Chronicles of the IEV Kimmy

8/9/2019 Chronicles of the IEV Kimmy

1/9

The young man looked up as he hung from the edge of a piece of debris, the

sun gleaming o of the face shield that was only part helmet now, the piece of

equipment ragged from use and oversized for his head. With a grunt he

reached up with his free hand and closed it around a jutting blade of metalwreckage that was sharp enough to cut a eshy hand in two, but the gloves he

wore protected him from such mundane things.

!is muscles tensed beneath the strangely color brown"orange suit as he tested

the strength of the metal. #t had bothered him since the $rst time he had

salvaged it that anyone would go through the trouble to make a space suit

orange. %f course the surface of the suit was stained from so many dierent

uids that one could not count them all on every digit they had, thus its

brownish"orange color now, but truly did it matter if the suit was orange in the

black of space&

The reective stripes that crossed over his shoulders gleamed in the sun,

shaking him loose from the momentary thought that had caught him, but

thankfully the glare was mostly dulled by the face shield leaving the he'agonal

reected light dancing o of the metal as he moved.

(icking the magboots against the metal wall beneath him he paused as they

locked into place and then hauled himself up with the light grunt of someone

who had seen their fair share of climbing, his hand letting go of the rockrete

debris and gripping the edge of the outcropping that he had been seeking

purchase on for the last half hour.

)icking his lips to get rid of the dryness that haunted them from the ragged,

dusty wind he hauled himself up over the edge slowly, he considered the

chapping more of an inconvenience than the height he hung from and that was

one of his advantages as a salvager. Where most people see problems in a

leaking plasma battery or a damaged compression coil, he saw an opportunity

to tinker with a new way of $'ing something or show o skills he*d gained over

the few years he had spent at the academy. +fter all, salvaging and putting his

skills to good use were the only ways that he was going to get o of this gods

forsaken rock.

irst his head and upper body laid over the edge, eyes surveying the areabefore he found a jagged"edged hole that he could use as a handhold to haul

himself up. !is hand swung over and he grabbed it before using his toes on the

buttons inside the boots so that he could move them.

!is upper body tensed once again and he slowly pulled himself up into the

shaded area, the metal scraping against his chest but never leaving anything


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greater than red marks and clean spots across the orange"colored metallic

micro$bers thanks to the protective layers. #t took him a few moments to right

himself and remove the left boot from the metal after locking it on the ledge,

but $nally he slumped over into the shade.

)ooking around he took note of the wrecked little shuttle*s interior. -verything

of importance and some things of not so much/ had been gouged out of it long

ago and now even pieces of its roof had given way to rusting as the hull had

been stripped of any panels that had protective coating.

0Well #*ve give this to them12 he said in the voice of a well"spoken teen,

reaching up and unlocking the helmet now that his face would be safe from the

sun*s beating rays. 0They sure don*t leave anything of use behind.2

!is hands gripped the helmet and pushed as he waited for the seals to count

down to unlock, rolling his eyes at the safety systems that were in place. There

was a button he could press with his tongue to stop the process, but the little

safety computer was too dumb to realize that the bottom half of the face shield

had been removed months ago so that he didn*t have to keep wasting his time

re$lling the one pair of o'ygen tanks that he had.

The helmet slid o to reveal a boy in his late teens, seventeen to be e'act, who

was panting not from the eort of climbing up the eighty foot pile of scrap and

rubbish, but instead trying to work up in himself the will to get out of the

wonderful shade that he had lain down in. !is face was clear of any blemishes

indeed as any middle"class son would have been. !is father had earned morethan enough money to take care of such mundane concerns with the pills that

were available on the market and he would never suer from outbreaks of acne

so long as he washed himself with relative regularity.

!is short, sandy"colored hair blew lightly in the breeze that managed to make it

to him as he had climbed up on the leeward side of the massive pile and he

looked about with eyes that were a deep blue. The hue of his eyes was not his

birth color, but his father had $'ed that before he had been even a few months

old with simple gene therapy treatments, deciding that the boy needed to look

more like the pool he*d sprung from. +fter all the man had always said the

naturally light tanned skin, sandy hair, and temperamental kicking had all beenso much like his mother, so why not the rest of his looks as well.

