Session 6: Leaving Walston
Sep. 8th, 2023 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
janestarzAugust 30th, 2023 / 025-1104
The High and Dry swooped in over a landing pad at Central Lake, having finally escaped the dark clouds over the volcano. The rest of the ride had been a breeze despite the controls still tilting to the left. Moira hardly had to think to compensate anymore, and if she could survive a wild ride through a highly charged ash cloud with debris raining on their hull, setting down a small scout ship lightly as a feather was all in a day's work.
At the landing pad people started milling about as soon as the ramp came down. Relief workers and medics swooped in, taking the survivors under their wing. People with clipboards checked each person for their name and their address, focusing on the humans first and mostly ignoring the three vargr. Emergency services were parked at the edge of the landing strip, and doctors were checking vital signs. The people with broken limbs were ferried into the caring hands of the available medical personnel and the crew surveyed the crowd. The busy crowd wore a motley of clothes, from roughspun woollens to mechanic jumpsuits. Several medics had obviously been pulled from their other jobs and it was clear that most of the people turning up to help in the emergency had other things they could have been doing. It was heart-warming to see the community rise to the aid of the unfortunate souls being evacuated. Obviously, it was the thing to do, because on a sparsely populated planet like Walston, the next time there would be an emergency it could be you that needed a hand.
Keeping their distance from the crowd was a small group of dignitaries. Alan Greene was talking to several people wearing cloaks. Their garb was darker than the usual attire of the people from Walston, and they stood out in the crowd. Most of the relief workers kept their distance.
The people in the dark cloaks seemed to be dressing down the Minister of Offworld Affairs, Public Relations and Fisheries. Alan Greene stood silently under the verbal barrage, nodding slightly apologetically.
As he noticed the crew had disembarked, he apologised and left the cloaked people to swiftly move over to the High and Dry.
"Did you do it? Did you complete the survey?"
Dendr scowled. "We did, of what's left of the mountain anyway."
"Ah;" Minister Greene waved a hand dismissively. "Not your fault, surely."
"No, that's just shit luck." Dendr agreed.
Greene turned to an assistant that was hovering nearby and flapped a hand to make sure the assistant took some notes on a clipboard. The assistant seemed unsure what in this conversation he should be writing down, but then he obliged the minister and scribbled something.
Greene turned back to Dendr and the rest of the crew. "Can you get me the data?" he demanded.
Qupar stepped up to the man and jabbed a finger into the minister's chest. "How about you help with the survivors and then we get you the data. Sound good?"
Minister Greene looked startled, and behind him Moira spoke up with a quavering voice. "If anybody needs me I'll be in a bar because there's too much adrenaline in my alcohol system." She moved off at an uncertain pace, leaving the rest of the crew to deal with Greene.
"I'm not letting this man onto the High and Dry without an escort." Qupar added.
"Ah, yes, Cooper, is it?" Greene pulled himself together.
"You can call me mister Vahj." Qupar snarled. He was quite fed up with Greene and his fixation on some stupid data while there were people suffering, their homes destroyed.
"Interesting name, interesting name. Of course, I'll accompany you and the bwap..." Greene waved dismissively at Parappa, who looked startled at being mentioned in the first place; "...and then we can arrange payment."
Greene waved to his assistant, who in turn waved to another assistant. "We don't carry around such sums, but I will be sure to arrange for the money."
He palmed the thumb drive Dendr gave him smoothly and smiled nervously, his eyes searching the crowd around them.
"You can come with us;" Hasta rumbled; "until we have sorted out that payment."
"Oh, he will." Qupar nodded empathically.
The minister quickly checked his assistant's chrono and started jogging in the direction of town. "Ah, I ah....have a meeting in half an hour."
Hasta immediately followed suit in lockstep with the minister, Qupar and the others following closely. As they entered the palatial building they had visited several days earlier, minister Greene waved off security. "Wonderful people!" he almost shouted at the security personnel that were moving in to pry Hasta off the minister's back. "Heroes! Saved fourteen people. We should, ah, pay them. Promptly."
