Tech Scavengers [Humorous, Action-Packed Space Opera]

As was usual on the long flights between star systems, life on the Antikythera settled down into a familiar routine.

Jeridan and Negasi made regular checks of the ship's systems, worked out in the tiny gym, and beat each other to a pulp in the holocabin. Aurora joined the holographic crowd to give some real cheers and applause, while Nova busied herself with tasks around the ship. Much of the time, their boss holed up in her cabin with a tablet. Jeridan and Negasi didn't ask what she was doing, and they were never told.

The S'ouzz remained in its quarters in astronavigation, only communicating with the rest of the ship when absolutely necessary. Mason didn't put in much more of an appearance than the alien. Jeridan and Negasi only saw him at meals, or sometimes in the room with his sister they used for lessons. He said almost nothing to them besides hello, but now and then, Jeridan would catch him staring at them with an appraising look that was so serious, so direct, he didn't seem like a kid at all. It would only last a moment. As soon as Mason saw Jeridan had noticed, he'd look down at his food and not look at them for the rest of the meal.

Once they made it more than a light year away from Sagitta Prime, they saw no other ships, not even on the long-range sensors.

Everyone felt grateful for that. The only ships that got this far off the beaten path were smugglers or slavers, making illegal deliveries or stealing people from backwater planets. You did not want to bump into another ship off the usual trade routes.

They also didn't see any signs of pursuit. Nova confidently said they had shaken the Syndicate mercenaries. Jeridan and Negasi kept a sharp watch all the same.

At last, Capella Epsilon grew brighter than the surrounding stars. Jeridan, Negasi, and Nova took shifts on the long-range sensors, watching for any unusual signals. Of course MIRI could do that better than any human or S'ouzz, but even the most advanced AI had limited capabilities of analysis. Some jobs were still done better by crew members grown paranoid by being too far from civilized space.

The sensors showed no signs of danger. After another day the star, a G-type main sequence star like Sol, resolved itself into a ball. The sensors picked up five planets and a thick asteroid belt. The S'ouzz dropped below light speed to navigate the system's Oort Cloud. While he had pulled off one near-light-speed trip through a solar system, it was not something to try unless in imminent danger of becoming dinner.

Everyone studied the long-range scans of the system. The innermost planet was a burned-out husk of rock too close to the sun to support life. The second planet wasn't much better, although it had enough of an atmosphere that MIRI suggested it could be terraformed with enough funding, giving an outlandish figure that showed why it never had been. The two outer planets were gas giants, each with their own system of dozens of moons.

It was the third planet that really caught their attention—a brownish-green world with about 35 percent water scattered in a few small seas. The land was dry, with green bands along a few equatorial rivers.

They got a better analysis as they drew closer. Much of the land mass consisted of rocky, dusty desert. There was little cloud cover, little rainfall, and thanks to the planet being 1.2 Earth Standard Gravity and slightly closer to the sun, any planetfall would be a hot, uncomfortable visit.

Jeridan and Nova were in the cockpit when the S'ouzz got them through the Oort Cloud. Jeridan took over the helm. He flicked on the ship-wide comm system and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is your captain speaking. We are nearly at our destination. As per my contract, I've gotten you there safe and sound. Aren't I amazing? Why yes, I am."

Negasi cut in. "The S'ouzz got us here, idiot."

He turned up the gain on his comm link right at the end, so the word "idiot" came out at an ear-splitting volume and echoed through the corridors of the Antikythera.

Then Aurora cut in. "And I'm not a girl."

"Right," Jeridan said. "Young lady. You're certainly more mature than our gunner."

"You're both losers," Aurora shot back.

Jeridan raised his hands in helpless despair. "You see what I have to contend with? How can I continue to be awesome under these conditions? And yet I manage it. It really is a miracle."

"Could you just fly the ship, please?" Nova said.

"Righto. I'm going to pass by the outer gas giant. Long-range sensors detect a space station orbiting it."

Nova went pale. "Operational?"

Her voice came out high, almost a shriek. Odd for someone who was usually so poised.

"No sign of that. It's probably been stripped. Worth a look, though. Didn't you check when you were last here?"

"We came in at a different angle and didn't even get close to the gas giant."

And your sensors didn't pick it up?

Jeridan decided not to ask. Working on this ship, he had learned not to ask questions you'd never get a straight answer to.

"Um, OK. I want to look."

Checking out the station was more force of habit than a feeling there might actually be something there. Still, it was always a good idea to check.

Jeridan steered the Antikythera closer to the gas giant, admiring the pale red and yellow bands of clouds and their complicated swirls and eddies. Sights like that never grew old for him, no matter how many systems he visited. They passed a large, rocky moon, the sensors picking up the remains of a mining colony. He scaled up the sensors and saw nothing of value—a few old buildings pockmarked by asteroid impacts, and some heavy machinery that was too bulky to remove and not valuable enough as scrap.

"Looks like it got looted ages ago," Nova said.

Jeridan nodded and accelerated the ship toward the space station, which hung in a lower orbit.

