Dyson’s Game

Book 1: Salvage Claim

Chapter 6

Boscha

Being a base commander was hard work. Especially when you’re but one out of many, many companies who set their claims on what remained on Bries after the Tesselation was done. A hollowed out husk of a planet, pockmarked and shaped by masses of assembly drones that chipped through its surface for the innumerable amount of solar sails required for the project.

Still, it just meant that widespread strip-mining was out of the picture. There were more deposits just hiding underneath the regolith, and hundreds of thousands of Kal’Dari went to brave the hellish conditions on Bries just to find that mother load. It meant that those who went and worked here were a little hardier than most other Kal’Dari in the system. It meant that those who worked here did their best to do their jobs, since a single mistake could and would end their life.

It meant that even if two of your most grizzled employees were all but shitting their asses off as they explained what they found on the wreck, you needed to keep calm and assess the situation.

“Where did you find this... thing?”

“Klathi and I... Klathi and I found it just sitting inside the part of the ship that had a large gash carved through it.” Shisholi replies, eyes crossed before blood begins to dribble down their mouth. “It was... Yeah, it looked like it was dead, but Klathi read bio-signs on it, so we thought it was a... a survivor...”

“Shisholi?” I asked, brows furrowing in worry as I tapped into her vac suit and– “Shisholi, your rad counter’s going fucking nuts. Get out of there.”

Efraim shot her colleague a look of alarm, even as she began marching through the ship with the plodding of her maglocks. Shisholi, on the other hand, simply looked confused. “I– What?”

I muted the pair for the moment, while I turn towards the rest of the crew in our rover.

“Anthani.” I call out, and he swiftly turns around and pushes away his screen. “Do we have any anti-rad meds on the back?”

His brows furrow, quickly tapping on his pad for a second to bring up the cargo manifest. “Some”, he allows, quickly rising from his seat as he strides over towards the cargo bay, “Did something happen to them? How large is the dose?”

“Shisholi got hit with a large dose of radiation.” The door to the cargo bay opens, and I send Anthani the data, causing him to stop in his tracks. “Do we have anything for that?”

“That’s...” He trailed off, shaking his head before stepping away from the cargo bay door and closing it with a gesture. “... We don’t have enough rad meds for this large of a dose. What the hell did she do, anyway?”

My eyes glance back towards my little call with Shisholi and Efraim, and unmute their voices with a flick of a thought.

“Efraim.” I rumble, catching her attention in an instant, “What happened?”

“Shisholi went to reactivate the reactor.” She babbled, her face contorted in effort as she dragged her friend out of the reactor room. “I– you said that there she took a rad dose?”

I slowly blink. A second passes in silence as I let the words sink in, before I slowly slump over my controls, a despondent expression on my face. “... She reactivated the reactor. After the ship crashed and got bathed with radiation from the primary for a few Bries cycles.”

Some of the radiation must've breached containment when the reactor was restarted. Either faulty panels or jostled containment chambers... Well, it all came down to the same outcome anyway.

Efraim blinks, before her expression slowly devolves into panic, certainly not helped by the fact that Shisholi was now coughing blood. “No, no, no, no, no, I– I, you have some rad-meds with you, right? I, we didn’t check if the shielding was still on, and Shisholi didn’t say anything and–”

“We don’t...” The words were hard to grit out, even if I sent the data that I got from Shisholi’s vac suit to Efraim. “... We don’t have enough rad-meds to cure those symptoms. Not to mention... Not to mention the time that it’s gonna take us to get there.”

My eyes glance downwards, quickly sending a message to our rover’s pilot to gun the engines. We could always replace the broken tires with the ones from Efraim’s rover, and we could always add a crate of new tires to come along with the next cargo delivery.

“You mean there’s nothing that you could do.” Efraim glowered. “You mean to tell me after all the fucking trouble that we went through, after narrowly dodging death after that fucking thing chased after us and hunted us down, after Klathi fucking sacrificed himself so that both Shisholi and I could have a fucking chance to live... You’re saying that I’m the only one getting out of here alive.”

I didn’t reply. My head was hung low, a hand covering my eyes, but my MMI didn’t care about it one whit, still keeping Efraim’s face haunting the left side of my vision.

