With GUPPY, Simon starts to show some usefulness. After some mumbling about metamorphism, during which Milo tries really hard not to look bored, Simon begins to dig. Soon GUPPY is filling up with little chunks of rock and flakes of graphite that the BASE can use. Simon’s a lot faster at this than Milo. Good work, Simon. Keep digging. Make up for that shit you pulled last night.
The problem is Simon is also a lot more distracted. Goes for a few walks, leaving Milo with GUPPY. I follow him with a drone on one. He climbs a little outcropping of earth, a hill of sorts, which extends in a little O shape to the right. He stands there looking down upon a plain of grass and trees.
SIMON?
“It’s so peaceful here,” he says. “No people around.”
A wind howls through the O, as if in agreement.
GOOD WORK TODAY, I say encouragingly. LET’S HAUL AS MUCH AS WE CAN BEFORE NIGHTFALL.
“How much do you need? I mean, we’re not going to stay here too long, are we?”
The answer, dear Simon, is in tons, and we’re going to stay here a lot longer than you suspect. Salvage missions cannot be fit into one episode, despite whatever Star Trek might have you think.
FOR STARTERS, ENOUGH TO SET UP THE HAB, I say, because I’m not a cruel bastard.
That seems to set him on the right foot. He crawls down, waves to Milo, and rejoins him. Milo waves back and goes back to chipping away with GUPPY. Milo is a patient man.
Meanwhile, over at the Hab, Anna is patiently setting down conduit.
“Any luck on the coal?”
NOTHING, I say rather despondently. My drones have picked up zilch. Technically, there should be plenty of coal—after all, there’s forest around us—but I suspect this forest is far too new. If anything, it’s got to be around the older trees.
The reason we’re looking for coal is the BASE. Our extraordinary little printer can work wonders with any material, but breaking down, say, rocks into the carbon required for finer polymers—that’s too power-intensive. Coal, on the other hand: ready-made carbon just lying around, fewer impurities. A person can go a long way with a bit of coal.
“We could probably burn some wood,” Anna suggests.
That would certainly work. Wood, if burned right, leaves around 25% of its volume as charcoal. Which is, like coal, just carbon.
I’m a Buddhist. Which means I don’t have any stick with Creationism; the Buddha said yes, there might be gods and demons, but they’re all somewhere below humans on the grand scale of things; they’re stuck in their own patterns, unable to escape their karma.
The ghost of SILVER HYACINTH in my head snidely points out that I too am a pattern, stuck in a metal shell, unable to escape.
This is too meta, and a waste of processing time. My original point was that I don’t believe in Creators, but thank you, kami of the Universe, for making damn near everything out of carbon, amen.
“First time, huh?” says Anna, soldering a fuse box.
SECOND.
“How’d you pop your cherry? Milk run?”
There was a previous settlement run on Angron IV, but I was the rookie AI in charge of the sensors, and it was a much more professional OP. Heavy gear, insta-forming foam habs. Higher risk.
“I can’t imagine spending an eternity alive, you know. Not even as a . . . whatever you are.”
Gee, thanks, Anna, but that’s between me and my eventual paycheck. To turn the tables around, I ask about her. I think I’m entitled to, now that we both know her fraud.
“Army,” she says eventually. “You’d be surprised how much they’ll overlook if you’re a medic.”
Ah. Hence the gunshot wound. WHICH ARMY? UN? ORCA?
“ORCA. Back when they first began recruiting. They need medics, you know.”
Yes, Anna. Armies generally need medics. After all, getting hurt is their prime directive.
She falls silent and goes back to work.
Our little hab slowly acquires a roof. The sun sneaks over the horizon.
It’s interesting that Anna got me around to Angron IV.
To start with, Angron IV wasn’t called that: Kuda Mahal was the name it earned from its first colonists. It was a lovely planet with very high mountains and very little water—the kind of place where the air bit into you like a dry knife. The people were like my folks back home—old-school farm folk who wore robes and grew fiberweed on rough precipices and got maddeningly drunk on their daughters’ wedding nights. A few of them were real artists with landscaping: you could see it in the houses and Buddha statues they carved out of the mountains.
