Garbage Pick Up

DATE: Year 308-B. Sol 377

LOCATION: Earth Debris Field

STATUS: Unauthorized Salvage

The first rule of the Halo is that the dead don’t stay dead. They orbit, they leak, they collide, they burn. And the small ones pierce.

Jimi Phoenix drifted in the silence, his magnetic boots locked onto the hull of a 22nd-century comms satellite. Below him, the Earth was a swirling marble of gray clouds and bruised wine dark oceans, huge and suffocating. He tried not to look at it. Looking at the planet was bad luck. Bad Earth. Defiled, abandoned, inhospitable.

Click. Hiss.

His regulator cycled. The sound was wet and rattle-heavy, the signature of a Type-4 scrubber that was three months past its service date.

-Come on, you beautiful thing, Phoenix purred.

He wasn’t talking to the satellite. He was talking to his left arm. It was a heavy-duty hydraulic loader arm he’d welded onto his flight suit after he lost the original in a card game on Ceres. It was strong enough to crush a diamond, but the neural lag was a killer. He thought grip, and the servo whined for a half-second before the metal claws clamped down on the satellite’s maintenance hatch. It took some time getting used to.

Whirrr-CLANK.

-Atta boy, Phoenix muttered.

He raised his right hand, his human-scale manipulator, and tapped the prayer beads wrapped around his wrist. The cold steel washers and copper nuts clicked against his faceplate.

He murmured a few prayers.

-Keep the vacuum out. Keep the air in. St. Eligius, guide the torch.

He thumbed the ignition on his laser cutter. A blue flame sparked in the void, silent and hot. Maximum setting.

He started cutting. It was slow work. The Halo was a graveyard and a garbage patch and a museum and a minefield. Millions of tons of debris from the old Earth—shattered hulls, frozen bodies, shrapnel—orbited at thousands of miles per hour. If his ship’s sensors missed a piece of paint chipping off a dead destroyer, it could punch through his suit like a railgun round.

Phoenix checked his heads up display. The Mighty Sparrow was drifting two hundred meters away, running dark. Its transponder was currently spoofing a registered Ore-Hauler named The Byron Lee.

O2 Level: 64% Debt. Status: Critical.

The text blinking in the corner of his eye was more dangerous than the debris. He owed fifty kilos of Heethree to a loan shark in the Tumble. If he didn't come back with something shiny today, he wouldn't need to worry about oxygen; they’d just vent his suit and sell the parts.

The hatch gave way. It floated free, spinning lazily into the dark.

Phoenix grabbed the rim and pulled himself into the satellite. It was like a time capsule. It was a time capsule. The interior was vacuum-sealed, protected against three centuries of decay. Floating in the center of the wire nest was the prize Phoenix was looking for: a black box drive.

This wasn't one of the cheap MTC crystal-chips. It was a lot older. From the Before time. Black matte finish. Gold connectors. No branding. It looked like a brick of pure darkness. These were mini-nuclear bombs.

-Jackpot, Phoenix muttered.

He reached for it.

Thump.

A vibration rippled through his boots, a low-frequency shudder that traveled through the vacuum, through the metal, and into his bones.

Phoenix froze. He knew that feeling. It was the displacement wave of a fusion drive, big, braking hard somewhere in the vicinity.

He killed his laser torch, grabbed the drive, shoved it into his kangaroo pouch, kicked off the bulkhead, and launched himself back into the void.

He spun in zero gravity free fall, orienting himself toward The Mighty Sparrow.

But he wasn't alone.

An MTC Patrol Cutter, marked black and orange as part of the Blockade authority. The railguns were already following him.

-Yil, Phoenix cursed with a hiss, tapping his beads again. Once for luck, twice for a favor, three times for a miracle.

His helmet radio crackled. The voice was crisp, bored, and expensive—an officer breathing premium air.

-Unidentified scavenger, the voice said. This is Captain Delavan of the Martian Trading Corporation. You are in violation of the Earth Zone Exclusion Rule, the Historical Preservation Directive, and, well, it looks like you’re flying with a spoofed transponder.

Phoenix grabbed a strut of the dead satellite to stop his drift. He looked at his ship. He calculated the distance. If he burned hard, he might make the airlock before they fired. But The Mighty Sparrow's engines were cold; it would take thirty seconds to warm the reactor.

He was dead in the water.

-Talk to me. You’re out of luck, Delavan sneered. I can save the circuit judge a lot of paperwork and leave you right here.

Phoenix looked down at his mismatched hands—the delicate human glove and the rusty hydraulic claw. He looked at the black drive in his pouch. It was enough money to buy a new life. Now it was just evidence.

He sighed, the CO2-heavy air tasting like copper in his mouth.

-This is Jimi, from the Mighty Sparrow, Phoenix replied, his voice raspy from the dry mix. I, I surrender. Don’t scratch my ship please. It’s older than you are.

-I don’t care about the ship, Delavan shot back. You and the drive.

The MTC ship opened its bay doors. A tractor beam latched onto Phoenix’s suit and pulled him in, out of the Halo and into MTC hell.

He looked back at Earth one more time. His look couldn't get worse. It was almost worth it. The bay doors slammed shut. The darkness was total.