Buying the big house, big and empty... 2017 or so.
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Quote:“That's 250 thousand,” the auctioneer announced, in a dessicated voice. “Do I have 260?”________________________________
Jet had the unique experience of watching herself watch herself across the room. Her Sylia Stingray body sat in the crowd, watching herself stood leaning against the wall because no chair would support her
The sock wore an outfit stolen straight from animé Sylia's wardrobe - OVA Sylia of course, not the silver-haired loon. A high-collared, midriff-baring sleeveless blouse under an elegent business suit, just the thing for those into retrofuturistic chic. A tight dark skirt kept things proper below the waist... and made walking a straight up pain. And the hair dye still stank.
Jet could feel her heart pounding. She wasn't sure if it was the tension, or just the requirement to keep all the overclocked silicon in her head from cooking her organics. The concentration required to controls both bodies separate was already starting to wear on Jet's mind. Her hardware just wasn't set up for this level of multitasking, even with the additional computing power built into the puppet.
“260,” the madboy beside the puppet called out.
A Foglio, obviously. And a damned good one. Unlike the traditional steampunks, his gadgets worked.
“260, 270, do I hear 270?”
“270,” Jet said. She was staring down at the madboy the way only a cyber could.
“Don't get carried away,” Ford hissed inside her mind. “We can't go above 400. I think he'll go at least to six.”
“Chigusho,” Jet growled under her breath. Time for plan B. Jet had Sylia Stingray stretch, crossing her legs again, slowly tapping out an unheard beat with her foot.
“270, can I get 280?”
The madboy nodded. Jet was staring him down
“280, can we go to 300?” the auctioneer offered.
Jet was staring into those black, polarised goggles, trying to get a read on how far he was going to go. Sylia was watching him begin to sweat.
“Three hundred,” Jet said.
Sylia put her hand on the madboys leg. He started for a moment. Ahe whispered to him. “Don't you know who that is?”
“What?”
“That's three hundred to the cyber. Do I hear 320?”
“Yeah, 320,” he said, automatically, before returning his attention to the businesswoman sitting beside him. “Who?” he breathed.
“That's Jet Jaguar. Panzer Kunst, from Operation Great Justice.”
“320 to the Foglio. Can I get 340?”
“I like you, so I'ldd give you a credit's worth of free advice; Don't try to go with her.”
“Why?”
“She's backed by her faction to buy a training centre. The only way she'll back out is if she's paying stupid money, and that'll leave you holding a 300k asteroid for near a million,”
300 thousand was the guide price.
“340,” Jet said, unphased. Keep the poker face.
The Foglio glanced over at her, at the cyber at the wall still staring straight through him.
“You're supposed to be a Genius,” Sylia prodded. “Guess what'll happen when people find out you ended up paying twice was this rock's worth?”
“340, it's at 340... can I get 360?”
He was looking right at the Madboy.
“350.” the madboy offered.
Jet smothered a smirk. She'd gotten him thinking about limiting the damage. That was the crack. She just had to lever it often. You don't spend three years as a troubleshooter without learning a few things about manipulating people.
“360,” Jet called out, before the auctioneer had a chance.
The speed of it startled the Foglio. He glanced over at her, then at Sylia.
“Trust me,” Sylia said, fixing him with brilliant blue eyes, “You'll get caught up in it and outbid her only to make yourself look the fool in front of every Madboy out there.”
Sylia's voice was soft, almost unconcerned. It didn't matter to her.
“Why?” he hissed.
“I said, I like you,” Sylia whispered. In an occasional acquaintance sort of way. “I thought you should know what you're up against.”
“The bid stands at 360. Do I have 370?”
A few moments went by. The auctioneer scanned the crowd. A few of the Greenwood executives where whispering between themselves.
“370,” the madboy said, tentatively.
“Unless of course, you want a Pyrrhic victory. Don't forget, there're plenty more rocks in the belt.”
“370. That's 370. Can I get a 380?”
“380,” Jet said, calmly. She looked to be just getting into her stride. I could go all night, that's what she was trying to broadcast.
“Of course, that's your decision, not mine. But part of poker is knowing when to fold, and not letting your ego write your cheques..”
“380.. 380 to the floor. Can I get 400?” the auctioneer requested.
The madboy was thinking. Sylia could hear something ticking under his leather jacket, almost like his mind ticking over. He sucked on his lips.
“All done at 380?”
The madboy looked up, looked at Jet, then at Sylia. Jet swallowed... had he figured it out? Now, now was the critical time. The few heartbeats as he thought it over. She slid Sylia's hand up his leg just a little bit... just a slight suggestion.
