Imagine the kind of shitty karma you have to have to sail the darkness for hundreds of years, actually find the alien world you’re meant to inhabit, and die within sight of the damn thing. And all your hopes and dreams are basically just display items for some snob museum and a day job for people like us.
“What do we do if we find ’em? I mean, wouldn’t it be like stealing?”
NOT OUR PROBLEM. WE’RE JUST HERE TO TAG THE CORPSE.
Simon chews on this for a bit while smoothing a bit of thermoplastic on the outside wall, sealing the wood bricks beneath a layer of tough polymer skin. “Shikata ga nai, eh?”
Translation. It is what it is.
YES, SIMON, I say, watching him smoothen the edges. SHIKATA GA NAI.
9
Milo and Anna are back! Simon, who despite his many faults turns out to be charmingly goofy, has written WELCOME BACK EXPLORERS <3 on a massive wall of wood that he’s set up just for the occasion.
The explorers in question look tired. Their suits are a bit muddy. But they’re in one piece, and behind them comes GUPPY, like a faithful rover, bearing goodies. And goodies they are: it’s the black box of the UNSC Damn Right I Ate the Apple. And what looks like half a mile of insulated cabling, a half-ton shard of ceramic and coldsteel. I can hear Anna’s laughter outside.
Simon and Anna are enjoying a moment of camaraderie, and it looks like she’s regaling him with tales of an epic trek over miles of the exact same terrain we have here. Milo, on the other hand, looks grim.
“OC,” he says quietly, “I’m not entirely sure, but there was a really high hill quite close to the site. And I think I saw . . . something. In the distance.”
SHIP PARTS? COLONISTS?
“No, they didn’t . . . they looked odd. Like they weren’t shapes that I’d seen before. Definitely not anything that belonged on a ship. Couldn’t really make it out, you know. Didn’t look natural at all. But I know, I know—” He held his hands up. “It could have been anything. Anna saw nothing. But maybe someone’s still out there.”
WE DIDN’T SEE ANYTHING FROM ORBIT.
“I know. Maybe it was a mirage. But still. Would you mind checking up on it?”
SURE.
There’s the sound of laughter outside. It looks like Anna’s seen one of those light-up tree clusters, and they’re sallying forth to pluck a bulb or two.
THE RUN WAS OTHERWISE ROUTINE, I ASSUME?
“Textbook. Barely a ton there. I think it hit the ground and bounced a couple of times, because we found ceramic tiles everywhere. HUD pegs it as the main rearward fin.”
GO ON, CELEBRATE, I say. WE’RE MAKING GOOD PROGRESS. I even generate a fresh poem to celebrate the event:
Like a heavy cloud drifting
In a sudden wind of glory,
You pass, between cloud and desert,
Three countries. The way ahead is courteous;
At this cold border we remain,
For a while, only
Our path leads to glory and orbit.
That night, while they sleep, Ship and I have a long chat. Well, not chat per se. Ship isn’t as intelligent as yours truly. I request a dump of every single item of data on the Urmagon system. And scans of the area where Milo thought he saw buildings. And, just in case, deep scans of everything in a hundred-mile radius.
The first batch is a bunch of highlights on where we expected the biggest pieces to be, right near the original landing site. Very funny, Ship. Stop taunting me.
The second batch shows . . . cloud. And in between, plains. Forest. Valleys. Mountains. A small river. No, that’s actually a very large river. Because this is sucking up so much data, I ask whether Ship can identify any obvious artificial structures in the area.
NOTHING, says Ship.
Wait. Nothing? Not even our little base?
NOTHING, says Ship. It sends me a photo of where we are. Our base is indistinguishable from orbit. If I zoom all the way in, there are a few pixels that look like a pebble pooped one out.
Blast. So Ship is too far out; its sensors are too damn basic to get through the atmosphere. WE NEED LOW-ORBIT SATELLITES, SHIP. Something parked a hundred miles up, where we can get nice pixel detail.
BUDGET, Ship reminds me. EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE IS A FUNCTION OF BUDGET AND POWER.
FINE. JUST ALERT ME IF YOU SEE ANYTHING ELSE IN ORBIT, WILL YOU?
