Salvage Seven: Chapter 2
Once you’ve started, why stop? There’s a lot more where this came from.
If you haven’t read the first bit of Salvage Seven, you can find the prologue and parts 1 and 2 of Chapter 1 at these links. If you have, then here’s Chapter 2.
All too soon, Gideon was following Petra and Collins back through the motor pool to the waiting flatbed. They were all fully kitted out: fresh fatigues and less-than-fresh body armour, bucket helmets and knee-high boots, with webbing belted over it all to hold their own specialist tools. Collins was carrying the big plastic case that held his drones, while Petra had a compact plasma cutter that, Gideon knew, could scythe through armour-plate like a knife through butter. Gideon had his full suite of electrician’s tools. They were probably the most important things he owned – some he’d brought from the shop, what felt like a lifetime ago. He still got regular updates from David on how it was doing. He hadn’t replied to one in months.
They made their way through the fuel-haze and hubbub to the flatbed; still covered in mud and grime but sitting a little more comfortably on its heavy suspension, its chunky tyres reinflated. Dawson was tinkering with something above the rear wheel, looking up when the three scavengers drew near. When she saw Petra, her eyes hardened.
“All ready for you, Corporal.”
“Good,” Petra replied, and walked straight past Dawson to the driver’s seat, climbing into the cab without another word. Gideon muttered vague thanks as he passed Dawson, and Collins tried a smile, but the engineer ignored them both. As Petra started the engine and rolled the flatbed out of its bay, Gideon glimpsed her in the rear-view mirror, staring a thousand blades into Petra’s back as she shrank into the crowd. That can’t last forever. The only way Gideon could see that particular feud settled was with at least one death – and not necessarily on the battlefield.
They waited for a long few minutes in the queue of vehicles; more flatbeds, a couple of armoured personnel carriers ready to go on patrol; until the duty corporal finally waved them through. Petra slipped smoothly into gear, and they rolled down the colossal ramp and out into the mud. It was getting dark now, but light from a thousand sources flowed out of the hangar bay and showed them the latest form of the ever-shifting landscape, the new shape of the flowing mud and earth. It was still raining. Gideon wasn’t sure that it had ever stopped. Petra found some tracks that hadn’t oozed back into the ground yet, flipping on the floodlights as Collins, riding shotgun, called up the navigation display and plotted a route. Gideon, useless, turned back and watched as the light from the hangar slowly dimmed, as the almost impossibly vast shape that was the grounded UNS Jeroboam, home and operating base for five thousand soldiers of the Union army, slowly faded into the gloom and was gone, leaving nothing but the mud and rain.
*
All too soon, they reached their assigned sector. Gideon donned his helmet, took one last breath of warm air, and then opened his door and dropped into ankle-deep mud, the chill immediately finding his bones and biting deep. This, apparently, was what passed for springtime on Arcadia, a world famed for its vast forests and their thousand-year-old trees – not that Gideon had ever seen them. Until the war came it had still been a wild world, recently settled and barely tamed by its colonists; ending up right between the seceding Republic and the reeling Union had sealed its fate. If there were still trees on Arcadia, they were far, far away – the war had chewed up the forests, sucked down the crisp, clear air, eaten the dream of utopia alive and left nothing behind but smoke and mud.
“Alright,” said Petra, closing the truck’s door behind her. Her dark fatigues, carefully divested of most of their insignia, made her blend far too well with the mud. “The scans picked up some heavy machinery. Corpse wagons haven’t been round yet. Focus on the big stuff, but pick up whatever you can.” She pulled up the map on her wrist-mounted PDA, a few taps synchronising it with Collins and Gideon’s. “Here, here and here. Spread out, take it slow, and keep in touch. If they’re Republic, let me know and I’ll be right over.”
“Got it, Corp,” said Collins. Gideon just nodded. Petra fiddled with her radio, cursing quietly as it crackled with static.
“Seven-Two to Seven-Actual. Comm check.”
“Copy, Seven.” Handel’s voice; given the man was already stuck back on the Jeroboam it was only logical that he run their comms and support. “Happy hunting. And if you find any fusion cells, let me know. Bounty just went up.”
“Will do.” Petra looked up and nodded curtly at Collins and Gideon. “Off we go.” Without another word she turned, snapping on her helmet torch, and stalked off through the mud.
“Would you hold this?” Collins asked, passing Gideon his gun. He took it, as the technician squelched around to the back of the flatbed and set down his heavy case, popping it open.
