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CH 71: Wheathop
🕑 Added 2024-12-31 15:00:00 +0000 UTC+ Reid +
Reid stumbled through the forest, drawn to the sound of running water. His legs burned with the effort of moving himself forward - dehydrated and spent.
It was reminiscent of his days right after the awakening happened - except then, he'd been wearing pants. Reid considered making himself some bone armor, at least, to cover himself up. But when he'd reached for his internal energy, he found next to nothing for his reserves - and the experience of touching the energy felt different and... odd.
The last thing he needed was to further deplete himself, or cause damage because he was experimenting with the new, odd feelings of energy swirling within him. Something about his internal energy landscape thingy had changed - which he guessed made sense if it had taken him a hundred years to wake up.
He chuckled at a thought. Mark once called him sleeping beauty for being out for a week. This time, the nickname might stick around. His laugh came out as a rasping thing that grated his throat.
#
When he finally reached the river, it was damn cold. It tasted clean, and he felt much better after a few rounds of drinking and resting.
He did not feel better after his attempt at a 'quick rinse off'.
The dust, dirt, dead grass, pine needles, bile, and sweat coating his skin wasn't pleasant - but the shock from cold water splashing onto him, buffeted by cold air and a cooler breeze made Reid cramp and shiver. He lost his balance on the wet rocks, and ended up completely submerged in the shallow water.
The bite of the air on his skin felt just as bad as the water, so Reid scrambled up and out of the river and back onto shore. Pebbles and pine needles stuck to the wetness on the bottom of his feet, and Reid lamented the fact that he had nothing to dry off with.
He was swearing and wiping the wetness from his eyes when a sound caught his attention.
High above, trees groaned as a massive hunk of metal crashed into the canopy. It let out a spiraling whine as branches and trunks snapped out of its path. A faint blue glow emanated out from a protrusion on the side, flashing inconsistently and jolting the thing forward.
The cracks and snaps of the trees became a cacophony of cracking and popping wood, the groan of falling trees and thumps of ground impacts, escalating into more chaos. The vessel's crash had a cascading effect like bowling pins, where each felled part or whole was snapping off more branches and sending other towering wooden columns to the ground. Reid stared on in amazement, just a bit glad that the craft hadn’t crashed in his direction.
A louder, metallic KLUNNNNG rang out in the distance. It must have been the vessel hitting the ground. He forced his muscles to move and took off at a jog in the direction of the noise. It was his ticket back to civilization.
#
Reid’s jaw dropped when the vessel came clearly into view. It was somehow fully intact after plummeting through the trees. The spaceship had no wings or windows, and it sat squat to the ground on five metal legs. Its central frame was a long rectangle with rounded sides on the left and right, a pair of cigar-shaped engines mounted on the rounded sides, almost halfway up. The frame tapered to a wide flat face on one end, while the other rose into a bulbed dome that was the highest point of the vessel and looked like it was the command center. Which meant the flat tapered end was the rear. It was large, but somehow still felt sleek and futuristic.
It was also very obviously a poorly maintained piece of shit.
Some coating of blue paint had long worn off large portions of the body, and a rust-like orange coating had replaced it in many of the spots of bare metal. Graffiti started near the tapered end of the vessel, a mix of whites and greens in shapes and patterns Reid didn’t recognize. Some other brown substance had dripping stains running from the top of the frame out and down the sides, and the area behind the engines was charred in a black cone shape.
He had approached slowly and cautiously, moving from tree to tree as he closed in. The ship… did not inspire any sort of confidence. Part of Reid wanted to walk away - even though the thing was Reid's only lead on finding his way out of the woods, and back to Sara. Something just didn't sit right with him. He was about to turn and leave when a figure called out to him, and waved.
<]]) Thad ([[>
In a deserted stretch of forest, Thad watched his mechanic fail to properly join the Crystal Reactor to the Alquin thrusters. Again. The tangle of copper alloy tubes and wires flowed in a jumbled mess from the crystal’s housing to the connector box, then from the connector box out to all of the ship’s systems. Normally, a ship the size of the Wheathop needed a class E crystal, but that was wasteful. No one needed to run the entertainment systems on these rigs, and Thad had found other unnecessary things to turn off in the water recycler, shower systems, and the radiation shielding.
With all that shut off, power was really just getting drawn for levitation, thrust, basic sensors, and navigation. It was a simple and effective way to run a ship, and it meant that he only needed a class G crystal to keep himself in work. Entertainment feeds were useless, and his species didn’t do well with water anyway. When he needed a full crew for a job, a few containers to drink from took care of their bio-needs.
Normally, radiation shielding wasn’t something to worry about either. It played hell with the entertainment feeds if you had them going, but other than that, it just caused small mutations, easily healed. Solar flares powerful enough to cause a jolt in a crystal reactor were rare, and only unlucky fracs got hit with those when running shield-off.
