The Salvage Crew

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  THEY SHOULDN’T, I say. KEEP PLAYING.

  Midday comes and goes, taking with it a wind from the east. Simon spots a new swarm of DogAnts from his perch, and, before I can say anything, the hills echo with gunfire thunderclaps again.

  The spoils? Two DogAnts down, one almost turned into kebab by Simon’s gun. He brings the corpses home. I don’t know how or why, but he has that crazed look again. Shit.

  Some part of me wonders how much bad karma Simon’s racking up with this act, but a lot more of me wonders how we can think of this as an opportunity. More food: excellent. The question is now how to store it, clean it, cook it in batches. We need some sort of processing station going.

  A few hours later, Anna goes out for her usual walk and is attacked by the rest of what I assume is the DogAnt swarm that Simon hit. The things swarm out from underneath a light-tree, screeching that horrible buzz-saw noise. Anna runs like hell.

  When she runs too fast, she limps.

  SIMON! MILO! GUNS OUT!

  For once Simon’s trigger finger turns out useful. He jumps out of the base like a mad commando. Five bullets, five screeching deaths. The hill is spattered with insect blood. Milo, alerted by the sound, comes rushing around the corner, but by that time Simon is hauling the carcasses.

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “They rushed me,” pants Anna, whose vitals are spiking dangerously. “I was—just there—”

  ANNA, CALM DOWN. YOU’RE SAFE. I WILL LOOK.

  I make a show of sending a drone over and around in clear sight of her.

  LET’S JUST GO BACK TO THE FARM, SHALL WE?

  She calms herself down with obvious effort. “No idea what I did,” she says. “They literally just rushed me out of nowhere. I’m going to go to the bathroom.”

  I update Milo and switch to Simon, who’s hauling the leaking corpses back to the base with grim determination. He has that look in his eyes.

  THAT WAS THE SWARM YOU SAW EARLIER, WASN’T IT?

  Huff. Puff. “Could be. May be. More than one swarm. Good practice for Mercers if they come, eh.”

  Oh well. GOOD SHOOTING, SIMON.

  Huff. Puff. “Thanks.”

  SIMON, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH THESE CORPSES?

  “It’s food.”

  WE HAVE THE FARM.

  “You said it yourself, OC,” he pants. “Can’t rely on just one thing, right?”

  SIMON, THOSE CORPSES WILL ROT.

  “I’ll sort it out, OC,” he says. He passes me and slaps me with a gloved hand, as if high-fiving a friend. It leaves a bloody print on my panel. “You’ll see.”

  Oddly enough, it’s Anna who comes to my rescue, though not in the way I expect. She emerges from her room and makes Simon lay the dead things out on a panel we’ve kept outside. GUPPY is with her.

  “Knife,” she says. “No, the cutter. Now show me schematics of this creature.”

  We watch, gruesomely fascinated, as over the next hour she hacks, stabs, slices, digs out offal, and GUPPY fills up with slabs of meat and gristle. The steps just outside our little border wall look like a massacre. Milo comes in, does a double take, and looks revolted.

  Anna stands up, covered in insect blood. “There. Go cook it.”

  “All of it?”

  “Figure out how to store the rest,” she says. To Milo: “What?”

  “I just—are we actually going to eat that?”

  “Eat it, shit on it, I don’t care,” says Anna. “OC, we’ll need to set up a . . . I don’t know. Some kind of chopping block, outside. Gods, I need a bath. Do we have enough water for a bath?”

  I look at Milo wordlessly through GUPPY’s camera. He looks back.

  “I’ll go sort out a place to do . . . this,” he says tonelessly. “Don’t let them do anything else. Please.”

  That night, we eat grilled DogAnt. By we, I mean them. They heat it over the ridiculously inefficient wood burner. I make them take biomonitors, just in case. Milo, not surprisingly, pukes and decides to work on setting up the food synthesizer, muttering to himself.

  “Hey, OC,” he says while he works. “You can make vodka from potatoes, right?”

  There is such a recipe, yes. But I don’t want anyone drunk. This is serious business. WE JOURNEYED ACROSS THE VOID TO SALVAGE A SHIP, I remind him, NOT TO BREW MOONSHINE.