They entered the treasury offices where several clerks were bustling about with papers and calculators, and Greene handed them their payment: notes of the local mint, the entire amount of 2000 credits divided into ten, twenty and one hundred credit bills at the instructions of Dendr. The minister quickly vanished, almost running out of the room after giving them a promissory note that would guarantee free repairs at the starport for the High and Dry.
"Let's go fish Moira out of a barrel." Hasta rumbled. "Fly the High and Dry to the starport and have them fix the ship so we can get off this dustball."
"Let's drop off the salvage first." Myles suggested. "I have that woman's address, and I did promise her."
As they left the offices and headed outside, Hasta noticed Greene and a man in a dark cloak schmoozing in a corridor, but he paid it no mind. It was high time to leave that place. Who cares if the minister handed over the thumb drive to some dark stranger?
Out in the street, they were at a loss where to start looking for Moira. She hadn't said where she'd be off to, and there were a number of bars available on the high street.
"Excuse me, I'm an offworlder;" Qupar stopped a woman passing them on the street. "I'm looking for an offworlder woman who might be drinking. Do you perhaps know where she is?"
"Well, there's a hotel behind you." the woman rolled her eyes, and continued down the street.
Inside the hotel bar Qupar repeated the request to the barman, who only jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. Moira was well into her fourth or fifth drink, but she seemed ready to leave with the rest of them. Myles filled her in on his plan.
The address he had been given turned out to be a dishevelled hovel near the railway tracks. On his knock, Evie opened the door.
"You came. I really didn't think you'd come." she said, a surprised look on her face. "Brin, Gareth, look! It's the kind gentleman we met on the mountain!"
Brin and Gareth were in the back of the room, drinking something and scowling. On seeing Myles at the door, their scowls turned to a sheepish grin.
"I'd said I'd give you the parts, and I'm going to give them to you." Myles said simply.
"This will make a big difference, thank you." Evie said. "Work is sporadic... but wait. Let me just find something for you."
She bustled off into a back room, possibly a tiny bedroom. Myles stood waiting at the door. The men in the room weren't eager to strike up a conversation, and they looked embarrassed.
Moira glanced around Myles, taking in the small hut and its furnishings. It reminded her that there was always someone worse off than she was. She might have been down on her luck before, but these people had troubles of their own.
Hasta, Dendr, Parappa and Qupar had remained a few steps back so as not to crowd the doorway, and were looking around. They had stacked the salvaged parts to the side of the front door so as not to get in anyone's way. The broken and charred parts with bits bent out of shape looked shiny and new compared to the rest of their surroundings. Emissions from the trains on the nearby tracks had coated everything from the sparse vegetation to the dust on the windows with a brownish sludge. It was obviously not the best place to live.
"I really really want to thank you." Evie came back to the door with something colourful in her hands. "This will build a little nest egg for us. We'd rather not rely on handouts, you see."
She fell silent for a moment, possibly remembering how degrading it could be to wait in line for a government handout that could barely support a family of three. Then she remembered she had something for Myles.
"It's my favourite scarf." Evie said, and she draped the scarf around Myles' neck. "A token of my appreciation."
Evie turned to her husband and his brother behind her, giving them a pointed look.
"Yeah, yeah, we're uh, really grateful;" they sheepishly mumbled at their drinks.
"Thank you for the gift." Myles smiled. "I'll be sure to wear it."
"Pretty cunnin' scarf, dont'cha think?" Qupar quipped as they turned away and Evie closed the door.
"Did Alan Greene pay us already?” Moira asked. “What's my share?"
Hasta quickly ran the numbers in his head. "333 credits and change."
"I want to give Evie my share." Moira said softly, so the people in the hut couldn't hear.
"You'll really embarrass her, but she will be eternally grateful." Qupar rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
Moira smiled. "It's a lot of money here, but it's a drop in the bucket of the mortgage."
"But you'll have to fill the bucket eventually." Dendr reminded her.
Moira ignored him, and took her share of the money alongside some more bills from a zippered pocket in her jumpsuit. She looked around the salvage, and tucked a few hundreds here and a few hundreds there where they wouldn't easily be seen from the street, but Evie would be sure to find them. Myles followed suit with a part of his share worth 300 credits, keeping the rest as spare change.
