Part 1

The Big Empty stretched on before them on the viewscreen for as far as they could see, an unknown expanse of darkness interrupted periodically by distant stars and shifting blots of color, planets that had either not yet been inhabited by another spacefaring race, or that had simply been uncontacted. To the Wrecking Crew, it didn't really matter which they were; if the place didn't ping their system as a friendly port to their outfit, they just drifted on by.

The bridge of their vessel, 'The Dozer', had been constructed after an ancient Chozo design referred to as 'The Meritocrat Style', with the ship's commanding officer elevated slightly above all other stations by a ramp and outpost, giving them an unobstructed view of the screen. A circular array of panels and screens was available to whomever sat or stood at this console, and at the moment, Molly Mash held the seat. She had held the seat now for six years, since disposing of the Crew's previous captain, a withering old outlaw who simply didn't have what it took to get the job done anymore.

She shifted aimlessly in her swiveling chair, the creak of her old-fashioned leather jacket the only sound on the bridge aside from Driver's instruments almost directly below her. The melchin pilot tapped away with his slender, amphibian-like padded fingers on his panels, shifting the viewport's perspective from one set of scanners to the next, until a full sweep had been displayed, bringing them back to the forward viewers.

"Not much out there, captain," he reported in his wet, slurping voice.

"I can see that, Driver," Molly replied with a sigh. "Has Wrench finished modifying our long-range sensors yet?"

"She told me she finished that up a couple of days ago, captain," Driver said from below. "But she didn't want me to use them until you gave the go-ahead." Molly snorted, her right foot twitching and bouncing as she balanced the leg on her left knee, her usual posture of boredom.

"Well for shit's sake, you little toad, fire them up," she crowed, tapping on her own sweep panel. Driver tapped away on the lower section of the bridge, and a few moments later, there came an audible trill from the bridge's automated alert system.

"WARNING- VESSEL DETECTED," droned the pseudo-female voice of the ship's computer system. "WARNING- VESSEL DETECTED." Molly shot up out of her chair, pushing it back with her thighs as she leaned over her control board.

"Driver, bring it up on screen," she barked, reaching for the All-Comms button on her left-most panel. "Attention Crew, this is your captain speaking. We have an unidentified vessel on long-range sensors. I want everybody to their posts, now," she said evenly, killing the All-Comms and shifting to her right to watch the automatic doors from the primary corridor.

The first one through the door, half a minute later, was Rivet, of course. A member of the Mosow race, he resembled a First Earth minotaur from their faery tales and fantasy games of old, wearing a blood red single-piece jumpsuit over his massive frame. Unlike those brutes of legend, however, the Mosows hosted only one horn on their head; males on the left, females on the right.

Rivet stomped four paces onto the bridge, turned and stared straight up at the captain. "A vessel," he grunted. Molly nodded and pointed at the viewscreen, which was zooming in on an unfamiliar ship. Vaguely yellowish in hue on the exterior, it had a kind of beetle-like shape to it, and at a glance, appeared to have seen better days. Even at this distance, Molly could spot signs of recent ship-to-ship combat, wherein this contender clearly didn't come away completely clean. "Does that thing even have any exterior weaponry," a new voice asked. Molly peeked down and spotted Hammer, their resident weapons expert. A member of the Cathus race, he was a vaguely humanoid cat-person with faint blue fur where visible where he wasn't wearing black transteel body armor. His gear belt was littered with various firearms and melee weapons, and the legs of his cargo pants appeared to have been modified and weighed down with more armor plating and tools. How the cathus could even move in that getup, she couldn't tell.

"We'll be able to see it better if we move in on it," Driver said. "Do you want us to bear in, captain?"

"Bring up shields to three-quarters force and bear in, half speed until we're on a ten unit distance, then hold," she said, dragging her seat back over and sitting down as the others took up seats around the bridge. Rivet, of course, headed to the security and defense systems control, which hosted more fine-tuned options than Molly's small section, which gave her access to only basic functions. That was the trade-off for the Meritocrat Style of bridge design; while she had access to all of the ship's most basic functions, anything that required a more finessed touch was accessible only to those specific system stations without the primary architect code.

Given that the Wrecking Crew had stolen the Dozer in the first place, nobody had ever known that code to begin with.

As the ship drew closer to the unidentified vessel, Hammer prepped the offensive systems, while Driver changed the viewer display from the long-range sensors to the mid-range ones, the image now further away but clearer. As they closed on the other vessel, it became clear that it did, in fact, have exterior weapons system. Or, rather, had once possessed them. Carbon scoring and rents along the shell of the ship showed Molly that whoever's ship it was, they'd had their weapons specifically targeted by whoever they'd been fighting against.

A smart move, she thought. Whoever's on that ship, if they're still alive, might well be trying to get out of the way of some serious heat. "Driver, run a systems check on that ship as soon as we're stopped," Molly said.

"It's kind of familiar, captain," Rivet said below, at the security/defense station console. His eyes were narrowed on the viewport, head slightly tilted to the side. "I could swear I've seen it before, just not sure where." Driver, meanwhile, was dipping and diving through available infonets the Dozer could connect to in this sector, the information packets sending out and coming back more slowly than normal, since they were in the largely uninhabited Feldar System. The Dozer came to a halt as they came to within a couple of unit's distance with the other ship, and the other boys started to work on their own information readouts.

"Scans for capabilities show that the other vessel has suffered severe damage to its weapons and defense systems," said Hammer.

"Life-support systems are operating at approximately fifty-percent capacity," Rivet reported. "There appears to be only a single lifeform aboard. Whatever it is, it is shielded from genetic scan outputs, captain," he grunted, slapping his console like a fool. "It's giving off some kind of strange feedback."

"What about propulsion," Molly asked. Rivet looked up at her and shook his head.

"It's core isn't damaged, but sensors do not detect any active charge blocks, only discharged ones. Whoever they are, they're out of fuel, ma'am," he replied.

"Captain," Driver yipped below her. All eyes turned toward him down there, hidden from her direct view thanks to the ramp leading from the bridge door to her console. "We've got something, and it's big!"

"Report, Driver," she snapped.

"Captain, that vessel has no name on its own, but you're not gonna believe who it's registered to!"

"Spill it, you slimy little whelp, or I'll have Carl cut your legs up and serve them to us as a delicacy," she barked.

"Captain, that ship is registered to the bounty hunter Samus Aran!"