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RP: The Fringe [Chapter 2.0] - Salvage

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Hull

As Crash work their way around to the end of the boom, he floated down and saw the shuttle for the first time. It was hard to make out on standard visual waves, but the infrared and the ultraviolet showed it perfectly, Crash was about to advance floating to it, but something moved through the window. The 'bot froze for a second, before retreating back to the airlock on the Veil as quick as It could.

Code:
There is someone in that shuttle. I'm coming back, unless you want me to vent
it and space them.

Free shuttle that way...
 
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Concordia Veil - Cockpit

Amelia stared at the screen of her Datajockey, keeping it in front of her and between her face and the canopy of the cockpit, waiting for any status update from Crash. She propped herself up when the message inevitably came through, reading over it twice before she even thought about what to answer back. Not that the answer wasn't too obvious, there was no reason to kill someone in cold blood like that, even though her recent experiences had shown that anyone could be out to get her and that neither was she a paragon of mercy and kindness. Still, her decision stood as she quickly tapped a response in the datapad.

Code:
 There's no reason to kill them. Have you seen anyone else?

She paused for a while once she sent the message to the bot. How the hell would she tell the captain about that without either giving away that she wasn't alone or making it seem like she ignored the order to stay aboard the ship. She could still attribute it to the sensors, but anyone would know that they couldn't pierce too far into the shuttle, let alone show her that there was a breathing, living person inside the shuttle.
 
Ship

Cycling the airlock,before entering the home ship Crash put the mobility pack back into it's storage place. It waited to respond until It entered the cockpit. "I did not, just the one. I didn't want to risk anything so I returned to the ship."
 
Derelict- Passageway

Six Four looked between the Oreza and Sienna as they talked. Even though it couldn't see there faces or their mouths moving the white helmet darted back and fourth between each of them as their voices came over the coms.

"This one has a suggestion." Six Four said twirling the kitchen knife in the 'air' as one would with a pen, "If we can find computer access, we can see which parts of the ship have life support still. Defeated: That is if there is a working computer on this ship. Then again," It began taking the knife and pointing towards the door in question," We could always try the door and hope nothing bad happens."

Six Four then once again put its finger where its nose would be on its helmet.
 
Derelict - Passageway

Sienna eyed the knife that Six Four was twirling, then looked back up at the Freespacer's featureless faceplate, further perplexed by its finger stuck firmly to the center of it. "You wanna put that thing away, first?" she intoned flatly, then swung her headlamp's beam through the corridor again, all the way down to the closed emergency shutter on the far end of the hall, then back up the opposite wall. "I don't think we're gonna find a console back here at all, working or not," she continued, and stepped forward to more closely examine the blast door, running a gloved hand over it. For a moment she was slightly distracted by the skin-tight material stretched over her arm, following it to her shoulder and then the rest of her body, wrinkling her nose at how little the suit left to the imagination.

Tapping the tip of her tongue on the back of her teeth for a moment, she rapped her knuckles on the shutter, for what reason, she didn't really know. "Well, Oreza may be right," she said, the pitch of her voice elevating slightly as she spoke her train of thought aloud. "Don't know why this would have deployed if the AI didn't think there was a chance of holding onto cabin pressure somewhere. But then again, this looks like pretty sturdy stuff," she said. After a pause, she turned to look at the others again. "See if you can burn a little hole through right here," she continued to Oreza, more definitively, touching her index finger to a spot just below the dead center of the door. "If it's pressurized on the other side, we'll see it start to bleed off when you punch through, and the door should still hold."
 
Derelict

"Right" Oreza said and moved to the shutter. He adjusted the setting on the torch ans turned it on, working at the spot Sienna had indicated.

He hoped the compartment beyond was not pressurized, if it was even a small hole could make things interesting for him, so he made sure not to stand in front of the hole he was burning into the shutter.
 
Derelict - Passageway

Sienna stepped back and crossed her arms, not realizing she was holding her breath as she watched with tense apprehension.

Though there was nothing to be heard, Oreza could faintly feel the feedback from the jet of blue flame lancing into the door from the cutter, and the metal around it slowly began to glow dimly, brightening the longer he held it there. The glow intensified to a dull red, then a brilliant amber, and finally to an eye-blistering white as it began to soften and melt away. Bit by bit, the molten metal began to drip out of the deepening hole, never quite falling far enough to form a pool before it hardened quickly back into glowing slag in the intense cold of space.

Several heart-pounding seconds later, the flame punched through as the last inch of hardened metal yielded to the intense heat... and nothing further happened. The other side was evidently a vacuum too.

Sienna exhaled with a burst of air, relieved. "Right," she said. "Let's cut it down and move on."
 
Derelict

Oreza let out a breath. Now that he knew the space beyond was decompressed too, he went to work on burning a man sized hole in the shutter. He cranked the torch up to high and made quick work of it now that he did not need to be so careful.

Once he finished burning his path through the metal, he kicked the chunk of shutter in.
 
Derelict - Upper Deck - Aft Passageway

The section of the shutter that Oreza cut out was, not surprisingly, quite heavy even in microgravity. It took a considerable shove with his boot to overcome its inertia and break it free from the rest of the door.

