These Things We Do: The Story of Bull by Casey Moores

Author:Casey Moores [Moores, Casey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seventh Seal Press
Published: 2020-11-09T22:00:00+00:00

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Chapter Twenty-Three

One Year Later

Kohsay System

Jimmy Francis found it nerve wracking to sit in the control room of the massive salvage ship where he could only observe the recovery operation. After Snowmass, he’d learned to fly shuttles, docking ships, corvettes, yachts, and even large freighters such as the Sevan Brasil in which he sat. Over that same decade, he’d done his first spacewalks and become comfortable performing external maintenance.

After he’d joined the now defunct shadowy rescue outfit, he’d learned a great many more skills. And not just weapons. As the Deputy Head of Transportation for the Company, he’d learned large-scale logistics, operational scheduling, maintenance scheduling, training plans, and mentoring, ad nauseum. Upon returning to the world of civilian salvage operations, he found himself overqualified to simply fly a ship. It had been apparent to the chief executive officer, as well. Mr. Antonowicz had immediately recognized Francis’ organizational aptitude and offered him the chief of operations position after only three months.

Two years later, James Francis found himself effectively running Intergalactic Salvage, a company that claimed its existence reached nearly as far back as the Alpha Contracts. As with most salvage companies across the galaxy, they mostly sought quick, easy, low-risk scores. As Francis took on more oversight, however, he convinced Mr. Antonowicz to budget for a larger security team, which led to a greater acceptance of risk in their operations. It had paid off. They had not yet encountered a greater risk than they could handle, and the payoffs had increased greatly.

Intergalactic Salvage had essentially become a battle-chasing company. His information sources and merc contacts notified him, for a fee, of when and where major actions were likely to take place. Intergalactic Salvage would time their arrival into a system to coincide with the expected cessation of hostilities between opposing merc units. Then they would ride in after the battle and clean up whatever was available. It usually required a substantial payment to the winning party, but said party was usually completely uninterested in wasting time collecting what they had just destroyed. Most were happy to receive a payment and let someone else do all the time-consuming dirty work while they resumed whatever scheme had necessitated a merc unit in the first place.

It was win-win. If Intergalactic Salvage emerged into a firefight, it was almost never a problem, especially since they could demonstrate their own defensive capabilities. They made it clear that anyone who attacked them first would become their target. Most opponents in ongoing battles were not keen on adding to the forces arrayed against them.

It was all a bluff, as Antonowicz had paid for targeting systems and mock weapon ports, but little actual weaponry. The boss was motivated by little more than the bottom line and kept expenses as low as possible.

But so far, the bluff had paid off.

The downside, however, was that ships defeated in space battles, or equipment left behind after a terrestrial battle, were frequently riddled with unexpended ordnance, unstable systems, or worst of all, survivors.

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