The Reaper Diaries: Fetch Job, Part 2
03 Dec 2015Michael Wolfe
Don’t look at her ass. Don’t look at her ass. Don’t look at her ass.I was following my new friend down a station corridor. As used to women as I was, there was something unusually distracting about Kyndi’s two perfect lumps shifting from side to side in front of me.
Goddamnit. I did it again.
Why do you have to be wearing skin-tight leather pants, Kyndi? My professionalism is about to, well… burst.
Kyndi and I were walking towards the hanger bay where she had docked. She glanced over her shoulder at me.
Thankfully, I had been looking towards the open bay doors, curious as to what she flew. Turning around, she gestured towards the door.
“This is me. I’ve got a few things to do before we set out, but I should be ready to go in two or three hours.”
I peered over into the bay. Kyndi’s ship was one of those new Diamondbacks- the Explorer variant, from the looks of it. Well, that makes sense, I thought. She can fly forever in that damn thing without needing to stop or refuel. Plus, I hear that they’re damn near impossible to track if the pilot knows how to rig for low heat-sig.
“No problem. You’ve got my comm info, right?”
Rolling her eyes, she pulled out her communicator and briefly typed on it. I heard a beep, and looked at the device on my wrist.
<Sure do>
I nodded. “Good enough.”
She narrowed her eyes. “And my cut is a full third for helping get this thing to its destination? That’s twenty K the moment we dock at Ackerman, right?”
I motioned across my chest. “Cross my heart, darlin’.”
Kyndi nodded. “Then I transfer the cargo, you get paid, I get paid, and we part ways?”
I smiled my most roguish smile. “Unless we decide to grab a drink once the job’s done.”
She rolled her eyes again. “Right. See you in a few hours.”
What the hell are you thinking, Matt? You just gave away a third of the reward to some chick you don’t even know, to basically do the job for you.
I was sitting in the cockpit of The Professor, sipping on some Old Sol. Nothing like time and alcohol to make a man question his decisions.
And what’s to stop her from just taking off with the damn thing the moment she’s got it onboard her ship? You ain’t got a prayer in the ‘verse at catching her, not with your ass in a Viper and hers in a Diamondback explorer.
I took another sip and stared out the window. All around me, ships were coming and going, cargo was getting loaded and unloaded below deck, tiny figures were milling around in the control towers. I often found it cathartic to watch people go about their business. As a child, I had done the same with ants on their hills, just watching them for hours.
Then, the station’s lights flickered and shut off. For a good two and a half seconds, the entire thing was completely dark. All I could see were whatever lights and displays I had active in the Viper’s cockpit.
What the-
I had no sooner completed the thought than the lights came back on. All around me, cargo cranes started going through their emergency reboot protocols, and my nav computer began the process of re-connecting to the system network.
That was an honest-to-God shutdown. No backup, no switchover- just a total grid collapse.
I glanced outside again. People were standing still, unhurt, but with confused looks on their faces. At least, that’s how I imagined it. I could only see tiny figures in the towers, but their postures implied confusion. At least the station seemed to be functioning normally.
Well, that was a first.
My communicator beeped. It was Kyndi.
<Ready to take off in twenty minutes. R U ready?>
It’s about damn time.
<In ship now. Let me know when>
I thought it over, and added on a bit more.
<U ok after power outage?>
No response for a moment and then-
<It happens. Just be ready to go.>
Well ok then. All business, huh?
Twenty minutes later, we were both in formation, the starport shrinking behind us. My comm lit up. It was Kyndi.
“What’s up?”
Her face appeared onscreen.
“I think I might know a good starting location for our little artifact hunt. One of the planets in this system- the one showing up as ‘4a’ on your nav, was the sight of several important archaeological digs. They’re mainly abandoned now, since no one wants to fund a bunch of eggheads rooting around for ancient alien junk, but scans show several unbreached chambers. I say we bust in and see what we can see.”
How the hell does she know all this?
“Sounds like a plan, darling, but how the hell do you know all this?”
