Salvage Title Read online

  Salvage Title

  Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy

  By

  Kevin Steverson

  PUBLISHED BY: Theogony Books

  Copyright © 2018 Kevin Steverson

  All Rights Reserved

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  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  Acknowledgements

  First, I would like to thank the good Lord above for everything...literally, everything.

  I want to thank my wife, Stacey, for encouraging me to just write the story and allowing me to talk things through with her. I realize now that she never really gave me an opinion, she just listened, and it helped immensely.

  A grateful thank you goes out to my publisher Chris Kennedy. He took a chance on me and I'll never forget it.

  Thanks to the guys in Cypress Spring for their friendship and support. Chasing dreams is no easy task, something they know full well.

  I can't forget the guys that read my writing first, Mike and Dustin. Some things they read for me will never see the light of day. Thanks guys.

  Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my Mother and Father. She was an avid science fiction fan. And I'm sure she read it over my shoulder as I typed. I followed my Father's footsteps into the Army, I know he would have liked the military aspects of the story.

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  Cover Design by Dawn Grimes

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Book One of In Revolution Born:

  Excerpt from Book One of the Earth Song Cycle:

  Excerpt from Book One of The Psyche of War:

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  Chapter One

  Four tons of steel and armor plating hung in the air, swaying slightly from the sudden stop of the grappler’s claws. Harmon Tomeral wiped the sweat off his brow before it could run down into his eyes. It was a hot one out there…again, he thought. He was inside an eighty-ton machine with cool air blowing full blast, and he still felt the heat from outside.

  The machine’s official name was the Scrap Mover 80 XL. Everybody who worked at Rinto’s Scrap Yard just called it the Grappler. It was a cross between a battle tank, an excavator, and a mech. Its base was like a tank, sitting on huge tracks with a humanoid-shaped cockpit on top. In addition to the blade up front there were two “arms” that extended out of the body, which each ended in four-fingered claws.

  Harmon had been moving scrap from the giant pile in front of the conveyer to the belt that brought it into the furnace building. Once there, it was melted down, separated, and processed into half-ton blocks to be shipped to the factories here on Joth, as well as off-planet to various shipbuilding sites and factories.

  It was a profitable business for Rinto. Scrap from sections of ships, battle stations, spaceports, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and even old mechs were melted down to become material for more of the same. Most of the time, it came down to the planet having already been cut into manageable chunks. Once salvagers claimed rights on anything they couldn’t sell whole, they cut it up with lasers, loaded it into haulers, and brought it down to Rinto. He was the only game in town, since Rinto’s was the only recycler on the planet that dealt in it.

  It was junk. For the most part, anything truly valuable found by the salvagers was kept on their ship to be sold in other, more advanced planets in other systems, not in a place like Joth. The system had a shipbuilding industry, sure, but everything needed to build spacecraft was fabricated on Tretra, the other inhabited planet in the system. The parts were then sent out to the shipyards in orbit around Tretra.

  That planet. Harmon hated that planet. It was nothing like Joth. It was all blues and greens, puffy white clouds, beautiful beaches, and mountains. It was so picture perfect it made him sick. Harmon new better.

  It was also where the Tretrayon System Academy was located. The academy where he graduated from the Officer Training Program in the top ten percent. The top fifteen percent were supposed to be guaranteed an active commissioned slot into the Tretrayon Defensive Fleet. Only that didn’t happen; politics happened. He wasn’t from Tretra. He was from the planet Joth and was attending on a warball scholarship. It was all well and good when he led the team to the System School Championship three years in a row—but to let him actively serve in the System Defense Fleet as an officer just wasn’t going to happen. Politics.

  Harmon shook his head and pulled himself from the memory. The grappler’s arms swung the load of scrap metal to the wide belt, and Harmon spun the body back around and reached for more. The machine moved with precision and, on occasion just to see if he could, he would pick up small pieces with the huge claws to maintain his delicate touch on the controls. The work Clip had done to its servos, programming, and guidance made them seem like part of him, and it was nothing short of genius.

  He called Clip on the Grappler’s comms unit. “Hey Clip.”

  “Hey man, what’s up?” Clip’s voice sounded hollow, as if he was inside something.

  “I haven’t found anything useful today. No motors, servos, or power cells are in this new load. I thought for sure I would find something. The Wren said he brought it in from outside the system, but today has officially sucked for our project. Do you think Rinto would let us have some of the good stuff from the warehouse?” Harmon asked.

