Exoformers and Salvage 3D Render, Digital Artwork by emarukk

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Exoformers and Salvage

3D Render by emarukk

The metallic tang and refinery fumes hung in the air above Valeria-Gate, clinging to the updraft like a perfume of scorched crowns. This landing platform, high and exposed as the lip of a crucible, was a place for heartbreak and slow hours, the kind that left grit beneath your tongue and a longing ache in your lungs. Far below, the world sprawled in a bruised patchwork: jungle-pipes and scaffolds knotted into infinity, the forest of refinery stacks crowned with burning gas torches, their flames flickering even in daylight, lancing through the shimmering smog. The engine roar of container transports clashed against the ceaseless hiss of burning waste. Valeria-Gate was no city, no home; it was an industrial fever-dream. Once exoformed for its resource-rich treasures, now wrung nearly to death by the very greed that had birthed it.
Cormak Medoshvili told himself he had nothing left to cry out for as he waited to depart this half-rotted echo of a planet. A stationer born and bred on Kessler-Fold, Cormak loathed planets altogether: the unsettling, limitless sky, the unbroken vistas with no protective bulkheads, the blunt sledgehammer of native gravity. Bodies like his were engineered for the comfort of corridors, for artificial night and the subtle drift of microgravity. Still, salvage law was ruthless, and riches waited only for the bold who dared to step out from comfort. Valeria-Gate was a graveyard of wrecks and wonders; things lost, things broken, things that nobody cared enough to retrieve. If a shipment missed its mark, no one wept; they just loaded a new manifest and fired it uphill to the waiting hauler. Here, trash held promise. They called Salvage Operators scavengers, but gold gleamed even on the bones of the forgotten. This time, a bulk cargo lifter had come apart in the mountains. No survivors. Wreckage was everything. Nurya Adjiar, Exosurveyor and Cormak's gold-cored comrade, had staked her claim on the disaster site before the ashes cooled. Still, the job was too big for one. Cormak's name was the first she called. The payout would be sweet enough for both to taste.
Cormak surveyed the tortured horizon, a landscape gnawed by industry and wind, and caught sight of a woman whose face on the left side was a roadmap of burn scars, old and restless as the planet itself. Nurya wore her wounds without apology. She was all command, but her hospitality could be unexpectedly gentle. She leveled the glowing tip of her guidance wand at him; in this light, her grin was molten steel.
"It's always a pleasure to have you here, stationer, but the stench of Kessler-Fold is more than even I can stand for long," she fired off, voice full of laughter and old rivalry.
Cormak tipped his chin at the sky, watching the distant pulse of incoming shuttles. "Pleasure's all mine, Nurya, but it's time to haul this stink to Naruska and enjoy the fruits of our labor."
Nurya's laughter was rough as refinery grit. "The only fruit you'll sample, Stationer, are the hips of entertainers half my age. Unless you've changed, and I don't believe in miracles."
The jab landed, as intended, but Cormak didn't flinch. "And I've never once complained about your hips, Adjiar," he shot back, only to feel the gentle, almost affectionate tap of the guidance stick against his brow.
Above them, the platform trembled with the arrival of the shuttle. For a moment, the battered world seemed almost to hold its breath in anticipation.