After I was done huffing and puffing, I was a little pissed at myself over my colossal, nearly fatal fuck up. If the giant-looking fucker hadn’t felt the need to give me a booming monologue and just shot me, I would be the corpse, not him. And for that matter, if there was literally anyone else around, I could have been a corpse as well. I made sure to get back to my ever-present job of keeping myself alive and took a minute to load Lefty back up and get back to my job.
As it turns out, goliath was the last person in the entire caravan. Which meant step three was over.
Step four was scavenging, which I started by pulling out all of the easily moved stuff first.
The cases on the outside made good containers, and I ended up pulling out lots of mechanicite garbage. Dime a dozen cheap tools, and replacement parts you could buy dirt cheap. Custom parts, which were made out of simple shapes I could have made for less than I had in my own account, filled several.
Custom sounded good on an ad, but it just meant that someone did it personally,
There were a few expensive tools which I did keep; however, I already had several, carbide tools were more expensive while also being light, a miniature lathe was a bit too heavy for its price which was unfortunate, but I was able to keep some of the bits I knew I could use. I was able to find some minimal jewelry, or easily removed metals that could be sold off nicely, and I was able to take their holy symbols to maybe cash in on the bounties later.
Some of them had solid credit-carrying devices, exactly as expected, although they didn’t have many credits.
Their caravan was solid, and rather minimalist, but over the course of a few hours, I was able to at least get some water refilled, so that was nice. As the day wore on and I picked apart the caravan, I kept my eyes on a timepiece, I had several check-in times to let Mission Control know that I had engaged my target and break radio silence. I could have just turned it back on, but I had a better use for my radio, that and he would have given me an earful when he had to pick up a call that wasn’t necessary.
If I was, like, holding on by the skin of my teeth and needed Doc or I was about to die, I could call, I would also probably get worse jobs in the future, but he would take it seriously.
The number one reason for not turning it on to talk with MC, however, was to pick up on the Artifact I was here to retrieve.
Artifacts were many things, but always conspicuous, they were not. They always had the pattern, but not all artifacts were my sword, they didn’t all glow and show off their myriad and confusing properties at a glance. Some were almost downright mundane, there were little rings, forks, earrings, and at least one suspiciously shaped rod that could produce 200 000 different types of seminal fluid.
However, there was one surefire way to detect one, and that was with a specially tuned radio and a special antenna. The antenna was able to detect something even if we didn’t know what that something was.
Whatever the ditectors were, whatever they detected, they were important to Humanity.
Every single planet and moon that was colonized had big artifact factories creating them, pulling in material and producing the ditectors with no oversight on their production. All we could do was pick up the final product.
It took us, Humanity’s genetically engineered servants, years to realize they made incredible antennas. The material wasn’t an artifact, at least, we didn’t think it was. But it could detect them.
The resulting frequencies for a radio set to pick up an artifact let us find them by literally walking around until the signal got louder, with some frequency’s picking up different artifacts.
It took me a lot of time to find them because, as it turned out, there were multiple artifacts.
My sword was one, obviously, so I moved away to put it down away from the caravan but found that the radio had gotten louder.
The Goliath, as it turned out, had a ring on his finger, so I stored it next to the sword but found another signal and traced it to the rear wagons in a bag of clothes.
The bag, the clothes, everything around it, looked so incredibly innocuous that it was almost obvious. It was full of normal boring clothing, and a normal, slightly worn case, full of boring stuff, with a credit chip. But going through everything, I found a tiny shape tucked into a pocket.
It was like a river stone, smooth and palm-sized, with one large hexagon on either side with other hexagons linking them in each direction. I slid it into a pocket and closed it.
There was nothing else that emitted an artifact frequency, so when the time rolled around, I radioed into Mission Control.
“Mission Control, come in, Mission Control, this is Bandit,” I called into my microphone.
I had to wait for a few seconds, but he did answer.
“Bandit, this is Mission Control, Status?” he queried.
“Passed,” I told him.
Passed, was the phrase that told him I was fine, answering with anything else would indicate different types of fuck up. It was simple, it could be more complex, but it just didn’t need to be.
He let out a sigh before asking, “Confirmed, have you found the artifact?”
“I have found two, we were only contracted for one, right?” I asked him, a little bit giddy at the idea of a second artifact.
I was, after all, a mercenary, a freelance operator. If it wasn’t on the recovery request, it was finders keepers.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Yes, only the one. Good work, finish up and hurry, how long until you leave for orbit?” He asked something in his tone, making me think about it.
“Uhh, at the rate I’m going, probably two hours at most. Why?” I asked, “Has something come up, MC?”
“There is a dust storm coming nearby in an hour or so, and the client has been incessant on speed. I would suggest getting into the sky as soon as possible. In the meantime, I will ask the client about the artifact in detail, and help figure out which one is the request. Mc over and out.” He told me before he dropped the connection.
I kept the radio on and turned it to the other signals, this time not listening to the sound of artifacts and their strange tone and tune, but terrestrial radio signals.
Turns out, the area had sucky reception for non-orbital radio. The sound was more scratchy than understandable, and I could barely parse the music, but I left it on. It was like white noise.
I found myself humming along, putting random nonsense words in as I worked like a game where you spot shapes in a cloud of gas, but for the radio. It was nostalgic, I could remember sitting around and watching the plumes from industrial plants with others when I was a kid.
What was it that Poss always said?
I turned off the radio then and got down to work.
I ended up being able to get a lot of stuff out, mostly small stuff and separated it based on if I was going to keep it or not. Some of the stuff would be nice to have, even if it was just spare parts. I had so many projects that I wanted to do, but only so much time and credits to do them with.
