Type: Salvage-class freighter
Home Port: Prospero’s Dream
Overview
She’s not much to look at, and she was never meant to be. The Second Chance is a working ship, built for cargo and salvage runs and not for setting down anywhere with real gravity — fusion engines humming away up top, the cargo hold and lower deck understung beneath the hull like something dragged along for the ride. The corridors are dirty in that particular industrial way, all exposed piping and scuffed decking, the kind of ship where you learn to walk a certain way past the engine room or you regret it.
The name wasn’t the crew’s first choice — they cycled through a long list before it stuck. But it fit, in the end, in a way none of the others quite did.
Layout
The ship keeps things simple, deck by deck. Cryo’s tucked away on deck one, close to where the crew first boards. Guest quarters and the captain’s quarters sit to one side, galley and mess hall to the other, with a straight shot of hallway running from engineering to ops — useful when something’s on fire and you need to get there fast. The crew bunks aren’t much: minimalist, a little cramped, nothing like a hotel room and nothing like a cell either. Just enough space to make your own.
The bridge sits roughly twenty feet across and thirty deep, the captain’s chair raised in the middle with two lower pits flanking it — one for the pilot, one for sensors — and the engineering stations run along the back wall. What used to be a second set of guest quarters has been converted into a brig, a fact the crew doesn’t advertise but doesn’t exactly deny either, given how often a bounty ends up walking in through their airlock.
Crew Quarters & Workspaces
The Bridge (Carl’s unofficial quarters): Carl technically has a cabin, but he almost never uses it — he lives in the cockpit, sleeping in the pilot’s chair more often than not. His station is a comfortable disaster: energy drink cans, half-finished notes, and knickknacks scattered everywhere in a mess only he could call organized. He always flies with a blanket close by, insists it’s just a comfort thing, and won’t say more than that. Whenever the ship heads into hyperspace, he cleans the whole station spotless — then lets it slide right back into chaos the moment they’re out the other side.
Arnold’s Workshop: Arnold’s personal space is a contradiction — his tools and hardware are meticulously organized, labeled, and exactly where they should be, while every other surface disappears under stacks of salvaged books and printed material, many in languages he can’t fully read, some patched together from corrupted files and mismatched pages. Half-finished kitbashed models sit around the workshop — the kind of thing where a tank ends up with airplane wings and a sticker that has no business being there. He does not appreciate visitors moving his tools.
Marge’s Med Bay: Kept clean, calm, and deliberately organized — a reflection of Marge’s own hard-won equilibrium since the “Year of the Rat” incident. Her bed is made every morning. A small display case of prehistoric melee weapons (including a flint hatchet) travels with her wherever the ship goes, alongside a growing collection of patches she wears on a vest depending on her mood — a quiet, unspoken signal to the rest of the crew for what kind of day it’s going to be. Her bookshelf has shifted lately toward the philosophical: self-awareness, healing, what comes after nearly dying inside something much bigger than yourself.
Captain’s Quarters (Jon): Sparse and meticulously kept, in keeping with Jon’s discomfort with owning more than his crew has. His one real indulgence is a shelf mounted above his cot, holding an actual collection of printed books — rare and heavy enough to be worth something, secured against drift in case the ship ever loses gravity. His desk holds a simple hardline terminal and a stack of PADDs, all neatly organized by whatever job the crew’s currently working.
Hydroponics Bay
Somewhere back in the cargo hold sits a single shipping container that doesn’t quite match the rest — repurposed, patched together out of salvage, more post-apocalyptic lean-to than proper greenhouse. It’s Etna’s corner of the ship: potatoes, chickpeas, and oyster mushrooms growing under salvaged grow-lights, the air thick and a little too green. Nobody’s quite sure what it smells like from the outside, and nobody’s eager to find out.
During the oxygen emergency the container was plumbed directly into the ship’s scrubber loop and is currently breathing for the whole crew as a living filter — worth roughly one working filter’s output, for about a day. Everything growing in it will be dead by the end of that.
The Dropship
The ship’s industrial heavy-lift dropship finally got a name during the fighting at Siddhartha’s Peace: The Hot ‘n Ready. She rides in a landing cradle in the dropship bay and came off that colony badly damaged — details on her own page. The Second Chance gave up the wiring to her own exterior running lights to repair the dropship’s control lines that night, and has been flying dark on the outside ever since.
Damage & Standing After Siddhartha’s Peace
Boarded in orbit by the Iron Cross while the crew was on the surface. The pirates came in through the salvage bay, which had been left standing open. They took the remaining half of the apple-tree cargo, drained the warp core of every drop of jump fuel, and rigged the impulse engines to detonate on ignition — sabotage the crew found and undid. The self-destruct they triggered on the way out was shut down with a second to spare.
The ship is otherwise sound, but she is not going anywhere far: no jump fuel, impulse only, a hull breach patched with sealant foam, a shot-up bridge, half a pilot’s chair, a med bay door that cycles open and shut at random since Bernard blew its control panel, and roughly twenty refugees aboard with no supplies budgeted for them.
Both surviving pirates were dealt with in the hours that followed. Zeid was captured, put in the brig, and died there when Bernard drained that compartment’s air during the oxygen emergency. Tanya was blown out of the industrial workshop into space and is gone.
The Air
The fight cost the ship her lungs. Tanya cut through the environmental monitoring and three of the four oxygen scrubber filters on her way through the ducting, on a vessel rated for twelve people and currently carrying thirty-two. Carbon dioxide pooled in the reactor pit deep enough to drop Weaver and Benny Letcher before anyone knew the system was failing, and the alarms went off ship-wide not long after.
What the crew did about it, and what it left them with:
- Bernard sealed and drained every compartment nobody needed — guest quarters, captain’s quarters, galley, pantry, utility pod bay, the lift, the brig — pulling their air into the occupied sections. Those compartments are now locked and close to vacuum. The brig was the only one he did not announce over the comms, and the prisoner in it did not survive.
- Etna’s hydroponics container is patched into the scrubber loop as a living filter, good for roughly a day.
- Arnold built one working filter out of the captured dropship’s mismatched environmental units, sealing tape, and spacers cut from the ruined originals. Bernard installed it.
Filtration is running at about 75% and holding. It is a reprieve, not a repair — the garden dies, the stripped compartments stay shut, and there are still thirty-two people aboard.
Docked at the Terraforming Station
With no jump fuel and Carl unconscious, Jon flew the ship himself to the orbital station above Siddhartha’s Peace. The Second Chance is now held in the station’s docking arms with the clamps locked around her hull fore and aft — nothing aboard can release them; that has to be done from inside the station. The airlock is open onto a station that appears to be abandoned.
Points of Interest
Drifting somewhere behind the ship, marked but not recovered, is the wreck of a ship torn cleanly in half — no atmosphere, old combat scarring, and “MARTIN RAYNE” painted across the hull in fading red. The crew chose not to risk towing it in on first contact; it’s still out there, worth an estimated 2,000 credits in scrap to whoever works up the nerve to go back for it.