Salvage
By
UCSBdad
Disclaimer: I'd love to salvage Castle, but it's gone. Rating: K Time: The future, after my story Shipwreck.
Esposito attached a number of devices to the safe and went to work.
"Oh, very clever." He said after about ten minutes. "There are two booby traps in the safe. When you disarm the first one, it sets off the second one. So, you have to find and then disarm the second booby trap, and then do the first. I'll be done here in an hour."
It took an hour and seven minutes as there was a third booby trap. Espo carefully opened the safe.
"It looks like there's nothing but papers in here. Let me go through them and make sure there isn't an incendiary of some kind hidden in them."
As Espo checked, he handed the papers to Rick. Rick looked them over.
"This batch is ship's papers. Probably from ships the pirates took. The owners might give us a finder's fee for these."
He looked at the next batch of papers.
"Jackpot. These are bank drafts worth…Over three million. We're…not rich." He said.
"Why not?" Ann and Fenton asked at once.
"They have Captain Vorpal's ID on them. That's her picture, fingerprints, retinal scan, DNA and brain wave patterns. We'd never be able to convince a bank one of us is her." He kept going through the bank drafts.
"Okay, we are in luck. Here are four that can be paid to the bearer. They're payable in Consortium of Tralk ducats and total about…" He did some quick math in his head. "Maybe fifty thousand tooks."
"Better than nothing." Ann said.
"Don't toss the other bank drafts." Esposito said. "I know a guy, if he's still around, who can either change the ID on those or find a bank that'll be happy to accept him as Captain Vorpal. But, since he has to do all the work, we'd probably get no more than five percent of the face value. He operates out of Butterfly, which isn't too far from Dorvan."
"Better than nothing." Rick said.
"There's a planet called Butterfly?" Fenton asked, grinning.
"It's a ringed planet like Saturn, Mephistopheles, or Garnet. When the first ship there saw the planet, they thought it looked like a butterfly."
"I wonder what happened to the crew?" Kate asked.
"They probably ran out of food, except for the beer, and went off looking for something to eat. I don't think they're coming back."
They headed back to the ship, did some minor maintenance on their battle walkers, ate and rested, and were ready for the next day.
Kate looked down on the base below them.
"There are two really small ships down there, but there are no neutrino emissions coming from either one, but there is some sort of a fusion power plant working down there."
"Are those blaster cannons?" Rick said, tapping the sensor screen.
"Yes, but there's a section where there are no cannons. We can cross the perimeter wall and land by the ships. Maybe there's something of value down there."
"One thing." LT said, looking over Rick and Kate's shoulders. "Look at the way the perimeter wall is built and the defenses. That wall is meant to keep people in as well as keep anyone out."
"A slaver's camp, maybe?" Fenton asked.
"Any signs of life?" Rick asked.
"Not that I can see, but…"
Rick thought for a moment.
"Okay, this time Kate does stay with the ship, just in case. Any slaves are probably long dead, but I just don't like this place."
Kate dropped the five off and then took the ship up to fly over the camp, ready to either provide fire support, or extract her teammates,
The five took cover for a few moments behind a wrecked building, then began walking towards the building that appeared to have the fusion plant in it.
A woman stepped out from the building, holding a blaster.
"Who are you?" She yelled, waving the blaster around in what Rick thought was a very unprofessional manner. "Whoever you are, you won't take us alive. We'll all die first."
"My name is Rick Castle. We were hired by the governor-general of the planet Dorvan to find a ship that crashed here a few months ago. We have no interest in you." He felt that he didn't need to mention that their original plan had been to loot the place.
"You're not from Dr. Mogami's people?"
"Never heard of him or his people. Are you ex-slaves?"
The woman laughed, rather hysterically.
"Slaves? Oh, no. If we were only slaves. How wonderful that would be. We're Dr. Mogami's science project."
She stepped fully out of the building. Castle saw she had four legs. Her butt, or perhaps the rest of her torso stuck out about two feet behind the rest of her and ended in two more legs.
"Come on out, my friends. We have company."
Several dozen more people edged out of the building. All had obviously had genetic modifications done to them. Severe genetic modifications.
One girl who looked to be pre-teenage, had a normal torso and head, but her legs looked to be seven or eight feet in length and her arms went down to her ankles. Beside her stood a boy who had a normal sized head on an enormous muscular body. An older woman had tentacles rather than arms and legs and one man had his two legs joined together making him a pinniped.
Castle looked them over.
"We have a small ship and we don't have room for you, but we can let people know you're here and what happened to you. Maybe someone will come for you."
The woman laughed again.
"Come for us? Do you see what we look like? And the ones who can't come outside are even worse. Do you think we'd ever be accepted anywhere else?"
"There are non-humans that look equally…" Rick wasn't sure what word to use, but finally settled on "…odd. There are places…"
The woman cut him off.