A bit of condescending laughter came over the line. “You ain’t the only one who can do a bit of research for a job. What do you think I needed some time for, knitting?”
This woman. “So if you’ve got it all figured out, what do you need me for?”
More laughter. “What if it’s heavy and I need a helper? Besides, a deal’s a deal, right?”
Now I’m her helper?
This job is getting worse all the time.
“Right. 4a it is, then.”
“It won’t show up as a point of interest, Matt. Just follow me in. See you on the surface!”
Jesus. I might be flying my own ship, but I had been pushed the hell out of the driver’s seat in terms of the mission. Under my breath, I started mocking Kyndi’s last transmission.
“Juth fowoh me in! Thee yoo on thuh thurfath! I’ve got purple hair and a nice ass, and Matt’ll follow that anywhere! Heeheehee.” I took a deep, ragged breath and shook my head.
“Matt?”
“Yeah?”
“Your comm’s still on.”
God- donkey balls- DAMMIT.
“Right. See you there.”
We both set down on a frozen world with almost no atmosphere. There was nothing that I could see, apart from ice and rock. I was standing outside my ship, in a heavy-duty spacewalk suit. Kyndi was walking up beside me, a device in her hand. It had two long antennae, and looked to be a heavy-duty tablet of some sort.
“It isn’t far from here. The signal’s a little fuzzy, but we should be right on top of it.”
I looked around. I still couldn’t see anything that would lead me to think that people had once been here. No outpost, no transmission array -nothing.
“I don’t see anything.”
She started walking towards… what, exactly?
“You won’t. Most of the excavations were underground.”
Well, ok. Fair enough. “So, does that mean that we’re looking at life support and an actual facility?”
Even under her atmo suit, I could make out Kyndi shrugging. “No idea. I wouldn’t trust it even if there was one, though.”
We continued to walk along, wordlessly. Eventually, we came to the side of what looked like the slope of a giant crater.
I stared up at the thing- from where I stood, it looked like a damn mountain. “Is this it?”
Kyndi looked down at her instrument, and back up. “I think so. Whatever it is we’re looking for is in the crater.”
I looked at her. “In?... as in, we’re walking up and down that damn thing?”
She turned to me. “Yeah. I took a few orbital scans, and it’s a gentle enough slope that we don’t need any special equipment. We’re just hoofing it. Whatever is in that crater is what you’re looking for.”
Kyndi turned and showed me the tablet. Sure enough, there it was:
“Looks like a crashed Anaconda.”
Through her helmet, I could see Kyndi nodding. “It’s the right shape for it. Hopefully, this’ll be as simple as getting in, grabbing the artifact, and getting back to our ships.”
“We can hope, right? Let’s get started.”
The trek up the side of the crater was… not something I had foreseen when I had brazenly accepted the job in Rax’s office. There’s something bizarrely off about sweating so much when the temperature just inches from your skin is many, many degrees below zero.
It took a few hours of starting and stopping, but eventually, we made it to the top. There, we were able to survey what was before us in the crater, and sure enough, there it was:
Kyndi was breathing a little hard, but hadn’t exerted herself terribly. I, on the other hand, was clearly a little under Pilot’s Fed cardiovascular standards. But no matter. It was here, we were here, and it was only a relatively short jaunt to the Anaconda- and the artifact, presumably.
We were able to bunny-hop a bit whenever the slope was level enough, but for the most part, we were reduced to walking speed. As we approached the wreckage, we came across spilled cargo containers. Kyndie walked up to a few and scanned it with her device.
“Let’s see, we’ve got some uranium, some plutonium…”- her face twisted up- “Not very well shielded, either, even accounting for the crash.”
We walked by some more containers, strewn about in a trail leading to the ship’s ruptured cargo hold. Kyndie was still scanning them all. “Yeah, all radioactive isotopes, but these containers”- I could see her shaking her head under her helmet- “these containers aren’t meant for this.”
Sure enough, there wasn’t a hazmat sign on any of them. No reinforced seals, no bright colors, no warning labels. Like someone had recklessly filled standard containers with dangerous metal, and loaded it up anyway. What kind of idiot does that?
