《Leap of Faith》Prologue 2 - Long Sleep
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Further exploration only strengthened that initial hypothesis of the wreck having some sort of covert purpose.
It seemed whatever the crafts outer walls were covered with served to hide it from conventional scanner technology. In the first place, he had only found it because he was only one person and could therefore afford to personally survey the debris field with short-range, high detail scanners. Even then, the ship had never appeared on any electronic survey tools, he had first found it by sight alone.
Within the inside corridors he had found further evidence of combat: explosive residue, spent bullets, impact marks on walls, floors, and roofs. The battle scars clearly intensified in the path from further inside the ship and to the hangar.
“Got to be careful from now on.”
The hangar and adjacent halls were already open and lacking any atmosphere but the inner bulkheads have been held sealed throughout the years and might still hold gasses within the wreck.
“You really don’t want to see what sudden depressurization can do to anyone nearby, trust me on that one.”
Best to find access to the ship's old air filtration systems and gradually remove the atmosphere with those, it would require him to pass current from the Grajo to power the slow process. Safety first.
Pretty simple though. First, find a filtration grate and search for the line that should feed it power, cut it and attach a long disposable cable, run that thing to the generator and connect both machines together. A bit more fiddling to get the grate working and soon it's pumping air out into the vast unknown.
After that it’s a simple matter of manually opening bulkheads, exploring, cataloging, and transporting loose valuables back to the hab.
“Some of these things are pretty efficiently valuable, stuff that sells well and weighs little.”
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A couple of days had passed and by now he had access to a cafeteria, barracks, armory, and medical area. The MREs were always good business and so was high-quality medicine, never mind some was past their expiry date, someone could still find a use for these sorts of things.
The armory had been a bit of a letdown, whatever scuffle had gone down, people evidently raided that area of the ship long ago, a couple of simple handguns and some loose caseless ammunition were all there was to find.
He had high hopes for this next one though throughout this process he had been checking power lines and had found them all dead. All but one. Coming off from below his feet, through the barrack floor, and into a sealed room with no windows was a single high-intensity cable, currently live and powering something.
That meant the ship's power was still working at some level, which could mean high-value salvage, it also indicated something behind this door was continuously requesting power to keep operational and had likely done so for years.
Shims hammered in the right places open the locks and a hydraulic bar wedged into the seam pushes the door open, inside is the one thing most likely to keep pulling power after so long.
Built for endurance thanks to health and safety guidelines lie ninety-nine empty medical coma cylinders.
And a single operational one, still occupied.
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