The Salvage Crew

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  I don’t think my parents understood why I did. They were largely content with their lot—or resigned, I couldn’t really tell. Every bad fact of our meager existence they shrugged at. Our karma, they’d say.

  But I was tired of the cold and the random water plumes and a lifetime of fixing the farm while Caesar glared at me like some baleful god in the sky . . . no, I wanted out of there. There were more things in heaven and hell than dreamt of on those cold lands, so when the PCS call came, I took it. At some point you have to stop blaming the world and go make your own karma.

  They didn’t really argue, but they gave me that look, like I’d turned into a stranger overnight and they didn’t quite understand me anymore. I told them to think about what they wanted to buy for the farm the next time the Market ships came around. I set their account to take my pay, minus food and lodging. And then I hightailed it out of there, and for the first time in my life, I found myself in a place where nobody knew me and nobody cared. I was free to be who I wanted to be. I was free to live. I was free to die. As long as I did my best—as long as I didn’t burn too many bridges and did more good than bad—I’d come out okay.

  It was liberation, in a sense. I went through my punk phase, boosting fuel cells and running races down the asteroid line. I lost my arm and got a new one. I fell in love and fell out of it. I got in with a union and negotiated better floor pay for the maintenance techs. Then I started working for a local PCS Overseer—a pretty high ranker, SILVER HYACINTH 222, a starship sent in to oversee the construction of a mining op.

  I was in awe of this thing that had once been a real, live human and now was a near-immortal hulk, cruising the stars. I wasn’t quite sure I liked that it used to be a person—I remember asking her once why we digitized people and didn’t just use proper, intelligent AI like in the science fiction flicks. Why the rest of us stuck ourselves so dangerously close to the baseline, like monks refusing to masturbate. A whole lot of stuff that started with words like loyalty programming and creationism and UN ethics violations and ended with the same damn thing: cost of doing business. I nodded like I understood.

  And one day I turned back to go home, and I didn’t want to. I knew that to go down there to Cassius was to go down to a people who wouldn’t understand what I’d become. I had spoken with starships, for God’s sake. To go back to the farm was to cut out everything I’d taken in and strip myself down to something I didn’t want to be anymore.

  So when HYACINTH opened up a crew posting, I took it. At first I was a tech grunt doing the work she couldn’t handle herself—scuttling out to fix her hull, hauling ice around, interfacing with stations, things like that. The rest of the crew were good people. They understood.

  But eventually your body breaks down. Too much radiation damage. Too much time spent in zero g. Eventually you look around and realize that all the old faces you came with are dead or gone on to lives elsewhere, and all these new faces are looking at you impatiently, wondering when the old man will finally give up and let them get on with it. Eventually, HYACINTH sent three people to my room, and they shoved a contract in my face.

  “You’re Nyogi Buddhist, yes?” they said. “Don’t think of it as dying. Think of it as rebirth.”

  When I woke up, I was no longer human.

  HYACINTH never apologized. I think, in her own way, she was fond of me, and this was her way of keeping me around. I was now an Overseer, albeit a minor one. AMBER ROSE 348. Property of PCS. Someday I might be given a real body myself. Turns out the old adage about not being able to choose your next life applies even if you’re software.

  I asked HYACINTH what kept her going. She pointed me to a particular clause in our contract. As long as we never, ever get caught by a rival corporation—especially the Enterprise lot—there’s the promise of a world out there that’s just right for you, an Eden among the stars. And there we can sit and watch the sunset until we rust away, while another version of you goes onwards.

  HYACINTH was searching for a hill to die on. She just wanted some company on the way there.

  Ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust.

  3

  Right, so we’ve landed.

  Okay, I admit, landed is a bit of a stretch. I was aiming for the nice prefab structure we sent down a week ago, but I hit a pocket of hot air on the way down. Spun a bit. Hit a few—birds? Octopi? Things? on the way down. Right now we’ve hit a bit of foresty patch, right in the middle of some small hills, about a few miles from the actual landing site. About a day from the ocean, which I’ve decided to call Ocean, because it’s too early to start naming everything and it bloody well can’t complain. It’s a patch of water washing up to a black sand beach. Fight me, you horrible wet thing.