“She...” I sighed, my eyes closing for a few seconds as I try to find the words to speak. “Specialist... Specialist Technician Shisholi ar’Can la Tamir’s family would be compensated for her work here as a part of Bries Salvaging Wri–”

“FUCK THAT!” Efraim all but screamed, “YOU BETTER GET HERE BEFORE SHE DIES OR I SWEAR I WILL FUCKING–”

“Efraim.”

I cut the call. Not that it got rid of the weight on my shoulders, but whatever Shisholi was about to say wasn’t my place to hear. Nor was anyone’s place to hear, for that matter.

“Bossman.”

I glance up, finding Anthani handing me a cup of wake-up. I quickly take it from his grip, sending a quick thank you on his way, before focusing back on my screen. My hand reaches out to a blank page, fingers poised to begin typing... but I stop with a sigh, turning back toawrds my second-in-command with a trite expression on my face.

“How many guns do we got stashed in the airlock?”

Anthani blinks. “... You’re believing them?”

“If I don’t and we get jumped by some freak with pipes stuck in their arms, then we’ll be dead anyway.” I reply back, before turning my seat around towards our rover’s pilot. “Moteng, how long till we get there?”

“Still gonna take us a few hours, Bossman.” She replies, eyes still locked on the road ahead. The whole rover jumps, rattling all of us, but then the constant rumbling started. “... Alright, so by the time we get there, we’re gonna be out of propellant for the thrusters, and our tires and suspension’s gonna be shot to hell. The way I see it, we’re gonna be sitting ducks out there.”

“We can swap out the parts from their rover when we get there. Going to take only an hour and a half at most.” I reply back, before turning towards Anthani. “So. Our guns?”

“Ballistics.” Came the reply from the airlock. “Standard load, which means one-fifty round mags of squash head tracers. Good enough for most of the idiots that try to enroach on our territory, but...”

Efraim told me that the rounds from her gun simply bounced off that thing’s vac suit. “That won’t do. Whatever that thing those three faced was, it had a mil-spec vac suit at worst.”

Anthani pops his head from the airlock, a cross look on his face. “So what, we’re just gonna go there to... Keel over and die when we get there?”

“Given Klathi died...” I take another deep breath, my hands shaking as I noted to prepare another will. “... Yeah, we’ll need something bigger than a gun that shoots steel BBs. Can we rig something up on along the way?”

“We’ve got extra batteries and capacitors.” Anthani pipes up, opening his pad and tapping away at the cargo manifest. “Got some repair tools for the rover, some additional metallic struts as well... I’ll try and whip up some audience on the System Weave for some help with this. Might even ping an AI’s attention and have them drop in.”

“You’re gonna stream us making a makeshift railgun over on the open Weave.” I sigh, shaking my head before getting out of my seat. “... Certainly beats any plan that I had. Broodmother knows that we don’t have enough engineering degrees running around this damn rover. Come on, let’s get going, then.”

“What? No.” Anthani pipes up, quickly pushing out of his seat and falling into step behind me, “I’m just gonna ping the pad-tappers at the base for some help, along with the rest of the engineering crew. I’m not stupid enough to just stream it on the System Weave.”

“Could’ve told me otherwise.”

“Hey.” He chides, and I quickly send an apology-cant in his direction right before the door to the cargo bay swings open. “I’m not that bad, am I?”

“No, not really.” I respond in turn, letting out a sigh as I began dragging out the crates that were in the cargo bay. “Back when she first started, Shisholi was worse. Almost ran a trolley into the cargo shuttle before we found out that she didn’t have a fucking license.”

“Bossman...”

Silence fills the air, as I realize what I had just said. My lips purse, eyes gazing downcast at the pack of batteries that I was carrying in my arm, before a sudden burst of anger causes me to snap the handle in half. The batteries land on top of my foot, a flash of pain that makes me want to scream, but I held it back.

Instead, I let out a long, slow hiss, my mind’s eye picturing a Kal’Dari in a mil-spec vac suit, with tubes jammed into its arms and legs.

“That thing would pay.” I thunder. "I'll make sure of it."