  “I can ask, but I doubt it. He doesn’t mind us taking a little something here or there as long as it isn’t too valuable. You know he likes to make those credits where he can.” Clip sounded a little clearer.

  Whatever he was working on, he was outside of it now. Harmon looked at the time display. “Well, it’ll be quitting time here in about thirty minutes; I was hoping to find the power cell we need to test it. If I don’t find anything today, we’ll have to try next weekend.”

  “Alright, man…owww!” Harmon heard a sizzle and pop as Clip answered, and he smiled.

  Clip Kolget was a great computer tech and programmer but was only a fair mechanic and electrician. He could take apart and repair or build just about anything. All he needed was the material and some ti
me. The material didn’t have to be exactly right, either. He could adapt, rewire, and reprogram most things to get the desired results. Well, close to what you needed anyway, even if he did get shocked. A lot.

  Harmon and Clip were friends but acted more like brothers. They had grown up together in “the system.” Their entire town had been destroyed when it was covered in a freak sandstorm when they were eight years old. The news vids had called it the storm of the century. There had only been fourteen survivors when the rescue teams had finally dug down to the elementary school basement. It was the only structure still somewhat intact after the storm swept in from the Great Middle Desert.

  In reality, the whole planet was a desert. In the winter, it only got down to the low nineties at the poles. On days like today, it could reach one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. Their town wasn’t the only one to get swallowed up in that storm, and a lot of children had been brought to the city from the wastelands.

  Moving the grappler forward, Harmon decided to drop one more load onto the conveyer belt and call it quits for the week. The arms reached out, and the claws dug in, but a warning light flashed yellow twice. Something had stopped the claw on the right arm from closing. Great. Now I have to get out in this heat. He really didn’t mind doing it, though. It happened several times a week, and sometimes he found items they needed. He just wished it had happened earlier in the day.

  Before he opened the cockpit of the machine, he scraped away all the junk he could from where the claw had been caught. He could see there was a twelve-by-twelve container still connected to a piece of bulkhead. It looked like a sealed room from a corvette, the kind of ship he had trained on for two summers while at the academy. He could see the access panel on the front of the container. He had no idea how this could have gotten past the salvage company when they were cutting the ship into sections. Their screw-up was his good luck.

  He made a call to Clip, then cracked the cockpit seal on the grappler. Immediately, he felt the heat pour into the pilot area. He didn’t care, though; there might be something they needed inside the vault. He could hope, anyway.

  He was standing in front of the container when Clip floated up in an ancient hovercraft that was far past its usefulness anywhere outside of Rinto’s property. Its motor rattled and blew a little smoke, but it was fine for getting around the thousand-acre junkyard. Clip left it running and hopped off the low-hanging side. It was about a foot closer to the ground. Clip could fix it, of course; he just hadn’t gotten around to it. His days were filled with repairing equipment and machinery that helped Rinto turn a profit.

  “Alright, what do we have here?” He clapped and rubbed his hands together. Harmon noticed that one of his glove fingers had a hole and a scorch mark on the back of it.

  Clip reached into the hovercraft and grabbed his kit. It was a backpack full of tools, small lasers, diagnostic equipment, some small power cells, and his sound box.

  The sound box was his own creation—he had been reading about antique technology again. The iPod had been invented thousands of years before, back on Earth; he thought it was cool to have something dedicated solely to music and nothing else. Clip had made his own version with an external speaker as well as the ability to link to his earpiece. Sure, he could listen to music from his slate via the Galactic Net, but unless he was connected to the net, the slate was limited to what he had previously downloaded. It couldn’t hold all the music that his sound box held, either. He said the sound box held all the music.

  Clip liked to tell anyone who cared to listen that he not only had all of Earth’s music, but also everything put out in all of the human systems as well. It also held a lot of music other races had created. Harmon didn’t believe it. Sure, it held a lot of music, but there were thousands of known races. There was no way it had that kind of storage.

  Harmon stood back as Clip went to work on the access panel. Music was blaring from the box, and Harmon recognized it. Bootleg Style by Cypress Spring from the twenty-first century. Nice choice. The classics were still the classics. He wondered what a southern girl was, compared to the other girls on Earth back then. Clip would probably know.

  The first thing Clip did was get power to the door and the access panel. Two of his power cells did the trick once he had them wired to the container. He then pulled out his slate and connected it. It lit up, and his fingers flew across it. It took him a few minutes to establish a link, then he programmed it to search for the combination to the access panel.

  “Is it from a human ship?” Harmon asked, curious.