They climbed back on board the High and Dry to make the short trip to the spaceport, a welcome change from the train they took out to Central Lake. Their landing was a little less smooth this time, courtesy a refuelling truck parked quite close to the landing pad and Moira's alcohol-adrenaline balance. Two customs officers came out to greet them after the landing.
Parappa handed them the promissory note given to them by Alan Greene and discussed repairs.
"Also, could you flush the cargo hold with some hoses?" Qupar inquired. The vomit stains would need to go before they could load up on decent cargo.
"Ganash!" one of the customs officers called while he was writing stuff on his clipboard. "Clean up!"
He didn't check whether his bark was answered, but behind him a hunched Vargr shuffled towards the ship. He looked dirty, as if his job consisted of cleaning up the dirtiest things the humans had no desire to touch. The customs officers ignored him completely, but Qupar nodded a polite thanks.
The next day they checked on the repairs. The technicians had done a good job and so had Ganash. The cargo bay deck was a lot cleaner than when they had found the High and Dry and the puddles of vomit from their volcano ordeal had been washed away. Moira checked the repairs they had done, and signed off on the repair invoice.
Hasta was just returning with his duffel from the storage locker, when he overheard Moira talking to Parappa. "We are going back by way of Bowman and Asteltine. We could fill some cargo space along the way."
"If we need to spend money to make money: I've got money. I can throw it into the pot." Hasta commented.
Moira and Parappa discussed options. The High and Dry wasn't as large as the Penelope, but it could still hold some cargo. The trip was fully funded by the Scout Services and with free refuelling on Asteltine and Bowman it would be a very profitable couple of jumps. Their mortgage on the Penelope had been suspended by the Scout Services while they were contracted to retrieve the High and Dry, but it would help get them a good start for next month's mortgage. They decided on taking 12 tons of personal computers which would fit neatly into the cargo bay hold and then asked Myles to set a course for Bowman.
037-1104 Arrival at Bowman
The Bowman system was home to one of the most extensive asteroid belts ever discovered. The planetoid belt, known imaginatively as The Bowman Belt, occupied the equivalent of five planets’ worth of orbits in one contiguous belt. Among the asteroids and debris floating around the central star many smaller and larger vessels navigated the belt. Large cargo ships, smaller rock hoppers and tiny shuttles all swarmed the asteroid belt at varying speeds. On one of the larger asteroids a settlement called Koenig's Rock was their destination, a central location for the small belter communities to trade their ore and minerals. Several vessels carrying the markings of Ling Standard Products and the LSP logo were docked on Koenig's Rock as the High and Dry was approaching the spaceport.
Life in the belt was hard. Small Belter communities living in clannish circumstances were scraping a living by mining their asteroid. It was a hard life for many and it was no wonder kids going to university couldn't wait to leave the system and search for their future elsewhere.
Moira and Parappa made sure to overlook the work of Dock Authorities people with their automatic lifters to unload their cargo from the High and Dry. When the cargo passed inspection, a quick transfer of twelve thousand credits was credited to their accounts.
"I haven't been back here since I was 18." Myles pondered. "So that's what, sixteen years ago? Starport Customs feels different."
He sighed as the customs officer waved him through. "Sixteen years is a long time."
They had soon moved to a local pub to discuss their next steps while the High and Dry was being refuelled. Parappa had set up a shared fund for the Penelope to make sure all the trade funds would move legitimately and the mortgage could be paid at the end of the month. The 12000 credits was just a meagre start to that end, but Hasta seemed to develop a taste for trading.
"Let's get rich." Hasta said happily, toasting his drink.
"I need to make a withdrawal for some urgent medical bills." Dendr said. He swished his drink thoughtfully. "I need 2500 credits to repay a loan quickly."
"Is that all?" Qupar laughed in his drink, but he didn't elaborate.
Hasta smiled at Dendr. "I'll lend you the money for the bills. And then we'll keep the money from this cargo in the fund for the Penelope for now." He waved to the bartender to pour another round of drinks.
"They're not expecting it back any time soon because it's such a shit load of money. But I need to be done with that employer." Dendr said.
He toasted his glass to Hasta in a gesture of thanks.