Jet was backed by a faction that wanted that rock. Jet was backed by a faction that had pockets enough to order their own Space Shuttle. Jet wouldn't back down off the table until things had gotten to stupid money. And if he pushed her to the point where she'd back down, he'd be the one paying silly money for an empty rock.
Jet hoped that's what he was thinking.
She made conscious effort not to move.
Come on you bastard, make the natural choice. You're not going to outbid a faction, don't even waste your time trying. Don't you dare call my bluff.
“Once,” said the auctioneer. “Twice,” Jet stared him down. “All done at 380?” Last chance. “Sold!” The hammer fell with a gunshot crack, “To the lady in the white armour for 380 thousand”
“Let her feel like the idiot,” Sylia soothed.
Jet was grinning. She quietly slipped out of the room, leaving her puppet alter-ego behind for a few more minutes.
“Ford,” she radioed. “I got the thing. I got the rock!”
-----
Former Mayor and CEO of the defunct New-Birmingham asteroid mine, Jacob Pinkard heaved a sigh, which was immediately swallowed by the dry, rusting air of the landing bay. He was short, stocky with a cheerful demeanour that did it's best to hide the fact that he was a man who had just witnessed his life's dream and work torn apart by like carrion for the corporate vultures.
“Well,” he said in his deep drawl, “I'm afraid we can't give you a map of the workings down below, they took the computers before we could get printouts for ya Miss Jaguar,”
“It's no problem,” said Jet, staring into the distance, feeling just a little ashamed for picking the bones of a good man's dream.
The landing bay though, was huge. Floodlights were stars on a rough rock ceiling.
It had been blasted out to accommodate the largest bulk ore carriers in Fenspace, with direct access to the ore-plant in another cavern. The cyber scuffed her metal heels off the steel floor.
“Rockhounds boys took near everything from us in the sale. All the plant, most of the fittings, and everything but the walls and the dome in the accommodation block. The powerhouse is still there, so there's gravity, electricity and oxygen through the rock, but not much else.”
Jet just nodded. The big solar-thermal generators couldn't be removed, and without removing them, it wasn't possible to get the oxygen and gravity systems. A stroke of luck really. A gantry crane spanned the bay, also too big to remove, BIG BEA printed on it in big, black letters. It was designed to move tonnes of ore at a time. Even with the gravity field turned off it needed to be strong to handle that much mass.
“If you don't mind me asking, Miss Jaguar, what do you plan to do to this place? It's not viable for a mine anymore, not even Rockhounds could make it profitable,”
“Why're you asking?” Jet responded.
“Well,” he smiled, “I'd hate to see a decent person like yourself left ruined by this old stone,”
“I was hoping to set up a martial art's school in the accommodation block,” Jet said. “And what I paid for this, I would've had to pay to stake a claim on my own rock and outfit it up and it still wouldn't have been half what's here.”
The ex-Mayor nodded, stroking thoughtfully at his chin. “Still, it must've been a hell of a loan,”
Jet smirked, “Who ever heard of a bank giving a loan to someone who couldn't pay it back?”
“Hah!” Pinkard laughed. “Yup. Well I suppose I'll just have to wish you luck. I hope the ol' stone is better luck for you than it was for us,”
“Thanks,” Jet said, making a conscious effort not to look at him. She was head and shoulders taller than him, and really didn't want to feel like she was looking down at the poor guy.
He offered a handshake, which Jet carefully accepted, trying not to break bones.
“Well,m be seeying you I guess,” he said.
His winnebago was a little white dinky toy lost in the bay.
“Laters man,” Jet responded.
She listened to him leaving, the RV's engines whining up with a turbine howl. it didn't even bother lifting off, it just turned and drove off towards the hatch leaving a haze of dust behind it.
Jet felt like a shit. She felt like the worst example of capitalist piggery, eating from the trough of other people's misfortunes. The whole town was leaving for the final time, leaving just herself alone on an asteroid with living quarters for over a hundred.
She knew she hadn't evicted them. Jet'd even offered to let them stay, but they had to leave. The receivers took all the furniture and fittings from their homes and sold it all off to meet the mine's debts. There was nowhere for them to stay anymore.
Jet the robber baron. Shit. she kicked a pebbled and it launched airborn, arcing away before landing not even halfway to the far end. It clattered to the floor, echoing in the vast tomb she stood in.
Rocks were cheap in space. Just stick a transponder on the one you want and call it yours, provided no-one got there first. Actually fitting the things out to live on, that was the expensive part. Expensive in money and time.
They could've spent the same amount on a virgin rock, and not have gotten a tenth of what was there.
What was it Jacob had said? “That's Capitalism, Jet. One man's loss is another's opportunity,” The Winnebago left through an airlock built into the main door, sirens and alarms sounding out one last time before the hatch slammed shut.
Jet was left alone in the loading bay.
