Jessica Li: Magpie Captain of the Hunter's Moon

Jessica Li was a Magpie, one of the freelance salvagers who worked the fringes of human space outside the law. She captained the Hunter's Moon and led the loose band of crews that, while mining illegally in the Aegis System, caught the drifting USG Ishimura and boarded it in search of profit. Her decision to scavenge the ruined planet cracker drew her crews into the Marker that had doomed it.

Life before the Magpies#

Before she took up salvage work, Jessica Li served in the Marines. She left the service voluntarily after an embezzlement scandal of an unknown nature, and afterward turned to the freelance trade of the Magpies, illegal miners and scavengers who picked through the wrecks and ore fields that the law could not reach. She rose to command the Hunter's Moon and to lead several Magpie crews at once.

The wreck of the Ishimura#

While Li's crews were running an illegal mining operation in the Aegis System, the device they used to pull in raw materials caught the drifting USG Ishimura instead. The vessel arrived among them with such force that it destroyed one of their ships and the storage vessel that held their take. Rather than count the loss, Li saw a fortune in the wrecked planet cracker and ordered the crews to board it and strip it for parts.

The boarding party found the compartments coated in Necromorph biomass, and the salvager Stefan Schneider at first believed the crews themselves had killed the Ishimura's people when they shocked the ship into their lanes. Li dismissed the idea. She narrowly escaped death when a malfunctioning door nearly crushed her, saved only when Schneider pulled her back. Exploring the medical deck, the two found the ship leaking radiation, and Li called the boarding party to gather on the bridge, inviting the captain of the Black Beak across to join them.

Death aboard the derelict#

On the bridge, the Black Beak's captain, the devout Unitologist Benedykt Malyech, revealed Marker shards he had pried from the hull. When Li proposed selling them, Malyech, enraged, attacked her. She knocked him out and had him thrown in the brig, overriding the protests of her own people. In answer, one of the crew betrayed the Magpies and fled to the EarthGov blockade to trade away their position, carrying a Marker shard along.

Convinced the Ishimura still carried a whole Marker, and not knowing the artifact had already been destroyed, Li began hunting through the ship for it, certain of an even greater payout. She ordered the others to repair their vessel, since the loss of their storage ship left them unable to move so large a prize, and she went to fetch Malyech to help with the work, only to find him gone. As she searched, Schneider reached her with what he had learned of the Marker's true nature and the madness that had consumed the Aegis VII colony, and she agreed to cut their losses and leave if the ship could not be made to fly within the hour. Before that hour ran out, Malyech, now turned into a Slasher, ambushed her and impaled her on his arm. She died as most of her crew did, lost aboard the ghost ship she had hoped to plunder.