The wastelands of Scrapworld were as expansive as they were inhospitable. Fallen wreckage, much like the skyscraper they had just looted, littered the landscapes at various points for the first few days of travel. Slowly, those lingering remnants began to fade away, replaced with a much bleaker reminder of their circumstances: barren nothingness.

  The Central Wastes were a permanent and ever-expanding reminder of the difficult task every Junker faced. These areas closest to the central hub of Scrapworld had been picked over hundreds of times by increasingly desperate Junkers looking for even the smallest scrap of glittering metal or shattered circuitry. Besides piles of loose silicon sand and red-brown fields of pure rust, almost nothing was left intact.

  Right now, the Junker band was standing outside the “almost” part of that “almost nothing”.

  “You sure you can pull this off?”

  “Reasonably,” Rush said. He grabbed a hunk of thick armor he had saved from the mechs he’d destroyed. While usually too heavy to be worth hauling, Rush had an idea of how to turn it into more profit.

  A solitary dot of intact technology still remained in the Central Wastes, a wrecked starship often referred to simply as the Crash Crater, because it was a crater something had crashed in. No one knew the nature of the vessel deeply embedded in Scrapworld’s surface, they only knew that it was borderline indestructible from the outside, and had deadly security on the inside. The loading door of the crashed ship was wide open, but anyone who walked in was all but immediately executed by two powerful defense turrets.

  “The plating should be able to withstand the turrets,” Rush said. The two gun emplacements were presumably anti-personnel, not anti-mecha. “Anything beyond that, I don’t know.”

  “Be careful, Rush,” Hartwell advised. “Nothing in that ship is worth dying for.”

  “Except thirty Kell Cells,” someone added. A crowd of spectators had gathered as Rush suited up, and Hartwell didn’t even need to scan the crowd to know who’d made that remark.

  “No one asked, Jen.”

  “What? It’s true,” Jen added. “Thirty Kell Cells plus some miscellaneous scrap would be enough to get us all off this hunk of junk tomorrow. I did the math.”

  “I don’t think there’s thirty Kell Cell’s in there,” Rush said. “It seems too small.”

  Jen raised what few chunks of eyebrow she had left. Time and facial scarring had taken its toll on her face and all its features.

  “Just get us the loot, kid,” Jen snapped.

  “But be safe about it,” Giza said.

  “Of course.”

  Rush put his helmet on and promptly jumped on top of the armor scrap. With a little push, and some magnetic boots to keep him steady, Rush surfed down the crater’s slope, drifting across rust sands and coming to halt just a few feet from the fallen ship. Had Rush ever seen a house, he would’ve compared it to one. The blocky vessel had multiple chambers connected by long hallways, and its blue-grey exterior was pockmarked by multiple futile attempts to penetrate the dense armor. The most jarring mark of the many attempts to breach the fallen vessel were piled up by the open door.

  A mountain of bones, some fresh, some ancient and degraded, were piled up near the only entrance. The only remnants of desperate junkers who had tried and failed to breach the same vessel. Rush noticed the smell of rot, and glanced to the side of the doorway. Scattered amid the bones was a much fresher corpse, missing most of its arm but otherwise intact. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who’d made a run at this ship recently. He clenched the mech armor scrap tight and activated his magnetic grips to keep it in place.

  The armor scrap was technically plan “B”, at least. For his first trick, Rush put his hand flat against the crashed ship’s exterior.

  “Elvis? Can you do anything with the devices here?”

  The silver wave surged out of his palm and slipped through minute gaps in the armor, then returned in a few seconds.

  “Apologies, Mr. Rush, the vessel requires a level of security clearance I do not currently possess,” Elvis said. “I can, however, confirm that this is a Kellarin Research station, used for off-station projects requiring exceptional privacy and security.”

  “Does that mean there’s something valuable inside?”

  “Possibly. I cannot access any station records.”

