The lift doors separated and the nostalgia washed over me as the magnets in my boots pulled my feet onto the bridge. To most, the gutted interior would have been unrecognizable but my brain filled in every missing detail. For a brief, beautiful moment I relived the past of another lifetime.

Most spacefaring military ships are built the same way—essential functions and personnel at their core with less mission critical decks radiating outward, like concentric rings on a tree trunk. Not that anyone would cut a tree down just to see such a thing. We drove our planet to the brink of its health and then we got out here and realized just how good we had it down there. But the bottle was uncorked by then—you can’t un-spray champagne just like we never went back to hunting and gathering.

The core of those vessels is reserved for officers, the command crew, and chief engineers. Specialized ships may have additional facilities on that deck, too. The key is to keep the most important operational functions as safe as possible. The crew responsible for moment to moment tactical decisions and keeping the nuclear reactor from turning everyone into a tiny, short lived star must be protected.

Habitation decks comes next, wrapping that sensitive core like a hard candy dipped over and over again in sugary syrups. The rest of the crew are what keep the ship running. The core can bark orders but if there’s no one around to crawl into a maintenance shaft to splice a bypass from a blown relay then the command doesn’t matter much.

If you’re on a big ship, the next decks can be anything. They tend to be what gives that ship class its unique purpose—doped fuel reserves, medical facilities, cargo bays, mobile refineries, mobile barracks, etc.

After all that, you’ll find the inner hull and a criss-crossing mess of access halls, shafts, and tunnels on the other side of it. Most of them lead toward the outer hull but some cut back through the interior to allow for quick access between layers. Beyond that, scratching at the crust you’ll find docking bays, docking collars, access ports, primary airlocks, secondary airlocks, emergency airlocks, escape pods, and other forms of ingress and egress.

And hard point mounts. Usually weapons but you can put anything on a hard point and about a million vendors make about a billion hard point attachments a year. They’ll be humanity’s greatest artifact of mass production when we wipe ourselves out. I expect we’ll take Earth with us when it happens, too. Out of spite, mostly. That, or the planet will express how tired of our shit it is and just give up on us. When that happens, all that will be left to remind us of nature will be man made.

Look ye upon our creations—the retired corvette, Vega, I was standing in, for example. A ship I used to command when I served in the Solar Force. A ship that I was familiar with down to individual bulkheads, rivets, seals, and passageways. Whole lives were lived inside it and many more were ended because of it. And now, the Force is on the brink of ending its life.

It took me almost a year to track it down; once I did, getting close to it became the next problem. I couldn’t just fly my way to the facility and expect not to be blown up before my digital footprint was interrogated and used to slander my posthumous name. Bonus points since the Force already did such a thorough job slandering my living one. I’m sure I would have been impressed with the fallout if I weren’t me. Instead, I had to disappear to stay alive. There are worse trades one can make for their life, though.

No, I needed a legitimate reason to get close to Vega and, since the last time I was on its decks I was being dragged off the ship, I knew I’d have to be creative. I’ll never forget the rage boiling out of my first mate’s eyes as she watched me struggle against the troopers the Force sent to collect me. The worst part of the ordeal is that she believed the story they cooked up. After all those missions it turns out propaganda is more powerful than trust.

So, I did the obvious thing. I went looking for a job—spent half a year melting my brain in virtual learning and then practicing everything I could about shipbreaking. The fake identity I paid for and the real consulting company I created to get me through the background checks landed me in the same financial bracket as everyone else in the application pool. The best lies are the ones that are true and at that point I was in desperate need of employment.

It took thirteen months before they even let me near the decommissioned military ships. Then, another five before I could get near the Vega without my superiors chewing me out. I won’t lie: as long as you ignore how many ways you can puncture a spacesuit while exposing the skeleton of a dead ship, the work can be meditative. It helped. Not at first, of course, but once I started to accept reality I found the tangle of emotions woven between my muscle fibers begin to loosen. I waited, bided my time, and let tearing down old ships become my therapy.

