Squib Games
There were a variety of people around the scrap yard. But, tempted as he may have been to offer them a good deal on a gently used navicomputer or wrist comlink, the Squib had larger plans in the offering.
Plans for which he had need of two things. A large crew. And ships.
But then, those ships were also going to need crews... so should the order of operations be reversed? Ships and a large crew? No, that sounded like it was just one crew for a single large ship. Not really what he was going for here...
Anyroad, the fox-like alien made his way up to the podium. Well, not exactly a podium. Did they even have a podium? How was there a landfill this size and not a single podium? But what they did have was a soap box! Now, how classy is that? Huh? Huh? Actually standing on a soap box! Which was, itself, on a mound of garbage. Because landfill.
“All right...” the Squib began, from his elevated position atop the soap box, which was on top of a mound of trash. And by elevated position, the kindergartener-sized furball was at roughly human eye-level.
A holo-projector droid flew into position beside him. Which was supposed to actually project images which he was speaking. Except there was no image, so the Squib stopped, looking at the droid and whispering, “Remember the plan? Do the thing!”
The droid gave a warbling chirps, as a blue light shone while the Squib turned back to the audience to say, “So...”
The blue light cut out. The Squid didn’t so much as miss a beat as he slammed an elbow into the side of the droid, which seemed to knock the holo-projector back on-line as he continued.
“...here’s the deal,” Ree began, as the image of a corporate star destroyer appeared over the audience. “This is a Tron-class star destroyer. Actuary or Accountant or some-such.” Seriously, who named these things?
“Anyroad, the actual accountants at CAD ran the numbers and the maintenance on this came up as a net negative, so it’s been decommissioned,” the Squib remarked, explaining, “They’ve taken the reactor core out, the hyperdrive, weapon systems – pretty much anything that wasn’t bolted down, and then a few things that were bolted down.”
The hologram seemed to pan out, showing the ship docked in orbit of the planet. “What’s left of the hull is at an orbital support platform, being fitted with remote-controlled jet thrusters that will put the ship on a one-way trip to the sun for incineration.”
That probably didn’t sound very appealing to this crowd.
“Here’s the trick,” the Squib prefaced, holding up a hand to waylay any naysayers. “They used impervium in the construction of the ship, which is made with ersteel besides.” Both of those were rather rare metals. And rare meant valuable. And that’s not all. “We’ve got plasteel throughout the interior, carbonite coating, and possibly even some infinium in the engineering section.”
Just in case the folks at home weren’t following, the Squib remarked, “In other words, the walls of this thing are actually worth their weight in aurodium.”
If that didn’t get their attention, nothing else he could say would.
“Now, it’ll take this ship a day or more to travel to the sun, but we don’t have that much time,” Ree supplied, as the hologram panned further out to illustrate the flight path to the sun. “We’ll have about eleven hours at most to bug out before the pull from the sun’s gravity becomes problematic.”
That was being conservative. He was giving them a pad. In reality, it was closer to thirteen hours, but he’d rather not risk a burnout on the sunlight engines just because someone wanted to wait to the last minute to grab and go.
“The good news, CorpSec’s not going anywhere near this. No one’s stealing this ship, if you could even call it a ship anymore, and it's on a one-way trip to Hell.” Well, that wasn’t really much of a recruitment speech was it. “We fly in, break down the floor, walls, any fiber optics that may be left, and we get out. And given what this ship's made of, probably use thermal detonators to blow apart the larger sections, then plasma torches to cut down the larger fragments. Gather it up, bug out... easy peasy lemon squeezy.”
If only it were that peasy.
“The bad news is, if I’ve figured this out, probably some other salvagers have as well. Not to mention some DireX flarblgorb who probably wants some profit under the table,” Ree mused aloud. “So, while CorpSec isn’t an issue, I expect we might run into other problems. You know, aside from the whole no life support or no gravity thing.”
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