“But, Roland, there might have been parts there for my suit! I just need to look at the stuff from that pile.”
Roland looked at Pete, then at Jenny, then back at Pete again. “Okay, kid. That sector has been scanned and sorted for useable salvage, but it hasn’t been category sorted, so it’s still all in one place. I can let you take a look, but I gotta warn you, if it’s been entered into inventory, you’re going to have to buy it. I can’t just let you have it, or the Boss will skin me alive.”
Pete tried to imagine a human with its thin dermal layer peeled open. It wasn’t something he wanted to dwell on. He totally missed the wink Roland gave Jenny. He swallowed and pushed the thought out of his mind.
When Roland showed him to the container with the tagged and labeled salvage, Pete pulled out the scanner and started running it over the piled-up components that would eventually be sold to sophonts needing specific parts. None of the pieces in the collection triggered the scanner, so Pete started over, this time looking closely under and behind the stacked components, but he never saw anything that looked like it went with the suit he’d found.
There certainly were not enough items here to account for the entire volume of the pile they’d originally explored—even given the items they’d salvaged themselves. Troopmaster Zentto had ensured that the troop members wouldn’t get into fights over the same pieces. Each patrol had been assigned different sectors and told to stay within them at risk of being disqualified. Since it would be another two years until the Maker Merit Badge came around again, it was a serious threat. So it was unlikely that another patrol had gotten to “their” salvage.
The problem was—where was everything else from the pile?
Pete hunted down Roland yet again. It was supposed to be the employee’s break time, and he’d last been seen on the far side of the open-sided roofed shelter where some of the larger pieces of good-condition salvage were stored. He knew that humans of Roland’s and Jenny’s age liked to engage in what Jerry and Jinx called “snogging”—he’d certainly heard enough details of the practice from the twins—so he made sure to make a lot of noise as he approached the area where the humans had last been seen.
Sure enough, he heard giggling and low talking from just beyond a large object that looked like a complete airlock assembly. Pete kicked a piece of debris into the airlock door, making a satisfying thunk. He waited a moment, then Roland came around the corner, putting his eye protection and hat back on.
“Okay, pipsqueak, what do you want now?” Pete realized he was a bit small for a human his age, but he would be nearly two meters at maturity. The scrapyard worker was probably about as tall as he would get and would barely come up to the Caldivar’s chin once he was fully grown. There was simply no need to be insulting.
“I’m sorry, Mister Roland, I really am, but... where is the rest of the scrap?” He looked around, and extended a claw to gesture with. “Each of these piles is mixed scrap. The sorted items you let me look at are only about half of the original pile. What happened to the rest?”
“Oh. Oh! Sorry kid, I guess I should have told you. If it’s not sorted for labeled salvage, it gets put over there.” Roland pointed to a huge pile of scrap on the far edge of the yard.
Pete’s spirits fell. There was absolutely no way he was going to find anything in that pile. It was many, many times the size of the original and looked like it had years’, if not decades’, worth of scraps.
“Although,” continued Roland, “we just finished sorting your stuff this morning. The scraps are probably still in the hopper of the Grappler...”
Pete didn’t hear the rest as he took off in the direction of the bulldozer-like mecha. Roland watched him go, then muttered “whatever” and took off his hat and sunglasses before he headed back behind the airlock assembly. “Jenny, I’ve got another 10 minutes, and then I’ve got to get back to work.”
As soon as he reached the Grappler, Pete knew he’d found the right salvage. There was the burned relay and cracked power cell that Orlin and the twins had rejected on their first salvage trip. He pulled out the scanner and started to run it over the items. He was rewarded with several beeps immediately. He dug into the pile and pulled out two bottle-like objects made from the same blue-green metal as the suit. Another ten minutes yielded a total of seven items—two long bottles, two short ones, one large, heavy rectangular object that was exactly the size of one of the unusual sockets on the suit, and two smaller, lighter cylinders. The cylinders looked like some sort of power cells and the bottle probably contained liquid or gas. One of the larger ones sloshed slightly, while the smaller ones seemed to be mostly full. The heavy rectangle appeared to be solid, with no openings or obvious connections. That they went with the suit was highly probable based on the size, the fittings and the unusual metal.
As for what they contained, he might have to go back to visit Bret.
* * *
“Yes. Perfluorodecalin,” Bret declared, holding up the bottle that still contained liquid. “The trace from the other bottle is the same, and they’re an exact match to a variant called ‘Flurodec.’ The bottles are designed to hold pressurized liquid, and Flurodec is pretty dense in liquid form. It’s probably a pretty good supply for fire-suppression and cooling. Are you going to want to refill them? I can synthesize some in the molecular printer. Carbon and fluorine can be scavenged from dirt, air and water, so it will be pretty cheap. I can make a run and fill the bottles once you clean them up.”
“What about the other pieces?” Pete asked.
