Malacalypse
Prowler
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2006
- Posts
- 1,050
- Location
- Crystal Palace
- Society
- SPU | Smart Professionals United
- Avatar Name
- Malachalypse Mal The Elder
The storage container opened with a dry hiss. What a mess. Wires entwined with extractors, metal plates, sensors, old rusty tubes and bolts all lying on a bed of old residue from the past. Also a compartment with small stacks of ores and enmatter, most of it next to worthless. Recent technical advances had made it easier to find the rare, valuable resources. Making it less rare and valuable as a consequence. Anything with a value on the street or was of large enough quantity had of course been sold long ago. Perhaps he could find a seedy trader in Twin Peaks who would give him something for all this but he doubted it.
Visiting the storage container was something Mal did every now and again, trying to scrape out a few more peds to pay off a debt or to get repairs done to his ever failing equipment. Before the Second Robot war mining had been abundant, Mal knew exactly where to go to find what he needed. He had good suppliers of finders and amplifiers, he even co-owned a sales outpost and times were good. After the Titan hit everything had changed, the locations of ore veins and enmatter deposits had shifted and most of his equipment had become obsolete over night. The Second Robot invasion, the Titan, the Evacuation.
It made him think of old friends, comrades of the Special Patrol Unit. Some resettled after the evacuation of Calypso, some never came back. Some lost it. The Special Patrol Unit had a very specific mission from the CDF. It consisted of a group of skilled miners using top of the line finders roaming the farthest outback of Calypso looking for something else than ordinary resources. The CDF had found a way to track robot drop ships with ordinary mining equipment. No one knew exactly how the drop ships entered Calypso's atmosphere, there were no traces of them landing. Some said they even came up out of the ground, but this was believed to be a myth. The ships were usually protected by a couple of Drones, an easy target for a hardened colonist with special weapons training. On dismantling the ships you most often found the ordinary robot scrap metal but occasionally robot beacons would be found in the debris. These beacons could be used to call down a transport ship that could be rushed and taken over by small attack force. This transport would then take the attack force into the heart of one of the Robot mother ships, where the fight could be taken to the Robot invaders own backdoor. Mal had been a Group leader of this fine branch and had gone on numerous successful beacon missions.
This reminded Mal, somewhere amongst all this debris he still had two Robot beacons. For some reason, directly after the Titan hit, they had stopped working and were no longer of any value more than the circuits and metal casing. Yes, there they were. He picked one up and shook it a little, still dead as a daikiba. Perhaps it was time that these went into the trade terminal, they were of no use any longer. No, not today Mal thought and threw it back in, these conductors will have to do for now. He turned around and closed the storage container.
There in the darkness of the container small lights started to flicker and a weak sound started emitting from the beacon that Mal had just checked. If he had heard it he would have recognized it at once as a Robot transmission signal. The beacons were only dormant.
Visiting the storage container was something Mal did every now and again, trying to scrape out a few more peds to pay off a debt or to get repairs done to his ever failing equipment. Before the Second Robot war mining had been abundant, Mal knew exactly where to go to find what he needed. He had good suppliers of finders and amplifiers, he even co-owned a sales outpost and times were good. After the Titan hit everything had changed, the locations of ore veins and enmatter deposits had shifted and most of his equipment had become obsolete over night. The Second Robot invasion, the Titan, the Evacuation.
It made him think of old friends, comrades of the Special Patrol Unit. Some resettled after the evacuation of Calypso, some never came back. Some lost it. The Special Patrol Unit had a very specific mission from the CDF. It consisted of a group of skilled miners using top of the line finders roaming the farthest outback of Calypso looking for something else than ordinary resources. The CDF had found a way to track robot drop ships with ordinary mining equipment. No one knew exactly how the drop ships entered Calypso's atmosphere, there were no traces of them landing. Some said they even came up out of the ground, but this was believed to be a myth. The ships were usually protected by a couple of Drones, an easy target for a hardened colonist with special weapons training. On dismantling the ships you most often found the ordinary robot scrap metal but occasionally robot beacons would be found in the debris. These beacons could be used to call down a transport ship that could be rushed and taken over by small attack force. This transport would then take the attack force into the heart of one of the Robot mother ships, where the fight could be taken to the Robot invaders own backdoor. Mal had been a Group leader of this fine branch and had gone on numerous successful beacon missions.
This reminded Mal, somewhere amongst all this debris he still had two Robot beacons. For some reason, directly after the Titan hit, they had stopped working and were no longer of any value more than the circuits and metal casing. Yes, there they were. He picked one up and shook it a little, still dead as a daikiba. Perhaps it was time that these went into the trade terminal, they were of no use any longer. No, not today Mal thought and threw it back in, these conductors will have to do for now. He turned around and closed the storage container.
There in the darkness of the container small lights started to flicker and a weak sound started emitting from the beacon that Mal had just checked. If he had heard it he would have recognized it at once as a Robot transmission signal. The beacons were only dormant.