
• Chapter 15 The Collector's Price
• Chapter 16 Echoes of the First Strike
• Chapter 17 Into the Debris Field
• Chapter 18 Traitor's Latitude
• Chapter 19 Ambush at Sector Nine
• Chapter 20 Iron Lies, Golden Myths
• Chapter 21 The Victor's Executioner
• Chapter 22 Burning Cold
• Chapter 23 The Broadcast Array
• Chapter 24 Battle of the Fleet Graveyard
• Chapter 25 Unmaking History
• Chapter 26 The Last Run Home

The void of Sector Nine did not bleed, but it certainly remembered how to kill.

Silas Vance leaned forward over the scratched viewport of The Bone Picker, his calloused thumbs tracing the edge of the copper navigation console. Outside, three thousand dead warships floated in an endless, frozen ballet. They were tangled in twisted girders, shattered hull plates, and clouds of crystallized coolant that glinted like diamonds under the distant, pale light of a dying white dwarf.

Twelve years had passed since the Battle of the Sunken Ridge. Twelve years since the Coalition’s Fifth Fleet had met the Vanguard armada head-on in what every textbook across the inner systems called the ultimate triumph of freedom over tyranny. To the historians on the capital worlds, Sector Nine was a sacred shrine of sacrifice and unbroken resolve. To Silas, it was a floating junkyard overflowing with high-grade titanium, unexploded torpedo ordnance, and dead men’s secrets.

"Sensor sweep is clear for another two klicks, Captain," Toren said from the tactical pit to Silas’s left. The young sensor operator wiped a smear of forehead grease off his glass display. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with the deep purple bruised skin of a guy who hadn't slept in thirty hours. "No Coalition patrol signatures. Just the usual background radiation and about five million tons of high-grade scrap iron."

"Keep your eyes on the long-range arrays, Toren," Silas replied, his voice a gravelly rasp seasoned by thirty years of recycled atmosphere and cheap shipboard tobacco. "The Coalition navy doesn't like people digging through their war memorial. If a frigate pops out of the drift corridor, we won't get a warning ticket. We'll get an incinerator beam."

From down in the lower maintenance bay, the rhythmic clanging of a sledgehammer echoed up through the floorboards, followed immediately by a sharp curse that could only belong to Mica. Moments later, the heavy iron hatch to the bridge clattered open. Mica stepped into the cabin, wiping her soot-stained hands on an oil-soaked rag. Her dark hair was tied back in a messy knot held together by a spare brass cotter pin.

"The starboard maneuvering thruster is spitting copper again, Silas," she said, leaning against the pilot’s headrest. "I patched the manifold with some surplus seal-line from the last freighter we stripped, but if you push her past four-tenths pulse, the whole housing is going to blow off and fly into space without us."

"Four-tenths is plenty," Silas said without turning round. "We’re not racing through this mess, Mica. We’re sneaking. How’s the main winch holding up?"

"The winch is fine," she grunted, tossing her rag onto the chart table. "It’s the rest of this bucket I’m worried about. The Bone Picker was old when my grandfather was in diapers. We’re flying a soup can held together by spit, prayer, and my personal hatred of open vacuum."

"That soup can has kept you fed for five years," Silas reminded her gently.

"It’s kept us broke for five years," Mica countered, though there was no real venom in her voice. She looked out the main viewscreen, her expression softening into the quiet awe that even veteran scrappers couldn't entirely hide when they looked upon the Graveyard. "Gods above. Look at them all."

The battle had been a meatgrinder. Across fifty square light-seconds of open space, two massive armadas had locked horns and annihilated one another. Entire super-dreadnoughts lay cracked open like walnuts, their interior decks exposed to the vacuum like exposed ribcages. Debris fields of jagged armor plating floated alongside intact fighter hulls, severed engine nacelles, and frozen supply containers.