PCS had them tagged as desperately poor planetscrubbers, but I think I knew what they wanted. they wanted a place to live. A place where they could live without bowing to the ceaseless beehive that humanity was turning itself into. A place their art could stand tall and be appreciated without being outdone by some joke AI running on their kids’ phones. A place where they could look out and feel humbled by nature and feel thankful for what they wrangled from it.
Well, everyone was fine with that at first. Nobody gave a shit about Kuda Mahal until one of the Explorer operations discovered a fabulously rich set of super-earths about five light-years from Kuda Mahal. The UN swung into action. Kuda Mahal was redesignated as a critical jump point. Ships were sent out with Odysseys node arrays. Kuda Mahal would grow to be a hub city of epic proportions, a center of commerce at the heart of a new Silk Road among the stars.
But the people of Kuda Mahal wanted none of this. They knew, I think, what happens when you become a hub planet. It’s a very subtle and powerful form of colonialism, one that nobody in the UN circles really wants to talk about. Before long you’re dependent on them for trade, your language is gone, your people are a minority, and your culture is slowly becoming the officially sanctioned homogenous goo, and that relentless hive has taken you in, made you part of itself. You are yet another sacrifice on the altar of trade and cooperation.
So they joined the ORCA.
This was back when the Outer Reaches Colonial Association was starting up. Back then they were a union of miners and farmholders, a sort of backwater Mafia. They sent one of their first big ships, the Tower of Babylon, to Kuda Mahal. The UN sent a small fleet under Admiral Jenna Angron. Angron had just won three minor skirmishes. She looked upon Kuda Mahal and decided it would be the fourth.
Pretty soon the Tower of Babylon was so many corpses and shrapnel, and the people on the surface were being punished for their treason. When she left, there was no Kuda Mahal anymore. No more Buddha statues. Only a small army of soldiers and bureaucrats and a planet named Angron IV. One of the bureaucrats called PCS, and PCS sent a bunch of us in under BLACK ORCHID’s command. The task was simple: salvage what remained after Jenna Angron’s firebombing.
That was an unpleasant op. We ventured out hundreds of miles over what was once lush and beautiful forest, looking for cities carved into the mountains. We raided homes, temples, the libraries in those temples, and whenever someone was alive enough to challenge us, we pointed our guns at them. No, sorry, no water. No food. Get out of our way.
I ran sensory; it was my job to figure out what threats we might face, and where the stashes with the most ROI might be. I felt like a mercenary. BLACK ORCHID ran us like a machine. Go in, get out, and anyone who falls behind gets left behind.
When I got back to the outside world, I found that news of Angron had spread far and wide, and all around the edges of known space, people like Anna were picking up their pitchforks and declaring for the ORCA. It didn’t even register. All I could see was what we’d stolen from a people who’d just wanted to be left alone.
And yes, that was how I lost my Overseer virginity, in the ashes of a once-beautiful, idyllic world.
8
Day four. The dark earth of Urmagon looks a bit better by the day. No sign of the Megabeast—which makes me hope it’s wandered away. In the absence of fear we’ve moved on to setting up our first construction bay.
Constru
ction bays are basically workshops. You’d assume we don’t really need one for a salvage run, but I need modifications to GUPPY so it can be used as a vehicle. And spare parts. Batteries. A few extra drones.
I have very little to do while all this happens—my drones are still combing the hex pattern; we can’t afford to do recon work while we’re still getting our shit together. So I end up writing yet another poem:
Her fingers are cold and her voice is low,
She listens to nothing but the word of the priest,
It’s a long way to the airport, she thinks.
What will be left of her?
Her ears feel full with the world;
Her clothes are cold with sweat;
But she gives herself so little thought that she forgets to wash her feet;
When she comes to you, she tells you her true name;
And she suppresses an earful for a few words;
But she forgets to recite it,
And her fingers bleed until she dies
Like a baby lost in a crystal lake.
