"Stupid Gabe... that's not an uh-oh... its a darn, or shucks... uh-oh is for dangerous things!" Emma pouted.

Title: "Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction"; Chapter one
Author(s): Gabe Yazimoto, Duncan Cooperstone, Emma Ditko, Venice Ditko
Character(s): Gabe, Duncan, Emma, Venice, a dog named Dog
Timeline: Current
Canon: Yes
Warnings: Suspense




[Somewhere in the Black]


Gabe clicked the helmet of her vacc suit in place and was rewarded by the comforting hiss of the pressure valves, working the way they should. Salvage ops were always risky at best; abandoned ships more often than not had had their hulls compromised in one way or the other. Or they had malfunctioning life support units. Or they were simply smelly. In any case, vacc suits were more than a precaution, they were more or less mandatory.

"Are we good to go?" Gabe peered at the others through the faint sheen of mist on the inside of her helmet. Her suit had seen better days for sure, and the air recycling was not working as well as it once had. An hour, two at the top, and then she needed fresh air. A quick survey of a derelict, however? Not a problem.


"I hate these things..." They'd sighted the derelict on the return leg of a well enough paying smuggling job to Whittier. Twenty minutes ago Duncan'd called Gabe to the bridge and despite his initial misgivings the potential of ready salvage, which in turn meant unexpected profit, was enough to prompt him to thumb a baffle and tell Venice to get their suits prepped.

Now he made a final check over the shoulders, harness and seals of Gabe's suit, then Venice's before locking his own helmet into the collar. The familiar, though none the more pleasant for that fact, smell of recycled air and well worn neoprene lining suddenly assailed his nostrils, his vision limited by the grime and myriad of scratches that criss crossed the visor. He was all of a sudden very aware of the sound of his own breathing and as soon as the compression seal was opened he'd loose most of the sensation of touch. But, it was all part of wreck jumping and as much as he disliked it, he'd done it more times than he cared to recall. Turning his back so Gabe could give his suit a visual check he toggled his comms to the open setting.

"Emma? We're stepping into the 'lock. How're we looking up there?"


"Right now, you have a better idea of that than I do," Emma replied through the comms a second time, having forgotten to push the button the first. "Seriously... who designed this thing..."

It had never made sense to her, the docking port was not only below the view of the cockpit, it was quite a few metres behind it as well; leaving her only able to see what she was doing through the eyes of an old, beaten up camera, which she could swear had a slight delay. There was eventually a loud thunk, and machinery audibly whirred in the hangar below.

"Ok... With any luck, that's a hard-seal..." Emma sounded more confident than she was, she half imagined that when the door opened, they'd all be sucked out into space or something...


Venice looked up as the sound of the clamps resonated throughout the bay, loud enough to be heard even through the helmets. Picking himself up off the crate he'd been sitting on, he wandered over to the other two, and took his place in the cramped room that passed for an airlock on transports like these.

"You can barely move in these things," he complained of the suit, more used to the pressure suits used in fighters, than the heavy monstrosity he was wearing now, "Haven't your corporate masters invented a comfortable one of these yet?"


Gabe glanced sideways at Venice and grinned while she pulled the straps of Duncan's harness tight.

"Oh, buck up, kiddo," she said cheerfully. "They only weigh seventy-five pounds or so." She sounded cheerful and she felt cheerful; as always, time in transit tended to move at a snail's pace, and this was a welcome distraction. Not to mention that she shared Duncan's feelings on the matter: it was a possible extra income, and that was always a good thing.


Emma just rolled her eyes at Venice's comment.

"Sorry... They must've been too busy plotting to take over the 'verse... or something." She flicked the switch to seal the first of the airlock doors, now that all three of them were finally standing inside it, before transferring the decompression controls to the panel beside them. She leant back in the chair, at least now when the door opened and sucked them into space it would be them who pressed the button, not her.


The light that indicated that controls had been switched to the airlock went on, and Gabe, who was standing closest to it, pressed the button to open the doors. No sudden rush of air, not to mention no 'getting sucked into space in the fraction of a second'.

"Hard-seal is go," she informed Emma over the comms. "We're going in." She looked over at Duncan for the confirming nod, then watched the airlock doors as they slid open entirely, revealing the derelict's airlock chamber. It was mostly empty, with a couple of crates lying in a pile, but that was not alarming in itself. If you abandoned your ship in the middle of space, you usually did so in a hurry. And things done in a hurry tended to leave a mess behind. Gabe approached the now open airlock doors and stepped over into the derelict.


