Personal Effects
Log 1 — Day 1
They gave us a ship and a list. The ship is forty years old, held together with welds and prayers. The list is coordinates. Fourteen debris fields between Mars and the belt, all tagged as “high priority salvage zones.”
Nobody explains what high priority means. Nobody has to.
I did three years on cargo haulers before this. Boring work. Safe work. The kind of job where the worst thing that happens is a delayed shipment or a docking clamp that sticks.
This is not that job.
We launched from Ceres Station six hours ago. Crew of four: me, Deshi on piloting, Reema handling sensors, and Captain Yuen. The captain doesn’t talk much. She lost her family on Earth. Most of us lost someone on Earth.
First field is nine hours out. I should sleep. I probably won’t.
Log 2 — Day 2
The debris field looks like a graveyard.
Twisted metal stretching across kilometers. Fragments of ships, human and Vethrak, drifting in loose clouds. Reema’s sensors tagged over eight hundred objects larger than a meter. Some of them are still venting atmosphere. Some of them are still warm.
Captain Yuen gave us the briefing before we suited up. “The Vethrak alloy is what they want. Anything that looks like a control system, a power cell, or a weapon goes in the hold. Everything else stays where it is.”
Deshi asked about remains. Human remains.
The captain’s face did something I couldn’t read. “Tag the location. Someone else handles recovery.”
I spent six hours in the field today. EVA work with a cutting torch and a collection bag. The Vethrak metal is heavier than it looks. Dense in a way that feels wrong, like it’s pulling at you. I cut a section from what might have been a hull plate. The edge glowed purple for a moment after the torch passed through. I don’t know if that’s normal.
Nobody knows what’s normal anymore.
Log 3 — Day 4
Found a body today.
Human. UEN uniform, what was left of it. The suit had breached somewhere I couldn’t see. Vacuum does things to people. I’ve seen it before, on accident reports and training materials. This was different. This was real.
I tagged the location like the captain said. Kept working. What else could I do?
Reema found something in the afternoon. A Vethrak device, intact, roughly the size of a toolbox. It had symbols on the casing, the angular script they use. None of us could read it. None of us touched it with bare hands.
Captain Yuen sealed it in a containment unit and logged it as “unknown electronics, priority recovery.” The manifest will say we found salvage worth thousands of credits. The manifest won’t mention the body I passed to get there.
Log 4 — Day 7
We’re not the only ones out here.
Another ship passed through the field yesterday. No transponder, no response to hails. Just a shadow on sensors that came and went.
Black market. Has to be. The Protocol hasn’t been running long enough to catch everyone. Some crews take what they find and sell it to whoever pays. Corporations, governments, private collectors. The Vethrak left behind technology worth more than most nations’ GDP. People will kill for that kind of money.
Captain Yuen doubled the watch rotation. We sleep in shifts now. The cutting torch I use for salvage work sits by my bunk. It’s not a weapon.
It could be.
Log 5 — Day 9
The second field was worse.
This one had Vethrak bodies. Three of them, caught in the wreckage of what might have been a boarding craft. They were smaller than I expected. Smaller than humans, most of them. Their armor had fused with their bodies in the heat of whatever destroyed the ship.
I stared at them for a long time. These were the things that killed eleven billion people. These were the monsters from the broadcasts, the nightmares, the reason my sister’s children will grow up without a grandmother.
They looked fragile.
Reema cut samples from their equipment while I watched. She didn’t say anything. Her hands were steady. Mine weren’t.
Log 6 — Day 12
We lost Deshi.
Microfracture in his suit, somewhere in the seam between the helmet and the collar. He noticed the pressure drop, reported it calmly, and started back toward the ship. He made it halfway.
The emergency patch failed. Vacuum found him.
Captain Yuen retrieved the body herself. She sealed him in the cargo hold with the salvage, because there was nowhere else to put him. We’ll bring him back to Ceres when the run is finished.
I asked the captain if we should abort. She looked at me with eyes that had seen too much. “The list isn’t done. We finish the list.”
Twelve more days. Eight more fields. I think about Deshi every time I seal my helmet.
Log 7 — Day 15
Reema found something.
A Vethrak control interface, mostly intact. The kind of thing that might run a ship, or a weapon, or something we don’t have words for yet. The salvage bounty on intact electronics is ten times what we make in a month.
We also found personal effects. Human. A locker from a UEN vessel, blown clear of the wreck but still sealed. Inside: photographs, a journal, a child’s drawing of a house with two stick figures standing in front.
The journal belonged to Lieutenant Commander Aisha Patel, UEN Defiance. The last entry was dated three days before the invasion ended. She wrote about her daughter, about a birthday party they were planning, about how the war couldn’t last much longer.
I sealed the locker and tagged it for recovery. The interface went in the hold.
I don’t know which one matters more. I don’t know if I’m allowed to ask.
Log 8 — Day 19
The black market ship came back.
They hailed us this time. Offered to buy our haul at twice the Protocol rate, no questions asked. Captain Yuen told them where they could put their offer. The transmission cut. The ship hung off our port side for three hours before leaving.
Reema thinks they were scanning our cargo. Deshi, Deshi would have known. He was good with sensors.
The hold is almost full. Vethrak alloy, power cells, control systems, and one sealed locker that nobody talks about. Three more fields on the list. Three more chances for something to go wrong.
I keep thinking about what Lieutenant Commander Patel wrote. About the birthday party. About how the war couldn’t last much longer.
She was right. The war ended nineteen days after that entry.
It just didn’t end the way she hoped.
Log 9 — Day 23
Last field cleared. Heading back to Ceres.
The hold is full of things that will help humanity survive. Technology we don’t understand, pulled from the corpses of ships and the bodies of enemies. The scientists will study it. The engineers will copy it. Someday, maybe, we’ll use it to fight back.
I thought I would feel proud. Accomplished. Something.
I feel tired. I feel like I’ve been swimming through the dead for three weeks, collecting pieces of a nightmare and calling it progress.
Captain Yuen found me in the cargo hold tonight. I was looking at the sealed locker, the one with Lieutenant Commander Patel’s effects. The captain didn’t say anything. She just stood there with me for a while.
Then she said: “They need to know who she was. The salvage will build our future. This will remind us why.”
I don’t know if that makes it better. I don’t know if anything makes it better.
We dock at Ceres in fourteen hours. They’ll unload the salvage, process Deshi’s body, and hand us a new list. Another ship. Another set of coordinates.
The work continues. The dead keep piling up.
Asante out.
Author’s Note
This story takes place in Year 2 (2127), during the earliest months of the Salvage Protocol. Before standardized procedures and dedicated recovery vessels, salvage work was performed by civilian contractors operating converted cargo ships. Mortality rates for salvage operators exceeded 15% in the first two years. Lieutenant Commander Aisha Patel’s personal effects were eventually returned to her daughter, Maya Patel, in Year 4. Maya later joined the UEN Engineering Corps, where she helped design the containment systems used to safely transport recovered Vethrak technology.