It was still a crying shame. She paced around the bay, glancing at the overhead galleries, and airlock-sealed passages leading away down into the mining works, storage bays and hangars.
For hiding a secret base, it was perfect.
----
The accommodation block was beyond dark. Even the lighting had been sold off. Ford was navigating solely by torchlight, a bright pool of blue light in jet-black passageways.
“Like some shitty horror,” she muttured to herself, picking her way forwards through the gloom. A cold breath exhaled along the corridor, chased by the distant boom of a slamming door. It sent chills through her body, shadows morphing into giegeresque monstrosities in her perpiheral vision.
The walls were painted a soft white, with a blue stripe at waist height, Jet's favoured colours. The floors where an industrial green with a fading sheen. Emergency lowlighting had long since run out of power, but glass strips still slashed with arcing sparks of reflections thrown off by her torch.
She found a door and shouldered it open, near falling into a room. Bright sunlight stabbed at her eyes, chased by a heat that made her feel like she'd jumped into the flash of an atomic bomb. Blinking, it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust.
Sunlight was pouring through three portholes looking out into open space. She glanced around. Nothing but bare walls and dangling wires taped off for safety. There were obvious marks on the wall where a cooker had once been. Ventilation ducts crossed the ceiling to exhaust any fumes.A strange distant thunder seemed to roll through the ductwork, chased by a breath of fresh air as the air-recirculators kicked back in. Piping for a sink and dishwasher had been left orphaned and sealed off, while a dirty square on the floor marked where the refrigerator had once been.
It was the worker's mess. It still smelled of seven years worth of French fries. It was a smell that seemed to be painted to the industrial walls.
Ford left the door open, like the others, this one allowing a shaft of sunlight to illuminate the corridor behind her. Now she only had to pick her way through a reflected twilight. There was still a load of crap scatteredon the floors... old piping, tools, anything that could've been dropped in a hurry.
She keyed open her comms, speaking through a mic. “Jet, Jet, you got your ears on?”
“Yeah, what's up,” Jet's voice answered back.
“Looks like I found the first subsurface sections,” she said. “Worker's mess has open windows.” She sighed through her teeth, “And it's about damn time too, I'm getting sick of groping through the dark,”
Jet laughed. “There's fuck-all left in the control room. I've got generator control, some of the external doors, a lightspeed radio set and a lot of bare walls and empty racks.“ a pause. “I think I might be able to get emergency lighting, gimme a second.”
A moment passed. Ford made her way to the next door, shining her light up at the label plate.
“Infirmary,” she read, then kicked it open with a bang. Sunlight exploded into the corridor, chased by a screaming klaxon alarm. She damn near launched out of her own boots, cursing as a bolt of fear shot through her body riding a wave of adrenaline.
Yellow lights pulsed in time with the alarms, throwing rotating shadows which flashed and slashed around the edges of her vision. Cursing, she reached reflexively for her gun. Pressure doors swung shut with a hollow bang.
“What the hell?” She fiddled with her mic. “Jet, was that you?” she demanded.
“Yeah, my bad,” Jet responded.
“You scared the hell out of me!”
“Sorry,” Jet said, calmly. “All the controls are gone, I'm mucking around in the relay box here with jumper cables and my fingers. Just.... one... minute..”
The alarms died a moment later.
“Jet....”
Something snapped and crackled in the background. “Chigusho! Stupid thing. Come on!”
The lights jammed full on, illuminating everything with a golden hue.
“And the doors?”
“I cut the power to the locks. They should open when you push them,”
Ford pushed the door with the rubber sole of her boot. No use risking getting electrocuted because Jet's being a bit madgirl with the local power supply. It latched open and she edged past.
Medicine cabinets still hung on the walls, but except for a few containers of guacamole, all the medicines and equipment had been taken. A laminated poster still taped to the wall advised what to do if caught in a handwavium spill.
Think happy thoughts, Ford thought.
She left each door she passed latched open, before reaching the end of the level. The elevator was still offline. Take the stairs. She blew a sigh through her lips. It was ten flights up to the next level.
“Jet, did you give any thought to how we were going to maintain this?”
“Huh?”
“Seriously, have you seen the size of this place? There isn't a chance in hell we'd ever use a tenth of this. But everything is going to have to be kept clean and mould free, even the parts we're not living in.”
Jet groaned, “Y'know, I really didn't think about that,”
“I know,”
Jet thought for a few moments.
“Well, either the Island'll sell us a bunch of Fisherbots, or we can pick up something from AC. We were going to have to get something to map the mines anyway, and we've got space in the budget.”
“Right. And it'll have to he something that can be left unattended because with that contract job we had to take to pay for all this...”
