Kaylee’s Lament

Part Nine

Cold, wet, and exhausted, Kaylee clung tightly to the mule as it rumbled into the pressureless airlock that connected Onyx with the frozen wasteland that was Set. Despite her aching body and her mostly-frozen brain, she was elated.

Not many ventured out into the Outside. There were gangs of scavengers who picked through decades-old junk in the debris fields south of the city, looking for pieces small and portable enough to be able to sell on the Concourse. But there were little in the way of organized exploitation of this huge frozen bonanza of slighty-used after-market parts (some lightly damaged by battle and/or impact). The scavengers were, in general, non-technicians, folks just desperate enough for coin to feed them another day to bundle their rags tightly around them and poke through the few picked-over wrecks closest to the city. Apart from that, people mostly left the Outside to itself. There were rumors of squatters, of course, violent hermits who made their homes in the derelict hulks . . .

Kaylee and Wash had spent most of the day prowling around the huge Alliance dumps left over from the War. Kaylee was amazed at the sheer volume of parts within the twisted scrap metal. Concerned that ingenious Independents – or other factions —would be attracted to salvage munitions and supplies from wrecks left floating in space after battle, the Alliance had thrown many of the hulks they had recovered in this quadrant down Set’s gravity well and into its freezing maelstrom of atmo, where they wouldn’t trouble anyone or remain a hazard to navigation. After the war, the Alliance had just left, leaving the debris to an icy grave. They were abandoning the world, and they were secure in the knowledge that salvaging the wrecks on any major scale would be cost-prohibitive.

For large-scale operations, they were correct. For quick hit-and-run-and-steal-anything-you-can raids like this, not so much.

The mule was pulling two trailers of salvaged debris, painstakingly r