The Salvage Crew

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  So, defeated, I do.

  In the farm, the fledgling potato crops grow at a painful pace, acting as if they have all the time in the universe. Local weeds have crept in, and some grass, catching the evening sun. The pipe set up in the stream chokes and splutters, spitting out water every so often.

  Anna emerges for lunch and takes both the food and Simon outside. My drones, floating past, see them sitting side by side in the tall grass, looking at the glowing trees. Guns at their sides.

  I keep watch.

  Day thirty.

  They came at night. From the trail, four of them; they’d clearly followed GUPPY’s wheel tracks, running almost as fast as we’d moved.

  I know because the repeater went down. That morning I had had Simon go out with a solar panel and a drone—the last bloody panel we had to spare—and I wired the drone to a tree. I didn’t have enough charging power to keep it in the air indefinitely, but with the panel, I could repeat the drone-signal-extension trick with the spiders. Have the resource extractor’s transmitter broadcast a signal to the drone if I needed to send a spider outward.

  The trouble started with the rain. I’d planned for it, given the heavy cloud cover on this planet, but I didn’t expect it to be so sudden. The sky went from reasonably light to depressingly angry in minutes.

  Anna followed Simon, still not talking to Milo, and they got soaked. Simon, being Simon, stayed out there, doggedly setting up the wire and chipping away with the plasma torch. “Repeater station up,” he said, and sneezed. Then he looked around for Anna.

  Anna had run back. She fell down thrice on the way back and came home with her suit coated in mud. She had a bath, came out, and has been scrubbing her suit ever since.

  Unfortunately, she’s scrubbing stains that aren’t there anymore, and she’s muttering to herself under her breath.

  Oh, god. The more I think about it, the more it feels like we need more people like Simon, much as I hate to say it. Masochists who will do damn near anything. I play soft music until Anna, heaving and panting, quiets down. Then Milo, who’s supposed to be on watch, runs into her. He looks Anna and the suit up and down.

  “Bit of dirt outside?”

  “Yeah.”

  They both studiously ignore the suit’s gloves, frayed from the vicious scrubbing.

  “I’m trying to figure out how to make that vodka process more efficient. Want some when it’s done?”

  THAT’S NOT WHAT I ASKED YOU TO DO.

  “Sure,” says Anna. “Later.” Her eyes dart outside. “You really think we might . . . they might attack us here?”

  “OC seems to think so,” says Milo. “Better safe than sorry, you know.”

  Phew. I still fly one of my drones after him.

  YOU’RE NOT DOING WHAT YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING.

  “Bite me, OC,” he says, bent over his vials. “You’re not helping.”

  I AM TRYING TO KEEP YOU SAFE. I AM TRYING TO COMPLETE THIS MISSION.

  “No, you’re trying to micromanage us to death,” he hisses suddenly, swinging back to my camera and shaking a spoon at me. “Ever since we landed on this goddamn rock, it’s been do that, do this, do that, do this. And now you’re telling me the bloody Ship’s not responding, and those bloody cranks keep trying to scalp us, and we’re just supposed to fucking sit here and manufacture, what, siege weapons from the dark ages? Are you fucking mad? Do you know what century this is?”

  He throws the spoon aside.

  “Fuck it. I need this. Anna needs this. Simon probably needs this, too, but he’s a half-baked little shit with a near-death experience. We’re not your goddamn machines. We need a fucking celebration every now and then. You spy on us all the fucking time; you should know this by now. Why don’t you fuck off and go back to your drones?”

  So I watch the glow-trees. With my drones, as Milo asked me to do. A herd of DogAnts passes us by, and I follow them into the forest, marveling at how perfectly they coordinate with their whistles and barks. One or two of them looks up to see me in the air, and the whole pack just stops and howls at me until I go away.

  I pull away and switch to the hills near the quarry. Lightning strikes in the distance. Rain falls again, lighter this time. It’s getting cold really fast.

  And Anna is cleaning the doorframes.

  This is all we have. This is all we can do. Life doesn’t wait for you to stop and get your shit together. The right response to being attacked is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The right response to Ship getting in touch is to stay alive and be ready to go at any moment.

  I ping Ship again, but nobody answers. My spiders scuttle around. Ping Ship. Ping repeater. Ping Ship. Ping repeater. Ping Ship. Ping repeater. The endless monotony. Ping Ship, ping repeater—

  Ping failed.

