Low-key but satisfying, Thomas Parrott’s Warhammer 40,000 short story Salvage Rites adds a small but valuable extra layer of detail onto the non-military side of life in the Imperium. Having stumbled across what promises to be a life-changingly valuable derelict in orbit around Effandor, Captain Ved Tregan leads his small salvage crew onto the ship to assess their find, keen to get the job done before his rivals appear. In the silent, strangely sterile corridors of the vessel, however, bonds between the crew start to fray as the ship proves to not be quite as lifeless as it seemed.
Inert, drifting ships are never good news in sci-fi stories, and in some respects this narrative plays out just as you’d expect it to – they go in, it gets creepy, bad stuff happens. There’s more going on beneath the surface, however (though to say more risks spoilers), along with just enough backstory to Tregan and his characters to make the tension and conflict believable throughout. With a pleasingly ambiguous theme of ‘are they greedy or desperate…or both?’ there’s plenty to enjoy in watching the crew tear themselves apart, but it’s the glimpses of everyday life (and the pressures thereof) for these characters, scraping a living clearing debris from a planet’s crowded orbit, which ties everything together into a cohesive, immersive whole.
Click this link to buy Inferno! Volume 4, which features this short story.