It was a scrapper’s dream and an pilot's absolute nightmare. One wrong turn into a drift field could slide a ship straight into an unexploded plasma mine or the jagged, razor-sharp edge of a ruptured bulkhead.

"See any blue-ribbon targets?" Briggs asked, hauling his hulking frame up the access ladder behind Mica. Briggs was the crew’s heavy cutter, a man built like a cargo loader, possessing broad shoulders, a shaved head, and hands so scarred by plasma burns they looked like tree bark. He was carrying his tether harness over one shoulder, the heavy steel carabiners clanking against his chest.

"Plenty of iron, not enough gold," Silas said, pulling up the visual feed on his central monitor. He tapped a greasy finger against the display, highlighting a cluster of dark, scorched hulks drifting near the outer edge of a debris swirl. "Those escort frigates out on the perimeter have already been picked clean by the first-wave scavengers. Radiators stripped, wiring harnesses pulled, reactor cores salvaged. If we want something that’ll pay for a full tank of fuel and three months of dock rent, we have to go deeper."

"Deeper means the core," Toren murmured, his hands hesitating over his sensor controls. He looked up at Silas with genuine concern. "Captain, the core is where the big guns fought. The radiation density in there is off the charts. Magnetic shifts, micro-meteoroid swarms, unstable fuel cells... plus, that’s where the high-orbit security buoys are clustered."

"Security buoys don’t work," Briggs spat, leaning his hip against the bulkhead. "The navy put those signal beacons out ten years ago to scare off small-time junkers. Half of 'em got their batteries fried by solar flare activity five years back. The rest are pinging empty space."

"They ping loud enough to call in an automated cutter if we set off a perimeter trip," Toren shot back. "I’m just saying, the center of the field is where the Iron Sovereign went down."

The bridge went quiet for a beat. Even the mechanical hum of the air recyclers seemed to drop an octave.

The Iron Sovereign.

Every kid in the Hegemony knew the story. It was the flagship of Admiral Vane, the legendary hero of the Coalition who had held the line against the Vanguard's iron vanguard. According to the state broadcasts, when the Vanguard broke through the outer lines, Admiral Vane had driven the Sovereign straight into the enemy flagship, taking down the rogue fleet’s command vessel in a blinding flash of nuclear glory. Vane had died, his crew had burned, and the war had ended in a decisive, heroic victory for order and state security.

The site of the Sovereign’s final stand was officially declared a Class-One War Grave. Trespassing within fifty leagues of its resting place carried a penalty of twenty years in a penal colony—if the patrol cutters didn't just target your engine block on sight.

"We aren't touching the Sovereign," Silas said calmly, breaking the silence. "I’m not looking to haul home a government symbol, Toren. Too much heat. Too many eyes. But the heavy cruisers that burned out around it? The ones that didn't get blasted into powder? They’re untouched. The first-wave scrappers were too terrified of the navy patrols to push into the core. That leaves the sweet meat right in the middle of the bone."

"Sweet meat," Mica scoffed, though her eyes were already scanning the structural readouts on her secondary monitor. "You mean forty-thousand-ton hulks of structural steel that haven't vent-stabilized yet. One slipped weld while I'm cutting and the whole compartment implodes on me."

"That’s why I pay you twenty percent of the take," Silas said with a faint smile.

"Eighteen," she corrected. "And you owe me a new set of cutting nozzles."

"Keep us from dying today and I’ll buy you a golden torch," Silas replied. He reached for the thruster stick, disengaging the primary drift lock. The Bone Picker shuddered as its cold-gas maneuvering jets fired, nudging the clumsy salvage vessel off its holding trajectory and angling its blunt nose toward the shadow of the dead fleet.

The ship glided past the shattered corpse of a light patrol vessel. Its registry numbers were burned away by atmospheric re-entry scars, its bridge canopy blown out into a starburst of shattered quartz. Silas watched it slide past the viewport, barely ten meters away. Inside the dark, airless bridge of the wreck, he could see the frozen forms of console seats, torn wiring dangling like seaweed from the ceiling, and the pale, frosted smear of an old emergency suit strapped into the commander's chair.