  Still, it’s not that bad. Urmagon Beta is a fine planet. Temperate. Standard sun, G-type main sequence, maybe a bit yellowish on account of how it’s only 0.83 solar masses—but otherwise perfectly serviceable. It’ll do its thing for at least seven billion more years, and after that you want to check the warranty and take it in for servicing. Between us and this thing are two moons—we’ll get to them later—and an atmosphere, which we just came through and I’m not feeling too charitable about, but quite breathable: 19% oxygen. About 60% nitrogen. A lot of argon, which does absolutely fuck all, but not enough carbon dioxide to kill anyone. 290 Kelvin.

  The ground is dark and craggy, all mountains and jagged edges. The trees are suspiciously large, with dark green, almost black leaves, but otherwise nothing like the nightmares cooked up by the simulation runs.

  A hundred years ago, an Old Earth colony ship crash-landed on this planet. One of the Project Gilgamesh ships. On the way down, it threw out a terraformer, which telemetry tells us is halfway on the other side of the planet by now, happily analyzing the local biosphere and doing with trees and bacteria what the UNSC Cortez did to the Xiao-Ancellus homeworld fifty years ago. Its legacy is what remains here: a local biosphere almost completely scrubbed dry, leaving behind just the safe and the sterile stuff.

  You could, of course, point out that this is a really unfortunate analogy. The Xiao-Ancellus shelling was what made the Outer Reaches Colonial Association go from being “hardheaded lobbyists with some unsettling mercenary power” to full-on military insurgency overnight. The Cortez was found ripped half apart, drifting into the nearest UN station with its crew’s vacuum-frozen innards painting the interior. And that was just the bloody nose that started the whole UN-ORCA war.

  But as far as we’re concerned, none of that exists. We’re here on a standard job, the kind PCS does for loose change. The Hyperion Museum of Interstellar History is paying us top space dollar to come to this little backwater and have a look at this downed ship. We find the pieces from orbit, scuttle down here, recover whatever’s useful, and haul it back to base. Once we’re done assessing weight and value and all that crap, our ship pulls us and everything useful up, and away we go.

  There’s just the little problem of us being fifty miles off where the first piece should be.

  Oh well. We can do this. The crew is ready. Protocol 3. Suits on. Helmets on. Emergency hatch blown open. Milo is first out the door. He strikes a grand pose for my cameras.

  “One small step for a man, one giant step for mankind!” he chirrups.

  Anna scowls. “This isn’t the landing site.”

  WE’RE ABOUT FIFTY MILES DUE SOUTH, I say. TURBULENCE.

  Nobody’s solved turbulence yet. On his deathbed, Heisenberg, the great physicist, was asked what he might say to God if he saw Him. “I’m going to ask Him two questions,” said Heisenberg. “Why relativity? And why turbulence?”

  I think that’s fair.

  Anna looks irritated. “So what’s the plan?”

  SAME AS WHAT WE WOULD HAVE DONE EVEN IF WE’D HIT THE LANDING SITE. SET UP A BASE. MAP OUT THE REST OF THE WRECKAGE. IT’LL JUST TAKE US A LITTLE BIT LONGER. GO TO PROTOCOL 3.

  She barks assent and begins moving, opening the hatches on my side. The armor panels slide
out so they can be used as building material. Inside are weapons, food rations, water. She straps on a cutting torch and tosses another to Milo. They begin cutting more armor panels away, exposing more solar cells. I unfold, like some kind of two-ton metal tree stretching out its leaves, and catch the sunlight. The tingle of voltage runs through my cells.

  Ah.

  I kick in my own version of Protocol 3 and unleash a small drone. That gives me a limited bird’s-eye view of us. So far so good. Next: several dozen samplers.

  Only Simon is left inside my bay, clutching a rifle. I didn’t notice him reaching for it, but instinct must have kicked in. He looks green.

  SIMON, I say carefully. SIMON.

  He looks up.

  PROTOCOL 3, SIMON.

  Simon flees.

  When the first colony ships hit the very first habitable worlds, they had absolutely no idea how to react. We gave speeches. We marveled at alien sunsets. We went out looking for alien lizards, hoping to get some concrete answers to the Fermi paradox.

