Milo ambles in while I watch the printer. He looks a decade younger. No, cleaner.
“Hey, OC.”
MILO.
“I’ve been thinking. What if Anna and Simon run into the Mercer folks?”
HOPEFULLY THEY DON’T SHOOT FIRST.
MercerCorp may extend the helping hand, as I did. But if they think you’re a threat, you’re just so much seaweed under a bootheel. And we’ve just shot and buried one of them.
“You think they’re after the same thing we are?”
WHAT ELSE IS THERE ON THIS PLANET?
He sighs and sits on the floor next to the printer. “They told me salvage was the easiest thing a guy could do.”
In a way, it is. A simple mission is an uneventful landing, some MREs, a few days doing what humans are really good at using those wonderful brains, optimized for pattern recognition, to look for things that stick out. Then it’s off to payday, excessive drinking, gambling, prostitution, and the next job.
“I keep thinking about those buildings. Shapes. Whatever. If they’re salvaging, why would they build something like that?”
I DON’T KNOW. LET’S SEE IF WE CAN GET BETTER EYES ON THOSE THINGS, I say, sending him the specs for what I’m printing.
“Whoa. Hang on, can you actually do this?”
I’m building the new drone framework out of wood plated with a thin polymer. It’s designed to be launched from a slingshot. The wings are large, designed for riding air currents, and have little solar cells embedded in them. Strictly against protocol, but bite me.
THINK OF IT AS A LONG-RANGE BOOMERANG, I say. IT SHOULD PATHFIND BACK TO US.
“This is almost the entire graphene supply. And all the charcoal.”
RISK/REWARD. THIS SHOULD GIVE US EYES ON THE BUILDINGS. AND THE DROP SITE. AND ANYTHING ELSE THAT CAN REACH US.
Milo studies it some more. “You know, this is very neat work. Out of spec. What were you before, OC? Engineer?”
I DID SOME ENGINEERING WORK. I confess I briefly entertained the idea of leaving salvage and going into engineering, but that was infeasible. The best engineers are second-gen AI: there’s maybe a hundred of them, and they’re more than enough. The second-genners might not be full conversions like me, but they were people who were really good at it before you were born, and they’ve been around for a few hundred years. Without that training data, I’d be just another bumblebot. Life in the inner systems is hard even if you’re digitized. NOBODY BECOMES AN ENGINEER NOW.
Milo snorts. “Yeah, tell me about it.”
THEY ACTUALLY PICKED ME BECAUSE I HAD EXPERIENCE WORKING WITH PEOPLE, I offer. I HAD TO DEAL WITH A LOT OF CRANKY ASSHOLES.
“You have plans for retirement?”
Digital shrug. PCS OWNS ME. Proprietary hardware and software. MY PAYDAY IS JUST AN UPGRADE. ONE SHELL TO ANOTHER. YOU?
“Ah. Well, I’d hoped I’d find a planet to settle down, you know. Something where they’d still want a guy who can fix an engine.”
The printer spits out the drone engine—or at least, the pieces for it. WELL, AT LEAST YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT PLACE.
Milo chuckles and reaches for the drone parts.
16
Day seventeen. THEY’RE BACK! The Boomerang, on its maiden flight, picks up two humans picking their way through a valley, accompanied by two squeaking wheeled bots. To wit: Simon being carried by GUPPY. Anna’s pulling.
Simon is hurt. His suit is scratched and there’s blood all over his hands. He’s bright-eyed, though, and shouts when he sees me, and gestures excitedly at the tarp on the UN bot. It’s piled high with—is that meat? And fur?
MERCERS? MERCERS?
“Megabeast,” says Anna to the drone I drop beside them. “No Mercers. Fuck off. Tired. Water.”
Milo is the welcoming committee. He runs to them, looking like some biblical prophet of bad judgment—rifle, beard, stained suit and all. Under one arm he has a bottle of Urmagon vodka. We’ve had to dissect some MREs for sugar to make it work, but judging by the way Anna and Simon down their shots and then shudder, it’s, ah, drinkable.
I can’t remember if we took the methanol out of it. We should have. That might kill them.
Well, they don’t die on the way to the base, so we definitely did take the methanol out of it. Anna wrinkles her nose at the Hab. “What the hell is that smell? And why the fuck is there so much mud on the floor?”