Read the next entry in this campaign.
Read the first entry in this campaign.
The High and Dry swooped in over a landing pad at Central Lake, having finally escaped the dark clouds over the volcano. The rest of the ride had been a breeze despite the controls still tilting to the left. Moira hardly had to think to compensate anymore, and if she could survive a wild ride through a highly charged ash cloud with debris raining on their hull, setting down a small scout ship lightly as a feather was all in a day's work.
At the landing pad people started milling about as soon as the ramp came down. Relief workers and medics swooped in, taking the survivors under their wing. People with clipboards checked each person for their name and their address, focusing on the humans first and mostly ignoring the three vargr. Emergency services were parked at the edge of the landing strip, and doctors were checking vital signs. The people with broken limbs were ferried into the caring hands of the available medical personnel and the crew surveyed the crowd. The busy crowd wore a motley of clothes, from roughspun woollens to mechanic jumpsuits. Several medics had obviously been pulled from their other jobs and it was clear that most of the people turning up to help in the emergency had other things they could have been doing. It was heart-warming to see the community rise to the aid of the unfortunate souls being evacuated. Obviously, it was the thing to do, because on a sparsely populated planet like Walston, the next time there would be an emergency it could be you that needed a hand.
Keeping their distance from the crowd was a small group of dignitaries. Alan Greene was talking to several people wearing cloaks. Their garb was darker than the usual attire of the people from Walston, and they stood out in the crowd. Most of the relief workers kept their distance.
The people in the dark cloaks seemed to be dressing down the Minister of Offworld Affairs, Public Relations and Fisheries. Alan Greene stood silently under the verbal barrage, nodding slightly apologetically.
As he noticed the crew had disembarked, he apologised and left the cloaked people to swiftly move over to the High and Dry.
"Did you do it? Did you complete the survey?"
Dendr scowled. "We did, of what's left of the mountain anyway."
"Ah;" Minister Greene waved a hand dismissively. "Not your fault, surely."
"No, that's just shit luck." Dendr agreed.
Greene turned to an assistant that was hovering nearby and flapped a hand to make sure the assistant took some notes on a clipboard. The assistant seemed unsure what in this conversation he should be writing down, but then he obliged the minister and scribbled something.
Greene turned back to Dendr and the rest of the crew. "Can you get me the data?" he demanded.
Qupar stepped up to the man and jabbed a finger into the minister's chest. "How about you help with the survivors and then we get you the data. Sound good?"
Minister Greene looked startled, and behind him Moira spoke up with a quavering voice. "If anybody needs me I'll be in a bar because there's too much adrenaline in my alcohol system." She moved off at an uncertain pace, leaving the rest of the crew to deal with Greene.
"I'm not letting this man onto the High and Dry without an escort." Qupar added.
"Ah, yes, Cooper, is it?" Greene pulled himself together.
"You can call me mister Vahj." Qupar snarled. He was quite fed up with Greene and his fixation on some stupid data while there were people suffering, their homes destroyed.
"Interesting name, interesting name. Of course, I'll accompany you and the bwap..." Greene waved dismissively at Parappa, who looked startled at being mentioned in the first place; "...and then we can arrange payment."
Greene waved to his assistant, who in turn waved to another assistant. "We don't carry around such sums, but I will be sure to arrange for the money."
He palmed the thumb drive Dendr gave him smoothly and smiled nervously, his eyes searching the crowd around them.
"You can come with us;" Hasta rumbled; "until we have sorted out that payment."
"Oh, he will." Qupar nodded empathically.
The minister quickly checked his assistant's chrono and started jogging in the direction of town. "Ah, I ah....have a meeting in half an hour."
Hasta immediately followed suit in lockstep with the minister, Qupar and the others following closely. As they entered the palatial building they had visited several days earlier, minister Greene waved off security. "Wonderful people!" he almost shouted at the security personnel that were moving in to pry Hasta off the minister's back. "Heroes! Saved fourteen people. We should, ah, pay them. Promptly."
They entered the treasury offices where several clerks were bustling about with papers and calculators, and Greene handed them their payment: notes of the local mint, the entire amount of 2000 credits divided into ten, twenty and one hundred credit bills at the instructions of Dendr. The minister quickly vanished, almost running out of the room after giving them a promissory note that would guarantee free repairs at the starport for the High and Dry.
