A: you salvaged a high priority package? In this desolate place? There’s barely any colony in 500 lights years. Surely you must be mistaken.
B: A, this is a human thing don’t worry about it.
A: I will, because this “high priority package” destination is tangentially 1200 LY of our original drop off point!
B: Look we’ll restock when we get there and you’ll listen to what I say, captain’s order.
Later in the ship A slip out of his post to inspect the “package”. Frustrated that it was in human writing they whip out their translator to read what it say
[ Lora Nala. Human Fellowship 42nd Captain of the Sidis Ultra ] -- Anon Guest
[AN: Changed a word or two to fit better into my universe]
This is space: it is automatically hostile to most known forms of life. Even those in the protection of a station or ship can come to an unfortunate end. For the wreckage, if there are not fast responders, there are scavengers. Salvagers. Opportunists.
Only lazy ones let the Hungry Caterpillar break a find down into stable molecular compounds. Some of the finds left on a wreck are more valuable in their existing state. If the crew of Naxzoprin had been lazy... none of the trouble would have happened.
This wreck was a courier, one of the low-budget ones that cut every corner until their business model was a perfect sphere. One casualty, the pilot. Killed by a slow leak of the air system while they were in stasis. They did what mercy they could, sending the body for identification, and gathering what had survived from the hold. Personal effects went from the body. Everything else... reclaimed for compounds.
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