July 30th, 2362

Ananke Group, 20 Gigameters above Jupiter

1300 Hours, Shiptime

Aboard a ship, everyone has their duties. These duties are essential to both the continued survival of the crew in the black depths of space, as well as their prosperity; the success of their mission hangs on the ability of each and every crew member.

Rain remembered when Captain Valentina drilled that into his head when he first boarded the Speak Softly, those scant months ago. So he did his duty, in the dimly lit hangar bay that sat beneath the ship's catapult deck. He worked on his salvage loader, a key part of the crew's salvage operation, where it was secured in its bay against the wall.

It wasn't quite on par with a Combat Frame, like the one in the hangar bay directly across from the loader. Gutted as it was, missing most of its armor, it still cut an impressive figure. 18 meters above the deck floor, its avian head still seemed majestic.

The squat, portly loader frame looked useless in comparison, a mere three meters tall with thrusters that had been haphazardly slapped on, but it was a solid piece of machinery nonetheless. He avoided the reflective canopy as he worked on the leg-mounted monopropellant thrusters. He knew what waited for him in the reflection, anyways; shaggy brown hair that would often obscure his eyes, soft boyish features, and pale skin. The few times Rain did look in a mirror, he thought the only thing he liked was his hazel eyes.

"All hands, decel in 2 two hours; Repeat, decel in two hours." came the stiff utterance of Noa Light over the intercom. If the helmsman was announcing deceleration, Rain thought that was his cue.

Monopropellant thrusters flew together in the blink of an eye, as a door on the far side of the hangar opened, and a woman kicked her way across the hangar, taking flight in the microgravity. Rain was already halfway into the cockpit when she stopped herself against the side of his machine with practiced ease.

"You can't keep avoiding me with work, Rain." She frowned at him as she spoke.

"I'm not avoiding you, Love, I'm just busy, you know?" He responded, avoiding the piercing brown and green gaze of her dual-colored eyes by powering on the loader and going through its preflight checklist.

"Valentina ordered a physical for you when you came aboard, and you've managed to avoid it for two damn months." She leaned further into the cockpit, and Rain finally turned to acknowledge her. She was taller than him, but that rarely mattered in the microgravity they spent so much time in. The lights from his displays cast a strange glow across her brown skin and dark, nearly black hair, but it hardly detracted from her menace. Love Fonseca was to be feared, like all medical professionals, as far as Rain was concerned. The ship's medic sighed as Rain's personal comm crackled to life, one display changed to display two words: CAPTAIN VALENTINA.

"All ready to go for exterior checks before we hit Ananke, Rain?" Came her voice, predictably crackly over the cheap comm unit.

Rain pushed the response button, shooting a look at Love. "Of course, Captain. I'm just doing preflights." As he released the button, Love shook her head.

"Just see me before we make it into port for our next shore leave. I'm done stressing over your ass." She kicked off the chest of the salvage loader, and easily slipped through the open door across the way.

Rain simply sighed and closed the canopy. It sealed with a hiss, and recessed micro-projectors threw a HUD across the thick ballistic plastiglass. A second command keyed into the control console in front of him sent the bay he was docked in shuddering, as the loader was moved out of it, and to the back of the bay.

His eyes met the single camera in the large combat Frame's head as he slowly moved back towards the launch elevator. He almost regretted the poor repair the Peregrine was in. It deserved better than this, for carrying him this far.

His thoughts were broken as his current, smaller, machine jerked to a halt in the elevator. He shook his head as it slowly lifted up.

Focus. The elevator opened on the catapult deck proper.

Two parallel catapult tracks, each made up of two lines too widely spaced for the loader, lead into what seemed to be a large wall of metal, but Rain simply keyed his console one more time.

"This is Rain, ready to cycle catapult airlock."

"Roger that Rain, cycling airlock." Came one of the other bridge officers, a young girl whose name he could never remember.

Atmosphere surged out of the oversized airlock, and Rain had to brace the sturdy loader against the sudden rush of air. Barely thirty seconds later, the sudden breeze abated, and the huge metal blast door ahead opened, exposing the kind of view Rain would always love to see.

Jupiter hung motionless ahead, filling so much of the visible field that you would swear you were almost there, and a few of its moons were barely visible around it. Rain could barely make out Ganymede if he really tried. Even the massive debris field that was their target couldn't detract from the beauty on display.

