Tech Scavengers [Humorous, Action-Packed Space Opera]

Jeridan peered down the darkened corridors and rooms, his headlamp lighting his way.

"Where should we go first?" he asked Negasi.

"We're spoiled for choice. Hold on."

The gunner pulled out his tablet and brought up the station schematic Poopsie had created on its recon mission. The thing had gone down every corridor and examined every open room. It had missed all the closed ones. Jeridan tried not to worry about that. They had done a deep scan from within the station and found no heat or power signatures.

The interior walls wouldn't shield those, would they?

Jeridan gripped his heavy slug rifle tried not to show his fear. He didn't want Negasi ribbing him. And the more he thought about the salvageable tech in this place, the more his fear was replaced by greed.

"Poopsie found a locked door marked Armory," Negasi said. "We should check that out."

"Can we call the combat mech something other than Poopsie? It sounds stupid."

Negasi shrugged. "Aurora named it after her dead dog. She'd be upset if we changed it now."

"Kids are annoying."

"Not as annoying as you."

"You're just annoyed because I'm a better chessboxer than you."

"In your dreams," Negasi snorted.

"In my reality!"

"Yeah, right."

"Just find a good spot for some plunder."

Negasi studied the tablet again. "Fine, but I'm still the better chessboxer. That android sounded good. Maybe we should get that first. We'd need something to carry it on. Hmm. How about we go to the hanger? Nova said there wasn't a ship there but maybe we could find a cart we could load up with goodies."

"Good plan. Let's go. We might find some goodies there, too."

They gave each other a high five and headed for the central stairwell. Despite getting the all-clear from their inappropriately named combat mech, Jeridan still felt exposed walking down the clattering steps, each footfall echoing into the vast darkness of the station.

Negasi must have felt spooked too, because he kept turning his head, shining his headlamp in all directions, the muzzle of his rifle following his gaze.

It was that old tech scavenger superstition. They had never seen a ghost, didn't even believe in them, but exploring dead old Imperium ruins always got their hackles up. Jeridan had never met a tech scavenger who didn't feel at least a little illogical dread when searching through an ancient place.

And this one was so big. Bigger than anything he had ever explored except for some ruined cities. With the cities, at least, you could stand in the outdoors and soak in the sunlight. Here was nothing but a huge, silent tomb floating in the void.

Four levels down, they got to the hanger. They had already seen the ship that had once docked here. She was the Brunel, and after the collapse of the jump gate system she had gone to the nearest inhabited planet, New Sahel. It was a hot, arid mining world that could not grow enough food to feed its population. Not a problem when the jump gates made transport a matter of days. Disastrous once the jump gates disappeared.

New Sahel had been marooned weeks away from the nearest inhabited world, at a time when all the other planets were suffering as well.

The Brunel had taken all the food and medicine from this station to help.

It hadn't been enough. Their distress beacon, still transmitting three hundred years later, was never answered. The population starved and the crew of the Antikythera found nothing but a dead planet.

The door from the corridor to the hanger was closed. Jeridan opened a service panel in the wall next to it, attached an external power source, and turned on the viewscreen and monitoring system. The external hanger doors were closed, as he already knew, and he discovered that the air had automatically cycled back into the hanger.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

So the crew of the Brunel must have left the power on as they left, or had a final crewmember switch everything off before coming out of the airlock. That was more likely. He didn't think they just left the station to slowly run down lose power. They must have switched off the reactor and left everything as-is in the hope that they would come back someday.

Jeridan and his companions wouldn't know for sure until they took a look.

Negasi took peered at the viewscreen. "I don't see any combat mechs plugged in anywhere."

Not that they could see well. Jeridan had only been able to power up a single light above the door, which only feebly penetrated the hanger's interior.

"That's a plus. Doesn't make sense that they'd have any here anyway. But we're not going to power anything else up. We're just going to get a dolly or something."

They opened up the door, each taking a protected position to the side of it.

Looking down the sight of his rifle, Jeridan scanned the room, his headlamp shining further than the light above the door.

The interior was mostly empty. A forklift stood to one side, as did a really tempting hovercar that was sadly too big to take through the corridors. Something else caught his attention, though.

