A few hours later, their two-seat CSV was registered and ready to fly. The engine clunked a bit, but it was spaceworthy, and handled well enough. It was almost enjoyable, putting around the debris fields in New York, shooting up Xenos...until a system-wide distress call came in, summoning a defensive fleet to Zone-21 to hold back the incoming Corsair invasion. Katashi jerked the yoke to port, and the CSV wallowed in that general direction, with Ren yelling in protest.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?!"
"Helping protect-"
"No you're not! We're Junkers now, not the navy! Keep doing what you're doing, and leave them to their thing. We don't want to attract their attention anyway."
Reluctantly, the erstwhile scavenger turned the freighter back towards the waypoint the girl had set, girding himself for a long day of fending off bounty hunters, Xenos, and wannabe heroes. They wound up spending a few weeks ferrying scrap metal to Bornholm Depot in the Omega-15 system. Though it'd been dangerous to get there, it proved to be safe enough in the area of space immediately surrounding the depot. The only departure they made was to the north end of the system to purchase a Turanic freighter to move more scrap...eventually, they had made enough to purchase the iconic Junker VHF, the Collector.
Though it was more cramped for two than even the CSV was, the Collector did have a cargo bay that doubled as an airlock, allowing one of them to exit the craft to extract some of the harder-to-reach valuable bits that several wrecks offered. So the two of them explored much of Sirius in search of undiscovered wrecks, and the absurdly valuable weapons that some of them contained.
They found plenty of wrecks, but virtually all of them had already been looted. Discouraged but undaunted, they packed up and headed for Sigma-13 during its low-traffic hours to seek out the remnants of the 80-year war still concealed in its azure puffs of nebulae. Still nothing...until they encountered a Junker in a pirate transport by the name of Joshua Quentin. He proved to be quite the amicable sort, and let slip the fact that he had a number of prototype weapons in his hold that he had little need or use for.
It was all Katashi and Ren could do to conceal their excitement when the other Junker agreed to give them the guns...in addition to several other valuable pieces of equipment. Better lucky than good, the two of them mused, and they hid their Collector in the scaffolding surrounding a shipyard while they posted their newfound inventory on the Sirius Stock Exchange. It wasn't long before they got an offer from the Coalition Army's armory for the prototype guns and 8 of their adv. debilitators, and an offer from the Hessians for the Supernova and the other 4 adv. debs.
They felt like they were walking on air by the time the deals were concluded, for they suddenly found themselves in possession of more credits than they'd ever seen as bounty hunters: more than fifty million credits, to be precise. The resulting conversation was as predictable as it was short.
"Ren, I think I know what we're going to be doing for the next few weeks."
"Hell yeah! But we need something sturdier to put the stuff in...wouldn't want some greedy passerby to vent our holds and take our guns before we can sell them."
"Right. A gunboat, then...but which one? There is no Junker gunboat."
"Sure there is! It's the one you find abandoned and dead and rebuild for your own use!"
And thus the search began. They found several, but none of them quite suited. This one had too little internal space, that one had internal space but one had to spacewalk to get to it from the bridge & cabins...but fortune smiled on them soon enough when they were flying through the unique "prism minefields" of Frankfurt. They found a shattered M26 Corsair gunboat, likely a relic of the failed Corsair invasion of Rheinland the previous year which the RM had halted in Frankfurt.
It was in sad shape, however. Though it was in one of the few radiation-free pockets of the field, drifting amongst explosive diamond-shaped rocks was not conducive to preserving a ship adrift in space. Ren drew the short straw, and had to suit up in the Collector's cramped hold in preparation for an appraisal of the wreck. She rapped on the hull with her knuckles three times to signal the pilot, and Katashi promptly opened the cargo bay door.
A spacewalk in such a place was dangerous to say the least, but in the past weeks Ren had done it many times. Still, nervous sweat threatened to drip into her eyes as she caressed her suit's controls to navigate into the battered gunboat's rent hull. First stop was the forward section, which had the largest holes and thus was the easiest to enter. It had been the bridge and crew quarters once; but fortunately for Ren's stomach, there were no corpses left for her to discover. Probably got sucked out when this thing's hull got breached...thank God.
What there was, was plenty of space for the two of them to live and work. In her head, she was already dividing up the forward section. This would be her quarters, that could be his, there were the guest quarters, that was the galley, that would make a nice workroom...
"Ren, you okay in there?"
"Huh? Oh yeah, I'm fine. Just thinking, is all...foreward section looks okay. The electronics and astrogation gear is damaged, but not too badly. We can fix it up pretty easy. No dead bodies, either, so that's a bit less cleanup if we decide to use this boat."
"Weapons systems?"
"One thing at a time. Point is, though it's pretty bare - I guess everything got sucked out when the hull buckled - it's pretty intact. Moving on to the central cargo hold." She floated down the short corridor from the bridge to the central cargo section, and was pleased when the hatch actually swung open when she pulled at it. There was a large gash in the port bulkhead, large enough to explain the hold's emptiness. But as she shined her suit's headlamp through the nebulous murk, she concluded that the hold was structurally sound in spite of the gash. "Hold needs some patching, but it's good. Now for the real test...the engineering section."
After passing through the cavernous hold, the cramped engineering space came as an unpleasant surprise...as did the powerplant's condition. "Crap - the reactor's shot, Kat. Beyond repair...we'll have to get a whole new one, and it won't be cheap."
"But other than that?"
Ren sighed, and floated back into the cargo hold. "Other than that, it looks like this is our best find yet. I vote we tow it to Kreuzberg or Yanagi and fix 'er up."
"You sure? Why not just keep it here, and ferry supplies and parts to do the repairs in secret?"
"Because somebody might notice the activity, follow us, and find the wreck. You wanna risk that? This thing is untouched, man. When I did the external inspection, it looks like three of the turrets might even still work. How many hulks have we found that we could say that about?"
Silence.
"That's what I thought. Meet me at the bow, and we'll figure out how to set up some kind of towline and where to affix auxiliary thrusters."
In the cockpit of the Collector, Katashi groaned. He hated the aux thrusters - they were notoriously unreliable and finicky, and moreover, costly to refuel after each use. But in some situations, they were the only option. Like this one - even with a tow setup, one of them would have to stay aboard the gunboat during the tow and use the auxiliary thrusters (each of which had their own fuel and control systems) to ensure the thing didn't swing around and blow up on one of the many oddly-shaped mines in the cloud. "Alright...I hope this is worth it."