"Cycle complete, good flying Rain." crackled his comm, and he shook himself back to life.

Right, work. His hands settled on the two hand controls, one on each side, and pushed them forward in their tracks.

The loader shot out of the catapult bay like a cannonball, and a grin split Rain's face as he passed over the entire catapult section in a moment. G-forces gripped him as he spun the machine up and around, blue lines of thrust vapor leaving a trail as he did.

"Alright show off, maybe actually inspect the ship for us?" Crackled Valentina's voice over his comm. A grin split his face as he slowed only slightly, and took the loader in close spirals around the *Speak Softly*. It was just a large box, maybe 400 meters long and 150 across, engines that took up a third of that space, a couple of catapults, and several large guns, two sets of two on port and starboard. The bridge was directly above the catapult hangar, with large exposed viewports that Rain knew could be covered in thick blast shields in a mere moment.

Rain rolled his eyes and brought his machine into a more professional flight path. The exterior checklist was simple, if exhaustive.

Armor plating, good. Minor discoloration from microimpactors along the bow, and several plates along the port side were a slightly darker shade of gunmetal than the rest of the ship. Check.

The guns performed their systems checks admirably, spinning and whirling on their gimbals. Check.

And on it went. Rain restricted himself to a few minor flourishes, conserving fuel as he went down his digital list. Attitude control thrusters, long-range high fidelity cameras, Fujikawa particle dispersal systems, emergency reactor plasma vents, etc, more, and so on. All came back green.

The most important checks were saved for last: Main engines, and an exterior inspection of the bridge.

Rain drifted past the three massive thrusters mounted in a triangle at the rear of the ship, massive magnetoplasma engines each with their own dedicated high-density fusion reactors, capable of pushing the *Speak Softly* to a small fraction of the speed of light, if you left the throttle on full blast for long enough.

All told, the ship was damn near 50% engine, and Rain was damn glad they were cold while he inspected them. Everything looked green, and he was sure the head engineer already knew that.

Check.

Which just left the bridge inspection. "Coming in for final checks, Captain." he keyed his comm, and shot off, spinning around the ship in a tight corkscrew, shooting back along the catapult deck, a scant few millimeters from the surface.

At the last possible minute, he brought himself up, the chest of his loader missing impacting the lip of the hangar door, and brought himself to a bone-crushing stop a mere meter away from the bridge windows.

Five very unimpressed faces greeted him, though he only recognized Noa's severe expression and haircut, and Captain Valentina's bright purple shock of hair, shaved on the sides, contrasting her dark skin.

She shook her head and keyed the console next to her chair at the center of the bridge.

"Cocky flying for someone who forgot to put on his helmet."

Rain reached up to touch his face, and his hand passed through the empty space that should have been a helmet he expected to be there to slap his face harder than he intended, and looked down.

He was wearing his pilot suit, with his bomber jacket over it, and the helmet was...

In his bunk.

"Shit."

-----

Alexandria Valentina watched the young, tousled pilot, mutter a curse to himself as he pulled his clunky machine down and back into the hangar. She could hardly ignore the safety problems of going into space without any kind of vacuum protection, but she had to admit, he made that ancient loader dance.

Her mind came back to her bridge as her various bridge officers burst back into action all at once. The bridge was laid out in a squared-off horseshoe, with the helm dead center at the front of the bridge, with fire control and comms on one side, and the expansive navigation set up taking up the entire starboard side of the bridge.

Valentina herself sat at the command console, set slightly back from the helm, and raised off the ground, giving her a good view of what her bridge officers were doing at any given point in time. The arm that raised and lowered it hadn't been used in a long time, microgravity making three-dimensional navigation simple.

Her first mate, and the helmsman of the ship, Noa Light, was at her side, keeping himself from drifting away with an experienced hand on the back of the chair. His other hand held a thin data slate, and his critical eye roved over it.

"Despite his...lack of professionalism, Rain was thorough in his checks. The particle dispersal systems were not included in the list given to him, but he checked them nonetheless." Something in Noa's voice sounded off, suspicious almost.

She doubted she'd have noticed if she hadn't worked with him for so long.

"Come on, Noa, spit it out. You've been testy about Rain since I hired him."

