The ship was in a bad state. No navigation sensors signature and no communications heartbeat; the vessel was a dull brown colour on the display, devoid of the status markers and corporate IDs that should have been plastered across the image, jumping out from the headers of the safety handshake protocol messages it was definitively not sending. The only signal emanating from the thing was a tinny automated distress repeater, not even a type designed for use on spacecraft. At this point, however, the distress call seemed somewhat unnecessary.

The ship had no effective thrust: its engine outlets glowed gently with the sickly blue of poisoned impulse torches as the radioactive isotopes embedded in the thruster casement walls over a long service life quietly outgassed into vacuum. Devoid of proper attitude correction, it was stuck in a slow, ponderous starboard roll, alternately exposing expanses of aged and battered hull plating and rows of twisted antenna clusters. A long shallow gash ran across the dorsal drive pod giving it the look of a tuber that had absorbed too much water and split lengthways, exposing an internal structure of machinery in a way that, admittedly, tubers generally did not.

Naomi sat in the singular command chair on the principal bridge of the WASTE ship she’d taken to calling “the Dirtsucker”, and stared at the image of the stricken ship slowly revolving on the console screen. There was room for more than 50 such chairs and consoles on the bridge, but when the Dirtsucker had been retrofitted with its current suite of largely autonomous running-systems the upgrade team had torn out all but one, leaving the huge bridge a dingy echoing chamber of nothingness. Light pooled out from the console, alone in the geometric centre of the otherwise dark room. Naomi had to admit it tended to focus the mind on the task at hand as she shifted uncomfortably in the Meitagenan-conforming command seat.

The Dirtsucker’s sensors had picked up the damaged ship an hour ago, drifting gently just off the line of their route. The personnel management routines had briefly panicked upon finding the requisite hardware for awakening the Captain was unaccountably missing, and were just starting up the emergency backup procedure of manufacturing a replacement awakening gong (a process deliberately engineered by the Meitagenans to take a very, very long time), when Naomi had wandered in to investigate the annoying beeping sound and switched it off.

A minor downside of having effectively commandeered the Dirtsucker was that Naomi had thereby inherited the responsibility for making decisions about unexpected vessels turning up dead in their path. This was not a responsibility she had been overly concerned about due to the staggering unlikelihood of anything of that kind actually occurring on their trip: space was simply too big and, out here beyond the Network, too empty for what other ships there still were to just show up by accident. And yet here she was, staring at that very thing, drifting by, obstinately unworried about the probabilistic inconsistencies incumbent upon its existence.

Of course the obvious explanation was that it wasn’t there by accident. Nefarious beings of various stripes were rumoured to use the old “Help I’m die in space” trick to attract well-meaning rubes, but such antics, if they really happened at all, would be expected in places where well-meaning rubes could readily be found, and out here on the cold, lonely route through the darkness to the Cloud couldn’t be said to be one of those places. Naomi pulled up the radiological sensor feed; the dead ship was leaking a steady stream of deeply unstable plasma from its damaged drive pod. Deception was one thing, but even some sort of desperate space-bandit would have to be actually insane to poke a hole in their own drive containment membrane. Why, the thing could explode at any --.!

The thing exploded. Well, it exploded a little bit. The ventral drive pod ballooned in white on the display as the Dirtsucker’s sensors saturated with incoming radiation before fading back to dull brown, now smaller than before and misplaced harshly to one side, leaving a trail of torn and ruptured metal along the ship’s central hull. The damage was hard to see in detail behind the annoying purple blob floating in Naomi’s vision (Meitagenans liked their displays exceedingly bright, and didn’t particularly want any other species looking at them in the first place so didn’t feel the need to make them adjustable).

Naomi slumped back in the chair and frowned at the screen. This was a problem. The ship was now leaking even more volatile plasma and she really didn’t want the entire thing exploding while the Dirtsucker was passing nearby. Not that it would cause any problems for the Dirtsucker. The ship was comparatively tiny compared to the enormous WASTE vessel, and the Dirtsucker’s industrial-grade systems were built to survive the thunderous unstable firing of its own engines; this thing exploding would barely register. No, the real problem was that explosions in space had a way of being rather visible, and people found them endlessly fascinating and liked to stare at them. Naomi really, really didn’t want anyone staring at the Dirtsucker in the near future. Sure, if the ship exploded today it would take a good while for its light front to reach civilization, but by the same token anyone looking at the explosion when it arrived, winding its tentacles round some fancy telescope, would see the Dirtsucker where it was today – right next to it, no matter how far the ship moved in the intervening time. And the Dirtsucker still wouldn’t nearly have finished its journey by that time; if the ship became news, even just as a curiosity... Naomi levered herself out of the chair and started for the port-side docking station: she would have to do something about this apparition herself.

---

Naomi drifted across the narrow space between the Dirtsucker and its visitor. She’d had the computers pull the newcomer alongside with the tractors while she was powering up her personal exo-suit for the trip over. Dirtsucker had arrested the spinning, and now Naomi tracked along the ship’s hull looking for an airlock or docking assembly.

From close-up it was clear that the ship had been damaged before and rebuilt, perhaps multiple times. The hull had been patched up in several places with different kinds of plating, displaying strange bulges where esoteric machinery Naomi couldn’t identify had been added or removed. Naomi had no difficulty persuading one of a cluster of airlocks to open – she had brought her exo-suit with her from her previous job and it sported a number of useful… extras for times like these. Extras that would be very helpful in finding the right fuel lines, locking them down, turning off the distress repeater and leaving the ship to drift off into space, unseen and unheard from forever more.

Survivors, if there were any, would have to be made into un-survivors of course. She might possibly dump them in another cargo hold on board the Dirtsucker, but she had more entertainment than she needed already, and frankly who wanted the effort of moving them across through space. No, un-survivors would be much easier.

Aboard the Dirtsucker, a new beeping began to sound, plaintive and alone in the empty bridge. The outdated and poorly maintained security computer had finished installing the mountain of updates that had accumulated since the last time it had woken up from Technosleep™, and had just worked out that although the strategic analysis routines had determined that the damage profile of the new ship made it overwhelmingly more likely to be the victim of a genuine serious drive malfunction rather than being a pirate vessel lying in wait for victims, it was technically possible for it to be the victim of a genuine serious drive malfunction AND be a pirate vessel lying in wait for victims.

On the bridge of the damaged ship, another beeping commenced. Lextrazsahia “the Dread and Terrible”, bandit queen of the outer darkness and scourge of a billion suns, took a momentary break from exacting terrible vengeance upon the egregious incompetent responsible for the unforgivable state of her ship’s engines. She extended one extravagantly jewelled claw and scraped some of her chief engineer’s turquoise blood from the relevant screen to reveal an alert about an airlock unexpectedly opening on deck 7.