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A story from the Frontier

Rock and Bones

I make a habit of coming down and checking to make sure the compactors have been cleaned out properly myself after each run. The bots do a pretty good job, but every so often junk gets caught in there they can't dislodge and they all just sit around looking at it, or something doesn't register for them and I need to get in there myself and take a cutter to it for an hour until it either breaks up and drops out of the compactor, or it gets hot enough that the drones finally realize it needs to be removed and they all come over to do it themselves.

Anyway, this last run I was out by A15-N4 at some old planetoid. It's been pretty well scrubbed by this point - clans picked whatever was left clean from whoever got it first, but I had just replaced the grinder wheels on the main engagement hub and wanted to break them in a bit. Every good salv knows those wheels need to be worked a little bit on something that doesn't matter first, otherwise they start slipping and you'll lose more than you pull in. It's an inconvenience, since it means you lose cycles every time you do a new install, but I don't mind it much. 

So I'm at this empty planetoid, and this thing is a real husker. Just dried out and practically particalized in a few places. I get up there and start munching on some dusty tectonic and let it run for a while. The trick is to run those grinders until they stop slipping more than once every three minutes or so, to not waste any cycles on dead rock. Problem was, these new wheels just kept sliding around, no matter what I put through them. I figured it was just an issue of consistency, and mineral scanner pointed that there were some heavier metal deposits on the surface layer. Nothing useful, obviously, but at least something the grinder could really get its teeth into.


Four or so hours of crunching surface rock later and finally I can hear actual grinding, and decide to disengage. Some of the older scavs won't ever touch surface layer rock - say you're not supposed to munch on places people might have walked. Say it's bad luck. I say it's not good for much else, so might as well put it to the one use it has left. 

I waited until the bots had done their work and went down to check on the compactors again. The first two heads were clean, but something was jammed in the third the drones couldn't figure out. I climbed up in there to see what it was and found something unusual. There wasn't really much to make out, mostly twisted metal and rock, but definitely shaped by human hands. There in the rubble were little trinkets, tokens that might have meant something to someone once. Bones, too - definitely human, and loads of them, pouring out from inside whatever this big metal frame had been. 


Shook the grinder wheel a few times and knocked it all out. Bots figured out what was going on and came over to clean up the rest. Only took a few hours and a bit of surface grinding and I was ready to hit clean rock. Old scavvers might have had some trouble with all of that, but I don't like to dwell on the past. Too much work to do.

Rock and Bones

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