Zone: Outer ring transit lanes and the debris field — no fixed itinerary, no registered address
Type: Light Rust Alliance salvage collector — small class
Operator: Yamar (pilot) and Gelon
Crew capacity: Four comfortable · eight maximum
Status at story start: Spaceworthy. Old. Reliable in the ways that matter and temperamental in the ways that do not.

1. Overview & Specifications¶

The hull Yamar and Gelon live on. Not the Marrow — a smaller ship, and theirs in a way Davan Ore's family collector never had to be earned. Gelon found it derelict in the debris field, ran the numbers on what it would take to make it fly again, and decided he had the time. He did. Most of what holds it together is salvage cannibalised from a dozen wrecks, fitted by hand over the better part of a decade. It is old enough that there is no manifest anywhere of what the ship originally was, which suits both of them.

Gelon named it. A vagabond, he told Yamar, is not lost — it has simply declined to arrive. Yamar pretended not to understand why and understood completely.

It carries no real weapons. A salvage vessel that looks like it is worth boarding does not last in the Drift Corridors, and one that looks like it is not worth the fuel lasts a long time. Yamar flies it like the second skin it is.

2. Layout & Exits¶

The ship is small. There are two ways off it:

• The cargo bay outer door — a wide aperture built for hauling salvage and mating to a dock.
• The personnel airlock — a single lock for EVA and anywhere too small, too dead, or too suspicious to dock.

Everything else is interior, reached through a single spine corridor: bridge forward, crew quarters and cargo bay amidships, engine room aft.

   [BRIDGE]
      |
   [AIRLOCK] — [CREW QUARTERS]
      |              |
   [============ CARGO BAY ============] — outer door
      |
   [ENGINE ROOM]

3. Compartments¶

The Bridge¶

Forward. Low-ceilinged. The two seats came off different ships.

Two seats bolted at slightly different heights because they were salvaged separately. The console is a patchwork — three generations of instrumentation wired into one panel, half of it labelled in Yamar's handwriting where the original legends wore off or never matched. It "needs two hands and occasionally three": some manoeuvres require one person flying and another holding a relay contact closed that has never been worth replacing properly. Yamar's seat. Gelon stands.

The Cargo Bay¶

The largest space and the true centre of the ship. Where the living happens.

What the layout calls the part that "does most of the living." Strapped-down crates double as table and bench; a salvage net slung across one corner holds everything that does not have a home. The wide outer door — one of the ship's two exits — is rigged to mate with a dock or open to vacuum. When the bay is empty it echoes; when it is full the crew lives in the gaps between cargo. This is where people eat, argue, and wait.

Crew Quarters¶

A short run of bunks off the cargo bay.

Four fold-down racks that sleep four in comfort and eight in grim shifts — the way they will have to during Return. Thin curtains for privacy, personal kit in netting overhead. Yamar's bunk is the one nearest the corridor, because he is the one who gets up when the ship makes a noise it should not.

The Engine Room¶

Aft. Hot. The loudest room aboard.

Gelon's domain — the room he "treats as a second home," and the only space sized and kept for him rather than for the human crew. The reactor and drive are the most cannibalised systems on the ship, held in tune by two hundred years of patience and a parts inventory that exists mostly in Gelon's memory. He can hear when something is about to fail days before an instrument would.

The Airlock¶

A single personnel lock. The ship's second exit.

For EVA and for anywhere too small, too dead, or too suspicious to dock. The suit lockers are here — old, well-maintained, one of the few systems Gelon refuses to run on salvage margins. In Return, this is the way out into Hephaistos-9's no-atmosphere sections if the cargo door cannot mate to the scarred bay.

4. History — Salvaged and Rebuilt¶

Yamar's birth family's ship was boarded and taken in the Drift Corridors when he was six. Gelon pulled him out of the wreck. Years later, Gelon found another derelict drifting in the debris field, judged it worth the time, and spent the better part of a decade making it fly again — most of it on salvaged parts, fitted by hand.

For Yamar the Vagabond is the answer to a question he does not ask out loud. It is the ship Gelon pulled him into the future on. He does not call it home. He does not have to.

No money changed hands for it. Nobody aboard could have afforded a ship like this — Yamar runs on opportunism and small margins, Gelon on patience, and Seren arrives with credentials and knowledge but no funds. The Vagabond was never bought. It was found and rebuilt, which is the only way a ship like this comes to two people like them.

5. Role in Return¶

This is the "Rust Alliance salvage vessel" the team takes to Hephaistos-9. Yamar can fly the salvage approach profile that threads the station's outer perimeter without tripping passive monitoring, and the Vagabond reads, on any instrument that looks at it, as exactly the kind of junk that drifts through dead orbits picking over wrecks. That is the whole point of it.

At the station, the Vagabond either mates its cargo door to the scarred docking bay, or — if the slot is unusable — the team goes out the airlock in EVA suits into the no-atmosphere sections.

Writer's Notes¶

The Vagabond is not the Marrow. Keep them distinct: the Marrow is Davan Ore's family collector that picks up Janus in Drift; the Vagabond is Yamar and Gelon's smaller home ship, used for the Return approach. They are two different Rust Alliance salvage vessels and should never be conflated.

The ship is unarmed by design, not by poverty — looking worthless is the camouflage. Lean on that for the Hephaistos-9 approach rather than on stealth tech.

The emotional load sits in the rhyme: Yamar lost one family ship to piracy in these same corridors, and lives on another that Gelon rebuilt from a derelict. Handle it the way Yamar does — without saying it out loud.

See also: Locations Index | Hephaistos-9 | Characters — Yamar & Gelon | Story — Return