Elias Finley, Male, Scavenger

Warning: main reactor off-line
Warning: water filtration cartridge expired
Warning: atmospheric control operating at less than 30%
Warning: thrusters 1, 3, 5 and 7 off-line
Warning: hyperfuel levels below safety limits
Warning: spacial anomaly detected

"Vera, shut up!" the loud siren that accompanied the messages were deafening and there was sadly no way to disable this without crippling the ships AI. It wouldn't be much of an issue if those catastrophic elements were not permanent fixtures of the Patchwork and if the AI didn't insist on reminding it at the start of each shift. Every 8h, like clockwork...

Captain Finley got up from his bunk and made his way to the small kitchen of the ship, still groggy from the lack of sleep. He had worked late and only had 3h of rest before the next alarm. Not bothering to put clothes on he picked on of the few remaining caffeine tabs and let it dissolve in a mug of hot water with a distinctive metallic taste.

Once upon a time, a ship logged under the very inspiring name VMCS Freighter 36643-zrx-347 the ship had known better days before Elias acquired it. Even in his time far from the best of his class, the Zrx freighter from the Varn Mercantile Consortium was a long tube with a knob at each end and at the mid section. Bridge and spartan living quarters for a theoretical crew of 4 at the front, the huge fusion reactor and some of the working parts of the ship at the middle and finally the main thrusters and hyperdrive at the tail. Cargo was transported in removable rectangular containers docked around the tubular hull, 6 for each half of the ship.

One interesting historical detail was that the Varn Mercantile Consortium declared bankruptcy 2837, after the Hyrnian trade wars. Which made it at best nearly 400 years old.

Elias was Voidborn, having spent his childhood from ship to space station, his dad was a scavenger, failed prospector, con artist at times and drunk most of the time. His mother practiced the so called oldest profession in the world and let herself believe in one of his dad's riskproof get rich quick schemes. She only figured out how out of his depth he was 6 years and a kid later, leaving him for a way more successful pirate captain which had a real ship, with a crew.

All 16 years-old Elias got from his dad after he died from a terminal case of being too drunk to cheat at cards properly was a very small, very old, banged up, barely hyper capable, almost out of fuel, decommissioned auxiliary repair ship (his childhood home), and a debt of 300000 credits to the Thaorios cartel.

He had negotiated an installment plan that was actually more reasonable than what the corporate bank offered him went he tried to borrow legit money to repay his debts from the mob. Both his ship and the one he came upon, lost in space a year after than needed so much repairs to be up to pretty much anyone's standards that they had an almost negative value and were so obsolete that even being scrapped for part was not much better.

He had found the freighter with half of the living area and all of the bridge missing. The reactor core had been jettisoned. More than half of the thrusters were destroyed (and after repairs only half worked at all, the highest output on one was 71%). And only 3 of the possibly 12 cargo holds were present.

He had managed to jury rig something to couple his own ship to the top most docking port and was using the small craft as the bridg, living quarters and power source of the derelict.

Despite all that, it offered him more possibilities than before and even with all the money spent keeping it afloat and fuelled up, he was slowly chipping away at his debts.

He had a few profitable hauling jobs and was currently doing some prospecting in an unregistered system of the Ludani sector.
And one of the prices to pay was to have the old corporate AI, repeating the same list of defects all time...

"What the fuck, Vera? Repeat last warning!" he shouted almost spitting his precious morning stim, as he realized what he heard before.

Warning: spacial anomaly detected

To this AI a spatial anomaly was pretty much anything that wasn't a star, a planet or a rock. Which could mean a lot of things that could be sorted in 3 broad categories: some useless junk, an horrible **** or some chance to get rich.

"Put it on screen and focus the scanners on it! Let's see what we got!"