Okay, so the vodka process stinks a bit. And Milo has been a bit careless about cleaning up. But, WE HAVE A BATHROOM, I point out helpfully, AND INDOOR PLUMBING.
“Oh, God, thank God, thank you,” says Anna, and promptly runs off. We’re left with Milo and Simon, who are high-fiving each other. Simon is bleeding a bit. This doesn’t seem to faze him.
“We hit plasma, bitches!” he yells. “OC, forget the wounds. You were right! Plasma thrusters, just a little banged up! Check this out!”
Wow. The data he sends me is gold. Literally. Thirteen million ISK. The dollar value is a thousand times higher. With this, we’re halfway to our goal! I join Simon and Milo in cheering. We’re on top of the world!
SHIP, SHIP, WE HAVE PAYDIRT. LOOK AT THIS!
NICE, says Ship ten minutes later. CONGRATS.
SIMON, ARE YOU—
“’Tis but a scratch, sir,” says Simon grandly. “Come on. More vodka! And look, we have enough meat for days—who wants a barbeque?”
GO GET CLEANED UP FIRST. I tell Boomerang to return and start downloading GUPPY’s logs. MILO, HELP HIM.
The story, based on GUPPY’s logs and what Anna recounts around the campfire that night—yes, we’re actually doing a campfire—is this: they had a reasonably uneventful trek for the first twenty miles. By uneventful, I mean GUPPY tagged and identified at least thirteen new species, including something suspiciously like a really large snake that hid in the tall grass, but nobody gives a shit about that.
They got to what we call Stardew Valley, which was a lovely resting place for our little piece of wreckage: a great metal shard plunged into the earth between long, sloping banks of those beautiful light-up trees, with a river running through the middle. And, on the other side, there were the buildings.
“Right at the horizon,” says Simon. “Miles and miles away.”
“Okay, not that far,” says Anna. “But you were right, Milo. I think you saw them earlier from that hill because they were just . . . five miles away? Four? Really hard to see unless you pull out the binocs.”
“It’s pretty huge,” says Simon. “Different shapes, all. I think everything I saw had a square base and some differences up top.”
“Wait, so . . . a city? Town?”
“I don’t know,” says Anna.
“That’s the weird part,” says Simon. “No roads, no . . . I don’t know, what do you have in a city? Like, I couldn’t even see a way to get there. It’s halfway up the next mountain. Maybe half a mile across. Like . . . one of those stone circles the Druidic folks keep building around their churches.”
“OC, what does this mean?”
I DON’T KNOW. I zoom in and out, trying to examine every single detail in the photos. They’re slightly fuzzy and skewed, but there’s no mistaking it. The structures do not seem to have any useful function whatsoever. CERTAINLY NOTHING LIKE MERCER ARCHITECTURE. ALTERNATE HYPOTHESIS: COULD BE THE COLONISTS WHO CAME HERE YEARS AGO SURVIVED.
“Is that normal?”
I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT, I say, querying my databases for every type of recovered settlement architecture. THE ENERGY EXPENDITURE MUST HAVE BEEN ENORMOUS. Verifying, rerunning search. MERCERS RARELY BUILD ANYTHING THIS SIZE.
“Fucking hell,” says Milo in a whisper. “I wish I could see it. So an actual colony survived? That explains what the Mercers are doing here!”
IT HAS TO BE, I say, allowing myself the faintest glimmer of hope. If they’re here for this, there’s a good chance we can do our salvage op in peace.
“We didn’t get closer,” says Anna. The firelight flickers
on her face. “You know, just in case.”
Then they saw the wreckage. It’s enormous. “Like a whale sitting there on the ground,” says Anna. It’s crashed into the valley, turning the world around it into a wasteland. Shards of metal sticking out like daggers in the soil. Bits and pieces of electronics—Simon pulls out an engineer’s handpad, one of those ancient things they had back in the day. And, perfectly protected, slightly dented, a six-nozzle plasma engine array just sitting there waiting to be discovered.
“No Mercers, nothing,” says Anna. “Not even a leak. Looked like a clean tag.”
“But you know, complications.”
Complications in the form of a Megabeast.
