Chapter 28 Sanre-tay Day 6 – The Flats of & Kin
The trip to & Kin's was a holiday excursion for much of the off-duty crew. & Kin occupies a large cluster of craters three hundred kilometers out from CraterPort. Half of their facility is a large, ten-kilometer-wide, flat bottomed crater, known simply as the flats where for two thousand years, wrecked and salvaged space ships have been dumped – complete ships, and pieces of ships in every size and type lay scattered across the airless plain, a vast treasure trove in the eyes of our engineering staff, and indeed in the eyes of most spaceers. On any given day, in addition to the & Kin salvage teams, the flats hosts scores of ship parties roaming the wilderness of wrecks on some excuse or other just to explore the old ships, treating it like a spaceship museum.
With the proper plans, many components can be printed or manufactured aboard the ship, but parts made of D-matter must be purchased since D-matter can't replicate with ship board printers. The owners who'd last refitted the ship (500 years ago) were old ship captains who'd fitted her with the best, the most reliable and the most repairable components credits could buy. Still, 500 years and a star system away means that a lot of D-matter replacement components can only be found in salvage yards, and they're rare. The engineering staff has spent decades restoring the ship to this old standard, regularly scrounging the flats of & Kin's and other yards searching for the replacement parts needed to swap out the cheaper components that the less the prosperous owners of the ship had used in its lean years. There are, of course, newer components, but the Unity is all about dynamic stasis – improvements to anything remain local for thousands of years, so new parts aren't better than the 500-year-old ones, and many are not as repairable as the ones those old ship captains installed. Though the engineering department has thus acquired a large collection of spare D-matter parts, on the theory that you never know when you might need more than what you have on hand, they never pass up the chance to scour & Kin's for more. As I said, exploring the flats of & Kin's is not only business, but a treasure hunt, a museum tour and picnic as well, and not only for the engineering staff – there were ten of us aboard the long boat who found some reason to tag along – only the harbor watch was left behind.
The & Kin complex also includes four smaller, overlapping craters, the largest of these being the sales field where they sell fully refurbished space ships and boats. A second housed their shipyards for repair and refit work. Jann and his partner's planet traders could be seen being refitted in the gantries, as were a host of other smaller ships of various types. It didn't look like a gantry was empty. A third crater held the salvage facility that stripped the ships of useable components before the hulls were towed off to be recycled in vast furnaces, mostly in the drifts. Given the number and age of the ships on the flats, the salvage operation seemed to be falling increasingly behind. The final crater housed the & Kin's offices, factories and warehouses for refurbished parts. They also operate an orbital ship yard for repairing ships too large to be brought down to the surface, and a small armory several hundred kilometers away to store and outfit ships with anti-meteor defenses.
We landed, tumbled out in our space suits, checked in, picked out several crater buggies and headed out to the flats, splitting into two groups, Vynnia, Molaye and I went off in search of a couple of suitable drones, while the rest set out to find a suitable defense system. We'd charts of where to find what we were looking for, but the surveys were sketchy, so examining them in person was the only way of assessing their condition. They expected to spend the morning assessing the possibilities on their list, and only after lunch in the & Kin's cafeteria, would they return to extract the various components selected from the wrecks.
With Molaye at the wheel of the crater buggy we clung on for dear life as we bounced through a maze of dusty lanes between the hulking carcasses of wrecked ships, bright in the sunlight, black in the shadows, to the section of the flats where the drones in assorted shapes, sizes and conditions lay in ragged rows. There are drones for every purpose. The drone section was divided into lots for asteroid prospecting and mining drones, with a bewildering array of appendages to perform specialized tasks, planetary probes for all sorts of environments from inhabitable planets to gas giants and icy moons, spy and guard drones, and the scout we were looking for, plus a hundred other small, specialized pilot-less vessels whose purpose was beyond my imagination. Hundreds of them were laid out in rows, intact and in pieces in the grey dust and bright sunlight. It was, therefore, a minor miracle when Molaye and I discovered two ever so slightly battered scout drones in less than five minutes.
'What do you think, Vyn. A few dents aren't beyond our ability to repair. We'll have plenty of time... and the price looks right,' I said drawing her attention to our find. 'All the pieces seem to be present too. More or less.'
'I'd prefer units that are all in one piece,' she replied tersely and moved on.
Molaye and I exchanged glances and a shrug and followed her. Within three minutes we'd found several more likely candidates. 'What do you think of these, Vyn. They're all in one piece...' I said, drawing her attention to two more battered scouts.
She looked at them, and at me and said, 'Lift off. Go look at your blasted boats, Captain. I'll find you when I'm done.'
'I was just trying to help, but if you're really okay with that,' I replied. I could see Molaye grinning in her clearsteel helmet behind Vynnia.
'Lift,' she said with an impatient wave of her hand.
'Right, we'll leave the buggy with you. And we'll be a com channel down so that we won't annoy you with our chatter,' and adding brightly in my most captain-like manner, 'Carry on, First.'
I don't think Vynnia was really (all that) annoyed. While she was serious about the need for drones, I knew our budget and that we likely couldn't afford them, still, I didn't care to mention that to Vynnia. Molaye and I were mostly along to check out the vintage rocket boats in an adjacent section, since we shared a passion for flying rocket boats. It was still too early in my career to think of picking one up, but well, this was actually the first time I was free to check them out in the flats, and you never know...
