Mokar Apex - HMV Meridian // Novara Universe

Jack was late. He was always late. It didn't matter.

 Out here, no one was checking the clock. The graveyard didn't care, and neither did the spreadsheet. Two reactors this cycle, both salvageable, both already logged and on their way to HQ. The numbers people back at the station would leave him alone for months. Maybe longer.

He settled into the loader's seat, arms finding the controls the way hands find familiar tools. The sticks were well used, the grip material worn almost mirror-smooth at the points Jack touched every day. The plasma cutters hummed to life on their articulated arms, casting pale neon blue light across the hull of the ship he had earmarked for the day. He knew this class, an old Mokar Apex. Had taken apart three of them over the years. Knew where the good sections were, knew where the contamination usually spread, knew exactly how she'd come apart.

 A butcher knows a chicken. Knows where the joints give, where the blade finds no resistance, where to let the weight of the thing do half the work. Jack knew this ship the same way.

 He started at the dorsal section, peeling back hull plating in long, controlled passes. After each hours long cut, he glanced at the scanner mounted beside his viewport. Green. Green. Green. Atmosphere inside not contaminated, no radiation creep, no bio signs. He moved to the next section.

 The plasma cutters worked their way down toward the fighter bay. Fighters meant bonus money. Clean components, easy to move. But he had to be careful because the cutters could destroy the small ships effortlessly, especially when they still held ammunition and offline shields.

The bay opened up beneath his cutters. Eight hours in his cockpit already, sweating from the heat the plasma arms threw back. The scanner confirmed contamination contained to the aft compartments, exactly where the old design flaw always pushed it. The fighter bay went unusable first on these ships, every time. Back in those days the Apex carried ten to twelve fighters at most. Maybe six bombers. Almost quaint compared to the two hundred plus the Titan holds. Humanity had learned quickly to make its arguments in volume.

 Jack cut through the magnetic catapult seal. Everything exactly where he expected it.

Except one thing.

He set the loader on hover and checked his instruments. Tapped the screen a few times. At least two times more than necessary, the way you do when you're half expecting the system to be lying to you. But the reading held. Four ships. One was far too large to be a standard fighter, and far too large to be any bomber he knew.

He flicked a switch. The cockpit's front panel shifted with a hiss. What looked like a screen was actually a window, defaulting to augmented display mode because the camera overlays and pre-calculated cutting outlines were almost always more useful than raw eyesight. But not now. Now he wanted to see it directly.

There was a ship in that bay. Sleek. Far too modern looking to belong inside an old Apex. The flagship of her era, sure, but this was something else. And it was clean. Almost pristine. The other fighters were fused to the deck, bearing the clear scars of a reactor that had slowly cooked everything around it. But this one looked like it had been parked yesterday. Like it didn't belong here at all. A glitch.

Like it had never belonged here. And officially, it had not.

To Jack the design looked strange. Foreign. Active military would have spotted the Veladar influences immediately. A historian would have called it impossible because the timelines simply didn't align.

But it was here. Earth flag on the side. A HM number. Quiet and patient waiting as a untold secret kept too long.

 And Jack? Jack liked money more than history. And he was fairly certain he had just found a considerable amount of it, in the form of one very unusual small jet.

He turned to the console on his right and began building a connection to HQ. Standard procedure. Log the find, flag it, let the numbers people decide what it's worth.

His finger hovered over the confirmation.

He looked back through the window at the ship.

He never opened the connection.

Jack leaned back in his seat for a moment, just thinking. Then he pulled up a different channel. Private. A contact he'd never had reason to regret using. 

The line connected.

"It's Jack. I need a valuation. Something unusual."

He paused, glancing back at the ship one more time.

"Very unusual."

The person on the other end asked him a few questions.

"No, no. Nothing like that. I'll send you a picture."

A few button presses later, Jack leaned back and waited.

"Now, do you have a price for me?"

Silence.

"Hey, are you still there?"

It took a moment before the dealer answered.

"I'll call you back in a minute, we'll come to an agreement."