The main hangar deck of the SSS Harbinger of Sorrows was littered with hundreds, thousands, of parts from the broken Empire destroyer. Everything from handguns, uniforms, weapons turrets, computer terminals… technicians were examining parts, and tossing them onto automated platforms to deliver them to three piles; one at the back of the hangar, one by the right-side hangar door, and the other by the left hangar door.

  The smallest one remained by the left hangar door… and it mostly included remains of corpses. As Kyle entered the deck, he stared at each of the piles… and the mass of loose debris still across the floor. One of the technicians; Barret, if he recalled correctly; was sorting through the one right by the internal lift where he’d entered, and glanced up.

  The man was one of the senior technicians of the Screaming Skulls, wearing the same bone white skinsuit the rest wore, only without the fake… or real… bone armor most of the combat troops war, just a set of open-mouth skull logos on the shoulders, and a heavily scarred, bald head that was a sign of someone who either didn’t care about their looks… or thought women liked scars.

  “Oh, hey, Kyle. Good to see you up and about. Been a couple days.” He seemed friendly enough, and… oh. Yeah. Definitely Barret. Lieutenant Barret Harrison, taught him how to make and maintain a railgun when he was thirteen.

  “Yeah, they got my left arm replaced better than new. I can now actually punch someone with that hand and only break the bones in my shoulder instead of all my fingers and wrist. What’s with the piles? I see some familiar stuff.”

  He glanced around at the debris on the deck, and smiled. “We’ve been going through all the debris we netted up, one batch at a time. Basically we load a whole mess of it into the bay here and strap the fighters to the roof. Then we make three heaps. The ones we want to either take apart ourselves or put on a ship…”

  He pointed at the nearby pile.

  “The stuff we’re gonna sell to the dubs at Ash..” He pointed at the pile to the right.

  “And the stuff we’re returning to the Empire.” He nodded at the much smaller pile on the left.

  “So…....Any chance I can take a look through all this, or is it all set?”

  A deep chuckle. “First come, first served, with folks who contributed to the fight taking priority, same as usual. I understand you killed that fat space-snake thing, so you’ve got dibs, if you want anything in here. I think the current list goes, you, then the captains of the big ships, then the fighter pilots, then anybody else who wants a trinket or souvenir.”

  He studied Kyle for a moment. “You can’t take all of it, but there’s parts of a cruiser and three destroyers. You could bring out enough to kit out a whole ship in Empire gear.”

  “You really shouldn’t say that to a man whose ship just got the hell blown out of it, Barret. I could use just about anything.”

  “Well. We learned all sorts of kick-ass stuff. Their hulls are alive, and just regrow if they get fed the right mix of materials. Their usual self-destruct is apparently made to kill it so nobody gets the technique, and make sure the most vital, high-end stuff gets slagged. Not sure if its useful or not, since it’d be a huge pain to equip a ship with it, but… lets see…”

  Barret lifted up his wrist.. A diagram of a computer terminal popped up. He started flicking his fingers, images appearing of weapons, conduits. “Hmmm. Their armory was mostly intact, and they had some stuff built to kill dragons in it, and for on-board fighting. We’ve got some of the best plasma beamers I’ve ever seen, with range and coherence that are just scary, some missile variants that are just crazy, an emitter array that is just excellent…”

  He paused… and grinned. “And some of the best computers I’ve ever seen. At least five to ten times the density of processors, and higher-efficiency. And… alive. Literally self-healing. Its not copied from human, but its clearly synthetic brain tissue.”

  “...If its self-healing… does that mean we could take a sample… and slowly copy it just by stealing one sliver at a time and feeding it to let it regrow?”

  “We think so. Though, to be clear… whatever it came from, its not the dragon. Extremely different chemistry.”

  Kyle looked at the massive pile of debris. Even when they lost the first galactic war, the Empire had managed to keep most of its starship tech secret. The big deal back then had been the FTL drives. Now…

  He definitely needed to pry into these secrets.

  “Well then. If they’ve got a whole armory worth, would it include an augment suit or equivalent? My regular one is probably still broken and I might need to move more weight than this one is built for.”

  Barret grinned. “Ohhh, yeah. Not just the intact ones in the armory, we actually retrieved a few free-floating from the debris of the ones that self-destructed, too. You’re gonna love this.”

  ***

  Kyle had seen power armor before. It was a massive, bulky thing; a ‘light’ power armor suit was a 2.5 meter tall monstrosity, usually built for someone of unusually short height; marines were usually heavy-world augments that were less than a meter and a half tall, but strong enough to pick up something as heavy as those suits if they needed to.

  Built to tear through walls and melt enemy troops in boarding actions, real power armor was absolutely nasty.

  Tons of people… including the Skulls.. Would make what was called a ‘poor man’s power armor’. An augment suit that took the weight off of the wearer, and just an unusually heavy suit of ordinary armor strapped to it, or even just an armored breast-plate, gauntlets, and boots.

  The Empire marine suit… was neither. It connected to the implant at the back of his neck without a problem, like any other augment suit… but it was clearly built as an ultralight power-armor suit from the ground up.

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  He wouldn’t want to take it into a fight against real power armor… a dub marine would just crush it with ease… but it moved quickly, easily… and had a seamless dull white finish, nothing unprotected.

  There were a few problems with it. The HUD was in japanese, and it had a rising sun logo on the shoulders. But it moved like it was part of his body, and was clearly a step above the usual augment suits.

  It had a pair of hilts built into the hips, as well as a tiny laser built into the right hand; there was nothing in the hilts right now, but if he had to guess, that was likely the spot for a sword of some description; power armor had claws built into it for shearing through hull, it was likely something similar. He should grab one, if any were left.