  In the darkness, flames, briefly, and then nothing.

  WAKE UP, I hiss to the others.

  Light gleams off Milo’s barrel as he climbs to the now-thicker walls, crouched. Simon takes up position thirty feet away from him.

  There. Standing in the moonlight, just past the glow-trees. Three figures, clearly human.

  “Are they armed?”

  “Too far out to tell.”

  I scuttle my spiders. There’s no way I can surround them without being seen, but two I can make crouch in the long grass; three I keep inside the compound.

  The light shifts as the moons pass behind the clouds.

  GIVE US A WARNING SHOT, MILO.

  Milo fires. The sound rolls across the landscape, startling a flock of those jelly-creatures from the trees beyond. Dirt kicks near the glow-trees. I use the distraction to position a spider closer.

  And the Mercers don’t even flinch. As one, they turn and walk away. Back along GUPPY’s trail.

  “What the fuck?”

  MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY.

  The rest of the night, needless to say, is sleepless.

  This karma is not for me. I send out a half-formed poem, letting it dissipate into the channel I shared with Ship.

  Make haste to the general by the white flag, the hero with the iron staff.

  A minute later, the rest of it comes to me.

  Sing to him the song of his people,

  For buried in the clouds of his own thoughts

  He has no eyes or ears for your suffering.

  And now the frustration, like the slow cauldron, boils over.

  25

  It starts with Milo. Just before dawn, I find him sneaking beyond my new perimeter, fully kitted out, gun nestled in the crook of one elbow. His suit seems to have acquired a thick coat of stiff animal hide sewn with discs of wood and spare metal. He clanks slightly as he moves. To say he looks utterly ridiculous is an understatement.

  AND WHERE, I buzz him from a cleverly camouflaged spider, ARE YOU GOING?

  He jumps several feet in the air, a feat I would have considered impossible given how much he’s wearing.

  “Gods dammit, OC.”

  ANSWER THE QUESTION, MILO.

  “Fucking spyware machine,” he says. “I’m going to check out the trail.”

  AND IF THERE ARE MERCERS OUT THERE?

  “I’m going to shoot those fuckers.” His jaw is set.

  I CAN ORDER YOU TO STAY.

  Milo looks defensive and defiant at the same time. “I’m going to make this right, OC. I got to do this.”

  Classic engineer approach paired with cheap moonshine. He’s created a problem. He’s going to go fix it.

  Idiot.

  I’M COMING WITH, I say, not just because I, too, need to know what’s out there, but also because I can’t let Milo’s ego get him killed in the brush.

  He looks relieved. I briefly debate sending the one drone I have charged—which means I lose overwatch—or the spider. Spider it is. If we can get to the crash site, I can charge the thing (hopefully).

  IF THIS SPIDER DIES, I say, YOU’RE HAULING IT BACK. I pointedly take point (hah), and Milo and I set off, clanking gently.

&nbs
p; An hour later, Simon wakes up, coughing gently. Anna senses him leave the room, but says nothing. There is the gentle click of a light-gas rifle being readied.

  “Where is he?”

  RECONNAISSANCE, I say. Damned if I’m going to lose face like this. I NEED A PAIR OF EYES OUTSIDE THE PERIMETER.

  Simon breathes heavily. I can see it in his face—he wants to go after Milo, but dark rings of exhaustion outline his eyes. Groaning slightly, he pulls up my perimeter map and hauls himself to a sitting position on the hab wall.

  Milo, meanwhile, plods through the tall golden grass, every so often starting at a snakelike thing or an animal cry from the woods. The wind, slightly colder today, has picked up and is blowing the grass in waves toward us, making him lean forward. His clanking cloak of jury-rigged armor sounds like cardboard slapping against flesh. A bizarre gunslinger in a dirty space suit.

  “Shouldn’t have run,” he says, half to himself. The alcohol is wearing off.

  I, wisely, say nothing, focusing on scanning the periphery. Movement, south. Something that doesn’t fit the usual list of suspects. I send the spider over to investigate, but there’s nothing there.

  I deliberate awhile. The spiders don’t have good hearing, just a basic omnidirectional microphone array. I’d have better luck triangulating using astrology. Back to the path.

