Salvage

High sun would come soon, Xzavis mused, charting it's course through a tinted visor across a malachite cosmos. He may have an hour to return to the habitat before risking the cyclonic flares that scorched the glass-sand sea. Not that he thought to worry, after all, he had with him the fastest dune sled that side of the Fortuna-6 star cluster. He could be home with a vanilla cooler in hand by the time the solar spectacle began.

The trip was a matter of necessity and opportunity. The back end of a C-class Thanatos freighter wrecked on his own doorstep? Those things didn't drop from the sky every day. Pirates would have stripped the front in orbit, they wouldn't have risked making planetfall to salvage the rest. And soon the remains would be incinerated, likely detonating the fuel reserves - the surface would be irradiated for months. Xzavis had enough supplies to see him through, and the guild would compensate him for the trouble, but with a cache of scrap to sell off as soon as it was safe, his latest shortcoming could be his big break.

He grew close - chunks of metallic debris littered his path to the wreckage, making for seared ramps to leap up over the waves. Shadows bleeding from the upright shards sheltered his approach, chilling the air to a cool simmer. Then ahead, the magnificent shipwreck - a goliath of smoking alloys and fibres shaped like a splintered lozenge. The many decks were open and exposed to the boiling atmosphere - its own life-size schematic plastered against a celestial wall.

"Yep, that shouldn't be there." He tutted.

The destruction was gloriously ominous - humanity's greatest achievement left ravaged by the cruelty of the cosmos. A thousand years ago, Xzavis' ancestors had dreamed of making it to the moon, now he had a whole planet to himself amid a confederation stretching across the galaxy.

And if it was to stay that way, he needed to make a living, even if that meant the majority of his income coming in from someone else's catastrophe. He switched off his engine, stepped into the diamond dust, and nodded his head in respect of the dead. A moment was all he could spare. He turned to the dials and switches on his wrist - perhaps rudimentary in design, but they were the best solution considering the glass particles in the air. The scanner attached to his helmet clicked on, buzzing as it flashed a grid of light where his eye drifted. The results appeared on the inside of his visor. Low-grade carbon fibre, metal alloys, insulated cables - mostly worthless. Rubble crunched heavily beneath his feet, though soon dwindled as he crept further up into the wreck.

Steam sizzled from cracked piping - what had been the atmospheric control ravaged at the mercy of the stratosphere. The electrics had shorted after the shields had gone down, with the wires hanging limply up the corridor like the threaded tissues of a charred corpse. Still nothing of note. Xzavis' sled wasn't large enough to shift the carcass scrap. No, he was after something smaller, compact. Warp cells. That's where the money was. They'd have stored them close to the engines in a microclimate vault to protect them when the ship reached hyperspeed. A freighter like that could make two-dozen trips per tour, and with the terminal eight systems over, they likely had some left. Warp cells were expensive to make - the fleet would pay handsomely for them back, but a rival corporation may offer more. Either way, Xzavis would be back in the green.

He focused on finding a way upstairs. Xzavis had made such salvaging missions a hundred times before, but that was his first freighter, and the first he'd explored on his home turf. He was usually called to battleship wrecks drifting in the void - he knew them like the back of his hand, and could navigate them blindfolded. Freighters were different beasts entirely. He had an idea of their layouts - they were modular, put together like flat-pack furniture, though the burden of gravity made moving around a hassle. Vertical access was hindered by the necessity of ladders.

It took a good fifteen minutes to find the vault. Xzavis tugged his guild wrench out of his back pocket - a tool of his trade that acted as a skeleton key for all confederation ships in the event of power failure. He clicked the prongs into the socket and waited for the distinct ker-chunk of the lock override. The deadbolt released, and with a crank of the handle, the latch unhooked.

Xzavis' heart quivered. "The hell?"

He'd expected canisters fixed to the shelves within - each cradling a warp cell. Instead, as he shone a torch inside, claw marks scraped up the walls, and the canisters littered the floor, shredded with their contents nowhere to be seen. Something dripped from the ceiling - a liquid that shimmered like petrol on the floor in a puddle. His eye crept upwards... and he was knocked to the floor, smacking his head on the inside of his helmet. Xzavis was dazed, his lifesigns blaring red on his visor. An emergency shot of painkillers seeped into his bloodstream, helping him get his breath back in time to see what had hit him.

