Trashtown, part one

On a planet of junk, can they find a way home?

Trashtown (part one)

The darkness was almost complete, only a small low powered light hanging from the ceiling in the far corner of the room provided any cessation from the dark. There is a window on the left side, up high, but it’s a dark moonless night so no light comes from there. There is a stirring on the right wall. A shadow slightly less dark than the surrounding darkness stirs.

“Oh shit, that hurts,” a voice groans from that shadow.

The sound of steel grinding on concrete fills the room as the shadow gets to its feet.

“Where the fu … ah, home,” the voice mumbles.

The shadow limped over towards the light, dragging it’s right leg. That made a screeching steel on concrete sound. Once in the light, the shadow resolved into a tall figure with exotic armor. There appeared to be extensive damage to the right side along the hip and knee. There was also some deformity around the right shoulder.

It reached out with its left arm and flipped a switch on the wall. Moments later, the room filled with light from overhead fluorescent lights. It could be seen that there were benches and tables scattered around the large room. The side walls were filled with shelves. There is a wooden door by the switch and a half closed steel door on the opposite wall.

“I need to close that … but first I gotta get this damn armor off,” the figure said quietly.

The figure fumbled with the visor on the helmet and got it up, revealing a pretty face. She flexed her facial muscles then said, “Looks like the helmet held up. Too bad the display died. Need to talk to Cassius about that. Now lets see if I can get the seals to open.”

She reached across her midsection flipped open three clips then pulled open a panel. It swung outward and down. She then turned three knobs. As each nob turned a clicking sound could be heard. Once that was done she closed the panel and removed the left legging armor and boot. The right boot also came loose and she took that off. Beneath the armor she wore a tight netting garment that was leaking a whitish fluid.

“Crud. Losing coolant,” she said as she limped across the room to a table and leaned against it. She left a thin trail of whitish fluid as she crossed the room.

She leans against the table, the whitish fluid pooling at her feet for several minutes. She then shakes herself and said, “No help for it. I gotta call Brice. I can’t get the rest off without help.”

She picked up a small gray box from the table and pressed a button on the side several times.

“Brice here,” a voice said coming from the box.

“Helan, I am in the lab. I need a little help,” Helan said to the box.

“Be right down.”

“Thanks.”

She replaced the box on the table.

“I really need to close that door, but I am just so tired,” Helan said quietly.

Several minutes pass. The fluid stops leaking. She dozes off and startles herself awake as she starts to fall.

The wooden door opens, and a tall, lean man steps into the room. He looks around quickly, then steps over to Helan.

“You OK?”

“Yeah, Brice. I think I am just tired. Gotta get the door closed.”

Brice walks over to the door and pulls it closed. He pressed a button on the left side and solid metal bars shot out of the jamb on both sides and slid in to solid metal loops mounted on the inside of the door. He backs away and watched a set of three lamps above the doorway. They winked on, in sequence from left to right. One they were all on he turned back Helan.

Brice stepped up to her, reached up and unclipped her helmet. Her dark brown braided hair fell out. There was the beginning of a bruise on the right side of her head. He proceed to remove the rest of her armor except her right arm. The web garment was torn in a few places and more of the whitish fluid leaked on the floor while he worked on her.

“Gonna have to order more coolant,” Helan said.

“We are good for a while. We have about 79 liters left in the barrel we have opened, and another 100-liter barrel of the new stuff. So, we are good,” Brice said, then he tried lifting her right arm and couldn’t budge it.

“You really took some damage to exactly the wrong spot on the shoulder. I think we are going to have to remove the entire arm to repair it.”

“I figured that. It was a Gartapan ‘bot. God damn thing came out of nowhere and hit me from behind. It only got one in before I disabled it. Managed to pull a newish power converter out of it, though. Depending on how bad the damage to this arm is, it might be a good trade,” Helan said as she shifted around to let Brice access both sides of her right shoulder.

Brice stepped away to a nearby shelf and then returned with two tools. He set to work on her arm and, after several minutes of work, pulled the entire shoulder and arm off Helan. He set it on the table and stepped back.

“Need to get the cool-suit off, don’t want to leave coolant tracks all over the house,” Brice said.

Helan nodded, stepped away from the bench, and turned her back to Brice. He disconnected the cool-suit pump and fins from the back of the torn-up suit. Helan was able to strip off the rest with only one arm. She wore a skin-tight bodysuit beneath the suit. The bodysuit went to mid-thigh and mid-bicep on her left arm. The right was cut around her shoulder. A pink scar could be seen to run from her ear, under part of the bodysuit, down her chest, around her right breast, and disappear under the bodysuit again on her back. Her shoulder was a black metal joint with the surrounding skin bunched up in places.

Brice handed her a towel to wipe off the coolant, then caught her when she passed out.




Helan woke up several hours later in another dark room. This time she was tucked into a comfortable bed. She was still wearing her bodysuit. She sat up, swung her legs off the bed, and stood. She stood for a moment then said, “Bathroom then I gotta get something to eat.”