It had been stripped clean. The transmission equipment was all gone, the solar panels vanished, and the airlocks had been removed. There had been nothing but vacuum inside the station for generations. Even some of the protective plating was gone.

"There's nothing," Jeridan muttered. "I bet the satellites around the habitable planet are all gone too."

"They are," Nova said.

Typical. Jeridan couldn't count how many burnt-out hulks of the old Imperium he had come across in his scavenge runs. If they hadn't been destroyed in the Galactic Civil War, scavengers had gotten to them decades before he had been a glint in a slum dweller's eye.

All that remained was just a sad, worthless remnant of the past that wasn't even worth towing away as scrap. The fuel consumption to get it to a system where it could actually be recycled would cost far more than what all that steel was worth.

"Are there ghosts there?" someone asked over the comm link. It took Jeridan a moment to realize it was Mason. The kid had spoken so little in the past week, Jeridan could barely recognize his voice.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"Ghosts aren't real, kiddo," Jeridan said.

"There are ghosts there," Mason replied with conviction.

Jeridan suppressed a shudder. In a way, the kid was right. Seeing these old hulks always made him feel a bit spooked, but even more, it made him feel embarrassed. The intelligent species of the Orion Arm, led by the human race, had achieved so much, and then pissed it all away on a pointless civil war that everyone lost.

If it hadn't been for that war, this space station would be full of people. That moon they had passed would be honeycombed with mines. The planet they were heading to would be advanced and wealthy, instead of a primitive backwater no one ever visited or even thought of helping.

And all because of the jump gates going down.

Who had done that, anyway? There were a million theories, but no one actually knew.

Jeridan sighed. No point thinking about that, or about those reports on the edge of the Orion Arm about some sort of invasion. He had enough to worry about right here on this ship. Nova kept too many secrets, and he didn't believe for a minute that the Syndicate had given up the hunt. He didn't know how they'd find them, but they would.

First thing first, he thought. Let's get that memory chip off the planet and get out of here. Negasi and I can get our share and once we get to the first civilized world, we can jump ship and find an employer who isn't being hunted by giant intelligent insects.

Not too much to ask, is it?

Jeridan put on some extra speed and escaped the gas giant's gravity. It took only half an hour to get to Capella Epsilon. Jeridan settled the Antikythera into a high orbit. While Nova had reported the local tech level to be pretty low, he didn't want to take any chances of getting spotted. Then he started a detailed scan of the planet.

There were no satellites in orbit, which didn't surprise him at all. Any satellites that had survived the Civil War would have been scavenged or decayed in their orbits decades, if not centuries, ago. The planet interested him more.

The scans reinforced his initial impression from the long-range scanners—a dry world with a few green river valleys and shallow, salty seas. The oxygen levels were good and the pollution nearly nonexistent, just trace elements of limited wood and coal burning.

The Antikythera had come onto the day side and Jeridan zoomed the optics in on one of the larger of the green areas. A faint trace of smoke led him to a settlement. He zoomed in further.

He saw earthworks around a small town that couldn't have housed more than a thousand people. The houses appeared to be made of mud-brick with thatched roofs. In the center of the town stood a second compound, the walls of this made of metal plates and wooden beams, the plates probably scavenged long ago from some old ruin dating to when this had been a mining colony. He saw towers at each corner and larger houses of wood with tile roofs inside.

Zooming out, he saw a larger shantytown outside the city walls. Jeridan grimaced. That looked a bit too much like the one he'd grown up in outside the walls of his home world's lone spaceport.

Following the flow of the river, he came across smaller villages dotted among cultivated fields and patches of woodland.

"Notice how all the villages cluster near the main town?" Nova said.

"Yeah, and they all have walls around them, even the smallest hamlets. I don't see any isolated farms either. Some of these farmers have a long way to walk to get to their fields."

"Bandits," Nova said.

"MIRI," Jeridan said, "Scan for more settlements and give us a global population estimate. We'll do a couple of orbits to give you a full sample size."

"Working," MIRI said.

"That's not necessary," Nova said. "Let's just get down there and get what we came for."

"This world's hardly ever visited. I want to gather some information on it."

"We're wasting time," Nova objected.

"I'll power the engines so we'll do the orbits quicker," Jeridan said, hitting a few buttons. "We can make two orbits in twenty minutes. In the meantime, why don't you get the shuttlecraft ready?"

Nova's lips tightened. "We don't have a shuttlecraft."

"What do you mean we don't have a shuttlecraft?"

Aurora's voice cut in on the comm link. "Mom sold it."

"Do you always listen in on your mother's conversations?" Jeridan asked.

"Yes."

"Quiet, Aurora," Nova snapped. "Yeah, I sold it. We'll take the Antikythera down."

"Why did you sell it?" Jeridan said. Taking an interstellar journey without a shuttlecraft? He'd never heard of such a thing.

"Why does anyone sell anything? We needed the money."

