"Space people. Universal love."
- Clinton & Worrell
Sitting at the command console of the Kis Dió, Béla lit a joint and nudged the volume up on Planet Claire.
He was in the final stages of a relatively large unsponsored salvage job 1,750km above the surface of Earth. His fleet of drones could handle most of what work remained. So, Béla took the opportunity to unwind a bit as the moon rose over the Arabian Peninsula.
"Absolutely goddamned awe-inspiring," he exhaled.
Béla was talking to himself.
The Kis Dió wasn't built for company. Other than the command console's cushy chair, it was a pretty spartan affair. Behind Béla there was a workbench, a zero-g water closet, a cot, and the door to the cargo bay. Béla kept a clean ship and wasn't much for decorating. The cabin looked like it had just cleared the assembly plant, for the most part. There were two little flourishes that made the ship his own.
The first was a printed snapshot Béla had stuck to the console shortly after purchasing the Kis Dió. It was a photograph of his childhood sailboat. Béla had captured the shot himself while standing waist-deep in shallow water. The little Pirate dinghy is moored to a buoy in front of the shoreline reeds of Balatonlelle. No one is on board. The sail is up but slack. The lake has that familiar cloudy blue glow of white silt and sunlight. To the right of the Pirate and just a bit closer to shore, a collection of brightly colored fiberglass paddle boats are anchored and waiting for renters. Béla was fourteen when he took the photo. It was shortly after he restored the boat and dubbed it the Nagy Dió.
The second flourish hung beside the door to the cargo bay. It was a framed theatrical poster for The Ice Pirates - not the reboot. Beyond that, the walls were white and the floor was industrial grey. Really not much to look at. Which was fine because Béla spent most of his time aboard the Kis Dió looking through the large forward porthole. With a massive row of thunderheads over the Caspian, Béla inhaled a bit extra, wondering if he had time to get out the easel to do some painting.
An indicator lit up, tugging at Béla's attention. The status signal for his drone fleet began to pulse a steady tone just out of sync with the B-52s. His bots had each caught their assigned hunks of a long-defunct communications satellite. They would now link back together before coupling with the Kis Dió.
Béla tapped the console, acknowledging the transition. He muttered, "Easy is sexy," nodding in agreement with himself as he turned back to take in more of the view.
Béla was happy he got to this job when he did. The sat's orbit had started to decay just twelve hours earlier. His personal network of scanning probes caught it before Near Earth Safety posted anything on the cleanup schedule. It had probably been struck by unidentified debris.
Clearing out the scrap was bound to become a NES priority; the larger parts were certainly going to present a threat to low-orbit infrastructure. But what was even more concerning, according to Béla's models, was the unacceptably high probability that the debris would strike Anchor's tether. It was urgent, even if NES hadn't figured that out yet. Nevertheless, the job was simple enough, and getting here fast gave Béla enough time to capture the stuff worth recycling.
Once the drones were linked and coupled to his module, Béla would haul the whole mess back to his workshop on Anchor. Once there, he could repurpose the scrap, building more drones for his salvage operation. Closing that loop was always deeply satisfying for Béla.
And he would have enjoyed that sense of satisfaction this go-around were it not for the distress call from La plaça del Diamant.
He read the details on his monitor.
Béla wasn't happy about it, but he was gonna have to drop the scrap.
Lives took priority. He extinguished the joint.
He logged the debris and, along with his video record, submitted the job into the Global Waste Removal League's leaderboard. It pushed him into the top three. So, at least there was that.
He was about to guide the load into a clean re-entry burn when he noticed something unusual. His drones had used nearly a quarter of their charge already. It didn't pose a problem, but that was way more than they should have used at this point in the job.
The drones were little more than electric propulsion units on robotic arms fitted with magnets and clamps. They captured debris and hauled it back to the command module. Nothing fancy. But Béla had been at this long enough to know how much charge it should have taken to reach the linking stage of the operation.
He was going to have to run a diagnostic when he returned home. He retained the closest load of scrap to facilitate that diagnostic. That closest load was in the cargo bay before the more distant drones had even started recoupling with the ship. So, it didn't delay him from carrying out the rescue order.
He did have to get a move on. The distress call was urgent, and according to orbital logs, Béla was commanding the only catch and capture fleet in the vicinity. So, once the remaining drones coupled with his module, he calculated an intercept course and set off.
The Kis Dió only had to alter its current heading by a few degrees before accelerating enough to create three-quarters of a g. Béla took advantage by doing a few jumping jacks. After only three minutes, warning lights flashed, the ship began to reduce the rate of acceleration, and Béla buckled himself into the captain's chair. Back at zero gs, the command module flipped and the ship began to decelerate.
The feel of some gravity returned, but Béla stayed seated this time. There wasn't really enough time to properly use it. He did clip into the pedals under his console to get a few RPMs in before the ship returned to zero gs. That was better than nothing.
The