The energy of her bridge crew slowed somewhat, and she smiled. Just like those three girls to listen in, scuttlebutt was practically the lifeblood of the crew, more than the special meals Horace cooked up sometimes.

"Ma'am, he has no records, and he brought a damaged Earth Federation C.Frame on board with him, a prototype even. Suspicion seems only natural."

She nodded as he spoke, ignoring the obvious eavesdropping as her other three officers found reason to crowd the communications console, closest to where Noa was floating.

"I know it's not how the Navy did things, Noa, trust me. I went with my gut, and it told me we needed a damn good pilot-" The rest of what she had to say was interrupted as the comms station beeped a shrill warning.

"Frisson?" She called to her comms officer, her tone serious as each member of the bridge fell back into place.

Cleopatra Frisson, a young olive-skinned brunette woman, called back.

"Ma'am, F Particle density spiked sooner than we expected. We've lost all communications except for tight beam and intraship."

"Vela?" Valentina called next, as she read the stream of info coming into her console, reports from the rest of the crew. The information wasn't critical, so she dismissed it in favor of the readouts from comms.

Retha Vela, a woman only somewhat younger than Valentina's own late '20s, with thin, elegant features, spoke up from Navigation.

"We're still an hour out from decel, and two hours out from our destination."

Valentina narrowed her eyes and was about to speak up, but her fire control officer beat her to the punch.

Isobel Ramey, a mousey woman who stood maybe five feet tall, spoke up in a voice louder than one would expect from her size.

"That makes no damn sense, there'd have to be a reactor still active in the rubble field, spewing particles for years, or there's another ship out there somewhere." Left unsaid was which, exactly, she thought was more likely.

"Or both," Valentina muttered, as her gut twisted in a way that told her something didn't add up.

"Call the debrief early, Noa. Something's strange here, and we need to be ready."

"Yes ma'am!" He called back, and the bridge descended into the familiar hectic energy of a venture into the unknown.

---

A bit over an hour and one deceleration burn later, Rain leaned against the back wall of the conference room, near the elevator that brought him here. Most of the crew was in attendance, which was something of a feat in the small room, made even smaller by a hastily assembled holo-viewer in the center of the room.

It was once an observation room for officers, back when the *Speak Softly* was first built some fifteen years ago. Two large reinforced windows, though certainly not made of glass, graced the port and starboard sides of the room.

Out of habit, Rain checked them in his peripheral, and noted the heavy shutters across the top that could drop down in case of a breach. Space was beautiful, Rain thought, up until you were drifting aimlessly through it without a ship's hull between you and the void.

His gaze drifted across the rest of the crew, most of whom were instead eyeing the captain as she talked in a low tone with her 2IC. Uniforms weren't a thing aboard a ship as loosely organized as the *Speak*, so Rain had to go with who he recognized.

Which was nearly no one. Captain Valentina and Noa Light he recognized, they hired him after all. Rain also noted the presence of one of the mechanics, a young-ish girl he'd seen staring at the Peregrine Frame in the docking bay once or twice. He was terrible at judging age, he knew, so she could be older than him for all he knew.

"Alright crew, listen up." Valentina's voice rang out, and so the crew did. Rain almost snapped to attention as she spoke, but managed to quell the instinct with some effort.

"The mission has changed. On our way to our original destination, wreckage from an old war wreck that had been caught in Ananke's orbit, we encountered a Fujikawa field, far in excess of anything we'd expect in this region of space."

Something about the way she spoke kept the room silent, and Rain felt a familiar twist in his gut, something he hadn't felt in years.

"Thanks to Ms. Frisson," she nodded at the brunette, who straightened at the attention, "We were able to ascertain the likely center of the field. Our high gain visual cameras revealed this-" as she spoke, she tapped a small screen mounted on her wrist, causing the holo to come to life.

A grainy photo hovered in midair, and Rain felt the twist in his gut tighten, a vice grip on his insides.

A rocky celestial body, the moon Ananke, was visible in the far distance, but that wasn't the important part. Visible against it, thanks to the moon providing a backdrop, was a ship; broken into two pieces down the middle, the bow separated cleanly from the aft.

It was too grainy to make out much detail, but there was one other detail. A small ruler, digitally added next to the ship, read '2 Kilometres'.

What had they stumbled upon, Rain wondered.

It couldn't be anything good.