Junker JoeJoe caught the faint echo of the hulk on his ship's sensors. Excitement buzzed through him, a thrill that never got old. Goddamn sweet. No way was this a lump of space rock. No mistaking those clean lines even through the fuzz of the cracked display. A ship. The shattered remains of a ruined spacecraft. A huge spacecraft.
A thing of goddamn beauty. To a junker like him, the most beautiful sight in the whole wide universe.
“This is it, Avi. I told you. Sweet Jesus, this is the one. At last.”
He still talked to Avi. Like she was there on the Orpheus with him. Like she was still alive and not buried beneath ten thousand tons of asteroid a million kilometres and thirty years away in the Belt. She'd died and he'd carried on talking to her, that was all. No one else to talk to out t
