Salvager a military scie.., p.1
Salvager: A Military Science Fiction Adventure, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Scott Moon
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READING ORDER
TALL BOYS
Every galactic empire has a star system where peace won’t stick. These wartorn, dystopian nightmares produce unlikely heroes. Some of them drive mechs. Some get friendly with artificial intelligence, aliens, and the thrill of putting everything on the line for friends and allies.
Mechanized Combat Rigs have another name: Tall Boys.
The men and women who operate them don’t know how to quit.
Salvager (A Tall Boys Novella)
Boots Down (Tall Boys, Book 1)
Crossing Power (Tall Boys, Book 2)
Short Time (Tall Boys, Book 3)
BOOK DESCRIPTION
When galactic forces go to war, someone has to clean up afterward, even if there are still shots being fired.
Bameron Kold has never known anything but life in Yorp, a city ruined by centuries of war. When a pilot crash lands in his zone, saving her life comes at a personal cost. His closest companion is a construction robot with more artificial intelligence in its operating system than is legal.
Now, he must earn the pilot’s trust in the hope that she won’t turn him and his robot into authorities.
When he thinks everything is going wrong, it all gets so much worse.
Fans of science fiction, mech warfare, and post-apocalyptic settings will love Salvager. Check out this exciting addition to the Tall Boys universe today.
SALVAGER
A TALL BOYS NOVELLA
SCOTT MOON
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
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What’s next?
Characters
Military Units
Factions
Language
Miscellaneous
Places
Ships
Technology
Weapons, Armor, Equipment, & Other Gear
Spread the Word
About the Author
Also by Scott Moon
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION TO THE MECH WARRIOR WHO NEVER WAS
“It’s getting dark,” the hulking robot said. His camera eyes reflected red light from somewhere strange, or maybe, just maybe, they were glowing softly.
If ten tons of metal gears and kilometers of fiber optic wiring could keep secrets, then this might be what he… it… would look like when imagining the dark end of humanity.
That was no way to think about your best and only friend.
The sun thrust its sword-like rays from below the horizon. The ruddy orange light shouldn’t have produced that effect in the eyes of my friend, not from this angle. I marveled at how the surrendering day cast the roughly proportioned bot in shadow.
The massive bipedal machine appeared to be on fire for several seconds, but he wasn’t.
Was he watching me, considering his next action, calculating the efficiency of our partnership? That was what machines did—calculate. There was no thinking, or feeling, or friendship. Bots like my big, steel buddy were no more than a sum of metal and subroutines.
That’s what I told myself.
His huge form was intimidating, even though I drove a machine that wasn’t easy to push around.
My mechanized salvage rig didn’t have a name, but the robot did. I called him Sketch.
Me and Sketch—best friends for life. He was good at picking things up, digging my rig out from structural collapses, and sometimes breaking things. My job was deciding where to go. The trick was to find as much salvage as possible without getting killed-to-death by soldiers, gang bosses, or collapsing superstructures.
High-rise buildings leaned as though to whisper secrets but were probably just sad about rocket damage, large caliber bullet holes, and the mostly terrible graffiti that decorated their lower levels. Art was art, and beauty was in the eye of the beholder.
That didn’t mean some of my less talented friends didn’t need their spray cans seized and hurled toward the sun. Dazzling and expressive murals were the only real color in Yorp, a city ruined by constant warfare and the proliferation of lawlessness. Those works of art shouldn’t have two-meter-high bubble letters in neon pink and green obscuring their base.
Chucky was here. Bulgy Babe 5–bam, bam, boom.
What the hell did that even mean?
“Darkness,” the robot said. “It is descending, as I have quite clearly mentioned.”
“That happens about the same time each day.” I looked toward the broken-teeth horizon. “Some people blame it on the setting sun.”
Sketch was attuned to my moods. This was probably a good chance for some conversation. Robots weren’t always up for that sort of thing.
“I’ll protect you, dude.”
“I am not a dude. I am made of metal and need zero protection from a small, squishy biological like you.”
“Whatever, Metal Dude.”
“Please do not change my name. Sketch is a fine identifier, though the reason you applied it to me remains beyond logic.”
“Maybe you have two names.”
“Of course that would make sense,” he said, sounding like one of my more sarcastic uncles.
Robots could be a blessing. Or a pain in the ass. Right now, his towering bulk was reassuring.
I had a lot on my mind. Sketch was covered with grease from our last effort. There was blood swirled through the black slime. Neither of us knew where it was from.
Or who it was from. I hadn’t wanted to dig deep and find a friend or even a stranger from another collective. Recovering the body of a soldier would be bad as well, though for more complicated reasons.
