If there was one rule which held true across the Universe, it was that if something could go wrong at the worst possible time, it would.

The outside hull of the Dangerous had seen better days, and its most recent impact with an unyielding object had damaged the fuel lines and heat sinks connecting his main reactor to the thrusters. It was the latest in a long line of disasters to befall the rickety ship. At the very least, he was confident that he could repair it well enough to get him back into civilized space. Again.

The Dangerous wasn’t a large ship, and it didn’t take him long to maneuver his way around the exterior hull. The tether around his waist kept him connected to the anchor point near the airlock so he didn’t drift away into the inky void of space, but it also caught on every single antenna or buckled hull plate in its way. Twice, he’d had to backtrack to unwind the cable so he could proceed. Again: if it could go wrong at the worst time, it would. Guaranteed.

Space could be disorienting – although from his perspective the planet of Myrtea was below him, his ship was actually upside-down in orbit above it. The planet was technically ‘above’ him. Reference frames in space were solely based on his position or the position of his ship. If he looked down, he could see the massive, sprawling oceans and grayish clouds of the planet. Originally, he’d had no desire to see the planet’s surface. If he couldn’t repair the engines in a few hours, his stabilizer was going to fail and his ship would be dragged down with him attached… and Myrtea was a toxic planet he had no wish to see up close.

“Ok Lumos, I’m at the impact site. It looks pretty bad – can you see it?”

There was a moment’s hesitation before his ship’s CI responded. “Yes Captain, I can see it.”

“Are we gonna be able to fix this? Or am I dead in the water?” he asked, looking into the gaping wound in his ship. Tiny flashes of light sparkled from the severed wires and droplets of fuel floated in the void.

“Everything is fixable, Captain,” the monotone female voice responded. “You will need additional resources, however.”

“Yeah, it figures. How far is that derelict from here?” he asked, climbing “up” the side of his ship and peering out into space.

A healthy distance away was the whole reason he’d come to this system: an abandoned Erythian Corvette. It had been here forever – at least a thousand years – and as testament to the durable construction the Erythians loved so much. The plan had been to slip in and gut the ship for parts, salvage and anything remotely valuable and sneak out before anyone was the wiser. Unfortunately, the Dangerous had suffered a navigation glitch and collided with the derelict, bouncing off and putting him in this current predicament.

“The wreckage of the Gesiak is approximately 1,200 meters from your current position, Captain,” Lumos responded. “Your tether has a maximum effective length of 2,000 meters – you should be able to reach it.”

“Yup. I was thinking the same thing,” Skinner said as he clambered onto the underbelly of his ship. “Paint a trajectory on my visor.”

Lumos ran the calculations for a few seconds before indicating a safe path through the void to the Gesiak. Skinner checked his rigging lines one more time before pushing off his ship and drifting towards his target.

Floating freely in space was a paradox for him – it was both deeply relaxing and intensely frightening. It all depended on the situation. There had been plenty of times where he’d drifted purely because it was calming. There was something humbling and beautiful about seeing a planet slowly turning at your feet. At the same time, in situations like this, he couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen if his tether line snapped or if something else happened. He’d be lost, drifting aimlessly in space until he ran out of air and died in the freezing void of space.

Thankfully, Lumos was as good as ever. Unlike some of the more modern polyform spacesuits, his didn’t have jets to guide him if he drifted off course. Considering he’d bought the CI chip secondhand, Lumos had yet to fail him – and this was far from the first space jump he’d done. His gloved hands closed around the twisted metal of near one of the massive holes in the Gesiak’s hull and he guided his magnetized boots against the side. “Ok Lumos, I’m here. What am I looking for?”

“Excellent landing, Captain. You are looking for a replacement fuel line, some copper or malkathite wires to repair the damaged ones and a heat-sink manifold to cover them.”

“That and anything else valuable, of course,” Skinner said as he rubbed his gloved hands together. The Gesiak had been here since the Tenth Galactic War – there was bound to be something good on board… unless he wasn’t the first person to loot it. That was always a possibility.