It was a flat platform the size of a small dinner table with a raised handle. It was clamped to the floor like everything else so it didn't get moved when the outer hanger opened.

Jeridan approached, Negasi at his side. Something about that thing jogged a memory, something he had seen in an old Imperium film clip.

While a lot of video evidence of the old empire had vanished or was jealously guarded by scientific institutes or planetary governments, enough was available to the public that Jeridan and Negasi had spent countless hours watching and rewatching everything they could get their hands on. The real trick was to find what was real and what had been made by AI. A lot of those very same scientific institutes and planetary governments created excellent fakes in order to mislead their rivals down dead ends of research. Video dealers did the same, making interesting clips they could sell for lots of credits to clueless customers.

The clip he remembered this platform from was probably not AI. It had been too short and there had been nothing exceptional in it, just a street scene.

A street scene with one of these in the background.

"I know what this is. It's an antigrav transporter."

"A what?" Negasi asked.

"What it says, dummy. It worked with antigrav technology. See those controls on the handle? I guess that's so you can switch the antigrav on or off."

"How do you know so much about it?"

"A data packet of rare Imperium clips I bought on Latimer station a few years before I made the mistake of teaming up with you. Cost me a whole case of Grun'hon slop."

"Who would trade in that gunk? It stinks more than the aliens that eat it."

It was true. The Grun'hon were giant mounds of flesh and muscle and rage. They smelled as bad as their attitude. Their food smelled worse.

"Damn right it does. But I held my nose and shipped those monsters a whole crate of the stuff, the best brand credits can buy."

"So what went wrong?" Negasi asked.

"Why do you think something went wrong?"

"Because something always goes wrong with you."

"That's not true! Well, OK, this time it did. Things usually go wrong when the Grun'hon are involved. Turned out the stuff had gone bad. How was I supposed to know? The stuff smells awful even when it's fresh, and since it was contraband, it wasn't in its original packaging. No sell-by date."

"You didn't kill any of them, did you?"

"Takes a grenade to kill one of those things. No, it just gave them serious flatulence. Ever smell a Grun'hon fart? It feels like your eyes and nostrils are burning. Even my eardrums hurt. I broke out in hives, too."

"You're lucky they didn't kill you."

"The whole station was lucky it didn't die of asphyxiation. They had to evacuate an entire deck. I got out quick, learned my lesson, and never did that again. Anyway, the clip shows a street scene somewhere. I think it was from an entertainment vid because the two girls talking were beautiful, like actresses, the kind who like me and don't even notice you. In the background, a delivery guy had one of these. It only appears for a second. It's floating in the air and he pushes it along as if it doesn't weigh a thing."

"All right, let's get it turned on."

They walked over to it. Negasi pulled out an external power source and plugged it into the power outlet he found on the back of the platform.

Jeridan hit the power button and a simple display lit up. Instructions in Old Imperium Standard asked to input the local gravity level. It was already set to 1, the gravity of Earth and the gravity of this station.

He and Negasi removed the clamps around the platform.

A button said "activate/deactivate". He pressed it and it floated up to waist level.

"Wow!" he and Negasi said in unison.

Negasi hopped on. The antigrav transporter didn't dip a millimeter.

Jeridan swung it around, Negasi laughing, and raced for the door. Grinning evilly, he gave it a big push and Negasi and the platform flew out ahead.

"Hey!"

The platform slowed and stopped within a couple of meters.

"Damn, it resisted me. I couldn't get a good push," Jeridan said.

"It must have an IQ detector."

"Yeah. It realized you were too dumb to jump off and so it saved you."

"Shut up and let's get going."

Jeridan opened the door and swung the platform out into the corridor. Pushing it was effortless, even with Negasi sitting on it, and yet it had an inertia that kept the user from overcompensating. He jogged down the corridor, only the feel of the handle telling him he was pushing anything at all.

"Let's get that android Poopsie found and then take a look in the armory," Negasi said.

"Good plan."

Just then, a loud female voice echoed through the corridors. It spoke in Old Imperium Standard, its voice booming from every PA speaker in the place.

"All high-ranking personnel please report at once to the command center."

Jeridan froze, a cold prickling dancing all over his skin.

They had just met their first ghost.