  Milo looks longingly at the farm, where the potato seeds have been buried, shakes his head, and gets back to work on the synthesizer power circuit.

  That night, Anna sneaks out of the Hab bedroom and wanders over to me.

  “OC,” she says, “how’s work?”

  YOU DID GOOD, I say, meaning it. Sure, nothing’s going at the speed I want it to, but a few more days of work and we’ll have a decent base of operations—enough to protect us. Then, if nobody shows up, we should be able to start the recon work for the second site.

  “You ever been on a battlefield?”

  I haven’t, other than in sims. She leans against my side and looks up at the stars floating overhead.

  “I haven’t had to cut up someone in a long time,” she whispers. “I don’t want to do that to anyone.”

  She begins to cry. And I, trapped in this metal tomb, can only make soothing noises and bad poetry to console her.

  That night, we all stay awake.

  14

  It starts with movement. Ten miles out, close to the first dig site. My bots are on recon—not the familiar broad hex pattern, but a narrower depth search made by piggybacking one drone off the other and then rotating the one on the edge in a half-circle around the tether, like a morningstar of visual insight. I’ve spent the better half of a day rewriting its software to let me do this.

  It’s a horribly limited method, but good enough to spot movement.

  Female. Tall. Accompanied by a bot that looks like GUPPY—or at least a version of GUPPY a hundred years out of date. A tattered landing suit in MercerCorp black. Pale, dirty-blond hair.

  Holy shit, it’s an actual Mercer.

  I drop the outward drone closer and almost recoil. The woman’s face is like a shrunken grapefruit. Black veins run through it and stain her lips. One blue eye squints at me. The other is a putrid hole. I can see electronics inside.

  OPERATIVE, I try, going for politeness first, I AM AMBER ROSE 348 OF PLANETARY CRUSADE SERVICES. PLEASE IDENTIFY YOURSELF.

  She gapes at me, her mouth moving soundlessly. Do I threaten her? Do I help?

  Oh, blast. Let’s try being the good guys first. ARE YOU INJURED? Wonderful, chalk one up for utterly redundant questions. I moved my drone closer. MAY WE PROVIDE ASSISTANCE?

  “City . . . speaks.”

  COME AGAIN?

  She swallows and seems to find her tongue. “You’re all a dream,” she says in a voice that sounds like it has been dragged several miles over hot gravel. “The city . . . the city . . .” She spins around and almost falls. “Which way to the city?”

  City. Base. Same difference, I suppose. PLEASE FOLLOW, I say, leading the drone gently backwards towards our Hab. I ping my crew. Milo and Simon pick up. I send them the feed and say, BE READY.

  The woman shambles after my drone. Her bot follows her, squeaking gently. I try pinging it and receive an ancient command interface, password protected. A UN interface, not a Mercer thing. Where from? Another site?

  By God, we’ve got an injured Mercer on our hands. I can see Simon and Milo cresting the hill, waving.

  And that’s when it all went south.

  The woman stops, staring at my two waving colonists. Then she screams—a terrible sound that must travel for miles—and she pulls out a knife and charges them.

  Several things happen in quick succession. I shout for her to stop.

  And Simon shoots the woman.

  Light-gas gun bullets don’t leave wounds. They leave holes in people. I’d say the light went out of her eyes, but to be honest, that blue stare never wavers. Bits of the body tumble to the ground. And above it, framed, is Milo’s look of shock
.

  The bot tries to execute some kind of attack program. I smash my drone hard onto its exposed power circuity. The woman hits the ground. Simon shoots again, this time hitting the bot.

  The wind howls overhead. The bot beeps and dies. Red blood pools around the body.

  Her name was Yanina Michaels. She was a linguist aboard the MCS Apex Predator. Oort origin, which explains the seven-foot height: low gravity there.

  Her body—bits of it—tells me the rest of the story. She had dozens of implants—everything from water purification to combat subdermals—but nothing works. It’s as if someone pulled the plug on every single system she has, including the ones in her brain. Result: Severe malnutrition. Claw marks all over her body, at least three laser burns. The left hemisphere of her brain in general doesn’t exist anymore: it’s just so much scrap metal. Her suit is caked in sweat, blood and the stink of human feces. This is not the terrifying Mercer in my head. This is a beast in pain.

