Reclaimers
“The stars.
“Humanity had long dreamed of leaving Earth and spreading out amongst the stars.
From the days of the earliest astronomers, mankind has envisioned what waited for us in the
void. Entertainment from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are full of optimism. Look at
Star Trek: space, the final frontier. Full of planets filled with green-skinned babes and humans
whose entire culture was based on some weird-ass shtick, like 1920s Chicago or the ancient
Roman Empire. A benevolent, Earth-based Federation made up of dozens of species, all
peacefully co-operating. That’s the sort of thing we expected when we got into space.
“What we got instead was a whole bunch of emptiness. Humanity, it seems, was late to
the party: there was nobody out there in the Black but us. Well, these days. Intelligent life had
existed, but not anymore. We found their cities in ruins, their ships drifting silently through the
void…and their corpses. It seemed that while humanity was busy imagining what intelligent alien
life would be like, they were out here livin’ and dyin’.
“But they were here, and they left all sort of neat toys behind. Toys that fetch a pretty
penny back on Earth. Didn’t take long for people to realize that they could make their fortune off
of selling centuries-old laser rifles and holovids of some civilization nobody’s ever heard of
before. So here we are, out here on the edge of civilized space. Criminals, cut-throats,
vagabonds, scoundrels, mercenaries, pirates, hackers, smugglers. People who haven’t worked an
honest day in their lives. People who have nowhere else to go. People who don’t fancy watching
their life pass them by as they work as a corporate wage-slave. People who have a dream of
getting rich or dying in the attempt.
“There’s a certain freedom to it, but it’s a hard life. Cash flows out of our hands as easily
as the blood from our wounds. But at least it’s our life. And if we're lucky, smart and stubborn,
we might come out on top. There’s a lot of lost loot out there for the finding. And salvage law is
mercifully generous. We find it, it’s ours to spend, sell or keep.”
-Jena Scoxson, captain of the Reclaimer vessel Oort’s Cloudburst
