Samuel had been pouring over his finances, trying for what seemed like the thousandth time to make some kind of sense of his predicament, to guesstimate how many more years of Reaper duty he would have to endure before he and his family could leave Grotto. It had been nearly eighteen standard months since the battle on Tetra Prime, and still he awoke with nightmares about the mech.
Back on Baen 6 his wife Sura continued to work part-time to help Samuel chip away at the mountain of debt their family owed Grotto Corporation. With what remained of their two life-bonds, the usual costs of living, and now Samuel’s monumental medical expenses, the only way they were going to make any progress beyond just paying the interest on what they owed, let alone trying to save for expatriation and a homestead, was for Sura to return to work.
Samuel had found himself actively hoping for combat deployments. The chance to earn the increased hazard wages that accompanied hostile salvage ops would go a long way toward eliminating his debts even if it did increase his chances of being killed on the job.
In the time since his injury the Baen Reaper fleet had been pulling operations in parts of necrospace that had been somewhat picked clean. The scavengers and pirates on the Red List had little in the way of heavy extraction equipment, much less the kind of tug ships to haul scrap tonnage the way the Reapers did.
In many ways it made Samuel feel as though the Reapers were the apex scavengers of the galactic ecosystem, like the bone worms sometimes found in the cesspools beneath Assemblage 23; unstoppable scavengers who mowed over anything weaker and ate them alive.
His father had taken Samuel down there once, when he was only ten, to show him the bowels of the forge. That had been back when the Hyst family had still hoped to secure a place for Samuel at his father’s side.
Under the massive forge was a hub of network waste tunnels, where inedible bio-mass from three nearby food processing plants was piped in and channeled to various dump exits. Part of the function of Assemblage 23 was to maintain the hub, patching pipes to replacing valves, in addition to fabricating the materials for the other hubs and tunnel networks throughout the Bean system.
For the indentured workers of Baen 6, being part of the Assemblage crew was about as prestigious an achievement as was possible without being born into a wealthy family.
It had been with pride that Samuel’s father had helped the boy don a hazard suit to venture with him into the subterranean darkness.
Samuel’s father was happy to show young Samuel how the molten slag or toxic runoff from the forge would inevitably breach some of the tunnels beneath. No matter what they did to stop spillage it would always happen, and even when it didn’t, parts would just sometimes fail.
That was the lesson of industry on such a massive scale, that everything found a way of breaking down somehow over time. It was the same for the human body, thought Samuel as his wandering mind returned to his chamber and the mission clock as it steadily counted down.
Ben was leaning against the wall in Samuel’s chamber, having dropped by to check in on his friend before muster. After the letter fell from Samuel’s hands the bulky soldier knelt down and picked it up. He’d seen Samuel reading it over and over, crunching numbers on his data pad, and his friend’s face was always grim at the end of it.
“No matter how many times you read that letter or how many times you punch those numbers I’m pretty sure the answers are going to be the same,” laughed Ben with false mirth as he folded up the paper and returned it to the small stack of files on Samuel’s nightstand.
“Well, at least the lifetime warranty on your new hardware is made null and void if you engage in any routine heavy lifting or take part in any military or security force activities.”
“You always see the upside so clearly?” grumbled Samuel as he got to his feet and grabbed his deck jacket, “Or just when it’s not you getting saddled with another life-bond’s worth of debt?”
“Come on, man, lighten up, I’d rather you be fit to fight than be a head on a stick,” said Ben as he opened the door and held it for Samuel to walk through, “Can’t get paid just sitting around right? Besides, Grotto disability payments are barely enough to keep people out of debtor’s prison, much less raise a family.”
“I get it Ben, really, I do. I just get pissed sometimes that I wasn’t able to make that choice for myself,” responded Samuel as the two men walked down the narrow corridor of the barracks section of the tug, slowly making their way towards the main hold, “I now owe Grotto more money than I did before we hit the ground on Tetra Prime.”
“Mags would say that you just had some bad luck, and then something snarky about how you’re still alive when folks like her got early retirement,” whispered Ben as they passed several crewmen in the hallway, “You’re here, I’m here, and we’re still in the game.”
“I swear, Ben Takeda, it’s like you took an elective course on speaking in clichés,” Samuel retorted as they reached the service shuttle that would carry them through the engineering sections of the ship on their way to the staging area, “But I get it, the numbers don’t lie. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m actually glad we’ve finally pulled a hostile salvage.”
“Is blasting somebody going to get you some payback jollies?” scoffed Ben as the shuttle rumbled along the enclosed passage, taking them through the bowels of the ship.
“I’m thinking about paydays, brother, you were at the same mission briefing I was,” said Samuel, nodding to Virginia Tillman and Harold Marr as the four Reapers fell into step together towards the staging area, “A city with an upspire the size they showed us will have a downspire easily ten times the size once you factor in the unrecorded expansions and abandoned ventures and that’s just what’s been mapped.”
“It’ll be a bigger haul than our entire tour with Hive Fleet 822,” added Ben as he punched his fist into his open hand. “Not that I’m looking forward to spending months or years wading through sewage having to look over my shoulder for toxic mutants while I’m trying to weld.”
“That’s why we got Prybar here,” kidded Harold as he clamped his hand on Samuel’s shoulder, “He kills monsters.”
“Vorhold sounds like a nightmare,” Virginia chimed in, “What the shift manager said about the landscape of downspire reminds me of being in Mining Unit 5597, and Prybar isn’t in Squad Marsters, Harold, so we’re probably going to be on our own.”
“Hey, at least it has gravity,” answered Harold while the group passed through the sliding door and into the bustling staging area. “If I live the rest of my life without another zero-g firefight I’ll call it a win.”
“Well, don’t you lot sound like a bunch of hardass war veterans,” hailed a smiling Jada Sek as she sauntered over to the group, already kitted out in her combat armor.
The group continued to swap pleasantries as they were joined by Spencer Green and George Tuck, who had several recent Reaper recruits tailing behind them. As Samuel looked over the new faces he had to remind himself that he’d known these people for nearly eighteen months. In the years since Samuel’s first deployment there were only six of his boot camp comrades still alive and serving in Tango Platoon. He had always done his best to remember the names of the other Reapers who joined the unit, though beyond Bianca Kade he couldn’t manage to hold their names on his tongue for more than a few months at a time. Samuel was positive that Mag would have had some phrase of pithy wisdom or at least a redemptive shrug to help Samuel make sense of it.