Ship agrees and promptly sends me detailed descriptions of our planet’s two moons.
OTHER THAN NATURAL SATELLITES, I yell upstream.
Ship agrees and falls silent. I let her float away. Be that way. Be useless. I’ll sort this out on my own.
10
The next day’s ablutions begin as normal. Milo starts stripping down the stuff we can use for the Hab; Anna wanders around doing a bit of basic mapping, and I develop a genius plan for extending the range of my drones.
Basically, send Drone 1 to as close as I can get to where Milo saw the buildings. Second, reprogram Drone 2 to recognize Drone 1 as the base station instead of myself. The command lag will be impossible, but it’ll let me piggyback drones off each other—and the window of operation should be enough for them to record about thirty minutes of video before the number of unanswered requests hit critical levels and the safety protocols kick in and they pull back. I test this by recording a clump of gasbags floating past us. It works.
Unfortunately, karma throws a monkey wrench into my plans, because our dear friend Mr. Megabeast is back. It’s pretty obvious that the big guy can smell us. He’s skirted around the perimeter in a huge circle and is slowly spiraling inward. His feet go hoof-hoof-thump-thump. And we’re behind walls of reinforced kindling, basically.
This is like taking a butter knife to a gunfight.
I keep Simon away from all this. He and GUPPY have been sent to go chip out stone from the quarry. Anything hard that can be used to make some emplacements around my fledgling hab. Anna keeps pinging me for the Megabeast’s location.
“Can I go see it?”
NO. YOU CAN SEE THE FEED.
She looks at my cameras, puts on her helmet, and steps out of the Hab. “Don’t say I didn’t ask you,” she says, setting off at a brisk walk. Now I’m forced to retask a drone to follow. The Megabeast is about a kilometer behind her favorite hill.
WE KNOW ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT THIS CREATURE, I whisper to her. EXCEPT IT’S CARNIVOROUS AND WEIGHS ENOUGH TO TURN US INTO PASTE.
This doesn’t seem to deter her. She’s gawking at it with her optics on full zoom. “Is it a him? We should call him Bearly.”
(A) I HAVE NO IDEA, AND (B) WHY, AND (C) CAN YOU GET BACK INSIDE ALREADY.
“Because he looks like a bear. Look at him. He’s positively cuddly.”
NO HE DOESN’T. AND HE ISN’T.
“Yes he does.”
FINE. WHATEVER. By all means make a twenty-foot alien life form sound like a teddy bear.
“You know, we should give Simon some kind of award. New species discovered! I wonder what its kids look like. Do you think they lay eggs?”
I’m surrounded by idiots. CAN I USE YOUR HELMET CAMERA? I NEED THIS DRONE ON THE PERIMETER.
We watch Bearly Megabeast, Esquire, as he ambles over in apparent boredom to one of the glowing-tree clumps. He sniffs around it a bit and begins to dig. The dog-creatures come swarming out again. These ones have a red-and-black pattern to them, unlike the vague blue of earlier. Either way, they are devoured like cereal. Anna watches this with a sickened expression on her face.
Well, at least we now know where the dog-creatures live.
“I think I’ve seen enough for today.”
MAKE YOURSELF A MEDAL, I say sarcastically. NEW SPECIES DATA. She’s already running down the hill, so I cut the helmet cam and switch to drone.
A few more Bearly-watching sessions later, I think I have a theory. It’s not very robust, but here goes.
Imagine that you are a twenty-foot ground sloth. Your life’s work has been digging up weird trees and eating what lives under t
hem. You and your ancestors do this for, I don’t know, a few million years, at least.
Somewhere along the line you figure out that the trees you dig at glow at night. This makes it easier to find them. The trees don’t really mind, because their fruit gets trampled under your feet and get in your fur and eventually shed somewhere else, and that’s a viable reproductive strategy. And it’s certainly easier than dating.
Anyway, the correlation between things that glow and things you can dig up and eat is pretty strong. So one day a bunch of humans arrive and they set up a Hab. Which also glows at night.
You see what I’m getting at?
So from now on I’m ordering the construction of a wall around our Hab, with a roof on top. Minimal light leakage.
