“Leah, I don't want to imply anything, but don't you think we've come here for nothing,” I asked the girl tiredly. We had been crawling in the most remote corners of the dump for seven hours. We saw the last living creatures more than three hours ago, and they were not people, they were some mutant rats that were happy to eat the insulation from some broken flyer in front of us. Honestly, for a moment I even thought about shooting it, but Leah stopped me and said that where there was one, there were several dozen froschas, and they were much smarter than ordinary rats. If you attack one of them, the others may ambush you in revenge. And the canines of these froschas can eat steel sheets. So it was better not to touch them unless it was necessary. And so, for more than three hours, we did not hear or see a single living soul.
“Not for nothing,” she said, feeling victorious in our argument, turning to me.
“Is it like the last three times?” I asked her skeptically.
During the seven hours we spent in the oldest part of the dump, we found a seemingly good place to set up a temporary residence three times. But each time we started looking for a different place. In the first place, we found an old flyer bus, there was spilled rocket fuel under a thick layer of household garbage. It was not visible, but it was there, and the sensors in the communicator detected it. If you stay for more than a couple of hours in this place, you can get very serious health problems.
The second place was a small transport container of aliens. It was a very nice place, the battery was even in place and provided enough power for a comfortable life. But it was too close to a settlement with local people. We realized why they were not using this container only when we got close. It was mined, and quite well. This means that someone had already chosen it and used it for their purposes. Judging by the type of explosives, it was not local vagrants, it was someone serious, so since we did not want to get into a conflict, we went to search further.
Our third discovery was a garbage truck. And everything would have been fine, but froschas were living nearby, and given their peculiarities, it was not a very smart idea to choose a place to live next to them. So we set off again.
“No,” Leah waved me off and pulled me down behind the cover of some unknown device. “Look,” she pointed a whispering finger to the side.
“So what? I don't see there... hmm, something is wrong there," I answered and saw a man emerge from under the mountain of garbage, he was wearing torn clothes and could barely stand up.
“Go and ask,” Leah replied sharply, “ How do I know."
“ But I don't have a great desire to ask him anything,” I replied, watching the man walk over to a refrigerator or something else, where he took off his pants and made a big pile of shit. After finishing his business, he didn't even wipe his ass and went to a box where he took out a syringe and injected himself. Almost immediately, he fell on the spot. Drug addicts are the type of people I've hated since my last life.
“Here's the second one,” said Lia, and indeed another drug addict crawled out of the hole and picked up the first one's syringe, then took some purple stuff from the box's vial and injected himself.
“What interested you here?” I asked Leah, not understanding what interested her in this place.
"Look closely, of course, it's covered with garbage, but it was done on purpose to cover it up. " She nodded toward the hole where the third addict had now climbed out and started preparing his dose.
“Garbage is garbage,” I replied, not understanding what she was seeing. “You better explain to me, don't forget that things are not good here,” I tapped my temple, “right now."
"If I'm not mistaken, it's a Xaria interplanetary shuttle, almost a thousand of them were made and used for transportation from planet to station after the station was built. Inside, there are seats for three hundred people, plus a luggage compartment for a thousand cubic meters. Look in that corner,” she pointed to a protrusion above the garbage, “This is the shuttle's atmospheric rudder, it has a specific shape that cannot be confused with anything else. "
"And? What does this give us?” I asked, not understanding her enthusiasm for the boat, “Junkies live in it, it's filled with garbage."
“It's a historical value,” Leah replied, “Although that's not the main thing, the main thing is that their hulls are extremely strong, plus most of their systems were duplicated by hand. For example, if we lock ourselves inside, there's no way to get us out without super-heavy weapons."
“And what should I do with them?” I asked, looking at the drug addicts. “Kill them? I have to tell you right away, I can't kill them like that, even such drug addicts."
"Of course, killing them would be the best option, but I don't think we'll go for such radical methods," she answered, "Now we're going to tie them up. Then we'll check what's inside, if it's Xaria and she's alive, then..." she thought about what to do with the drug addicts, "then we'll just chase them away. They won't be able to do anything to us."
To be honest, I didn't understand why she was so eager to get on the shuttle. But I decided to agree with her. Fortunately, the addicts were not responding to the outside world, so I quickly tied them up with some wires we found nearby and wiggled inside.
The first thing I saw was a pile of shit, and a moment later I could smell the whole aroma. I almost threw up and had to stop, close my eyes, and convince my body not to vomit right now. But Leah kept walking forward, and after three meters of tunneling under the garbage, we saw the upper hatch of the shuttle open.
