Wreckers: A Denver Boyd Novel by George Ellis (ebook reader ink .TXT) 📕

Located on the larger of Mars’ two moons, about 3,400 miles off the planet’s surface, Sal’s Parts Depot took up most of the 5-mile-wide Stickney Crater. From above, the yard looked like the final resting place of every kind of ship you could imagine, rising from the dusty moon like gravestones.

Nobody knew why it was called Sal’s Parts Depot. The guy who owned it was named Mike. Maybe he just liked the sound of Sal’s. Anyway, the process was pretty efficient. Incoming ships waited in a queue to head down to the moon’s surface, where one of five rovers would meet you and follow you around as you retrieved parts from various ships.

I didn’t figure I was taking too much of a risk stopping at Sal’s right after my escape from Port Lauderdale. The feds on the barge weren’t there on official business, meaning they likely wouldn’t put out a bounty on me or the Stang. And even if they did, I’d be out of the neighborhood soon enough. As I waited for my number to be called so I could head to the yard and pick up a few things, I scanned the inventory available. First priority was to acquire some backup filters for the Stang’s air system. Those could be purchased from Sal’s stock. The rest of the items on my list were likely to come from the ships on the lot.

“I’m no genius – well, actually I am – but do you think we should maybe not stop right now?” Gary asked. “Kind of ruins the idea of a getaway when you go shopping right around the corner.

“Relax, those guys are morons and on top of that, they won’t be following us anytime soon,” I said. “I may or may not have unplugged a thing or two when I left the 405 unsupervised.”

Gary said my uncle would have got a kick out of that. As much as I liked my uncle and learned a lot in the brief time we spent together, I took Gary’s word for it, as he would always know my uncle better than I did.

“Mustang 1, you’re cleared to enter the depot,” an automated voice informed me. I selected the area I’d be landing in, then took the Stang down to the moon’s surface.

An hour later, I walked down the gangway in my space suit. The rover driver was waiting for me at the bottom, standing next to his vehicle, which had a medium-sized cargo bed in the back for moving parts around the lot. The tag on the guy’s suit said “Egon.” Once we were in the cab of the rover, I asked him if the name had any connection to the old movie about ghosts. He said he wasn’t sure, but his mom had been Earth-born, so anything was possible.

I told him the ship I was interested in checking out, and we drove the rest of the way in silence. He cast me a few glances that suggested he didn’t get too many customers my age shopping at the depot. I was going to have to get used to that treatment, I reminded myself. He parked the rover next to a large orange ship with white paneling. The shell was covered in rust, which meant the ship had likely been on Earth or in low orbit at some point, as the relative lack of oxygen in space meant most metals didn’t really rust. I pulled up the available history of the vessel on Sal’s store page. According to the depot’s files, the ship had been there for 10 years and still had a decent amount of parts intact.

I left the rover and went inside to search for what I needed. Walking through a still, deserted ship always kind of creeped me out. I knew there were no threats looming around the corner of any given corridor, but I still gripped my flashlight a bit harder than usual when searching for the engine room. I eventually found it and went to the auxiliary fuse box. The ship was an S-class leisure cruiser made by the now-defunct Boeing Corporation. Before going belly-up 50 years earlier, Boeing had built a variety of ships in the verse, both private and military. Their fuses were some of the more versatile around. I popped open the box and saw that all of the fuses were still there. I removed them one by one and all but two of them were intact and likely functional.

I reported the fuses to Egon when I got back to the rover. He placed them in the cargo bed and logged the items into the computer. I had a limited amount of credits I was working with, so I had to be choosy and remember to save money for the air filters. I told Egon to add the filters so I didn’t forget; Sal’s had a strict policy that once you removed something from a ship on the yard, you had to buy it. They didn’t take kindly to having to return merchandise to a ship because a customer couldn’t pay.

We hit a few more ships and I was about to tell Egon to head back to the Stang when he looked over and asked if I was in a tight spot with credits. I told him I wasn’t, but he must have seen that I wasn’t being totally honest, because he grinned through his visor.

“Just saying there’s a card game going back at HQ if you want to try and charge your pot,” he said.

* * *

They were playing 8-Card Hold ‘Em when I walked in. Two tables of Sal’s employees plus a few visiting captains and crew. I didn’t spot any blue suits. Not surprising, as their first thought would be to bust up (or tax) Sal’s for running an illegal gambling operation. Taking their credits wasn’t worth the hassle, even if they were probably easy marks.

Sal’s HQ was a series of small domed structures, about