Ten minutes later, she was in the kitchen putting a frozen dinner in the microwave. Brice wandered in and said, “You did well. Besides the power converter, you brought back four couplers, six power crystals, four cans of beans, and something I’ve never seen before.”

“Yeah. A Luthan was carrying it and dropped it when he saw me. I figured it must be something interesting,” Helan said as she took her dinner out of the microwave and to the small table in the kitchen and sat down.

“When you are done, come find me in the Power Lab,” Brice said as he left.

Brice stood before a bench that jutted out from a wall of equipment. He had placed a half helmet on his head that had dark spectacles on the front over his eyes. On the bench was a dark blue cylinder, lying on its side. It had a knurled end on the right side and a lens on the other. The lens was faceted like an emerald. The body of the cylinder was smooth.

“What have you found out?” Helan asked after she entered the room and watched Brice for a few minutes.

“Not a damn thing. It emits no radiation that I can detect with this equipment. If it’s above 750 GHz, we don’t have anything that can detect that. The bottom, assuming the crystal is the top, has a center slot with a small hole on either side.” Brice pulled the helmet off, picked up the cylinder, and examined the knurled end.

“It probably needs a power source. That description sounds like one of the power converts I brought back. Let me look,” Helan said as she tepped over to the bench with a pile of devices on it. One handed she rummages through the devices until she pulled one out with a ‘Ha!’

She hands it to Brice, who attempts to fit it in the cylinder. It’s far too small to work.

“Let me see if I can find another … this would be easier if I had another arm,” Helan said when she returned to the bench.

“Apologies, let me get one from the charging booth,” Brice said as he put the cylinder down, walked over to a white cabinet, and opened it.

Inside were several ‘arms’ that were clipped to the back wall and plugged into a power strip along a shelf. Beneath the shelf were small hand energy weapons of various kinds and of different configurations. Brice picked up a four digit, single thumb hand and a dual joint arm and brought them over to Helan.

Helan stood still as Brice attached the arm at her shoulder and then slotted in the hand at the end joint. She flexed the arm and hand, then said, “Thanks, that is so much better. I hope the fat toad the took my arm got indigestion from it.”

Brice helped her sort out the devices she’d brought back. Only about half were power converters. The rest were adapters and couplers. They did find an adapter that mated with the power converter she’d found that would allow their power supply to connect to the cylinder.

“I am thinking that we should power it up in the cage and not out here. If it gives off a signal of some type, it might attract attention to us,” Brice said as he carried the adapter, converter, and cylinder to a steel door in one wall.

Helan opened the door and waited outside while Brice went in. He returned after only a few minutes and said, “All set. Let’s power it up.”

They both stepped over to a large display with a control panel in front of it. The display showed a large room with a copper-screened cage in the middle. In the cage was the adapter, converter, and cylinder connected, and a cable coming from the adapter and out of the cage to the wall.

Brice flipped a few switches and turned a knob. For a moment nothing happened then the lens end of the cylinder started to glow. It got brighter as he turned the knob then coalesced into a green colored beam of light.

“So, a torch,” Helan said.

“I am detecting no other radiation besides the light. I think you might be right.”

“So I just deprived a few Tulans from seeing in the dark,” Helan said, then added. “Probably not my finest moment.”

“It is curious that they wanted it. It must mean something more to them,” Brice said, paused, then continued. “We should be able to trade with them for something we want. It’s two days until market day. If we had a few more things to trade, we’d do much better. A phase balancer or beam enhancer would really be good. Where did you find the adapters and converters?”

They shut down the panel and walked out of the Power lab into a short hallway that had a door midway on each side and a door at the end. They passed through the door at the other end and into a large rectangular room with a few overstuffed chairs in an arc around an old-fashioned fireplace. There wasn’t a fire going in it and it looked very clean. They passed the chairs and sat on opposite sides of a small four-person linoleum and steel tube table.

“I went to the abandoned Hazan base,” Helan said quietly.

Brice looked at her with concern.

“I know, I know. It’s just that all the other good scavenging places close to us had Fargs or Haflands at them. It seemed too much hassle to fight with either group for the little bit that was at those places,” Helan paused, rose, went to a nearby counter, fixed drinks for both of them, then returned to the table.

“I figured I’d scout around the base and see if anything had changed. When I got over to the base, I saw that someone had tried a raid. They’d hit the gate on the way out, and it must have spun the small van around because the cargo area was outside the gate, and what was left of the cab was inside. I got as much as I could carry and left the rest. The stuff might still be there. I just need another way to carry it. At least one Tulan was lurking around there, too.”

Brice frowned, then said, “Tulans? I thought they wouldn’t go near that base. Interesting.”

“I only saw the one. If there were others, they were hidden. There is enough stuff in that van that we could really get some good trading in, if we could get it home,” Helan paused, took a sip, then continued. “Maybe that’s what we could trade with the Tulans. They help load up our number 7 transport, and they get what they want from the haul.”

“Hmm. I can contact the Engineer. She is in charge of them.”

“See if you can set up for early tomorrow.”

Brice nodded, then took a sip of his drink.