  Considering the color for the skulls was bone white, they’d likely take one apart to copy, and just slap a skull logo over the Empire one on the rest. For him… Kyle might make some other adjustments. This thing had potential.

  After spending a few minutes trying out the new toy as an amused Barret watched, Kyle got back to the matter at hand; looting.

  He was going to rebuild the Sapper. Empire guns were better than standard, so if there was something that could be mounted to a corvette, he wanted it. Especially if it would be good for killing dragons. And one of those computers, too. And…

  He shook his head. Best to take it one step at a time.

  He joined in with the technicians going through the massive pile at the center.. Hull plates that were beneath the living skin. Random conduits. Thousands of meters of tubing designed to pump everything from coolant to human waste through the ship. The armor plates that protected vital areas.

  Electrical wiring. There we go. He found… a communications terminal.

  Just like the ones for everywhere else, it had both a wired connection to run to an implant, and a display so that other crew could see what was going on, or interact with it without an implant.

  There was even a wireless receiver. And…. an actual processor. There was a computer built-in to the terminal. If Barret was right, he could pop this open, and copy it, one sliver at a time.

  There was a small reservoir of liquid attached to it. Most likely whatever ‘fed’ the processor. It was almost full, so not likely to be a problem in the near future.

  He set down a storage crate in one corner of the massive hangar bay, and set the terminal in it… and went back to hunting.

  Missiles. The dubs used 40mm, 80mm, and 120mm for their smaller warheads. The Empire used 50mm, 100mm, and 150mm. The names on them were all in japanese, and there were over a hundred of them, mostly neatly stacked up in one spot.

  The HUD brought up data on them as he looked… but it was still stuck in Japanese mode. He spent a minute working on his implant until he could get it to translate…

  There we go.

  ‘Inferno’ missile. Sprayed out an enormous cloud of self-igniting liquid that contained its own oxidizer and could burn even in vacuum. Excellent against lightly armored craft, and also good for melting off external components like sensors and gun barrels on bigger ones.

  Pass.

  ‘Dissolver’ missile. Breaks apart molecular bonds of objects in a small radius around the warhead. Clings to the ship initially, runs for ten seconds, excellent for penetrating armor. Typically melted apart by dragons before being able to kill them, but able to make massive gaps in their armor.

  He’d keep a couple. See if he could copy them. Good lord he’d never even heard of a weapon that could do that before. Dissolve molecular bonds? How? Anyways.

  ‘Thorns of…’ Yeah, a basic Multiple-impact missile. Split into a dozen, good for killing fighters. He could make those himself.

  Pass.

  There we go. ‘Dragon-Slayer’ missile. A powerful shaped-charged munition, designed to try to cling to a target and fire it through the shell into its internals, or, if it misses direct contact, fire from the closest range it can manage. Modestly effective against living things, but specifically built to kill dragons, including numerous filaments of ‘Rhenium’, which the dragon would convulse and violently reject if introduced into its system, rendering it temporarily unable to fight.

  He should figure out the why behind that, if possible, but…

  Knowing the Rhenium bit was the most important part. He could just lace railgun needles with it for similar effect. But he wanted a few of the purpose-built missiles, too. He loaded them onto a flat carrier. Aside from the Dissolver and the Dragon-slayer, everything else on the pile had a United-Worlds equivalent. Most people kept missiles when they found them, but there were still dozens found every day in the enormous scrapyard at Ash.

  Now….Guns.

  He looked over the pile; there was the neatly organized stack over beside the armor, but he didn’t want personal weapons. He wanted big ones. Well, sort-of big. Railguns, plasma weapons, whatever would fit on the Sapper.

  And… aside from a single broken turret that could be fixed up, none of that was in the bay. He piled up everything he’d grabbed so far.. Tossing in another couple of the smaller computers and handheld items on his way… and headed over back to the entrance, carefully weaving his way around the techs sorting things out.

  “Don’t see any of the ship weapons in here. Or many, at least. If there’s something available, I’d like to upgrade the Sapper a bit for next time. Definitely a railgun, but whatever I can get.”

  Barret glanced at him, and nodded. “We do this one batch at a time. This is the third batch. The only big guns that survived off the ones that self-destructed were external turrets, and only a few of those. What you thinking? Plasma? Needler? Laser? There’s actually this hilarious-looking launcher that shot like a hundred 50mm-missiles at once to clear out fighters.”

  “The biggest railgun and plasma weapon I can fit on my ship without causing problems. These Empire designs are gonna be better than anything I can get on the open market, and even if its busted up, I don’t mind taking the time to fix em.”

  He nodded. “No problem at all. I’ll nab em for you. You gonna keep the armor?”

  “Of course. Peel out any trackers, replace the HUD, and give her a new paintjob, but she’s perfect. Did you know they adjust to fit you as soon as you put them on? The arms and legs actually stretched a bit as I put them on.”

  The older man studied the armor for a moment, and smiled. “Well, that’s good. You sticking with us after the swap, or….?”

  “...No. I’m taking a share of the salvage and getting the Sapper fixed up and modified. She was tough; that dragon melted the externals but didn’t hurt the insides… but I underestimated the variety of threats I might find out there.”

  He slowly shook his head. “Next time, I’ll be ready. And I won’t have anyone stabbing me in the back, either.”

  Barret chuckled. “I’ve actually got a bit of good news on that score. If you can afford them, I think your mom has found at least one or two you can trust.”

  “...I find that difficult to believe, after that last time. But fine. Who is it?”

  "You wouldn't believe me. You'll see for yourself shortly."