Bodies, living or dead, didn’t survive a bad collapse. When a building came down, it was always a surprise to people expecting to keep on living their lives. You never knew in Yorp. Getting smashed by a thousand tons of concrete and steel was all the burial most of us would ever get. Maybe it was better to be here one day and be gone the next. No messy goodbyes. No arguing over shoe sizes or what was in your pockets.
Everything was damaged beyond repair, including my people.
I checked the important parts of my rig, cleaned what offended my delicate sensibilities, and wished for a functioning car wash. No one really knew what a car was, but sometimes there were these cleaning bays without doors where hoses could still spray water. The signs sometimes displayed the words “Car Wash” or “Wash-o-World” or whatever.
To be honest, that almost never happened—finding things from the old days that worked. But I knew people—my Uncle Iton, for one—had discovered multiple facilities with electricity, water pressure, and even something old people called air conditioning.
Man, did the elders talk up all the stuff they’d done. How they’d managed with less and accomplished more and weren’t soft like my generation. Then, in the same breath, they’d talk about luxury and comfort that had to be imaginary. Cool air from wall vents? Yeah, right. I’m sure that happened in the magical land of Happyville.
Uncle Iton kept everyone up late last night. He told tales he claimed were historically accurate. Normally, what I remembered were the jokes. Today, facts floated to the surface of the intellectual swamp of my thoughts.
Our entire world was the city of Yorp. We had no prospects. Iton never claimed otherwise. But he liked to talk about those who had come here from the stars.
“Vaux VI struggled for the first hundred years of colonization, a key period for each new world.” Iton coughed. “After that, it was, as the ancients sometimes said, on like Donkey Kong.”
Donkeys were definitely real. Suzzie Keener had an uncle who had a friend who’d met a rancher beyond the city who owned two of the beasts. Apparently, they were stubborn.
None of my generation understood what a kong was, and I doubted the elders did either. And that was why the ancient phrase was just a collection of sounds that went into exclamatory sections of Iton’s stories.
“War broke out, and every soul on the atmospherically friendly space rock cleared their calendars for two hundred years. The yellow sun rose and fell without passing judgment, though to some, it probably seemed like a sad deity watching her favorite child march toward needless self-destruction.”
He looked my way, a sly expression adding emphasis to the story I should have expected. “To others, every day was a laugh riot full of friends, shenanigans, and bold advent
Kids and adults had chuckled. A few cast knowing glances my way. The warmth of firelight made the moment nice.
Yorpers called me Bameron Kold, or just Bam—and I was that guy.
Reckless.
Hardworking.
Extraordinarily handsome.
Funny as hell and twice as accessible. Which was really saying something because Yorp was only a hop, skip, and a jump from the fires of damnation.
By age nineteen, I’d spent exactly nineteen years in contested zones. I wasn’t afraid to fight, but recent events showed me a higher calling.
“The rigs didn’t make themselves,” Iton had said. “There was a natural progression, a way things came to be. You know, problems getting solved. When the sun goes down, we all live with the rewards of our ingenuity.”
He’d droned on to explain that since humans flinched at bullets, shrapnel, and particle beams punching holes through their faces, our ancestors spent two centuries of total warfare building better ways to attack and defend. In recent decades, that meant C-FEF involvement. They patrolled the ruins of Yorp with their mechanized combat rigs and air support. They were from wherever we were from, though more recently arrived in their vast fleet of war makers and dream takers.
“Capian First Expeditionary Fleet,” he’d said. “Does anyone know what that means?”
No one did, and he hadn’t explained, which meant he probably wasn’t sure either.
Other times, it was the UPV or the ROV6 troops that caused us grief. I had only the vaguest idea what those acronyms meant. Iton thought the V stood for Vaux.
He hadn’t gone into that part of the story either.
Because he didn’t know. My exhausted mind returned to this revelation often. Contrary to what he wanted everyone to believe, he didn’t know shit about sunshine, as Grams liked to snicker.
“Infantry was needed to take and hold territory, for that was the only way to claim true victory over an enemy. And it just seemed like a good habit to foster: take what is yours and deny those who would deny you,” Iton had said, but I was starting to doodle things on my last pad of decent paper and tune out everything but the dicey parts.
“Exoskeletons that allowed each soldier to carry more guns, bullets, and contraband pop-tarts had to be armored. Weapons had to be upgraded. And the fighting had to grow more intense.”
My nieces and nephews always laughed at the pop-tart jokes, and last night was no exception. I drew some of the mythical pastries and made a robot dinosaur eat them. Little Tommy and Samantha covered their mouths when they giggled. No one wanted to interrupt Uncle Iton.
He went on and on and on. “That led to modern-day battle knights stomping across the ruined landscape in mechanized combat rigs five meters high.”
