We junkers have been making a living for years off the trash of Liberty. I was born and raised on rochester base, and from the time I was a child I helped sort out the salvage our collectors brough in from the debris fields.
Rummaging through space trash was never my dream, of course. I wanted to be out there - to drift through the stars, find treasure, strike it rich. Eventually that dream became reality; when I was old enough, and my father's time came, I inherited his CSV. She was an old ship, but sturdy, dependable.
I spent years raking in the salvage from the debris fields around New York. Some of it was remarkably valuable... everything from computer systems to power cores, battleship turrets to fighter escape pods, could be found in the fields. Liberty's trash was junker's treasure.
Occasionally I heard of other junkers finding derelict ships in the debris fields. Mangled rogue fighters, or liberty freighters, that had been nearly destroyed in conflicts long ago. It was every junker's dream to find some remarkable ship that could be salvaged and put to personal use, but a rare occurance in reality.
It was only a few months ago that I heard tale of the Serval. It was a firefly class transport hauling starship components through the Texas system. When pursued by rogues, the Serval was forced into the Pequena Negra - an area of intense radiation and dark matter leftover from the Dallas incident. The radiation overtook the ship, killing it's crew and leaving it adrift in the negra.
The story intrigued me. Not only was the ship possibly still out there, in salvagable condition - it was also likely to still have it's hold full of ship components. Such components fetch a very high price on the black market of Sirius, as various pirates buy them up to repair or replace sections of their damaged ships.
I decided to risk it all - life and ship - to find the Serval, and find it I did. Though the radiation seared away at my hull, blackening it to a crisp, I pushed on into the field of Dark Matter until I caught a glimpse of her. The outline of the massive firefly looming ahead, jammed between two peices of the decimated dallas station.
It took a few well placed shots to blast apart the metal entrapping the ship, but once it was free my tractor beam was able to grab onto the hull. It was slow going, and the radiation of the debris field almost proved my downfall before I could escape it - but I managed to tow the ship to safe space, and eventually back to Beamont.
It took months of work to repair the firefly. The hull panels were nearly disintegrated, the sensors fried, and life support destroyed. Most of the replacements needed to repair her were already in the ship's hold, a fortunate turn of events.
It was hard selling my father's CSV, but now I had my own ship, more grand than anything used by the rest of the junkers at rochester. I was the envy of our fleet of salvagers, with a cargo hold big enough to hold more scrap metal and salvaged parts than one could collect in a day's work.
The ship was also quite suitable for the odd smuggling operation now and then. It's hidden caches allowed for secretive storage of contraband goods, and it's hull was strong enough to survive trips through asteroid fields and radiation belts to reach my destinations - or to escape the hands of the law if such was ever required.
Pilot and Owner of the firefly class ship Serval, salvaged from the Dallas Incident and now employed by the junkers as a trade vessel. http://www.myspace.com/cstek