#RustbucketTales   #Part10

#RustbucketTales   #Part10  

last week they made a mess. This week, they try and hide from it.

Previously on Uncharted Worlds…

…Anvil tries to find out what’s wrong with his hand scanner and connects it to the test system. A massive amount of data downloads, then a message pops up: “Hello. My name is Sai.”

…Kestrel talks to a new passenger, Matha Dowe, in a bar. She’s a turncoat from the Shards of Xa; “I need to get outsystem. My former crewmates won’t be too happy to see me”. Later, Orcha checks out her identity and discovers that she is a bounty hunter…

…Dev tells Kestrel that she needs her to contact her family…

…Orcha reads the file Bryanna sent over: “Dr Lincoln Westcott, Greenworlder priest. Currently in maximum security detention on piracy charges after he and his congregation stole a yacht”…

…Veer tells Anvil “Kanu and Braj would like a word with you”. They loom behind him menacingly…

…Orcha is led, handcuffed, into the prison transfer shuttle. Midflight, he beckons a guard over, then reaches under his seat and tries to jab him with the stunrod. But he’s too slow and the other guard zaps him in the back…

…The Shadow clips the prison transfer shuttle stabiliser, sending it immediately into a spin towards the city below…

…The pilot keys open the hatch at gunpoint, and Anvil hauls Orcha and Dr Westcott out to the sound of approaching police sirens. They board The Shadow and it burns for orbit.

Rustbucket ran. With Orcha now wanted for murder, assault, and escape from prison, it had no other choice. It bypassed Qahwah using smuggler routes, hoping to beat the news to Lyca. But a fast courier and a couple of priority transmissions had put the news ahead of them, and Kestrel judged it too risky to dock. Instead, she plotted a course for Nakhon and kept running. Orcha-37 would have to meet up with Orcha-17 somewhere else. Fortunately, she was able to put Phoebe at ease with stories of Peregrine’s exploits when he was young, and convince her that seeing the universe would be an adventure.

Orcha spent the time debriefing Dr Westcott. Westcott knows what Epoch is up to: trying to crack the encrypted Greenworlder gospel and locate the greenworlds for themselves. That’s why he’d stolen the ship: to try and get there first, to warn humanity’s unknown brothers that Epoch was coming to enslave or dissect them. He clearly knows the location of a greenworld, but he isn’t talking yet, and with a ship full of passengers, Orcha isn’t yet willing to push it.

Kestrel kept running, stopping only for fuel at smuggler hideouts, pushing out into the fringe. But eventually something had to break…

Fallow: a system of two halves. The planet is owned by a bunch of rustics dedicated to living a simpler existence, with nothing but high-powered rifles, vaccines and antibiotics (because even rustics aren’t that stupid). They’re self-interdicted, refusing to deal with the outside world except limited exports through a single port. Overhead, built into an orbiting rock, its the usual starfaring civilisation: a small community of itinerant belters, a maintenance base and stopover for those going further out into the frontier, and the Nakamoto security contractors Fallow pays to keep everyone else from bugging them.

As Rustbucket fell into the system, Anvil knew they had to stop. The proton depolariser, vital to the ship’s stealth system, had been under a lot of stress, and was liable to fail. No stealth would make things much harder if they had to keep jumping, but it looked like they’d finally outrun the news and could spend a couple of days on maintenance. Still, it would be risky – the SectorNet showed that the Scythe, a bounty-hunter ship, was docked; if word reached Fallow while they were still around, and Scythe had connected Orcha with the Rustbucket, things could get very messy. So rather than risk the highport and let everyone know they were around, Kestrel decided to land on the planet, in an isolated rocky desert which looked to have good cloud cover during the day. But their stealth approach was too much for the depolariser, and it died just before landing; if they wanted to get Rustbucket offworld without getting arrested, they’d have to fix it.

Before landing, Orcha had looked up what was known about Fallow on the SectorNet. It turned out that the desert was home to the Greater Fallow Rock Lizard (technically lizardoid), a large burrowing carnivore hunted by the locals for its skin (hence, the rifles: protecting yourself from dangerous megafauna justifies simple firearms). While Anvil checks the ship and verifies that the depolariser is indeed dead, Orcha starts reading up and planning a hunt…

The depolarizer needs a total replacement, which means either buying one or acquiring the parts to put one together in the Rustbucket’s manufactory. Which in turn means that Anvil and Kestrel will have to take the Shadow and head to the highport to acquire it. They take some of the handwoven textiles Kestrel purchased on Jagatika, and Anvil also takes the ship’s backup computer (hosting Sai), spinning Kestrel a line of bullshit about needing to run some diagnostics. After telling Dev to make sure Phoebe is OK, Kestrel takes off and plots a roundabout course which should see them approach the highport from the direction of Fallow’s outer moon.

