The graveyard shift did its best to grind workers to powder, and Drexler suspected it was succeeding. The sleeping quarters he’d checked into were sparse, with thin mattress, and the chemical burn of recycled linen had seeped into his pores. Still, He’d slept on worse in his ten years in the military, on ships and on field campaigns against the Corporate Confederation or the Concordat Houses. He slept, though not well, and woke ahead of his alarm to head to shift.

By 0100, he was on assignment in Maintenance Bay 23B. The job: clear a jammed coolant valve from the cargo lifts. It was the kind of work that passed for meaningful on Nya Stockholm, provided you didn’t think about it too hard. The bay was lit by the wan glow of emergency strips, the regular arrays flickering overhead in rhythm with the station’s power cycles. Half a dozen service bots lay scattered like upended beetles, some powered down for repair, some cannibalized for parts and never properly reassembled.

Drexler crouched by the base of the lift, fingers numb and tingling. His knuckles bled a little where he’d scraped them against a stubborn housing panel. He dabbed the cut with the hem of his sleeve, then set to work with the magnetic wrench. Every twist fought back, every bolt screamed like it remembered all the wrongs the universe had done it.

Somewhere above, a pair of voices echoed across the hollow bay.

“You hear about the freighter in 42C?” The first voice was rough, edges sanded by years of recycled air and stronger drink.

“Abandoned one?” The second was younger, sharper, with a click to her words like she was used to being the smarter one in the room.

“The Halcyon. Old mining model. Lights dead, hatch sealed. Hasn’t moved in at least a year, maybe two.”

Drexler kept working, but his ears pricked. Halcyon-class ships were out of production, and not too common out here anymore—too pricey for most colonists, too slow for smugglers, too old for most corporate fleets.

“Security doesn’t even know it’s there. The whole bay’s off the regular patrol matrix.”

“Yeah? Or they just want to see who’s dumb enough to poke inside.”

Silence, then the scrape of boots on metal floor as the voices moved closer. Drexler finished removing the fouled valve and set it aside. The coolant hissed softly, like a relieved sigh.

He glanced around, weighing whether to follow the conversation or focus on the job. Curiosity won. He pulled off his scratched goggles, wiped the sweat from his brow, and leaned against a battered support column to listen better.

The two contract techs emerged from a side hatch. The man was stocky, arms tattooed with fading hexes; the woman, slight and restless, flicked her wrist-tool like a nervous tic. They barely noticed Drexler as they argued their way to the diagnostic terminal.

“Might could salvage it,” the man muttered. “First in, first claim. We stake it tonight, we own it tomorrow.”

“Or we get spaced if there’s something weird, I dunno…” the woman shot back. She plugged her tool into the terminal, blue holo-letters flooding her face with cold light. “Look, here’s the logs. Last registered dock: two years ago. Nobody’s touched it.”

“Nothing’s untouched,” the man said, but his eyes lingered on the schematic. “Worth a look.”

They shut up when they noticed Drexler, the man’s gaze going wary. “You need something?” he grunted.

Drexler shook his head, deadpan. “Just here for the valve. Don’t mind me.”

The woman snorted, unplugging her tool. “Yeah, join the club.” She nudged her partner and the two drifted off, plotting low-voiced and urgent.

Drexler watched them go, his mind ticking over the new information. He finished reinstalling the cleaned valve, double-checked the pressure seals, and signed the repair log with a thumbprint. Then, instead of heading back to the assignment board, he ducked into the shadows and pulled up his own wrist-comp.

He still had access to a few back-channel station systems—old favors and forgotten codes buried in the OS. A quick probe showed Maintenance Bay 42C as dark, flagged “inert.” No scheduled work orders, no Security patrols. On the public overlay, it didn’t even exist.

He weighed the risk. If the Halcyon was just a rusted shell, he’d waste an hour and maybe get chewed out by station security if they happened to notice. But if not…

He set off through the service corridors, toolbox in hand. The route ran through the station’s underbelly, past ancient vent shafts and wiring closets. Every so often, a motion-sensor light would kick on, painting the walls in sickly yellow.

He kept his head down, but his brain mapped every turn, every bulkhead. Old habits, old training. Drexler knew how to walk quiet, how to log every turn to retrace his steps later.

At the halfway point, he caught the echo of another voice. Someone whistling off-key—Jax, He’d worked a few shifts with him now. Drexler quickened his pace, not wanting to be followed or even noticed.