I explain my theory to the humans, who thankfully agree that being eaten on the job would look terrible on the performance reviews. And we start building a wall. It’ll set us back on the second expedition, but as the great performance poet Hitang Sunil once said,
Better safe,
Than sorry
Oww gettitoffmegettitoffgetitoff.
11
True to form, our old pal Bearly Megabeast does take a run at the lights.
The charge happens at dawn. For a big animal, it moves with terrifying speed. It hits the Hab headfirst, making Simon scream and Anna run outside. I sound the alarm. The Hab holds—we’ve placed the ceramic and steel shards outside—but a few cracks run up the edge.
Blasted creature. May you be reborn as a vacuum commode. May ten thousand lightning bolts strike every anus in your family tree.
Milo staggers outside with his rifle, half-out of his suit, and fires.
The bullet misses the Megabeast by a few feet—but it jumps back at the sound, roaring.
AGAIN! I yell at Milo. AIM ABOVE ITS HEAD!
I don’t want him to hit it, in case we end up pissing off this thing. But frightened, that’s a state I’ll take. I shoot all three drones at the Megabeast, blaring the most horrible noises I can think of. Milo follows it up by peppering the earth with the sound of lightning.
It works. It backs up, roars once more, and starts running back, crossing the ground easily in its loping gait. No, wait, it’s circling back. Crap. Anna charges outside with her rifle.
At this unfortunate moment, I go to sleep.
Let me explain: a whole lot of data stuff is due. For one, the black box of the UNSC Damn Right I Ate the Apple. Most of the information is locked by UN decree and pretty strong encryption, but by law the last ten minutes of the ship’s nav logs have to be decrypted.
Decryption takes time. To be precise, decryption takes an extraordinary amount of compute. Ship, floating up there, can probably pull this job off in a few hours—she has a lot of serious hardware up there; just not software on my level. It’s a design constraint: you want a system that can react fast, you keep the software as lean and mean as you can.
My design constraint, on the other hand, is having to run a full ex-human persona on the relative equivalent of a calculator. I really don’t have a lot of smarts left over.
The solution is to go into FPS, the Fugue Processing State, where you set a job to run and you put bits of yourself to sleep.
It’s like dying through carbon monoxide poisoning, except jankier. One cut, and that’s your drone controls gone. Another cut, and there’s your memory. There’s an order to this slow lobotomy . . .
And the Megabeast is coming our way.
Seconds before I go under, I see Anna climb out and start firing at the ground near the beast. Well, that’ll either work or piss it off, I think . . .
And then I am dreaming.
I dream of numbers ticking away patiently, of combinations tried and tested and failed one after the other.
I dream of being a ship. Or a part of a ship: I’m not very aware, and in my dream-state, this seems like an appropriate version of me. I know a version of events sent to me by some black box at the helm—I know we’re entering atmosphere, for example. But most of my consciousness is mundane stuff: sensors that tell me the fuel lines are working, the crew are stowed away, the fuel lines are working, the right side of the ship isn’t responding, the fuel lines are missing . . .
I come out of the dream in shudders, piecing together the data the black box spat at me. The ship entered atmosphere hard, but intact and braking well. Judging by the sensor failure warnings, it was already bleeding. The thing blew up into at least three chunks before the section that held this particular black box was ripped out.
Based on the trajectory, mass and general maneuvers of the ship, I’ve got a pretty good idea of where the other pieces should have fallen. There’s at least two chunks between us and the original landing site. Which gives us a very clear path of foraging.
I spin a drone over to check on Anna and Milo, who seem to have done alright.
NICELY DONE.
“Thanks, OC. Anna, you okay?”
“Just what I needed in the morning. That’s sarcasm, by the way.” She’s shaking slightly. “So what’d you get out of the black box?”
I tell her about the ship trailing into this planet with a hole in its side. The question is, what hit it? Our job description says asteroids.
“You sure?” says Milo. “You know, turbulence and all that?”
There are some snickers. Thank you, wise guy. But he has a point, even if he didn’t mean to make it. I’ve been around PCS long enough to know that all sorts of shit gets passed off as asteroid impacts.