  Rush hefted the armored slab and measured it against his own body size, crouching down so that his entire body was covered. From his position in front of the door, but still out of range of the guns, he could see the turret emplacements clinging to the roof, so he angled the armor upwards slightly. It was a straight shot down a short hallway, and the ceiling the guns were attached to was relatively low. After a few more seconds of careful observation, Rush realized there was nothing left to do but dive in, so he dove in.

  He took a few steps forward, and the guns began to fire. The armor scrap held, but he could feel it began to get hotter as the energy weapons rained down a torrent of fire. Rush angled the armor scrap higher as he approached, until he was directly beneath the guns, holding the armor plate straight up. The sheet of metal had started to turn red, and was burning so hot he could feel it through his gauntlets. He had been hoping to take a more delicate approach to disabling the guns, but it would appear he did not have the time. He took the direct approach.

  With a quick mechanically assisted jump, the Scrapper suit rocketed upwards, carrying the slab of armor with it. The red-hot metal was still sturdy enough to completely crush both turrets, putting a permanent end to their threat. The station rattled from the impact, prompting a few worried gasps from onlookers surrounding the crater.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Rush! Are you alright?”

  He took a few steps backwards, out of the hallway, and gave a thumbs up. Giza nearly walked over the edge of the crater to join him, but Hartwell grabbed her and pulled her back.

  “Wait until he gives the all-clear,” Hartwell said. “We don’t know how many other traps there could be.”

  “It’s got like three rooms,” Giza protested. “There can’t be more than one trap.”

  Meanwhile, inside the crashed station, Rush was looking at another trap.

  “Why is the entire hallway electrified?”

  The entire hall, from floor to ceiling, was lined with conductive panels that crackled with live electricity -at a voltage he and Elvis could only assume was lethal.

  “Mr. Kellarin takes his security very seriously,” Elvis said. “While I am not privy to security documents on such high-level facilities, I can only assume this station is designed with the highest standards of consumer safety and industry security in mind.”

  Rush looked at a spark of electricity arcing between two platforms. He wasn’t sure that counted as a safety feature.

  “Can the suit resist electricity?”

  “Not entirely,” Elvis said. “However, the electrical mechanisms in the gauntlets are designed to conduct electricity. By activating them without running a charge, the electricity from the grid should pass harmlessly through.”

  Rush stared down the hallway and did the math in his head. He had never tried for a long jump in the suit, but it seemed plausible he could jump the length of the hallway. However, he would never be confident in his ability to make the jump without a lot of practice. Even the slightest deviation would mean instant death, even in the suit. Rush looked at each wall for a few seconds, and then stared at the ceiling for a minute in dead silence.

  “Elvis, can you activate the volt grips and the magnets at the same time?”

  “Of course, Mr. Rush!”

  The two devices sprang into place at once. Rush jumped up and latched on to the ceiling, making sure to start in the non-electrified portion of the hallway. He unlatched one hand and swung it forward, clambering across the ceiling with his magnets, until he was confident enough to make a tentative grasp towards the electrified panels. He put one hand down and didn’t immediately die, so he made another move, and another. He pulled his feet up to avoid the electricity crackling under his heels as he swung across the ceiling and made his way to the far side of the hall.

  “Please tell me if you see an off switch for that,” Rush requested.

  “Removing the Kell Cell that powers this installation should depower that and all other active systems,” Elvis said. “By my estimation, we are not far.”

  “We can’t be far, there’s only one room left,” Rush said. They were standing right outside one of the two, even. Rush pulled on the door was frustrated to find it was sealed, but another, stronger pull cracked whatever mechanism was holding it in place and let the door grind open. The scent of stale air made it clear this room had been sealed for a long time, and the undercurrent of dry decay made it clear that someone had been sealed inside it as well.

  Rush stepped into a laboratory, complete with researchers, though whatever brilliance they had once possessed was lost along with any recognizable features due to their shriveled, mummified state. The three corpses were scattered across the room, dried bodies partially shattered by their ancient, catastrophic landing. Parts of the floor were stained rusty brown by long-dried pools of blood. Elvis let out an electric sigh of discontent when he saw the frayed badges of Kell Tech researchers stuck to their decaying uniforms.

