Dyson’s Game

Book 1: Salvage Claim

Chapter 8

Boscha

There were three bodies in the cargo hold of our rover. One looked like it had been half-eaten, with claw and bite marks punching through the vac suit like it wasn’t even there. The other looked at peace, but there was no mistaking the slight uptick of my rad counter. The last one... I turn towards my crew, a hollow expression on my face.

“Moteng.” I softly rumble, “How’s she doing?”

Our pilot brings closes up her pad, before turning towards me. “I put her in a medically-induced coma. Had to ah, improvise on that though, so she’d probably wake up groggy.”

“Her injuries?”

She takes a sharp breath, glancing away from me. “... Her spinal cord’s pinched. Unless we shell out some good money for regrowing it, she’ll either be strolling around in a wheelchair or getting some prosthetics.”

“Efraim’s been here for a long time. She’ll get it.” I answer back in response, closing my eyes while letting out a drawn out sigh. “... At the very least, we know that the mass driver is in working condition. That's a windfall of krannts for us.”

“Bossman...”

I sigh, holding up a hand just as she snarls at me. “I know, I know. They can blow the damn thing up too if I want to. I don’t really care at this point – in fact, I’d rather they blow it up.” My eyes gaze at the three corpses in the cargo bay. “... Even three million krannts won’t be enough to change what we lost, but I have other mouths to feed. Wages to pay, insurance to wrangle... funerals to arrange.”

Moteng lets out a sigh. “It’s your call.”

She quickly exits the cargo bay, checking my shoulder as she did so. I could only let out a soft sigh as the door closes behind me... before it open up a few seconds later, and Anthani strolls into the cargo bay while putting his pad away from his robes.

“It’s been a rough day, isn’t it.” He muses, eyes locked onto Efraim’s form. “... Though, I’m sure they had it worse.”

“If there’s something you wanna tell, just bring it up.” I rumble, my arms forming into an impatient cant. “I’m busy–”

“You’re not.” Came the immediate reply. “You’ve muted your contact information, and the pad-tappers and techs back at base want to know what the hell happened out here. If you don’t get this sorted out soon, then they’ll take this up to the station.”

“If I knew what the hell was going on, then I’d have already done so.” I grumble back in response, bidding my MMI to life just as I was swamped with numerous alerts and calls from the staff on base. “For the meantime, I’m just going to sit here and keep watch. Ask away, but I’m not moving from this spot until the vertigo goes away.”

“That’s what you get for doing something stupid.” Anthani snorts, a wistful smile on his face about the events that only happened a few hours prior. “... Clambering up to the roof of the rover to fire a makeshift railgun. You realize there’s gonna be stories about this, right?”

“We were close, we had a line of sight to the ship, and the scopes showed Efraim in danger.” I sigh. “I just pulled the trigger.”

“And the recoil knocked you out of the rover, and I had to line up the next shot before the capacitors were fried and the railgun just stopped working.” Anthani grins. “... Though, if anyone asks, I’ll leave it out of the re-telling. Just buy me a drink when we get back to base.”

“Fuck that.” I roll my eyes, “I’m shunting off my pay for the month to get all of... all of this settled. Better to get this done now rather than leave it waiting.”

We settle into a comfortable silence, the thrum of the rover’s engine being the sole backdrop between Anthani and I. It doesn’t take long before my second-in-command breaks the silence, his voice all but a whisper as he gets my attention with a cant.

“Bossman. That thing that we shot at earlier...”

“It’s not an ordinary Kal’Dari, that’s for sure.” I mutter back, my MMI spooled up as I began searching the System Weave for information. “Something related to the military considering their mil-spec vac suit, but you don’t see a Clanner running around with pipes jammed into their arms. Doubt that’s within the Accords.”

“Like jamming tubes and fluids into a Kal’Dari is a good way to make a combatant.” Something bout Anthani’s words makes me pause, and my eyes narrow as I begin narrowing down my search terms. “Worst case scenario is just that they die instantly, though no doubt someone with a passing knowledge of med tech would be able to keep whatever that this was from falling apart so long as they’ve got a drug cabinet–”

“Fer’shai.”

My words stop Anthani in his tracks, my second-in-command slowly craning his neck towards me. “... Sir, no offense, but that’s just an urban legend.”

With a contemptuous flick of my fingers, my eye projects a feed from a in, scrambling away from a drop pod that lands just meters away from whoever they were. The doors were blasted open, and three figures step out from the cloud of dust, right before the helmet’s owner was picked up in a vice grip, showing a snarling Kal’Dari with its head crest rattling. Of course, what was more interesting was the haze in their eyes, and the tubes all but jammed by the back of that Kal’Dari’s neck.