  But after the ill-fated sixth UN colonial expedition was chewed up by a passing lizard while they were staring at a sunset, we decided to get our shit together.

  Space is large. It’s not friendly. It’s not meant to be. When you’re ten light-years away from the nearest settlement, you don’t get to call home and tell mum and the commander you’re donating body parts to the local fauna and flora. Which is why Protocol 3 exists. Roughly, it’s:

  Land. Try not to go splat on the ground. Try not to land in the ocean.

  Set up the BSE3, or BASE, as we call it. The BSE is a slow but ridiculously hardy 3D printer. Into it goes whatever you can find—rocks, earth, the bones of dead lizards. Out of it comes neat prepackaged blocks that fit tightly together.

  Stack these in whatever way is optimal, make shelter. Get inside before night falls. Set up a base station with energy, sensor arrays, production capability. Anything and everything else can wait until you have absolute security in a ten-mile radius.

  The Overseer (that’s me) is responsible for the lookout. And keeping an eye on everyone and everything in general. Always. Obey. The Overseer. The Overseer is Good. The Overseer is Kind. And when you return, the Overseer’s report is what determines your pay, so for all points and purposes, the Overseer is your personal karma. Don’t fuck with it.

  Milo, Simon and Fake-Anna have spent some time in cryosleep with these instructions slowly being burned into their minds. If they do this right, we’re good. Promotions all around.

  The first order of business is to establish a safe perimeter. Which, for me, is to get more drones in the air. My main battery is a Damayanti Small-Arms Nuclear P3. It’ll last for years but only provide a trickle charge for me to stay alive and run the BASE. Beyond that, I can support only three small drones or one of the long-range recon jobs.

  I opt for the three. Combing in a hex pattern, I build up a map of our environs. We appear to have dropped into a sort of depression, ringed to the northeast with hills, and around with plains. The downed colony ship activated its terraformers before fizzling out, and in fact, one of them is running somewhere due north. The result is that the dark earth has been overlaid with a kind of long, wet grass. Grass . . . grass . . . hill . . . cluster of weird trees, sort of like overgrown bellflowers, definitely not our stock . . . aha. Water. A small stream. I can purify that. Alright, we’re in a good patch. The colony ship’s terraformer has clearly done a good job.

  The original drop site was near some limestone deposits, which we could have used to make concrete—but no use crying over spilled coolant.

  More scan results. The cloud cover is incredibly dense, but the soil is reddish and has a lot of iron in it. Perfect: iron’s literally a girl’s best friend. Iron we can use for building, making steel, repairing our equipment—damn near everything. Whereas diamond—well, that’s just overpriced coal. There is some kind of rich and complex biosphere, as we suspected, but none of it is genetically capable of doing any of my humans any harm. Nothing so ridiculous as incubating in someone’s chest and then popping out.

  As I wait, I compose a poem to my awkward humans.

  Iron muscles on strange soil

  Your cries spreading to the treetops

  Clanging in the evening sun.

  O bipeds, you hug a new earth

  I am a casket for your sins

  A basket for your life

  The womb that brings you forth

  Into this world of dew.

  Hmm. Not the best I’ve managed, but reasonable. The loose form fits the work at hand. Later will come structure, and we’ll probably end up with iambic pentameter.

  The samplers return and buzz me more good news. The trees are mostly a heavily modified variant of Acacia melanoxylon superior, probably from the terraforming run. What we call blackwood. They say a shittier version once grew in Old Earth’s Australia, which means anywhere else in the universe is a piece of cake for our stuff. Random planet? The surface of the sun? The outer edge of a black hole? Blackwood is your tree.

  This mission might not be so bad after all.

  HELMETS OFF. AIR’S BREATHABLE.

  Simon takes off his helmet, still looking queasy. “Smells weird,” he says. He pukes again.

  DON’T WE ALL. Especially since you puked in me, you little shit. And now you’ve polluted a brand-new planet. But then Anna joins in.

  “Oh, God. It’s like smelly socks. Or rotten cabbages.”

