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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Fulliron on 2026-03-26 17:46:07+00:00.

The salvager's life is... unpredictable.

The Void is, well, mostly void, so even small claims might take 3 days at FTL to sweep, only to find naught but exhausted reaction mass. But I have to say, one of those two-bit claims was my most interesting ever. Not most profitable, but definitely interesting.

So I come outta hyperlight and do an active scan. Not expecting to get anything back, I'm not even scanning in the hydrogen band. Instead, I get two pings; a return ping for a probable ship hulk about 2000 klicks out, and a weak comms hail. So I set a 6 hour burn and take a look at the hail. Now, I wasn't working with a crew at the time, so there shouldn't've been anyone to hail me in half a light. And yet, hail. Check the thing, and it's barely more than static. At least, with the normal comms transceiver. I went to ignore it as lucky static, when another burst came in. Closer this time. I was gettin' real uneasy; I'm permitted and all, but survivors always make claims rough, and I certainly didn't have lawyer money at the time.

So I switch the comm's mode a couple times, still just getting static, until I think I hit the wrong button a few too many times and got it to fallback into raw data mode. I don't read binary, not really, but… you don't Voidhop for as long as I have without picking up the difference between random static and proper data. It's sometimes the difference between a huge score and freezing in your wrecker's cockpit for a month eating expired rations just to keep a few fumes in the tank. Funny thing is though, any survivor in that sector would have a proper ident-code as a message header. These data blasts didn't have that.

About this time, I got into visual range on the possible wreck. It was… a Sight. Mostly, it was some ancient Hegemony patrol frigate, but some enterprising SOB had welded like 20 more guns and a fuckin sombrero onto it. The hulk wasn't even in that bad of a condition. One giant hole in the engine compartment, but the engines were still mostly there and the guns were still in their mounts. My little wrecker wouldn't be able to scratch the thing, but I had a feeling, if I could hook in and commandeer the engines to my navi-computer, I'd probably be able to jump the damn thing whole back to port. Hegemony always built like granite.

I'm doing my final burn to match velocities when I get another comm ping, so clear it had to be from the ship. Didn't have much choice at that point, so I prepped a burst back with some config data. I swear though, as soon as I opened the channel, my ship went insane. Engines cut, alarms blared, and I swear my clamps tried to eject. Then the message sent, and... silence. Until, impossibly, a voice came over. "Um. Sorry about that. Been so long, I forgot you might not be expecting Party Time. What... year, is it?" Thought it was a fucking ghost, at first, and I wasn't far off. The SOB had rigged a full-dive sim into "the Fiesta Ship II" and then, somehow, pushed the damn thing to almost a gigalight. Somehow, and without time dilation safeties. So at speed, his fuckin' body withered away to nothing, and he'd been drifting for who knows how long after a coolant tank blew out. Why'd he do it? "We know we can go fast, yes? But truly, do we know how fast?" I had to concede, we do not. "Well. Do you want to see?"

You asked me, when you sat down, how long I'd been a scavver. That depends on your frame of reference. From mine? Maybe 30 or so years. From yours? I gotta ask. How fast've you gone?