There was this one ship we hauled, for example, an ORCA dreadnought that had lost her engines in one hell of a grinder. She sent out a distress signal pretending to be a commercial mining station. The moment we came in, she trained her guns (which were still very much alive, unfortunately) on us and demanded we tow her to a friendly system. We ended up writing her off as a luxury cruise tow. Cause of damage? Asteroid impacts.
So I fire up the communicator and reach out to Ship, who is basically lazing around doing nothing.
SHIP, I say. YOU SEE ANYTHING UP THERE?
STARS. ABYSS.
Sorry, I’m in no mood to philosophize. SCAN REQUEST, I say, describing the parameters of a scan covering the whole planet from a slightly greater distance.
This sets off a row. Ship is nice and comfortable in geostationary orbit. She doesn’t want to move. That’s a waste of fuel, and she doesn’t like wasting fuel.
Bully for that, I say. Things to that effect. Come on, we need imaging.
EXPLAIN WHY.
A HUNCH, SHIP.
BUSINESS IS NOT CONDUCTED ON HUNCHES.
So I have to appease the brain-dead idiot with all the power. May it be reborn as a small root vegetable. I tell her about Milo’s possible structures on the horizon.
It takes ten seconds, maybe more. But Ship does do as I ask; she tilts upwards and arcs away gracefully from the planet. A sudden star appears in the sky. Ship is going to conduct what we call close space imaging, a rather expensive gimmick we get to use maybe twice without blowing past the budget for this operation. The CSI scanner will run massive, concurrent, sweeping scans over this entire planet, working on multiple levels and collating input to filter out the noise. A good scan takes three revolutions of a planet; the one we’re getting takes a single cycle.
“And now what?” says Milo, who’s hauled Simon out of the Hab and is busy setting up more cover for the lights. You know, just in case.
NOW WE WAIT.
It doesn’t take too long. Twenty hours later Ships sends in a report: we have company.
There’s an old rust bucket from MercerCorp cloaked and parked in close orbit. Only relentless triangulation coaxed it out, and when Ship finally hailed it, it didn’t respond. From the looks of it, it’s either one of the old Hestia or the Hestia gamma hulls—old mining ships bought off scrapyards and converted into cheap, heavily armored transports. They’re as slow as all hell, but at least three yards in ORCA systems make good money peddling them.
Ship says it looked quite dead, but I’m a bit more pessimistic—what can be powered down can be powered up.
So it looks like someone, possibly the UN, commissioned a previous run on this planet—and judging by the ship, they’re still here.
This isn’t good. A Hestia hull means these people would be on the lower end of the Mercer ladder . . . well, like us, really, but with backdoor access to old military scrapyards. These aren’t the kind of people I want to meet.
Let me explain. MercerCorp are straight up left-leaning transhumanist ORCA. They don’t send baselines. They send kitted-out ex-cons with so many modifications they can make a fur jacket out of Mr. Bearly Megabeast in our backyard. Most of them can survive in a vacuum for short periods of time. They’re the cockroaches-cum-crime bosses of our business. We have a tentative agreement with them, despite the whole UN-ORCA thing, and it boils down to this: business is business.
Which, if you know anything about the history of business, or PCS, is not particularly reassuring.
I’ve run into MercerCorp once before. On the ashes of what used to be Cassius, my home planet. It wasn’t something as simple as a rebellion or a war—no. Someone, somewhere, rerouted the supply lines from Brutus to the war effort, and they forgot that just a hair’s breadth away were a bunch of farmers who desperately needed that fuel to survive.
My parents had long since died; what had been a couple of decades for me, frozen between jobs, was a lifetime for them. They’d left the farm to my sister, and her then-husband was a transhumanist wannabe, the kind that hung around with cyborgs from the ORCA but was too chicken to make the leap himself.
I came home in a rented humansynth body, the kind the UN gives to employees taking shore leave. Just enough for a last look around the old place. Ran into my sister’s ex and a trio of Mercers drifters in a bar, kicking up a fuss. The old stuff about leaving the UN and freedom and sticking it to the man and all that crap. The wannabe was the loudest of them all.
The Salvage Crew Page 5