"Let's go fish Moira out of a barrel." Hasta rumbled. "Fly the High and Dry to the starport and have them fix the ship so we can get off this dustball."
"Let's drop off the salvage first." Myles suggested. "I have that woman's address, and I did promise her."
As they left the offices and headed outside, Hasta noticed Greene and a man in a dark cloak schmoozing in a corridor, but he paid it no mind. It was high time to leave that place. Who cares if the minister handed over the thumb drive to some dark stranger?
Out in the street, they were at a loss where to start looking for Moira. She hadn't said where she'd be off to, and there were a number of bars available on the high street.
"Excuse me, I'm an offworlder;" Qupar stopped a woman passing them on the street. "I'm looking for an offworlder woman who might be drinking. Do you perhaps know where she is?"
"Well, there's a hotel behind you." the woman rolled her eyes, and continued down the street.
Inside the hotel bar Qupar repeated the request to the barman, who only jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. Moira was well into her fourth or fifth drink, but she seemed ready to leave with the rest of them. Myles filled her in on his plan.
The address he had been given turned out to be a dishevelled hovel near the railway tracks. On his knock, Evie opened the door.
"You came. I really didn't think you'd come." she said, a surprised look on her face. "Brin, Gareth, look! It's the kind gentleman we met on the mountain!"
Brin and Gareth were in the back of the room, drinking something and scowling. On seeing Myles at the door, their scowls turned to a sheepish grin.
"I'd said I'd give you the parts, and I'm going to give them to you." Myles said simply.
"This will make a big difference, thank you." Evie said. "Work is sporadic... but wait. Let me just find something for you."
She bustled off into a back room, possibly a tiny bedroom. Myles stood waiting at the door. The men in the room weren't eager to strike up a conversation, and they looked embarrassed.
Moira glanced around Myles, taking in the small hut and its furnishings. It reminded her that there was always someone worse off than she was. She might have been down on her luck before, but these people had troubles of their own.
Hasta, Dendr, Parappa and Qupar had remained a few steps back so as not to crowd the doorway, and were looking around. They had stacked the salvaged parts to the side of the front door so as not to get in anyone's way. The broken and charred parts with bits bent out of shape looked shiny and new compared to the rest of their surroundings. Emissions from the trains on the nearby tracks had coated everything from the sparse vegetation to the dust on the windows with a brownish sludge. It was obviously not the best place to live.
"I really really want to thank you." Evie came back to the door with something colourful in her hands. "This will build a little nest egg for us. We'd rather not rely on handouts, you see."
She fell silent for a moment, possibly remembering how degrading it could be to wait in line for a government handout that could barely support a family of three. Then she remembered she had something for Myles.
"It's my favourite scarf." Evie said, and she draped the scarf around Myles' neck. "A token of my appreciation."
Evie turned to her husband and his brother behind her, giving them a pointed look.
"Yeah, yeah, we're uh, really grateful;" they sheepishly mumbled at their drinks.
"Thank you for the gift." Myles smiled. "I'll be sure to wear it."
"Pretty cunnin' scarf, dont'cha think?" Qupar quipped as they turned away and Evie closed the door.
"Did Alan Greene pay us already?” Moira asked. “What's my share?"
Hasta quickly ran the numbers in his head. "333 credits and change."
"I want to give Evie my share." Moira said softly, so the people in the hut couldn't hear.
"You'll really embarrass her, but she will be eternally grateful." Qupar rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
Moira smiled. "It's a lot of money here, but it's a drop in the bucket of the mortgage."
"But you'll have to fill the bucket eventually." Dendr reminded her.
Moira ignored him, and took her share of the money alongside some more bills from a zippered pocket in her jumpsuit. She looked around the salvage, and tucked a few hundreds here and a few hundreds there where they wouldn't easily be seen from the street, but Evie would be sure to find them. Myles followed suit with a part of his share worth 300 credits, keeping the rest as spare change.
