Unknown Station, Planetary Orbit, Unknown System
Former Apollo Province, Unclaimed Territory
February 10th, 3010
Sam was doing his best to not bounce off the walls in excitement. It had taken more than a week to figure out the station's systems and get things restarted. With power, air and water moving about the derelict was markedly easier.
Policing the bodies had been less fun. Without any better option, they were currently storing them in the compartment that had been blasted partially open by the attack that had damaged the station back during the Amaris Coup. At least, Sam considered, we haven't found any more of them. With heat and an oxygen atmosphere restored, rot would have set in quickly.
He shook the thought off. Instead of dealing with centuries-dead corpses or trying to figure out an awkwardly designed life support system, Sam and the rest of the volunteers from the Implacable were exploring. A week had given them plenty of time to find and pore over the deckplans of the station, and the Captain or maybe The Boss had decided they were to check on the shuttle bays the station boasted to see if they could be put back into operation.
It would certainly make getting back over to the Dropship less stressful, he thought as Deric navigated through the corridors of the station, navigating towards the port fore small craft bay. The once-imposing structure was much less threatening with power and a survivable atmosphere restored, but the deckplan was either deliberately confusing or the person who'd designed it was a drunk. Or the jokes about the periphery had a basis in fact.
Even so, at every point of divergence, his eyes shot down paths untaken and he wondered what could be found down those corridors. The small craft bay might be important, but it didn't seem exciting to him. At least we're finally getting out of a handful of rooms around Engineering. That was something, he acknowledged. Just sitting around when there was who-knows-what to find had been maddening.
Finally, Deric came to a stop outside the man doors to the shuttle bay. After a moment to ensure that the access panel was powered, he opened comms and asked, "Your seals still good?"
Reflexively, Sam checked his helmet and gloves. "All good," he responded.
"Same here," Deric replied and hit the 'open' control. The computer thought about that for a moment, then with a thunk the pressure door slid open. The first thing he noticed was that the space looked far larger in person than the block had looked on the deckplan, and much larger than a standard Aerospace bay was described as being. Set into the 'starboard' wall were four bays for small craft of a type that he didn't recognize.
They were aerodyne vessels, and they appeared to be on the upper end of the weight range for such vessels, but they had the look of a civilian model.
A few quick tests later, and Deric reached up and unsealed his helmet, "Air's good. I'll take a look at the birds, you tell the terminal there to run a system test."
Sam had expected those orders to go out the other way around. Setting the terminal to do a check up was about as trivial as a task got. Crawling around the shuttles would be a lot more troub-
Oh, right, Sam remembered as he removed his suit gloves so that he wouldn't have to fight with the fat fingers while trying to type. Deric was one of those guys who talked about flying ASFs every chance he got. A shuttle wasn't as light and agile as a fighter, but for someone who'd always regretted that the company didn't have an Aerospace wing anymore, they were probably a heck of a consolation prize.
Without much difficulty, Sam instructed the Small Craft bay's terminal to run a full set of diagnostics. As he'd expected, it was a quick and easy process. It also left him again at loose ends. His eyes were naturally drawn to the single large door to 'port,' opposite the four individual small craft bays, it looked like a cargo door.
Wonder what the rimjobs were moving through here back before the coup? he considered, then shot a look over at his supervisor. Deric had opened one of the shuttles and clambered inside. Given the sheer size of the beast, he'd be busy for quite a while yet.
Leaving the computer to its appointed task, Sam kicked off and drifted across the bay to the big door that was practically calling his name. The controls for this door were a bit different than most of the others he'd seen so far on the station, but not so different he couldn't figure them out. A quick press of a button set them slowly moving apart. A second had the lights in the room flickering to life. Careful of the sliding doors, Sam poked his head into the revealed cargo bay.
For a long moment he was disappointed. He'd been half hoping for 'Mechs or ASFs. Then he realized just what he was looking at. "Holy shit! Deric, get over here!"
XXXXX
Dropship Implacable
Same Time
"So there's how much of this stuff?" I asked, confused.
"A lot," the tech responded. I'd had the Captain send teams out to check two of the three small craft bays on the station. This guy was half of the pair that had gone to check the aftmost of the two portside bays.
They'd accomplished the mission; the shuttle bay would be relatively simple to reactivate even if the shuttles themselves would require some time and effort, despite the nitrogen atmosphere. Then they'd decided to check the neighboring cargo bay, which had resulted in a real head-scratcher.
"How much is, 'a lot?'" I demanded.
"It's at least three quarters of the cargo bay, stacked deck to deck and bulkhead to bulkhead. I climbed to the top of the stacks, and couldn't see to the back."
"And it's all Green Mountain S brand survival rations?"
