"Shit!" Miranda snarled, curling her body away as the second transformer blew out in a shower of sparks. Despite her figure hugging coveralls flares of pain prickled on the back of her hands and across her neck. She let out a long sigh blowing a lock of hair out of her face as she grasped for the multitool she had dropped when the overload had cooked the transformer.

"Virrr?" a small electronic tone inquired. Miranda opened her eyes and looked up to the ceiling of the maintaince conduit eight inches above her. A small approximation of a lizard, made of metal and plastic with bright green led eyes hung from the ceiling secured by magnetic feet, which it activated and deactivated by rocking its feet forward, giving it a smooth motion that none the less appeared skittering.

"Yer Vir, shit," she explained to the robotic lizard, which cocked its head and slipped sideways to investigate a nest of jury rigged wiring. Vir wasn't alive in the strictest of sense but he had a small cerebral cortex made of trageminite, a notorious unstable quantum conglomerate which, coupled with some of the fittings of a standard AI allowed him to display something like learning and freewill. Like most of the rest of this bucket, he had been cobbled together by whatever Miranda had been able to find.

Belatedly Miranda realized that Tryansa had been talking to her. She blinked twice and then flicked through the menu of her engineer's visor, scrolling back with quick twitches of her eyes. The visor wasn't as good as a helmet for the job, but these maintenance shafts were bad enough without getting your head wedged in every tight corner. Finding the timestamp she played the message forward at twice speed.

"Well Trys, I'm afraid we have also cooked number two transformer in the power train," she reported glumly, pressing her feet against one of the indents to slide herself along the shaft towards the access point ten feet away.

"Which means no guns, or at least no guns while we have the drive running," she corrected. These ancient freighters usually used a trio of transformers to bring power from the fusactor to the various ancillary systems. Unfortunately they weren't very well buffered and tended to fail when put under alot of stress. Miranda found the access point and swung herself out head first, catching a ladder rung and tumbling herself neatly to land on both feet and booth hands on the engineering deck.

"I thought I saw a couple of crashed ships on the scope when you were looking for somewhere to land this tub, maybe we can salvage?"

And suddenly a fourth problem reared its head.

“Just our luck, I guess.”

The girl sighed as she rose from the cockpit, grabbing her blaster pistol from the dash as she did so. She left the intercom on as she checked the system diagnostics one last time. She wasn’t sure how she missed the report on the transformer, but there it was flashing in red. On the bright side, salvaging for common parts needed for transformer repair wasn’t all that out there. It was certainly easier than finding the exact type of angstromatic disc they needed. Easier than finding transponder codes that wouldn’t get them shot into stardust from an imperial cruiser.

“We’re gonna have to salvage. Should be the easiest thing to find on our grocery list.” She said over intercom, “Just going to have to hope we don’t run into trouble. There’ll be enough of that hunting down the transponder codes we need. See you in five... going to make sure I got what I need ready.”

Leaving the pilot’s seat Tryansa took another breath to calm her nerves as her brain went over everything she needed to remember when they left the interior of The Carthage. Broken transformer. Inoperable transponder codes. A compatible angstromatic disc. Not enough credits. It sounded like they needed to make contacts, though the only contacts on Andares Prime she still had didn’t want to see her, let alone hire her and someone they had no track record with.

Miranda was good. Back when Tryansa was last on Andares Prime she hadn’t met her yet and Tryansa herself was rather inexperienced and plucky, a mostly green pilot and occasional hireling. If the local settlement was still run by that old warlord then she would be in steep trouble given how much she had set his operations back. At the very least if he was listening he wouldn’t have recognized The Carthage as its original transponder codes had been wiped from its databanks some years prior to Tryansa meeting Miranda. She wondered how much uncovering her past would do harm, but with Miranda being a fresh face as long as Tryansa kept her head low it should’ve been serviceable enough. If they needed to operate in league with the old man or any of his old cohorts they’d have to do it through Miranda while Tryansa kept quiet and discreet. Tryansa was good at discreet. She could do that.

It didn’t take long for her to dig through her quarters for her extra gear. A spare hold-out pistol, some grenades and other utilities. Her credit chit. She knew she had just enough credits to keep her ship in the “spaceport” unmolested by scavengers and crooks. It was better than landing the ship in the middle of nowhere and hoping for the best. For the time being, anyway.

She straightened her synthetic jacket as she moved a stand of hair from her face, before moving toward the docking bay… or what made for a docking bay. As Miranda likely shuffled through her own things she leaned against the walls of the ship, arms crossed as she waited for them to get started.