It was always like this when you entered the Boneyard. The quiet hit you first. In deep space, silence was normal, but here, the silence felt heavy. It felt like walking into a cathedral after the roof had been blown off. Thousands of lives had ended in this tiny patch of the cosmos in the span of six short hours. The fear, the heat, the radio screams—it had all evaporated into the freezing vacuum, leaving behind only cold metal and long memories.

"Got a structural hit," Toren announced, breaking Silas’s train of thought. The young tech pointed at a blue pulse blooming on his long-range radar. "Mass readouts suggest a heavy cruiser, Vanguard manufacture. Looks like an Aegis-class carrier hull. She’s jammed up against the stern of a Coalition line battleship."

"Is she stable?" Silas asked, throttling back the main drive to a crawling drift.

"She’s caught in a gravitational lock with the battleship," Toren said, tapping his keys to process the orbital telemetry. "They hit each other at high velocity during the final fleet push. Locked teeth and froze. The Vanguard carrier’s main armor belt looks intact from here. Hull integrity is estimated at sixty percent."

Mica leaned over Toren's shoulder, checking the density scans. Her eyes widened slightly. "Look at the core housing readings on that carrier. The reactor didn't detonate. It scuttled. Which means the primary power distribution channels were sealed before the crew evacuated."

"Or before they died," Briggs muttered.

"Either way," Mica said, turning to Silas with a sharp, hungry grin, "that means the auxiliary transformer vaults are still sealed. Those vaults are packed with refined palladium and heavy copper coils. If we can get inside that hull and snip those coils, we can clear fifty thousand credits at the black market yards on Port Delilah."

Fifty thousand credits. That wasn't just gas money and dock rent. That was a full engine overhaul for The Bone Picker, a fresh set of radiation seals, and real food for six months—not the compressed soy-paste they’d been eating out of tin cans for the last three weeks.

Silas looked out into the blackness. The target mass was visible now, a massive, dark silhouette towering over the surrounding debris like an ancient sea monster. The Vanguard carrier was pinned beneath the colossal steel boot of a Coalition battleship, their hulls torn open and welded together by the sheer kinetic force of their collision. The metal was jagged, white with frost, and completely dark.

"Take us in, Silas," Mica said softly. "That’s the score."

"Hold your horses," Silas said, though his pulse had quickened. He brought The Bone Picker around in a wide, sweeping arc, keeping their belly thrusters pointed away from the target so the heat signatures wouldn't bounce off any surviving optical arrays in the area. "Toren, keep that passive scanner running. If a mouse sneezes within three astronomical units, I want to know about it."

"Passive only, Captain," Toren confirmed. "No active pings. We’re as dark as the dead."

"Briggs, get the plasma torches prepped and load the heavy cables into the airlock," Silas commanded, standing up from his pilot’s chair and pulling his worn leather jacket over his shoulders. "Mica, you’re with me on the first breach. We go in, check the atmospheric pressure—if there is any left—and locate the transformer vault. If the deck is soft or the structure is shifting, we pull out immediately. No risks."

"We never take risks," Briggs cracked with a dry laugh, slapping his harness buckled against his hip. "We just fly an unregistered scrap tug into a military kill-zone to steal government wire."

"It’s not stealing," Silas said, grabbing his magnetic helmet off the wall rack and checking the pressure seal around the neck ring. "The government left it here. We’re just recycling."

He turned back to the viewscreen one last time before stepping down into the suit locker. The massive, tangled shadows of the two dead warships loomed larger now, filling the entire viewport. Beyond them, lost in the thickest, darkest cloud of radioactive dust at the center of the graveyard, sat the massive, broken spine of the Iron Sovereign.

