Salvage Seven: Chapter 3
Chapter 3 time. Let’s go.
Prologue
Chapter 1, parts 1 and 2
Chapter 2
They disabled the tank with surprising efficiency; on the rare occasion that the members of Salvage 7 worked together without remembering their petty squabbles and disagreements they were a damn fine team. While Collins’ drones continued scanning the tank’s internal power lines, watching for any spike from the backup battery to one of the tank’s many energy weapons, Gideon, under Petra’s direction, systematically disabled as many of the tank’s visual sensors and external weapons as possible. Some of the sensors were inaccessible – the backups, sheathed in armour-plated clamshells that only opened if the main cameras were knocked out – but Petra’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the tank’s design let Gideon short out all the tank’s main eyes, largely blinding it. That alone wasn’t especially reassuring, so they moved onto the external guns.
“Power diverted from main cannon… now,” Collins called, one of his drones holding position over the tank’s back, an invisible beam piercing the armoured shell. Gideon nodded and bent to his work, insulated wire-cutters snipping carefully at the relevant cables through the hold Petra had carved with her plasma cutter. Within a few moments he had disabled every feed to the big pulse cannon save the one to its auxiliary plasma reservoir.
“Collins,” Petra called, “can you drain the aux tank?”
“Working,” the technician replied. He was still up on the ridge, hunched over his laptop and tapping furiously at its keyboard. Awkward he might look, but there was nothing awkward about the smooth flight of his three drones, circling balletically around the buried Talos. The nearest – Gamma, Gideon thought – stopped jamming the cut power feeds and shifted position.
“There,” Petra pointed, to a spot beneath the armour that was identical to all the rest. Gamma held position, shuddering as it began to emit invisible radiation again. It would have been impossible to tell, had the unseen beam not vaporised every raindrop that it touched, sending them hissing into steam.
“Fifty percent, thirty…” Collins called, “ten, empty!”
“Cut it,” Petra ordered, but Gideon was already working, Petra’s plasma cutter in his hand. There was a hiss as ozone forced its way out of the pipe and Gideon almost threw himself backwards, but Petra waved her hand.
“It’s fine. Empty.”
Gideon leaned back and saw that she was right; the pipeline was empty. He cut through the rest, just to be sure.
“Main cannon disabled,” he called for Collins’ benefit.
“Nice job,” came Handel’s voice over the radio. “Now, get to the other hardpoints. Some nasty shit mounted on these things.” Gideon nodded; he didn’t want to tangle with any of the tank’s munitions if he could help it.
“No,” Petra countered, and Gideon’s heart sank, “we kill the backup battery. We’ve a way in now. Let’s kill this thing for good, and we can haul it out intact.”
“After my own heart,” Handel replied with an audible grin. “Alright. Backup on a Talos is a 50MW output. Fry you out of your skin. But it’s an older model. Capacitors were pieces of shit, used to bleed out into nothing if you looked at them funny.”
“We can use that,” Petra decided. “Gideon?”
“We’ll need something to bleed them into,” Gideon replied, burying his nerves as best he could, “if we don’t want to get fried.” And I don’t. He thought back to the old shop and all the ancient vehicles and ancient capacitors that had come through day after day. In the shop, they’d had a big industrial capacitor buried underneath the workshop floor, which had come in handy during their frequent powercuts. Here, in a muddy field in the middle of nowhere…
“Another vehicle would do it,” he decided finally. “Big enough frame to take the charge, and if we earth it properly it’ll flow straight through.”
“Could use that four-wheel you found,” Collins called to Petra, clearly eager to redeem himself a little, “if it runs!” Petra shrugged.
“Let’s go and find out.”
It took all three of them, all their strength and some clever leverage to get the jeep on its wheels again, heaving it out of the mud. Gideon knew the type immediately; a popular civilian model modified for combat use, simple and rugged and one he’d mended dozens of back in the day. Once he’d reconnected the leads for the hydrogen fuel cell the engine started with barely a splutter. The four-wheel had become a two-wheel drive, and its gearbox was shot to hell, but Petra still managed to coax it up and over the ridge and back to the tank. Collins was sent back to their own flatbed and stumbled into view a few minutes later with a reel of insulated cable slung around his shoulders. He busied himself attaching one end to the jeep’s heavy chassis. Gideon took the other.
“There,” Petra pointed, and Gideon squeezed the trigger of his soldering iron, sticking the frayed cable end to the exposed terminal with a hiss of flash-boiling drizzle. “Collins, let’s try this!”
They all scrambled well clear of the tank. Two of Collins’ drones kept monitoring the power flow to the tank’s many weapons and sensors; the third moved into position above the backup battery. The technician was glued to his laptop screen, but Petra beckoned Gideon into cover in a shell-hole. Worryingly, she had unshipped her marksman’s rifle – decidedly non-standard even for the unregulated Salvage crews. Gideon checked the load of his shotgun, for all the good it would do. If the tank woke up, he’d be paste and vapour before he could so much as aim, cover be damned.