Jeridan shook his head. They'd been on the ship for more than a week and she had never mentioned they lacked a basic piece of equipment. He had simply assumed the shuttlecraft bay had a shuttlecraft in it and had never checked. Now he wondered what was in its place.

This created a problem. A ship the size of the Antikythera would look like a giant meteor entering the atmosphere. The entire region would notice them landing. So much for sneaking onto a savage world.

"Negasi, gear up."

"Already gearing up," his gunner grumbled.

Guess he had been listening in too.

"Here are the coordinates," Nova said, sending the information to the pilot's readouts.

He checked and found they lay on the day side. The ship was just passing onto the night side now, a nearly complete mass of black with only a few pinpoints of light from little settlements strung out along the rivers.

After a couple of orbits, MIRI announced, "Estimated global population is 25 million with a margin of error of ten percent."

"Twenty-five million for an entire planet," Jeridan whispered. "Damn. I wonder how many people lived here before the Civil War?"

"Records are incomplete," MIRI said. "Estimating from planets of similar size and resources, the pre-Civil War population would have been 1.2 billion with a margin of error of five percent."

Jeridan felt his chest tighten. No one said anything.

Slowly they passed over the night side and came back to the day side of the planet. Jeridan checked the coordinates and saw they corresponded to an abandoned mineshaft a few kilometers from a fortified village. The village stood in a patch of scrubland on the margins of a desert, a tiny river wending its way through the rock and sand the only feature giving this bleak region some life. The mine stood in a tangle of rugged hills a few kilometers away from the river valley.

"They're going to see us," Jeridan grumbled.

"Those villagers are scared," Nova said. "They won't venture out to see what we're doing."

"Scared of what? Bandits? The Antikythera is the best scavenge this planet has seen for generations."

"Just land," Nova ordered. "We'll get in and get out as fast as we can."

"Yes, ma'am," Jeridan grumbled.

"No attitude, please. If I wanted attitude, I'd speak to Aurora."

"I heard that!" Aurora said.

"We need to make a private cockpit comm," Jeridan said.

"At least we agree on something," Nova replied.

It would be nice if we agreed that my position as captain deserves some respect.

Jeridan took the Antikythera in steep, coming at a hard angle that stretched the heat shield to its limits. As the viewscreen opaqued to save their eyes from the flaring glow around their ship, Jeridan kept a sharp watch on the readouts. He wanted to get in as quickly as possible and across the least area as possible. The fewer people down there who noticed their entry, the better.

The Antikythera shuddered with the strain, but the ship was well built and held up. After a couple of minutes the heat around the ship lessened, the viewscreen cleared, and they saw they were flying above rough terrain of steep, rocky hills and narrow ravines. Jeridan zeroed in on the coordinates and spotted the mineshaft. In front was a large open area of ruins and rusted hulks. The remains of the processing plant, long since stripped of anything remotely useful.

Nova pointed to the north. "See that mesa a few clicks away? Land there and we'll take the hovercar. I don't want them seeing where we're headed."

"I'll go," Negasi said over the comm link. "Jeridan, you stay with the ship and be ready for a quick takeoff. I'm better in a fight."

"That's not true!"

"Yes, it is!"

"No, it isn't!"

"MIRI, what's the current score in—"

"You leave MIRI out of this!"

"Will you two oversized children stop arguing?" Nova said. "Negasi will go with me. You stay here and keep an eye out for trouble."

"Will do," Jeridan grumbled.

Nova left the cockpit while Jeridan, still grumbling, brought the Antikythera to hover above the mesa. After a brief scan to make sure no barbarians were about to chuck spears at them or start a cult and raise Jeridan to godhood, he lowered the landing gear and settled the ship on a relatively level portion of the rock.

Negasi's voice came over the comm link. "We'll get this done and get back as soon as we can, buddy."

"You do that." Dead worlds like this always gave Jeridan the creeps. To think that a few generations ago it was alive with cities and factories, the skies full of transports, a jump gate just a couple of days' flight away, and now the place had lost 99% of its population and gone back to the Neolithic …

… it was too much to wrap your head around.

Jeridan studied the surrounding landscape. The mesa measured about five hundred meters by two hundred meters of bare, mostly flat rock standing a little taller than the surrounding hills. The rock was a light tan color, occasionally streaked with layers of red. A few bushes with strange, circular leaves clung to cracks in the rock. Something that looked like a small lizard darted from one shadow to another. Some sort of insect buzzed past the rear viewscreen. Otherwise, he saw no sign of life. Not even any birds.

An indicator light came on, showing the door to the cargo bay had opened. Jeridan switched the external view and saw the hovercar shoot out with Nova at the helm and Negasi in the passenger's seat wearing combat armor and gripping a slug rifle.

Jeridan nodded in approval. Knowing his pal, he'd brought along a few bombs as well. He was always ready for a fight and damn deadly in one. Strange that he kept losing at chessboxing.

The hovercar gained altitude and darted off to the south.

Jeridan settled back in his pilot's seat to wait, idly looking around at the parched and dreary landscape.

It was then that he saw the smoke signals.