You spend a frankly absurd amount of money buying passage aboard one of the Shipbreaker's cargo freighters. There's no other choice; theirs are the only ships making the trip out to that abandoned section of space. You spend a subjective month sleeping on sealed insulation packets and eating chlorine flavored nutrient paste in a dimly lit, windowless cargo bay along with about a hundred other treasure seekers. You feel the descent to the surface before the voice of the autoNav announces your arrival; microgravity slowly swelling into the full 0.8 grav of the still unnamed desert planet. It seems like the ship hasn't even fully settled onto the landing pad when the huge side mounted doors slide open. You squint and cover your eyes. Heat and light pour in like you've opened the door to a blast furnace. You blink away the tears as the backlit forms of men and loading machines begin streaming in, already loading the ship with salvage. You gather your belongings and slip past the crowds of Shipbreaker apprentices, out onto the alien world.
The sky is blue but the enormous sun is a ghastly red, casting the world in purplish red hue. The ground beneath your feet is metal covered in a thin coating of sand. Hot winds swirl in seemingly random gusts around you, blowing the sand this way and that. It smells of dirt or dust, mixed with oil, chemicals, and ozone. All around you is the Shipbreaker's Camp, the expansive base of operations for the Guild's salvage operation. To the south are the huge metal slabs of the landing pads, each floating on insulated gel cushions to prevent damage and stabilize them on the shifting sands. Stacked towers of modular, spherical refueling tanks rise like bizarre towers all around the landing field. Each clear synthplas tank shimmers with refracted sunlight. Salvage, stacked in filament bound piles or stored in clear Synthplas crates, is arranged in wide rows awaiting loading. To the east, the living quarters of the Guild, a vast complex of opaque white Synthplas and gleaming aluminum composites. Apprentices in their tight packed modular habitat cubes and utility sections, piled in jagged mountains like discarded tetris blocks. Beyond them, the guild houses and halls with their rib-like buttresses and protruding spires. And finally the grand lodge looming up behind it all, a fist of polished aluminum reaching for the sky.
To the west, the cutting grounds, a slaughter house of metal. Nearest you are long warehouses which stretch into the cutting grounds like searching fingers. Beyond them, a flat of metal plates that have been fused to the alien metal just beneath the sand. Colossal pieces of machinery and metal are dragged onto the cutting floor on antigrav sleds and set upon by workers with torches, lasers, and industrial cutters. Purple, blue, red and green sparks and plasma jets are so numerous that the entire area looks like an unending fireworks display. It is unimaginably loud. Directly to the north and in front of you is a strange chaos: Apprentices in their pressure suits and full guildsmen in their hulking powered Hazsuits hurry back and forth, antigrav sledges loaded with salvage trundle towards the landing pads, piles of supplies and goods from the cargo ships are unloaded and inspected. Amongst this chaos is a single straight road lined on either side by much more ramshackle buildings: food vendors, clothing merchants, arms dealers, a tiny temple to the Void Watchers, all manner of businesses hoping to separate new arrivals from their cash.
Beyond this camp, visible even above the fuel towers and the grand lodge, are the engines of the Enigma. Each one towers hundreds of feet into the air, larger than the entire cargo freighter you arrived in. There are four in total, tracing out a square 3km to a side. One, directly to the West, is being dismantled. You can see the glittering scaffolding, cranes and grav lifts around it, half its outer plating has been cut away to reveal the skeletal machinery within. To the East, beyond the Grand Lodge, the engine is overgrown with strange flora which stretches nearly to its tip. The engine far to the north east is visibly damaged, shorn in half and smoldering dull red. The engine to the North West appears undamaged, though you cannot see its base thanks to the buildings around you. Directly ahead, down the road of ramshackle shops, you can see a gleaming metal and a black void, hazy with distance and heat. Glimpsed through gaps in the buildings you can tell more there are more structures within the square created by the engines, especially towards the north east. You cannot see them clearly though.
The other passengers are brushing past you or stopping next to you, glancing about as you are, deciding where to go.
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Topic: DEEP SPACE: Space vampires and work safety (Read 36669 times)