Michael Armstrong - The Deadliest Moop

They’d been about to power down for the day when dumbass Sven pulled in the squid.

The Anna Marie had been dragging the high orbits, 100,000 klicks up, working the fringe because Cap had gotten nervous going any shallower. Ian had thought him a pansy-ass until the Carly Renee doing a 75k pass took an old Soviet spy satellite right across the beam and blew up. Cap might be a schmuck, but his hunches paid off—good or bad—and he ran a slick tiller, too.

Besides, Ian had to admit, it was Cap’s crabber. His call.

They’d been pulling in good sets the past week, the pots catching lots of debris, most of it crap, but sometimes you got decent stuff—a few artifacts there, maybe some high-grade metal here.

Asshole that he was, Captain could guide a crabber neat and smooth in a high-velocity orbit, easing the Anna Marie right up to a patch of moop—material out of place, but wasn’t that everything?—and throw out the pots just right so they’d scoop it up without shredding them. Some crabbers liked to take debris straight into the hold, but Cap said some crabbers liked to die, too. He’d used pots, always used pots, and if a chunk came in too fast, you’d lose a big cage of high-density, photodegradable plastic and not your dang ship.

Cap might run the ship, but Ian ran the deck, he and Todd on the grapples, Sheila on the boom crane, and newbie Sven there in the sorting belt. Guy had an eye for stuff, Ian thought, and could flick through moop as fast as it came in, and not even miss a shiny. Sometimes new guys worked out okay from the start.

You had to move fast on deck, out in that big steel cage fifty meters long and twenty-five meters square. Rack ’em and stack ’em, that was the trick. Ian and Todd pulled in the pots with the grappling hooks, big harpoons on steel cables, Ian on the dorsal and Todd on the pectoral. You shot the hooks, hoped they caught because you only had one pass, and started reeling in the pot as soon as the baby caught. Cap stood there behind an observation port, counting pots and making sure they didn’t miss a set.

“What good does it do cleaning up orbits if you add to the moop?” Cap always said. Ian knew better than to point out the pots would turn to plastic dust inside of a year. Cap didn’t always like to hear logic. Pots cost money, anyway.

Sheila pulled in the pots with the boom crane and damn, that lady had a smooth touch. The pots came in with a little momentum—too fast and you’d ram it right through the port and wouldn’t Cap like that? Shelia had to slow the pots down and slide them into the bay, rack ’em and stack ’em, oh yeah, baby. Once the pots got racked, poor old Sven had to dump them and sort them. Rack ’em, stack ’em, dump ’em, sort ’em, that was the drill.

Todd had just grabbed his last pot and Ian was passing his set on to Sheila. Ian had gone on private comm to Todd trying to figure out if they should go help Sven sort or just let him sweat, but Sheila caught on to them—she couldn’t read lips, but she saw them talking—and shook her head and held up five fingers. Yeah, Sven had to come in on five, he’d been in his Deimos suit too long, they all had, but Sven was at the stern closest to the sun and catching most of the rays. Give the guy a hand, she meant and didn’t have to say it.

“I got me something,” Sven said over the loud hail. “It ain’t aright.”

They’d remember that phrase later, up before the tribunal. Ain’t aright.

The Anna Marie had left the Lagranges six weeks ago, out to fish a big gnarly patch of moop 100k up from earth. Cap liked to say he’d been in it since the first lottery, when the old freighters hauling nickel ore from the asteroids first came back to earth orbit and found damn near every high-altitude satellite blown up by photodegradable-plastic cluster bombs.

Everyone blamed the Chinese, but no one could pin it on them, not enough to start a hot war. Crabbers liked to talk about a secret bonus if anyone ever hauled in a smoking gun, something to nail the Chinese and get the Nations pissed off enough to stop the Chinos once and for all. But that was just crabber talk, really. Funny how that worked out anyway, Ian thought. Real funny. The Nations ponied up the bucks to hire the crabbers to clean the debris, and what with tariffs on the Chinese and all, huh, the Chinos paid most of it, so it all worked out anyway.

Truth was, Cap came in on the second lottery, after a dozen freighters kinda missed the learning curve and became one with the moop. Plus, well, the Anna Marie had been a hog anyway, and though Cap wouldn’t say it, the reason he’d never won the first lottery was, well, because the old girl hadn’t arrived quite in time for it.

Sometimes late was better than first, particularly when first meant never. Boom.

The Nations paid good money to clear the orbits. With five-hundred-million tonnes of shredded moop whipping around Earth, most of it no bigger than a half meter, hardly anyone wanted to risk coming up out of gravity. You could send out a robot freighter and cross your fingers, but living cargo? Leave it to the military jocks.

Until then, no one had figured out how to make space habitats profitable, and who wanted to live in a pressurized can when you could set your foot on solid earth—or Luna? Even a cold-ass, dark corner of Antarctica beat out space. Air, water, gravity: there was a lot to like about that, even at eighty below.

The Satellite War changed all that. You had all these spacers stuck in orbit, all the solar power in the universe, and as soon as the crabbers started hauling in moop, plenty of good quality building material. Snag it, haul it to the Lagranges and dump it, and there it stood out of harm’s way and ready for some tinkerer to start building away. A couple of old crabbers who’d had one close call too many built a smelter, started inflating big aluminum balloons, and quicker than you could say “shore leave,” you had Dutch, the crabbers paradise, named after the old Aleutian port, of course.

They called it the squid ’cuz that’s what it looked like: a torpedo-shaped cylinder with fifteen wriggly arms that unrolled five meters long after Sheila dumped it out of the cage with a bunch of other moop onto the sorting belt. The body wasn’t more than two meters, if that, clean and shiny and not pitted like it would have been if it had been in space for longer than a decade. Pretty much everything in orbit had been up there at least a decade, and the squid should have been pockmarked or sandblasted from millions of micrometeors—only it hadn’t.

Ain’t aright for damn sure.

Sven pulled the squid off the belt into a bin. Ian and Todd had to swim over to Sven and keep the belt moving. Moop stuck to it, little teeth around the half-round pipe moving stuff along. Sheila dumped the last pot and the three of them finished the sorting—nothing more of consequence, just lots and lots of dull gray fragments—all the time eyeing that squid. Sven had sorted a few shinys, nice clean pieces of steel, but that squid held their attention, for all sorts of dang reasons.

Ian ran through the list in his head:

A) It was intact.

B) It didn’t look like anything in space they’d ever seen, and all they hadn’t, courtesy of endless watches browsing Gilbert’s Catalogue of 100,000 Satellites and Other Orbital Debris .

C) And, oh yeah, it was intact.

“What you dickheads starin’ at?” Cap yelled over the loud hail.

Ian looked over at the observation deck. Cap, nice and comfy behind thick Lexan, saw him standing there, hands on hips. “Got us an anomaly, Captain,” he said. You never said Cap to his face.