And then I was assigned to help with The Big Job—the forgotten ship moored at the edge of the facility with some of its outer plating already stripped off. The Vega was there for years and from the outside it appeared untouched for most of that time. The Force was looking for something they believed was hidden on it and they spent years sifting its every molecule through the finest sieve to locate it. They wouldn’t—I made sure of that—but the effort was enormous nonetheless. Special crews with strange equipment would show up, board the Vega every day for weeks and leave empty handed just to be replaced by a different group with a new set of tools. They didn’t want anyone to know what was going on inside, so a full compliment of eager shipbreakers were forced to watch its pristine exterior remain intact. Until three weeks ago, when the last crew left and the order to scrap the whole thing was given. I guess this is how you erase history.

Well, sorry Jovial Jovian Teardown, not on my watch. I’m taking my ship back.

Enough reminiscing.

I opened my eyes, exhaled, and disengaged the boots to float my way to the security console. Once I reached it, I slung the shoulder bag around and pulled out the override device—a crude bit of hardware that would have gotten me detained just based on how many stray wires were hanging off of it. It started out as a simple bypass board and was finished with the last of my credits from an account labeled “Rainy Day Fund.” It would allow me to power up the ship despite the shipyard lockouts. It would buy me a little time, too, but even someone asleep at the job would notice the ship was making flight ready preparations. Ships tend not to leave teardown yards whole and via their own propulsion.

The display on the override device went green, alerting me that the hacked configuration profile was uploaded. “Time to get you out of here,” I muttered as I tapped on it.

The ship shuddered to life, shaking like an animal after a frantic swim back to dry land. After a few seconds it lessened to a steady vibration before settling into an imperceptible hum. I imagined the sound I’d hear if the bridge were pressurized.

I connected my suit comms to the ad-hoc network the override device broadcast and spoke to the ship for the first time in almost four years. ”Vega, begin flight ready procedures.”

“Automated flight check beginning.” The stock Solar Force corvette class virtual agent greeted me in response. I knew it wouldn’t be the Vega I remembered but my skin still crackled with anticipation.

“Keep it quiet, only prompt for errors. Give me full engine status ASAP.”

“Affirmative.”

Should be about three minutes. I glanced at a timer on my HUD which started when I connected the override device. Then I looked around the bridge as I waited. A red light was blinking at the Comms console.

“Is that a message?”

“Affirmative.”

“When was it sent?”

“The message was not sent. It was transferred to the console via an external source.”

“When?”

“Three weeks ago.”

Oh. Fuck.

“Play the message,” I said, after settling into the command chair. I tapped at the dead console attached to the armrest before I could stop my muscles from performing the familiar action. The audio from what must have been a holo vid filled my helmet.

“Levi, I hope you don’t receive this message. But, if you do, then you know we didn’t find what truly made the Vega what it was. It must have been a joy watching us look for something that was never there.”

I paused the playback and glanced at the timer again. “ETA on engine status?”

“Ship systems have not been initialized in full for several years. A diagnostic is in progress.”

“Of course it is. Skip the diagnostic. Skip everything except for the engine check.”

“I must advise th—”

“And don’t you sass me. Give me my control profile at the security console,” I commanded as I pushed myself out of the chair.

“There are no control profiles available.”

They reset my goddamn settings. “Fine, give me the default Chief Engineer controls.”

The red to green ratio the engine check diagnostic was spitting out was not encouraging but it would have to serve.

“Another message?” I asked as the Comms console flashed again.

“Yes, a local message from the shipyard office.”

“Archive it,” I said before resuming the one I left hanging.

“I don’t know where you’ve stashed it away, Levi, but it belongs to the Solar Force. Do you think we’d let something like that remain unaccounted for?”

I punched in a few commands after the engine check finished and the ship shuddered again as it freed itself from the spindly arm the docking collar was attached to. My weight shifted as the maneuvering thrusters pointed the ship towards the coordinates I keyed in. I flung myself back towards the command chair and strapped myself in.

“Levi, we won’t stop searching. Wherever you go, I will find you.”

The recording ended just as the main engines woke up. The muscles around my mouth tightened as the wild grin on my face expanded.

“You know what? I don’t think so,” I said as my body pressed back into the seat.