Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

Jerry Nagel nodded and looked up at the ship’s chronometer. “Well, it’s been nice working with you, anyway. It’s about two hours until we have to get out and walk.”

That wasn’t literally true, of course. In two hours they’d be in orbit, and then they’d have to wait until An Li went down and filed the official reports. The entire account of the mission would already be there by now, of course, downloaded as they’d come within range, but face-to-face reporting was the last of it. As team leader, Li would have to find them some kind of quarters and arrange for some sort of holding position until the crew could be taken to various civilized destinations. That wouldn’t take long; there were always ships, big and small, coming in and out of Sepuchus, shopping at one of the sector’s biggest salvage yards for whatever they needed.

The account would be part of the public record, as tradition dictated, so it would spread as well. That would both help and hurt them, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.

“You know, I’ve got a virgin fifth of bourbon, really good aged stuff, private label, in my cabin,” she commented. “I was saving it for a little celebration when we got back and could total up the shares. Not much I can do about that now, but even coming back flat broke and a failure again it’s at least an occasion . Want to break a seal and have a few toasts?”

“Real alcoholic booze, huh? No funny pills, no virtual mindblasts, just good old-fashioned good-going-down-make-you-puke-later stuff? You know, you’re a real throwback, Doc.”

“Well, we may as well get used to it,” she responded. “Just in case this is an omen, the spare parts aren’t there anymore, and it’s sooner than we think, that time when you can’t fix things anymore…”

An Li was not a very happy person going down to the surface, nor was she much happier coming back. The chewing-out, screaming, cursing, and threats she expected; par for the course. The accusation that they’d failed to do the job because of cowardice was unacceptable. They’d seen the records and the data, the same that she’d looked at before okaying the abort. There was no way that those greenhouses could have been salvaged entirely by automation, and the loss of Achmed was proof that when you put people back into there, well, sooner or later they would be gotten. It was very easy to second-guess from afar, and long after the fact.

There were twenty-one vessels in orbit with the Stanley at the time she was getting her ass chewed. These included nine capital ships, three large military vessels, and several slick yachts clearly used to move purchasing agents to the wares they needed as quickly as possible, which meant that their employers were desperate and would pay through the nose.

The cost of repairs on the base and the consumables would be stiff, but she’d done the math, and they’d brought the ship and base back intact, when common sense had said to leave that base and smelter and disassembly unit behind. That loss might have broken the company, but not a simple failure to reclaim a site. She would almost wager that more than enough to cover the Stanley ’s bills was being paid out just today by those various orbiting ships looking for vital parts to keep going.

Poison the ocean indeed! she sniffed, thinking of the exchange. Like that would have stopped them from becoming translucent units of a greater whole.

Well, she’d get the crew put up at Canyer’s Guild Hostel about a hundred kilometers south of here. That would at least have them out of Kajani territory, so any funds that might be dropped by or on behalf of the crew wouldn’t go back to those bastards.

What she needed was a room, a hot bath with real water, and maybe a few patches of squibs to send her into another and more pleasurable state of mind for a while. Canyer’s had mineral baths, and even if she would have to tap her private account for some privacy, it was available.

She looked around the place for the last time and sighed. We, too, are in the funeral business, she thought sourly. In this day and age, it’s everyone for themselves and if it takes grave robbing, then so be it. These days what was left of civilization maintained itself by robbing the failures of the past and by cannibalizing the rest. Eat. drink, and be merry, for tomorrow… Nobody thought much about tomorrow, herself included. Not in this day and age. No money, no job, you did what you had to do. She’d worked her way up to here from a start in a navy brothel, and she’d do it again if she had to.

Those Kajani bastards! Did they think she’d have let such a threat as that thing in the sea stop her from a profit even if it had cost the whole damned ground crew? She’d authorized the shutdown because it was impossible to salvage without even her becoming a part of that thing. “Dialogue is irrelevant.” What a stupid worm that was! It wasn’t enough to imitate, you had to learn from your victims. She’d have sold out the whole damned human race except for her own private places if that thing had been smart enough to make a deal.

And this would have been a hell of a great base for taking over the rest of the race, too. Everybody came here eventually, everybody who could. Three of the biggest salvage yards in the remnants of the empire were right here. Hell, that destroyer up there… How long would it take the worm to have taken every soul down to the rats and roaches on the damned thing? A few days? Less? And then it goes back and takes a planet destroyer, and the rest of the battle group, and there’s power . That’s what she would have done, but she didn’t have to spread her knowledge over countless cells. It was nice, compact, and in one place for easy correlation.

Trouble was, I needed to become the worm, not the other way around, she reflected bitterly.

Canyer’s Guild Hostel looked like the kind of place that put up working stiffs between jobs on a junkyard planet. Cobbled together from every conceivable kind of old building site, it seemed less a large building than an assemblage of junk that had somehow come alive from the weight of salvage all around and under it. It could have been described as ball-shaped, triangular, oblong, rectangular, starlike, and flowing adobe and been pretty well depicted correctly. The only assurance was that, because it had been put together by the same sort of people who might need to stay in it for a while, it was pretty damned stable. No two rooms were remotely alike.

Getting the crew set up wasn’t a problem; the guilds owned the place, and if you had a valid card they couldn’t refuse you, even if you couldn’t afford to stay there. Salvagers, like other skilled workers in guild or union organizations, took care of their own because, God knew, nobody else would.

There weren’t many different guild facilities on a dump of a world like this. Salvagers’, engineers’, longshoremen’s, and entertainment were about it. “Entertainment,” of course, was always there except on the Holy Joe-type worlds, and, buried deep, even on a couple of those. The folks who lived in the entertainment hostels didn’t exactly do Shakespeare. They were more like a service industry.

The odd thing was, she was a card-carrying member with some experience in three out of four. Engineers required more than on-the-job training; when you were dealing with the complex cybernetic spaceships and robotic design and reprogramming, well, you needed an education for that.

But she’d run tugs to and from orbital freighters, she’d been on and then led salvage teams, and she’d begun, actually had been born, in one of those entertainment guild hostels, so she had the other three. She might have had the fourth one, too, if she’d ever had the time to learn to read and write. That was a luxury in an automated age, even one that was falling apart. She’d never felt the need nor figured out the sense of knowing those skills.