“Please remember – your priority is repairing this ship. You only have enough power here to maintain orbital stability for another four hours and thirty-seven minutes.”

“Got it,” Skinner said, taking a deep breath. His eyes flicked to his oxygen gauge. He had a little over six hours of air in his tank, so that wasn’t going to be an issue. Not this time. “Copy that, Lumos. Conserve power whenever possible. Upload an image of the things I’m looking for to my visor and run only vital processes until I get back.”

“Shall I hibernate, Captain? It is likely you will not be able to hear me inside the wreck anyway. There is quite a lot of interference from the Corvette’s damaged reactors.”

Skinner could already hear the telltale crackling in his earpiece. “No. Stay on comms. I might need you. Switch to the emergency channel if anything happens out here. Sweep the local system every ten minutes and keep me posted.”

“Understood, Captain. Standing by.”

Skinner stepped into the Gesiak with one hand on his gun out of habit more than necessity. No one had been in this wreck for at least a thousand years, but it never hurt to be prepared. Ambushes were unpredictable and violent in the Frontier Belt – he’d been in more than his fair share.

The interior of the old Erythian ship looked very similar to their current models. The hallways were small and hexagonal, small enough to where he would have to duck through the doorways. The hull had been blown out in several places, exposing the crew quarters on the port side of the ship. Above the gaping hole he could see the Erythian symbols for G, E, S and I. The plating had been torn off after that.

His helmet warned him of the radiation in the area well before he hit the hallway. A bright orange “Radiation Alert - 256 mSv DANGER” lit up at the top of his visor. That was less radiation than he’d expected, but still enough to be dangerous if it went much higher. There was also a secondary alert for some Type-II background radiation, which caught his eye as it blinked in much smaller print below the standard radiation meter. Type-II radiation was usually associated with supernovae and the cosmic microwave background. Unless he was in a particularly concentrated patch of it, his meter should’ve been able to filter out the tiny amounts that existed all throughout the void of space.

Skinner shook his head and ignored it. If he didn’t move quickly and find the parts he needed, he was going to become part of that void. He unhooked his tether and clipped it to a section of exposed girders. Inside the ship it was going to become tangled on debris and corners, and if it snapped… he was done for. Without a lifeline to get back to his ship, and likely without Lumos’s guidance, there was no way he could make the jump. Not on his own.

Skinner was used to moving around in Zero-G environments. The Dangerous lived up to its name in all ways but one – the life support systems – and he had routinely found himself making repairs on the outer hull… and sometimes on the inner workings themselves, albeit with Lumos’s guidance. For a CI, she was remarkably useful when it came to repairs – almost as if whoever had programmed her had designed her to function as a repair facilitator. A few days ago, she had assisted him when the Dangerous had lost power to its gravity generator, leaving him drifting aimlessly in the cabins. Navigating the Gesiak didn’t feel too different to dragging himself around in the darkness of his own ship… only the ancient wreck was much, much bigger than his - easily twenty to thirty times the length at least.

Although the hallways were cramped and tiny (built for Erythian bodies, not humans), Skinner had very little difficulty in pulling himself through them horizontally. With no gravity to force-orient him in the corridors, it was like dragging his body through a waterslide. A very empty, quiet waterslide. Skinner had done all kinds of work over the past decade or so, and at one point he’d found himself in a Heil tomb. This felt eerily similar, just without the statues.

Officially, the Gesiak had gone missing during the Tenth Galactic War. It had been commissioned by the Gray Syndicate to act as a covert runner, smuggling supplies and valuables off several planets before the fires of war consumed them. Along with her sister ships, the Hesseli and the Melesicu, it had been a massive success. Thousands, if not millions, of historical artifacts had been recovered after the war because of their efforts.

The Gesiak, unlike her brethren, had not survived the war. She had gone dark during the final days of the conflict and had been presumed lost with all hands. Although many had searched for her remains, none had succeeded until now. Skinner had bought the information off an arms dealer who claimed he’d seen the wreck and marked its location, and the deal had been to split any valuables found in the derelict fifty-fifty. Skinner had been skeptical, but after literally running into the Gesiak, he had to admit the dealer was telling the truth. But what really thrilled him was the potential that there were real treasures still in the hold. The Gesiak had been a transport ship, after all. Perhaps she had been carrying something of real value. Something ancient or historical that one species or another would pay top dollar to get back.