  “Poor souls,” Elvis said. “Kell Tech Search and Rescue couldn’t recover them in time.”

  “They probably had bigger problems,” Rush said. There had been an entire civilization on Scrapworld once, and it was all gone now. Rush could not imagine three researchers weighed that heavily against the rest of the world.

  Once he had gotten over the grim sight of the multiple corpses, Rush took a look around the rest of the lab. A large metal cylinder hummed in the center of the lab, with multiple wires extending from the bottom and spreading across the structure. Also connected to the central cylinder were six smaller glass domes, each of which were overrun with golden crystals.

  “Hmm. Kellcite.”

  Rush tapped the domes, and examined the calcified structures within. He had only ever seen Kellcite around broken Kell Cells. Seeing it isolated like this was new. It was still just a rock, however, so he lost interest quickly and looked at a nearby computer.

  “Could you access that one, Elvis?”

  “Not at the moment,” Elvis said. “However…Ugh. If I had skin it would be crawling right now, Mr. Rush.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “The necessary encryption keys are contained within Kell Tech security badges,” Elvis explained. “Such as those pinned to the lapels of our unfortunate researcher friends.”

  Rush reached down and plucked the badge off one of the corpses, tearing a chunk of the decayed fabric along with it. He’d lived his entire life as a scavenger, plucking something from a corpse didn’t bother him that much. Elvis hesitantly emerged and extended a single tendril of silvery nanites to poke at the badge. After a brief moment of reluctant contact, Elvis withdrew, and Rush could practically feel him shivering.

  “Permissions acquired,” Elvis said. “Please place your hand on the terminal and I will log us in.”

  Rush obeyed, and the terminal sprang to life at the slightest touch. The computer sprang to life and began to display a series of numbers and symbols Rush could not comprehend. Unlike many junkers, Rush did know how to read, but this was still far beyond him.

  “What is this?”

  “I am struggling to parse the data myself, Mr. Rush,” Elvis said. “Luckily there is a way to greatly expedite the process!”

  The side of the computer popped open, and a small plastic tab about the size of a tooth popped out. Rush got barely a second to examine the odd tab before the silver tide washed over it and drew it back into the Scrapper suit.

  “There we are,” Elvis said. “I have successfully integrated the memory chip.”

  “Oh, was that one of those memory chip things?”

  Rush had found those before, but since they were all but worthless as scrap, he mostly used them to clean gunk out from under his fingernails.

  “Indeed. I can now confirm that this station was devoted to researching those strange mineral growths -the ‘Kellcite’, as you refer to it,” Elvis said. “Unfortunately, while their research was extensive, they found little concrete information to explain why it manifests on damaged Kell Cells.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “Not from the station,” Elvis said. “However, I have made use of some excess storage space to decompress more of my personal files. Allow me to make a proper introduction: I am E.L.V.I.S., The Emergency Launch Vehicle Intelligence Service.”

  “Emergency Launch Vehicle?”

  “Yes, apparently I was designed for use in an escape pod of sorts,” Elvis said. “Apparently with the specific intent of evacuating some sort of VIP. How interesting.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Unfortunately the available memory space was limited,” Elvis said. “While inconclusive, this research was apparently a priority project for Kal Kellarin, and my programming prevents me from deleting the data to free up more room.”

  “Hm. Guess we’ll find another one.”

  “In the meantime, let’s deal with this station’s security,” Elvis said. He remotely deactivated the containment around the station’s single Kell Cell, retracting the metal cylinder and exposing the core within. Rush grabbed it, twisted it once to free it from its casing, and then pulled it out. The humming systems of the crashed station all fell dead at once, silent for the first time in centuries. Rush examined the glowing core in his hand.

  “This should make the Junkers happy,” Rush said. One step closer to those thirty Kell Cells Jen had mentioned. Rush made sure the security was fully offline on his way out, and then called the entire Junker Clan in to take the station apart from the inside.