It was a good haul. None of the large salvagers had shown up yet to chase them away, so Trey Dooley concentrated on the firearms left behind, dragging them into the hold with the robotic arm. The cyborgs themselves, the bodies, were worth plenty, but he couldn't stomach processing the bodies and appliances. And those dead bodies would be too traumatic for the kids, who still had nightmares about their escape from the war-torn planet Toph. He’d leave that to the big boys, they likely had robots to do the dirty work. Weapons were an easy sell, and lucrative. This haul would pay their fuel for a trip to somewhere safe, an open colony world, or on to New Prague if the space lanes were safe.
“Captain, blasts! Wait, life signs!” Carr yelled over the com. Excitement made his red curls bounce.
“They are not shooting at us, they want our attention,” Carzen, Carr’s identical twin spoke.
One of those cyborgs was still alive! Dooley’s hands flew over the panel, bringing up the data, focusing it.
Five cyborgs alive.
Well, he couldn’t leave them out there to die. This small ship would be even more crowded, but another adult around might be a good thing. Right now he had twelve-year-olds in charge of younger children. Good kids, but twelve.
Then an alarm on his arm com went off. An old alarm, set more than ten years ago, on a spacestation very far away. Dooley looked at it, shocked.
2LN77 confirmed match. 23.3 clicks.
2LN77. A female cyborg he’d met years ago. She’d had a breakthrough moment, and he’d realized her humanity was not gone. He had tried to take her away with him, but she got sent off the spacestation with no warning. He’d put an alert on her tracking ID, hoping to find her, but he never did, until now.
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