Home Alone 2 (Patreon)

@Leinglo requested another episode of Home Alone. Gladly. I love the Greasy Smear and the crew who live on her!

———

Lieutenant Ruim’s tail flicked madly in agitation. The safest ships to salvage were those in the best shape and those in the worst shape.

It was rare that the team got to salvage crafts in good shape, but it happened from time to time. Escape pods—for example—were seldom jettisoned over planets with a breathable atmosphere, so engineers programmed the guidance systems to move the pods away from whatever ship they were abandoning to a safe distance and await a rescue. The salvage team merely had to scoop these ejected pods up, dump out the occupant’s corpse, and haul them back to the yard for cleaning and re-certification. Easy money.

At the other end of the spectrum were the ships left to drift for decades or even centuries—cold and dead, without power in their batteries, air in their compartments, nor liquids in their plumbing. The crew merely had to cut those old heaps into bite-sized chunks and wrestle them into a recycler to convert them back to metal ingots.

But this derelict was the worst of all possible worlds. It still had air, still had power, and a single glance around the dirty corridor confirmed the worst of it—nothing aboard this ship would be worth saving for resale. They were going to end up recycling the heap for ingots, and they’d have to be careful the whole time—careful not to cut into a pressurized cabin, not to cut a powered cable, not to cut into pipe full of … well, there were dozens of liquids that got pumped around ships and at least half of them were dangerous to cut into.

“Yup,” the lieutenant said over his radio link, “it’s a junker. I hope you didn’t have your heart set on a big payout, Captain.”

“What’s she made of?” crackled Captain Neotny’s voice in his ear. “Steel? Aluminum?”

“Looks like a lot of plastic fiber panels, composites everywhere,” sighed Ruim. “I’m sure there’s plenty of metal in the superstructure, but the interior is all hydrocarbons. Looks like a built-by-the-lowest-bidder special.”

“Damn. What about the cargo? Anything in the holds?”

The lieutenant’s ears smirked hard. “I found a manifest,” he said, “a paper manifest on an actual clip-board! You got any connections at the national archives, Captain? Perhaps they’d pay you a stack of golds for this ancient artifact!”

The captain ignored Ruim’s quip. “What’s she carrying, Lieutenant?” he gruffed.

“Aluminum—”

“Now you’re talking!” interrupted the captain. “That would be worth hauling—”

“—ore,” finished Lieutenant Ruim. “Fifty thousand tons of bauxite. We could probably walk away with ten thousand tons of ingots, if you want to sit here for two years, running it all through the recycler.”

Over the radio link, Captain Neotny groaned. “We’re not a foundry, Ruim.”

“No, sir, we’re not,” he agreed. “No one’s gonna want to sit out here for two years to earn a minimum-wage payday.”

“Agreed, we’ll dump it,” said the captain. “How long before we can start breaking her down?”

“We’ll need to purge her pipes, vent the cabins, drain the batteries, take the reactor offline,” said Ruim, counting the major milestones off on his fingers. “A week, maybe less if—”

When Ruim didn’t continue, the captain, “Less if what? How should we reduce the delay?”

“Captain!” the lieutenant hissed, his heart pounding in his temples. “I’m not alone. There’s a geroo here—young adult, female. She’s waving her arms at me and yelling.”

“What’s she saying?” crackled the radio.

Ruim let his ears fall flat against his head. “Hellifiknow! The translator in my spacesuit is for printed text. It’s not even designed for use inside an atmosphere where people can talk.”

“So, shoot her.”

Ruim stared at the geroo with eyes opened wide. He wasn’t certain that he’d heard correctly. “What?” he whispered back.

“Shoot her,” the captain repeated. “We warned these claim-jumpers to get off the derelict, and they’re still there. We’re not splitting this bounty. Shoot her.”

Ruim put his paws on his hips, but he was careful to keep his right near the sidearm. “No! I am not shooting anyone.”

“We issued you a blaster—”

“Yeah, for defense,” snapped the lieutenant. “I’m not murdering anyone!”

The captain started to say something about it not being murder, but the geroo crumpled to the deck when Ensign Patris slammed a meaty fist into her left kidney. “Got it, Cap,” Patris said into his radio.

The chunky feline wasn’t known for his decision-making abilities, so the armory hadn’t issued him a gun—thankfully—but Patris didn’t seem to mind. He seemed content to make up for his lack of firearms by stomping on her skull with his boot. “Maybe if you … hadn’t been screaming … you’d have heard me … walking up on you!” he grunted as he worked.

Ruim stared in horror as the ensign meted out more savagery. A nagging voice in his head wanted to make Patris stop. The Golden Claws XII wasn’t a military vessel. It was a commercial vessel licensed and operated according to the empire’s salvage laws.

But Ruim still had to work with roughnecks like Patris every day. And even if the officers wouldn’t hassle Ruim because they respected the lieutenant’s ability to keep the team safe, the guys shoving chunks of scrap into the recycler still had plenty of power to make his life miserable.

Ruim turned away and headed toward what he hoped was engineering.

# # #

“How is she?” Arge huffed as he barreled into sick bay.

Dr. Jeku shook his head and led the captain away from the exam table to where the other officers congregated. “Not great,” he admitted in a quiet tone. “Broken bones, concussion certainly, torn muscles, left eye is too swollen up for me to even see how bad it is.”

He drew a deep breath and let it slowly out. “I’ll do my best, Cap’n, but this med bay isn’t cut out for brain surgery.”

Gise sobbed quietly from within Engineering Chief Kestos’s arms, and the captain rubbed a comforting paw across the broad geroo’s back. He looked up from her and to his mate’s eyes.

“They’re right that the Greasy Smear is a hunk of junk,” Kestos whispered. “Maybe it is time for this heap to be salvaged.”

“Be fine with me if they wanna follow us to port and toss the whole thing in the recycler,” Arge grunted. “But we’re still eight months from dock, and I’m not fond of walking home.”

The engineering chief nodded. “So, what do we do, Hon?”

“What can we do?” said Arge. “We have to fight back.”

Gise looked up and wiped her eyes. “Fight back?”

“Yeah, we do,” agreed Kestos. “And we know this ship better than anyone.”

Arge nodded. “If anyone can do it, we can.”

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1soCVEW2GiNmzutmufy4Y01xD554MZPNqZksPSUfcE_U/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?