  SHE SUFFERED, I tell the others. The laser burns look intentional. DEATH WAS PROBABLY A MERCY.

  They say nothing. None of them will touch the parts of the corpse. Yanina’s bits lie in a pool of her own dried blood beneath the cloudy sky.

  “An attack,” suggests Simon. “A scout?”

  “Not much of either,” Anna points out. She’s been reviewing my footage. “I think she needed help.”

  “What does that mean?”

  IT MEANS THAT SOMEWHERE OUT THERE, SOMETHING HAS GONE VERY WRONG, I say. AND WE KILLED SOMEONE.

  “At least we know the name of their ship.”

  I edit the footage. Take out Simon shooting Yanina Michaels. Leave just her and the ragged bot. I beam it up to Ship and ask her to send it to the MCS Apex Predator. Ask it what they’re doing here.

  Speak, memory

  Tell me of what goes on outside this window

  Rough seas of grass

  And a lone voice, wandering, through the land of the dead.

  It starts to drizzle.

  I’m not sure what happened, but Milo and Anna have had a bit of an argument over bringing the bot in. Milo wants to see if we can use it for parts, but Anna won’t let him take it in until he wipes the blood off. They’re keeping it quite professional, but tempers have frayed a bit. It ends with Milo bringing the bot in anyway. He’s tracked a fair bit of mud in, but doesn’t seem to mind.

  Anna storms out with a digger beam and GUPPY and starts hauling rocks from our quarry, her helmet painted with raindrops. I wonder what the hell she’s doing, but then it becomes obvious: she’s building a cairn around Yanina’s body.

  Pretty soon, Simon shows up.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he says. His breath is visible in the air. The nights are getting colder.

  “Help me finish this,” says Anna. They haul rocks in near silence. Soon Yanina is hidden beneath the rubble.

  “Wasn’t right to die like that,” says Anna, studiously avoiding looking at Simon.

  “She had a knife,” says Simon. “But yeah.”

  “Shot many people, have you?”

  “Not since I was a kid,” says Simon, hugging himself. “You think there’s more of them out there?”

  Anna reaches out and squeezes his gloved hand.

  YOU MIGHT WANT TO GO BACK INDOORS, I say gently to both of them. Simon starts. I blink the lights on my drone to let them know where it is. AND, SIMON?

  “OC?”

  YOU DID THE RIGHT THING, I say. IT’S MY FAULT SHE CAME HERE. I THOUGHT SHE NEEDED HELP. I LED HER TO US.

  “You were trying to do the right thing, too,’’ he says gamely. Both of them get up, hug briefly, and start following me back to base.

  “We’ll get through this,” Anna says, almost to herself, as they trudge through the increasingly muddy ground. “You know—years from now we’ll meet up and have a drink and talk about how glad we were you had your gun on hand.”

  DRINKS ON ME.

  “Deal,” says Anna. Simon says nothing.

  15

  The last four days have been bad. Yanina Michaels is a bomb in our little camp; the actual damage is not her death, but the specter it leaves behind, the speculation, the endless stress over what follows.

  The MCS Apex Predator, I’m told, did not accept Ship’s direct connection request. So Ship broadcast the message on widebeam, attaching my bad poetry to the end as a sort of apology. No response from the Predator, but on the ground, something shifted. I burn the second scan we can, hitting the budget limit, and some of those odd-shaped buildings have changed form: they look as if they’re facing us now.

  This sinks morale faster than a gravity well. Clearly the MercerCorp team landed close by. Those odd-shaped buildings are most likely their work. And now they know we’re here. Should we look for them? Should we contact them?

  It’s a long way home, a long way from my heart.

  When shall I reach my hiding-place and be able to face them all?

  . . . Sister, I lie, Sleeping-Dragon,

  My heart in my foot, reading, writing,

  An empty cant outside their door

  My eyes around a dying forest,

  Close to a rolling white sunset

  “We should try to talk to them,” says Milo. “They’ll understand. At least, it’ll be good to know we aren’t the only ones out here.”

  “I don’t know,” says Simon.

  “No, no, absolutely no,” says Anna. “Those aren’t people we want around.”

  I’ve looked at the satellite data, but whatever those buildings are, they’re too far for us to reach right now.