"Yes, sir, all the boxes we can see have 'S-Green' on them."
That was just … insane. Not that there was a whole cargo bay full of emergency rations. No, to be fair it made a certain amount of sense to have a lot of emergency rations on hand if the planet had been a Forge World like I was anticipating. Those generally had a difficult time feeding themselves.
I just couldn't get over the Soylent Green reference. It was the sort of thing a bored Dev would stick into a game as an easter egg for a lore grognard or completionist to find. Seeing it in real life was just bizarre.
"Thank you for the update," I said and hung up.
"Well, at least we won't go hungry if the expedition takes longer than expected," I asserted.
"I can tell you've never tasted the stuff," Captain Chapman stated with a grimace.
Coming from her … "That bad?" I inquired.
She actually shuddered. "Worse. The taste is bad enough, but the texture is worse. They used, still use really, the stuff is still being made, the cheapest supplements they could find. It's fortified enough for a person to subsist off of at two tubes a day forever, but it's got the consistency of spoiled milk and tastes like old blood because of all the iron in it." Her expression got more haunted the more she talked about consuming the stuff. Was it possible to get PTSD over food?
I was feeling guilty enough for bringing it up that when the comm officer interrupted with a call of, "Sir, you'll want to take this," I was relieved to have a change in subject.
"This is Weber Actual," I said as soon as I got the phone to my ear.
The response was better than halfway to blowing out my eardrum, "Boss, I'm looking at at least a hundred-million C-Bills worth of JumpShip spares here!"
I flinched away from the headset, and left it about an inch from my ear. Then I processed what he'd actually said. "Did you just say a hundred-million C-Bills?" And why did that voice sound familiar…
Immediately, the decibel level on the bridge spiked and the air echoed with shouts and cheers. Hailey had to call for quiet so I could hear the report.
"-two Nav computers and a Jump computer sitting here in the damn boxes. Not the bridge terminals, the actual fucking computers! There's precision helium pumps, rapid discharge capacitors, and superconductors. Hell, there's three complete collar assemblies! And-"
That last part immediately stuck in my brain. "Collar assemblies? As in jump collars? Could we get the Smitty's broken collar fixed?"
The voice didn't sound irritated by being interrupted at all. "Hell, Boss, there's enough spares here to fix everything twice over. Every damn system that's been limping along? We can pull all that shit and still have enough C-Bills of salvage to fill every empty 'Mech and ASF bay on the Implacable!" the tech enthused. He had an 'S' name. Short. But it refused to pop into my head.
"Good! Damn good job spotting this stuff," I could feel the grin spreading over my features. Having both of the Merchant class JumpShip's collars back in working order was …
It was like going from the deep and certain knowledge that the submarine you were in was a hundred feet below its rated crush depth to sailing back into port and knowing you were due a month of leave.
And not only that, but we had a financial cushion to go along with it, even if unloading all those parts would mean a trip to a major shipyard or trade hub.
Before I even thought about the possibility of cutting the expedition short and taking off with the loot we'd just uncovered, I realized I'd already decided against it. There were logical reasons like the relative difficulty of selling the parts locally, or the hope of finding a bunch of Star League 'Mechs in a cache, but really I just wanted to see more of what was out here.
With a wide grin, I told Duh, Sam! It shouldn't have been that hard to remember, "First priority now is getting a shuttle ready to fly. As soon as you've-"
XXXXX
Dropship Implacable
February 15th,
Everything took longer than I expected it to. It always seemed to come down to piddly little details that screwed things up. Getting a shuttle flying required a couple hundred man-hours. Settling who would be flying it felt like it had taken nearly as much effort.
"Track confirmed; we're on course."
The Company had once boasted a sizable ASF contingent, and there was still a pool of flying enthusiasts amongst our number.
All of them had wanted a chance to get in a cockpit, reasonably presuming that any flight hours were better than none. There'd also been the need for the Dropship to hang around just in case of a sudden failure in either the shuttle or, more reasonably given just how much rust the old-timers needed to blow off and how lacking in experience the next generation were, the pilots.
It made me wish we'd been able to spare the resources to fully reactivate the station, rather than just the most important areas and the shuttle bays.
"T-minus thirty to burn."
"Confirmed."
I shook my head. I was getting distracted with trivialities. The most immediately important information my people had gathered in the past few days was what certainly appeared to be the primary spaceport from back when Amaris had been in charge.
It wasn't where we'd expected to find it. For some damn reason, it had been built on either a terrace carved through a mountain range, or in natural 'pass' in the north to south running mountains. With all the green of what looked like unbroken forest, I had expected them to have built down on flat land, not to have gone to the difficulty and expense of doing so way up in the mountains.
It had set my paranoia senses tingling.
