Debt Payments

This rock was bullshit. The assignment to check these hunks of nothing? Bullshit. The ancient probe net licensed to him for this assignment? Worthless bullshit. The whole damn punishment that put him here? Bullshit to a factor of quad.

Wayne scowled as the images on the monitors floated past in hazes of dark browns, blacks, and reds. Plenty of iron and dirt in the soil, but nothing valuable enough to pay off the corp-debt. He’s need to find something of deep value equal to his debt. And he was in deeper than some of the canyons on a shattered world.

So he caused the destruction of not one, but half a dozen mining rigs. Ancient pieces of trash anyway. Did the company a favor really. They should have owed him. Besides, that’s not what landed him here anyway.

That was the fleeing through Centuari dock and knocking into that courier that put him into impossible debt. How was he supposed to know that flunky was touting around enough sentient AI’s in his case to buy and sell the sixteenth arm’s entire armada, colonies, and population twice over? Criminal to transport something that valuable and not take caution. Besides couriers have insurance, and they would of taken care of the guy. Well, would have had the courier not shot himself in the head rather than deal with the folks backing his assignment. Melodramatic species that courier belongs to.

Wayne sighed as he worked it over his mind again. The guys who funded the courier did come after him. Odd that the Ankaris company backed him up though and put him into hiding. They even paid for the price of the debt of those AI’s, but then fined his corporate account the money.

He knew why they kept him around instead of just letting the goons gun him down like most other workers. Wayne sighed again, briefly dropping three dozen of his current batch of tools arms in a mild depression. Around him, a similar number of probes stopped checking the asteroids around this dead star. His kind was rare, and he knew it. This was too tedious of a task to spare the costs of an AI on, and far too complicated for most galactic citizens to comprehend or perform. In human terms, Wayne figured at least one probe per person, maybe two if one was flying to a new rock. Also too expensive.

He was controlling and focusing on around eight thousand. Too bad most of the probes were busy either receiving repairs from other probes or playing maintenance to the dysfunctional ones.

Such a worthless damn network. At this rate it would take him a year to survey this entire asteroid belt. This assignment was such bullshit.

Debt Payments by Justin Diehl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.