Tester sticks were usually bright green, the sort of green that would probably be visible through thick fog on even Eavesdown's gloomiest days. The one Duncan had just broken the seal for and exposed to the inside of the wreck dulled a little, with the odd speck of black and dark reds appearing on the surface, but overall remained largely unchanged.

"Still got atmo," he stated, his voice as flat and monotone with the same crackling and dull whistles he heard from the others inside his helmet. He hefted the large bag of tools, acquired though recommendation and experience, back onto his shoulder and directed a pale lance of torch light deeper into the expanse of the cargo bay.

The scene was one of disarray as far as he could make out. Packing cases were broken and littered around, overhead ductwork torn down and at least two cable looms were intermittently showering the darkness with near blinding sparks of white. Duncan scanned the bay with the torch again, shadows shifting as he moved.

"I'm gonna head aft... see if there are any parts we can use from the plant." Having sketched a rough layout for the deck plan of this class of ship from the cortex, he raised his torch and turned the wrist of his left arm, so he could see better the folded and creased slip of paper taped to the inner forearm of his suit. "You two head up to the habitat area; you know what to look for."


Emma stuck her foot out as the flight controls whizzed by a third time, bringing the spinning chair to a rather sudden stop that nearly threw her out of it.

"You got the...woah..." She let go of the transmit button and paused, until she could finish a sentence without sounding like she had just made herself extremely dizzy; there was no reason to let the others know she was messing around in the control room while she waited. "You got the list of parts I gave you, right Mr.D?" Or rather, the list that she had given Gabe, to give to him, because she was still nervous about taking things directly to him.


Venice chuckled to himself as he overheard the radio chatter.

"Careful Em, you sound like your about to lose your lunch." He knew the sound of her voice all too well, it was the exact same as the trainee pilots had when they stepped out of the G-force simulators back on Shadow. "If you're that bored, you could always switch with someone."


Emma would have stuck her tongue out if she could, but the comms were audio only.

"Very funny... and anyway, you really don't want me down there... Ask Gabe what happens every time I've been let loose on a salvage mission if you don't believe me-"

The signal cut off abruptly, and Emma found herself staring at Dog, who had propped himself up by his paws on the console, and was staring right at her. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you accidentally hit that button so I'd pay attention to you." She leant forward and hoisted the aptly named canine onto her lap, "You upset you were left behind too? Its not their fault, they don't make doggie space suits yet.." She scratched behind the animal's ear "And anyway, you cant go on salvage missions, you cant carry things, dogs need all four limbs to walk, nothing left for holding crates, silly"

Emma clicked the comms back on, the dog now satisfied with the amount of attention it seemed to be getting. "Sorry, technical difficulties." she joked, "And anyway, I'm allowed to be bored, its not like you have a camera feed I can watch or anything. Heck, you could at least describe what your doing as you go..."


"Em, this is a salvage op, not a gorram audiobook," Venice replied through his teeth, in the midst of forcing an unusually stubborn hatch open at the same time. "Honestly... who locks the doors behind them when they are abandoning ship?" He complained, as the door finally gave way, before stepping back so Gabe could go through. "After you."


Gabe grinned, hidden behind the scratched visor of her suit, at the banter between the Ditkos. She was carrying an old tool sack slung over her shoulder; the first piece of usable loot they'd come across. When you sailed in a ship as old as Raivenn, tools got used a lot and hence got worn out often, and finding new ones was always good.

"Now, can't blame folks for followin' old habits--" she told Venice, and stepped through the hatch into the galley of the ship. How that sentence was meant to end would be forever clouded in mystery, because it was gone from her mind in an instant.

"Uh-oh..."

The galley was a mess. Unless you had expert training in forensics, the chain of events leading up to the mess was hard to suss out: almost everything that wasn't nailed down (and some things that probably had been) had gotten thrown about. Chairs were tipped over, and so was the table, there were broken glasses and china-ware all over the floor. Every cupboard was open, with some of the doors hanging on one hinge or completely torn off. In a corner a sofa lay on its back, gutted, several slashes across the upholstery making the straw-and-horse hair filling spill out. It looked like someone had turned the entire kitchen and common area upside down.

"Seems we're not the first ones on the scene, Captain," Gabe said over the perpetually open comm channel. It was disappointing as hell, no question about it. If others like themselves had already been here, the chances of actually finding something of value were slim. "Gorrammit!"