They climbed back on board the High and Dry to make the short trip to the spaceport, a welcome change from the train they took out to Central Lake. Their landing was a little less smooth this time, courtesy a refuelling truck parked quite close to the landing pad and Moira's alcohol-adrenaline balance. Two customs officers came out to greet them after the landing.
Parappa handed them the promissory note given to them by Alan Greene and discussed repairs.
"Also, could you flush the cargo hold with some hoses?" Qupar inquired. The vomit stains would need to go before they could load up on decent cargo.
"Ganash!" one of the customs officers called while he was writing stuff on his clipboard. "Clean up!"
He didn't check whether his bark was answered, but behind him a hunched Vargr shuffled towards the ship. He looked dirty, as if his job consisted of cleaning up the dirtiest things the humans had no desire to touch. The customs officers ignored him completely, but Qupar nodded a polite thanks.
The next day they checked on the repairs. The technicians had done a good job and so had Ganash. The cargo bay deck was a lot cleaner than when they had found the High and Dry and the puddles of vomit from their volcano ordeal had been washed away. Moira checked the repairs they had done, and signed off on the repair invoice.
Hasta was just returning with his duffel from the storage locker, when he overheard Moira talking to Parappa. "We are going back by way of Bowman and Asteltine. We could fill some cargo space along the way."
"If we need to spend money to make money: I've got money. I can throw it into the pot." Hasta commented.
Moira and Parappa discussed options. The High and Dry wasn't as large as the Penelope, but it could still hold some cargo. The trip was fully funded by the Scout Services and with free refuelling on Asteltine and Bowman it would be a very profitable couple of jumps. Their mortgage on the Penelope had been suspended by the Scout Services while they were contracted to retrieve the High and Dry, but it would help get them a good start for next month's mortgage. They decided on taking 12 tons of personal computers which would fit neatly into the cargo bay hold and then asked Myles to set a course for Bowman.
037-1104 Arrival at Bowman
The Bowman system was home to one of the most extensive asteroid belts ever discovered. The planetoid belt, known imaginatively as The Bowman Belt, occupied the equivalent of five planets’ worth of orbits in one contiguous belt. Among the asteroids and debris floating around the central star many smaller and larger vessels navigated the belt. Large cargo ships, smaller rock hoppers and tiny shuttles all swarmed the asteroid belt at varying speeds. On one of the larger asteroids a settlement called Koenig's Rock was their destination, a central location for the small belter communities to trade their ore and minerals. Several vessels carrying the markings of Ling Standard Products and the LSP logo were docked on Koenig's Rock as the High and Dry was approaching the spaceport.
Life in the belt was hard. Small Belter communities living in clannish circumstances were scraping a living by mining their asteroid. It was a hard life for many and it was no wonder kids going to university couldn't wait to leave the system and search for their future elsewhere.
Moira and Parappa made sure to overlook the work of Dock Authorities people with their automatic lifters to unload their cargo from the High and Dry. When the cargo passed inspection, a quick transfer of twelve thousand credits was credited to their accounts.
"I haven't been back here since I was 18." Myles pondered. "So that's what, sixteen years ago? Starport Customs feels different."
He sighed as the customs officer waved him through. "Sixteen years is a long time."
They had soon moved to a local pub to discuss their next steps while the High and Dry was being refuelled. Parappa had set up a shared fund for the Penelope to make sure all the trade funds would move legitimately and the mortgage could be paid at the end of the month. The 12000 credits was just a meagre start to that end, but Hasta seemed to develop a taste for trading.
"Let's get rich." Hasta said happily, toasting his drink.
"I need to make a withdrawal for some urgent medical bills." Dendr said. He swished his drink thoughtfully. "I need 2500 credits to repay a loan quickly."
"Is that all?" Qupar laughed in his drink, but he didn't elaborate.
Hasta smiled at Dendr. "I'll lend you the money for the bills. And then we'll keep the money from this cargo in the fund for the Penelope for now." He waved to the bartender to pour another round of drinks.
"They're not expecting it back any time soon because it's such a shit load of money. But I need to be done with that employer." Dendr said.
He toasted his glass to Hasta in a gesture of thanks.
Read the next entry in this campaign.
Read the first entry in this campaign.