3rimacing slightly at the memory as he looked into the helmet*s remaining

golden surface he set it beside him. !e had been tempted to toss it away in

irritation as the feelings ared within him, but he reminded himself that if he


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lost that helmet that would cost him his vision within a few short years on this

planet. 03et a grip +daven1 That old bastard*s a billion +.4.s away.2

!is father was signi$cantly less than that far away from him, but the thought

still gave him comfort. +fter all in his mind it was a better life crashed here on

this 56unk World* than beneath his father*s blackened, tainted wings.

!e sat up quickly then, deciding fast that it was time to move on. 7ormally he

would have sat there for a time, perhaps even broken into his water or food

rations, but he found that the best way to forget his past woes was pure and

simple scavenging. 8esides1 he was out this far west for a reason.

9lugging his helmet back on the system worked to re"seal itself around his

neck, the boy*s features with the e'ception of the lower half of his face now

hidden from view. #n the suit he looked almost as dingy as the number of other

people that were forced to call this planet home either by disaster or design.

!e looked back out from the makeshift tower of ruined machinery and broken

down ship parts, smiling at the fact that he couldn*t even see the slightest sign

of the settlement from here. !e had been here for the better part of half of a

year by the -:; -arth":tandard ;alendar/ and still hadn*t found the ability to

trust even one of the $lthy scavengers that he had thrown in with.

8eing the only one beneath thirty years did nothing to help his cause and the

fact that his ship was still close to functional made it necessary for him to

defend it with everything he*d had. )uckily only one man had been shot in the

vein of him establishing that he was not to be messed with and the guy had

forgiven him easily enough when he*d given him a standard work battery and

the medical means to help heal the wound. %f course that meant nothing of

trust and he*d had to learn fast how to booby"trap his ship lest he go out on

some scavenging run and come back to $nd it gutted.

Turning back away he reminded himself why he was out here, a little bit of a

smile coming to his face as he leapt up and grabbed one of the remaining

girders in the shuttle*s roof. 9ulling himself up through the hole he climbed atop

it and smiled brightly. +ccording to what the group of old scavengers had been

saying the 5haunted ship* was just a few ridges further out.

+s he looked down across the massive valley of trash with its mounds that

betrayed the gutted ships beneath them he showed not a single sign of

tiredness. !e had been travelling for a little over $ve hours now and he wasn*t

going to stop until he arrived at the ship and got to check it out.


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The rumours of the ages old black"hulled wreckage had been thrown around

like papers in the wind last night. 3hostly blue lights dancing around inside its

hull, groaning spirits come to seek the living, even more realistic stories of

ashing monitors with messages of desperation left by the ship*s crew in their$nal moments were abound. The group of men had talked long into the night

while he had listened and instead of being afraid the boy*s eyes were lit with

glee.

They claimed that few who ventured into the wreckage returned and those that

did were forever changed by the ghastly e'perience and would say little of

their $ndings, but that sounded like something out of a fantasy book to him.

:omething that talked about the men $nding old earth devastated by a

catastrophe and speaking with the long dead spirits of their progenitor*s

society echoed in the men*s voices and he*d even picked out a few passages

he*d read himself from popular literature whilst going through his classes.

The men were fools to not have searched the wreckage already. The place was

a gold mine and they were letting it languish. #t had been described as a small

ship and if that was true then there might be parts he could use to $' his

shuttle and leave this place in the dust. !e had enough credits to get it

repaired, but the only ships that plied these lanes had refused to take him on

for such a pittance, especially if he couldn*t y himself into their holds after

they*d dropped their garbage.

+nd so he began his voyage down the pillar of garbage with a hope in his heart.

This ship could hold all of the answers he needed to get himself back into the

sky and keep ying, and that was all he wanted. -ven a man who had the skills

to captain a ship was not a captain without one.


5/9

:till, with the bright light coming from behind him as he looked down upon that

black chunk of wreckage he couldn=t help but imagine that were someone

standing there he would look just like a ;aptain of an e'ploration vessel

surveying the horizon for new $nds.

!e stood for a moment and enjoyed the thought before he looked down across

his dirty suit, the illusion shattering like so much glass as he was reminded of

the state that he was in. >4gh... $lthy fragging planet.>

8ending his frustration towards the planet into a will to get o of it he headed

down the hill of discarded parts, garbage, and miscellaneous debris. #t was not

far now and he would not let anything stop him.

The remains of the so"called =black ship= did indeed seem to at least be black in

color, but that was where the relation to the stories he had heard seemed to

stop completely. #t did not look ominous, there was no smoke rolling out from

its depths, no ickering lights in sight and no ghostly apparitions either. What

was a new fact though was it would be di?cult to get into.

