The Deadliest Moop

The Nations paid good money to clear the orbits. With five-hundred-million tonnes of shredded moop whipping around Earth, most of it no bigger than a half meter, hardly anyone wanted to risk coming up out of gravity. You could send out a robot freighter and cross your fingers, but living cargo? Leave it to the military jocks.

Until then, no one had figured out how to make space habitats profitable, and who wanted to live in a pressurized can when you could set your foot on solid earth—or Luna? Even a cold-ass, dark corner of Antarctica beat out space. Air, water, gravity: there was a lot to like about that, even at eighty below.

The Satellite War changed all that. You had all these spacers stuck in orbit, all the solar power in the universe, and as soon as the crabbers started hauling in moop, plenty of good quality building material. Snag it, haul it to the Lagranges and dump it, and there it stood out of harm’s way and ready for some tinkerer to start building away. A couple of old crabbers who’d had one close call too many built a smelter, started inflating big aluminum balloons, and quicker than you could say “shore leave,” you had Dutch, the crabbers paradise, named after the old Aleutian port, of course.

They called it the squid ’cuz that’s what it looked like: a torpedo-shaped cylinder with fifteen wriggly arms that unrolled five meters long after Sheila dumped it out of the cage with a bunch of other moop onto the sorting belt. The body wasn’t more than two meters, if that, clean and shiny and not pitted like it would have been if it had been in space for longer than a decade. Pretty much everything in orbit had been up there at least a decade, and the squid should have been pockmarked or sandblasted from millions of micrometeors—only it hadn’t.

Ain’t aright for damn sure.

Sven pulled the squid off the belt into a bin. Ian and Todd had to swim over to Sven and keep the belt moving. Moop stuck to it, little teeth around the half-round pipe moving stuff along. Sheila dumped the last pot and the three of them finished the sorting—nothing more of consequence, just lots and lots of dull gray fragments—all the time eyeing that squid. Sven had sorted a few shinys, nice clean pieces of steel, but that squid held their attention, for all sorts of dang reasons.

Ian ran through the list in his head:

A) It was intact.

B) It didn’t look like anything in space they’d ever seen, and all they hadn’t, courtesy of endless watches browsing Gilbert’s Catalogue of 100,000 Satellites and Other Orbital Debris.

C) And, oh yeah, it was intact.

“What you dickheads starin’ at?” Cap yelled over the loud hail.

Ian looked over at the observation deck. Cap, nice and comfy behind thick Lexan, saw him standing there, hands on hips. “Got us an anomaly, Captain,” he said. You never said Cap to his face.

“Anomaly?” Cap asked. He moved a camera on a boom arm out over the salvage bin, scanned it up and down. “Bring it in,” he said.

“Uh, Captain…” Sheila started to say.

“Bring it in.”

She glanced over at Ian, and he nodded. He was deck boss, he’d take the grief.

“Captain, Nations protocol calls for an anomaly to be quarantined,” Ian said. That meant tagged and bagged and left on deck for some Nations investigator to handle. Good idea, Ian thought.

“Bring it in,” Cap said.

“I’m gonna have to log a protest,” Ian said. That was the union rule, too. If your captain made a bad decision, you covered your ass by making a protest.

“So logged. And Deck Boss?” Captain banged the thick port. “Bring it in.”

That would be the second dumb thing they did: bringing in the squid. The first dumb thing had been catching it in the first place, or not dumping it once they realized what they had. But, you know, it looked all shiny, they’d say later. That was the thing about crabbing: you saw so much dull gray junk that the shiny stuff made you want to reach down and pick it up, like bright blue sea-glass on a white beach.

Idiots. They brought it in.

Cap had the sense to keep the squid sealed in the big garage lock, strapped at six points, those weird tentacles flopping loose in zero gee. The crew floated in through the little airlock in the tunnel running along the spine of the ship. They looked out at the squid through a nice thick viewport, still in their suits, Sheila standing by at the panic button, ready to slam shut the port shutters should anything get hinky.

We’re way beyond hinky already, Ian thought. Light-years.

Sheila ran a scanner on a little boom arm over the squid, the scanner’s big camera recording away down to macro, mapping every pit, scratch, dit, and dot. It ran into the hot spectrums, too, temperature and radiation, all that stuff.

“We’ll blow it if it’s at all hot,” Cap swore, the first sensible thing he’d said since “bring it in.” Only sensible thing so far.