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Oppino Kopl - Pilot of Oppino's Salvage

I laughed to myself again when I saw that rich-boy vessel parked out along the refuse stream of the grubs. “You won’t find any riches, today boy! I already raked that crap. The grubs made a mistake this round, yes they did!” I chuckled into the rhythmic pulsing of my vessel's cockpit. Maybe one day I would be able to afford a grub engine. Everyone said that they were the best.

Who were the Grubs you might ask? Ha! They chose to call themselves the Tela but everyone knew them as they had been: space grubs. They had almost been wiped out too, more's the pity that they weren’t. I thought to myself as I rushed back for the fourth time from the maintenance dock and the only parts store in this solar system that had what I needed for Old Grinder.

Old Grinder might have finally made me rich, what with this last haul. Normally all we found in the grubs' refuse were ancient burned-out research equipment and Hydron-based generator parts. Only good for recycling the base components. Oh, and don’t forget the tons and tons of Queiie feces. One of those grubs must have been making a killing on Queiie crabs. Probably trying to harvest and reproduce the coveted Leva nesting material.

What an idiot.

Everyone knew that Leva were the only beings that could ingest Queiie veins and produce something that every space-faring race would kill for. Well, everyone except those scummy grubs. Batteries and the best heat resistant plating. The plating of the cosmos.

Leva, they were rare in these parts. You had to be crazy or brave to head further in towards the center to track down their nests. Crazy and super-rich to already have enough of the material to get close enough to the sun to harvest more of the nest material. A catch 22 situation. What a load of crap.

I ran my sucker over my ocular implants, cleaning off any condensation from the leaky cooler unit. Maybe once the Tela memory module that Old Grinder found amongst the refuse sold I could finally replace that cooler unit. Hell, maybe I could replace my ship if they managed to hack it.

Finding it had broken the blades on Old Grinder. She was just doing her job when her blades ran into the illegal technology of the grubs. Well, illegal only to everyone else. The grubs killed anyone who tried to learn its secrets. The secrets as to how they had created such a magical material.

I scarcely couldn’t believe my implants when I wiped off all the green Queiie crap from the block of cr. I had struck it rich!

I knew that I had to offload it fast on the dark market. There were always people in the market for grub tech. Their rise to power had been a thorn in so many race’s sides that I was sure to get a good amount for any cr that I found. It wasn’t often that unfused cr escaped their clutches, let alone a whole module.

Sure you could buy cr technology from the grubs but those sneaky grubs fused the cr so that no one could figure out their secrets.

I had nearly leaked myself when I saw that the cr hadn’t been fused while checking it under a microscope.

“Keep searching, rich boy! Ha ha ha!” I laughed as I blazed back towards the parts store. They should have been able to deliver Old Grinder’s new blades by now.

My left side was still giving me pains. Burn those Queiie parasites! You get stuck by one and you are never right afterward. Burn them and the grubs for farming them in this system. The parasites just loved to hide out inside the Queiie crap. I had been on a walk outside of my vessel to sort through parts when one had burst forth from a large ball of crap and stuck to my side. I hadn’t been fast enough with my plasma hammer to incinerate it before it ripped into me.

It had cost me valuable med resources and a new suit.

“Burn them all!” I shouted as my side itched again. The wound had healed but I still felt a ghost pain as though the parasite had tried to leech my life energy from me the moment it had attacked me.

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“Yeah, Kevin, you will have an easy job. Just a quick grab and go. Pick up the module, it will be easy. Easy my butt!” I grumbled as Ess and I dug through piles of stuff on the surface of one of the asteroids.

We had flown to the exact spot that Meditati had projected her memory module to be but she must have gotten the timing wrong because all that was there was more of this green stuff flying through space.

The asteroid that we were on acted as a huge catch-all for the refuse of this system’s Core so if her module was to be anywhere, it would have ended up here. At least that was what I thought. We had been here for hours already searching fruitlessly.

I had thought to keep Ess locked up inside the vessel but when she saw me leaving she acted all anxious and began darting back and forth near the window opening I had created so she could watch me.

Now she was busy playing in the piles of engine grease that seemed to be the main source of this Core’s refuse. I would have thought that grease would have solidified in space but not whatever this stuff was. It remained like a thick putty and seemed to stick to everything.

At present, I had at least a hundred huge “Grease paddles” of gold cr sifting through the mountains of matter around us. Working sector by sector. For some reason, my Cr mind link key did not want to name my new sifting creation no matter how I played with the naming conventions for it.

They all had to work carefully and not exert the force that I knew that gold cr could manifest. I didn’t want to squish Meditati by accident. This slowed things down just a little bit but not too noticeably. I promised myself that I would get normal metal to work with in the future for jobs like this if I ever had another job like this. Next time I think it would be George’s grand task to sift through mountains of engine grease. He might like something like this since he worked on cars so much.

