A treasure found accidentally
A crashed spaceship and toad attacks draw Bucky and the crew to a squandered world, but there's a treasure hidden in the decay.
Lacking for inspiration, I have built this story around a couple of already written scenes, and I think it actually makes for a nice continuity. I'm trying a different writing style, getting into the characters' heads a bit more. I think I like this better than a purely visual description. Working on making this one cannonesk, but expanding on the universe and backstories. Feedback always welcome.
Prequel
Tia eased back on the port thrusters. After a moment, the massive ship beside her tiny tug vessel responded, angling more gently into the planet's atmosphere and slowing its decent. There was a crackle from the panel communicator in front of her. "Easy now, I want to her down in one piece." Ralph's static-clouded voice said unnecessarily. He always gave instructions after you'd already done something. She peered through her ship's main view screen; a dozen other tug craft surrounded the huge cargo vessel they were towing, Ralph's would be the shiny one near the front. Everyone knew he was trying for a promotion to on-world management.
Her ship abruptly shuddered violently. She grabbed the docking controls and loosened the energy beam that bound her to the cargo vessel as it bucked beside her. She scowled as she retightened the bond in concert with the other tugs to steady the towed craft. If Ralph was doing his job as lead tug he should be scanning for pockets of instability like that. Losing control of the tow now, halfway through decent, could mean a crash. A ship this size would do a lot of damage on the surface. All large tows were brought in over unpopulated areas due to the ever present risk of an accident, but she didn't intend to have a crash on her record because someone wasn't paying attention.
She flicked her observation pane to show the planet below. As usual, it was thick with murky clouds, but there were still clear snatches of the ground to be seen. From here, the surface of Rodere II looked simply mottled browns that might have been rocks or dunes, the distance concealing the vast tracts of rubbish. She'd guided more than a hundred ships down to that surface. None of them ever left again, at least not whole. She turned the observation pane to the vessel in tow. It was a large one, and old, retired from service and now ready for scrapping. Paint in a dozen colors flacked off a battered and scrapped hull that no longer kept out the coldness of space.
She frowned. Part of the hull glowed red-orange around dark new holes punched in the ship's skin and fuselage. Where had those come from? Their decent shouldn't have caused that damage. If there was stray atmospheric debris around they were all in trouble.
As she hurriedly reached for the communicator, the vessel kicked at its bounds again, slamming her back into the seat then forwards. Tia grabbed for the docking controls, it was then that she saw the other ships. She watched in astonishment as the small green fighters arched around in a rough formation then opened fire haphazardly.
Chapter 1
The air was stale but it was an improvement on the fetid stuff she had been forced to breath on the surface. After the oppressive heat, the relative cool was a relief as well. Most importantly, there were no signs of pursuit, although what sort of a refuge she'd found remained to be determined.
In front of her, a stairway sloped downwards into gloom. As her eyes adjusted to the low light, she could see heavy piles of dusty sand heaped against the rough plastered walls. The dust was one thing you never seemed to escape on Rodere II. The place should be nicknamed Dust rather than Sludge.
Jenny started down the stone stairs, a slender shadow in silver armor moving stealthily. In the darkness, her usually bright green eyes were almost black as they drunk in the meager light, and her thick hair looked more pale grey than pink.
She could feel the warm sting where her lip had split and a sharp ache in one arm where it had been twisted, but they were minor concerns. When she had tried her communicator all she had heard was the hiss of static, and her locator didn't seem to be registering. She was cut off and lost. She needed to find where she was, find a way out, and find the rest of the crew. And going back was not an option.
The stairs soon stopped, ending in a large arched doorway that lead into a wide underground room bathed in darkness. She stepped through the doorway and glanced around to where the light penetrated. Plaster cracked away from the walls and there was more dust heaped among furniture that might have once been good. The place must have been forgotten long ago. She could see brassy metal gleaming dully from several chairs that were arranged around a wide table, and there was a headless statue against one wall that had more glinting inlay. The inhabitants of this planet wouldn't have left such meager treasures in situ had they known about them. The heavily polluted planet Sludge functioned now mostly through what resources it could glean from its own and others' waste. That was how it mostly functioned. The impoverished government was only too happy to play host to a secret base if it meant remuneration; remuneration and, at times, assistance. So now she and the crew were here, assisting.
