Samuel could not remember the names of the three new mercs, only Narek and Garn remaining in the forefront of his mind, and the marine found the lack of personal connection to the fresh recruits to be eerily similar to his time in the Baen Reaper Corps. Soldiers came and went, though it was only ever the ones that survived long enough whose name found its way into Samuel’s memory. He quickly discovered that it was the same with Yanna’s drill crew, as he spent just as much, if not more, time serving the drill master than he did Narek.
Yanna and her team were fast, and usually, the Rig was only deployed for a week or so before they’d extracted enough to cover costs, factor against the market flux, and yield sufficient profit margins to make it better than finding a different line of work.
Braden was good at finding the deposits, one of the best in the industry Samuel had come to find out, though even with such a genius aboard, the Halo spend more time docked or in the black than it did planetside. For every week or two on the ground, the crew would spend several months in the artificial gravity of the ship or one of the handful of stations to which the Halo paid docking subscriptions.
Samuel had spent plenty of time in the void as a Reaper and knew that to keep one’s body fighting, and labor fit was a tremendous amount of work. Artificial gravity was all well and good, but the human body needed more, and so nearly every ship in civilization that was meant for deep runs came equipped with a gym of one size or another. While most everyone else had spent their childhoods planetside, his son, Orion’s, young life had been lived just as much in the black as it had been on the surface of Baen 6 during his infancy and Longstride in his pre-teens. Now that he was a teenager, Samuel begrudgingly acknowledged, at the insistence of both Sura and, frustratingly, the captain himself, that the youth’s body needed as much dirt time as it could get.
The light of the twin suns bounced off the patchwork Reaper’s armor that protected Orion’s body, and thanks to the helmet that covered his son’s face, he looked just like any other salvage marine.
The years of homesteading on Longstride had paid off, and Orion was much larger and stronger than he would have been if he’d been raised in the half-lit urban stacks of Baen 6 like his father. The youth held the combat rifle in proper form, and his head moved slowly as he scanned the perimeter. Orion was only a few years younger than Samuel had been when he and Ben Takeda had first signed up for the Reaper Corps, and with Sura standing next to the young man, Samuel felt almost as if he were looking at himself from times past.
Sura was different to be sure, and not just because she was older than she had been when she and Samuel had met. She was thicker of shoulder and limb, which was just as much the result of hard work as it was exercise. Even the changes in her body weren’t what struck Samuel as much as the way she moved, the way she dressed, and the rogue’s demeanor that had crept into what had once been a bright personality.
While Samuel still kept his military bearing and somewhat reserved Grotto manner, Sura had fully embraced the onboard culture of the Halo, which was to say the greater culture of the prospectors, mercs, freelance colonists, and adventurers that made their life on the move and score to score. Her duster fell easily across her shoulders, and the combo revolver on her hip rested comfortably, ready to fill her hand with a faster draw than he’d even seen Vol or Boss Marsters manage.
Their relationship had been troubled from the start, and Samuel felt as if the wedge between them had first been driven in when he’d left for Reaper duty. They both had conducted their fair share of infidelity, and neither held it against the other. Life was hard in necrospace, and they’d each needed the comfort of another’s embrace. It was in the past, and once Samuel reached Longstride they had enjoyed something of a romantic renaissance for a few precious years.
Osi 2216 had changed everything between them. Sura had known what they were heading into and chose to say nothing. For her, there was already an acceptance of the violent reality of life aboard the Rig Halo. While work had been relatively free of more conflict than the occasional skirmish to drive away competition or claim jumpers, the slaughter on 2216 stayed with Samuel.
He resented how swiftly and easily the crew of the Rig Halo, including Sura, were able to justify their actions. Samuel also resented his own hypocrisy, for while there indeed were theoretical rules of engagement for Reapers during hostile salvage, it had not always unfolded in such a clear-cut way.
More than once Reaper Hyst had found himself collecting base wages and hazard pay for battles in which he knew for certain he was not on the side of decency. For the crew of the Halo, there appeared to be little inner conflict, their callous pragmatism overcoming whatever emotional or ideological issues they might take with the implications of their actions.
As Samuel watched his son and his mother silhouetted in the dying light, he felt detached from them somehow. He would always be on the outside of their family unit. For so long it had just been Sura and Orion. Often it felt to Samuel that even when they were sharing the cramped quarters aboard the Halo, he was the odd one out.
Orion’s accent was even changing, losing the Grotto to affect more and more of the spacefarer and station dweller patois. Not that Samuel was overly proud of his Grotto heritage, but it was a clear sign of how life aboard the Halo was changing Orion as much as it was Sura, perhaps more so.
Lately, Samuel had been thinking what life might have been like for Sura and Orion had he never returned. Would they have remained aboard the Rig Halo all this time or would Sura have pushed forward with the homestead on Longstride without him? Had he not been there, would the Tasca slavers have seized them? Part of Samuel wondered if the slavers would have even come to Longstride had he not been there, considering how eerily it was that the Gedra monster had been in the cargo hold. In the small hours of the night, when Samuel’s sleep was troubled by a near certainty that the ghosts of Ellisian space had followed him home.
The thought of the Gedra, and what he had done in order to rid himself of the beast, snapped the marine out of his reverie.
The sun dipped behind the mountains, and in seconds the Rig’s lighting flared to cast artificial illumination throughout the platforms and the ground beneath.
As uncomfortable as he was with Orion serving as part of Narek’s security detail, at least the youth had learned much in the way of weapons and armor. While he had yet to kill anyone, much to Samuel’s relief, the young man had become an acceptable marksman and could manage the armor at least as well as a Reaper fresh from boot camp.
It felt odd to Samuel as he turned and walked down to the drilling platform to return to work under the protection and weapons of his wife and son, though somehow, despite his grim mood, he felt comforted by their competency. If one of Yanna’s drills snapped and the broken piece jumped its mooring to impale Samuel, he’d at least die knowing that they would be capable of surviving this kind of life, at least for as long as anyone could.
Samuel reached the bottom of the stairs and walked across the decking towards the center of the platform. The Rig was a rapid deployment drilling compound, almost identical to the one used by their competitors. It detached from the Halo and could be erected and operational within hours. However, even if the compound could be brought online so quickly, each play was different when it came to the drilling. They could be punching holes in the planet for days before striking juice, for while Braden could pinpoint the ink-rock, extracting it was not nearly so precise a science.