On the other hand, Captain Chapman had a point that building it there might have saved resources in the long run, especially if there were hard rock mines or, as we hoped, buried factories within convenient transport range.
Maybe they didn't see the point in hiding the factories too, since they were already hiding the star system. It made sense, but … I still felt like I was missing something.
"Commencing deorbit," Haley called from her seat in the center of the bridge.
The kick in the chest from the Dropship's engines was heavier than it would be for the usual sort of maneuvering, but with an unknown heavy gravity world, that was only to be expected. Better to have some altitude in reserve if we discovered we needed it than to need it and not have it.
"Plasma layer … now," came the expected comment as reentry briefly blinded even the Implacable's hardened sensors. Then-
"We're off our expected course. Compensating."
The arms of my station chair creaked and I abruptly realized I had an absolute death grip on them. I forced myself to relax even as the irreverent thought, Worse than going to the dentist, brought a grin to my lips.
"Gravity calculations were off by two hundredths. We're back on course."
"Very good," the Captain praised with calm sincerity. "Deploy landing struts. Full burn on Engineering's mark."
"In three … two … one … mark!" One of the less familiar voices called as a horse kicked the seat under me. The engines kicked into full overboost for a long moment, then rapidly powered down.
"We're down. Legs all green. Ops?" The Captain asked.
"Atmosphere reads green. Oxy-Nitrogen with the usual traces. Surprisingly rich, especially considering our height above sea level. Got a good breeze out of the west. We'll be safe to exit in less than ten."
With the report complete, Captain Chapman turned to me with a smile, "Well, Major," she said, giving me the usual courtesy promotion aboard ship, "we're down in one piece. Your turn."
"Then I guess I'd better be about it."
XXXXX
The operations officer had been as good as her word, the stiff breeze through the pass had cleared a sufficient amount of the heat from the old Overlord's engines that we could have easily left within five minutes if we'd only been taking 'Mechs.
Stepping out of the Dropship in my Commando revealed a fairly barren bit of ecosystem. Whatever needs the lower level forests had, they clearly weren't fulfilled by the environment here. Instead, it looked more like prairie or maybe more accurately high-altitude tundra, with lots of grass, but nothing that looked like a tree anywhere in sight.
Then I raised my eyes, and let out a whistle.
Marsha, stepping up beside me in Orcrist seemed to agree, "Damn, that is some view."
The southern side of the pass reached from terraces worked down to bedrock, up to majestic mountains topped in snow-covered peaks where air would be perilously thin even with an oxygen concentration that was on the high side for the Jurassic. "Hell, maybe they settled here just for that. Wow."
These were mountains like the Himalayas, not the comparatively pitiful things I'd grown up beside on Icar.
"Wouldn't be the first time some bureaucrat from that era decided to pour money into something just because they could," Melody added.
A look to either side had the pass, slowly descending towards foothills, with grass a shade too red to be purely Terran as far as the eye could see. The only interruptions to the vista were the toppled remains of what looked like elevated highways meant to connect the terraces on the north and south sides.
Still, much as I liked the view, it wasn't what we were here for. I turned my attention to the buildings that made up the spaceport's functional elements.
The terminal seemed to be mostly intact as well as what were either warehouses or maintenance hangers. More immediately, there were a bunch of Dropships scattered around. A mix of aerodynes and spherical types. "Let's head that way," I called, and throttled up to a slow cruise. The twins in their Wasps, and Rowdy in his Firestarter following in a diamond formation.
As we moved, I took a look at our potential prizes. Unfortunately, scans with Striker Alpha's sensors confirmed what my people had reported based on looking down from orbit, most of them had been left open to the elements for decades. It was a damn shame, even Star League engineering wasn't proof against a couple centuries of exposure.
I planned to send survey teams to check anyway, but I fully expected that most if not all of them would need either a depot-level overhaul, or a complete factory-level rebuild before they were fit to fly again.
I did, however, take note that one of the Mules, a Union, and a third design I wasn't familiar with, a big damn aerodyne, appeared to have been sealed when the disaster that hit the planet occurred. With just a little bit of luck, maybe they could be salvaged.
Still, they weren't the focus of our little expedition. With the landing pad down to a better temperature, some of our ground vehicles began to work their way after us. Thankfully, we didn't have to babysit them too much yet.
The starport was a bit overgrown, but ferrocrete slabs meant to survive dropship landings didn't appear to be affected by a couple paltry centuries without maintenance. The taxiways for aerodynes were also well built, and had survived equally well with just the occasional vine growing across the surface.
As such, we were able to make it to the Terminal and its control center without incident. While the techs piled out of their trucks with a few ground security types in case of feral dogs or other predators, I again swept the area with Striker Alpha's sensors.