Where did that come from? Anna, I think; has to be. Except she hasn’t told me her true name yet, and frankly I don’t care at this stage. Morbidity aside, the baby and crystal lake imagery is interesting. I’ve seen a star with green crystal rain; a mineral called olivine, a magnesium iron silicate, sprayed out, sucked back in by gravity, an eternal rainstorm of refraction. I’ve seen a planet with a diamond continent. But never a crystal lake.
Oh well. Holographic memory doing its thing again.
I switch the drones to check on my crew. Milo’s working on a table near the construction bay. On one end is what looks like a Go board. He’s taken some of the thermoplastic goop I cooked up to harden the surface and coat the pieces. Go is an ancient board game from Old Earth China. Simple rules—basically pebbles on a nineteen-by-nineteen board. But the way this game is made, there are more moves on the Go board than there are atoms in the universe.
I suspect he’s doing it mostly to socialize. A full-length game can have at least 101,023 possible moves. Enough to keep three humans entertained for centuries.
I hope.
Anyway, it seems to be working—Milo strikes up a conversation with Anna and Simon about Go, about its history, how it led to the discovery of some esoteric branches of mathematics, and all that. They don’t play, but they do all sit down in the dirt for a bit and raise a couple of cups of water to the hab as if they were drinking shots. Simon, presumably in a fit of generosity, staples together a bench so Anna can have a place to sit and eat while she works. Anna shows them the staging she’s planned. Or rather, I’ve planned.
Nice. I let the party continue, discreetly manifesting a little timer on their HUDs. The first expedition is a critical part of the process. They’ve got four hours.
After a while they start to quiet down the way people do when they’re tense and silent, and start going over the maps I’ve assembled from drone footage and best guesses. Milo and Anna will have to do a roughly twenty-mile walk along terrain that’s rather similar to what we have here. Milo is in charge of analyzing the video and figuring out what kind of tools they’ll need. Anna’s navigation. The suit radios will fizzle out a mile or so down, so they have to be ready to go out there alone and get back in one piece.
“I think we can cut out this shell with the torches and GUPPY as a tug,” says Milo, skimming frame by frame. “What do we pull out?”
ANYTHING THAT LOOKS LIKE A FUNCTIONAL SUBSYSTEM. SOME PANELS IF YOU CAN HAUL THEM. WE CAN’T SELL THOSE, BUT I CAN USE THEM FOR THE HAB.
“Got it.”
ANNA, READY?
She sights down her rifle. “I’m hoping I don’t have to fire this.”
Close enough. I reroute GUPPY to Milo and Anna. The modifications have turned the long crawler into something that looks like the bastard love child of a wheelbarrow and a tank: slow, but enough to fit the two humans and some salvage.
Time to go scavenging, lady and gentleman.
YOU’RE HEADING INTO UNKNOWN TURF HERE, I remind them. THIS IS THE FIRST STEP. WE KNOW THERE ARE THREATS ON THIS PLANET THAT WE DIDN’T REALLY ANTICIPATE. CHECK YOUR GUNS. CHECK YOUR WATER. REMEMBER THAT GUMBALL IS SLOWER THAN YOU ARE. IF YOU SEE ANYTHING UNEXPECTED, DON’T BE HEROES. RUN MY WAY AND LET THE BOT SORT ITSELF OUT.
Thirty minutes later, Simon is watching their backs retreat and waving to them. Which gives me play for my next move.
SIMON, I say, HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO TRY AN EXPERIMENT?
The experiment is this: the analysis on that dog-insect meat has come back. Roughly 60% water, 15% saturated fat—basically long chains of carbon with some hydrogen thrown in. And about 15% protein. And some trace amounts of other crap.
Basically, it’s edible. Probably safer than the steaks back home.
It’s the protein that bugs me. Alien protein can be damn near anything. And, uh, yes, bacteria. But I’m banking on the probability that none of it should react with the human body in a, shall we say, overly destructive manner, because (a) human biology didn’t happen here and (b) that UN terraformer should have wiped the floor with the DogAnts if it thought anything could have really harmed a human. As big as the Megabeast was, it’s nothing compared to a terraformer: those things are tanks, roughly a third of the size of the colony ships themselves. There’s a reason street slang for those things is Dalek. They’re merciless, they don’t really have a sense of humor, and they have absolutely no trouble with genocide.
