POV Call Sign: No Sweat

POV Unit Type: vurker, The Eternal Order of the 100%’ers

THE OLD GUY WAS COVERED IN SCARS. Some I’m sure he’d gotten working in the fields, others were older than that. He must’ve had a pretty interesting life is all I can say.

He still moved pretty quick, for an old guy. And was definitely spry, I’ll give him that.

I’d seen him wale pretty good on one of the kraggit who’d attacked us when we first landed on Debron IV. Those bastards are sketchy little fuckers, you have to move real quick to be able to hit one like that.

The deadeyes [space marines] went absolutely nuts when they found the Krag were already here. Just a whirlwind of death from the moment we hit the dirt. They cleared out the kraggit and gave chase back to wherever the hell they’d come from.

It’s spooky to have kraggit in the supply chain so soon. I’m glad we have That Aggressive staying near the fields to guard us.

Anyways…

The old guy’s arms were crossed and his expression wasn’t surly but it was plain he had low expectations of me. Despite his generosity, I’m certain I will still manage to disappoint him.

“They call you No Sweat because everything is easy for you? Or because you’re lazy and don’t vurk so you never sweat?” the old guy asked, interrupting my thoughts.

I’m pretty sure that vurk was an Old Guy joke.

He didn’t sound angry, or accusatory. He sounded casual, like he was teasing me. Maybe. I don’t know, sometimes it’s hard to tell with old-timers. More often than not their jokes can be a little hard to get.

The reason why they call me No Sweat is because back in the day, on my first battlefield, I’d gotten hold of some baby powder and rubbed some of it on my balls before the sync down. I thought it would help keep things well lubricated.

Instead, the baby powder soaked up all the moisture in my crotch and my nut sacks overheated. Oh, my aching balls. Damn near fried the poor things off. I didn’t rate for medical back then so I had to walk it off. It was close to two weeks before I could take a step without wincing.

But there was no way I was going to tell him that.

Fortunately, the scarred old guy didn’t wait for an answer and instead he introduced himself saying, “I’m Skeeter,” with a raised fist.

Of course I knew who he was. He was kind of a legend among the vurkers.

Skeeter had been with the The Good Shepherd since almost the beginning. He was one of the founding members of the Brothers of the Hook, one of the Three and the Seven. And at one point or another he had probably built damn near everything there was to build in our entire tech tree.

I’m no slouch but I’m not a living legend either. I tried to keep my cool but I guess I was a little self-conscious, still I raised my fist to meet his and said, “Fuck yeah,” then we bumped in salute.

It’s kinda weird touching old people.

They smell so damn… Old.

Everyone stinks on the battlefield.

Water rations are always tight, but especially when we’re deployed on a battlefield. But not showering is just inviting a serious disease outbreak to happen, so there’s a healthy balance between water use and hygiene that always errs heavily on the wrong side of BO [body odor].

Most of us just smell like sweat, or puke, or bad breath or sour piss or unwiped butt or whatever.

On the battlefield, nutrition is mostly fats on purpose–maximum calories from the minimum weight.

Unfortunately, a lipid-heavy diet gives a man gas.

And as much as I enjoy sharing the lovely aromas of my own ass, you never go long before someone else has to blow a big phat disgusting cloud of nasty stinky oily ass all over everyone’s air space.

So you get used to some pretty awful stuff real quick.

But Skeeter…

Man, he just smelled old. That’s a bad smell all to a league of its own.

I’ve been assigned to build the gassery down here on Debron IV.

Except I’ve never built one before. Sure, I’ve done it a few times in the sim, but that was a long time ago, and this is going to be my first time building a real one on a battlefield.

I think it’s the Algorithm. Trying to tell me that I’ve leveled up in its estimation and can be trusted with more important jobs. That’s me.. moving on up.

I assumed Skeeter was going to supervise and I was going to watch, listen and learn which translates into me doing all the work while he tells me I’m not doing it right.

So I was pleasantly surprised when he began to help me with the construction.

We were both in our builder mechs, he and I. Piloting the builders over a cordoned off area of the battlefield not far from where the rest of the base was being worked on.

He set a good, brisk pace, and talked while he worked.

It coulda been worse. He was definitely an Old Guy though, cheerily delivering a lecture I called Everything You Never Knew You Never Wanted to Know About Energy Mining.

I recorded a little bit of it here, in my apocalypse:

You heard of the primordial ooze, right? Well, the gassery is the primordial structure of the base’s energy supply chain. It’s the first step and the cornerstone of all of our planetside energy harvesting operations.