“Alpha, close support,” he muttered, tapping at the screen of his PDA and linking it to the crude AIs, “Beta, wide scan, Gamma, focus standby.” He pressed a button with a flourish, and from the case three silver spheres popped up, springing into the air on miniature repulsors to hover around Collins’ head. Lights flickered in a wide array of patterns, and Collins smiled, satisfied.
“Good boys.” He flicked back to the map. “I’ll take the west mark, you the east?”
“Fine,” Gideon said, handing the submachine gun back. “Shout when you know what it is.”
“Got it.” Collins turned on his own head-torch and squelched away, his drones following, taking up their assigned patterns. Gideon shook his head, flipping on his own light. His bunkmate spent far more time than was healthy with his little friends – but he had to admit that they were useful bits of kit. None of that for him, though. If he wasn’t working with his own hands, he wasn’t working. He checked his map, found his waypoint, and set off, leaving the floodlights of the flatbed behind.
He’d barely gone twenty steps before he found his first body. Once he would have been squeamish about it, but now the sight of the corpse barely shook him. Because, he reflected as he turned the body over, its flesh pallid, bloated by the endless rain, it’s not fresh. Someone days, even hours dead was no concern of his – it was the thought of the dying that made him shudder, of fresh blood on living skin. He pushed the memory away, scanned the body. It was a Union infantryman, armed with a kinetic rifle soaked through by mud. Gideon pulled it free of the corpse’s hands, cleared the firing chamber with a jerk, examined it. Properly cleaned, it ought to work again. He disassembled it and stuffed the pieces in his pack, before finding the dead man’s dogtags, flat above the entry wound of the shot that had killed him. A few taps on his PDA logged the serial number and name for the corpse wagons that would sweep the sector after Salvage was done – or at least after they had disarmed the really dangerous stuff. Gideon knew that this blasted waste would never truly be free of the remnants of battle. He had read about the Iron Harvest back on Earth during his training, of how farmers had dug up shell-casings and helmets for centuries after the big old wars were done. In years to come, Arcadian farmers would dig up shards of steel, plastic cartridges and ballistic polymers. If any ever come. Gideon couldn’t say Arcadia would be at the top of his list for settling down.
Four more corpses delayed him on his slow, sticky journey to the pulsing signature on his PDA map. He checked each one, relieving them of their weapons, armour if he could easily get it off – and if it was remotely intact. By the time he drew near the energy signature his pack was already heavy with broken-down rifles; nothing special, but finding the special things wasn’t actually his job, much to the chagrin of Handel. The official mission statement of the Salvage Corps was to clear up the battlefields of the Uncivil War (as the satirists had long since called it), to make a half-dozen planets safe again for human habitation, a grand gesture of a joint venture between two armies who very much still wanted to go for each other’s throats. The actual role of the Salvage Corps, as Gideon perceived it, was for the Union and the Republic to scavenge as much scrap and still-functional materiel as they could, so that when the uneasy truce inevitably shattered they could get right back to shooting at each other like nothing had ever interrupted.
Regardless of how idealistic you were, Gideon’s job remained the same: find anything remotely usable or dangerous – and a lot of stuff that wasn’t – and bring it back to the Jeroboam to be used and reused again. As he brushed the worst of the mud off a pistol, he wondered idly how many hands would wield it – and how many hands would pluck it from the mud on a dozen different worlds so it could be wielded again. He wondered if anyone he knew had held it, would hold it. Maybe he would. He hoped he wouldn’t.
The mud formed a low rise, up which he slid and squelched, his high combat boots providing as much grip as possible – which was to say none at all. The beam of his helmet torch jerked around like a half-dead moth as he struggled over the lip of the rise, almost falling more than once, but he got a grip on some half-buried chunk or rock or metal and straightened. Looking down at the shallow dip in the field, he didn’t need to consult his PDA to see what the orbital scanners had picked up – and really wished that he did. Crouched in the bottom of the dip, what little of it that wasn’t covered in mud blackened and warped by energy weapon impacts, but still brutally, terrifyingly intact, was a Talos-pattern Automated Weapons Platform, big and brooding and bristling with guns. Gideon instinctively dropped into what little cover there was, drawing his woefully useless shotgun. His heart was pounding. Fucking auto-tank! It looked intact, too, or mostly so; half-buried in the mud of the battlefield it might be, but he could see no obvious damage beyond scorching. It was also, he realised, his heart slowing a little, completely still. He slipped a compact scope from his webbing and scanned the mass of metal slowly, looking for the telltale crimson glint of active sensors. He found none. Forcing himself to breathe out, he keyed his comm.