The part of the ship that e'tended from the garbage was only about twenty

meters long, sadly denoting that it was a much smaller ship than he had been

led to believe. The main problem was that its hull was at an upwards angle that

made approaching it from below impossible without a huge ladder. 7ormally he

could have just gone around it and come over the top but sometimes when the

ships dumped their garbage onto the world below they were carrying they

dumped all of their cargo as well in the case that it had gone bad. That, ofcourse, was the case here, and when you leave out anything biological on this

planet eventually the vines get to it... They were all over the top of the wreck

as thick as thieves.

>@ogue vines... great.> he said to himself, the e'haled breath holding no small

amount of disdain

@ogue vines were the primary reason that you didn=t sleep anywhere but in a

nice enclosed space on this ball of dirt. !e remembered his $rst run"in with

them as he had been looting a shuttle out on the blast steppes, an area where

something huge had crashed and leveled practically everything around. #t wasan easy place to $nd recent wrecks and dumps, but very open and just as easy

to be found by another scavenger.

Tired after the long trek over the melted waste he had curled up in a little

alcove and slept the night away. The morning had come just as sweet as it

could on a planet like this and it was only when he tried to get up that he


6/9

noticed the vines wrapped all in thatch around his legs. !e=d panicked at $rst

and struggled, $nding out quickly that the more you did the harder the things

pulled into the ground. Taking his knife to one of them had gotten the same

reaction from them all at once like they were one plant. #n the end it had takenhim more than eighteen hours to $gure out you could only get them to release

by hurting one of their bulbs, big red owers that were often close by to

patches of them.

#t had used up $ve of his last seven shots trying to hit it with the numbness

coursing through his legs and lower body. The memory made him a little

agitated as he had previously thought himself a better shot than that.

!e shuddered visibly, mostly out of instinct as there was no one around to see

it, at the thought of having another run"in with them. !e=d talked with a few of

the survivors about it when they=d laughed as he came hobbling back into thecamp. +pparently they don=t tell anyone about the hazards of the planet so that

if they=re lucky the survivor will die out there and they=ll get whatever he had.

!e spit in disgust at the memory. #t had been hard not to waste the last two

shots putting holes in the man who=d told him that, the only thing holding him

back from such a rash action being the imagined look on the man=s face as he

watched +daven=s ship rocketing skywards and leaving them all behind.

#t didn=t take him long to decide what to do, after all he had come here to loot

the damnable thing and he wasn=t going to go back now. 9iece by piece he

lifted, tugged, wrenched, pulled, or likewise moved solid pieces of the garbagein the area to make a kind of haphazard pile he could climb to get up into the

ship. #t was going to take some time but he had already $gured coming this far

out he would have to $nd a safe place to sleep anyway.

+ good forty minutes of hard work paid o when $nally he was able to reach

the edge of the ship=s broken side and it only took another few quick seconds

for him to yank a small defunct refrigeration unit that was about the size of a

stepping stool from the nearby pile of detritus to $nally be able to pull himself

up.

There was always a giddy kind of feeling whenever he found something useful.That was something that had followed him straight from childhood all the way

into his adult years. rom when he was using the little building blocks and

found the right piece to make his little ship look like a real (estrel class frigate

he=d always had a love of building things and even being stranded on this gods"

forsaken planet could not deny him that. This feeling now though was even

stronger. !e was about to set foot on a ship that no one else had searched yet


7/9

and he was so e'cited about that fact that he completely bypassed his normal

look around to make sure that the components were compatible with his own

ship and were not comprised of some Aalchor imperial design.

+daven grunted as he pulled himself up to the edge of the ship, chuckling

inwardly at how easy people made a pull"up look when they=re not doing it on

the jagged edge of a wrecked shuttle. )eaning inside as he hung over the edge

he took the opportunity to let his eyes wander while his legs attempted to

follow the rest of him, not wanting to be left behind.

The room was about twenty feet deep and half that wide, the height being

standard for any normal ship so it wasn=t a compact build. The metal had been

colored some kind of dark purplish"black and it made him roll his eyes as the

idea of =camouaging= a ship crossed his mind. >!eh, somebody didn=t tell the

engineer that we don=t $nd each other by looking around out there in theblack.> + half"grin at the imagined face"hitting"palm action of the pilot spread

across his lips but faded quickly as he spotted something that made his heart

break.

