Hunter's Moon: The Magpie Ship That Caught the Ishimura

The Hunter's Moon was a Magpie salvage ship of unknown class, captained by Jessica Li and crewed by the freelance miners who worked outside the law on the edges of known space. As the vessel of the woman who acted as effective leader of several Magpie crews, it served as the flagship of the four ship group that ran an illegal mineral harvesting operation in the restricted Aegis sector. That operation ended when the derelict USG Ishimura shocked into the middle of it, and the Hunter's Moon, having chased the wreck down and berthed inside its ruined shuttle bay, became a trap for its own crew. Of the four people who flew her into the Aegis System, only Stefan Schneider escaped the Necromorph infestation that consumed the planet cracker, and he left his ship behind, swarming with the dead.

Flagship of an illegal operation#

The Magpies were freelance salvagers and miners who operated throughout known space in defiance of EarthGov licensing and CEC claims, and the Hunter's Moon carried one of the tightest crews among them. Its captain, Jessica Li, was a former Marine who had quit the service after an embezzlement scandal, and she ran the ship as its "people person," holding together crews that answered to no other authority. Her second in command, Stefan Schneider, was a onetime legitimate miner whose business had been destroyed by CEC interference and EarthGov capitulation, leaving him with a deep mistrust of every institution in human space. The rest of the complement consisted of an engineer, Wenbo, and a pilot, Thorssen. Li was the only person who could keep Schneider in line, and together they made the Hunter's Moon the lead vessel of a four ship group that also included the Black Beak under Captain Benedykt Malyech, the Sunset under Captain Gatura Okeke, and the Liberte under Captain Bellevin.

In late 2508 or early 2509, this flotilla shocked into the restricted Aegis System to extract illegal minerals. The Magpies worked their claim with a shockring, pulling harvested ore "Eggs" through to their storage vessel, the Nest, while the four crewed ships managed the operation. The Aegis VII system had been placed under an EarthGov blockade, a detail the Magpies could not yet explain, and the presence of warships on the system's edge hung over the entire venture.

The Ishimura shocks in#

The operation ended in a single moment of catastrophe. As the ships were pulling an Egg through the shockring, Schneider noticed interference coming from the ring, and then a massive vessel shocked in directly on top of the Magpie formation. The arrival destroyed the Liberte and obliterated the Nest, and the newcomer, drifting without power or guidance, struck the Hunter's Moon and damaged its starboard side. Schneider identified the hulk as the USG Ishimura, the famed planet cracker that had gone silent near Aegis VII.

Li saw a payout in the wreck rather than a warning. She ordered the remaining ships to chase the drifting Ishimura down and bring it to a halt with gravity tethers. Once the Magpies caught the giant, the Hunter's Moon flew into the Ishimura's damaged shuttle bay and set down inside the ship itself, positioned so the crews could survey the interior, while the Black Beak held station outside the hull. It was the last landing the Hunter's Moon was ever recorded to make.

Berthed inside a ghost ship#

From its berth in the shuttle bay, the Hunter's Moon served as the base for the Magpie boarding parties that spread through the Ishimura. What they found was not salvage but the residue of a massacre. The compartments were coated in a sludge that matched human DNA, and Li and Schneider discovered radiation leaking through the Medical Deck. On the Bridge, Malyech revealed the shards of the Red Marker he had found embedded in the hull, and Li's proposal to sell the fragments provoked the devout Unitologist into assaulting her. She had him thrown in the brig, and his second in command, Julia Copland, betrayed the Magpies in response, flying to the EarthGov blockade with a Marker shard to give away their position.

Partial logs recovered from the Ishimura's locked records told Li that the ship had carried a full Marker raised from the planet's surface. Not knowing the artifact had been destroyed, she committed the crews to searching the vessel for it, and because the Nest was gone, she ordered the Magpies to repair the Ishimura itself so the wreck could carry the prize out of the system. The plan kept the Hunter's Moon parked in the shuttle bay while, unseen, the Marker shards began to reanimate the Ishimura's dead crew.

The fate of the Hunter's Moon#

The Magpies stranded aboard the Ishimura died one by one as the Necromorphs rose. Li herself was ambushed and impaled by Malyech, who had been transformed into a Slasher, and the boarding parties on the Bridge were overwhelmed. Schneider, the last of the Hunter's Moon crew, fought his way back toward the shuttle bay through Necromorphs, EarthGov marines, and the pair of Oracle operatives who had boarded the wreck in a stealth ship to hunt him. When he finally reached the docking bay, he saw Necromorphs swarming over the Hunter's Moon, and he abandoned the ship where she sat, escaping the Aegis System in the dead Oracles' stealth shuttle instead.

No record preserved what became of the vessel after that. The Hunter's Moon was presumably secured by EarthGov along with the Ishimura when the blockade forces took custody of the planet cracker, but the ship was not present when Isaac Clarke later returned to that hangar during the outbreak on Titan Station. The last confirmed image of the Hunter's Moon remained the one Schneider carried away with him: a salvage ship claimed by the very wreck her crew had tried to claim.