“I think this job just got a little more complicated, darling.”
Kyndi was examining one of the ruptured containers. Her radiation detector was ticking rapidly.
Great. Now we’re both going to have to take an iodine shower in and out of these suits.
I looked at Kyndi’s face, brows furrowed as she worked the controls of her tablet.
Not that showering with her would be such a bad deal.
She looked up and pointed towards the ship. “Let’s get inside. The readings for the artifact are still that way.”
It was a little bit of a climb, getting in and out of the gash that had torn open the Anaconda’s cargo hold. We flipped on our helmet-mounted searchlights and took a look around.
Nothing but ice, rock, and cargo containers.
“Think we can get power back on?” I was pulling on one half of a sliding door, trying to open access to one of the main decks. It was cracked open a few inches, but jammed shut with ice and debris.
“I doubt it. This thing is pretty wrecked. There might be local auxiliary systems, but that reactor ain’t never firing up again.”
She set down the tablet and stepped just in front of me to grip the door. “Ok, on three.”
“One…”
We both tightened our grip on the door.
“Two.”
Muscles tensed. Let’s get this thing open and score us a payday!
“Three!”
We both pulled as hard as our atmo suits allowed. Slowly, slowly, the door started to slide open, making a grinding metal-on-metal noise that we could hear even with the thin atmosphere and through our helmets. After a few minutes of hard straining, it had slipped open enough for us to get through.
This time, Kyndi was breathing hard, too. “Let’s have that be the only time we do that, ok?”
I stepped into the corridor, lights creating little circles of illumination on the bulkheads. “Deal. Now let’s scoop up some pay dirt.”
Despite all the training, all the experience, and all the confidence an independent pilot tends to possess, ghost ships are still spooky as hell. All along the corridors, little icicles had formed along exposed piping, and just about every everything had a layer of frost all over it. It was creepy with the searchlights, and it was creepy with low-light vision enabled.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and Kyndi was looking at her tablet, with a puzzled look on her face. “Where the hell is the crew? I’m not getting anything organic, even frozen-for-years organic. It’s like the ship crashed itself. And all the radiation from that cargo is screwing up everything else!”
I looked around. Still nothing but ruined modules and frosty bulkheads. “If I trip over a body, I’ll be sure to show you.”
We continued going deeper inside the derelict ship. Even well into the interior, Kyndi was close behind me, still shaking her head. “It just doesn’t make any sense. Why haul such hazardous material in containers that ain’t suited for it? I mean, it’s easy enough to treat for rad exposure, but why even risk it? Your cargo wouldn’t pass the first checkpoint you came across, radiation or no.”
She flashed her light on another door. It, too, was partially open, but enough so that we could fit through. I walked up to it and shone my light in. Crew quarters. Straight ahead were some bunks built into the walls, with a small desk and holovision on the right. Along the left side was a row of lockers, with a small shower and toilet setup. Nothing. Like the rest of this ship.
“What if regular hauling wasn’t the idea? Radioactive stuff is still illegal to haul all over the bubble without a permit-maybe we’re looking at some kind of black market rig.”
We stumbled across what looked like the main lift. It wasn’t operational, but there was enough loose objects- mini containers, scrap metal, fallen piping- to pile into a makeshift step so that we could climb up.
I climbed through first, and helped Kyndi up. We both surveyed the deck, pitch black except the light coming through the ruptured bridge canopy. So, here’s the command deck. It would sure be nice to have some power and download the ship’s log. She got to work scanning the surroundings like before.
“I’ve thought about that, but no one in their right mind uses a ‘Conda for smuggling. It’s too damn big, heat sig is all over the place, and it can’t dock at any of the little outposts where black markets thrive anyway.”
She turned, and started walking towards the bridge, seemingly following where her tablet was leading her. “No. This was something else. No crew, no weapons fire marks, no sign of a struggle. It’s just not right.”
Hesitantly, Kyndi made her way towards a prominent entryway. Above it, in frosted-over, faded yellow letters, “Auxiliary Bridge” was barely able to be read.