"This is an emergency hatch," said Leah, "My great-grandfather told me that on one of their flights when they returned to the planet, they fell into the ocean, so they got out through this hatch, the shuttle can stay on the water and protrudes one and a half meters above the water.
"So what? Are you going to go inside?" I asked her, looking through the hatch, and it smelled like shit, dirt, and smoke as if something chemical was burning. There was also light coming from the inside.
Instead of answering, Leah just jumped inside, and then I heard three blaster shots and Leah's voice:
"Come down, it's safe here."
I carefully climbed down the ladder and looked around. It was a small room, maybe ten square meters, no more. Along the walls were rags on which three men were moaning in pain. Leah was knitting them with wires right now. In addition to the rags, there was a fire in the middle of the room, like a bonfire, a kind of stove with some kind of combustible substance coming through a tube. In addition, there was a lantern attached to the ceiling that illuminated the room. The strangest thing was that the passage into the depths of the boat was closed and littered with various garbage, which was the stuff of these junkies.
"So they were not inside?"
"Looks like it," Leah replied. "And now I think we should talk to them." She slapped a hand to the face of the man who looked more sane than the others. "What is this place? "
"Untie me, girl, or you'll be sorry..." The next moment Lia hit him in the face. " Do you think that will convince me?" the junkie laughed.
"I don't think so, but withdrawal," she said, "Partner, what do you think if we shoot that box?"
"It's a good idea..." before I could finish, the man roared with rage, before our eyes, finger-thick wires were torn on his arms and legs, and blood began to appear through the pores on the exposed parts of his body before I could get scared, the man froze for a moment and fell. Leah immediately went to him checked his pulse and said.
" A corpse."
" What was that?" I asked her.
"It looks like the modifiers from my great-grandfather's story, but they haven't been produced since the war," Liya replied.
"And how were they made?" I asked, approaching the passage to another compartment of the shuttle where all sorts of garbage were lying around. I saw a box just like the one at the entrance.
"I don't know, it was some kind of secret shit. It was like you had to get an injection and after a while, the nanobots would have..." Lia began to speak.
"Spreadsheet eighteen forty, tolerance level yellow two," I interrupted Leah, reading the inscription on the box. "Dosing, every six hours, so what else, ah, here, a warning about seventy percent death." Leah, meanwhile, came over to me and looked at the remains of the box as well. "La-la-la," I missed some scientific bullshit, "Hmm, hey, could this be the same shit?"
"I don't know, but I doubt it, that one... - at this moment another addict came to his senses and, just like the first one, jumped to his feet, the wires on his arms broke instantly and he rushed at us, not caring that when he broke the wires he damaged his arms and even broke bones. I don't know what I was thinking, but I somehow missed his punch and flew a meter and a half to the side. I even lost consciousness for a few seconds, and when I came to, I saw that Leah had already dealt with him, and next to the first corpse, there were two more with neat holes in their foreheads where smoke was coming from.
"Thank you," I said, getting to my feet. "The pain in my chest was quite severe, but it was as if I hadn't broken anything - as if I had been hit by a train."
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
"Not the train, but close, and it's good that the overalls took most of the impact," Lia replied. "It was at this time that we heard screams of rage outside, but they died down pretty quickly.
"I think we found that shit," I replied, "What do you think is waiting for us up there?" I nodded at the ceiling.
"I hope it's the same as with the first one," Leah nodded at the drug addict who died most likely of cardiac arrest.
Cautiously climbing the mountain, I looked out of the tunnel, apparently the junkies came to their senses and realizing that they were tied up got angry, I don't know how this shit works, but it gives you a lot of strength, but it takes away your mind for sure. These three druggies broke the wire ways and found nothing better to do than to throw themselves at each other.
Now there were three corpses in front of us. One had his head torn off, the other had his stomach torn open and his insides were lying on an area of more than ten square meters. And the third one had torn out his eyes for some reason and then torn his throat with his hands. I couldn't stand it anymore, I started vomiting, I could barely smell the whole aroma outside, it was not the best aroma in here anyway, and now the aroma of entrails was added, it was a fierce cruelty.
"Leah, what are we going to do?" I asked the girl about twenty minutes later, when I more or less came to my senses, having moved a hundred meters away from the slaughterhouse.
"On the bright side, we've just made a good place for ourselves to live. But if it's that crap for modifiers, and someone else knows about it, then we need to get as far away from here as possible." Leah replied.