The problem is, I don’t have the time or the processing power to map out the less harmful ways this can interact with a human. Diarrhea is a possibility, and we don’t really have a toilet infrastructure set up yet.
It’s easier to just let the human try it. Look, even if it goes south, we’ll be out of here and in Ship’s medbay soon.
I direct Simon to build a little cooker that works directly off my power unit. Let’s microwave this thing.
TAKE THIS PILL WHILE WE WAIT.
“What is it?”
BIOMONITOR. IT’LL DISSOLVE EVENTUALLY, BUT I’LL BE ABLE TO READ EVERY INCH OF YOUR BODY.
He swallows.
“The meat, uh, looks really white,” he says.
LOW MYOGLOBIN LEVELS. No idea why. Wild guess. COULD BE BECAUSE THEY LIVE UNDERGROUND AND DON’T USE MUCH OXYGEN.
We watch the thing cook. It chars and gently turns brown.
THINK OF IT AS EATING AN INSECT, I try.
“You’re not helping.”
I zoom in with my cameras as he slices a piece off with his cutter torch. I go through everything on his vitals. He chews and swallows.
“Tastes like chicken.”
Hallelujah. I’m going to monitor him like a hawk now.
Over the next twenty hours, Simon works on the Hab, sleeps, snores, breathes, shits in a bucket (yes, we need to work on that; right now we need this stuff as fertilizer).
Our karma is good. He does not die. His vitals remain the same. Another victory for science! Take that, Urmagon Beta! We will eat you up!
I’m almost feeling confident about this now. And slightly better about Simon, who, despite being a guinea pig, has kept himself pretty busy sorting out the graphite and installing speakers in the Hab so I can talk to people inside. Later I’ll have him set up one of my backup processing units as a base computer. He hums as he works.
WE’RE MAKING GOOD PROGRESS.
“You think they’ll find anything interesting out there?”
LET’S SEE. The last photos from Milo, just before he went out of range of my drone hex, are reasonably promising: it looks like we may have dug up one of the colony ship’s black boxes. Every spacefaring vessel—and even some like me—maintain multiple black boxes. Logs. In case anyone ever finds your corpse and wants to know what happened. I send Simon the photos and we zoom in.
“What do you think happened, OC?”
YOU DIDN’T READ THE BRIEFING?
“Those things are always shit. We get three paragraphs. Two of them
are disclaimers.”
Well, he has a point.
Our target—at least, according to my briefing files—was sent, like every other colony ship, with a very specific set of instructions: find planet. Unleash terraformer. Land. Spew out whichever random assortment of humans the UN decided was suitable to start a new colony. Sit placidly by as most of them die and the survivors build a small civilization around your corpse.
IT LOOKS LIKE THEY GOT THROUGH TWO STEPS OUT OF FIVE. SOMETHING BREACHED THE HULL WHILE IN ORBIT. IT DIVED AT THE PLANET AND HIT THE ATMOSPHERE HARD AND AT THE WRONG ANGLE. CASCADING STRUCTURAL DAMAGE.
“Damn. Survivors?”
I shrug internally. IT’S A COLONY SHIP.
In the movies, these old hulks always have survivors. Alien attack? AI gone mad? Boom, out pops a survivor and takes control of the situation. Some on the corporate grapevine say that even in reality, PCS sometimes finds an old UN colony ship that’s missed its planet, run out of fuel, drifting through empty space, and the moment they get the power back and running, the colonists start waking up and asking tough questions, like who the hell are you, and why are you ripping out our nav computer, and hang on, that’s the engine, you can’t take that.
But on the other hand, physics. A hard enough landing on most planets will generally sort that problem out. Humans don’t do really well when they hit the ground from orbit. The ground is not an entity you can shoot or negotiate with.
We did run the scans. After all, I spent a month in orbit, waiting for the cloud cover to clear. Buildings don’t really show up from orbit, but if there is anyone alive out here, they don’t have lights and they don’t have radio. My guess is that whoever was in there turned into so much ketchup.
The Salvage Crew Page 4