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Drifting on his left, Jarred was stretching, warming up for the action to come. The centaur’s movements were smoothly copied by the slender bone-colored exoskeleton he was wearing over his ranger-green vac-skin. The echo-loader dramatically amplified his strength, giving him some very big pockets indeed when it came to hauling out Glass.
To Bhushan’s right, the new kid Rainen floated almost motionless, a hooded angel silhouetted against the stars. Smoke-grey armor covered the leading edges of her feathered wings while her tan-gold feathers were painted over entirely in glossy black vacuum-gel. He supposed the sharp color contrast of the gel helped her avoid missing any spots. The young Sylph’s gear was top of the line. Not completely surprising considering her parentage: her family were legends in the alien grave-robbing business. A genuine “Crow Princess”, as Jarred liked to tease.
Bhushan chuckled to himself. Between them, the pair was a living portrait of flawed stereotypes. Centaurs were a colonial offshoot: steady powerhouses devised to work the raw frontier. Sylph were born spacers, their feathered “wings” concealing muscular appendages more akin to a praying mantis than a bird, each tipped with javelin-like spurs.
Only Jarred was the seasoned spacer, positively graceful in zero-gee. While Rainen… Her movements were hesitant, tentative. She wasn’t outright clumsy but it would be a while before the ugly duckling became a proper swan. Given a choice, he’d have posted her back on the ship.
Except she wasn’t just another rookie crow. She was ‘the money’ on this expedition. It was her research that had brought them here. If she wanted to peek inside the site, he could hardly say ‘no’.
Bhushan rolled his head around on his neck, his exoskeleton mimicking the motion. Unlike the other two, he was laced into full echo-armor, resembling a 3-meter tall techno-samurai cast in obsidian. His Ravensleek 880 was a well-worn and well-oiled instrument of the professional looter. More than a match for any goblins that might be shuffling around the ancient complex and he’d held his own against a pair of basilisks once. Most crows were academics, not fighters, but you occasionally had to mix it up with the locals if you wanted the big prizes.
He turned and looked back. A white wedge floated in the distance, catching the thin light of the system’s primary star. His ship. She’d stay well back from the fragmentation limit – bottled antimatter responded poorly to random computer glitches. He’d acquired the Carnarvon after a big score, six years ago now. The find that had made his reputation: nine dragon pearls and an unblemished Leystone. Chipping Glass paid the bills, but sometimes you got truly lucky. As he watched, the vessel fired another probe at the asteroid.
He frowned. Another probe? When they were this close to breaching? Kyma must have spotted something strange. “Any final words of wisdom from my favorite sea witch?” The team’s sensor-specialist should have been long finished compiling the short-range probe data. He’d been expecting a map upload, not another launch.
Aboard the re-purposed corvette, Kyma linked in. “I do, boss man. And the words are ‘seriously cursed’.” Bhushan could have sworn he heard her broad tail swishing in frustration. The merwoman was a top-notch tactical cartographer. A bit of a wunderkind coming up through the specialized academies crows often tapped for new talent. Bhushan had had to spend some serious markers back at Astoria University to keep her from getting snapped up by one of the other crews.
“That rock has the worst fragmentation ratio I’ve ever seen.” She went on. “A couple of the K2’s popped in under two minutes.”
That …was bad.
To Be Added Later
‘The Pharaoh’s Curse’, they called it on Astoria. To the crows of Typhon Station, it was ’Lady Luck’s Frown’. Smaller crow communities had their own names for the effect, but it was always trouble. Some kind of entropy field clung to the ruins. Bad things happened with startling regularity to people who entered the halls of the ancients. When you’re breathing bottled air in a body-baggie surrounded by hard vacuum, Murphy’s Law didn’t exactly have to expend a lot of effort to end you.
Defense mechanism or disaster? Bhushan had spent many an evening in a crow watering hole arguing both sides of the mystery. Nobody knew. Digital fragmentation artifacts were one of the surest signs you were looking at a genuine Celestial Dynasty site. The Curse made things risky for people but it was outright vicious to machinery. People could duck in and out if they were quick but drones were like lightning rods for the Curse. Another of the many reasons reclaimed Glass was so valuable. It had to be gathered by hand.
“Copy that. Any good news?” Bhushan asked, unwilling to give up just yet.
“Maybe. Mapping’s always iffy with T’ien Lung sites. This is costing us a fortune in dead probes and all I can say for certain about the interior is it sounds like there’s a deep harbor near the core. Some sort of large cavity, anyway. Looks like Wings’ treasure map is legit.”
“Feeling the love down here, Tail,” Rainen snarked. Kyma and Rainen had taken to calling each other “Wings” and “Tail” for reasons that were simultaneously obvious and could also get your face punched in polite company. Demi-humans weren’t automatically touchy about their non-standard features, but….
Two centuries of widespread genetic tinkering had increased lifespans and done away with numerous diseases, but it hadn’t eliminated the very human tendency to be rampaging jerks towards anyone who looked different. The first time his two young crewmembers had exchanged those epithets it hadn’t been even remotely friendly. Kyma was used to being the rising star in any given flock that might gather near the university campus. Rainen flatly outranked her in the crows’ social pecking order whether she wanted to or not and did so despite Kyma’s greater field experience. It had taken weeks for the two to reach an equilibrium and most of that had only come after they’d left port.
Bhushan cut them off, taking over the channel with his command voice.
“Ok, we knew we’d have to go fast and go clean, that’s the gig. Now we’re doing it with a sense of urgency. If there’s a harbor there will be a Leystone in the core. Stakes are high, but the plan remains solid. Jarred goes shallow, Rainen and I go deep. We push ‘till the Curse starts eating through our charms and then we turn tail and run. Smooth as glass.”
He kept his voice even and didn’t say it, but they all knew what went unsaid: If there was a harbor, there was a thousands-to-one shot there was a starship in dock. The ultimate prize. Crow glory forever.
“Slip in. Pocket some Glass. Don’t get killed.” This time it was Jarred who offered up the simple formula that had been the common wisdom of so many expeditions. It had been a favorite saying of Irindes Sierra, popularized by the holo-logs of her team unearthing the Omen-class starship Athena. A vessel that had gone on to become a strategic cornerstone in the interstellar balance of power and one of the greatest xeno-archeological finds of all time.
Irindes was also Rainen’s mother. One of the fastest, safest, smartest crows ever. It would be fourteen years next week since her parents had gone missing on a dig.
It Matters
Rivals, Not Enemies
Routinely operating on the edges of Charted Space requires a fundamental camaraderie. When your ship is all alone in a minimally tamed system, if something goes wrong, help is not coming. In such cases your only hope for rescue may be other Crows in the area. This has evolved into customs of mutual aid that require crews to assist others in dire need… for a share in the glory. Expeditions requiring assistance are expected to credit members of teams that aided them as equal contributors to their discoveries.
While informal, this system of “recognition fees” carries tremendous weight in both Astoria and Typhon (the major hubs of Crow operations), ensuring crews that fail to acknowledge their debts are quickly shunned and lose access to talent and services.
Because of this open access policy, crews are often reluctant to publicly reveal the location of their sites, hoping to make multiple runs before having to share the location with others. Treasure maps, family secrets, and legendary found-and-lost-again sites are all part of the evolving mythology of the T’ien Lung civilization.
Naturally, some crews develop ‘bad blood’ for a variety of reasons, but even then, they are expected to provide at least lifesaving support if the need arises. Even a rumor of a crew leaving other Crows to die can prompt career-destroying backlash.