“Well, as you said, the cylinders are power cells. They’re exhausted, but it shouldn’t be hard to power them up. It looks like a standard capacitor array. As for the small bottles, the pressure and weight suggests they are probably between half and three-quarters full. I can’t tell what the stuff is, though; it’s a complex organic mix that doesn’t match anything in our database. This—” he held up the dense rectangle “—is interesting. Its density suggests heavy metals, possibly even rare ones. The closest density match is osmium, but it’s the wrong texture—this feels like a polymer, not a metal. However, I can’t scan anything in the interior. It seems solid all the way through, so it’s unlikely that this is just a plastic shell over heavy metal. Given the scan, this is either made up of nanometer-sized or smaller components, or it’s a heck of a lot better shielded than anything I’ve ever seen.”
Bret looked at Pete expectantly.
“I’ll take that refill. And thanks. Oh, by the way...” Pete reached into his coverall and pulled out Bret’s watch. “Cleaned, serviced, and in a brand new case, courtesy of the Farnog student workshop.”
“Wow, thanks.” Bret put the watch back onto his wrist and closed the clasp. Immediately, the face of the device lit up with the time and a list of the Caldivar grad student’s appointments and reminders. “Yeah, no problem. I’ll start the synthesizer. Bring back those bottles with the fittings cleaned up, and I’ll refill them for you.”
* * *
The day finally came to assemble the components of the suit and see what it did. Pete first attached each of the limb sleeves to the clamshell via the hiring and tubing harnesses. He attached the four bottles—two large and two small—and inserted the heavy block in the matching receptacle on one side of the shell. He then attached what he assumed was the control module to the front of the clamshell. Orlin, Jerry and Jinx clustered around as he inserted the first power cell into the back of the suit.
Nothing happened.
“Are you sure—”
“—it’s charged up?”
“Shut up, I charged them myself. They’re not that different from the power cells for my mecha. They both registered peak charge when I tested them,” answered Orlin.
“So what—”
“—do we do now?”
“Insert the other one.” Orlin nodded at Pete, who felt a prickling on his long tongue, a sure sign of anxiety. It was the Caldivar equivalent of a nervous sweat.
“
I
“Are you okay, Pete?”
Pete stared back at Jerry, dumbfounded. It was the first time in his experience that one of the twins had spoken a complete sentence on his own. Jinx looked on with a concerned expression. “It’s okay, ‘just a head cold’ I think you’d call it.”
“Sounds like more of a ‘nose cold,’ Jinx corrected. Pete was used to his friends teasing him about his long flexible snout, but Jinx seemed genuinely concerned. “That has got—”
“—to hurt,” finished Jerry.
The surreal moment had passed. The twins were back to splitting sentences. “I’ll be okay. Let me run this test, then plug in the other power cell.”
He had a multiband spectral analyzer plugged into his slate. A check of the suit showed no activity. After pausing to sneeze a couple more times, he plugged in the second power cell. Again, the scanner showed no activity.
“It doesn’t work,” Pete muttered.
“Wait—”
“—look at this.”
Jerry pointed to the odd rectangular block. A seam appeared in the otherwise solid block, which was lit by a faint orange light. Meanwhile, the rectangular socket on the other side of the clamshell was pulsing with the same orange light. Jinx reached out to touch the block, and it came apart at the seam.
“Maybe you should—”
“—plug this in—”
“—over there?”
Jinx handed the half block to Pete, who looked it over carefully. It was just like the original block, only half the size. There was no evidence it had ever been part of a larger object, yet strangely, it felt just as heavy as the original. He shrugged. “Might as well.”
Once the block was plugged into the open socket, the light stopped pulsing, and a brief flicker showed on the screen of the control module. The multi-band scanner showed there was some electronic activity in the control module and a faint electromagnetic field emanating from the torso of the suit.
Aside from that, there was no other indication or response from the suit.
“You have to—”
“—put it on.”
“Yes, Pete.” Orlin nodded concurrence with the twins. “This is the last part. You have to put it on to see how it works. You’ve done all of this work reassembling and restoring it. Don’t you want to see how it works?”
“To be honest,
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Orlin looked at him with concern, but then his expression turned into a smirk. “Or is this just an excuse to back out?”
“No balls,” whispered Jinx.
“No balls,” Jerry repeated the taunt with a bit more volume.
“Eff you, Lizard Face!” Pete managed between sneezes. “And you too, Monkey Twins!”
The sneezing and, now, the taunting were giving Pete a splitting headache. With a glare, he stomped over to the bench set up at the foot of the assembly table. The suit was attached to a rack that would lift it upright off the table and over the bench, so that he could sit and pull the clamshell down over his torso. It was too big around and too tall for him, but his hips were still slim enough at his age that the suit would settle over his shoulders and hang halfway to his knees.
It was almost anticlimactic.
Almost.
The one unexpected occurrence was that, as the clamshell slid down over his body, the surface separated into plates and readjusted to perfectly fit him. Then it just seemed to sit there.
Jinx ran the scanner over him while Jerry took a bunch of pictures with his slate. Orlin had been taking a continuous video recording, but the human used a close-up setting to capture the details of the now-perfectly-adjusted suit.
