Territory: Frontier salvage and repossession routes

What It Is

Sable Reclamation does the work creditors and rivals want done and never want to be seen doing. Somebody defaults, somebody wants a claim that is not theirs yet, and Sable’s boarding craft comes alongside in the dark between routes. They breach, they strip the hold, they take the ship or the cargo or the coordinates, and they are gone before a distress call clears the nearest beacon. Clean seizure, no argument, no witnesses worth the name.

What made Shack’s boarding stay with him was not the loss. It was the crew. The men who came through his airlock did not talk and did not miss and moved through the ship with a flat, patient economy, as if clearing a vessel was the only thing they had ever been for. He has never been able to prove who sent them, or whether it was Sable at all and not just Corvid’s paper wearing a rougher face. He only knows what he saw. Men who had been grown to do exactly that.

The boarding crew that stripped Shackleton Magellan’s expedition and, with it, his solvency and his name. Whoever they were, they are the reason he is at the dead end taking any job that will have him.

Relationships

• Raided Shackleton Magellan — Boarded Shack's expedition mid-run, stripped the hold and claim, and left him with the debt.
• Pattern echo Six — Crewed by boarding assets of a pattern uncomfortably like Six — a thread only Six could recognize.