Molaye and I bounded off to the section of the flats devoted to (the wrecks of) rocket boats, ships' boats, small yachts and assorted other small craft. We'd downloaded the treasure chart and had marked the location of at least fifty boats we wanted a look at and we'd certainly find many more of interest as well – we'd easily fill the morning.
What made it a real quest was that & Kin's identification system rarely notes the variations of a rocket boat model over the decades. To an enthusiast, the difference between Crimson Comet 33z and a Crimson Comet 33zx are like night and day. The two models were built several centuries apart, and the 33zx looks completely different – it has a Gothic sort of look that was briefly in style during the 33zx era – and was produced for a much shorter time than the 33z, the 33za, and 33zb... and so it commands ten times the price. & Kin listed seven Crimson Comet 33's, without further details – though I think they do this on purpose, since however clueless & Kin may seem about the fine details of the wrecks they have on the flats, they actually price them with an expert's eye on the desirability of the model and its physical condition. In any event, we had to check them all out plus many other boats that caught our attention as we went along. We did find a wrecked Crimson Comet 33zx deep in the dust of the flats with a listed price that we (meaning I) could possibly afford. We stood admiring it – though you had to tilt your head in several angles to admire it all and use your imagination to see the missing pieces.
'What do you think, Captain? A 33zx with almost all the pieces...' Molaye said, hands on hips, taking it all in after we'd spend half an hour peering and poking around and in it. 'Just needs a little shop work...'
'They seem to have salvaged a few hull fitting, which might be hard to replace. And, well bending the hull so that all of it is pointing in the same direction would likely take a better equipped hangar t
han I anticipate owning...' I said, trying to talk myself out of it.
'Have & Kin straighten it out. There's enough of the original left to keep it authentic even if they have to print out replacements for the missing fittings...' suggested Molaye brightly.
'Well it's the best price I've ever seen,' I had to admit. 'I wonder what they'd charge to get it straightened...'
'Do you think you might buy it, Captain? We could store it in no. 4 hold and work on it the whole voyage. Why, I bet Riv and Lilm could cut and straighten it out and we'd have it operational – if not quite authentic – by the time we reach the Aticor or Amdia.'
Fortunately, Vyn, in the buggy, pulled up in a cloud of dust, because I was tempted, even though the boat's price and estimated bill to get it all pointing in one direction would likely wipe out a wide swath of my savings...
'I thought I'd better get over here to chaperone you two. You sound like you're having way too much fun to be just window shopping for rocket boats,' she said.
I may have blushed, but I managed a laugh, 'You can't have too much fun, Vyn. And you don't find a Crimson Comet 33zx just lying about in any old salvage yard every day. It's a find well worth getting a little carried away,' I explained, pointing out our prize. 'They only produced seven thousand of them and only for several decades – it's quite rare.'
She glanced at the wreck and back to us. 'I'll grant you that it looks quite rare, but you seem to have a strange affinity for rockets in pieces...'
'Oh, don't mind her Skipper, she just doesn't understand,' laughed Molaye.
'Maybe I don't, but I'm getting hungry and I see it's time to meet the gang in the cafeteria,' I said, tearing my eyes off of the (pieces of) the Crimson Comet. 'We'll have to think on this Molaye. It's been here a thousand years by the look of it, but... Still, it might pay to see what type of down payment might hold it until we could actually afford it,'
'That's the spirit, Captain. We'll be rich enough trading in the drifts that we'll be able to pick it up in a couple of years with pocket change,' replied Molaye brightly.
'Right. But why settle for this when we'll be so rich we could afford the one on the sales lot...' I added, 'which is in one piece.'
The rest of the crew was already in the cafeteria. They'd also had a successful morning, having found the exact make and model Tenry had at the top of his list in good condition. I remembered to asked Vynnia how her search had gone, only to get a short, 'I've marked four prime quality drones that we could refurbish on board at a good price'.
'Good work, First.' No point being discouraging.
After we lunched, we divided into three groups – Vynnia and I tagged along with Tenry on his treasure hunt. Riv, Lilm and Myes went prospering for spare parts even though I told them the budget wouldn't allow it, and Molaye accompanied Kie and our tech crew back to the wreck to extract the various components they'd selected. I'd high hopes that Tenry would turn up some old contraband which we could use to fill the budget gap, but that proved unfounded. In hind sight it's clear we were up against two thousand years of transmitted wisdom on where smuggled goods are hidden, so the likelihood of finding hidden contraband in the wrecks was likely nil. Nevertheless, the afternoon was not wasted – I learned where and where not to hide things in ships, should I ever have things needing hiding. And it was fun.
Before we left, Molaye and I talked to Nat about the Crimson Comet 33zx. A down payment was doable, but to get it structurally straight and have the missing components replaced pushed the price so close enough to an operational 33zx that we decided to give it a miss for the time being. Who knows what we'll find in the years ahead?
It was evening before we arrived back at the ship with our new weapon control system. I postponed purchasing the drones, and passed on all but a few pump parts that the engineers swore they were very short of. And now, tired and sore from a day spent in a space suit, I hear my hammock calling, so I'll close.
Chapter 29 Sanre-tay Days 7 & 8 Buggy Racing & The CreditBox