As the section of the door drifted into the passage beyond, the three crewmembers' headlamps outside penetrated the darkness, catching glimpses of floating debris knocked aside by the massive chunk of metal. Various articles of clothing, a cracked and iced-over picture frame, a boot, a broken tankard... all chilling memoirs of the dead ship's former crew. A fine distribution of unidentifiable particulates suspended in the void glittered in the lamp beams, undisturbed by the passage of the cut-open emergency shutter.

The cutaway of the door slammed into the opposite wall, barely five feet away, but it canted, as if it had struck something between it and the bulkhead, before it stopped and seemingly came to rest, save for the tiny bit of movement as it slowly drifted back towards them, more than slowly enough to give them enough time to walk through without fear of being caught under it.

Sienna, one hand resting on the pistol at her thigh, hesitantly stepped over and through the hole, swinging her headlamp down the long corridor, then back the other way. "Damn," she muttered. "These must've been some of the berths..."
 
Derelict, Medbay

" Damn! Damn! Damn!" muttered Dylan Bjarkmar. For three days now he had been shut inside the medbay, and his supplies had run out. Nobody had come by or anything, it seemed like he was the only one left.

Suddenly, he felt a sudden quake in the room. He shouted out: "Hello? Anybody out there?! Please, help me!" He stood silent for a moment. No response.

"Damn! Seems like I'm stuck to float in this space forever. Or, at least 'till I die of lack of oxygen. That will be fun for sure!" Dylan said. He was beyond reasoning at this point. Exhausted, lonely at with no hope left, he tried to take some sleep. It did not help much. Too much going on, and no explanation how the crash even happened.
 
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Derelict Ship

Six Four sidestepped Sienna to get a better look into the room. As it entered it swung its head around taking a full view of its surroundings, noting the particles that glittered in its headlamp's light.

"Curious: Interesting, wonder what these particles are..." The freespacer said as it reached towards the floating picture frame.
 
Derelict

"Space dust" Oreza commented as he entered the compartment. He had no desire to know what they really were. The Nepleslian man moved deeper into the space, sweeping his helmet lamp around in a search pattern so he could check every corner of the compartment for anything dangerous before they did any rooting around for salvage.
 
Derelict - Upper Deck - Starboard Passageway

Six Four's fingers closed around the picture frame floating slowly through the corridor, and pulled it towards her. Its face was halfway covered mostly across the top in the same ice they'd seen in the mess hall, obscuring much of its surface. The frame itself was relatively simple, a wide silver square bordering a printed photograph of a family, faded slightly from exposure to the harsh extremes of space. The ice obscured the faces of the man and woman in the photo, but one of each of their hands rested on the shoulders of two young Nepleslian boys standing before them, neither of them appearing much older than seven or eight years old. The taller one had a mess of dark black hair that had clearly just been hand-brushed, and a dimpled smile warmed his face. The smaller one had an impish-looking grin that gave him away as something of a trickster, and a few freckles dotted his cheeks beneath short-cropped reddish-brown hair. The family was standing in front of a metallic, waist-high fence of some kind, and what appeared to be either a majestic mountain range graced the background, although the details were difficult to make out. Etched across the bottom of the frame was the phrase, "Happy 10th Anniversary! Love, Erin, Sean, and Chance."

The long hallway terminated less than a meter to the right of the shutter that Oreza had cut through, but to the left, it stretched out into the darkness, the other end too far away for their headlamps to illuminate. Along the right wall at regular intervals were identical-looking hatches, all at differing stages of ajar, like their actuating mechanisms had all failed at once, leaving them to drift along their rails as the ship was wracked with whatever had destroyed it. A few meters down the hall, the left wall changed from the industrial-looking metal bulkhead to a row of glass panes, possibly windows to something, although it was impossible to tell from where they stood what they were built to observe.

The corridor was sparsely filled with all manners of haunting reminders of the ship's former crew. Articles of clothing and undergarments, boots, coveralls, tool belts, coffee mugs, the occasional pack of cigarettes, datapads... all drifting amid the smattering of dust-like particulates suspended in the "air." Not a single one of the overhead lights showed any signs of even attempting to light their way; much as before, everything on this massive ship was dead.

Dead, that is, except for one thing: far off in the distance, on the other end of the hall, Oreza caught sight of what appeared to be a red light, plaintively blinking in the silence.
 
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Shuttle in the shuttle bay

Within the shuttle, Shrie was sitting and deep in thoughts. She activated the datajockey and listened to some rock music she found there. It was more slow, kind of jazzy, which fit the mood. The tall woman sighed and looked outside the shuttle. It was dark there, which was just fine to her, she did not have to watch dead crewmembers float around after all. If only there was a way to go you, if she could release the docking clamps and open the hangar bay door, she could get out. But there was vacuum outside and the EVA suit would not fit her.

Shried got up and walked to the locked in the shuttle, where suits were. She watched it for a second, wondering if she could use two of them to make one large for her. But it was clear, she did not have tools needed for such thing. With a sigh, the woman took one of the helmets into her hands and looked at it. It would fit her of course, but the suit was problem. She was simply too tall, not to mention her wing, which would be largely in a way.

