The Spiteful (Learning.4) (Patreon)

I lounged atop the Rambler’s canopy, relaxing under the clouds. It was a windy day, but it was always windy, here on Jemison. I was enjoying the chill; days usually ran hot, and I was happy to get something damper than usual. Steam billowed from the vent, doing my job to put more water into the atmosphere. It might have been a little irradiated, but what wasn’t, nowadays?

I’d been here at work for nearly two weeks, installing and upgrading the grav drive from the Interceptor. I was a little worried the Rambler’s original reactor- an old, mass produced Tokamak- wouldn’t be strong enough to handle the drive and the shield simultaneously, so I’ve been running a few test cycles.

After every step, I’d have to open it up to manually adjust the tiles inside. It got pretty hot, especially since I had to flush it after every test. Each reactor had its own little quirks in its magnetic fields, and the trick was to alter those quirks with microadjustments to keep the neutron count low. Newer reactors mostly automated the process, with articulated tiles and fancy software, but all I had was with a toolbox and a dream.

The plastic sheeting that hid my makeshift shipyard from the rest of the scrapyard crinkled as a light pitter-patter of rain started. I flinched, somehow not expecting to get it straight in my face. It didn’t rain much here. Still, it was nice. Toliman had been cold. A lot colder. I was starting to get sick of this planet. Too dry. Too hot. I flinched again when another droplet hit my nose.Then, the venting was done. I heard a beep, sat up, and checked the testing software. From the readings, it wasn’t fully aneutronic- I’d need a lot more vytnium for that- but it was ‘less than’ neutronic, and it would be enough.

Fresh fuel rod. Full of H3. An upgraded grav drive, my own design. My ship was scrap, two weeks ago. I’d fixed it up at a blistering pace; Slept in the hab, ate nothing but Chunks, and got the onboard shower working. 

I battened down the hatches. Did my pressure checks. Then climbed inside the ship, into the cockpit, and just stretched my arms out over the dashboard. All the systems booted up. The reactor started, the hab vented itself and then repressurized. No problems. No surprises.

There was a knot in my gut. I’d never owned my own ship before. I’d fixed some up, back before Argos, and I’d helped scrap some, but I’d never owned one.

This was what I’d been aiming for, for so long. 

On earth, it was a tradition to christen ships with new names. It followed us out into the Settled Systems, but people didn’t seem to do it as much anymore. According to the transponder, this one hadn’t been renamed either. If I was more superstitious, I might have blamed that for why the ship ended up in a scrapyard.Still. I already had a name in mind. I didn’t have a bottle of wine or anything to smash, but I wasn’t that superstitious.I flicked a switch, and the engines sputtered a few times… and began to roar.

“New Atlantis Port Authority, this is the Arcadia.” I said. “I’m testing out my new wings. Can I get a vector?”As the lady on the other end gave me directions, I couldn’t help but grin.

I was spaceborne.

===

The Arcadia was surprisingly agile. The original shuttle was designed for in-atmosphere flight, and it really felt like it. That could have just been because of the lack of atmosphere, but it had been the same when I took off from Jemison. The flight terminal chugged, giving me new approximates for my vector now and then, but it was working well enough that I’d be able to manage until I got a new one.

It probably didn’t help that I was storing a copy of the Eye’s data on it. It wasn’t all processed, but Sall’s onboard AI had already indicated points of interest, spread throughout the Settled Systems. As soon as the Arcadia was in orbit, I’d taken a little visit there and borrowed a copy of the data. Sall was nice about it, even. I liked him; he was much more personable than Morgan or Stroud, and didn’t set off alarm bells like Barrett.

Still, the Eye’s data was partially why I was here. The Arcadia’s scanners were barebones, and I wasn’t anywhere near as good an operator as Vladimir was, but I was at least going to check out one of the few ‘points of interest’ that the data had indicated.I burned over the site, my scanners pointed downward. Whatever was here, in the past, it wasn’t anything now. It was an old, old site. There was a flag, still standing tall, though it was worn and ragged. This was some kind of expedition, an old one from before Earth’s magnetosphere went to shit. From before the exodus. The flag, standing so tall when the people who lived in that nation were all long-dead… It was a little sobering.

I couldn’t detect anything. It meant that the anomaly they’d noticed must have been an old grav drive. Maybe one of the really early ones, before the kinks were worked out. The Eye was all the way out at Alpha Centauri, so Sall probably picked up the echoes from the past. We didn’t have data on how fast the Artifacts’ exotic energy wavelength traveled, but we could confirm that it was at least a lot slower than light speed.Still, I didn’t come here for just one thing. The trip back to the ‘old neighborhood’ had more purposes than just checking out one of Constellation’s points of interest. I saved the scan data to drop off later for when I went past the Eye again, and kept flying further south.The site I picked out was a quiet one without a proper landing pad, further from the equator than most. It was a little harder to get to unless you planned your insertion right- more burning required- but I knew orbital mechanics like the back of my hand. I’d come in at a high inclination.

I’d considered going back to Earth for this, but… No. Some things were beyond the pale. Even scavengers weren’t grave robbers, and Earth was the biggest grave of all.

Soil crunched under the Arcadia’s landing gear as I settled down onto the surface. There was a landing pad nearby, but it didn’t look functional at all. The supports were pitted and dented. Hundreds of years of meteorites had done their job. If I landed on it, the whole thing would have probably caved in.

I sat there in the cockpit for a second, just breathing. It was nice. The hab was bare, with barely anything but a bed, my Eridium cutter and my locker, but it felt… Safe. Comfortable. It had only been a few days since I took off in my new ship, and it was already home. It was more home than Argos ever was. More home than New Atlantis, too.

