The Scrap-Jumper fell out of its jump with a sickening lurch, the groan of overstressed metal echoing through its corridors. The main lights flickered and died, plunging the cockpit into the dim red glow of emergency power. The only constant was the frantic chirping of damage control alerts scrolling down the main screen.
Kaelen ignored them for a full minute, just sitting in the chair, her hands trembling on the armrests. She focused on breathing, on the simple, mechanical in and out of air. They were alive. The ship was a wreck, but they were alive.
Slowly, like someone moving through deep water, she unbuckled and began the triage. Power first. She rerouted from non-critical systems, bypassing burned-out conduits with jerry-rigged cables until the main lights stuttered back on. Life support was stable, thank the void. The hull breach in sector four was sealed by emergency bulkheads, but it had taken a storage locker with it—a week's worth of food rations, gone.
The shield generator was a lost cause, a melted slag of components. The FSD was critically damaged; another jump like that would tear the ship apart. They were stranded, limping on thrusters alone.
And they were being hunted.
Her hands moved on autopilot, performing repairs she could do in her sleep, but her mind was elsewhere. Vyper Dynamics. They weren't just a corporation; they were a sovereign power with a private army. They didn't do retrieval. They did acquisition. And if a target proved problematic, they did extermination.
A new, quieter alert chimed. It was the long-range comms array, finally back online. It was automatically scanning standard data channels, searching for news, traffic reports, anything to get a bearing on their location.
Most of it was static and automated mining reports from claims light-years away. Then, a packet came through, tagged for general broadcast across the entire sector. It was a public news feed from the Core Systems.
A bland, synthesized news anchor's face appeared on a secondary screen. "…authorities continue to deny the claims, stating the radiation readings are within normal parameters for…"
Kaelen was about to dismiss it when a ticker tape of information scrolled across the bottom of the feed. Stock prices. Shipping manifests. And then, a single, stark line that made her blood freeze:
// SECURITY ALERT: VYPER DYNAMICS ISSUES SYSTEM-WIDE BOUNTY // CLASS: HAZARDOUS CONTAMINANT // VESSEL: SCRAP-JUMPER (UNC_REG) // OWNER: KAELEN VOSS // LAST KNOWN: CERES BELT // REWARD: 5,000,000 CREDITS // DEAD OR ALIVE //
Five million credits.
The number hung in the air, brighter and more real than the damage reports. It was a life-changing sum. A generational sum. It was enough to make every freighter captain, every bounty hunter, every two-bit scavenger and backwater pirate from here to the Core drop whatever they were doing and start scanning.
Dead or Alive.
The message was clear. Vyper didn't just want the fragment back. They wanted her silenced. They had turned the entire populated galaxy into a weapon against her.
A low, static hiss crackled from the comms—a weak, encrypted signal on a band only junkers and scavengers used. It was a voice, rough and filtered through a cheap transmitter.
"…repeat, that's a confirmed Vyper bounty. Five mil. You seeing this, Kael? That's your tag they're flashing across the core. What in the seven hells did you do out there?"
It was Rourke. An old junker who operated a salvage yard on the edge of the belt. A rare contact she sometimes traded with. If he knew, everyone knew.
Her hand hovered over the comms button. She could warn him off. Tell him it was a mistake. But lies wouldn't stop a five-million-credit bounty. Her silence was the only protection she could offer him now. She killed the incoming signal, severing the tenuous link.
The isolation she had once craved now felt like a prison. The silence was no longer peaceful; it was the quiet of a tomb. Every star outside the viewport was a potential enemy. Every blip on the scanner would now be a threat.
She was no longer just a miner. She was a commodity. A prize.
Her eyes drifted to the shielded locker. The source of it all. The thing that had promised her freedom and delivered a death sentence.
A cold, hard resolve began to crystallize within her, sharper than any crystal. Fear was a luxury she could no longer afford. Vyper Dynamics had declared war on a single, solitary woman. They had made her a public enemy.
Fine.
If she was a contaminant, she would infect their entire operation. If she was a ghost, she would haunt them.
She wasn't just going to run. Not anymore.
She was going to find out what this fragment was, why Vyper wanted it so badly, and she was going to use it to burn their entire empire to the ground.
The first step was to disappear completely.
"Chip," she said, her voice low and steady. "Scrub our transponder. I want this ship to be a ghost. And plot a course for the one place no one with a five-million-credit price on their head would ever be stupid enough to go."
> Query: Destination?
Kaelen's lips curled into a thin, humorless smile.
"The Rust Market."
It was the largest den of scum and villainy in the Outer Rim. A lawless, sprawling space station where identities were sold and forgotten, and where, for the right price, you could buy anything. Including a new life.
Or the means to end someone else's.