"Don't you care about what we just saw?" I asked Leah, marveling at her coolness.
"I have an implant here that controls my emotions," Lia tapped the implant on her head, "It's working now, so yes, I don't care, and that's why I can think soberly.
"And what does your sober brain think?" I asked Leah sarcastically.
" He thinks we should wait to make any final decisions. " Leah answered and nodded towards the corpses, now frosh was cautiously walking towards the corpses, looking in all directions. Then he approached the first corpse and nipped at it, biting off a large piece of meat at once. "You remember that frosch doesn't walk alone."
And indeed, in about ten minutes, other froschas began to appear from the garbage. It took them half an hour to eat the corpses, after which they went inside the boat to smell.
Half an hour later, we noticed how they started to disappear: one minute a frosh would walk up to a pile of garbage, and the next second it was no longer visible, only a slight swaying of the garbage indicated that the mutant had jumped into the middle of the garbage.
After waiting for a few more hours and not seeing anyone else, we decided to move on to what was left of the froschas. As we approached the tunnel, we saw only the remains of blood with traces of mutant rats', they liked human meat so much that they ate everything, including bones, and then ate the garbage on which the blood had spilled.
I was getting more and more afraid of these froshas, no wonder Leah said not to touch them. Going down inside the boat, we saw the same picture as outside. Those creatures are monsters. Although they did a good deed for us and saved us the work of burying the bodies.
" I don't know why they couldn't open the hatch inside, but we'll find out," Liya answered and, scattering the debris from the hatch, simply turned the manual hatch lock, which creaked but gave way and in a minute we were able to go inside. Immediately, the stale air hit our noses, but it was better than outside, we didn't feel all those aromas. Turning on the flashlight, Lia walked over to the wall and took a plastic plate from the shelf. "Xaria-375, route from the Zhonskar Plateau to sector ten forty-two. There are marks here for six thousand seven hundred and forty-three flights. Wow," Leah was surprised. "Yes, yes, the ninth year after the resettlement began. Damage to the atmospheric rudders during landing in the hangar was written off for conservation because the repair required too many resources. That's all."
"What kind of sign it is", taking the plate from Leah's hand, and there was information cut out in small white print on the plastic.
"It's a kind of backup analog of a black box. At the beginning of the flight, the name, flight number, details of the flight, events, and decisions of the crew are entered into an empty plate. Judging by what is written here, this shuttle was written off because of an accident in the hangar, by the way, so you understand, we are in a repair hangar, once it was planned to repair space technology, but as you can see, it was turned into a dump," Lia answered."And now what I wanted to get here for, " Lia smiled and led me inside.
We got lost several times, but it eventually led us to the reactor compartment.
"And what do you want to find here?" I asked her, watching her tear down the reactor's protective shell.
"Grandpa wasn't lying," Leah smiled and tore off a piece of plastic and pointed to a metal thing, "It's ninety-three percent cardonix. There's about one ton of it here, and that's about seven million credits. "Leah said smugly, "But there's a problem, it's very, very hard to remove, it's an extremely stable material, and you need plasma cutters and a supply of fuel for them. "
"Can we sell it?" I asked Leah, "And do we need to? We need to sit back and figure out what to do in the future."
"After you lost your memory, you became very boring," Leah grimaced, "Whatever we plan to do, it's much better to do it with money.
"And then it will be like with Braillo, we will find a buyer, and we will be forced to flee," I decided to be more cautious.
"You're so boring," Leah did not share my attitude to life. "But you're right in a way, now we are nobody and have no name."
"You're wrong, we're criminals who are now on the official wanted list," I answered, "On the inter-sectoral wanted list, where we stole the energy cell, why were we put on the inter-sectoral wanted list?" Leah seemed to shrink after my question. It was obvious that she didn't want to talk.
"In the police warehouse of confiscated items," she replied.
"Are we complete morons?" I stared at her in shock. "Who do you have to be to go to the police?"
"I had a tip-off, the energy cell had been there for over a month, and the next week it was going to be moved to a storage facility at the central bank, it was going to be sold at auction," she said, "No one was supposed to be there, it was the anniversary of the warehouse attendant, they were supposed to be drinking in a cafe nearby.
"But something went wrong?" I asked her. I wanted to finally find out what happened, why I woke up in this body.
" Some policeman decided to get some dope at the warehouse to have more fun, and on the way back he saw us. You shot at him with a blaster, and then the alarm, the droids," Leah finished the story, "So we had to run away. And then you got shot."
