The Slag Rats’ hovercraft. Patched a hundred times and still running.
She wasn’t called the Rat House when the Slag Rats found her. Ash looked at the scarred plating, at the rodent skull barely visible beneath the grime and scorch marks, and said it plain: “The Rat House. A nod to the crew that had her before us.” Raz considered it for about a second. “The Rat House.” The name stuck.
Built to take punishment
The Rat House is a heavy military hovercraft, and she wears every kilometer. Dented plating, scorched hull, turbines that scream when Jae-woo pushes her hard. The roof deck carries twin gun turrets behind sturdy side rails, and doubles as a lounging area where the crew catches air between contracts. The rear ramp has seen more combat drops than any of the crew cares to count. She is not fast. She is not pretty. She gets the team there and she gets them home.
Inside the hull
The central room holds the holo table, a rectangular command table projecting tactical maps in blue light, where the team plans every descent.
Off to one side sits the med bay. It is the cleanest room on the ship, spotless from heavy use, because strikers who go where no one else will go tend to come back bleeding.
Up the ladder, the upper deck bunks are built directly into the walls, tight but functional, each with a privacy divider. A single ladder at the far end runs from the lower deck straight through to the roof hatch. Lena has fallen asleep to the hum of those turbines more times than she can count.
Technical specifications
Class: heavy military hovercraft
Armament: twin roof-deck gun turrets
Propulsion: turbine lift array
Crew: the Slag Rats
Distinguishing marks: rodent skull stencil, mostly worn away
The skull on the hull
Nobody knows which crew painted the skull, or what happened to them. The Raiders never painted over it. Some things you keep.