The white cat continued into the room. The only light came filtering uncertainly down from the top of the stairs behind her, and even her sensitive eyes were having trouble seeing much in the deeper parts of the space. She paused on the threshold of light and dark.
Earlier, when she'd walked away from the cluttered office that had served them as a briefing room, she'd heard the Sludge bureaucrat's parting slur. 'Witch!' He'd hissed it under his breath, spitting out the word in a muttered curse that made it an insult. It was nothing she hadn't heard before, and she had long ago learned to be numb such verbal jabs. Bucky, walking in step close beside her, heard it too. He heard everything. She saw the green hare pause and his lean back stiffen with indignation under the neat uniform. She quickly reached over, brushing her hand against his arm in a gesture of reassurance and restraint. It was a small signal but he understood it. A moment later and they continued on without a word spoken, although Bucky was scowling hard. She was fighting back a smile at his righteous outrage on her behalf.
Jenny pulled her thoughts back to the present. She supposed they had some reason to call her a witch, there were plenty of things she could do that most others could not. She reached out with her mind and focused, the large ruby gems set in her armor blazed with a pale yellow light in response. The room around her sprung into view in the faintly pulsing glow.
It was a surprisingly pleasant space, or would have been before it was given over to decay. Beyond the chairs and table she had already glimpsed, a sunken crescent shaped pit held seating and beyond that there was what looked like a counter backed by a dark doorway. And there were more pale stone statues, all of them badly damaged, like they had been deliberately smashed to remove features. Perhaps this had been a tavern or a meeting place or somewhere to worship. She knew little about this history of the area. The locals seemed to know little more. Their briefing from the Rodere II representatives had been, well, brief.
The first Rodere II spokesperson had looked pompously official as he sat arranged among the disorderly jumble of the office. He shot her the occasional sour, unfriendly glare. His eyes spat 'witch' before his mouth did. Beside him, another bureaucrat lounged nonchalantly. His glances were a little too friendly. She ignored them both.
The rats that now ran most of Sludge were relative newcomers to the planet. They had been space-wandering pirates before settling here a generation or so ago, and they still retained something of the look of pirates, although they lacked the flamboyant style of the Canards. The two in the office wore what seemed to be an odd assortment of random material and adornments. They suited the space, which also seemed to Jenny to be full of random junk. She turned to looked past some of the dusty ornaments and out of the large, dirty window.
The office was set high in a multistory building. The widow beside them overlooked a vast expanse of scrap that seemed to end only at the murky horizon. Here and there, the hulking skeletons of spaceship hulls and engines dwarfed the more mundane refuse. The pilot part of her found them mildly distressing. It was an organized chaos, with open dirt roads and snaking trackways through the rusty piles. Vehicles laden with choice scrap meandered along the roads whiles others plucked excitedly at the heaps with metal arms. From a distance, thorough filtered air, it looked almost peaceful.
She turned her attention back to the pompous bureaucrat as he spoke again. He was thick-set with quick, suspicious eyes and greying fur.
"It was toads." He said stiffly. "They came out of nowhere and attacked a crew towing a wreck in from orbit for salvage."
"What sort of wreck?" That was Bucky. Her captain was shorter than either of the rats, but wiry and surprisingly strong, with a commanding presence. He sat beside her, both of them facing the Sludge officials over the large, roughly made desk. Bucky had what she thought of as his 'drill sergeant' manner in place, firm and formal, the one he used for most officials.
The bureaucrat looked down to some papers on his desk. "The Suetonius. Retired cargo freighter Class IV. Not ever space-worthy." He looked back up at Bucky with a frown, as if it were his fault. "Toads made her break up in the atmosphere and now I have pieces scattered all over the area. It'll cost me half the profits of salvage to find and transport the usable bits." He seemed much more concerned with the dent in his profits than the crew that had been attacked, she thought.
"And you have no idea why they attacked?" Bucky asked, still formal.
"Why do toads do anything?" That was the 'friendly' one. He was younger than the first official; skinny and sharp featured. He sounded annoyingly casual and it was a stupid question, or rather a way to draw attention to himself. Most toads followed whatever orders their leaders gave them with idiot fanaticism, but the leaders would have plans and reasons.