  Milo strolls up, taking off his helmet. “Simon, you okay? Oh. Shit. What’s that smell?”

  “It’s silent,” says Anna. “So silent.”

  Milo cocks his head. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I’m used to it.”

  Simon pukes again. There goes the silence.

  Just to be safe, I ping our Ship, which is just about to float out of signal range. Ship, which is a nice dumb object, reports that nearby geysers might throw up trace amounts of methanethiol. It’s less than one part per billion, shows up quite naturally in the human body, and is completely harmless, but it turns out humans are somehow genetically evolved to detect rotten-cabbage gas. Crap.

  IT’S HARMLESS, I tell them, throwing markers on their arm displays. SIMON, MILO, BUILD HERE. ANNA? LET’S GET THIS SHOW ON THE ROAD.

  Rotten cabbages.

  I shake an unseen fist at the universe and get to work.

  4

  Four hours later: I have to say I’m quite pleased with the Rotten Cabbage Crew over here. Milo hopped to hauling stuff right away, like I knew he would. Simon, once he’d stopped heaving, followed Milo’s lead. Anna picked up the cutter and went to work on me.

  Our first order of business is to set up the framework for the hab where we’ll live. A salvage crew, any salvage crew, is expected to have a safe base, well shielded from the weather and the elements. From this base, over a period of weeks to months, they venture out, find whatever they’re supposed to find, and cut off bits and pieces that they can take back. Usually it’s small, sensitive stuff, like electronics or engine and weapons cores. Bring these back to the base, sort through them, and lift off with what’s worth the most amount of money. Fairly simple.

  So yes. The base. I run through the designs stored in my memory, accounting for what we have around. Pattern 1338 seems a good fit: a plain design supported on six latticed pillars—my lander legs, really. The lattice design can take an enormous amount of stress. Around this can go wood—the trees can be harvested; wood insulates well because of its cellular structure.

  So Anna’s cutting my legs out, shepherding Simon around; Milo’s measuring and surveying and laying out boundaries with stones. All three are working well together. I’ve been sampling their cross talk—your usual stuff about the landing and how the Overseer can’t pilot for shit—hey, I resent that. Then Anna and Simon went ooh over a weird little flowering shrub Anna found—the flowers are gray and green and try to rotate away from noise. Rather pretty. Milo made small talk with Simon about recovering from the dro
p, and then the conversation shifted to the wreckage, and that led to this discussion about some old TV series they’d seen in school. Star Trek, or something like that. Simon, who’d never really been to school, nodded and asked questions while taking my outer panels apart.

  They remind me of my second crew. Not the ones on that job on Brutus; we were too alike, too angry, too defensive, too eager. This is more like the Austaire job. Half of the Austaire crew were a bunch of hippies, the kind who’d taken a little bit of Nyogi Buddhism, a little bit of Abrahamic, a little bit of Old Earth reggae, and woven them into a lifestyle bound with synthweed and a kind of lazy anti-authoritarian chillout. Then there were two or three people who’d worked corporate jobs, all high-velocity constant-grind types. Somehow they found this pattern of working in bursts, chilling between hauling pipes and coolant, and generally having a decent enough time of it.

  Soon I am a denuded framework with a few solar panels stretching out, and the base’s foundations are in. They eat their first meals under my shade while the BSE3 crunches and spits out bricks. Nobody’s died; nobody’s stabbed each other. There’s a stiff breeze playing on everyone, which makes them smile and forget how stuffy those suits are. It’s like Urmagon’s gotten used to having us around and is saying hi.

  Hi back, you planet.

  Meanwhile, I test the limits of my drone capability. Can we do five miles? Yes, we can. Seven? Yes. Ten? Yes. AHA! What’s that?

  A long, angular shape, half-buried in the dirt. I drop the drone closer. The shape resolves itself into a glitter of metal shards, several hundred meters long, with UNSC stamped on one.

  We’ve found a piece of the wreckage! Almost by accident, too. I relay the news back to my humans, who clap and cheer. Simon, still looking green around the gills, wants to go haul it back right away, but no, Simon, let’s do this once we’re set up. It’s right at the edge of our security perimeter, and I don’t want to take any chances.