Just to kill time, she put the helmet on and turned it on. The HUD showed her that the main suit was not connected and the radio activated itself. The radio. Shrie raised her eyebrows and then frowned. It was just a short-range radio, but if someone was alive in the ship, they could hear her. The woman took a deep breath and started broadcasting.

"Hello. Can anyone hear?" She said with nervous voice. Speaking was not her forte in past year or so. Silent and not making any troubles, that was her way. "This Shrie. I am in shuttle bay. In a shuttle. Dock clamps are locked and gate closed, I cannot get out. Shuttle works except for communication. Is anyone out there?"
 
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Concordia Veil - Cockpit

Amelia nodded in reply to the not-spiderbot as it entered the cockpit again, interlacing her fingers and leaning forward as she got deep in thought. Normally, she wouldn't bat an eyelid about going down there and rescuing the survivor herself, not only did she have to keep the presence of Crash a secret but just to add the icing to the cake her captain was also pretty pissed as well that she wasn't following all her orders to the letter like a machine; there was also the possibility that the person in there might not be friendly, and Amelia was still paranoid about trusting people after what had happened in the Black Moon. She didn't have to keep thinkinng for long, though, since soon after the bot entered the cockpit the ship's comm system caught a radio broadcast in an open frequency.

She hurriedly pressed one side of the headset against her ear again, listening to the message and leaning forward to switch to the same open channel that was being used by whoever was broadcasting. The astrogator didn't know whether her captain had heard it or not, but since the comm-unit in the Dusk could only listen to the channels it was connected to at one given time instead of several that the ship was capable of, she guessed that the latter was the case.

"This is the Concordia Veil, we read you," Amelia said, pausing as she thought what to say next. It wasn't that she didn't know what to say, since she was familiar with the communication procedures, but it was more that she was thinking what to say and what to do once she told Sienna about what was happening. "Are you the person in the shuttle?" She asked, but didn't actually wait for a reply, quickly switching to the channel that the shore party was using, albeit leaving the previous one open, "captain, I've just picked up a radio broadcast from inside the ship, it looks like there's a survivor," she said, then waited for a reply from both parties.
 
Derelict, Medbay

Dylan woke up from his sleep. He thought he felt something hit the medbay. " No. Just my imagination again." He said. Dylan sighed. " Well, at least I don't have to listen to to that awful Shrie anymore. God, what a dreadful woman. No. If I die, at least I will not hear from her again. Her irony and sarcasm just were too much for me. No, thank you." He mumbled to himself.

He began muttering in himself. " God gracious me! I still don't get it why they took in poor Marcus. I mean, he was a total moron and a complete imbecile. Oh, I haven't even started talking about that idiot Carlos. He was a joke! A utter waste of time and resources. Really, if he knew which side to point a gun too, he'd make a fine marksman. Instead, all he has done is almost kill me and the rest of the crew. Oh dear, only the captain was any good. At least he knew how to use the toilet. The rest just thought to get into the pot and aim outwards! Besides from the women of course. Shrie was a pain in the arse, but at least Cecilia knew her manners. Oh lovely Cecilia, if any way I will meet her again. I would want it more than anything."

And so he continued for the rest of the time. Mumbling about the crew and their habits, and what not. He was completely oblivious about what happened outside.
 
Shuttle Bay - Shuttle

"Yes. I am in shuttle in the shuttle bay," Shrie responded to the person on the radio. She wondered what kind of ship Concordia Veil was. Were they the cause of the mining ships destruction? But then pirates would get to Shrie by now, drill a hole though shuttle and kill her. No, maybe they were some kind of captain's contact or salvagers, other miners maybe? Still they were someone with ability to keep Shrie alive and that mattered. That was only thing that mattered. The fact that Shrie was ready to die, did not mean she wanted to.

"The shuttle is locked, it cannot fly. Gate closed when things went bad. I do not know what happened." Shrie called back to woman on the other line. "Can you help?"
 
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Derelict - Upper Deck - Starboard Passageway

Amelia's unexpected message made Sienna blink and her gaze unfocus as her eyebrows lowered slightly. She looked over at Oreza and Six Four with slight displeasure as she listened. A survivor? She muttered a curse under her breath as she considered her options.

"Where in the ship?" the captain radioed back. "Find out who it is, and what they're doing."
 
Concordia Veil - Cockpit

Listening to both broadcasts, Amelia pressed the send button on her radio again, "stand by... Help is on the way," she said to whoever was the owner of the distorted and garbled voice that came through the radio in the shuttle, then switched to the crew channel. The astrogator hesitated for a moment, mulling over again about what she would say, "Someone's stuck in the shuttle, the docking clamps are busted or something and the shuttle doors seem to be busted wide open," she said, then waited for a reply.
 
Concordia Veil - Cockpit

There was a very brief pause after Amelia answered Sienna's query, then the captain's voice came back over the radio, obscured by another swell of static. "Wh...ttle in? It must have life supp...alking to you. Ask them why they can't take off."
 
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