There wasn't a lot to see, beyond the scenery which was partially occluded by probably-worthless dropships. The only feature that stood out was the wall and fortified gates at the start and end of the path up to the next higher terrace. Made sense, if this had been an important Forge World for Amaris. Nobody wanted to risk losing one of those, but I wasn't looking forward to figuring out how to get one of them open. Just because this gate was standing open didn't mean all of them would be.
I fidgeted in place; it was quiet. I was getting some scatter from the techs and our limited site security, but otherwise the silence was fairly deafening. Felt sort of like I'd always expected an Old West ghost town to feel. Or maybe the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse.
… And now I was freaking myself out. I reached up and worked the bridge of my nose between my fingers since I couldn't really roll my neck in a heavy-ass Neurohelmet.
I took a closer look around. We ought to be the most formidable thing on the planet, but I'd played enough games that dropped unexpected surprises on you that I was trying to be ready for anything. Still, as the minutes turned into hours and all we did was walk the occasional short patrol around the immediate area, something caught my eye out of sheer boredom.
Compared to the tall grass down in the pass itself, the flora growing in the rare area that wasn't paved over looked … scruffy. Like it was only barely clinging to life. Briefly stepping off the roadway, I scuffed my Commando's feet a bit as I walked.
"Uh, Captain, you okay over there?" Rowdy asked, and I drew my attention back to what was going on around me.
"They took this terrace clear down to bedrock. Even after two centuries, there's maybe two centimeters of soil here," I explained, looking down at the traces my 'Mech had left in the dirt and rock.
"Uh, okay. And that matters …" Rowdy trailed off questioningly.
"Not sure, but just like the placement of this spaceport, it's odd. Why spend the money?" I asked rhetorically.
"Aesthetics, make-work, who knows?" Melody tossed out.
"... Hell of a lot of make-work," Marsha commented.
"I guess if you want to make a flat spot that you're certain is going to last …" Rowdy trailed off.
Maybe that was it, and 21st century me was stressing out over nothing, like seeing a face in running water. Matrixing with paranoid intent instead of faces. It was entirely possible that Melody had been right; the Star League had loved it's big engineering projects. Maybe the original colonists had decided on the project, or maybe Amaris had after he conquered them? Either way it was probably noth-
"Captain Weber? We found something interesting down here …"
XXXXX
'Something interesting' turned out to be a street address.
I was less than impressed until they explained the particulars. By the time the FE techs had gotten the emergency generators, fusion engines by another name, inspected and fired up, the computer techs had found the mainframe at the heart of the building. As soon as the power was on, they'd fired it up to see what sort of data they could get from it.
When they did, every terminal in the building had produced a text box on startup.
With the mystery address.
"This is either the most transparent trap in the history of traps, or someone got clever," I assessed. "I don't suppose they were kind enough to leave a map for their scavenger hunt?"
"Over here, Captain," Mace Brown, one of the techs that had specialized in keeping Comet's Dervish running called out. "Found this downstairs. Layout's really odd. Doesn't look much like the usual spaceport concourse down there. Anyhow, as you can see," he pointed to a section of the laminated map, "we're on terrace N1 right now. The address is for TN2, or the second north terrace. The next one up from this one. It looks like a lot of that area is warehouses and low-income housing. The address corresponds to this warehouse here," he said, and tapped on the map only a few blocks from the entrance to the second terrace.
"Well, it's not far. I can take the lance and look to see wha-"
"Uh, guys, I think I found the SLIC team that landed here," came a spooked sounding voice as the radios around the room crackled to life.
I considered for a moment, but there was no compelling reason for me to take care of that personally. Turning my head to look at our site security detail, I commanded, "Sergeant, I'll leave dealing with that up to you," pointing at the radio, then turned back to the tech. "There any more of these maps?"
XXXXX
Thankfully, there had been, even if driving a 'Mech with a map in my lap was a pain in the ass. I had a pretty good sense of direction for places I'd been before, but most of my 'navigation' had been done by listening to Siri relay directions from MapQuest. Luckily, whoever had laid out the roadplan for this terrace hadn't been in love with European cities, so the roads were in a regularly spaced and easy to follow grid pattern.
I managed to avoid getting us lost, and didn't even need to kick off my Mocdals, or maybe Sandacins to keep count on my toes.
It was also a good thing that we'd brought 'Mechs with hands, because the big sliding warehouse doors were big, and they didn't have power. They were, however, excellently hung and in surprisingly good shape for having had no maintenance since before the Star League had fallen apart. As Melody's Sting and Marsha's Orcrist pulled the door open, I damn near opened fire, thinking it was a trap after all as my magscan went nuts. Only the fact that the thermals were cold as ice kept me from … well scuffing some expensive paint.
"Hooooooooly Shit."