Silas stared at the distant shadow of the legendary flagship for a long second. Something about the way the wreckage lay—the angle of its descent, the weird pattern of the debris trailing behind it—had always bothered him back when he served his time in the merchant marine. The official map of the battle showed the Sovereign charging straight forward into the enemy line. But looking at the wreckage from here, with his own eyes, the math just didn't seem to line up. The ship looked like it had been running away from the main engagement when its engines tore apart, not diving into the thick of it.

Silas shook his head, clearing his thoughts. Historical math didn't pay the bills. Titanium did.

"Mica, grab the heavy torch," Silas called out, snapping his helmet visor closed with a clean, airtight click. "Let’s go pick some bones."

The airlock of The Bone Picker cycle-vented with a long, wet hiss that tasted of stale oil and copper dust. Silas checked the wrist-gauge of his suit for the third time. The seal was green, but the pressure needle jittered like a dying moth. Everything on this boat was twenty years past its scrap-by date, including the suits.

Beside him, Mica double-checked the oxygen feed on her harness. Her visor was down, tinted gold against the harsh, unfiltered glint of the white dwarf behind them. Through the thick glass, her face was set in that quiet, sharp concentration Silas had trusted for a half-decade. She didn't look like a girl who had grown up scavenging rust-towns on the fringe; she looked like a surgeon preparing to slice open a corpse.

"Pressures matched," Briggs’s voice crackled through the short-range comms. He was standing on the narrow catwalk inside the airlock, bracing himself against the frame while holding a heavy magnetic winch line. "The nose of the Picker is locked onto the carrier’s port loading bay. You've got half a meter of void between the airlock lip and the ship’s skin. Watch your feet. If you slip, the gravity lock between those two warship hulls will grind you into paste."

Silas didn't need the warning. He pulled his safety tether from his belt, clipped it to the guide rail above his head, and pushed the manual cycling lever.

The outer airlock door slid back with a groaning screech. Vacuum took over instantly. Sound evaporated, replaced by the deep, internal thrum of Silas’s own breath echoing inside his helmet and the faint, rhythm-less ticking of his suit’s life-support pumps.

Beyond the threshold, the world was gray, black, and broken.

The Vanguard carrier—the Aegis-class heavy hull Toren had flagged—loomed over them like an inverted cliff face. Its dark composite armor plates were scorched white where heat-rays had blasted away the outer thermal coating. Great rents in the plating exposed the skeleton beneath: thick, ribbed girders of cast titanium, crushed together like cracked ribs. Pinned against its stern was the prow of a Coalition line battleship, its massive Ram-bow buried six meters deep into the carrier's engine assembly. The collision had welded the two ships together in a frozen tangle of twisted iron.

"Looks like a high-speed broadside," Mica said over the suit-to-suit channel. Her voice was flat, masked by the dry static of the local radiation. "The battleship rammed her to stop her from turning her broadside cannons loose on the transport fleet. Old-school tactical doctrine."

"Old-school means dead men," Silas said. He stepped across the narrow gap between the airlock seal and the wrecked carrier, his boots striking the frozen armor plate with a dull, vibration-only thud. The magnetic locks in his soles engaged instantly, snapping him down against the deck. "Briggs, feed out the cable. Keep the line taut."

"Taut it is," Briggs replied. "Toren says passive sweeps are still clean. You’ve got clear air for now, but don't linger. sector-nine radiation is climbing."

Silas led the way toward the emergency entry hatch, three meters up the sloped curve of the hull. The hatch was bent out of true, jammed fast by the sheer kinetic weight of the collision that had killed the ship twelve years ago. The rubber gasket seal was burned away, leaving a thin, frozen gap where atmosphere had vented out into the void during the battle.

Mica unslung her heavy plasma cutter. She didn't bother with the manual manual lock handles. She clicked the torch’s high-frequency ignition, and a bright, needle-thin beam of blue light speared out from the nozzle. Spark-shower cascades drifted off into the blackness, floating like glowing embers in zero-gravity.

