Decoy Five

Overview

Decoy Five is an unregistered autonomous electronic countermeasure drone, a disposable decoy platform assembled and operated by the black-market information broker Orin Vasquez. Built from the salvaged hull of a Kirin-class prospector sled recovered from the Pallas drift graveyards, it is a weaponized falsehood: a remote unit designed to mimic the sensor signatures of freighters, relay buoys, or life-support leaks in order to confuse and misdirect hostile tracking systems. Deployed in deep-space debris fields, Decoy Five draws hunter-seeker platforms away from genuine targets, providing crucial cover during covert operations. It is not a ship in any traditional sense—it carries no permanent crew, has only minimal cold-gas propulsion, and is treated by its creator as a consumable asset, destined to be expended once its luck runs out.

Description

Decoy Five’s physical form is blunt and chaotic, a 14-meter wedge draped in mismatched armor plates. Faded yellow-and-black hazard stripes, stenciled cargo codes from defunct corporations, and brittle vacuum-sealant foam the color of old bone patch its exterior. Along the dorsal spine—a heavy beam salvaged from a collapsed station strut—sit three matte-black Saito jamming transponders, their serial numbers deliberately left exposed. The stern is dominated by twitching cold-gas thruster arms that vent glittering plumes of frozen nitrogen crystals, a brief, beautiful giveaway of the drone’s position. The interior is an unpressurized tomb of blinking amber diagnostic lights arranged in a circle on a status board, their hypnotic pulses tracking each subsystem. A single worn hand-hold bar near the access hatch is the only concession to human touch. During full-power broadcast, the hull surface heats to 340 Kelvin, and stray radio-frequency ionization creates a faint violet halo around the central junction box—a ghostly signature that betrays the drone only when it is already doomed.

Society

Decoy Five belongs to no government, corporation, or registered entity. Absolute control rests with Orin Vasquez, who pieced it together over two years in a hidden Pallas maintenance bay, bartering black-market favors for every component. Vasquez alone loads the encrypted mission profiles via a dongle only he carries, refusing to share the spoofing engine’s frequency algorithms even with close allies. Only Hari Okada, a longtime associate, is occasionally permitted to handle physical pre-launch checks. Within the fragile resistance network, the decoy inspires both gratitude and unease: commanders value its tactical role in covering critical transmissions, while pilots distrust an asset they cannot fly or adjust in real-time. Vasquez’s relationship with his drones is intensely personal—he speaks to them, berates them, and regards them as the only crew that has never betrayed him. He will use each until it is atomized, then build a replacement and remember the old one by its call sign. Decoy Five is his fifth.

Notable Features

• Signature Spoofing Engine: Programmable to mimic eleven distinct freighter and relay-buoy emission profiles, combining repurposed jamming transponders with a white-noise oscillator and a library of recorded crew chatter stitched into audio camouflage.
• Thermal Deception Modes: Four preset thermal signatures allow Decoy Five to impersonate a cold drifting wreck, a ship with a simulated life-support leak, or a fully loaded ore hauler, manipulating how hostile platforms categorize it.
• Fusion Bottle Endurance: A single reconditioned micro-fusion bottle provides up to 22 hours of continuous full-power broadcast or over 40 hours in intermittent spoof mode before core embrittlement renders the drone scrap.
• Debris-Field Camouflage: Its irregular silhouette and precisely timed thruster bursts are designed to blend with tumbling fragment fields, making it visually indistinguishable from ordinary wreckage between broadcasts.
• The Halo: At peak output, RF leakage from the jury-rigged junction box creates a faint violet ionization glow visible within a hundred meters—a known vulnerability, but one Vasquez accepts, since by the time an enemy is close enough to see it, the decoy is already lost.