"Because they're told to." She answered him briefly.
The comment earned her a yellow-toothed smile that focused on her chest. One of the rat's long incisors gleamed gold.
"There's nothing special about the ship that we can see." The first spokesperson continued grumpily, jabbing a finger against the papers before him in emphasis. "They never bothered us before that base of yours went in. Toads are the UAC's problem. That was the deal."
Jenny doubted the attack was anything to do with the secret SPACE base on Sludge. If the toads had wind of that they wouldn't be bothering with derelict space craft. But the official was right, toads were their problem.
She leaned forward to catch a glimpse of the papers on the desk. "May we have access to the records?" She asked. "Our android might be able to find something."
The grumpy one nodded with a grudging huff, but it was 'friendly' who spoke. "I will personally make sure you have access to anything you want." He said in the general direction of her breasts. Sisters give me strength. She noticed his boots had laces and contemplated tying them together with a quick spell.
Bucky was speaking again. "What damage was done on the surface when the ship crashed? Where did she hit? Did you lose any personnel?"
The second official waved a hand dismissively. "We're careful. All big ships like that are brought in over wasteland. It will have made a hell of a dent but it was nowhere near anything important. There's only old rubbish out there, no settlements."
"And your communication said something about ongoing issues?" Bucky asked with a frown.
"Yes." The first bureaucrat nodded sharply again. "There have been follow up attacks on-world." She'd guessed the next part before he spoke it. "They're targeting crews trying to find pieces of the Suetonius."
And that had been all. They'd been handed information on attack locations and times, as well as the vessel's historic details, and then sent on their way.
Outside, the air tasted thick and smoky. The muggy heat made her uncomfortable and her eyes stung slightly. She'd flicked over the locations of the toad attacks as they made their way from the briefing, walking past ragged looking vendors selling random junk and unappetizing food of varying shades of brown as they cut through one of the busy roadside markets that clustered around the large scrap processing plant they'd come from.
"The toads have a ground base somewhere close by in the south." She concluded after a brief study of the records. The original raid had been made with small fighters that couldn't travel far in open space, and subsequent attacks had used fuel hungry ground based speeders that had all approached from the south. She doubted it was a faint. Toads were rarely clever with their tactics.
Bucky didn't look up. He was concentrating on some of the other records. "The Suetonius has been in operation for a long time. Her logs go back before the beginning to the Toad Wars. There may be something in there, but we'll need Blinky to scan them effectively." He shuffled another data-pad to the top of the pile in his gloved hands. "We don't have time to wait for that though. Deadeye and me will shadow the next crew out looking for bits of the ship. There's one leaving in seventeen minutes. They're after the section with the cockpit. That'll have the navigation array, the CPU, any general records. If there's something in the ship's databanks, it'll probably be there. You take Bruiser and the Croaker and see if you can locate the toad base."
Jenny frowned. Bruiser was strong and loyal, but difficult to control, especially around toads. On a stealth mission she'd move more effectively alone. She glanced up to Bucky's face, but the protest died on her lips when she saw him looking back with a firm expression. "That's an order, First Mate. I'm not having anyone off by themselves if it can be helped. Leave him with the Croaker if you need to move quietly, but take him."
"Aye-aye, Captain." She'd replied with slightly put-on meekness. Sometimes she wondered who read whose mind.
The memory made her smile, straining the tear in her lip. The sharp pain brought her back to the present.
Jenny stepped further into the dark underground room, shimmering in the light of her own gems. The scale was large, made for beings larger than the rats; larger than Aldebaran's too. Her curiosity was plucked when she saw the walls must have held murals that were now only visible in fragments – she thought she could see trees and clouds, the beams of bright suns and a pale moon, and swirls of rushing wind, in the undulating patterns – but she didn't have time for causal exploration. She headed for the dark doorway at the far end of the room, lifting one hand above her head to trail the broad chest of the headless statue as she passed it. She regretted the gesture when her black gloved fingers came back coated thickly in the gritty, ubiquitous dust. Damn Sludge. She briefly shook her fingers in a fruitless attempt to get them clean then gave up and stepped lightly into the darkness.