"Gasket's fried," she murmured, steering the white-hot arc along the seam. "Iron's cold-welded. Give me twenty seconds."

Silas watched the perimeter while she worked. In the deep drift around them, pieces of broken history bobbed lazily. A twisted section of solar panel; a discarded emergency suit container, its bright yellow paint faded to ash-gray; a length of heavy ammunition feed belt still loaded with twenty-millimeter solid tungsten shells, swinging back and forth like a pendulum.

Everything here had value to someone, but most of it was junk compared to what they were after. Scrappers who spent their time dragging light sheet-metal out of the Boneyard ended up dead of radiation poisoning or broke from fuel costs. The only way to make a run pay was to find high-density internal components—super-conducting coils, primary power relays, untouched vault metals.

"Hatch is free," Mica said, stepping back as the heavy steel oval gave way under her crowbar. The hatch dropped inward, disappearing into the pitch-black maw of the lower deck with a silent, heavy drop.

Silas unhooked his flash lantern from his shoulder strap and clicked it on. The narrow beam cut through the dark inside the wreck, illuminating a floating cloud of frozen hydraulic fluid, shredded insulation, and loose paper charts.

"Going in," Silas said.

He lowered himself through the opening, dropping two meters down onto a steel mesh gantry. His boots clamped down on the grid with a metallic clink. Mica followed an instant later, dropping into a crouch beside him, her plasma torch resting over her arm like a rifle.

The air inside was gone, long since vented. The atmosphere readout on Silas's wrist read absolute zero pressure, with an ambient temperature of minus one-hundred and forty degrees Celsius. The cold was a physical presence, creeping through the insulation of his heavy boots and nibbling at his fingertips.

"Deck three, damage-control passageway," Mica said, projecting a crude schematic onto the inside of her faceplate from her sleeve console. "If this hull matches standard Vanguard schematics, the main auxiliary vault should be thirty meters aft, right behind the secondary fire-control station."

"Let's move," Silas said. "Watch the deck plates. Structural integrity is shot. One bad step and you'll fall through into the main engine trunk."

They picking their way along the ruined passageway. The deck was tilted at a sharp fifteen-degree angle, warped by the force of the collision. Overhead, power lines dangled like frozen vines, their rubber coatings cracked and brittle from years of exposure to vacuum. Bulkheads on either side were buckled inward, showing the crushed interiors of crew berths and storage lockers.

Silas kept his lantern swinging from left to right. Every few steps, the beam caught something that made his pulse hitch. A half-melted boot stuck beneath a collapsed locker. A shattered cup made of tin, still stuck to a steel table by a magnetic base. A hand-painted lucky card, stuck to a bulkhead with yellowed tape, its ink faded to a faint gray smudge.

"No bodies," Mica noted softly, her torch beam probing a dark doorway to their left. "They got to the escape pods."

"Some of them did," Silas said grimly. He pointed his lantern at the ceiling of the corridor.

The emergency pod bay hatches were all bent inward, their hydraulic rams melted into slag by short circuits. The crew hadn't escaped; they had been sealed inside when the ship’s primary power grid back-fed during the ramming maneuver. Whatever was left of them had likely been pulled out by the navy during the initial post-battle mop-up, or lay buried deeper down in the lower compartments where the air seal had held a little longer.

"Here," Mica said, stopping in front of a massive, reinforced blast door stamped with a yellow hazard crest. "Auxiliary Power Vault B. The emergency seal is still locked."

Silas stepped up, running his gloved fingers across the heavy locking wheel. It was pristine. Unlike the rest of the scorched corridor, the thick lead-lined plating of the vault door showed no thermal discoloration.

"The lead shield held," Silas grinned, feeling the old scrapper’s itch down his spine. "That means whatever is inside didn't get cooked when the reactor blew."

"Get the wedge," Mica said, already swinging her torch into position. "This door is two inches of solid armor. If I cut it straight, we'll burn out three gas cartridges. We need to split the lock pin."