I liked to translate meters to feet for reasons I couldn’t quite understand. Walking heel to toe, generating measurements that directly correlated to my dimensions, provided a personalized understanding of the size of things and soothed my mind when it was troubled. Sometimes that happened. Scavengers like me saw some bad stuff.
Technically, I was supposed to call myself a “salvager” because that was legal. Looting wasn’t, and all the military types shot people for that. Didn’t matter if it was C-FEF, ROV6, or UPV troops. None of them liked us stealing things off their dead.
Kinda made sense. I’d be pissed if Uncle Iton or any of my Yorper family died and then I saw someone wearing their boots without paying for them or saying the words.
I paused Iton in my memory and considered the size of my feet in relation to the construction bot on my right and my patched-together rig on my left.
“If I’m making up the rules, then I’m making up the rules,” I muttered as I cleaned the unarmed mech and tried not to think about what greased it and Sketch up when we dug through the last building to come down. Maybe it had been rats or other shadow creatures.
C-FEF soldiers called their mechanized combat rigs MCRs. Once, I’d listened to them talk after they parked near my overnight spot and didn’t find me in the rubble. My machine was just an MSR. Mechanize salvaging rig didn’t sound as cool. Maybe my uncle would help me think of a cleverer designation.
“What in the name of all that is rational are you talking about? Rules? You’re making up rules now?” Sketch asked.
“Meters versus feet.”
“What?”
“I think it would be way better to measure things like this…” I walked heel to toe and used my hands to direct his attention. “Uncle Iton, and about everyone else, use some made-up system from the star travelers who brought us here. My feet are more reliable.”
“If you say so,” came his tinny voice from the cool shadows of a twisted building frame where he lurked. “I understand how biologicals need to feel like there is such a thing as destiny and that they have some meager influence on its course.”
“Now you sound like Uncle Iton.”
“Is that a compliment?”
I made an undefined sound that he knew better than to question. Seeking clarification rarely ended well for the too-smart machine.
He stood seven meters—twenty-three of my feet—high, which was seven feet higher than my mechanized rig when all the conversions were factored. The difference between five meters of metal and gears and seven meters of the same could mean everything or nothing, depending on what we needed to salvage. Battlefields were dangerous places, even when the fighting was over. Sometimes, the smaller target had the advantage when it came to remaining unperforated.
A volley of kinetic tracer rounds ripped over the top of a gutted train station. I froze. Sketch remained silent, of course. No explosions followed, and I didn’t hear MCRs walking or tracked vehicles tracking.
Random stuff happened in Yorp. Someone was fighting, but not nearby. The tracer rounds were misses from far away. My zone was eerily quiet.
Scraping the gunk off Sketch was a lost cause, so I finished my work, tidied up my daydreams, and packed my tools. “Let’s get moving before shots are fired at us.”
“We should have nearly three hours before this sector heats up—if the pattern holds.” Sketch stepped out from his hiding place and scanned the street beyond the dead-end alleyway we had used for a base of operations. He looked in the direction the tracer rounds had come from, paused for over ten seconds, then returned his attention to me. “All is well, Bam.”
“Our goal is to find one new thing tonight. Do you think we can manage that?”
“You’re making the rules,” Sketch said. “You tell me.”
I climbed up my rig, strapped in, and closed the opaque metal canopy. The cameras flickered to life, and a fan whirred cool air against my face. Maybe it wasn’t air conditioning, but it didn’t suck. “Tonight is going to be the best yet. Trust me.”
CHAPTER 2
DOWNED PILOTS ARE ALWAYS TROUBLE
We didn’t go far at first. There wasn’t as much fighting as I’d expected. Who cared if I could still see the tracer rounds flashing above the buildings? Dark as it was now, the sight was spectacular. It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed something like that. Maybe this was a little more than I expected or hoped for, but that was fine. No problem. They didn’t care about salvagers like me as long as we stayed out of their way.
Moving was best when there was a lot of noise and action. I wasn’t sure where that left us because this zone had gone deathly silent hours ago. It could be days or weeks before the sounds of animals returned. Birds and rats and deer each had their own criteria for what was safe and what wasn’t.
I was more concerned with non-Yorp humans.
Soldiers, whether they walked or flew or drove mechs bigger than mine, focused on threats that could kill them. The dumb ones confused salvagers with enemies and blasted us, but as long as they were busy, it was worth the risk. They didn’t always slaughter us, just sometimes.
Battlefields could be great places to find stuff—as long as you stayed clear of the aforementioned looting. Never go near their wounded, never take weapons or technology that was too good to be true, and just basically don’t get caught. That was my credo.
