Tech Scavengers [Humorous, Action-Packed Space Opera]

"Let's play this cool," Negasi said. "I'll talk to them and try to get them to go away."

They brought the hovercycles down for a landing in front of the statue.

"Cool, hovercycles!" one of the drinkers said.

Negasi saw they were mostly teenagers, a couple of the older ones in their early twenties. Their bodies were tall and gangly thanks to their youth and the lower gravity on their home world. They wore jumpsuits like spacers, adorned with flashy decals Negasi supposed were the latest fashion. He doubted any had ever been to space, or ever would. Poor kids.

They stood, some gripping bottles, and walked over to the hovercycles. A bottle clanked and rolled across the polished tiles of the square as one of the teens stumbled over it.

"How you doing, boys?" Negasi said in Sino-Amharic.

"Good," the eldest one said. "You're not from here, are you?"

Negasi glanced at Nova. "How could you tell?"

The kid must have caught Negasi's look because he grinned and said, "Oh, not because of her. We got some Anglos on this planet. It's because you're so short."

"Grew up in one G," Negasi said.

"Cool!" one of the younger kids said. "Which ship you come in on? What planet are you from?"

The boy's words came out slurred. He looked too young to drink, not that Negasi could judge. He had started earlier than this kid.

"I'm from Butara Prime. Boring farm planet. Got out as soon as I could."

"I've heard of it!" one of the other kids said. He sounded more sober, until he ended his sentence with a belch. "You export seeds all over the Orion Arm."

Negasi cocked his head. "I'm impressed."

"The traders sell programs from other worlds to the vidchannels here. We watch all the docos."

Negasi nodded. He'd seen this before. They hardly even had a local accent. Bored kids itching to get off-planet and sucking up every show about other worlds so they could to feed the dream.

"So you guys want to be spacers?" Negasi asked. He was breaking the ice pretty good here. Just what he needed for when he suggested what he planned to suggest.

"Sure!" another of the younger ones said. "The Powerful And Just Father Of All His Loving Peoples is building a space fleet."

Negasi seriously doubted that.

The belcher belched again, then added, "But we'd never leave Makayamawe Prime permanently."

"This is the closest planet to paradise anywhere in the Orion Arm," they all said in unison.

Probably had to learn that in school.

The belching kid took a bottle one of his friends passed him, took a swig, farted just for a change of pace, then turned to Nova.

"Where are you from?" This was asked in Terran Standard, in a careful, grammatically correct way that showed the teen earned high marks in school but never got a chance to use the language in real life.

Good question. I've been working with you for months and you never told me.

And I never ask because you lie all the time.

"I'm from the Xylerian system."

"That's pretty remote," the oldest kid said.

Remote enough that I can't check if it's true.

"Can we ride your hovercycles?" one of the younger ones asked, wide-eyed and eager. He spoke Terran Standard too. Looked like the local dictator invested in education, at least for kids rich enough to lounge around the main square drinking all night.

Nova grinned. "Do you have your parents' permission?"

"Who cares what they think?" one of them declared, puffing out his skinny chest.

Negasi looked around. He didn't see anyone else in the square.

"Tell you what," he said, looking at the oldest two. "We'll let you ride them, and give you some more money for booze, but you need to help us first."

"How?"

"You guys look like you're pretty hooked up with the nightlife here."

"Hell, yeah!"

"Good. We have another crewmember who's coming here in a minute. He's going to bring us some money but doesn't want to be seen, all right? So I need you to get out of the square for a few minutes and find us a dealer, someone with good quality weed. We've heard you grow some good stuff here. Don't come back for at least fifteen minutes, because my friend with the hard currency needs time to come and go. Bring back the dealer, we'll make a deal, and give you something for your trouble. How does that sound?"

The two oldest boys looked at each other, turned back to Negasi, and pulled out badges.

"You are charged with soliciting illegal narcotics and contributing to the delinquency of a minor," one of them said. "You're under arrest."

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No one looked as surprised as the two undercover officers' young friends.

"You're … you're feds?" the belching kid said. He looked so betrayed that he might start crying.

"That's right. The Powerful And Just Father Of All His Loving Peoples watches over all his Loving Peoples, just as a Powerful And Just Father should."

"But we were only having fun!" another kid whined.

"You're not in trouble, but know that we are watching. We are always watching. There are thousands of undercover police in all levels of society. We are here to keep you safe from bad influences, such as these spacers looking for drugs. Ma'am, get your hands out of your pockets!"

This command was accompanied by the officer whipping out a small concealed gun. It looked like an old-style firearm that shot lead bullets, although it was of such a strange design Negasi couldn't be sure. He didn't want to find out either.

Nova yanked her hands out of her pockets and clapped them over her face, wailing, "Don't hurt me!"

She's up to something. Negasi, keeping his hands in the air, took a step away from her. The second cop pulled out a gun and pointed it at him.

"Don't move!"

The kids gasped. At first Negasi thought it was because of the guns. He sure felt like gasping himself. Then he noticed they were all staring at Nova.

Yellow smoke started billowing out of her pocket.

"Did you fart?" one of the kids asked.

Negasi dropped and rolled for the guy covering him. The cop had turned to look at the strange sight and didn't react in time to plug the galaxy's best chessboxer before he undercut his legs. As the cop fell, Negasi delivered an uppercut to the point of his jaw.

