02.01 - The Slow Thaw

Telly was teaching a course at the Scout School on Albe on Explorations in Zero-G. Ricky Dewey sat in the back, hoping for a friendly game of catch up after all these years. Ricky (or was it Dewey) stood back against the wall, plugged in to a service outlet, charging his servos. Telly noticed another man, the one that got him the teaching gig, was also hovering in the back of the room. Literally.

John S. lounged precariously in his hover chair, scanning the class. No doubt he was counting dollars. Every head in the class conjured the sound of credits depositing into Smith's coffers. He, or his family, or someone he knew owned much of the property on Albe and rented it to the businesses and corporations that served it's million inhabitants. 

Albe was an inhospitable, desert planet; a hellworld. Nobody stayed here because they wanted to, they stayed because there was money to be made. Not on the planet itself. There were abundant natural resources, but they were just raw materials planet-side.

If you had transport and some backing, you could make a tidy career trading goods between Albe, Realgar and Cordillon.  For the risk-takers, trading just outside the Imperium in the Holberg system offered some lucrative opportunities. But, on Albe, the people that harvested the goods lived in poverty under the domed tenements of artificial atmosphere controlled by the trade corporations, who "harvested" the credits. 

Telly was here, doing time, until the drama from his discharge had dissipated. The Scout School was happy to employ him in a civilian role as an instructor at a fledgling scout school, as long as he kept quiet and minded his manners. The plans were to build a scout base off Albe. Telly hoped that in a few years, a good track record in the class room might earn him a recommendation to a post on the new station, and get him off this dusty rock.

John Smith clearly was a man of some connection. However, his age and health required that he avoid too strenuous an undertaking. He mostly got about in a hover chair. This did not stop him from being everywhere at once, it seemed. He was quiet. But he had opinions. And, he seemed to know whose hands needed shaking and whose needed slapping... and who it was that needed to do the shaking and slapping. It was rarely every himself.

A small messenger drone interrupted his mental math, and delivered a hand-written message (strange) from a contact at the SHS, the Sindalian Historical Society. The drone slipped back in to the utility vent from which it had come and left John with his note. He finished reading the scrabbled hand-writing and a faint smile flickered on his face. He looked at the instructor, then to the obviously military man sitting in the back row. A plan formed in his mind. 

After Ricky/Dewey left the Imperial Navy, they still had an itch for adventure and heard there were plenty of traders in need of pilots in the Albe system. They ended up on Albe because of their TAS facilities came highly recommended. It had been about a week of unreturned calls when they finally got their chance to pilot for a salt trader. The in-person interview shed some light on why the rumors for the planet's dire need for pilots was seemingly false. Albians were highly suspicious of outsiders. The idea of working with a symbiotic human/cyborg did not endear itself to many trade corps. R/D was determined to give it another week of trying when he saw a name they recognized in the downside port adverts. 

"Hmmm, Telly is teaching on Albe. We must pay him visits," they said in unison. From somewhere deep within his kit, SAMB mumbled something about darkness being a physical condition of the temporal matrices of photon rehabilitation. 

As class ended, R/D remained seated while the eager young scouts piled out of the classroom, fixing their filter masks, goggles, and scarves over their unprotected heads. The building the classroom was in connected to the public concourse with pressurized hallways with considerate atmosphere, but it meant detouring 20 minutes below the surface to access them. Or, one could brave a five minute sprint across a determined, but manageable, wind storm that permanently lived on the surface of Albe. Reaching the other side of the cyclone meant cycling back into the protected, public concourse and saving yourself a good chunk of time. Aspiring scouts predictably exposed themselves to the 'threats' of natural life on Albe as par for the course in their quests toward becoming Imperial Interstellar Service Scouts.

As Telly folded his computer against the desk, and the last scouts exited stage left, R/D began a soft polite clap.

"Well done, professor! Well done!

We might have even learned a thing or two, zero-g exploration, what a thing!" Ricky and Dewey turned to look at each other and exchange a wink for a whirr. They had their own running personal narrative that felt more like a long-winded inside joke than an actual conversation open to outsiders. Inside R/D's kit, SAMB mumbled to herself up is down and in is out, who am I and why... why...

Telly smiled and acknowledged his old boss. They shook hands and were just pacing themselves through the routine set of small talk conversation prompts when a pillow of air wafted about their collective ankles. Telly turned and acknowledge John Smith, stepping back a few steps to allow for a comfortable three- make it four-person conversation circle... where one person was bionical and the other was hovering in a smallish air raft.

John smiled at the polite gesture, and accepted the invitation to join... and the space in which to do it.