  “I don’t think so, but it doesn’t matter; ones and zeros are still ones and zeros when it comes to computers. It’s universal. I mean, there are some things you have to know to get other races’ computers to run right, but it’s not that hard,” Clip said.

  Harmon shook his head. Riiigghht, he thought. He knew better. Clip’s intelligence test results were completely off the charts. Clip opted to go to work at Rinto’s right after secondary school because there was nothing for him to learn at the colleges and universities on either Tretra or Joth. He could have received academic scholarships for advanced degrees on a number of nearby systems. He could have even gone all the way to Earth and attended the University of Georgia if he wanted. The problem was getting there. The schools would have provided free tuition if he could just have paid to get there.

  Secondary school had been rough on Clip. He was a small guy that made excellent grades without trying. It would have been worse if Harmon hadn’t let everyone know that Clip was his brother. They lived in the same foster center, so it was mostly true. The first day of school, Harmon had laid down the law—if you messed with Clip, you messed up.

  At the age of fourteen, he beat three seniors senseless for attempting to put Clip in a trash container. One of them was a Yalteen, a member of a race of large humanoids from two systems over. It wasn’t a fair fight—they should have brought more people with them. Harmon hated bullies.

  After the suspension ended, the school’s Warball coach came to see him. He started that season as a freshman and worked on using it to earn a scholarship to the academy. By the time he graduated, he was six feet two inches with two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle. He got the scholarship and a shot at going into space. It was the longest time he’d ever spent away from his foster brother, but he couldn’t turn it down.

  Clip stayed on Joth and went to work for Rinto. He figured it was a job that would get him access to all kinds of technical stuff, servos, motors, and maybe even some alien computers. The first week he was there, he tweaked the equipment and increased the plant’s recycled steel production by 12 percent. Rinto was eternally grateful, as it put him solidly into the profit column instead of toeing the line between profit and loss. When Harmon came back to the planet after the academy, Rinto hired him on the spot on Clip’s recommendation. After he saw Harmon operate the grappler and got to know him, he was glad he did.

  A steady beeping brought Harmon back to the present. Clip’s program had succeeded in unlocking the container. “Right on!” Clip exclaimed. He was always using expressions hundreds or more years out of style. “Let’s see what we have; I hope this one isn’t empty, too.” Last month they’d come across a smaller vault, but it had been empty.

  Harmon stepped up and wedged his hands into the small opening the door had made when it disengaged the locks. There wasn’t enough power in the small cells Clip used to open it any further. He put his weight into it, and the door opened enough for them to get inside. Before they went in, Harmon placed a piece of pipe in the doorway so it couldn’t close and lock on them, baking them alive before anyone realized they were missing.

  Daylight shone in through the doorway, and they both froze in place; the weapons vault was full. In it were two racks of rifles, stacked on top of each other. One held twenty magnetic kinetic rifles, and the other held some type of laser rifle. There was a rack of pistols of various types. There were three cases of flechet
te grenades and one of thermite. There were cases of ammunition and power clips for the rifles and pistols, and all the weapons looked to be in good shape, even if they were of a strange design and clearly not made in this system. Harmon couldn’t tell what system they had been made in, but he could tell what they were.

  There were three upright containers on one side and three more against the back wall that looked like lockers. Five of the containers were not locked, so Clip opened them. The first three each held two sets of light battle armor that looked like it was designed for a humanoid race with four arms. The helmets looked like the ones Harmon had worn at the academy, but they were a little long in the face. The next container held a heavy battle suit—one that could be sealed against vacuum. It was also designed for a being with four arms. All the armor showed signs of wear, with scuffed helmets. The fifth container held shelves with three sizes of power cells on them. The largest power cells—four of them—were big enough to run a mech.

  Harmon tried to force the handle open on the last container, thinking it may have gotten stuck over time, but it was locked and all he did was hurt his hand. The vault seemed like it had been closed for years.

  Clip laughed and said, “That won’t work. It’s not age or metal fatigue keeping the door closed. Look at this stuff. It may be old, but it has been sealed in for years. It’s all in great shape.”

  “Well, work some of your tech magic then, ‘Puter Boy,” Harmon said, shaking out his hand.

  Clip pulled out a small laser pen and went to work on the container. It took another ten minutes, but finally he was through to the locking mechanism. It didn’t take long after that to get it open.

  Inside, there were two items—an eight-inch cube on a shelf that looked like a hard drive or a computer and the large power cell it was connected to. Harmon reached for it, but Clip grabbed his arm.