The door to 42C was a manual seal, old enough to predate most station systems. Drexler checked the panel—no obvious alarms, but a mechanical lock still in place. It was a pin-tumbler lock, invented in ancient Egypt so he’d always been told, and even though there were much more advanced locks now, it was still the most common mechanical type he encountered. He set down his toolbox, and pulled a set of lockpicks from a pocket. He’d learned to pick these as a kid, but had gotten into the habit of carrying a set of picks when he was an enlisted Marine, and kept it up later when he became a naval officer, and now even after he was out. He didn’t often have use for them, but now and again they were useful.

Two minutes later he got the tumblers into just the right position, and he turned the cylinder with a tension wrench.

Inside, the bay was colder, the air thin and brittle. The only illumination came from a motion detector light at the entrance. And there, parked in perfect symmetry at the far end, was the Halcyon. He found a dust covered switch and flipped the overhead lights on.

It looked worse than he expected: plating scorched, paint blistered by decades of cosmic weather and working in asteroid fields. The ship’s name—Andra Chansen—was barely visible beneath a layer of soot. It was about 20 meters long, and maybe 10 wide and nearly as tall. the sides and top and bottom were flat, meeting each other at right angles, except where it’s four pivoting engines stuck out to the side like shoulders and haunches on a four-legged animal, currently pointed down at the ground, with lander struts extended to the hangar bay floor. The nose of the craft sloped down to the cockpit like a chisel sharpened on only one side.

Under the dust and scorch-marks and scrapes, he could tell it had it’s original paint-job. It was the standard Husqvarna Starship paint, orange and gray. The company had started centuries ago on Earth making outdoor power tools like chainsaws, but had branched out to making utilitarian starships when humans began settling in other starsystems.

The Halcyon had been their mid-range workhorse for decades, but had been out of production for a few decades now. Still, they were known for reliability and they shared a lot of parts with other Husqvarna ships. This one looked pretty standard, though the nose of it looked a little odd, like someone had added a little extra length, in what looked like steel to the front. That was odd, Steel was strong and cheap, but rarely seen on starships, as weight was a big consideration and other metal alloys were more common, especially aluminum and titanium.

Drexler scanned the hull, looking for recent marks. Nothing. No tools left behind, no trash, not even a boot print in the bay’s years of settled dust.

He walked the length of the ship, fingers trailing the metal. The access panel by the main hatch was dead, but a standard override port blinked with the faintest trace of energy. Drexler pulled a line from his wrist-comp, jacked in, and watched the handshake protocol cycle through a dozen vintage pings.

The hatch unlocked with a pneumatic sigh.

He hesitated, glanced over his shoulder. The corridor outside was empty. In the distance, the hum of the station’s life support sounded like wind through a hollow tree.

He stepped inside, sealing the hatch behind him.

The interior was dark, so he turned on the flashlight on his wrist-comp. He moved forward, boots muffled on the flooring. The cockpit was dusty and spartan, but the controls were familiar, even welcoming. He powered the main console, half-expecting nothing.

Instead, a ghost of an interface flickered to life. Minimal power, just enough to display a fragment of the last ship’s log.

He squinted at the screen.

“Evac incomplete… manifest error… emergency shutdown… Awaiting command.”

He scrolled through the logs, each more fragmented than the last, then pulled back, standing in the dead calm of the cockpit.

For the first time since he’d hit the station, Drexler felt a pulse of purpose, the old instincts returning. This was promising, and if nothing else, a project to keep his mind off of things, if he could get the paperwork filed correctly. In the Unified Systems, a ship abandoned in open space or in a public dock for more than six months could be claimed as salvage, but it had to go through a period of public listing and the salvager had to show that they had done due diligence to contact the owner.

After a year the paperwork was simpler, and after two years it was easier than that. It was odd though that the station had never impounded the ship or auctioned it. It really must be forgotten. He would have to see what hoops they would make him jump through, but this ship would be his soon.

He unplugged the comp, pulled his datapad from his cargo pocket, and started mapping the Andra Chansen’s interior. He worked fast, adrenaline smoothing over the tremor in his hands.

He barely noticed the time pass. By the time he finished, the first hints of station morning filtered into the bay, coloring the frosted viewports in gentle blue as the transparent sections of the hangar door let in more light.

He let himself out the hatch, locking it with a new code. Then, toolbox in hand, he strode back toward the main decks of the station.

Behind him, the Halcyon waited in the silence, secrets still mostly intact.

But not for long.