The man fell like a sack of oats right on top of him, knocking the air out of Negasi's lungs. Negasi automatically took a deep breath and felt his lungs fill with fire. The yellow gas from Nova's pocket had turned into a cloud encompassing everyone, and as he struggled for breath, he saw all the kids coughing and staggering away. Nova, seemingly unaffected, kicked the remaining cop's gun out of his hand and followed up with a roundhouse kick to the head.

The guy went down for the count.

Negasi struggled to get the other cop off him, his vision fading for lack of oxygen. If he hadn't gotten the wind knocked out of him a moment before getting gassed, he'd have managed, but all he ended up doing was flailing like a fish on a riverbank until Nova hauled the guy off him and dragged Negasi out of the cloud.

He lay there for a second, gulping clean air, or what passed for clean air in this dump of a world. Once he got his senses back enough to look around, he saw the kids had gotten out too and were kneeling on the ground, breathing heavily.

"You all OK?" he managed to choke out.

One let out a belch. "Damn, she really let it rip. What did she eat?"

Nova came up to Negasi, carrying both the police firearms. Negasi noticed she had a nose filter crimped over her nostrils.

"So that's why you put your hands to your face."

"Well, I didn't do that out of ladylike fear."

"I would have never expected that of you," Negasi said, struggling to his feet with her help. "Did you really need to gas the kids?"

"They'll be fine. Let's get this done."

"What about security cameras?" Negasi said, looking around, his head still swimming. "You said there would be security cameras."

Nova held up a small device. "Fixed those on the way in. The cameras are all running the same five-minute loop from just before we came into view."

"Whoever's monitoring is going to notice the kids going through the same motions."

"Not for a minute or two. Let's get this done."

He and Nova went to the hovercycles, Negasi glancing over at the teens to check on them. They seemed to be recovering all right. One cradled his wrist and cursed.

"I think I sprained it when I fell," he moaned to his friends.

Negasi shot Nova an angry look, but his boss didn't seem to notice.

They ascended on the hovercycles to the level of the ancient ship. Negasi moved in close to the side hatch and reached for the handle when he noticed the door had been fitted with a magnetic lock. A fairly modern model, too. Must have been an import.

Not a problem. His head had cleared now, and so he flipped open a toolkit he had fixed to the side of the hoverbike and grabbed a demagnetizing lockpick. Technically illegal on any planet that had some semblance of a legal system, but then again so was breaking and entering.

He touched the lockpick through the lock and smiled as the lock snapped open.

"Good job," Nova said. "I'll keep watch while you go in. Look on the bulkhead beneath where the bridge controls would have been. You should find a serial number there. Take a photo with this."

She handed him a tablet.

"Righto. Try not to incapacitate any drunken adolescents while I'm gone."

Nova didn't reply. Negasi remembered what that data hacker on Latimer Station had told him.

Stick with Nova. I know she's not the easiest person to get along with sometimes, and you probably don't like being left in the dark, but stick with her. She needs a friend, and you'll witness history in the making.

History in the making. As in bringing the jump gates back online to rebuild the galaxy and maybe deal with that alien invasion from the rim. He was on board with that. But he didn't like how Nova used that noble goal to justify doing anything she damn well pleased.

The irritation he felt vanished as he stepped into the ship's dark interior.

Negasi had been inside many Imperium ruins—an orbital station near the Teminan home world, a crashed destroyer on the ice moon of Rigel Beta, and most recently a scientific base on Capella Epsilon. No matter how decrepit these old installations had become, no matter how stripped by previous tech scavengers, he always felt a little prickle of awe when he entered one. It was like stepping back in time, back to a golden age when the galaxy had been at peace and even the most remote world could enjoy a bit of prosperity and connection to the rest of known space.

Negasi pulled out a flashlight from his pocket, flicked it on, and gasped.

He found himself in a corridor running down the starboard side of the ship. Two open doorways stood to his left, and ahead was another doorway leading to the bridge.

Heart beating fast with the thrill, Negasi walked down the short corridor, peering into the side rooms. As he had expected, everything had been stripped, the walls now bare spaces with only a few bolts to show where equipment had been. In the second room, however, a bunkbed remained in place. Negasi paused, wondering who had slept there and what their lives had been like. He wondered how many worlds those spacers got to explore in the days when the jump gates still worked and interstellar voyages took hours or days rather than weeks or months.

Negasi forced himself to concentrate on the mission. If it wasn't for the raiders honing in on their ship, and the cops lying unconscious down below, he could have stood here and dreamed all night.

Stepping onto the bridge, he found it stripped except for a low shelf that had once held the main console. The walls were blank metal. Instead of glassteel, the designers had relied on computer projections of the outside. He knelt down to look under the shelf. It took a moment of shining his flashlight around before he saw the serial number stamped on the bulkhead, nearly invisible under a coating of dust.

"We got company!" Nova shouted from outside.

"Cack!" Negasi wiped away the dust with the sleeve of his jumpsuit and took a couple of photos with the tablet.

"Hurry!" Nova shouted again.

He checked the serial number was readable on the photos and leapt up, banging his head on the shelf.

"Damn it!"

He ran back to the hatch and saw the two things he least wanted to see.

A hovercar with the word "Police" emblazoned in red on the side, and Nova sitting astride her hovercycle leveling her uranium slug thrower at it.

That weapon was far more illegal than a simple set of lockpicks. Highly radioactive, it was almost as deadly to the user as it was to the target.

And Nova seemed intent on blowing away some strangers whose only crime was to be police officers trying to stop some offworlders from breaking into a national monument.

"No!" Negasi leapt out into open air.