Cutting out the middleman and just keeping the good stuff would save me thousands of credits in the long run.
I bundled them up along with one tank of oil from the side of the front cart and set them up next to my bike. I had ten minutes or so until the storm was supposed to hit, but I dutifully got to opening up the bike.
My bike, upon inspection, had two sets of tires; two tires in the front, and the back, as opposed to a normal bike you might find on the cramped streets of a city with one. That’s because one of the many upsides that helped in picking this bike was its capacity.
Most of its insides were able to be pulled out, and it squatted down into a four-wheeled profile.
It was from a Triton design, and much like the largest moon of Remiel, it was designed backwards. A normal bike, was a bike, but like anything made on Triton it wasn't, it was what was this bike made to replace? Because why make a bike, when you could make a bike that folded out into a four wheeler? Just large enough to carry a metal barrel of fuel and a few bags of parts that I put into other pouches.
Then, with one last drink from the caravan's water, I picked up whatever I could carry off, I put holes through the rest of the tanks of water and oil, and got off back the way I came.
You know, after I picked up my stuff again, including my poor hat.
Down the road, I decided to stop and pick back up the rig I had used to pick off the carts, I could re-use the scope.
“I finally get what Dad meant by waste not, want not,” I murmured.
I got back onto the road, shifting gear as I picked up speed, zipping down the road and past dunes and rock formations that remained untamed despite the attempt at terraforming that had left the planet partially habitable.
I zipped down the road, and then off to the side, down a barely noticeable path of turned dust and compact red earth that I followed up and onto a rocky section, gaining altitude until I was on a higher foothill.
Scanning the skyline, I could see a dust storm coming in, a wall of dust like an orange-red cloud skimming the land. I couldn’t ask for a better way to rough up the scene I had left behind; it would damage the bodies, wear at the prints, and discourage anyone from tracing my egress back to my boat.
The boat in question sat like a piece of scrap metal art on the rocky hilltop, landing gear keeping it a foot or so off the ground. It was a lumpy-looking, scrappy, scratched and dinged-up old voidboat. The tan top layer of paint was somewhat spotty, bits of olive-green bleeding through in some spots, while others were worn down to the metal.
It was very much a Cerian design, with little in the way of sharp angles and notable parts where the scrap it had been made from had notable defects and had been rounded out for a smooth bubbly look.
It was older than I was, probably as old, if not older than my parents. And despite its shoddy bits, it had enough grit to keep up even decades after it was out of date. Part of an attempt at producing enough orbital landing and short-distance transport boats to keep up with the estimated growth of interstellar commerce.
It had a kind of winged rail car blimp thing going on, longer than it was tall or wide. But wider than it was tall.
It was smoothed on top and hexagonal on the bottom with long tube-like protrusions as part of the wings down its length that doubled as low altitude thrusters, tapering a bit at the front before sweeping all the way back with its thinner outer wings. Somewhat hexagon shaped from above, and from in front, it was like three aerodynamic cylinders strapped onto one another, which looked strange but let it get efficient speeds at the surface, low altitude and orbital flight. It was like a plane, crossed with a rail car and a boat and was wonky as hell.
The Junker, was an old Tagphract Industries Orbiter StV mark 5 and was the granddaddy of modern orbital landers. It was my Junker, and I had picked it up the better part of a decade ago and fallen in love with it. I could live in the thing, and I had at a few points before I got a job on the Gull.
Its body was fifty feet wide port to starboard, not including the outer wings, twenty-five feet tall from keel to dorsal and over a hundred feet from bow to stern, and it was built like a fucking brick.
I got close and stopped the bike and pulled out my ship tag, and checked my timepiece, spinning dials on the palm-sized gizmo until I found the code that I would need to open the bay door.
I quickly hopped off the bike and made my way to the hatch control before opening the plate next to the bay doors, double-checking the code before moving the complementary dials to the correct position and disengaging the lock with the clunk of a button.
No transponder to open the hatch, just old-fashioned codes, dials, and steel locking pins that could be activated by a button. I could hear the pins being unspun from their places, the movement of steel in steel barely grinding until the lock-up clunked out and the door was free to move. A second button released the clamp, and the door fell open a foot before the hydraulics caught the door, and it slowly opened, the side of the big lug opening up beneath the tubes that doubled as low-altitude thrusters.
I left it to open on its own and got back on the bike, the bay door made a ramp into the hold, and I drove on up and into the boat.
The hold was still a mess, things held down in any way I could, but the middle area was wide enough to unload the cargo onto my ship, tying down the spare parts in tiny drawers and the barrel in a larger bin in the wall.
I checked about halfway through to make sure the storm wouldn’t sweep in before hurrying along, closing the door and tying down my bike, still set for four wheels made it a tight fit but considering how cluttered the place was, what wasn’t in here?
The door protested its closure, but the hydraulics would probably hold out for a few months without any more checkups. Depending on the prices MC got for my loot, I could probably pay to get it repaired several times over. More stuff if the ring was my bonus artifact.
People loved them, even if they were purely decorative, considering how almost no one alive could operate them.
The door shuttered closed, cutting me off from the outside and leaving me in the weak fluorescent light of the ship, and the sound of the locking pins engaged the frame to seal me in.
I stretched out, popping my joints and stretching my stiff muscles to loosen up. The Junker was a safe place, but after a few moments, I left the hold, making my way up toward the bow and the flight deck.
“What was it, Goshe said. get the loot, get liquid, and get the hell out of here? That sounds nice, I could use a shower.”
It was time to get on with it, get paid, and keep getting on with my life.