A small creature sat on top of him, by the looks of it phasing in and out of existence. The main body glimmered as a bright, white light, with its extremeties burning to black, shifting like flames. Its eyes were an arctic blue, chilling Xzavis' blood with their stare - three in all. He choked, glancing down to see its claws stabbing into his chest, and its teeth twisting into a resonant growl. Xzavis' skin crawled, and he wished to scramble away but his body suddenly felt heavy as lead. It reared back, and he thought it might let him go... then it smacked its head down onto his visor, cracking it.

Get up. Run. That's all Xzavis could think. He did the first thing his instincts inspired - throwing a fist in its side. It was agile, leaping over his arm and sticking its nails back into his skin, raring to throw its skull down on him again. His hand floundered at his side, meeting his wrench. Holding his breath, Xzavis stabbed its prongs into the monster's side. Hearing it squeal, he ripped it away from his flesh and suit, stumbling into a run along the passage. Light filled the mouth of the turn ahead. He didn't hesitate. Xzavis dove from the gap, underestimating the height of the second story from the floor. He landed hard on his feet, breaking his ankle and falling on his front. His suit immediately responded to his screams, flooding his blood with more painkillers. The glass dust embedded itself in the cuts on his skin, but with adrenaline coursing through him, he fixed his thoughts only on reaching his sled.

Behind, the creature followed, wavering at the edge of the platform to adjust to the light, and calculate the distance to the ground. Xzavis didn't give in to the urge to look, throwing himself towards the vehicle sitting idle a few paces ahead. The creature decided it was safer to climb down, granting him a precious extra second to struggle into the seat and start the engine. As he gripped as hard as he could around the accelerator, the monster leapt for him, getting blasted in the face by his exhaust and the cloud of glass he whipped up. The sled roared, surfing over the dunes at top speed. Xzavis braved a glance over his shoulder. The creature's body flashed, and like a spark, it snapped closer to him, bounding as it went and by the looks of it, growing larger with each step. Xzavis gasped, watching the warnings flashing on his screen - 'EXOSUIT COMPROMISED, REPAIRS IN PROGRESS. HOSTILE ENTITY DETECTED.' Then 'DISPLACED PILON FRACTURE IN RIGHT ANKLE - SEEK MEDICAL ASSISTANCE.' He tried to shake off the stress, focusing only on the horizon and the high-pitched whistling that was his suit fixing itself.

Xzavis recognised he had one advantage over the creature. He knew those dunes better than anyone, and he knew how his sled reacted riding across them - where it sped up, what slowed it down. He could steer the back of the sled into the top of the ridge, spraying glass right at its face. The damn thing had three eyes, if he could blind it, surely it would back off.

The adrenaline started to wear off, and Xzavis soon realised the pain relief he'd been delivered wasn't nearly enough. Every bump and jump was agony, but the habitat was up ahead. Just a few more minutes... The creature slashed at his leg. It ran alongside him, and it looked as if it were about to shift again at any moment - aiming straight for his face. He thought about ramming it with the side of his sled, but it was too clever for that. Instead he braked and changed course, speeding off before it could blink. It had grown to the size of a cheetah - if it caught him, he'd be ripped to shreds.

The monster soon got back on his trail. Xzavis met its eye. Its body flickered again, raring to pounce, to snap out and into existence right on top of him. He couldn't go any faster, there was nowhere left to turn. A yellow alert flashed on his visor. The air grew unbearably hot. In a flash, a spire of flames rippled down from the heavens like a fork of lightning, striking the creature at his back and singeing the tail of his sled. It reeled up on its end, throwing Xzavis into the sand. He was mere feet from the habitat.

In the seconds that the fire twisted and scorched across the sands, Xzavis took notice of the alert on his screen - 'SOLAR STORM IN PROGRESS.' The amber light had been flashing around the edge of his visor for the last five minutes. He'd completely missed the early warning. The cyclone left molten glass in its wake, though nothing of the creature. Xzavis took a breath, crawling to the habitat door which had automatically opened for him and his vehicle. His sled was too badly damaged, and it wasn't safe to try and get it inside. He didn't think twice, stumbling in, and letting the door roll down behind him. The glass-sand desert, the burning green sky, the towers of fire, and the flash of a massive explosion off in the distance were shut out behind a reinforced shutter - the last of the outside world he'd see for months.