He breathed in deeply, then out, slowly. It didn’t help at all.
“Hope this works,” commented Handel unhelpfully. Gideon saw Petra scowl.
“Collins, when you’re ready,” she called. The skinny tech replied over the radio.
“Ok. Opening the taps in three, two, one…”
Gideon felt the air crackle with static as the backup battery emptied itself down the cable and into the frame of the four-wheel-drive, the backwash standing his hair on end. Four sharp cracks, a burst of gunfire, made him cringe into the mud, almost foetal, as Petra instinctively snapped her rifle up to return fire. He tasted copper – but it wasn’t blood, and though his ears were ringing he couldn’t hear Collins screaming, the whine of bullets, barked orders and rumbling engines. Cautiously, Gideon poked his head above the lip of the foxhole, shotgun in a death-grip. The four-wheel was a blackened ruin, its chassis warped and buckled by the sheer heat of the discharge, and all four tyres had burst – in rapid succession Gideon realised, flushing with embarrassment under his coating of filth. The mud surrounding the wrecked jeep was bubbling with heat, giving off a deeply unpleasant, worryingly organic smell – but a few yards away Collins sat happily with a big smile on his face.
“It’s dead!” he called, waving at Gideon. “Not a watt left!” His three drones swirled over the Talos, beeping merrily. Beside Gideon, Petra lowered her rifle with a sigh of relief, and for a moment Gideon felt a new solidarity, a reassurance that, for once, he hadn’t been the only one scared. But then he saw Petra’s expression of utter indifference; the look of a woman who’d seen all this before a hundred times and never once flinched, never once faltered; and the feeling faded.
“Alright. Good job. Now let’s get it out and go home.”
She shouldered her gun and strode towards the tank, leaving Gideon in the foxhole, wet, and tired, and alone.
*
The Jeroboam’s Deck Three mess hall was packed, as it always was. The grounded frigate was home to thousands – besides the five thousand Union soldiers and salvage operators who packed its hastily converted barrack-rooms, the ship had two thousand in its crew, from bridge officers to mechanics, and another several hundred assorted hangers-on and camp followers who plied trades sweet and sordid in the lower decks. The Jeroboam had not been designed as a troop carrier. It was a warship, an escort vessel, meant for the simultaneously lightning-fast and achingly slow dance that was space combat. With the war against the Republic officially over, however, and the cleanup operation only widening in scope, Union Command – and indeed the Republic’s own Council – had pressed the Jeroboam and dozens of other ships like it into service as improvised ground bases. It was, Gideon reflected as he shuffled another few inches forward in the heaving queue, trying not to jostle the big infantrymen who surrounded him, a good idea in theory. Capital ships had communications equipment, powerful sensors, defensive weapons and the manufacturing and recycling capacity necessary to work very well as bases. They also, on paper, had plenty of room in their cargo holds and other big spaces to fit the region’s assigned ground forces. On paper, the Jeroboam was a perfect ground base. In reality, it was an overcrowded hellhole. The Navy men and women of the ship’s crew resented the Army for cluttering their ship and forcing them to spend months on the ground; the Army resented the Navy for being stuck-up arseholes who wouldn’t allow them free reign aboard ship; and everyone resented the Salvage squads for being the reason they were there at all. Gideon, therefore, as he shuffled towards the mess hall’s food counter for dinner, kept his head down and his mouth shut.
After what felt like hours he finally reached the counter, taking a tray of the evening’s nutritionally balanced rations. The best thing anyone, Army or Navy or Salvage, could say about the supposedly perfect balance of protein, carbohydrates and vitamins was that it was sometimes hot and usually didn’t taste like vomit – no matter how much it looked like it. Gideon took his tray and slipped back through the crowd to a long table in the corner, where the rest of Seven and some other Salvage people picked at their slop with varying levels of enthusiasm. He slid onto the end of the bench, next to Handel, who alone among the group was attacking his slop with a smile on his face, metal arm moving slowly. He actually liked the stuff, Gideon knew; apparently standard rations had been much worse once upon a time. It was difficult to believe, Gideon reflected as he took his first bland, faintly acrid spoonful, that such a thing was possible. Next to Handel was Collins, barely paying attention to his food as he leafed through some technical manual, utterly absorbed. Just once Gideon wanted to see the volunteer in some kind of discomfort – but the day still had not come.