  So I do what Overseers do, and decide for them: we have to go out and make progress on the salvage. Eyes on the possible Mercer camp is a bonus, but not required.

  THE FASTER WE DO IT, I point out, THE FASTER WE GET OUT OF HERE. AND I’VE PROMISED YOU DRINKS.

  That settles it. Milo, burning the midnight oil, modifies GUPPY, giving it a slightly more powerful engine, and sticks the old engine in the UN bot. We now have two haulers. We have the wreckage mapped out.

  Colony ships are designed to come apart in certain ways. First the engines, to lose weight and thus momentum. Next, various extra bits—recreation facilities, heavy vehicle bays, and so on. The most protected parts are the living quarters, the core ship systems and the life support.

  A ship like the Damn Right has two types of engines. One’s a RAIR setup—a Ram Augmented Interstellar Rocket. A scoop field to pick up interstellar hydrogen, an accelerator, and a Kowalski/Andyne Fusion-Pulse Reactor to keep the accelerator running. But this is the big one, the long-haul elephant. It’s terrible at everything else. So the Damn Right has a smaller array of helicon plasma thrusters for everything from decelerating to producing initial lift.

  Technically, the RAIR is the most valuable thing on this planet. But we may not be able to do jack with the RAIR setup—even if it isn’t cut to bits by the blast and the landing, it’d be impossibly expensive to salvage. The smaller engines, though, those we can bring back. And if my models are correct, twelve miles from the previous site is a fairly substantial piece—hopefully a cluster of these small engines—waiting to be hauled back.

  So here’s hoping we find the small cheese here. Milo and I wave Anna and Simon off. They’re both armed to the teeth, and I’ve beefed their suits up a little. Exactly two layers of graphene weave, extracted at enormous energy cost, makes reactive armor that’s harder than diamond.

  They’ll be alright.

  I hope they’ll be alright.

  I’m babbling.

  Just to be safe, I’ve instigated Protocol 10. No transmissions, no leaks, no calls until they absolutely are 100% certain that the area’s safe. Radio silence.

  Which explains why Milo and I are basically staring at a map in frustration.

  “Aaargh,” says Milo at last. “Aah, dammit.”

  I must say I agree with him.

  To keep things off his mind, I’ve given him permission to set up this vodka distillery h
e keeps thinking about, provided he sets up a ground array of solar panels and a small windmill. I can’t run everything off my core. I can’t help feeling a little disappointed in Milo when he accepts my offer, but you know what—it’s for the Greater Good. And there are moments where you have to set the old rules aside.

  As the old saying goes, if you meet the Buddha on the Path, kill him. This is not to advocate the slaying of religious leaders, but the idea is that too much attachment to instruction is also bad.

  So now he’s at the workstation part of the Hab, and I . . .

  I have nothing to do.

  Fuck.

  For fun, I look at the setup we have going on here. Walls, okay. Water supply, okay. Farm . . . needs more irrigation, but basically okay. Living quarters, bit of a mess. Built more for functionality than for living in, really.

  Let’s change that.

  “What’re you printing?” shouts Milo from the Hab, hearing the whine of the BASE printer firing up.

  IMPROVEMENTS.

  When Milo emerges, it’s to a whole heap of piping. “What the hell’s this?”

  BATHROOM. YOU WANT TO SHIT IN A CAN AND BATHE OUTSIDE FOR THE REST OF THIS HAUL?

  “Er. No?”

  THEN LET’S GET FIXING.

  Seven hours later, we both look upon the assembly with pride. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s got pipes from the stream, pipes leading to a fertilizer bin for the farm, and everything thermoplastic’d up the wazoo. Perfectly watertight.

  NOT BAD.

  “If you had hands, I’d high-five you,” says Milo, stepping into the shower cubicle. He turns a lever and water begins to flow, cut into a thousand drops by the crude sprinkler head we’ve attached. Laughing, Milo begins to strip off his suit, and I withdraw to give him some privacy.

  Well, that’s one thing done.

  Unfortunately, I’m bored again. What else can I do?

  I revisit the one internal item from Protocol 3 I haven’t got around to: get the large drone up and running. Unfortunately, it’s a power-hungry bastard. Unless . . .