Alien Exodus, Page 3

  Cleaned, relaxed, and outfitted in new, fresh and warm, cushy booties, gloves, and skin’, including attached, skintight hood, Buster left her neat and tidy quarters and pulled herself along the corridor. The trip to her personal bay, within the enormous section of the ship devoted to storage, was long. When she finally arrived, she ordered the appropriate hatches sealed so she could increase the gee without affecting the rest of the ship. The ship maintained the gravity in the storage bays at two gu. In addition to that, the materials were containerized, palletized, and secured by titanium composite nets to keep them from slamming around in the case of heavy turbulence inside the ship because of junk collection or orbit entry. Buster ordered the gravs outside her bay increased to match the insides and opened the bay hatch. She appraised her booty.

  One of the perks of working for Apical Mining and Recycling Company included scooping up unclaimed asteroids and having the ship mine them for personal gain, as long as the operators didn’t take up more than one percent total transit time to do so. Otherwise, fines were imposed. Everything mined from the asteroids belonged to the operator who’d ordered the scoop. They stored this matter in personal units. Company reasoned that happy operators would want to continue working in order to continue mining asteroids to continue making themselves relatively rich. The Company didn’t really pay very well.

  About fifty Earth years ago, Buster stopped cashing in when she docked, and started leaving her booty in her personal storage. She had it transferred every time they gave her a new ride. She looked at the stacks of palletized bars of platinum, palladium, gold, silver, copper, tin, and many other valuable metals, and the barrels of rough diamonds, colored gemstones, quartz crystals, and every other precious commodity she’d found and salvaged for herself, and felt satisfied. She closed the unit, recalled the gravs, opened the hatches, and pulled herself out of the storage section.

  Back at her post on the bridge, Buster ordered the ship to clear the opaqued viewports so she could look at the beautiful and constantly various Infinity of space surrounding her.

  Wait a minute! What was this, then? Civilization on a planet which had been unoccupied when she’d previously last passed this way? And space waste? Excellent, she could negotiate a brand new contract, one of her favorite chores. Buster ordered the shipbrain to scan frequencies for noise coming from the planet.

  Maybe the time had arrived for some well deserved shore leave.

  Chapter Two

  Klon, Civilized