Wreckers: A Denver Boyd Novel

of four turbines “under the hood.”
Some people questioned my uncle’s sanity when he had the additional nuclear core installed, but he had the engineering chops to do it right. The result was unparalleled power and speed for a ship in its class.
Yep, Uncle Erwin had been a genius and a pioneer. Me? I was just a lowly mechanic. He’d also been a shrewd businessman, building the only independently-owned ship in the galaxy capable of towing a battlecruiser to either end of it.
I took a few moments to study myself in the bathroom mirror. I didn’t look amazing. For a 19-year-old, I had some pretty heavy bags under my eyes, thanks to a constantly shifting sleep schedule. Sometimes I went days without decent shuteye. Other times I would be out for 12 or more hours a pop. My curly black hair was tangled and filled with grease of various origins – the engine, my body, maybe even the garbage stacked up all around. It was just hard to stay motivated to clean myself or my ship between jobs. That always bit me in the ass when I got a new gig, as I had to clean out the Stang all in one go.
As I exited the bathroom, I nearly tripped over a bin of spare turbine parts in the middle of the corridor. Like I said, it was the maid’s year off. I made a mental note to clean up and shower before the next time I went to bed.
I looked down at the parts by my feet and grimaced. Resting atop the stack of mismatched metal thingamajigs was a piston for the very type of engine found in most 405’s. Once again, the universe was trying to tell me something. I hated when it did that.
The distress call was fairly specific as far as those things go. The ship had apparently stalled about a hundred thousand miles from the Earth’s moon. The message suggested it was a mechanical problem, which meant it was probably something else entirely. If they had the right diagnosis, they’d be able to fix the damn thing themselves. They wouldn’t need me. And you can bet that’s the first thing the engineers would say when I arrived: they already knew what the problem was. They’d keep talking down to me, even after I fixed their ship for them, or gave them a tow. That was the federation way.
Formally known as the Interstellar Federation Force, the military group started as a joint peace-keeping organization between the governments of Earth, Mars and the various stations that had sprung up in between. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. You know, keep the verse safe through collaboration and cooperation. Blah, blah, blah.
The very first General of the IFF was a well-respected former military man who had served on Earth as the head of the United Nations forces, and then later on Mars as one of the first settlers there, back in the early days. He modeled the federation based on what he knew. That was the military. So instead of creating some kind of new organization to fit the dynamics of life in space, he just copied what worked on planets. The result was an inefficient mess. One of the first signs that the federation model was flawed came just a few years after it was formed, when they realized you basically had to just hope the captains of any particular ship were good men and women. If they weren’t, it could take months or even years to track them down, and a rogue captain can do a lot of damage with no oversight.
So, like any governmental agency – and especially one spread so thin across the verse – the federation grew more and more corrupt over time. It was just too much territory to cover. Back on Earth, there was a finite plot of land an army had to protect or a police force had to oversee, and they still had problems. Out here in space, it was naive to think rogue admirals wouldn’t begin to treat their little pockets of the verse more like personal fiefdoms than parts of a larger community.
These days, the feds (I didn’t like to use their full name, it gave them too much respect) were basically their own nation-state, spread out across hundreds of ships in every corner of the verse. Under the guise of keeping the peace, they enforced arcane taxes and tariffs, extorted local officials and often laid waste to ships and individuals they deemed as being threats to society. In some ways, the federation was the most dangerous and powerful force in the world.
Most of the officers were also insecure morons who got off on being in a position of power, and the crew were people who couldn’t hack it on their own in the private sector, where things like talent and skill mattered. That wasn’t just my opinion. It was the opinion of most non-feds. In my opinion, anyway. So it didn’t surprise me at all to receive a distress call from a fed ship. They couldn’t fix their own ships if their lives depended on it. Which they did, of course.
The main issue with being stalled in space is the life support system. As advanced as the tech is in the 24th century, all systems will eventually fail. Then you either freeze or suffocate, depending on the order of your malfunctions. I always thought freezing would be better.
In addition to the Stang’s prodigious towing capacity, I had enough life support reserve to keep a small army alive for a month. If Pirate and I ever stalled, we could probably last five or six years if it wasn’t for the whole running out of food thing (I think we had a month of food reserves).
That is, unless Gary drove us crazy first.
Gary was the ship’s on board AI. My uncle was a big fan of the historical entertainment programs on Earth. In addition to filling