Kyndi held her tablet up to the letters, grabbed my arm, and pointed. “I was afraid of that.”
I turned to her. “Afraid of what, exactly?”
She looked around, shining her floodlights on the deck and bulkhead. “This Anaconda is older than I thought. We’re talking centuries, at least. Faulcon Delacy hasn’t manufactured them with a spare bridge in at least that long, back when redundant everything was incorporated into ship design.”
I shone the light on the door again. “So, what’s there to be afraid of?”
Kyndi walked up to the door, testing to see if it would open. “Didn’t you see the cargo containers? The wreckage itself? This ship ain’t been crashed here that long, or else the whole thing would have been buried under layers of ice and rock.”
She wrenched it partly open, and I helped her pull the door open wide enough to step through.
I shone my flashlight around. Just a single chair, surrounded by viewports. Old-fashioned switches, but the frost hadn't gotten to the room yet.
“Nothing in here. So- the central question is: what the hell is an antique ship doing here with no crew, poorly-contained radioactive cargo, and evidence that it was flying until not too long ago?”
Kyndi stepped in and took a look around. “Yeah. Nothing about this makes a lick of goddamn sense. But you were wrong, Matt- at least about the crew.”
With one swift motion, Kyndi kicked the side of the chair. It burst out of the ice that had been forming around it, spun around half a circle to face us, and-
Holy-
“Ok, so we’ve got at least one left-over crew member.”
Kyndi shone her light down. “One crew member, and one familiar looking object by his feet.”
Sweet Jesus.
She turned to me. “It’s all yours, Mr. Twice-My-Share.”
Scowling, I bent down at the corpse’s feet to pick up the artifact. I held it between Kyndi and me, holding it up in our helmets’ light. This was it, alright.
“Well, at least we’ve got ourselves a payday.”
Kyndi went back into the main deck room and retrieved her tablet. “That’s weird.”
I took a deep breath and shook my head. “Kyndi, I like you and all, but you’ve just about given me my fill of weird for the day.”
She snorted. ”It’s the signal. It isn’t isolated to that artifact, even though I know for damn sure that that’s what we’re looking for.”
I walked over to the lift entrance and helped Kyndi down to the level below us. “Well, signal or no, I think it’s time for us to get the hell out.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
RUMMMMMMMMMBBBBBBBBBLLE.
The ship started to shake, not violently, not jarringly, but we could both feel it under our feet. Kyndi held out an arm to support herself against a bulkhead and almost slipped on the frosty deck.
“Oh, hell. What now?”
We made our way as fast as we could travel in the dark back to the cargo bay. Even from inside our helmets, we could hear the rapid pounding of debris against the ship’s hull. Outside, through the gash in the cargo bay, we could see the violent maelstrom of ice and rock. A thumb-sized shard of ice flew inside the cabin and sliced through the arm of Kyndi’s atmo suit.
“Son of a bitch!”
We both back away from the opening, Kyndi clutching the hole that had opened up her suit. Air was rushing out rapidly, almost instantly forming ice crystals from the escaping moisture. Quickly, I set down the artifact and unhooked my emergency kit. I opened up the tube of sealing gel and spread it over the tear on her arm. Within seconds, the suit had re-sealed itself.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
For about a minute, Kyndi and I stayed near the door we had wrested open, looking at the hurricane-like storm of ice and rock.
“There ain’t no way we’re making it back to the ships in this.”
I nodded. “I hear you. The nav had said that the planets in this system were subject to water geyser activity, but they didn’t mention a damn thing about monsoons of ice and frozen goddamn rocks.”
We both had a seat in the ship corridor, facing each other. For a long time, neither of us spoke.
“How long do you think this storm’ll keep up?”
Under her suit, I could see Kyndi shrug. “Hopefully not longer than 45 minutes.”
I looked outside again, and then at her. “Why do you say that?”
She gingerly put her hand over the patch on her suit, a concerned look on her face.
“Because according to my readouts, that’s all the air I’ve got left.”