  “Didn’t think,” says Milo. “Dammit.”

  Grass. Trees. Wind. A lone human bickering.

  I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN PRIEST, I remind him. IN CASE YOU’RE ATTEMPTING CONFESSION.

  Milo shoots me a look.

  “I’ll make this right,” he says, and falls blessedly silent.

  Presently we get to the point where my repeater array used to be. The solar cells, the last of our good graphene, have been crushed and mangled, the drone hacked into pieces, the tree they were hung on burned to a dark cinder. At the base of the tree is a corpse. I can see the suit melted onto its skin.

  So this was the fire I saw in the night. Milo circles it once, twice, like some arcane huntsman around a trophy.

  “It’s like he sat down here and set himself on fire,” he proclaims. “You think it was one of those we saw?”

  “No, the fire happened before,” I say, opening a line to Anna and Simon.

  Anna lets it ring for a while before she picks up.

  WE HAVE A PROBLEM, I say, and very carefully spell out what we have here. I NEED A REPLACEMENT REPEATER ARRAY.

  “We don’t have any decent metal left,” says Anna listlessly. “We’ll need new receiver circuits, antennae, weights.”

  “We don’t have any more solar cells,” says Simon at the same time.

  The choice is hard, but it must be done. TAKE ONE OF MINE. PRINT WHAT YOU CAN. I’ll lose some forward cameras, some sensory edge analytics.

  “I’d rather not take you apart,” says Milo. Translation: he’d rather not have Anna and Simon take me apart. “We have miles of cable. Maybe we can run a line to here.”

  No. A Megabeast could run over it. A pack of DogAnts could chew through it. Solar cell it is. ANNA, GET ON IT. LOAD IT INTO GUMBALL. GET IT OUT HERE.

  Silence.

  “I’ll do it,” says Simon.

  YOU’RE—

  “OC,” he insists, “I’ll do it.”

  “Bring the lye,” says Milo.

  It takes an hour for Simon to show up in GUPPY. Milo parks himself at a distance from the corpse, gun pointed very carefully at it, as if he expects it to wake. Dawn comes with the engine-whine of GUPPY; inside is Simon, with bits of me carefully packed and clutched in his hands. He’s shivering very slightly.

  “You shouldn’t be out here,” says Milo gruffly, hauling himself up the side.

  Simon takes in the weird leather armor. Then he sees the burned tree and, at the base, the dead Mercer. Wordlessly, he hands the parts over to Milo.

  “I’ll keep watch,” he says. It’s the first time they’ve spoken to each other since the incident.

  Soon the repeater array has been restrung—this time on a tree a little bit higher and slightly less visible—and we’re heading back: two men and a spider, jumping at shadows.

  Nothing sneaks up on us that night.

  “They didn’t fire,” says Simon as they sit at their dinner. Milo has proposed a fire, but been voted down: they’re eating meal rations cold.

  “No, they just stood there, the spooky fucks.”

  I do my thing. Ping Ship. Ping repeater. Repeat ad infinitum while the wind howls outside.

  “What do we do now?”

  “We wait,” says Anna, breaking in. “We watch.”

  “We can’t wait forever,” says Milo. “We’ve got what, twenty days of food left?”

  “We’ll have to wait forever unless Ship shows up,” says Anna.

  “Maybe they’ll send a backup,” says Simon hopefully.

  Ping Ship. Ping—

  CRACKLE. Half a packet of information, cut off. It bears Ship’s ID.

  SHIP?

  Ship, I hope you’re out there. I really do.

  Nothing. Then noise, a packet with the right encryption header but nonsense inside.

  SHIP?

  ALIVE, comes the message, and a new star flares briefly in the night sky. HIDING. WAIT. SALVAGE. WAIT.

  The star vanishes, and only the wind remains, howling.

  The news that Ship is alive runs through the two humans like—well, like a hot meal, or several shots of Milo’s moonshine. Simon laughs, incredulous, actually laughs, before bending over in a fit of coughing. Milo drops the gun and whoops. He hugs Simon.

  I think he surprised them both. I let them high-five each other for a bit and then discreetly test the waters.

  THE ONLY THING NOW, I say, IS TO SALVAGE.

  I’ve been avoiding thinking about this so far, but it’s time to face the possibilities.

