Running Tab

The Outer Rim built the Hell's Bells by answering one question seventeen times in a row: what if there were more engines? The result was a cruiser that looks, from most angles, like an engine cluster that grew a cockpit by accident — thruster nacelles stacked and angled in directions that no single engineering philosophy would sanction, held in alignment by flex polymer and the structural magic of materials that cost more than most ships weigh. Fast. Suspiciously fast. The kind of fast where you check your instruments because your instruments must be wrong. Pirates stripped the dark matter cores and the flex polymer. They replaced the missing mass budget with additional conventional thruster housings — more of them, uglier, bolted wherever the clearance allowed, exhausting across each other in ways that technically shouldn't work. The Running Tab is louder than a Hell's Bells, its exhaust signature is visible across three sectors, and it is faster than the ship it came from because it turns out the Outer Rim's real engineering insight was not the exotic materials. It was: more thrust, less weight, argue with the results later. The name comes from what it leaves behind. Every system it passes through has a running tab of damage, encounters, sensor ghosts, and unanswered questions. The ship is always somewhere else before the accounting starts.