Magpies: the illegal salvage crews of known space

Magpie was the term used across known space for illegal salvagers, freelance miners who took ore and wreckage out of systems they had no license to enter. They were the shadow cast by the Concordance Extraction Corporation and the licensing regime that EarthGov enforced on its behalf, and most Magpie captains had been thrown out of one or the other before they took up the trade. In late 2508 four Magpie ships under the loose command of Captain Jessica Li were stripping minerals out of the Aegis System when the drifting hulk of the USG Ishimura came through their equipment without warning. The salvage they attempted afterward killed every one of them but one. The name was common currency by then, familiar enough that Kendra Daniels reached for it while trapped aboard the Ishimura herself, saying she would take a rescue from a Magpie at that point.

Freelance miners outside the law#

There was no Magpie organization in any formal sense. The name attached to a way of working rather than a body, and any crew that lifted minerals without a license and sold them without a manifest was a Magpie. What held a group together was the captain who could talk the others into a shared operation and the split they had agreed beforehand.

The trade drew people who had been shut out of the legitimate one. Almost every named Magpie captain of the Aegis group had a history with the corporate or governmental structure they now worked around. Jessica Li had been a Marine and left the service following an embezzlement scandal rumored to involve several million credits. Stefan Schneider, her second aboard the Hunter's Moon, had run a legitimate mining business until CEC interference and EarthGov's willingness to accommodate the corporation put it under, and he came out of that with a permanent distrust of anyone in authority. Benedykt Malyech had been a CEC supervisor until the company terminated him for breach of contract after he handed corporate secrets to the media. Gatura Okeke had been a commercial pilot until he was fired for insubordination. Julia Copland was a career criminal and confidence artist who took up freelance mining as a place to hide from the law and discovered the culture suited her. Bellevin had simply never done anything else, and was said to understand the risk and reward of illegal mining better than anyone in the trade.

Unitology ran through the crews as it ran through most working populations of the period. Malyech was a practicing and devout believer, Okeke a moderate one, and neither fact was remarked on until the Aegis operation turned up something worth being devout about.

Four ships and their crews#

The Aegis group consisted of four vessels of unknown class, each carrying about four hands and each fitted with a ShockPoint Drive. The Hunter's Moon was Li's ship, with Schneider as second, an engineer named Wenbo and a pilot named Thorssen. The Black Beak answered to Malyech, with Copland as second, a pilot named Venschiff and an engineer named Gottheddir. The Sunset was captained by Okeke, the group's resident gearhead, whose hands kept the others' machinery running. The Liberté was Bellevin's.

Command among them was a courtesy rather than a chain. Li was described as a people person who ran a tight crew, and she acted as the effective leader of all four, but the arrangement rested on consent. Bellevin had gone freelance precisely so he would not have to take orders, and told her as much when she started giving them.

ShockRings, Eggs and the Nest#

The group's working method was a ShockRing, equipment that pulled material through from elsewhere rather than digging it out in place. Hauls came through the ring in units the crews called Eggs, and were held in a dedicated storage vessel they referred to as the Nest. Without that vessel the group had no capacity to move a large object, a limitation that shaped everything that happened afterward.

The Aegis System was chosen for the same reason the Magpies chose anywhere. It had been mined, it had been abandoned, and the Aegis VII colony that once justified an EarthGov presence there was gone. What the crews did not know was why it was gone.

The Ishimura comes through#

The operation ended in seconds. While Bellevin was working the ShockRing to bring a haul through, the damaged USG Ishimura arrived on site without warning, shocked in on top of the salvage work. The planet cracker destroyed the Nest outright. It struck the Hunter's Moon and damaged the ship's starboard side. The Liberté could not be maneuvered clear of the drifting hull and Bellevin was killed in the collision.

Li's response was to treat the wreck as a payday. She ordered the surviving ships to run the Ishimura down and bring it to a halt with gravity tethers, and once it was stopped, to strip it. The Hunter's Moon set down inside the damaged shuttle bay to survey the interior while the Black Beak held station outside.

What was aboard#

The boarding parties found a ship in a condition none of them had seen before. The compartments were coated in Necromorph biomass, and Schneider's first assumption was that the crews themselves had killed the Ishimura's people by shocking the vessel across. Li refused the idea and kept the salvage going. She was almost killed by a malfunctioning door and only survived because Schneider pulled her back. Working through the medical deck, the two of them found the ship was leaking radiation.

Li called the boarding party to the bridge and invited Malyech over from the Black Beak. There the argument that broke the group began, because Malyech had found shards of Marker 3A embedded in the hull. Li proposed selling them. To a devout Unitologist the suggestion was intolerable, and Malyech assaulted her. She knocked him down, had him thrown in the brig over Copland's objections, and went on believing the wreck held a complete artifact worth vastly more than the fragments.

The betrayal and the blockade#

Copland did not stay to argue. She took a Marker shard, left the group, and flew to the EarthGov blockade holding the system, where she offered the fragment to Defense Secretary David Chang in exchange for immunity. Chang handed her to the Oracles, the organization that handled such matters on the government's behalf. She told them everything she knew about the wreck, the crews and the artifact. When she asked for the reward she had been promised, the lead Oracle killed her with his ring, and she bled out from the nose in front of him.

Her defection gave EarthGov the position of the Ishimura and the Magpies both, and it removed the Black Beak from the operation at the moment the surviving crews needed every hull they had.

The end of the crews#

Aboard the wreck, the group came apart. Li ordered repairs so the ship could be moved without the destroyed Nest and gave the effort a limited window. Okeke volunteered for the engines and refused to leave until the rest of the artifact had been found. Schneider, meanwhile, pieced together what the shards actually were and what had happened to the Aegis VII colony, and got Li to agree that they would cut their losses if the repairs failed.

She never had the chance. Malyech had gone missing from the brig, reanimated as a Slasher, and he ambushed Li in the corridors and impaled her on one of his arms. Okeke died the same way. Schneider watched the Hunter's Moon overrun and escaped the Ishimura in a stealth shuttle, the only member of the group to come off the ship alive.

The vessels outlived their crews by an unknown margin. The Hunter's Moon was presumed to have been secured by EarthGov along with the derelict, though it was not in the hangar when Isaac Clarke reached the ship years later. The Sunset was most likely recovered by government forces as well. The Liberté was already scrap in the debris of the Aegis System, taken out of the sky by the same hull that had cost the group everything else.