Typically from this building, we’ll engage the BHA (bottom hole assembly) and the drill string as well as perform all of our return-conduit management.

The BHA is what does the actual digging and the drill string is how we communicate with it.

Skeeter pauses in his lecture and smiles at me. “One of these days… I’m going to see if I can get Hangman to race me. We’ll see if he and his Ouroboros can punch a hole through a planet faster than I can drill one with my BHA and a good drill string.”

Man, fucking Old Guys, I am sure he’s making a joke this time.

Skeeter sucks air through his teeth then launches back to the lecture…

In most cases, the gassery will be constructed as close to a [a source of energy] as possible. This facilitates both the discovery and recovery of the resource.

The most common case, is near or in a [tremelene field], which are easily identified by the green vapors that flow naturally off the fields. The source of the vapors is [tremelene ore], itself buried deep below [in most instances] the surface. So we have to drill to get to it.

[He pointed at some pipes stacked near our work.]

“To a lay person that looks like pipe, but you’re a vurker, so you’ll call it what it really is: conduit.”

You can pump damn near anything liquid anywhere you want through conduit.

The geology of a tremelene field in its most basic form is this. Near the surface are the vapors. After drilling past the first stratification zone lies the liquids, we call it tremelene gas. Don’t confuse it with the vapors, which are actually a gas.

Skeeter laughs.

[That mighta been an Old Guy joke, I’m guessing it was. Old Guys really can be hard to get sometimes.] At least he didn’t ask me to pull his finger.

Beneath the underground pools of liquid tremelene gas, beyond the second stratification layer are the tremelene solids, which we also call tremelene ore.

Once we get the gassery built we could potentially build an array of atmospheric collectors to gather the vapors naturally coming off the tremelene field. It’s not an optimal fuel source, but we could feasibly power some basic structures with it.

Granted, it’s not much, but it’s the closest thing to free energy on the battlefield and in a pinch can keep the base online.

The liquids are the first target in an energy mining supply chain. In a good field they are found only a few miles below the surface and can be pumped via conduit from below ground up to the gassery where they can be refined/processed to have any impurities removed.

This liquid based energy is desirable as it is stable, safe to work with and has an adequate density to energy ratio. However the primary advantage of using the liquid energy is ease of transport.

Sometimes after processing we’ll pump the liquids straight to a power plant (through a network of conduits) but more often we push it into an equivalencer.

Once you’ve built out the basic infrastructure [gassery —> conduit/pipeline —> equivalencer] you can power most objects/structures/vehicles in the base. It’s just a question of how much gas we need to keep the base powered balanced with how much energy The Good Shepherd needs, and how quickly they want it sent to them.

And the faster we do that, the faster we can get off this damn rock and get our asses back in a hidden space hole where the Krag can’t find us.

“Speed, to a vurker, is of the utmost importance.” He makes a point of that last bit.

I must have looked bored, because Skeeter makes eye contact with me before continuing. “This is a fuck-chop free zone. No screwing around. We’re on the clock down here and no one goes anywhere until we hit the energy quota assigned to us by the The Good Shepherd.”

Right, right. I nod my head. No fuck chopping.

“We’ll cover the more advanced pieces of the energy mining infrastructure some other time.”

He indicates the massive reinforced steel canisters—frosted so they look like kegs of beer—scattered near the build site.

We keep barrels of a Frankenstein-modified sif3 [a misreading/mispronunciation of the actual chemical formula ClF~3~] (sif3 is easier to pronounce and the name just caught on, I’ve never heard it called anything else) to burn through stuff that blocks the BHA (bottom hole assembly). If there’s something in the Universe that sif3 won’t catch on fire, we haven’t found it yet.

Skeeter chuckles, probably at a private Old Guy joke.

You wouldn’t be the first vurker to worry about pouring one of the most explosive compounds ever created down a tight hole filled with a liquid energy source at the bottom.

Gross. Man I really hope that wasn’t a sex joke. Fucking Old Guys…

One last thing, we’ll get some decent seismic activity once we start the mining operation in earnest. If you’ve never been in a quake before your first time might seem a bit intense, but don’t worry. You’ll get used to it soon enough.

Before long you’ll be rocking and rolling with the rest of us.

“Welcome to the club!” Skeeter cracks a smile and finishes his lecture:

“It’s called rough-necking, pulling energy from the ground. One of the most noblest of professions there ever was.”