>7o. 7o no no no no...> !is feet slid a little on the deck as he headed towards

the little bench that was against the wall. :ure enough it wasn=t a workbench or

a place to stow gear. #t was a seat, pure and simple. !e cursed as he slammed

his $st down on the seat and looked back out the way he had come. + seat

meant that this ship carried passengers and that likely meant that it hadn=t

been 7ear")ight equipped. #t wasn=t large enough to be a mass transport,

barely big enough to dwarf his shuttle in fact, so the door likely led to the smallcockpit and whatever good bits had been in the engineering section were likely

either ash or long since gone.

6ust looking back at that hole and the now murky light coming from outside

made the hole in the pit of his stomach all the more palpable so instead he tore

his gaze away from the garbage"coated hillocks and instead looked to the door.

>Bour cockpit better be intact and not $lled with vines or # swear # will go $nd a

fusion cell and nuke you into orbit.> !e glared at the door, daring it to be

anything besides a treasure trove of free parts, cool air, and delicious limeade.

:hoving the thought of his favorite drink aside almost violently in the attemptto not care about his situation he reached out to begin trying to $nd out how to

pry the panel loose when a the ship made a sound that he hadn=t heard in

months.

#t chirped.


8/9

The little metallic beep that the touchpad had let out meant power and

suddenly the whole situation changed again. The outside of the ship had looked

beaten to hell by whatever had landed it here and the way that the men had

talked about it made it sound like some kind of ancient tomb that everyone hadavoided since time immemorial, but it had POWERC :crambling for his tools he

quickly worked against the strangely screwless panel to pop it open and when

it $nally did the rush of air told him that it had still been pressurized.

>What kind of ship are you&> !e asked as he looked at the wires inside, the

multicolored sheaths unlabeled. >4hh... +!+C 3ot it.> +s he slid his tool around

he had found that a goop cable ran through its inner workings.

>Where there=s oil, there=s a tank for it. +nd when the tank pops...> 9opping

open his toolbelt he would pull out a can of oil that he=d siphoned from dierent

tanks just for this occasion. #t was a well"known fact that in many ships oil isstill used for a number of things, but if there is no temperature spike and liquid

hits the internal failsafe of a locked door in most ships the door will open in

order to allow the crew to escape.

%n a lot of newer ships this kind of trick doesn=t work because of how well"

known the trick was now, but sure enough after he dumped his oil into the

door=s inner workings there was a snap and a hiss as the failsafe kicked in and

the door shot open like a bullet.

>+lright sweetheart. )et=s see what you have.. to... o....> !e trailed o as he

leaned on the doorframe and looked downward into the doorway, his musclesstiening to keep him from falling as he saw not a cockpit but instead a long

hallway that reached o into darkness. >Twin 3oddesses... What are you

indeed&>

!e just stood there for a time taking it all in. !e had never been so completely

o about a ship before but it seemed that what he thought was a shuttle was

actually just a piece of something larger. !ow much he didn=t even hazard a

guess at. @eaching inside with his %D reader in hand he took hold of the side of

the door and tentatively stepped past the threshold. The reader stayed steady

so he holstered it and pulled out his lamp, icking the beam on and illuminating

the area.

The inside of the ship was the same color as the outside almost without

e'ception and though cables hung down from the ceiling and out from walls it

was the crates that interested him the most. #t took him a moment to approach

them because there was something suddenly foreboding about entering the


9/9

place but when his staggered footfalls $nally sounded from him working his

way along the downward slope he started to $nally get e'cited.

The crates looked like they=d been damaged in an e'plosion and

decompression but the fact that the place still had air spoke against that. :till

when he saw the good size double"si' battery amongst the garbage the mood

lifted and he plucked it away from the mess that had been made of the rest.

>+ good $rst $nd.> !e said to himself as he e'amined his treasure, a real smile

gracing his features and feeling almost strange with how little he wore it. >)et=s

see what you are and, more importantly, what else you have to give m=dear.>

+s he made his way down the hall to the $rst doorway trying not to slip on the

tangled cables he began working to pry o the wall panel to access the door.

This one didn=t beep so it would be a manual job and that meant a job that was

quite distracting.

That was unfortunate to say the least as the little ickering lights that shone in

the hallway where he had entered would have been easy enough to see if he=d

been paying attention. :till, just because he wasn=t watching them did not

mean that it was the same the other way around...

Documents

Chronicles of the IEV Kimmy