I’d make it better. But for now, I needed more parts. I needed to expand the computer systems. I suited up, equalized the pressure with the thin Martian atmosphere, and stepped out toward the facility.

While conflicts were raging on Earth, people on Mars were mining a lot of resources to build ships. They’d dug up every surface vein that they could scan or reach. It had been humanity’s greatest undertaking. Hundreds of launches a day for decades, and there still weren’t enough spaceships to take even a tenth of humanity from the planet before things detonated.

This was one of those facilities: A mixed metal mine and processing center. The area had been volcanic billions of years ago, and that left a lot of copper sulfide deposits, and they’d sent out both that, silver, and gold. Exactly what I was hoping for. I might only find traces left, but my Cutter meant I’d get a lot more than anyone else would.

I’d found a promising bit of machinery- a few deactivated type-A robots- when I noticed they’d already been scavenged. The metal was scraped and scored, like someone had pried htem open with a screwdriver. They’d pulled out most of the goodies- batteries, circuitry, that type of thing. It had been too much to hope they’d all been untouched.

Still, I had spare space, and I was already here. I slung the cutter off my back, checked the systems-

My helmet beeped, picking up another radio. Another helmet, and active suit.

“Don’t move.” A feminine voice said. I turned back and saw a woman in an old, refurbished suit, new homemade patches and reinforcements. She had a gun, the trigger modded so she could pull it from the side, with her offhand, instead of the grip, and the stock was magnetically clamped to her suit’s arm for extra bracing. It had been modded for use specifically with a suit. 

Spacer.Somehow, though, after the Hunter, I didn’t feel a hint of malice from her.

“Hello.”

“Why are you here?”“Just doing some scavenging,” I said. “These Type-As. They your work?”“... No,” She says. Then she sighs. “You know how to use that thing?”

“The cutter? Yeah.” I said.

“Okay. Good, that’s good. So, I need your help.” She was talking with a slight shakiness in her voice, tight with anxiety.

“I mean, you are pointing a gun at me.” I said.She looked down at it. “Right. Okay.” She sighs, and carefully unclamps it from her arm, putting it onto her hip. “My buddies went inside. They’re trapped, and I need someone who can cut them free.”

I hesitated. My laser cutter wasn’t even really laser anymore. It was a bunch of Eridium tech stuffed into a laser cutter shell and some extra plating for safety. I couldn’t really fake cutting anything.“Yeah, I’m a fucking Spacer. That doesn’t mean I’m some kind of monster, okay? I’ve got friends. I’ve got family. Get off your high fucking horse.” She snaps. 

“That’s not…” I trailed off, holding my hands up. “I have no problems with spacers. Let’s go help your friends.”

She let go of a breath I didn’t notice her holding. “Okay.”

She led me across the facility, into one of the borehole tunnels. The door had also been pried open, though this time the marks were bigger. They’d used crowbars. We turned our headlamps on, and went in.

“There were a bunch of stuff we found, and we’d stocked it all up in one spot,” she says, “Viper noticed the tunnel was big enough we could fit the whole REV into it, so we were taking it in.”“REV?” It sounded like some kind of acronym, but not one I’d heard before.“One of those old buggies. Khan’s baby. He fixed it up. That’s how we got all the way out here.” She says. “We hitched it to a trailer, and we were taking it in when the tunnel just… fell in.”Eventually, the two of us were standing before a trailer with mismatched wheels attached to the back half of a rover. The rubble had fallen directly on the driver’s seats. It was directly on them.

I shuddered, and felt my stomach drop.

“Khan! Viper!” She called. “We’re here! I got some help!”My helmet beeped. Two more radios connected. But I couldn’t hear any breathing from them. I couldn’t hear anything from them but silence.

“Do you think you can, uh…” She trails off. “Help get them out?”They probably weren’t even alive. Still, leaving someone- even a spacer- under rubble like that… It didn’t feel right to me.

“... Yeah.”  I said. “I can get them out.”

Behind the helmet, despite not being able to see many of her features, she beamed at me.The pit in my stomach grew.

===

I didn’t enjoy watching people cry.Jackal knelt by the cairn we’d erected there, the bodies placed in the soil not far from where they’d died. I’d obligingly muted my radio so she could have some privacy. She was murmuring something to them, something intelligible to me through Mars’s thin atmosphere.

I tried to understand the logic behind going all to this work- I unburied two men so they could be reburied. I knew enough not to ask about it, though. Everyone dealt with grief differently, and I wasn’t going to start ambling around and looting things during Jackal’s moment with her friends.

Instead, I was thinking about the REV. It wasn’t working anymore. That much was clear- it had been crushed by the rocks and rubble. I knew that I had no way of knowing they were here, but… my landing could have caused the cave in. I didn’t use the landing pad, damaged as it was, which meant… the ground had to take the impact.

It could have been my fault.

I stood kind of awkwardly there while Jackal finished up what she was saying. She slowly stood up, and turned to me. She said something I didn’t hear- and I scrambled to turn on my radio again.

“Sorry, what was that?”“I… I wanted to thank you for helping me,” She said. She hiccupped. “I know you didn’t have to, and I pointed a gun at you too. I just… “

“You didn’t know what else to do,” You say.“... Y-yeah.” She said. “... I… I still don’t, really.”

“That’s fine. People usually don’t.”She nods.“I… Without the Rev, there’s no way for me to really get back to my camp.” She said. “I don’t have the supplies for days of walking.”

I thought about it. 

“... I was going to scavenge this place,” I said. “So if you want to help me with it, I can fly you to your camp. Give you some supplies.”

I couldn’t read her expression behind her mask, but I could hear the smile in her voice.

“Okay,” She said.