Donoghue sat down across from Gideon, nodding curtly but saying nothing to him. Handel smiled at her and cracked a joke that cracked her dour expression just a little, and the two began chatting amiably. They had been thick as thieves as long as Gideon had known them, the kind of genuine friendship that only came, at least for soldiers, from months spent under fire together, trapped in foxholes with nothing but each other’s company. It was the kind of friendship Gideon had never had. He didn’t expect to ever find it. Next to Donoghue loomed Yaxley, twice as broad and almost a foot taller than any of them. Yaxley Gideon barely knew at all, even after half a year spent working with the big man. He was good with explosives, even better to have around when the heavy lifting needed doing as it so often did… and that was just about all Gideon knew about him. He’d been, according to Handel, in the Ordnance Corps before being seconded to Salvage; an artilleryman. What he’d done to end up digging unexploded shells out of the Arcadian mud instead of putting them there was anyone’s guess.
Dawson sat next to Yaxley, and, at the far end of the table with another half-dozen people separating them, sat Petra, eating silently. Surrounded by people she might be, but she was unmistakeably alone. Even Gideon, ignored as he was, seemed part of the squad – but no matter what Petra did she would never escape the fact that she was the enemy. Gideon would have felt sorry for her if he’d not felt so sorry for himself. The salvage operation might nominally be a joint effort, but the Union and Republic commands had been sensible enough to realise that mixing squads of soldiers who’d only just stopped trying to kill each other wasn’t a good idea – except in Petra’s case, and a few other unfortunates like her. At least, he reflected as he ate, trying not to concentrate on taste or texture, she was separated from Dawson. Gideon knew from experience what would happen if the two were forced into the same space for longer than a few minutes. It was never pretty.
He suddenly realised that he was out of slop, spoon clattering against his bowl. The others, too, were just finishing up, and Gideon waited quietly for them. He wanted sleep, knew he was unlikely to actually get it. Something, as it always did, would come up. One by one, Salvage Seven finished eating.
“Well, that was awful,” sighed Donoghue, stretching and wincing as something that shouldn’t have cracked did. “But we’re done. Nothing more tonight, everyone, so do what you want.”
They all stood, gathering trays and bowls.
“I’m going for some real food,” Dawson grumbled. “Can’t stand this shit. Yax, coming?”
“Sure,” rumbled the big man. Gideon wasn’t surprised; standard rations were designed for humans of ordinary size – Yaxley had to need twice as much just to not starve.
“Collins?” Dawson asked, barely disguising her relief when the technician shook his head.
“Had a few gyro issues earlier,” he said. “Might go down to the workshop and have a proper look before tomorrow. Always maintain your kit, right?” He smiled. Only Handel offered a weak smile in response.
“Well, I might have a tasty little deal going down for those flechette pistols,” he said with a predatory grin. Gideon shuddered. Those guns were nasty little things, normally banned by at least two conventions he could think of – compact, easily concealed and horribly efficient. No wonder Handel stood to make good money off them.
“You want backup?” Donoghue asked. Handel shrugged.
“Couldn’t hurt. Get the feeling a sergeant isn’t exactly inconspicuous though. I’ll be fine alone.”
“Never said I’d show my face,” Donoghue countered. “Besides, you can’t afford to get anything else cut off.” The quartermaster scowled, making an obscene gesture with his prosthetic fingers that was all the more insulting for how slowly it came together.
“What about you, Gid?” Handel asked, unexpectedly. For a too-long moment, Gideon struggled with an answer he hadn’t expected to have to give.
“I’m shattered,” he finally said, lamely. “Need to sleep for a week.” He shrugged. “I’ll settle for eight hours.” In truth he’d settle for six.
“Alright then,” Donoghue said, dismissing him with a wave of her hand. “Whatever you do, don’t start a fight you can’t win and don’t get so drunk you can’t stand. Briefing at oh-seven. Piss off.”
The less-than-formal dismissal was met with a series of less-than-formal salutes, as Salvage Seven made its way out of the mess-hall and, splitting, out into the bowels of the Jeroboam. Gideon spared half a glance for Petra as they passed. She’d heard Donoghue, but didn’t look up as the rest of the squad filed out – she just ate her gruel in silence, alone save for whatever dark thoughts she carried. Gideon knew there were some. They were the only commodity not in short supply on the muddy hell that was Arcadia.
He, Handel, Donoghue and Collins went back to the squad’s cramped quarters, Yaxley and Dawson splitting off for the sub-decks together. As Handel retrieved his contraband from whichever hidden compartment he’d stashed it in, and Collins gathered up his drone kit, Gideon once again rinsed the mud from his body armour, his boots, all his outdoor gear from earlier, hanging them up in a vague semblance of cleanliness. He took another shower – all too brief, their hot water allowance running out almost immediately. By the time he emerged, he was alone in the suite of rooms. In less than nine hours, he would be on duty again.
He killed the lights, climbed into his bunk and buried himself in the thin blankets, and tried to relax. In the dark, the bloody face of Corporal Atwell waited, and she was not alone.
He did not sleep for some time.