"Might be I'm reachin' the same conclusion," Duncan murmured, having ducked under another fallen, or torn down conduit across the entrance to the engine room. The scene of disarray and ruination that lay before him was decidedly not what he'd hoped for. At best someone had already been over this part of the abandoned ship and picked it clean.


Emma startled as Gabe's exclamation rang out over the comms, springing for the transmit button at speeds that would have made any smaller animals fly off of her lap, though thankfully all Dog did was perk his ears up, wondering what all the commotion was.

"What's uh-oh? Don't just uh-oh! Be descriptive, you know I cant see you guys..." She let her worried rant trail off as she heard Gabe on the other side, trying to explain the situation to the captain over her own frantic transmission.

She let go of the transmit button, and slumped back relieved into her seat, pulling Dog close.

"Stupid Gabe... that's not an uh-oh... its a darn, or shucks... uh-oh is for dangerous things!" She pouted as the animal on her lap just looked at her in confusion, "Your owner is dumb... making me get scared for no reason," she explained, trying to calm herself down by scratching behind the animal's ears again.


"Galley's a mess, Em," Gabe explained distractedly as she took a step over a broken chair, moving further into the room, the beam of her flash-light sweeping this way and that.


"Who breaks chairs?" Venice remarked as he followed Gabe, picking up a piece of the chair she had just stepped over, and casually throwing it from hand to hand. "Can't hide nothin' in these, especially such cheap ones." He chucked the piece of wood behind him and quickened his pace to catch up, "Either very dumb looters, or very desperate ones. Or..." He shrugged and let his thought trail off, leaving everyone else to finish it how they desired.


The halo of light from Duncan's torch scanned across the room. Light falling on the main carapace of the engine core, torn open, gaskets and bearing mounts pulled from their precious resting place, sheared and split. Tools and spares that were probably once carefully stowed and stacked by the bulkheads were scattered on the deck and the tester stick he still carried had turned solid black as soon as he entered the compartment: a sure sign of a coolant leak, if the ruptured pipework and vapour plumes weren't telltale enough.

"Emma... don't reckon you'll be gettin' too much of that wishlist this trip."


Emma blinked, and looked up from Dog when she heard her name, having now decided, after the Gabe-induced panic, to only listen when people were actually talking to her; until she got bored again, in any case. She stretched her leg out, and bumped the comms with her heel.

"I wasn't exactly holding out much hope anyway... From the blueprints you found, not much was gonna be compatible with an ol' Firefly like ours..." Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, a small blip had appeared, and subsequently vanished on the interference riddled instruments in front of her. Ironically, the very thing she was supposedly left on board to watch out for.


Curiously, Duncan stepped further into debris-strewn scene. Crouching, he let his gloved hand grope in the semi dark before it closed round a crushed cardboard container. Finding it empty he scowled and tossed it to the side before reaching further and finding what he recognised to be a set of engineering callipers. Duncan smiled; not nearly as valuable as replacement seals, or the gasket that Emma had asked him to keep an eye out for, but at least there would something for her to add to her collection after all.

Duncan's eyes followed as pale torchlight moved forward over more small and seemingly incomplete parts and what he recognised as the ratchet for a torque set. Again he reached forward, not quite reaching it on the first attempt, another piece of precious for Emma, as he raised it to eye level and examine it with his less than expert eyes. Even if he wasn't entirely covered with the suit he probably wouldn't have been able to assess the workings of the piece but what he did recognise was the thick, almost black trail across the fingertips of his glove.

"Gabe..." Duncan began, compelled to crawl further toward the back of the compartment. "...what've you got up there?"

Torchlight showed where the trail of of blood, half clotted in the inhospitable conditions of the coolant flooded compartment, lead to the back of the half destroyed engine core. The face was contorted, frozen in a death-mask of pain and terror. What had once been the chest cavity was torn and split in a way that made the carnage of the engine room seem mild in comparison.


Down in the galley, Gabe turned around enough to flash a quick grin at Venice.

"Now, don't judge," she said. "Maybe the fella had a deep and passionate dislike for chairs. Some childhood trauma or summat. It happens." The smile didn't reach her eyes, though, and she turned away again, making her way towards the kitchenette by zig-zagging between the debris. Venice was right; it didn't make sense. Then Duncan's voice crackled in her ear and her blood ran cold.

"D, what's wrong?" she said, because something was wrong. The tone of Duncan's voice was not a good one. Not one tiniest bit. "D, talk to us!"