Silas pulled a heavy hydraulic jack from his utility belt and jammed its hardened teeth into the seam between the door and the frame. He pumped the hand lever twice. The metal groaned—a sharp, mechanical ping that traveled through the floor straight into his boots.

Mica brought the plasma torch down right on the stressed hinge pin. Bright orange sparks erupted in a vacuum cascade, instantly freezing into tiny metallic beads as they hit the cold floor. The torch whistled quietly through the suit's audio pickup as the blue needle sliced through three inches of tempered steel.

With a loud, metallic CLANG that vibrated up Silas’s knees, the heavy locking pin snapped. The blast door swung inward by an inch, releasing a sudden, tiny puff of dry, twelve-year-old Nitrogen gas that instantly turned into white frost in the vacuum.

Silas grabbed the edge of the door and pulled. The heavy slab of lead-lined steel swung open on its greased hinges, revealing the interior of the vault.

"Jackpot," Mica whispered.

The vault was roughly eight meters square, lined from floor to ceiling with secondary power transformers. Down the middle of the room ran three massive distribution buses—thick, gleaming bars of solid, refined copper, each as thick as a man's thigh and six meters long. Flanking them were four heavy backup storage capacitors, their gray outer shells stamped with the seal of the Vanguard State Arsenal.

"Look at those bus bars," Mica breathed, stepping past Silas into the room. She tapped her gloved finger against the shiny metal. "That’s ninety-nine percent pure copper. And those capacitor banks... they're filled with liquid-state silver-palladium electrolyte."

"What’s the haul worth?" Silas asked, keeping his lantern fixed on the back of the vault to check for structural cracks.

"The copper alone is worth fifteen thousand," Mica said, her voice rising with rare excitement. "The palladium inside those tanks? If we drain them carefully without leaking the liquid into the void, we're looking at forty, maybe fifty thousand on the black dock at Port Delilah. Silas, this is a clean sweep. No burn damage, no radiation soak."

"All right, let's not get sloppy," Silas cautioned, though he couldn't hide the relief spreading through his chest. Fifty thousand meant they could clear their debts, buy three months of real food, and pay off the harbor master at Delilah to stop looking at their fake registration papers. "Briggs, you hear that?"

"I hear it," Briggs’s voice came back over the radio. "Sounds like I’m going to be dragging heavy metal for the next four hours. Get the winches ready. I’m sliding the guide line through the hatch now."

"Toren, how are we doing on the horizon?" Silas asked, stepping back to help Mica set up her cutting guide along the base of the main transformer bus.

There was a short pause over the radio. A static crackle hissed in Silas’s ears, sharp and long.

"Toren?" Silas repeated, his hand dropping automatically to the heavy iron wrench at his belt.

"Captain," Toren’s voice came back, thin and hurried. "Got a weird ping on the wide-angle passive array."

Silas froze. "What kind of ping? Scrap movement?"

"No," Toren said. "It’s a thermal spike. Came out of the shadow of the Iron Sovereign about eight klicks out. It was real brief—less than two seconds—then it dropped back down below background levels."

Mica paused her torch, the blue flame flickering out. She looked up at Silas through her tinted visor.

"Could be an unexploded ordnance venting," Mica suggested, though her tone lacked conviction. "Or a structural collapse inside the flagship’s engine room."

"No," Toren cut in. "The heat signature wasn't a sudden explosion. It was an engine ignition curve. High-density pulse-jet. Like someone fired up a maneuver thruster to adjust their position, then killed the drive to stay dark."

Silas felt the cold vacuum outside his suit suddenly feel a lot closer. Sector Nine was supposed to be empty except for scrappers, ghosts, and the occasional high-orbit navy automated sweep. But automated sweeps didn't hide in the shadow of a war grave and nudge their thrusters to stay out of sight.

"Did they ping us with active radar?" Silas demanded.