Skinner tried to open the communications channel to Lumos, but was met with a wash of static. She was right – he wasn't going to be able to reach her from here; not with this much interference from the reactor. The radiation levels were still within tolerable limits, so he pushed on. Not that he had much choice – he needed those parts.

A gigantic fissure had split the deck he was on, and from the looks of it, it wasn’t caused by torpedoes or missiles. It looked like the natural effect of gravity working on an already-damaged vessel. The cargo bay would be all the way at the bottom, and engineering would likely be just above it – probably near the front of the ship. He propelled himself forward and down the crack, climbing downwards hand over hand along the exposed structural supports.

Engineering was on the second deck, just above the cargo bay, and was as dark as he expected. He switched on the lights on his helmet, looking around in the gloom. The darkness seemed thick and oppressive; more like being at the bottom of an ocean than in a derelict starship. Skinner took several deep breaths to calm himself down, focusing on not hyperventilating before turning to the task at hand.

Most of the wall paneling was so damaged he could pry it free with his hands or by using random bits of debris as a crowbar. The wires were plentiful behind these panels, and he took several handfuls of them as well as two different manifold covers. As for the fuel lines, those were beneath the floor. Without Lumos’s guidance to tell him how much he needed, he erred on the side of caution and took as much as he could, wrapping it around his body like a bandoleer before tying it in place with the wires.

Feeling confident that he had enough supplies to repair the ship, Skinner headed back out and descended one more floor. As long as he was here, he might as well check out the cargo bay. If there were treasures, he would come back for them. If not, he wouldn’t have to make an extra trip.

Something crackled across his skin the moment he entered the cargo bay, even with his polyform suit. He checked the radiation meters, but both had remained the same. He advanced into the hold, sweeping his lights left and right. There were plenty of crates here – far more than he had expected. He would definitely have to return and start examining them. But something in here was giving off some strange energy and he wanted to know what it was.

He pushed aside several of the crates drifting freely around the area, looking for anything that could give him a clue. It wasn’t radiation – his sensors looked like they were lower than when he’d first entered the ship. Well, the main radiation meter was. The Type-II radiation had climbed a bit – almost double what it had been before. Ordinarily, the sensors in standard-issue polyform suits filtered out anything less than 2500 units… which was double the usual amount in the vacuum of space. His current readings were over 4000. While Type-II radiation wasn’t known to be harmful, it wasn’t well understood either. It made him somewhat nervous – the last thing he wanted was to suddenly grow a third eye or a second nose because he was exposed to some insane concentration of Type-II radiation.

Skinner was debating on heading back when he saw something on the far side of the cargo bay. One of the crates had partially broken open, and there was a faint bluish glow emanating from it. He crossed the room by kicking off the heavier crates and pried the lid the rest of the way open. Inside was one of the strangest things he’d ever seen.

It was no larger than a grapefruit, but it was most definitely not food. It was a light blue octahedral crystal, floating in the center of the cracked supply crate. Floating a few inches away from each of its six points was a small, greenish-black torus that seemed to be rotating very quickly in two directions at once. They were not only spinning, but they seemed to be folding in on themselves as well.

Skinner cautiously used a piece of debris to prod it, testing to see if it would respond in any way. When it didn’t, he slowly reached in and picked it up. The moment his gloved hand touched it, the six toroidal portions snapped inwards against the central piece, locking themselves in place. Even with the absence of gravity, Skinner could feel the weight of the object in his palm.

“Now what in the heck is this…?” he wondered, drawing it out of the box.

Before he got his answer, a red light pinged inside his helmet. Lumos may not have been able to use the comms arrays to contact him, but that hadn’t stopped her from activating the emergency alerts. Something was wrong. Clutching his find to his chest, Skinner launched himself across the cargo bay and up the fissure as quickly as he could.