Thad turned and climbed the ladder back to his viewscreen area. Unlucky was the theme of this trip. He let out a disgusted grunt in the direction of the kid mechanic and surveyed the forest again for any visual signs of enforcers. This was old growth, and even with the scar of downed trees left from their ‘controlled’ crash, it was difficult to see the stars through leafy branches high overhead. Thick trunks were spread out around him, separated by a bed of old leaves, soft moss, and inconsistent hills of rock and dirt.
He’d had worse crashes, and this world wasn’t evolved enough to do real damage to the Wheathop. The trees had snapped easy enough, even if they made a hellish noise coming down. No, the crash had gone surprisingly well – the issue was where he went down. This was still a relatively new world, by all standards – it had awakened only a millennium ago. Most planetary rulers reigned for at least ten times that long, and one of Thad’s late mother’s favorite soap feeds had been on air for three millenia when she passed.
As a new world, a few things were true. It was still going through some political power struggles. It wasn’t effectively using its planetary resources, and because of both of those, it was both less populated and less developed than any established planet would be. It was a backwater, really. In places like these, there were even stumps still living in communities that refused to awaken – or in some cases, too poor to pay the local power broker a few credits to get on the awakening schedule.
These newly awakened, underdeveloped, under inhabited, and under leveled backwaters attracted a certain type of danger. Cross-Cosmic Enforcers. Every planet had local enforcers, but those were usually someone’s cousin. They hated their job as much as they loved a good donation to their enforcer fund, and their levels and equipment were generally laughable to any established force.
Local enforcers were decently active in sites like this. Thad knew there was some protected heritage site a few miles away from where he’d landed. If a local enforcer was out here and found him, or if he breached some barrier and one came to investigate, he had every confidence his spendable appreciation for the local’s job well done would be enough to part ways without further questions.
The Crocs - Cross Cosmic Enforcers - were trouble. Their vetting process had done in more than one brave soul trying to enter the force with some… alternative motives. They didn’t even let recruits out of training until they were sufficiently leveled for their assigned sector, and their equipment was designed like siege armor.
Worst of all, the fractin crocs were nosey damn helpers. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t called for help. If one noticed his crash site, they’d fly on down and stick their silver little helmets right into his business. They’d detain him, or he’d run and they’d catch him, or he’d fight and they’d drag him off unconscious. Even if they just saw him running G class crystal in an E rated frigate, he’d be dragged off, detained, and fined. If they searched the cargo – things would go a lot worse.
Thad pulled at the fur on his left ear and mused. It was always the simple runs that posed the biggest threat, his father once warned him. At the time, he’d assumed it was just the liquor talking, but now he knew better. This was a milk run. A short run. His normal mechanic, Dennis, broke his damn leg trying to impress some half-arachnidan ape the night before the job started, so Thad had scrambled just to find a gutter rat to make sure the Wheathop stayed airborne.
The idiot hadn’t even had a proper name. The scrappers just called him Kid. Saved 1000 credits with that one, he thought to himself. He probably could’ve gotten a real Crystal Mechanic – one from the shipyards, even. But the Kid was there, Thad was in a hurry, and gutter rats came cheap. A few minutes later, his temper flared as a vvvwwwhrrrr-hisss-POP! From the reactor punctuated another failure.
“What the fract are you doing back there!? Get us back in the air on the next try or I’m leaving you in this forest!” he roared towards the reactor.
The kid flinched and dropped the soldering iron he’d been holding, but quickly scrambled to pick it back up and mend the next fault in the connection. Thad frowned at the jumbled mess of tubes, wires, and the matrix on the crystal they plugged into. It all made no damn sense to him, and he’d long given up on forcing himself to figure it out. That’s what mechanics were for, anyway.
“What a goddamn mess.” He frowned. He turned back to the viewport as he thought of another threat to motivate the Kid, “I paid for you already. If you keep costing me, I’ll get it back by selling you to the-“
Words caught in his throat as Thad saw moonlight reflect off a large, bulky outline moving through the trees far off to their right. Even this far away, he could tell that the figure had their attention trained towards the Wheathop. He focused, trying to will himself to make out features in the dim light filtered through the trees.
The figure was the size of a large adult, but they moved sluggishly through the rough terrain. A cheshire grin spread as the figure drew closer to the ship. This wasn’t an enforcer – local nor Croc. It wasn’t even a threat. Some hairless bumpkin had stumbled on the crash, and was too damn stupid to realize that no normal ship would ever fly this close to a protected zone.
The moron was unarmored, unclothed, unarmed, and probably untrained. This idiot would be easy to capture. Hell, if he was unawakened the traders would buy him for a premium.
The kid had stopped working, and was standing at the base of the ladder, staring up at the moment on the viewscreen.
“GET THE FRACT BACK TO WORK!”, Thad spat as he turned towards the exit hatch. He popped open the riot gear locker, and slipped a handful of G-grade weapons into his pockets. He took a step away, then returned and shoved some F grade riot gear into his vest. There was never any reason to venture out under-armed - especially when you were swimming in good gear. “I just found a way to recoup some coin for this damn job.”
