Kestok crouched, grabbing the orb that formed the body of the lead robot. He lifted, helping the thing up. It was much heavier than it appeared, though the high gravity wasn’t helping. “Come on, we’ve got a ways to go yet.”
The ship rumbled as it circled over the city. Michael gripped onto the tight straps as around him Murt’s crew did the same. It had been Aileena’s idea, to clamber aboard one the crew’s salvage ships, ready and poised for when Kestok completed his mission. If it were up to Michael, they would have climbed into the Seeker, but Aileena had quickly and sternly refused that idea. Michael wasn’t sure why, but he trusted her. Dealing with Murt and his men was much more in her wheelhouse.
“You surviving there pink thing?” barked one of the salvagers. He was wearing a thick leather jacket that he had paired with what looked like a gas mask. Red eyes peeked out through the goggles and thick wiry hair spilt out through the gaps on his clothes.
“Doing alright. Bit bumpy, but I’ve been in worse.”
“Hah! You here that! The small man in the fancy suit has been on worse flights? What, you take a cruise and they only the one kind of svektch? No free nuts in the rooms?”
“Crash landed onto an ice planet, survived the wilderness and giant crabs,” Michael said. He was oddly proud of himself. A few weeks earlier and it would have been the end of the world if his cupboards were bare. It was strangely comforting to realise he wasn’t as helpless as he thought.
“I wouldn’t say crashed,” Aileena said. “More of a rough, unscheduled landing.”
“Not what you admitted to before.”
“Oh, look here lads, we got a lovers quarrel,” the masked alien said. The rest of the salvagers chuckled in response.
“If I were you,” Aileena said, her eyes narrowing. “I would shut it before I remove all of that shaggy coat. By hand.”
“She’ll do it too,” Michael said, nodding along.
“Fine, fine. I was just messing with you.” The alien adjusted himself nervously in his seat. “So, you think this is going to work? You know we all need to do this to eat? The longer we spend up here wasting fuel, the less time we have salvaging what we know is out there.”
“Is it salvaging, if its brand-new stuff?” Michael said. “I mean, salvage has this implication that its old found stuff. Crashed ships and that kind of thing. Everything the beam makes is new and, well, I would think it was more, harvesting? That word fits better and I—”
“Michael, you’re rambling again.”
“Well, you know, I just realised that we’re messing with these people’s lives. The people who have us on their ship, with all the guns, and who outnumber us.”
“This lot? Nah, they couldn’t take me.” Aileena leant back in her seat and inspected her nails. It was a deliberate motion, one designed to sell that she very much meant her words.
Michael expected angry shouting. Instead, there was a burst of hearty laughter.
“This one, she has guts. You ever think about becoming a salvager, you can look us up. We can always use people on the crews who have real grit to them.” The hair on the masked alien twitched, shifted by a concealed smile.
“Hey, maybe? Always good to have a backup plan.”
“So,” Kestok said, staring at the array of machinery before him. “Do we have a backup plan? This is all… way outside of my league, honestly. I thought the Sword was pushing it, but this. I don’t have the first idea how it all works?”
“Do we need to know how it works?” one of the Clives said. The machines had spread out through the chamber as they had entered it, Clive’s control of them improving by the minute. “We just need to turn it on, on the settings we need, right?”
“I would rather know what we were dealing with before we go pushing buttons.”
“Oh… you should have said,” Clive said. His voice was bouncing between the machines. “I’ve, uh, already started it up?”
Kestok stood there, speechless, tool bag hanging off his shoulder. He allowed it to drop to the floor. He placed his hands on the side of his head and rubbed his temples. “You did what?”
“I started it up. One of the units, number six, the one at the far side of the room, found a connection port it could plug into.” Across the chamber, one of the robots waved a hello with its flexible metal tendril. “So, I plugged it in, gave the instructions.”
Kestok let his head drop backwards. “What instructions? Specifically? I swear if you’ve done something stupid, I’ll march right back to the Sword and drop your data chip into the nearest sun.”
The robots, as one, scratched at their orbs with their tentacles, as Clive thought for a moment. “Well, I instructed it to construct a capital class ship. I picked one that seems to be a cruise liner. I figured making weapons from a race as advanced as this was a bad idea.”
“Oh, well. That actually makes sense.”
The machinery in the chamber began to come to life, gently vibrating in a rhythmic throb as lines of green light crept along them. Slowly the chamber began to illuminate itself, revealing the machinery within in full. There was a central column, around which great metal orbs span, connected to the column with thick black rods. It looked like an orrery, though there were far more spheres than there were planets in the system. They began to glow with the same green light, faint trails following them, forming transparent rings as they span.
“It’s… difficult to understand the station. It has plenty of programs for building specific ships. It’s designed to pull elements out of the soil and forge the ships ready to go on the surface. It looks like it worked on a schedule, but over the millennia the pre-programmed routine has become corrupted.”
Kestok watched the growing light show in awe. “Is that why it’s building random sections? Plain old-fashioned data-degradation?”
“Seems like it. It’s only going to get worse. That city below, on the tracks, isn’t going to be quick enough one day. The construction phases are getting more random, the times falling out of sync, becoming differing in length. It might be in a few years, it might be a few centuries, but eventually, it will catch them.” The Clives had assembled before the machine, aside from the one still plugged into the wall.
“Can you fix it?”
“Maybe?” The robots seemed to shrug with their tentacles. “I can shut off the repeating program totally, but then the people below would lose their livelihood. Is that our call to make?”
“We fired on the Merydians, detached their crystal by force,” Kestok said. “Is this any different?”
“That was for their own good.”
“Is that who we are? The people who get to decide what’s good for everyone? I’m not comfortable with that. That’s playing in the realm of gods. Second-guessing the universe.”
“Isn’t that what the knower is, the voice of the universe?” Clive said.
“If you believe in that, yes.”
“And do you?”
Kestok thought for a moment. “Maybe?”
The ship rocketed through the air, flanked by three of its fellows, Murt’s entire crew held within them. They were flying towards co-ordinates that Clive had sent to Aileena, a head start to the construction site. The AI had stated it would be a controlled area, a much smaller beam than the one that had swept the planet. It had also come with some information that Aileena had chosen to keep to herself. The beam could be switched off completely.
Ahead of the ships, the efforts of Kestok and Clive above were taking effect. A single long beam of light, a pillar of pulsing energy, was striking through the clouds and hitting the ground. It had been targeted away from the city, to try and prevent the other salvagers from jumping onto the site. Michael could see it through the glass of the cockpit. The passenger section attached directly to the cabin, no door sitting between them to block the view. It reminded Michael of the end of far too many science fiction movies.