Result: She sold refined ingots, not rubble. A rival might bring back 2 tons of mixed scrap worth 2,000 credits. Mira brought back 600 kilos of pure iridium worth 15,000 credits—and left the slag behind. The Composer paid for itself in three runs.
Word came of a lost colony transport buried in a methane ice crevice near the south pole. Two other crews had tried and failed—one fried their engine trying to melt the ice; the other triggered a collapse.
She had replaced the stock wheels with articulated, low-ground-pressure tracks built from recycled landing-leg composites. The mod distributed Old Rusty ’s weight across six times the surface area of a normal SV-4. She drove over the unstable ice like a snowshoe hare, while rival rigs—still on wheels—sank or shattered through.
She extracted the database and drove away as the trench collapsed behind her.
Today, you can buy pre-modded SV-4s at four times the price of stock. None are as good as Mira’s. Because a real mod isn’t a catalog purchase. It’s a story of survival, written in scorch marks and salvaged steel.