I go through GUPPY’s footage to confirm this bit. The Megabeast in question looks like a skinnier cousin of the one haunting our backyard. There’s bits of metal in its fur; it’s oozing pus—clearly took some crash damage. It looks pretty dead. Except it wasn’t, and it wakes up in a hurry. It wakes up and swings a paw at Simon, knocking him ten feet back.
Anna retreats behind the engine. Simon is left out in the wild. The Megabeast gets to its feet, making a curious Oof! Oof! Oof! sound, and charges.
“I thought he was going to die.”
“I peed my suit,” says Simon. “And I ran like my ass was on fire.”
The next few minutes show Simon displaying athleticism I’d never thought possible from him. He runs like the wind with the lumbering Megabeast on his tail. Hiding behind pieces of ship, he fires. Run. Fire. Once. Twice. Seventeen times. Each time the Megabeast slams into whatever he was hiding behind, ripping it out of the earth. Each time the bullet finds its mark, hitting the creature with the force of a meteor. Okay, it’s hard not to miss—it’s a twenty-foot target—but seventeen shots in, the Megabeast sways, points itself at Simon again, says Oof one last time, and dies mid-charge. It collapses and the sheer bulk of it crashes in front of Simon like a slain dragon in front of a medieval knight.
“Which is how we meat, pun intended,” says Anna, turning away as the video shows her approaching the fallen creature with the cutting torch in hand. “I patched Simon up first. And I, uh, avoided the infected bits. If it’s safe to eat, you know—can’t hurt.”
I’m not too happy about Simon becoming the designated killer in the group. And I’m not happy about Anna having to do yet another butcher job. But I have to hand it to him.
YOU’RE A FUCKING HERO, SIMON.
We drink to Simon, dragon-slayer, knight of the light-gas gun.
“Lady and germs,” says Simon, hiccuping slightly and raising his makeshift tumbler. “Here’s to a clean run.”
It’s saying something that almost being trampled to death now counts as clean.
OUR NEXT OBJECTIVE IS GOING TO BE SLIGHTLY PAST THE STRUCTURES, I warn them. WE’LL GO IN ONCE I’M SATISFIED WITH RECONNAISSANCE, AND IF THAT GOES WELL, WE GO HOME.
“Can you make some more vodka?” says Anna.
“It’ll take a day,” says Milo. “But here’s to paydirt.”
“And to those poor bastards in the city.”
“And showers,” says Anna.
17
I spend the entirety of the next two days sorting out the back-end work while my crew takes a well-earned break. Well, as much of a break as possible, in between watches, farm rotations, and the occasional print job.
First I review the footage of the run, looking for any signs of Mercer crew. Then I run it again, looking closer at the wreckage. Sure enough, Simon and Anna have done a decent job: as per orders, they’ve walked away with anything they can walk away with, and left behind data tags for components that’ll need more than three scrawny humans to extract. Engines . . . good. There should be a backup nav computer housed near one of those clusters: that’ll get us a bit more money. A closed pod bay of some sort; no idea what’s in it. Those hull plates—pointless. The thirteen million claim estimate goes up and down and settles at a few thousand under fourteen million.
I show this to ship. RESOURCE EXTRACTORS NEEDED. IT’S SUBSTANTIAL ENOUGH.
Ship agrees.
NO CHANCE OF A THIRD SCAN, EH?
BUDGETS, says Ship pointedly.
Well, two can play this game. RIGHT. CAN YOU CHECK FOR PROPERTY CLAIMS ON URMAGON BETA? INTELLECTUAL, PHYSICAL, DISCOVERY?
Any functioning base should be registered. Ship returns null. There is no record of a functioning base on this planet. Not from MercerCorp or anyone else.
Right.
REGISTER THIS AREA AS A DISCOVERY, I tell Ship, marking out the strange structures on our shared map.
Because you know what? If it’s unregistered, we own it. Whoever actually runs this op will eventually have to file a counterclaim, and I’ll get to know who they are. If not, I—that is, the Company—legally get thirty percent of the proceeds of anything coming out of that place, and I can sic the police on these people anytime I want. And until they do, in the interests of economic benefit, I ask to be allowed to investigate this place.
MISSION SCOPE EXPANSION AUTHORIZED, says Ship self-importantly.
Thank you, O One Who Watches Over Us Without Actually Doing Anything Useful. Now, in the interests of investigation, I hereby order another scan as a preliminary survey.
