A high
pitched whine escaped the stabilizers as the ship drifted downwards. Mark
sighed. He was doing that a lot lately.
"We
have reached the designated work site on Eriandus." chirped Nav.
"I
had noticed." Mark grimaced.
The jolt
in travel had been rather hard to miss. Nav had chosen a route through a
subspace highway, which for organisms like Mark nearly always proved to be a
jarring experience. Regularly bending reality often isn’t that great for your
joints, or for your relationships, considering subspace jumping has the nasty
side effect of killing everyone you ever knew due to the relative nature of
time.
Mark
sighed again. This had the frustrating effect of fogging up the inside of his
suit helmet. He paused, and gathering all of his disdain into a single motion,
uncurled himself and dropped from his cockpit chair on to the spongy planet
surface. Despite a seemingly temperate biome, the atmosphere clung to him, hazy
and thick. Mark's ventilators oscillated furiously to compensate as he trudged
to the edge of the cliff where his ship had perched. Far below the cliffside
lay the rubble of what appeared to be an entire civilization. Partially melted
spires speckled the ravine, and distantly from under some of the metal debris,
poked what appeared to be a few limbs. A stench soon followed.
"Great."
Mark said.
"Mass
extinction is not great!" offered Nav.
"That
wasn't... Forget it." Mark turned back to the ship. "You know, it's
getting pretty old only having you for conversation."
"My
system is currently 23,640 years old." Nav said brightly.
Mark
sighed a third time, not that anyone was counting. Unloading his work gear from
the ship down to the
maintenance point was tedious work, and Mark was trying very hard to not be alone with his
thoughts. In order to pass the time, he wondered idly about what might have caused
his current project. Perhaps this planet had been obliterated at the hands of a
neighboring planetary warlord, or a terribly bored BIGBOT, or just a very
embarrassed intern. There was probably some clues hidden among the ruins, but
Mark didn't particularly care enough to investigate. He just had to clean it
up.
The mustard soil stuck to Mark’s legs as he
shuffled down along the ravine. It gummed between the fingers of his gloves,
and misted his mask. He picked his way through the greyish growths that
peppered up the slope for a good while before pausing his descent to rest. Mark
raised his arm to wipe his goggles of the mist as it calcified, but the slog
beneath him shifted as he did. Slipping, he lurched over to brace himself with
one of the stilted grey bits but it crumbled in his grip. Sliding now, Mark
wheeled furiously to stay upright but the planet’s gravity had other plans. Mark
bounced as he fell, as gracefully as a water balloon might, before tumbling
into a thicket of grey. As if only to spite Mark further, the ground beneath the
thicket gave way, and half of the entire sorry mountainside fell in on itself,
and into darkness.
Mark
wheezed, and the suit hissed, and the cave groaned. Mark thought those were
some very undignified sounds to die with. Empowered by this thought, Mark
rolled over to push himself up before hearing a groan that didn’t belong to him,
or the cave for that matter. He blinked and sat up, which this time produced a
gurgle, which also was not his. Mark found the source of the noises in the form
of a disembodied head belonging to one of the unfortunate members of the now
eradicated city below. The creature hadn’t had the good fortune to die yet, and
was rather upset about it. It garbled at Mark, apparently distressed at its
dismemberment, and also because Mark was sitting on its trunk. Mark rolled
over, the other way this time, and sat up against the wall opposite the head.
“Nav?”
Mark called.
A small flashlight
flipped open on the shoulder of Mark’s suit and Nav blinked to life.
“Howdy!” said
Nav.
“Can you
talk to this thing? It won’t shut up.”
The trunk
wiggled reproachfully.
“I know
this one!” said Nav. “It’s saying something about a prophecy … Its lineage is
really great I guess... Now something about a beacon? Oh! I think it wants to
pass its quest on to you! Seems awfully dire.”
“No thanks.” said
Mark. “Besides, from what I saw out there it looks like you kinda already
missed the boat anyways.”
“Aw.” said
Nav.
The
creature gargled, and in its anguish, died.
“…Oh no.”
Mark mourned quietly. “These things are carbon based. Do you have any idea how much
harder that is to clean up?”
-------------
To the
layman, the pack Mark had strapped to his back would have resembled a simple vacuum
cleaner. To a professional, the pack would have also resembled a vacuum cleaner
– but only because it happens to essentially be a vacuum cleaner. This model however
would make any veteran door salesman shake in their boots – because any vacuum
salesman worth his salt knows that as the standards set by the Union of
Intergalactic Waste Transport mandate that vacuums carried by workers such as
Mark contain a smallish black hole as its power source.
Smallish is
a technical term in the industry which denotes the size of a black hole that
ranges between tiny and small. More absolute terms cannot be used because the black
hole grows in size as it is fed more mass, and also because the potential range
in size of black holes is so large, that numbers lose any real sense of value. Beyond
a certain limit in either direction, the black hole reaches a critical point at
which the union no longer offers coverage over. When a black hole container grows
too large to be used safely, or it is messing with space-time in an amount that
is no longer convenient, the tubes are dumped through the nearest wormhole receptacle.
-------------