"Well, fuck," I cursed, "now I understand why we're on the inter-sectoral wanted list. What a blow to the reputation of the police. " Then I started thinking about what we should do. "We need new identities. And we also need our old identities to die. Do you have an idea how to do this?"
"I don't know how it is in this sector, but in ours, some masters search all the databases and make new documents. I think there are some here, but how do we get in touch with them," Leah thought, "We are new to this sector and no one will give us contacts. Of course, we can contact my grandfather, he has contacts in the shadow world of this sector. "
"We will," it was clear that Lia was very reluctant to do this, but even she understood the need for this step. "What do you need to contact him?
"Access to the intersectoral communication network, ten forty-three is officially a dead sector, but there is a connection, and I'll send a coded message there, it will send a coded message back to the contacts," Leah answered, "Unfortunately, there is no direct connection."
"So, now the immediate plans are gradually beginning to take shape. Contact with your's grandfather, new documents. After that, we can think about Cardonix. Although, no, I think our immediate plans should be related to rest and food. By the way, this is the last food bar," I took a bar out of my pocket. We bought ten of them at the bus stop while waiting for the second bus.
"I have three more," Leah replied, taking out a bar as well, "I think tomorrow we should go to the village we saw and buy some food, and then think very carefully about what we are going to do. You're right, we shouldn't act impulsively. And now we can lie down right here, you're right, we can use the rest."
Only when I was relaxing on the floor did I realize how tired I was, I didn't even have the energy to analyze the events of the last few days, and in just a few minutes I passed out.
The next day, or rather evening, because we had slept for almost twenty hours, began with the fact that I urgently needed to go to the toilet. Now I was beginning to understand the yesterday dead why they had littered everything around, but I didn't want to do that, so I had to find my way outside and do my business there.
Almost a day after the massacre, there was almost no blood left around. And those places where it remained were covered with some insects. Well, that's one less problem.
"Are you okay?" Leah asked me, she had gotten off the boat for the same purpose as me.
"I think I'm fine, but I definitely have a problem with my head, I'm too calm about it all," I answered Leah, "But maybe that's a good thing? I can just imagine myself lying there crying hysterically."
"You're not going to do that," Leah laughed, "So, are you ready?" she asked me, coming out of the garbage pile.
"Yes, but before we go, we need to think about what we're going to do with this," I walked over to a box with more than fifty vials of purple shit in it. "If it's that stuff, it's worth tens of millions, even I don't have the heart to destroy it. " I said looking at the vials that contained something extremely dangerous.
"I had forgotten about this shit. By the way, the good news is that no one has come here in a whole day," Leah said, taking the vial out of the crate, "If I could give it to my great-grandfather, he's more of a droid guy, but I think he'd find something to do with it. I think we should put it in the shuttle and hide it in a room for now, I'll be back soon," she added, and picking up the crate, she pulled it inside the shuttle. About ten minutes later she finally returned. "Well, are you ready?
"I was ready before, I was waiting for you here," I smiled, "if we go in a straight line, we should be there in forty minutes. What should we take?" I asked Leah.
"Usually in such places they sell either what they catch or army rations, which is what I'm counting on. We also need to see what power supplies are available, although I think it's better to buy them there," Leah waved her hand toward the gate through which we entered this compartment.
After discussing our immediate plans, which hadn't changed, I asked Leah to tell me more about the world I was in. It made her laugh quite a bit, but she didn't mind, so I spent the next half hour listening to Xarlex.
The place I was in was a cesspool. Now each sector considered itself a separate state, in some sectors there were sectarians, in some there were kingdoms, and in some there were republics. Only in the central sectors were there laws that people lived by immediately after the resettlement.
According to the last census, which was taken about fifty years ago, more than one hundred million people lived at the station. That's a lot, but you had to understand that the station was huge. The station was based on a one-hundred-kilometer asteroid that was brought into the planet's orbit by aliens, and from that asteroid, the sectors of the station spread out in all directions like branches.
The part of the station that was in the middle of the asteroid was something like a slave state. Most of the population lived there, and it was there, inside, on special plantations that food for the entire station was grown. And no one wanted to be there. With very few exceptions, there were no modern technologies there, and according to gossip, even cannibalism flourished there, as all the products were sold to other sectors of the station. This interesting story had to be interrupted when we entered the village, which looked more or less like a normal settlement. It was even quite clean, and most importantly, there were people everywhere, lots of people, at least a couple thousand people.
"And there's the market, let's go there," Leah finished her story about Xarlex.