Orcha meanwhile has decided that he wants company on his hunting expedition. After annoying Phoebe (who is horrified by the thought of killing and eating something), he convinces Lynard. After some quick rifle practice, the two of them set off for some distant rocks, which Orcha has identified as lizard country. When they reach the ridge, the two of them split up, keeping an eye out for lizards. Unfortunately Lynard is too busy boggling at the huge open sky above him, and steps in a burrow. His screams alert Orcha, who sees him being dragged down; he immediately activates his jump pack to get a decent view. As he climbs, he can see that a lizard has Lynard by the legs and is pulling him down; at the top of his arc, he lines up with his sniper rifle and shoots it cleanly through the throat. But Lynard can’t walk, let alone help carry the kill back to the ship, and Orcha will have to abandon his prize to the desert predators to take Lynard back to the ship.

Kestrel’s story of being on a supply run from lunar survey mission convinces the port authority, and the Shadow docks at the highport. Anvil immediately gets to work, plugging in Sai to the StationNet and doing a search of repair contractors. He can’t just buy a replacement depolariser – its specialist military tech – but the parts are available. Anvil heads off, but while he can get some of the parts, he starts to run into closed doors and awkward questions. Most of the repair shops here are contracted to Nakamoto, which has a virtual monopoly on system trade, and won’t deal with outsiders. Sai suggests that the Scythe is equipped with a depolariser, but stealing parts from a bounty-hunter ship doesn’t appeal, so instead he asks Kestrel for a better plan. Kestrel, who has been hitting the bars and assessing the market, knows just the man: Kidd, captain of the Profit margin, a free trader who works both sides of the line. He might be willing to act as a straw purchaser for their parts, for the right price…

It costs Kestrel both the textiles, and a favour: Kidd needs a delivery made to Fallow, and possibly a collection. Nothing dubious, just supplies for the illegal Iridium prospecting operation he has going down there. And he’ll even throw in the fuel for the Shadow, cos he’s a nice guy. Kestrel agrees – its either this or get used to being a lot more visible – and heads back to prep the Shadow.

Orcha finally drags Lynard back to the ship. He’s radioed ahead, so Dev has already got the first aid kit set up. He dumps Lynard on the ward-room table, orders Dev and Phoebe to fix him up, and heads straight back out again in the hope of retrieving his dead lizard. He’s too late – there’s another one snacking on it when he gets there, but he shoots it through the neck. He’s halfway through gutting the second lizard when he hears the distant roar of the ship’s engines. He looks up, to see the Rustbucket make a wobbly liftoff, turn to the South, and disappear over the horizon…

The prospecting camp is a small collection of bubble-tents, solar panels, and a small dish in the lee of a mountain. Kestrel figures out something is wrong when she makes the first pass overhead – there’s no-one about. Setting the Shadow down, she leaves Anvil on guard and heads to investigate. She finds the first body a little way out of the camp, dead, mauled by animals. She finds two more in the tents. Bt there should be more people here. She calls Anvil over, who notices a few bullet holes in one of the tents, and that the rack where the prospecting samples are kept is empty. Examining the bodies, he finds they’ve been shot before being dumped for the scavengers. This is not what Kestrel was being paid for, so she decides to bug out and take the supplies back to Kidd. Hopefully she can convince him that she’s kept her end of the deal and still get paid. But on the roundabout trip back to orbit, when Anvil is advising her on the optimum course to avoid detection, she notices that the “backup computer” is displaying messages every time Anvil’s comm beeps. Suspicious, she runs a diagnostic, but finds nothing – which isn’t good at all…

Back at the highport, Kidd is suspicious. Not that Kestrel murdered his prospectors – she’s not the killing sort – but that she did something to alert Nakamoto. He’s figured out what the parts are for, and that this means Rustbucket is landed on the planet for repairs, and he wants to know where. When Kestrel says that its somewhere cloudy, nowhere they’ll be spotted, he gets it: “you hid in the desert with the lizards, didn’t you?” But its half a planet away from the prospecting camp, so Kidd is convinced that its not her fault, and that he doesn’t have to make her pay the death benefits for his people. He arranges for delivery of the parts, and Kestrel heads back to the Shadow.

Down on the planet, Orcha checks his bearing. The Rustbucket headed this way, and all he has to do is keep walking to find it. Surely Dev or whoever was flying it wouldn’t be stupid enough to fly it all the way to “civilisation”, would they…?

So, secrets are getting out, and someone has stolen the ship. How are they going to get out of this one?