The Garbage Belt E-Book

Kari Kilgore

• Herausgeber: Spiral Publishing, Ltd.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Looking for humans? Just look for the garbage.
From bones to plastic to dead electronics, people rarely manage to clean up after themselves. 
Humanity takes a long time to learn how to manage limited resources, too. The rare and precious get lost with the useless and plentiful.
Meet Gayle Simmons, pilot of the Treasure Hunt. 
Rare and precious, in her sights.

Leseprobe

For my Papaw, Arthur Kilgore

Who would decide a thing needed doing,

then work out his own unique and often

puzzling way to get it done.

And somehow, it worked.

Every single time.

The Garbage Belt

Kari Kilgore

Spiral Publishing, Ltd.

Chapter 1

There had been a time when Gayle Simmons would have been thrilled to pilot a brand new, state-of-the-art scouter shuttle.

Every millimeter of the compact ship gleamed. The holographic instrument display floating under her fingertips, responsive enough to know what control cluster she needed before she did. The broad expanse of the forward viewport, so transparent and flawless she would have sworn she could reach right through it. The plush command chair that cradled her whole body, adjusting to her as she moved, far more comfortable than any piece of furniture she’d ever owned.

No detail had been overlooked, no expense spared in the design of The Treasure Hunt. Instead of typical steel floors, walls, and ceilings, every surface of the scouter was lined with heavy charcoal grey fabric.

It had taken Simmons a few days to get used to eerie silence rather than echoing footsteps as she moved through the ship. The lining damped every single sound she, her longtime crew member Rog, or the vessel itself made.

The stuff even repelled stains somehow. Or maybe it absorbed them and turned them into money.

These days the biggest thrill Simmons got from the Treasure was the greatly improved odds of bringing in treasure of her own.

Only a person with more money than sense would have designed a scouter more luxurious than the finest hotel on Earth, then hired a flinty space rat like Simmons to pilot it.

She took a long swallow of nutri-stim, smiling despite her grouchy mood as the minty, sweet liquid warmed her throat and belly. No trace of metallic or chemical undertaste, not on the pride of Jamison Wyatt’s private scouter fleet. Simmons was happy to take advantage of such high quality supplies when she could get them.

Outside that gorgeous viewport floated the biggest garbage dump humans had yet devised. Once fast-jump transport within the solar system became common reality about thirty years before Simmons was born, people immediately looked for a way to mark the new neighborhood as their own.

The most reliable clue to human settlement had always been vast piles of garbage. From bones to plastic to spent electronics, people never could manage to clean up after themselves.

Nowadays, humans recycled an incredible amount and used most of the rest for fuel. Not nearly as much ended up in these off-world dumps. Still, some things were too dangerous to leave floating around. And someone needed to clean up the mess already out there.

Most of the debris remained in an orderly orbit between the asteroid belt and Jupiter just like it was supposed to. Without magnification, Simmons could see dozens of dull metallic containment pods in every size and shape imaginable.

A few massive enough to hold tens of thousands of people instead of acres of their garbage were still left from the old days, along with many smaller modern versions. The smallest, only a couple of meters in diameter, usually held especially toxic waste.

Humanity took a depressingly long time to learn how to manage resources that were limited, too. They tossed out the useless and plentiful along with the rare and precious. More of that second category than most folks would have believed ended up endlessly circling out here in the ass-end of nowhere.

All things rare and precious were The Treasure Hunt’s prey.

Simmons fired her port thrusters in a two-second burst, bringing the scouter within a few kilometers of the most likely candidate she’d seen in a sector full of useless junk. Collisions did happen out here, though usually the containers stood up to the impact. At least a couple in this vicinity had not.

Clouds of waste, some no bigger than a shoe, swirled around the space, passing through the ship’s bright forward lights. A lot of the loose stuff was much larger, though, with no way to know what was truly dangerous until it was too late. Hazardous work most pilots weren’t willing to do, even with pulse fields around the scouters to keep the smallest junk away.

That meant serious prizes for the few who had the guts.

The target cylinder tumbled end over end, flashing purple and black slash marks for lab-created elements. Garbage haulers a few decades ago reluctantly agreed to use that much of an identifying mark, but only for whole families of dangerous waste. Simmons was going to have to get closer to the thing to make sure it was Element 127.

Wyatt paid for just about any rare element she brought in. The few discarded caches of 127 were the major prize she was hunting for. Not nearly enough to buy her a vessel as fine as the Treasure. Buying herself out of debt provided more than enough incentive.

A gusty sigh behind Simmons gave her barely a second of warning.

A carefully bored and disinterested voice said, “That at least looks promising.”

Simmons leaned her shoulder to the right, then let the chair take over and rotate away from the viewport.

The only person she’d ever been able to tolerate on a mission longer than a day filled most of the oval doorway. Rog stood a few hands taller than Simmons, and his broad shoulders and strong back did help with trouble on some of the rust buckets she piloted. On a beauty like the Treasure, his best asset was a head like a top-notch onboard data system.

Simmons trusted her own navigational instinct to lead them to the best find in any garbage pile. She trusted Rog and his vast memory of history to know what the hell they’d found.

“Got a strong hunch it’s 127,” she said.