The boarding ramp dropped and made a sort of plop noise as it settled, then sunk an inch or two into the gray mud of their landing pad. From the ramp, Jax looked around. “Well, this is disgusting.” He looked around, seeing the Osprey ’s landing gear settling into the muck.
From behind him, Kori said, “I’m not stepping in that.”
From behind her, Naomi added, “Me, either.”
“These are the only boots I brought,” Steve offered.
Rudy appeared at the top of the ramp. “A ground vehicle should be here shortly. I booked it to take you two into town.” He tossed Naomi a data tablet. “That’s got everything Mr. Ichiko provided on it.” She caught the device and nodded.
A few minutes later, what could only be described as a motorized cargo vehicle with oversized knobby tires rolled up. It was automated, the onboard RI capable of driving the thing and nothing more. Rudimentary Intelligences, or RIs, had no personality or feelings of any type. They were not self-aware. The cart moved as close as it could to the boarding ramp, but Jax still had to jump from the ramp to the vehicle. Naomi made the jump a bit more gracefully than Jax. As she dropped into the seat opposite him, she reached forward and slammed her open palm on the cab. “Let’s go.” The vehicle beeped twice and accelerated away from the Osprey, kicking up a rooster tail of mud that clung to the underside of the infiltrator. Kori shied away from the spray, moving back up into the ship and pushing Steve ahead of her.
The town of Abda, according to the WikiGalaxia entry Jax had looked at aboard the Osprey, had a population of about fifteen thousand people, nearly all miners or in mining adjacent fields. From what he could put together, plus what little Ichiko had shared, Abda was mostly small coop efforts, plus a handful of large mining concerns. The coop Ichiko represented was one of the mid-sized efforts. The town further up the line was mostly the larger mining conglomerates.
The ground car came to a halt. The driver RI beeped three times, then four times. Jax looked at Naomi. “Do you know what it wants?”
She shrugged. “Why would I? I don’t speak droid.”
He looked at her, then raised both hands and wiggled his fingers. “You know, your computer talk mojo thing.” She sighed.
Before she could try to interface with the ground car’s RI, Rudy said, “It’s saying you’re there. ” Through his earpiece. Jax looked around, “Really?” The ground car repeated its beeps. “Okay, okay, fine.” He climbed out of the vehicle. Naomi followed.
As the ground vehicle trundled away, Jax approached a grease-covered man in worn overalls. “Excuse me, we’re looking for someone. Adamic, Tommy Adamic. He’s a foreman at the depot.”
The burly miner looked Jax, then Naomi, up and down. “If he’s the foreman of the depot, then I guess he’d be at the depot, don’t you think?” He smirked and pushed Jax aside, continuing on to where ever he had been going.
Jax frowned. “Rude.” He raised his voice. “And the depot would be where?”
From fifty feet away, the miner held an arm up, his hand pointed to the north.
Naomi followed the gesture, then retrieved her gPhone from her jacket pocket. “Let’s go. We can scope out the depot, then see if our soon-to-be friend Adamic has a bar he likes. Guessing the workday here ends in about two hours.” She held up her gPhone so Jax could see the clock. He nodded.
The depot was on the outer edge of town, where the train line ran past on its way to Salma and the spaceport there. “There’s mud everywhere.” Jax complained, tapping his boot against a perimeter fence post. The depot sprawled nearly a kilometer of storage barns and stockyards. Men in power loaders wandered the grounds, moving immense crates of ore from barn to staging area in preparation of the train’s arrival in a few days. Each crate and barn was labeled with the coop or company the ore belonged to.
Naomi watched. “So...” she trailed off, lost in thought for a moment, watching the activity below. She pointed to a storage unit being carried by two power loaders. “Those must be the cargo modules that they load onto the train. Big.” She turned and put a finger over Jax’s mouth to stop the joke he was about to tell. “Can the Osprey lift one of those?” The modules were indeed quite big. It looked like each train car must hold two modules. The tops of the modules looked like they hinged open, likely how the ore was dumped in. In the distance, a heavy large wheeled vehicle rumbled. The back had a large rail-like protrusion, probably how the modules mounted on to it.
Jax watched the two power loaders move the cargo unit into position near the rail tracks. He tapped his chin as he thought. “Not for long, no. We’ll have to figure something out.” He took his gPhone out of his pocket and began snapping pictures, sending them back to the Osprey and the waiting Kori and Steve.
Naomi watched the men and women operating the loaders. “Bet twenty years ago, this whole place would have been automated. All droids.”
“I don’t think this colony existed twenty years ago, but yeah, almost certainly it would have been mostly droids.” He turned his head to look at her. “Say what you will—and I have a lot to say about him—the Emperor’s hatred of droids and AI has pretty much zeroed out the unemployment rate.” He scowled, thinking of the man responsible for his parent’s deaths. “If someone wants to work, there’s work to be had, somewhere.”
“On a stinky mud planet, deep in a mine,” Naomi replied. She looked at her companion from the corner of her eye. He hadn’t said much about the Empire during their trip so far, and despite her admitting that she was the product of Imperial engineering, he didn’t seem to be holding it against her.
* * *
Back on the Osprey, Steve’s gPhone buzzed. He and Kori were on the common deck having a snack at the small table set against the bulkhead. Between them a tablet sat on the table with a schematic on it. Kori watched him take his gPhone and examine it. When Steve didn’t immediately offer any details she said, “What? What’s going on?” She leaned over to see his gPhone.
Steve offered his phone to her then stood. “Hey...” He looked at her. “What’s the combat droid’s name again?”
“Baxter,” the speaker in the ceiling offered.
Steve looked up. “Thanks.” He turned. “Hey, Baxter, care to join me in the hold? I want to work out some design ideas.”
“I’m already in the hold,” the droid replied, his voice coming from the stairwell.