He ended up making some pretty rough landings occasionally, but he -wasn’t much worried about scratching his paint job, and the Condor wasn’t so big that he needed a lot of level area for a landing pad. He headed for the planet he’d selected for this minor emergency. If the rock had an oxygen atmosphere, he’d even be able to empty the cat box and let RK out to do a little business.
Sometimes they found some of their best cargo on these pit stops. Lately he’d run across a whole string of planets, all pretty well stripped of resources on the one hand, but chock full of possibly profitable debris on the other hand. Becker lived for debris. His big regret was that he had not yet devised a way to strap extra cargo to the outside of the Condor, but so far he hadn’t found a way to do so that would allow him to enter and exit atmospheres without burning up the merchandise.
The Condor landed on what seemed the only level bit of ground for miles around. Soil and vegetation had pretty much been stripped from the rock around this little basin in the wreckage, but here bluish grass-like plants still grew-until the Condor’s descent singed them, anyway. It was a rough landing. The atmosphere was tumultuous-roiling clouds of various red and yellow gases filled the sky. That was okay. According to his instruments’-if they were working properly, and they seemed to be -it was still breathable out there. Even if it wasn’t, he had a good protective suit if he needed it. It was the one item he bought not only firsthand but also top of the line. He never knew what the conditions would be like out here in the boonies. While he could use the robolift for most reloading, loading, and hauling jobs, some of them he needed to do by hand. It took him a day and a half to repair his system. The first full day, with RK’s enthusiastic participation, he devoted to rooting around among the derelict shuttles, escape pods, and command capsules in his inventory, looking for an outfit in better shape than the one he was using. As usual, much of what was on top of what he wanted landed on the ground outside the vessel until he found what he was looking for.
He eventually rounded up a replacement system and patched it in. RK “helped” again, trying to stand between him and what he was doing. Every time Becker reached past the critter, RK’s low snarl warned him off. When the cat tired of that game, he sat beside Becker and periodically reached up to sink a single claw into the man’s thigh. Finally, Becker opened the hatch again and the cat leaped out without a backward look. The work went amazingly swiftly after that.
Prior to reloading his cargo, Becker suited up. He was a little more cautious of his own hide than the cat was. Taking a work light, a collection sack, a tin of cat food to lure his roaming partner back aboard again, and the remote to the hatch and the robolift, he popped the hatch and disembarked. All he had to do now was throw his stuff back aboard and find Roadkill. While he was looking, he might as well take a stroll and scope out the local real estate.
The grass around the ConDor was singed for about thirty feet from where the vessel sat, and Becker thought it was a real shame about that. All around the basin, bedrock lay tumbled as if something had reached in, pulled it up, and stirred it around. What a dump. Only this one little patch showed any real signs of life. Of course, it could be the planet was just in the process of giving birth to life, or it could be a failed terraforming )ob, but his guess was that this planet had at one time been alive. The little patch on -which he stood was probably one of the last, if not the last, vestiges of that life. Damn shame, of course, but without ruins like this, he’d be out of business. Only problem was, the devastation here was so complete, there wasn’t much left, even for him. The other planets they’d come across lately had been much the same. Each of them had a few useless remnants that gave him the creepy feeling that a perfectly good civilization had been destroyed fairly recently.