Awfully familiar to what Efraim had described while we were making our way towards the ship. Awfully familiar to what Anthani and I saw when we fired that railgun.

“It’s not an urban legend when it’s been lurking on the Weave for a long, long time.” I sigh, sending the file towards him with a flick of a thought. “Check the date. Smack dab in the middle of the Eugenics Scuffle.”

Anthani frowns, quickly playing the video that I sent towards him, before his face pales. “... That’s a long time.”

“Older than all of us in the base, and we've been here for a century and a half.” I grumble. “Been what, almost a thousand rotations since the entire thing was over? Maybe more? Doesn’t really matter at this point, doesn’t it? Someone’s been playing around with this stuff a thousand years since Ilsoma pummeled out the opposition. And last I remember, making more of these things was against the Accords.”

My second-in-command frowns. “... So why send one of these things after a fucking freighter?”

...

“Good question.” I mutter after a few seconds of silence, “I’ll get back to you once I figure it out. Though, given that I wasn't there on the ship...”

“Alright, so bad idea to ask you for this.” I snort, shaking my head while watching Anthani's gaze flickering towards Efraim. “... Bossman, you think she got something out of the ship?”

“Most likely not. She was probably too focused on trying to survive along with Shisholi. If she did...” My eyes glance towards Efraim’s... no, Shisholi’s pad, blinking softly on one of the crates, surrounded by Shisholi and Efraim’s personal effects. “... I’ll take it up to her once she’s awake. That’s the least that I could do for her.”

“Sure. That’d be for the best.” Anthani mutters back, tapping down a few more notes in his pad, “... You think we should hire more security? Because there’s no doubt that whoever sent that fer’shai running after that freighter would be willing to send more.”

“More fer’shai? That just makes it easier for word to leak out on the System Weave.”

“No, not that. By this point, I’m pretty certain that this is a Clanner operation for... something, I don’t know. When Efraim and the others woke it up, it probably could’ve sent a signal to its handlers somewhere. Just, maybe send some kind of hit squad or so. Stake things out and figure out what happened.” I frown nonetheless. “... Still gonna be trouble. Whoever sent that fer’shai would be snooping around, and you know that’s trouble.”

“Any business with Clanners is always a bad idea.” Anthani sighs. “... Lemme guess, we can’t ask for extra security from the higher-ups.”

“Hell no.” I snap. “Clan Okmoshi has majority shares in Bries Salvaging Wright’s security apparatus. We ask for some, they’re gonna ask why, and like hell am I gonna tell them everything.”

I breathe. “... No. What we tell is that we had an accident on one of the salvaging operations. Accidental reactivation of a ship reactor and onboard weaponry, leading to the cause of death for two hardworking members of the base.”

Anthani gawks at me. “You’re burying this shit under.”

“To protect the lot of you.” I snap, more than annoyed at Anthani’s affronted tone, “If we try to leak this out onto the System Weave, even if we find some evidence in Efraim’s logs, we’ll be dismissed as a fucking hoax while a Clanner drops a kill-team on us. No – we keep this hidden, we keep our heads low, and we let this fucking incident pass us by until–”

“The whole system needs to know what happened here!”

“–Then until we get a fucking sponsor that won’t kill us for having this information, we keep our heads down.” I hiss, taking a deep breath before glaring at my second-in-command. “... I’ve lost two upstanding Kal’Dari now. I’m not too keen on losing more.”

Anthani glares back, only for his stare to cool off over the course of a few seconds as my words sink in. He opens his mouth to speak... before he shakes his head, stuffing his pad back into the folds of his robes.

“I’m gonna cool my head off for a little bit, Bossman.” He pipes up with a soft sigh, “Hope you have a good day.”

“You too.” I reply in response, hearing the door close behind me and leaving me to my own thoughts.

With a grumble, I turn my sight towards the three Kal’Dari in the cargo bay. One in a medical coma, the other two dead. I take a deep breath, closing my eyes for a few seconds before my eye activates. A holographic screen projects itself in front of me, showing myself standing straight with my arms clasped in a grim cant. With a twist of my thought, my eye glows, and the screen starts to record.

“Greetings, and I hope this message finds you in good health.” I begin, taking another deep breath before continuing on. “It is with my great sorrow that I tell you of your daughter’s current state. Shisholi... Shisholi las’Civarr mi’Sangre is no longer of this life. Her cause of death an overexposure of radiation with a leaking reactor core while out on a salvage mission...”