“Seven-Actual, Four.”
“Go ahead, Four,” replied Handel from the tiny corner of the operations centre that Donoghue had been able to scavenge to run the team’s support.
“Reached scan reference… whatever it is,” Gideon said, “and it’s a Talos.”
Handel whistled.
“You’ve either got the best or worst luck in the world today, my son. How’s it look?”
“Intact. Half-buried, but in one piece.”
“Shitting hell,” Handel breathed. “That’s one hell of a find.”
“Seven-Actual,” came another voice on the comm, “we are on duty.”
“Sorry, Two,” Handel said, without a trace of embarrassment. “Four, can you handle it?”
Gideon considered the seemingly dead machine. The many patterns of auto-tank were surprisingly cheap and horrifyingly effective murder machines of a kind both sides had thrown enthusiastically into the fray throughout the war. “Automation,” the press statements had said time and again, “will increase efficiency and save lives. Fewer soldiers on the battlefield means fewer soldiers in the infirmary.” There might have been fewer soldiers on the battlefield at a time, but the efficiency of death-machines like the Talos and the T-27 meant that those soldiers died just as fast as before. The Talos, Gideon remembered, flipping through hazy images of old technical manuals, was a multi-purpose assault vehicle, pointed in the general direction of the enemy and then unleashed, spitting fire and lead from its many mouths. If its slaved AI were still active, Gideon would be pulped as soon as he got within five yards – and if they woke up, he’d be just as screwed. He could take the thing apart and fry its brain like he had the drone earlier – but he couldn’t do it alone. Or at least he really, really didn’t want to.
“Could use a hand, Actual,” he said, trying to keep the relief out of his voice. “This one’ll be hard to crack.”
“Gotcha. Two, Six, can you assist?” If Handel knew how scared Gideon was, it didn’t show in his voice.
“On my way over,” came Petra’s voice, brusquely. “Mine’s just a four-wheel. Can get it later.”
“I can come too,” said Collins with a static edge. “Flatbed over here. Civilian model. Barely worth our time.”
Petra didn’t reply, but Gideon almost flinched away from the daggers she would be staring at Collins – dear, naïve Collins, whose tactless appraisal of the Republic’s improvised vehicles could not have been delivered to a less appropriate person.
“So we’re all on their way, then,” Handel said, filling the silence. “Lovely. Gid, sit tight.”
Gideon did so, and a few minutes later he heard Collins scrambling and squelching up his ridge, even less elegantly than Gideon himself. He didn’t offer a hand until Collins was almost at the top, pity overriding the vindictive pleasure of watching the struggle.
“Oh, lovely,” Collins breathed, settling into the mud next to Gideon. His three drones settled into formation above and behind his head, many lights flickering. “The targeting software on those things set a new standard.”
“And that new standard got a lot of people killed,” said Petra, and Gideon almost jumped out of his skin. He hadn’t heard her approaching at all, which in this sucking mud should have been impossible – yet there she was, standing behind them, her fatigues barely muddy at all.
“Collins, deep scan,” Petra ordered, her eyes fixed on the auto-tank. “Residual power output, anything that’s still charged. These things are tough; might just be dormant.”
“Yes, Corporal,” the skinny man replied, tapping at his PDA. Two of his three drones gained height and then floated forwards, stopping a few feet from the tank’s shell. The pattern of lights changed, and then Gideon saw the infrared beams flicker out, playing over every exposed inch of the dead – or sleeping – machine.
“Some residual power,” Collins muttered, eyes locked on his screen, the drones feeding him information in real-time. “Looks like the backup fusion battery’s still active. Main couplings are fried.” One of the drones was hovering over the mud-covered half of the tank, scanning through the muck.
“Any idea,” Gideon asked carefully, “what took it out?”
“Switching Alpha to external scan,” Collins replied, and one of the drones changed its pattern at his touch. “Armour mostly intact. Under the mud… ah. Rocket impact at the rear.”
“Engine block,” Petra said confidently. “Armour’s thinner there for heat dissipation. A good shot cripples them. It’s Union.” Gideon nodded, but he was unable to stop Collins asking the stupid question.
“How do you know?”
Petra turned, fixing Collins with a dark glare.
“Because that’s how we used to kill these things back on Karapoor,” she replied. “When the Union sent half a brigade into the suburbs and killed two thousand civilians. Auto-tanks, against noncombatants. Against children.”
She looked up at the tank again, and Gideon’s eyes were drawn to her collar, and the darker patch on the worn fabric where the insignia of the Republic had once been sewn.