It takes Ship a while to realize what I’ve done. WELL PLAYED, she says. INITIATING THIRD SCAN.
Hahahaha. Take that, corporate scum. I send Boomerang out for a sampling run. If there’s more Yanina Michaelses out there, we’re going to know.
Meanwhile, Anna’s first harvest comes in tomorrow: she’s fussing over the plants. Simon is recovering, so I’m playing Go with him while monitoring his vitals. And Milo is cleaning out the bots, hosing them down from a little tube he’s stuck in the stream nearby. My little drones are busy on their hex pattern, and all is reasonably well.
Now we just have to wait and see.
I had a vision of potatoes in the food synthesizer, and of my little crew here carrying out the rest of their duties to perfection while eating Megabeast steak and potatoes and chugging vodka under the stars.
I wish.
Simon wakes up late the next day and stumbles out. His scratches, which Anna assured me were minor, don’t look like they’re healing. I try talking to him once or twice, but he seemed happy, even slightly dreamy, and distracted. Still on a high from the Megabeast kill? I hope so. Either way, he dawdles outside for a few hours, then goes over to see what’s happening with the harvest.
Unfortunately, Anna and Milo have struck up an argument. I wasn’t paying attention—I think she tried to order him around regarding GUPPY, and he told her to fuck off. Which means both of them have stomped off in a huff.
SHIT.
Simon chuckles and makes his way over to GUPPY, wincing with every other step. Very patiently, he powers down the lumbering rover and starts digging out the potatoes by hand. Anna finds him two hours later, knee-deep in potatoes.
“You shouldn’t be working,” she says guiltily.
“Well, someone has to,” he bats back. “You seen Milo around?”
“He’s on watch,” says Anna curtly, settling down to dig with him. “Here, let me.”
She takes the spade from him and starts digging. They work long into the evening, only stopping when Simon gives up out of exhaustion. Slowly, our food stockpile grows.
I moved here in spring from my ancestor’s garden,
And have lived here among the green hills and woods
At midnight, when the cold makes the ground lightly wet,
I lie down to sleep in the twinkling of an eye.
On the bank, surrounded by polymer and metal,
I watch clouds scurry, as if they had been given the chance
To breed and to fly their perch with as many as were chosen.
In the mornings I wake to the silence of the sun
But now, distant peoples from scattered lands
Have come to wake me with their hunger.
How to tell them apart from the birds?
Only the clouds have the answers
And the shadows.
Wait, that’s odd. I don’t remember writing this one. Truth be told, it’s been a long couple of days, and I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to myself. Oh well. The digital signature’s mine. Holographic memory acting up again.
18
Day twenty-two on Urmagon. I’m a bit worried about Simon. His wounds are opening wider. I’m not sure how or why. He looks feverish and stumbles sometimes while helping sort out the farm. His sleep cycle seems to be getting more and more screwed up by the day—he’s taken to sleeping during the day now, and he works late into the night, often disturbing the others. But he seems to be enjoying all this, if anything: he’s thrown himself with gusto into the potato field. Am I the only one who can see how much he limps? Hello? Milo? Anna?
Oh, that’s right. The argument between them has blown up again. Deep down, I strongly suspect Milo’s a bit jealous of how much Anna and Simon got to discover about “his” city. There’s definitely some proprietary feeling there. For the second time, he left Anna and Simon to labor and went out for a “walk,” quoting some obscure philosopher about clearing his mind.
I know where he goes. He goes to the hill to watch for Boomerang. He spends at least an hour here every evening and rushes back to the research cohab—or rather, the lab—the moment the data arrives.
MILO, I say gently, THIS ISN’T USEFUL. IT WILL BE MANY WEEKS BEFORE WE GATHER ENOUGH DATA TO FIND ANYTHING NEW.
He tells me to fuck off.
Day twenty-three. Milo and Anna have another argument. I’ve spent so much time making sure these two don’t lose the plot that I barely noticed Simon waking up late again. He walks out his door, or rather, stumbles out towards the Hab entrance.
SIMON, YOU DON’T LOOK SO GOOD.
He gives my drone a glassy stare and licks his lips. His undersuit is drenched in sweat. Then he collapses, twitching.
The Salvage Crew Page 8