05 THE PLUME of smoke that filled the air around the deep quarry was thick and heavy, and even in the dimming light of dusk, it was clear to see it was the near-black colour of a Trutruxlian cherry. The heat though… the heat emanating from the great, grilled-front mining smelter built in the once snowy divot made the snows melt for half a land league around, which in turn made the entire floor of the quarry a mucky quagmire.

Bhig Bob Trumbeck leaned against the cheap, corrugated steel walls of the food stall, affectionately known as the Chop’n’Slop. Overbaked meat pie in hand, the big man scraped at one mud-caked boot with the other.

‘Damn this place,’ he said, giving up on the mud on his boots. The nearly ankle deep, sloshing mud was too much a constant battle to be worried about, really. He took a bite from the tough, chewy pastry he was palming and, dissatisfied, threw it into the mud. He spit out the overbaked piece in his mouth, and ran his tongue over his silvered, chromium-encased upper teeth.

‘Waste of creds, that,’ came a voice from across the way. Trumbeck looked from the meat pie floating on the muddy water to the speaker, and saw, through a nodding or bowing crowd, Dek Horton Greeley.

Trumbeck stood straight at the sight of the Dek, nodding as the others around did. ‘Dek, sir.’

‘Knock it off with that shit, Bhig,’ the Dek said, waving his hand at the large man. ‘I’ve told you to hell with my title. It means nothing out here.’

‘Old habits die hard, sir,’ replied Bhig Trumbeck, smoothing down his bushy beard with his left hand. ‘Grabbing a bite to eat?’

Greeley looked at Trumbeck’s discarded meat pie and grinned, ‘Not from the Slop, Bhig. Come, walk with me.’

Trumbeck moved from the steel food stall and fell in line with the Dek, the crowd moving out of their way as they leisurely strolled. Bhig Bob Trumbeck always found how lax the Dek was a bit unsettling, what with the man wearing no signs of armour or weaponry; even as warm as the smelter furnaces kept the quarry, they were still hundreds and hundreds of kilometres north into the Taiga, and cold settled here like nowhere else, yet the Dek wore no harsh-environment clothing. Hell, he wore not even a jacket at all, but rather ran about his day in shirtsleeves. Bhig Bob Trumbeck didn’t feel nearly the same level of comfort as the Dek, and wore his heavy and well worn matte tan atmospheric suit as much as he could -- though the bulbously spherical helm of opaque black-azure glass he left in his spartan quarters in favour of a short, cylindrical military shako.

And Trumbeck went nowhere without his particle destabiliser rifle, an antiquated model but far more powerful than the modern atomizers utilized by police and military forces galaxy-wide -- far more powerful, certainly, but also far more illegal. Trumbeck shouldered the particle destabiliser rifle for all to see.

This was a hard weapon for a hard man, the neon black-azure hazard striping branded above his right eye to attest to that…

Vanextroc Legion.

‘Whiin Flaun says rough estimates detect at least a gigatonne of platinum-group ore,’ said Dek Greeley, a smile creasing his smooth face. Trumbeck had heard the man was well over one hundred and sixty standard years old, but he didn’t look a day over fifty. These Consortium people, though… rejuvance skin grafts and organ harvesting could keep the monied young for centuries, and the intolerably wealthy alive for millennia.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Must be nice to have that sort of credits.

‘That’s good news, sir,’ Trumbeck answered, keeping his judgement of the Dek to himself.

Dek Greeley stopped and turned to the bigger, rougher man. ‘Three weeks, Bhig. We pull out of here in three weeks and head northwest six klicks to the next mine site.’

‘Understood.’

A steady thrumming was heard in the distance, and both the Dek and Bhig Trumbeck looked in its direction. A large brythm, hairy and wild, reared up on the inside of the gate to the refinery, and a small man slid down. He took something tied up and wreathing off the back of the steed and threw it to the mucky ground with a splash, and then grabbed something white in a net tied to the saddle.

‘Creel’s back, looks like,’ said Bhig.

Pocyrus Creel, dragging two heavy burdens with him, made his way to the two where they stood. He bowed his head to the Dek and wholly ignored Bhig Trumbeck. In his left hand, he threw forward the netting wrapped around what looked like a white fleece, the bundle sloshing forward in the ankle-deep muck water to rest close to the Dek’s boots.

‘Running perimeter, found more of the bastards,’ said Creel.

The Dek crouched down and untied the netting, letting the white furry body unravel at his feet. The lifeless black eyes looked up at him, the gnarled horns atop the head broken and splintered. ‘Dammit!’ exclaimed the Dek. ‘I thought we moved these things on for good! Their interference is trying my patience.’

‘They keep trying to come back here, but we’ve moved them off kilometres away, sir,’ answered Trumbeck. ‘They don’t pose a threat.’

‘This one wasn't even two klicks from the gate,’ shot back Creel with a satisfied grin. ‘Not doing as a good a job as you thought, eh, Legionnaire?’

Bhig Bob Trumbeck flicked his right wrist and a wicked-looking blade extended from the sleeve of his atmospheric suit with a crackle of an electro-transistor. He easily brought his destabiliser rifle to bear on Creel as if it were a simple, lightweight electrorod, and he took a big step towards the much smaller man; Creel just as quickly had drawn an atomiser from a low-slung holster.

‘Enough!’ yelled Dek Greeley, taking a step over the dead being entrapped in the net to stand between his two men. ‘I don’t pay you fools to nip at each other’s asses like dogs in heat, I pay you to take care of them,’ he pointed past the great gate of the quarry, ‘out there! Do it well, because I pay you well, or I will terminate your contracts.’

‘Sir,’ answered Trumbeck, snapping to attention, his gauntlet-blade retracting and he brought his destabiliser rifle back to his shoulder. Creel said nothing and turned, taking the wreathing package with him.

‘What is that?’ called Trumbeck.

Creel stopped and turned around, eyebrow raised.

‘Creel?’ called the Dek.

The small man took a deep breath and grunted, pulling part of the wrapped tarpaulin aside to show the face of a young girl, no more than thirteen or fourteen. ‘Spoils, Dek,’ Creel said sinisterly as he adjusted the crotch of his harsh-environment bibs. ‘Just my spoils for doing my fucking job out there.’

The Dek and Bhig Trumbeck watched Pocyrus Creel pull the young girl through the mud towards his ramshackle tent by her hair, the screams hauntingly echoing across the quarry. Workers paused for a split second to see what was happening, making sure not to make eye contact with Creel, before getting back to whatever it was they were just doing before they felt the shock from an overseer's electrorod.

‘Man’s a piece of shit, Dek,’ said Bhig.

‘But he’s good at what he does.’

‘I don’t give a shit if he’s the Legion’s Grand-General, he’s still a piece of shit.’

Dek Horton Greeley looked up at Bhig Bob Trumbeck, but didn’t respond to him. He just nodded and walked off in the direction of the great furnace.

Trumbeck watched Creel pull aside the entrance flap to his tent, throw the screaming girl inside, and close the flap behind them. ‘I’ll kill that piece of shit one day,’ he said, to no one but himself.