“That’s a whole lot of nothing,” complained Pete.
“Yes, but now—”
“—your suit fits.”
“You probably have to put the sleeves on.” Orlin handed Pete the first of the four tubes, which now seemed to be sized exactly right for Pete.
Even with the full suit on, it didn’t seem to do anything. On the other paw, it was now obvious that their earlier surmise that the suit would leave the hips and shoulders unprotected was incorrect. The torso appeared to have pauldrons to cover the shoulders right up to the top of the sleeves. The torso also extended over the groin and buttocks while the legs extended from his ankles all the way over the pelvis and hip bones. The comparison with armor was apt, given that it seemed to cover everything except his head, paws and feet, but it wasn’t actually protecting him. They’d already determined that the fabric couldn’t be cut by anything in their shop, but when Pete challenged Jinx to hit him in the stomach, the suit did absolutely nothing to block or lessen the blow.
That hurt!
At least, it hurt briefly. There was a slight flash of the chest display but nothing else, aside from a single green light at the top of the panel.
The suit was also hot. Caldivar didn’t sweat like humans, but he did start to pant from increased body temperature. Yet, almost as soon as he started, the suit seemed to cool off.
“It’s cooling.”
“Maybe it goes—”
“—under a spacesuit?”
“Whatever it is, it needs to wait until tomorrow,” Pete said. “I’ve been feeling bad all day, and now I’m pretty tired. I just want to go home and sleep.”
“Go ahead. We’re headed out to Beggar’s Canyon to field test Stomper and Zoomer tomorrow.” Orlin used the names Jerry and Jinx had applied to the mecha and two-seat flyer, respectively.
“Thanks.” Pete sat back down on the bench and started pulling off the sleeves. He hung them on the rack, and almost before he could reach for the catches on the clamshell, it shifted back to the original, oversized configuration. Jinx hooked the storage rack to a loop just inside the collar of the torso while Jerry released a weighted arm that lifted the suit right off the young Caldivar.
“Hey, did you—”
“—see that?”
“Some words—”
“—on the panel.”
Pete turned to Orlin. “Did you get that on the video?” When his friend nodded, he continued, “Zip that over to my slate. I’ll try to look at it later.” The headache was receding, and it felt like he’d be able to manage not sneezing for a while, so he’d try to look at the video of the test when he got home. In fact, he wasn’t feeling quite as tired, but he wasn’t sure why.
As one last step for the evening, he and his friends removed the bottles and power cells from the suit. The rectangular blocks, however, did not want to come loose. In fact, it wasn’t possible to detect the seams at the edges of the sockets. It was strange that the block had divided in two, and now couldn’t be removed—almost as if the suit had decided that those sockets needed to be filled and stay that way.
He’d worry about that tomorrow.
* * *
“Have you ever seen this script before?”
Cousin Bret was studying for his comprehensive exams, and he’d made it clear that he was not to be disturbed, so Pete took the video still images to Troopmaster Zentto. The adult troop leader didn’t recognize the symbols that had appeared on the control module of the suit, so he had referred the scout to an older human professor at Tretrayon Academy.
“It’s an older machine script known as ‘Roman,’” said Professor Gannon. “One of the variants of Earth Common from a few thousand years ago. Every once in a while, we’ll make contact with one of the Lost C
olonies, and their systems will use Roman. I have a book here somewhere.”
The professor’s office had something that Pete had never seen before—real, physical books. There were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with the rectangular objects of various heights, lengths and widths. The professor carefully stood up from his desk and slowly moved to select one such book from a shelf. He laid it open on the desk and opened it to show the symbols printed on the individual pages. Unlike the classical books sometimes shown in old vid’tainment, these weren’t actually made from the cellulose pulp that used to be known as “paper,” but rather from a thin polymer not unlike the screen of a slate. The images weren’t all static, either. Several pages contained searchable indices, and optical fibers displaying colored prompts helped identify locations within the book where searched text could be found.
The book was remarkable, but he hoped the professor wasn’t expecting him to take it and perform a translation by paw. The thought must have shown on his face, because Professor Gannon laughed and reached into a drawer, pulling out a long, thin cylinder, about one-half centimeter by eighteen centimeters. He tapped one end to the binding of the book, and both binding and cylinder pulsed green for a moment. He then took the cylinder, grabbed it in the middle, separating it lengthwise, and revealed a thin membrane stretched between the two half-cylinders. The membrane was approximately the dimensions of a slate screen, and sure enough, the membrane adhered to the screen when placed over it.
“That’s a translation filter. I programmed it with the Roman symbology. It will translate the symbols for you, and it may even be able to interpret some of the words. But I must caution you.” Gannon looked at Pete sternly and lifted one eyebrow. “It may not be a dialect of Common that you are familiar with. If these symbols come from a Lost World Artifact, there’s no telling how much the language has drifted. Good luck, son.”
Salvage Conquest Page 18