"No," Toren replied. "They’re dark. Completely silent. If I wasn't running the long-range thermal sensors on maximum gain, I would have missed it entirely. Captain, whatever it is, it’s sitting right in the middle of the wreck field, right off the Sovereign’s starboard bow."

Silas glanced down at the massive copper bus bars resting at his feet. Fifty thousand credits of clean salvage sat right in front of him. Five minutes of cutting, an hour of winching, and The Bone Picker would have enough fuel to leave this graveyard behind for good.

"Mica, how long to drop the main bus bars?" Silas asked.

"Ten minutes," she said, her hands moving quickly to set up the high-speed cutting clamps on the copper rail. "Fifteen if I take the capacitors too."

Silas tapped his suit console, pulling up his direct tactical display. The small, low-resolution screen showed The Bone Picker attached to the Vanguard carrier like a leech on a whale. Eight kilometers deeper into the dense, dark clutter of the field lay the black spot representing the resting place of the Iron Sovereign. Between them sat a dense, chaotic wall of shattered hulls, wire clusters, and gas clouds.

"Take the bus bars," Silas ordered. "Leave the capacitors. We cut, we load, and we turn off the lights. I don't like company in the dark."

"Understood," Mica said. She pulled the trigger on her plasma cutter, and a intense spray of white-hot sparks illuminated the lead walls of the vault once more.

Silas walked back out into the ruined passageway, his lantern cutting through the darkness. He walked to a wide breach in the side hull where a three-inch armor plate had been peeled back like an open tin can.

He stood at the edge of the jagged opening, looking out into the vast, silent field of dead ships.

The Graveyard spread out for miles in every direction. Great steel monsters lay frozen in their final moments of agony. Millions of tons of armor, iron, and dead men's bones, drifting through the dark without a sound. Out there, eight kilometers into the thickest part of the drift, the massive, broken shape of the Iron Sovereign sat trapped in a cloud of frozen radio-dust.

Silas raised his suit's optical magnification visor, zooming in on the flagship's dark silhouette.

The ship was a ruin. Its forward superstructure was crushed, its primary bridge tower snapped off like a twig, and its three massive main sub-light engine nacelles were torn open from the inside out. But as Silas adjusted the contrast on his visor, he noticed something strange.

The official navy records stated that the Iron Sovereign had been rammed from the front while holding the line, taking the full kinetic force of the Vanguard assault head-on.

Yet, looking through the high-magnification visor at the exposed structural frames around the flagship’s midsection, Silas saw something that didn't fit. The heavy armor plating along the port side wasn't bent inward from an outside impact.

The metal was peeled outward.

It looked like an orange peel that had been split from the inside. Great, jagged ribbons of three-layer composite armor had been blown out into space, away from the center of the ship.

Silas blinked, narrowing his eyes against the digital glare of his HUD display. Armor didn't bend outward from an enemy broadside. Explosions inside the hull didn't strip outer plates cleanly off their structural frames like that unless the breach started from the internal magazines—or from something detonating inside the primary command vault.

"Silas," Mica’s voice crackled through his helmet speakers, pulling him out of his focus. "First bus bar is down. Heavy line is locked on. Briggs is starting the haul."

"Good," Silas said, stepping back from the hull breach. He cleared his throat, trying to shake the sudden knot of unease out of his neck. "Keep it quiet, Mica. We’re leaving as soon as that metal hits our cargo hold."

"What were you looking at out there?" she asked, her torch humming as she lined up the second cut.

"Nothing," Silas said, looking back over his shoulder toward the dark silhouette of the dead flagship one last time. "Just old iron."

He turned back toward the vault, but the sight of those outward-torn armor plates stayed locked in his mind like a splinter. In his thirty years of scrapping, Silas had learned one golden rule: ships didn't lie. Men lied, history books lied, governments lied until their teeth turned yellow. But scrap iron always told the truth.

And whatever had destroyed the Iron Sovereign, it hadn't happened the way the textbooks said it did.