"I doubt it. We'll stay here. But if you want to help, you can help us repair things around here. The defenses won't keep out the animals here, nor dangerous people. We have to hide in the main building here when we're attacked. Our fusion plant isn't working properly and it'll fail someday."
"We can to that, but sooner or later…"
"We don't have a later. We're all infertile and our lifespans are much less than human norm. When the spaceships attacked some were killed and many more were killed when we attacked Dr. Mogami and his people. They're all dead and rotting in hell, I hope. And half of the survivors have died already. I think that in ten years, more or less, we'll be all gone."
"We can do that. And we can make a record of what happened to you. Maybe someone will go after this Dr. Mogami's organization."
"Thank you."
"By the way, what's your name?"
"I am called Win."
It took them two days to make the needed repairs. Kate, being the only real trained engineer among them, did most of the work, but things like weapons and comm gear could be repaired by the others.
Not that Rick had any reason to distrust Win and her people, but he was one paranoid son of a bitch, so he made sure that there was someone in the ship at all times.
Kate had gotten out of her battle walker to do some repairs and Rick noticed a number of people hanging around her, just watching. Then Win came by and shooed them away.
"Was that really necessary?" Rick asked Win.
"Yes. Your woman is very beautiful and completely human, unlike us. She reminds us of what we were meant to be and not what that bastard Mogami made us into." She stopped for a few seconds. "We've had a few suicides here. People just…" She stopped again. "It's best if they don't think about what might have been."
They left Win and her people and went to the next site of neutrino emissions.
"Shit." Kate said. "There's all kinds of jungle around the place and the terrain is pretty broken. We should stay in the ship tonight and start in the morning. Unless anyone wants to sleep in the walkers in the jungle when it gets dark."
No one did and they left at sunrise the next day.
They were close to where the source was when Rick stopped.
"Damn. Look at that. There's a trench here that must be fifty meters deep. And perfectly straight, too."
"That's not a trench, Boss." LT said. "That's from a heavy duty naval blast cannon. Probably some kind of cruiser to cut that deep into the ground. Look. You can see that it cut into bedrock. Someone wanted to destroy this place really badly. The ship that did this had to come down pretty low to do this much damage."
They moved forward and found more and more trenches blocking their path.
Rick finally stopped his team.
"I don't know that we can get to the damned neutrino source. It must be buried way underground to have survived all of this. I don't want the damned planet to collapse on us if we do find it. I say we go back."
Everyone agreed.
The trudge back through the jungle was easier since they could exit through the path that they'd chopped with the machete.
There was an unbelievably bright burst of light and Rick could hear a woman scream. He thought it was Hastings, but he wasn't sure.
He dove behind a large rock and looked around. The rest of his team had scattered, taking cover where ever they could. He couldn't see any of them.
"Who's hurt?" he radioed.
"Me." That was Hastings. "I lost my arm. Dammit, I mean the walker's arm. I think maybe my arm is broken, though. Hurt anyway."
"Beckett, are you near Hastings? If so, grab her and get back to the ship. I'm sending one of the extra walkers with you."
"I've got her and we're leaving."
Castle heard the sound of an engine and the squeal of treads.
A tank? He thought. What's a tank doing here?
"Lissen." Said a voice over the radio. "We gottsa tank. You got walkers. You give us ship, you live. Or, we kill. Unnerstand?"
He could see the tank tearing through the jungle. It was a tank all right and a big one. The armor would be collapsium and the gun was heavy enough to destroy their walkers.
He heard another sound. It was Lucy and she was taking off.
"Listen tank. I told our ship to take off and meet the two of us in a place in the rough country where your tank can't operate. And, the ship takes orders from me and no one else. Kill me and the ship won't ever go anyplace." Kate said over the radio.
"I don' believe you." Was the reply.
"Well, you know how to find out if I'm lying." Kate shot back.
"Mebbe we just kill your friends. See how you like dat."
The tank turned away from Rick and fired again. This time it wasn't with the main gun, but from a smaller one. Still, from the damage it did, a hit would at least damage their walkers and several hits would destroy a walker.
Castle saw a burst of blaster fire from somewhere in front of the tank. He wasn't sure, but he thought he saw Esposito's walker scrambling away, just as a blaster bolt hit where he'd been. Another blast hit the side of the tank, doing no damage that Rick could see. However, he did have an idea. It might be a suicidal idea, but it was an idea.
He got up and ran for the tank. Apparently, the crew was too intent on the other team members to notice Rick and he got to the back of the tank. He used the claw "hand" under one blaster to grab onto the back of the tank. He was right. The exterior of the tank was armored with collapsium, but the inside of the roadwheels of the tank were unarmored. After all, why armor a part with an expensive metal that couldn't be seen, much less hit, unless you were right on top of the tank?
TBC