The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald (A Tale of the 'Verse)

(Important note: this story is largely non-erotic, any sex that occurs will happen only when logically demanded by the plot and is incidental to the main thrust of the tale. If it does happen it will be suitably steamy however...)

It is the Year 2532. In the wake of the 'Miranda Wave' public outcry on the core worlds has completely revised the government of the Alliance and ousted its former leadership. Gone are the days of secret eugenics projects on backwater worlds and training facilities where those with psychic gifts have their brains cut up to make them perfect spies. Accountability is the new regime's watchword and this is for the best. They have stepped up efforts at Terraforming and 'Civilizing' the marginal planets and border moons, helping local populations develop to the point that they can fully participate in the Allaince. Now that the home base of the Reavers is known the combine fleet has gone and broken their main strength with Plasma-Fire and Torpedo barrages, then solemnly sent down thousands of marines to turn an entire continent into a cemetery for those who died on Miranda. The planet has been resettled, its air thoroughly scrubbed of the paxilon compounds, and though it is considered a hotbed for sedition and its people fearful and taciturn it is a productive member of the Alliance, all thanks to River Tam. Speaking of poor River and the other people in her 'program' they all have been relocated to an undisclosed location where they can live out their lives in peace and tranquility, cared for by the best doctors and psychiatrists money can buy, while the 'program' has been quietly but firmly SHUT DOWN.

After a brief scuffle in the 2525 elections the new coalition government pushed through a comprehensive bill outlawing indentured servitude and slavery in any form, and manumitting all persons presently held in any sort of bondage. This is now a celebrated national holiday, similar to unification day, and agreed by the general public to be far more worthy of the celebration. They had to make some concessions to get that put through of course, not the least of which was allocating resources to resettlement efforts for the newly freed, but also including relaxing the restrictions on many classes of professional endeavors, including salvaging. After the war and all the Reaver attacks and so forth there's a lot of derelicts floating around loose, and an entire class of legal-but-freelance salvagers has sprung up.

Now everything is not roses and sunshine: there's troubles aplenty in the verse.

For one thing, when the Alliance Fleet broke the Reavers over Miranda they didn't catch all of them. More than a few were already out hunting, and a lot of others turned and ran when it became obvious that the battle was lost. (Damn near the first time anyone had ever seen them do that, but they did.) Now they just float about, like un-exploded land mines, attacking basically at random and without warning, and not just the outer planets either, they've even hit one of the core worlds a few years back, though that was dealt with in under two hours by local LEOs and with only five casualties other than the attackers.

Meanwhile the Miranda Wave has fanned the long dormant embers of independence in the hearts of a lot of old soldiers and fresh faced young rebels. No one admits to having met anyone who is a member, it's always something they heard from a 'friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend' they met at a party who didn't give their name and was 'very anonymous looking' but supposedly there is a new battalion of Brown-Coats, and their recruiting. All manner of sabotage and theft is blamed on this "Finity's End Battalion" but try as they might the Alliance can't seem to pin them down or infiltrate them, and some among the alliance brass question if they even really exist or are just a cover story concocted by run-of-the-mill criminals to deflect suspicion that has turned into a kind of meme/cortex rumor...

As if all that weren't enough, there are stories out of the outer worlds of Kalidasa that towns are being attacked, not by Reavers this time but by, can you believe this: aliens! Supposedly there's two KINDS of them, one that are black and rubbery and eat people from the inside and another that look almost human and hunt the others for sport! No one's buying it, but the Weyland-Yutani Corp has offered 40,000 credits for anyone who can capture one of either kind alive, so there has to be SOMETHING to it: but that's nothing for Independent Salvagers like us to get involved in.

I am part of one of those crews of salvagers I mentioned earlier: we cruise around, looking for people to rescue, for a price of course; gotta keep ourselves fed and fueled after all! But a lot of the time we find them all dead: airlock malfunction, plague, Reavers, engine trouble, some guy who's been in space too long going crazy, lots of ways to die out here, and we go get a Writ of Salvage and pick over their bones. It's grim work but hey, someone's gonna do it if we don't, so why not ya know? At least we don't shoot any survivors like I've heard tell a few other crews do, naming no names mind...

Anyway, we supplement that with some honest cargo hauling, and since I can be truthful here some not-so-honest cargo hauling, though we've never broken a quarantine like old Captain Mal did back in the day. That was how we came to be about 3 weeks out of Whitefall on our way to New Omaha when we picked up an S.O.S. Beacon from this ship called the Edmund Fitzgerald...

Well, of course we're going to go have a look see: there could be people alive over there! The beacon says they still have atmo and power, and it's only been on about a week! If there's survivors it's legal to charge them passage to the next port of call and get a Writ of Salvage when you get there, so this could turn up a tidy sum for us...

But I'm getting ahead of myself, first you've got to know about our ship and her crew...