That last thought made me chuckle a little bit. Yeah, right. Invicta would have probably blown this place up and Tutor wouldn’t have touched it with a ten-foot pole. This stuff was sticky.

I was just getting ready to move to another sector of unsearched matter when I heard something that gave me chills down my spine. It came over through my helm, transmitted from the only other helm that it was linked to.

It was Sublimis screaming in pain!

I banished the amazed thought that she could actually make noise and searched for her amongst the mountains. There she was! She seemed to be coiling around a ball of fluff that was stuck to her side. I had seen a couple of these things in my search already but dismissed them as nothing important when they didn’t do anything to me. My paddles seemed to squish them easily, even going out of their way to mash them apart. They each popped with a little burst of light and fine hairlike filaments that went zipping off into space. Now one of them was attacking my pet!

I rushed over towards Ess as fast as I could, grabbing the morphing fluff ball from her side when I got near enough. The thing seemed to be growing and dividing, having rapidly fed from Ess through thin needle-like shoots I spied sticking out of the side that had touched her. It was trying to replicate itself before my eyes.

“Oh no, you don’t!” I raged as I brought my hands together to crush the ball into nothingness. A bright surge of light and energy leaked through the tiny gaps between my fingers as the ball was smashed between my hands.

“Energy?” I muttered as I looked at where it had stuck to Ess. Tiny holes lined her side as though it had rolled across her flank, puncturing needles into her as it moved.

“Let’s go, girl!” I yelled, thinking quickly and controlling my rising fear, as I wrapped my arms around her body and carried her away from the surface of the asteroid. I ordered my ship, ever a part of me, to open the cargo hold wide and to kill any fluff balls it observed with prejudice. I had already seen several myself so I knew that there had to be more of those things hidden around us.

I reached the cargo hold quickly and set Ess down, instructing my cr to clean and remove every last trace of the grease from our surroundings. My cr seemed more than happy to comply.

The small holes along Ess’s side were leaking light, spraying it even, and she seemed to be in considerable pain for such a small line of injuries. My hud came alive, selecting the holes and highlighting them with detailed sizes and depths.

-Medical treatment mode initiated - Apply plasma here- popped up in my vision as my gloves began to glow and crackle.

What was going on? I wondered as my hands became a blazing inferno in front of me. I had to step back from Ess, lest I accidentally injure her with my insanely hot gloves. Oh! Right! I was now acting as a Levasucker. That puffball had to have been a parasite that I had been told about in the tutorial.

I stepped back towards Ess quickly, intent on helping her seal the holes in her side. The hud on my helm guided me, dimming the brightness so that I could see what I was doing.

The method for healing holes in a Leva’s side was not done with hands, I quickly learned, as they morphed into suckers. I had to place my suckers over a hole in order to soften her scales and skin enough for my gloves to pull the whole skin and scales back together, melting and sealing the puncture wounds. I worked as quickly as I could, aware that the more time I took, the longer Ess would be in pain and leaking energy.

Once the last hole was sealed Ess seemed to pass out.

“What the heck was that!?” I shouted in rage as I felt the urge to lash out at something, anything that had hurt my hatchling.

My vision turned red as I felt !^*! stir inside me as I rose and stumbled towards the open door to look down on the asteroid.

“Die!” I heard my voice shout as my paddles working the surface of the asteroid became thin filaments of death that spread out and spun in place, turning the asteroid and everything on it into dust in a matter of moments. Dozens, if not hundreds of sparks of light pulsed as my alien cr killed every last parasite infesting the asteroid.

In my rage, I had obliterated everything. It had been accomplished at such insane speeds as well, revealing the full might of gold cr. It was terrifying.

“Oooh snap.” Was all I could softly mutter in despair when my rage lessened enough, letting me regain control from my overly vengeful hive.

I simply couldn’t do anything for a while as I stared down at the cloud that stood in place of the trash collection asteroid. What had I done?

“Well, I suck. I totally failed at everything. At least I can gather the remains of Meditati for Silver while I am here.” I muttered as I held my head in my hands, commanding my cr to search the area for any residual cr that had been obliterated. I had failed and let my control slip. My heart sank inside my chest, I had let my fear of losing Ess at the needles of a space bug lower my grip on my emotions. This had ended up getting Silver’s sister killed as a result.

I slowly lowered myself to the deck of the ship, commanding my cr under Ess to slide her over to me so that I could rest her head across my legs. I sat there gently caressing Ess’s scales while my cr searched for Meditati’s remains in the distance. Lost in despair.

My hud tagged a vessel that I had seen earlier in the corner of my vision but I ignored it. It had been passing by several times and I didn’t care what it was up to.

It must have noticed the mess that I had created because it blasted away as fast as its little engines could propel it.

-No CR detected.- Came the reply half an hour later once my cr had thoroughly swept the dust countless times over.

“What?” I muttered at the words, my heart rising in hope.

“Then where is she?”