2946-12-18 - Tales from the Inbox: Serpent of the Spoil
Today's Tales from the Inbox features Dakila B., a spacer like most of this audience who had the unfortunate experience of living on the world of Anonga. While she promises that her life there was never dull, most of the miseries that she found there are not worth repeating. She did however wish to send us this account of a salvage operation - dubiously legal though it was - that went somewhat wrong.
For those of you who are fortunate not to be familiar with Anonga, it would have been considered an uninhabitable planet, except that its surface once held a number of lucrative titanium and tantalum deposits. The mines of this once-booming industrial world have one by one become exhausted, and now it is slowly depopulating itself, as the locals leave for greener worlds in nearby systems. Anonga would likely be completely abandoned already if it were not for the economic interests of the prospectors who regularly scour it for another big deposit to sell to the mining interests.
Dakila made the mistake of landing on this decaying world to make repairs to her ship, and could not leave for almost a year. Though she claims the reason for this was corrupt spaceport customs personnel, her readiness to perform unlicensed salvage work suggests that the customs clerks who impounded her ship may have had legitimate grounds - or at least a reasonable suspicion - upon which to do so.
When the pair of lighters touched down, Dakila was the first of the two pilots to undo her harness and plant her feet on the oily mud and gravel that passed for soil on Anonga. Above her, the line of behemoth mining crawlers, lined up as if still prepared for the return of their departed masters, cast long, jagged shadows across a plain that stretched to the horizon in every direction. She immediately regretted her haste; the rain-softened mine tailings and toxic runoff seemed to hungrily crawl up the formerly pristine gray sides of her boots.
The pilot of the second lighter, apparently taking a moment to reconsider the life choices which had brought him to Anonga, much less to the planet’s infamous Spoiled Plain, remained perched precariously on the lip of the tiny vessel’s cockpit. “You sure you need my help for this, Dakila?”
“Stay put, Knox.” With some difficulty, Dakila picked up her foot and took one uncertain step through the muck toward the line of abandoned machines. “I’m happy to take your share of the pay on this gig, if you’d rather not get your feet dirty.”
Though she didn’t turn to look, Dakila heard her partner’s boots hit – and then vanish into – the ground with a satisfyingly wet crunch. Knox, with his gambling debt, was in no position to be surrendering his share of Parson Yeung’s money just to keep his enviro-suit clean, and they both knew it. Dakila wasn’t in much better financial straits than her local partner in crime – if she could pay off the customs officials that had hard-locked her little ship to its berth, she wouldn’t be out on the Spoiled Plain doing off-the-books salvage work for local grandees – but she at least had a ship and a distant hope of someday leaving the toxic world.
“Huh. These things don’t look as haunted as I was expecting.” Knox’s false bravado wasn’t even persuading the man voicing it, much less Dakila. Superstition was common among the dwindling population of Anonga, and even a dour skeptic like Knox couldn’t avoid being touched by the madness of his world. Superstitious or no, he was a crack shot, and he knew most of the local fauna far better than Dakila did.
In truth, the eerily perfect line of decaying machines, wind whistling through their exposed skeletons between corroded scraps of plating, were the most ghostly thing Dakila had seen on Anonga since she’d landed. They were a relic of another time, when the world had seemed to have a future. “This one looks good. What do you think?” Fortunately, the gravel and toxic sludge seemed to provide more solid footing around the half-buried tracks of the towering crawlers, and instead of sinking in nearly to her ankles, the groundlocked spacer found herself on almost firm ground. The ladder bolted to the side of the towering machine was rusted through and missing several rungs, but the structural skeleton itself appeared easy enough to climb.
“I’ll try the one to your left.” The wet sound of his awkward footsteps across the mud were enough evidence of his forward progress. “Watch out for fangwinders.”
“Fang-what?”
“Fangwinders.” Knox’s tone indicated that he was surprised that she wasn’t familiar with the threat. “Very territorial. They’ll hole your suit.” This, of course, would expose Dakila to all the toxins that fouled the world’s atmosphere.
“Then why don’t you go first?” Dakila didn’t engage her suit comm to deliver this quip, of course. Knox wouldn’t be clambering up anything first. He would wait to make sure no otherworldly forces struck his partner down first. Checking her toolbelt, the spacer hoisted herself up onto the lowest-hanging strut, remembering the appearance of the part Parson Yeung needed to repair his parish generator. It would have cost twenty credits on any functioning world, or a hundred credits on any normal backwater, but on Anonga, only one rapid-fab mill on the whole planet could make it, and its owner was demanding ten thousand. Dakila and Knox would find one for seven hundred, if they had to pry apart the whole line of hulks to find it.
After rooting through several of the most likely places to find the right part, Dakila emerged empty-handed. “This one’s a bust, Knox. Any luck over there?”
Only the mournful wind and the creaking of the rusting titans answered. Both the lighters were still parked below; Dakila climbed down and slogged over to where Knox had indicated he would start his search. Footsteps in the mud led to the base of the machine, then vanished.
Dakila clambered up after her local partner. She still had seen nothing that could be called a fangwinder – nothing seemed to live anywhere on the Spoiled Plain – but that didn’t mean the place was safe. “Knox, where the hell did you get to?”
As she stepped onto a rickety catwalk, the spacer stumbled over a pile of loose parts, recently dislodged. Knox’s work, most likely – he seemed intent on carrying back as many parts as he could, to augment his winnings for the unpleasant task. It was immediately apparent that the whole pile was worth only a few credits; barely worth hauling back given the limited cargo weight of a lighter. “Come on, this stuff’s worthless. Did you find it?”
“I found it.” The distant voice came not through the radio, but echoing up from the bowels of the mining crawler. “I’m going to need some help prying it loose.”
“On my way.” Dakila found a likely passage down and began to climb. She hoped fervently that Knox had not damaged the necessary part in his efforts. At least if he had, she would know where to look on the other wrecks for another.
When she was halfway down, Dakila heard a whine outside – the noise, she realized, of a lighter’s turbofan. This was accompanied by a crash, and a splintering noise. By the time she recovered from her confusion and began to hurriedly scramble out of the hole she had been coaxed into, the sound was already changing pitch and dwindling into the air as Knox’s lighter climbed to cruise altitude for the return to Yeung’s parish. Most likely, he had taken the part, and as much odd salvage as he could carry.
“Bastard.” Dakila muttered, even before she extracted herself and spied the tiny, dark wings of Knox’s lighter against the western sky. He would have the whole payment in his pocket by the time she got back, and she wouldn’t see a single credit.
That wasn’t the end of his treachery, though. Dakila’s own lighter lay torn half-open, its ultralight airframe shredded by an impact. If she had to guess, Knox had intentionally rammed it with the durable landing skids of his own craft on his way into the sky, hoping to further slow her pursuit by damaging the aerodynamics of her ride home. Unfortunately, he had done so thorough a job the craft that it was beyond all airworthiness and hope of repair. Even if the turbofan could be made to work, her lighter would never fly again.
Fortunately, Dakila kew that the way back to the parish was blocked only by the trackless artificial wasteland of the Spoiled Plain. It was too far to walk before her enviro-suit powerpack bled dry, but, standing on the catwalk of a hundred-year-old mining crawler, she knew she had other options. Her lighter would never fly again, but its powerplant looked intact; perhaps it would be enough to coax one of the dead mining machines back to life.
