Topic: The Story of The ''Almost Blessing''
FractalDactyl started this discussion 13 years ago #29,467
A button was pressed and the teeth came to life, spinning and grinding at the open space in front of them and a continuous whirring filled the ship....
After the war, you needed nothing more than a properly fitted ship and small crew to get your slice of the pie. With all of the wrecks floating aimlessly about the vacuum of space, there was plenty of scrap to be had. Sure, scavengers were able to easily make a quick credit by searching the empty vessels for medical supplies or leftover ammunition and selling the goods for a spot of cash and enough fuel to get their ship to the next wreck and back. But the real money to be made was the ships themselves. Scrap metal, when given a little tender love and care, could keep a family going for a while. Thus was the fate of the Almost Blessing. Any old ship could be outfitted to be a scrapper. An arm to pull in pieces, a set of grinding teeth to tear apart the large pieces and enough space to hold it all and even a teenager's first starship could be turned into a recycler. The Almost Blessing had its first scrapping job serving the Riazono family, who had bought it cheap thanks to the government discount on spacecraft many veterans received. The whole family fit on the vessel and would travel among the stars, haunting the battlegrounds that were littered with potential credits. However, Faine Riazono, could not take scavenging the ships he used to serve on, and was unable to continue. Eventually, they sold the ship to a couple of kids, newlyweds too, who were hoping to see the galaxy from the comfort of their own vessel and fund their journey using the ship's harvesting capabilities. But a fight broke out between the two after months of being cooped up in the same junker and it ended with a divorce. That wasn't the first time that the Almost Blessing had seen conflict, and the conflict it had seen had been far bloodier. Legal matters ripped the ship out of both of their hands, and it ended up in a government-owned junkyard.
It wasn't exactly a junkyard, but it may as well have been one. Asteroid wranglers were hired to tether up a hunk of space rock to a government controlled satellite, each satellite and respective asteroid serving a different purpose. In the case of Station C-715, advertisement and storage of the advertised goods was the valiant duty assigned to this satellite. Old ships or ships that did not otherwise have an owner were kept here, and anyone could take them off the asteroid's surface for cheap. That is, if the thing could run. Despite the Almost Blessing being in fine condition, it was a diamond in the rough that nobody would ever notice.
The ship drew nearer to the prize, just a few meters more, and the teeth of the vessel could grab it...
Of course, like all scrapper ships, it had a life before its menial duties. The burn marks on the hull and the stripped bolts were not from solar flares and space rock collisions. Blaster shots had made their mark on the old warship, and the Almost Blessing had its weapons hastily removed before it was decommissioned and sold. It could have been put into the Interplanetary Museum of Heroes for its role in the pivotal Battle of Mal Vicon, but the captain never would have wanted it that way. Savannah Everbright first laid eyes upon the ship when she was young, and by the time her military career awarded her the rank of Captain, she found the ship from her childhood locked away in a storage facility. Captain Everbright had it militarized and used it as her private vessel. She and her handpicked crew had used the Almost Blessing to carry out many missions, earning the respect of friend and foe alike. But Everbright and her crew were boarded for the first and last time in what would be the end of the ship's days as a war machine. While she ordered her crew to pile into the ship's escape pods and get out, Savannah Everbright stayed behind to fight off the intruders. She valiantly fought them all off before succumbing to injuries, filling the now empty shell with more death than any ship should ever see.
Even earlier than that, a boy from the outer rim had spent ten years of his life constructing the Almost Blessing from the best materials he could find, barter for or even steal. It was the fastest flier his planet had ever seen, and as the boy grew up to become a man, he would use it as a ferry to ship folks around from planet to planet, as other forms of transportation were limited around the outer rim back in those days. His name was Connor, and he made more than he could ever want doing what he loved the most. His children and their children would all eventually find the estate he built to be their homes, at least for some time. As he grew old, he mostly took long joyrides with his grandchildren, giving them the view of space from the eyes of the Almost Blessing. But children moved away and the magic of the ship faded just as fast as Connor's health did. One of the last things Connor Everbright did was lock the ship up in his old storage unit, in case the family ever wanted to use the junker again.
Station C-715 was never known to have the best maintenance, so it was no surprise when the gravity generator broke and no one was around to fix it. A few of the junk ships, namely the Almost Blessing had lifted off of their asteroid and into the cold reaches of space. They drifted for many months before underpaid government employees had been able to gather almost all of them up and put them back into the junkyard. However, a few vessels were never recollected.
The ship's grinding teeth began to tear into the metal of the abandoned vessel, ripping it to shreds. The Almost Blessing would fight its last battle against the grinder of a recycler, and it would surely lose. Wires and glass would be sifted out from the metal strips, which would be sent to a factory to be reforged into something else. Finally, ferry that was also a scrapper that was also once a warship would find its rest...
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