She felt a growl rise up her thought. The fan in the shaft squawled out it's own rhythm begging for a drop of oil, while reminding her of a Ukrainian FPS she'd once played. In the golden light, it was just a tad unnerving.
The plan made sense on day one. It made sense back on Sara. Getting this rock had seemed like a stroke of luck. A mansion for the price of her old Bridgeport home, it was Bart Simpson buying the old factory for a buck, but shit was it ever going to be a pain.
The rent from the garage would help. Worst comes to worst, it was the fallback in case it all collapsed.
Res' Level 2, a sign on the wall informed her, offering a map. There was living space for nearly a hundred families up on both of these floors. There'd been a school, a gymnasium... a bar. She focused her torch in on that part of the map.
She blinked. “Holy shit,”
Probably all been stripped. Even the machine shops had been stripped bare. It felt like she was walking through a ghost town. Elbow open a door, and she was stepping into someone's apartment. A combined kitchen-living area with a stunning view of the asteroid's magnificently desolate surface out a bay window big enough to drive a truck through led into a master bedroom - bare. Opposite that, judging by blue skies and clouds painted to the wall, was what had been the children's bedroom.
There were three more apartments, all pretty much identical to each other. Part of the corridor wall had been painted with a mural of a verdant green field, spotted with cloud-like sheep. A storeroom still had some cleaning supplies in it. And a rat.
That just underscored it.
Even if they sealed everything but the top level off, the rats would still find a way to live. They'd get into the wiring, into the ventilation. Wiring would start to corrode. Damp and mould would eat away at seals. Given time, they'd find themselves living on the clean veneer on top of a rotten table.
She kicked open the next set of doors she reached... a pair of double doors.
It was a gymnasium. The entire roof was glassed over, giving a stunning view of space.
There was a place to set up stunning workshop. There was the gymnasium where Jet could have her school set up. There were apartments. There was an empty shopping area; old company stores, naturally. There was even the remains of a cinema. All of them were bare walls, and the occasional orphaned cabinet or chair.
But god damn.
They'd bought an entire bloody mining town.
-----
The Mayor's house was outside, up on the surface. It was in the traditional American panelled-style, and looked to have been brought up piece by piece. Two stories, with storm windows and a shingle roof, painted with a brilliant whitewash.
It sat in the centre of circular dome, about 700 metres in circumference. Young trees were growing wild. Flower beds were getting rough. The grass lawn was growing wild and was in desperate need of mowing. A steel playground was silent.
Ford's truck was sitting idle in the driveway in front of the house, a momentary picture of American affluence.
Jet, using her puppet body, was lying on the grass with her eyes closed, almost naked except for underwear, looking almost like a corpse.
Ford traipsed over, wondering for a moment just what she was doing there like that..
“It's real grass,” Jet said, without even opening the puppets eyes. “I forgot what it felt like.”
Ford sat down beside her. God damn that was cool and soft. She could close her eyes and inhale, and it almost smelled like the local park back home, mixed with concrete dust and metal.
“Why you wearing underwear?” She asked. “It's only us out here,”
“Would you like me to take it off?”
“Maybe,” Ford began to twirl a few strands of hair through her fingers. “Maybe later, I'm still covered in dirt and rat-shit from that dungeon crawl.”
She flopped down into the dirt beside Jet. Their stuff hadn't even filled the house. How were they supposed to fill and entire asteroid? Something about it felt staggeringly lonely and quiet. Even Jet's puppet had stopped breathing. There was no bustle of activity like Sara. There wasn't even a breeze from any ventilation ducting.
The worst thing about the big house, was how empty they always felt.
“We own this, Ford,” Jet said softly. “We own every single bit of it.” she rolled over suddenly, drawing close enough for Ford to smell the soap on her body. “We can do whatever we want to it, and not worry about agreements, or local quirks or being too loud for the old man who doesn't appreciate the howl of a rotary engine at full power.”
“It belongs to the bank, technically,” Ford deadpanned.
“Spoilsport,”
“Still,” Ford said. “It is kinda cool.”
“So if I want to build a quad-bike track on the lawn?”
“Go right ahead,” Ford laughed. “But only if I get a full firing range for my future gun collection when we make it big, and a museum for the cars I'll buy...”
She was counting them out on her fingers.
Jet snorted “And maybe some kind of death ray, since we need to do something with all that spare electric power. We're only running one of four generators, and that's at just above idle. And maybe a staff of sexy gynoids who call me ojou-sama,” she smirked.
Ford punched her in the shoulder. “I love that body. It means stuff like that actually hurts you,”
“We're going to need some way of filling this place up,”
Ford sat up, then glanced around at the house sitting there. “Well, I'm sure we could have a hell of a housewarming here for a start”
“Who we inviting?”
“Who do we know?”
“Sounds like a blast.”
----
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?