The wreckage stretched before me, a graveyard of ambition and silence.
Somewhere in this field of corpses, buried beneath layers of rust and time, was the one thing I needed.
A transponder.
The only way to send a message without alerting the people who had sent me here to die.
I moved fast, my boots kicking up thin plumes of dust. The air inside my helmet was sharp with the filtered tang of Mars—thin, metallic, stale.
I had been through most of the wreckage before, but I hadn't been looking for this. Now I was.
I activated Database Scan.
Lines of data streamed across my visor, highlighting wrecks that had potential. Most were useless. Fried circuits, shattered antennas. Nothing strong enough to punch through the void of space.
Until—
There.
A partially buried fuselage, the insignia almost completely eroded. The ship was old—two, maybe three decades at least. But that was a good thing. The older transponders worked on simpler frequencies, harder to detect, easier to modify.