  I can’t control where Ship is or what its condition is. If she’s working, she’ll get to us. If she’s damaged beyond repair, she’ll cannibalize everything she has to spew out several thousand packets of data in every single direction, including the Odysseus relay network. I’ll know. So will PCS. Then PCS will eventually send an assessment crew to figure out what happened.

  And when that crew arrives, they’re going to hunker down with us and try to hit the rest of the salvage target, and claim our part of the share, plus expenses.

  Living isn’t for the poor. Not anymore. This fact sobers them up. WE NEED TO GO OUT THERE, I say. WE NEED TO SALVAGE. TO HIT THE TARGET.

  “How?” says Anna. “We tried hitting the target. We got hit.”

  SHIP TOOK OUT MOST OF THEM, I say. WE KNOW THERE’S FOUR OF THEM OUT THERE, I say. THAT’S PROBABLY ALL THAT’S LEFT. WE HAVE FIVE SPIDERS. AND TWO GUNS.

  “And we’ve shot them before.” Eyes glinting now, Simon inches forward.

  “You don’t know what you’re going up against,” says Anna flatly. “Just because you shot one sitting duck—”

  “I can shoot,” Simon insists. “We can travel inside GUPPY. That thing’s armored enough to be a tank, anyway.”

  I know what Ship would say if she were here. No salvage, no getting off world. IT’S NOT A MATTER OF CHOICE, I point out. SHIP DOES HER JOB UP THERE. WE DO OUR JOB DOWN HERE.

  Weirdly enough, they turn to Milo. Him and his bizarre fetish armor, chewing slowly.

  “How long would that big hunk take for us to chop up?”

  With no Ship, five spiders and no additional resource extractors? A very long time. OBVIOUSLY WE WON’T BE ABLE TO RECOVER THE MOST HIGH-VALUE ITEMS.

  “And it’s full of dead people. Meaning they never got to take half their stuff out of the cargo holds.”

  Anna blanches. “I’m not coming.”

  MID-TIER LOOT.

  “Enough of that to get us through?”

  LET’S SEE. The call was, of course, for enough to host an exhibition, mark the rest for later extraction, get out. A curated selection. Enough body parts to show off the corpse, as it wer
e, and we all know it’s not just the skeleton that fascinates. I scroll through the manifests.

  There’s technically enough in the cargo holds to make our payday three times over.

  Milo flicks a glance at Anna, who doesn’t respond. “Yeah,” he says. “If we go slow, guns out. Cut off small batches. Enough to drive fast if needed.”

  “Let’s do it,” says Simon, eyes feverish and glinting. He coughs slightly. “Let’s go do what we came here to do.”

  26

  Day thirty-two.

  Dawn finds Anna immobile in her bedroom, eyes wide open. She notices me, the little drone in the corner, but makes no attempt at speech.

  At exactly 6:00—just like yesterday and the day before—she pulls herself to her feet. Stuffs herself into her suit. Then, for reasons unknown to me, she runs. Ten times around our base. Pause. Ten times more. Pause. Ten times again. Always at exactly the same pace, a kind of fast jog that looks deceptively slow but isn’t. Huffing and panting, she has breakfast: she wolfs the food down in a way that says Taste is a planet in the Osiris system, and not one she’s fond of visiting. She drops her food the moment it’s done and does her morning ablutions with a speed nobody’s even come close to on this trip—three minutes, thirteen seconds, on the dot. Three days of this. I think it’s an old military routine.

  Humans react to shock in all sorts of unexpected ways. Hysteria and numbness are the most common patterns. Given a world that terrifies them, people either scream at it or stop caring. But there are other patterns. Anna seems to have gone through her scrubbing phase into what we call hypercompetence—adopting a set of behaviors that [or so the human thinks] will give them the greatest chance of survival. Some of the most famous survivalists in known space, for example—Wolf Bjorn, Dana Jayawardana—all had some deep, traumatic incident in their childhood that turned them into the kind of mad person that will happily land on a desert planet with no tools except their own fingernails and proceed to survive there for six months while making a reality-TV show out of it.

  The problem with Anna is that she’s gone a little too far into her routine. It’s almost midday when her eyes lose that disturbingly glazed look. She’s on overwatch, on the top of the wall, gun in her lap, staring into the woods. Her face twitches. She looks around and actually sees the world, the sky, the hab, the suit she’s worn for three days now.