"No room for damaged vessels, I'm afraid." Came the bored voice of Freeport 1's dockmaster when Ian Howler requested mooring quarter for his ancient Liner. "She's not damaged! Is rust forbidden? Or have you never seen a ship this old?" Ian replied indignantly. "Just let me moor, you have a damaged Liner in your ports, and I'm here for the repair."
With reluctance in their voice, permission was granted by the dockmaster and Ian sat back as the automatic controls did their thing.
Once moored, he disembarked and headed straight for the main docking hub.
He soon found himself staring at the wreckage that had been once been the OS&C Liner "Reverie".
It wasn't hard to find her, being the only ship around that was in such a poor state.
From the outside he could tell that the damage went deep, likely affecting multiple systems.
The smell of burnt components lingered around the pock-marked and hole-riddled vessel. "How in the hell did they survive?" He muttered to nobody in particular.
He had certainly seen worse and fixed worse, but he couldn't help but want some extra help with this one. "I'll have to get Rob in on this one." He said to himself, rather louder than he meant to while still looking up and down the injured ship.
A passerby looked at him as if he were crazy, and made a small sound of disgust.
He could swear they mumbled "Crazy Junkers..."
Ignoring this, he again spoke to himself, although much more quietly. "Hull is basically metallic lace now...power generator and core likely shorted out...major damage to the externals of the engines...
That'll have to be replaced...and...what's this?" He sniffed at the air, catching a familiar smell of pure Oxygen... "Life support definitely took a hit." He sighed, shaking his head and turning away to gather his thoughts. "I better give Rob a shout...and then find Franklin."
He tapped out a quick message to Rob on his comm-pad, closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose as he often does when thinking, then turned on his heel and headed off to the bar.
