Ricki Tarr (
rickitikitarr) wrote in
reverienet2018-06-08 07:12 pm
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voice: un: thomas
Being here reminds me a little of the time I spent working in Kowloon. The walled city is an old Song military outpost in Hong Kong, that everyone poured into some centuries ago. Instead of sprawling out the town went dense, some thousands of refugees pouring their way in and cramping in tight up against one another. I was there in '63, well after the fires and before the police started bothering the cathouses and opium dens.
[Ricki's voice is low, and close to the communicator. The hour is late, and he sounds tired, like he's sitting alone with a drink. His accent is fuzzy, too, British-Australian via Penang, Singapore, others. Indistinct, impossible to place, and cultivated over the years into something level and hypnotic.]
There were thirty thousand people in less than three hundred buildings, piled so tall and crisscrossed with laundry and walkways so thick that sunlight seldom reached the lower levels. You stepped from single cobblestone to cobblestone or else splashed through shallow puddles by the light of the few flourescent bulbs that had been wired in to light the lower market stalls.
[There's pause, and then a quick breath, like he's shaking himself out of it. He doesn't quite chuckle, but you can hear that it's a near thing.]
I'd take that over this if I could. We're just as flourescent and barely lit, but the food was better. My Cantonese is shit, I can order tea and apologize sincerely, but I still think I understood more there than I do here. Better bars, too.
[Ricki's voice is low, and close to the communicator. The hour is late, and he sounds tired, like he's sitting alone with a drink. His accent is fuzzy, too, British-Australian via Penang, Singapore, others. Indistinct, impossible to place, and cultivated over the years into something level and hypnotic.]
There were thirty thousand people in less than three hundred buildings, piled so tall and crisscrossed with laundry and walkways so thick that sunlight seldom reached the lower levels. You stepped from single cobblestone to cobblestone or else splashed through shallow puddles by the light of the few flourescent bulbs that had been wired in to light the lower market stalls.
[There's pause, and then a quick breath, like he's shaking himself out of it. He doesn't quite chuckle, but you can hear that it's a near thing.]
I'd take that over this if I could. We're just as flourescent and barely lit, but the food was better. My Cantonese is shit, I can order tea and apologize sincerely, but I still think I understood more there than I do here. Better bars, too.
un: rocipilot , but not Amos using his comm this time
Well most of the Belt. Our air filters still seem to be working, so there's that, at least.
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You told me a bit about that before, darling. What's it like up there?
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Don't know that I could accurately compare it, since I ain't ever seen Earth, but.
Bein' up there's basically the best damn feelin' you could ever have, if I'm honest. Not like bein' here trapped in a rust bucket, but bein' able to actually fly? Nothing compares.
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What are your routes?
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Before we ended up here? Didn't have a major route. We'd just kind of landed in the thick of it and managed to escape it in a martian gunship, so let's just say that at the moment we're 'free agents'. Been mostly in the Jupiter AO, lately.
Before that, used to do ice haulin' between Ceres and Saturn.
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[He proposes, lying back and settling in for a story. He doesn't specify what. It's two in the morning now, time for anything.]
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Alright, it's a long story, but. Basically, we all used to work on this ice hauler called the Canterbury. Beast of a thing, we'd take her out to Saturn, fill 'er up with giant blocks of ice from the rings, then haul em all back to the Belt. Water and air are the two most important things up there, right?
So we were on our way back from Saturn, when we pick up a distress call.
Now, rules are, whoever hears a distress call first, they gotta answer it. You leave it alone, that means you're probably leavin' someone to die. But it's also the primary way for pirates to pounce on trade ships. Lure 'em off the shippin' lanes, board 'em when they stop to help. You know the kind of thing.
Anyway we were gonna pretend we didn't hear it, but someone called in the distress call, so we had to go. Me and my crew? We were the ones sent out to check out the ship.
Only when we got there, no one was home. By the time we realised it was definitely a trap, the ship came out of no where.
And I mean no where. We'd scanned the area for a million clicks - ain't no one was supposed to be out there. But there she was, completely invisible on our scopes. Stealth tech. Me and the crew figured, alright, shit was gonna go down, right? The pirates would board the Cant, but we'd be off ship and we could help set up negotiations for ransom. So we were all a bit peaked, but okay. They fired torpedos, we thought they'd take out the main drive, but -
They nuked it.
The whole goddamn ship.
Went up in a blast so bright it nearly singed my eyes just through the view screen.
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Don't worry. I'm gettin' there.
So, the Cant was destroyed, along with 50 of our friends, in an instant. We were all god damned stunned - no pirate blows up a ship like that, right? So I'm sitting in my seat, watching my view screen like the world just went upside down, when I realise it -
That explosion? Now it was a debris field, screamin' through space at an incredibly high velocity. I did my best to fly us outta there as fast as I could, but the Knight wasn't set up for that kinda thing. She was a shuttle, and a rust bucket of one, at that. The debris hit us like god damn shrapnel, and tore a hole right through our airlock.
We started ventin' atmosphere, and it was a scramble to get the airlock doors closed again, but we were lucky. The rest of the hull was in tact, so we didn't die right then and there.
We tried to keep an eye on the ship that blew up the Cant, but we had our own problems - communications array was out, we were in the middle of god damn no where and we had a lot less air than we should have had. We were looking at maybe half a day, max, before we ran out.
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okay seriously he will give the entire story of the expanse so lemme know if you want him to stop...
We all did. But Naomi - she kicked all our asses into doin' somethin' about it. We managed to get the comms workin' again, but only after we had to vent half our air just to spacewalk.
[ He pauses, thinks about leaving out the part of the story where he nearly died, but then keeps it in.
Shed deserved a good memory. ]
My suit didn't have enough air in it - nearly suffocated, but Shed saved my life durin' it. Anyway, we got her patched up, got the comms back online, sent out a distress call.
It got picked up, we were saved - only thing was, when we saw what ship it was, we thought it was the same one that had killed the Cant. Comin' back for us.
The Martian flagship, The Donnager.
Luckily for us, it wasn't the Martians that did it - even though someone wanted us to think it was, real bad. And when they picked us up, they thought we'd done it, and interrogated the lot of us.
lmao no it's cool
What's it like to be here now, away from all the intrigue?
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This may not be intrigue, but it sure as hell feels like we just went from one shit storm to another.
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Actually, hell, what am I sayin'. No I didn't. The protomolecule didn't make a lick of sense either.
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I don't like feeling like a novice again.
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I can't help with all the crazy shit this place offers, but with space an' eveyrthin' else, I can.
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