My delivery to the stash house brought a surprise.
The desert lay below me like a calm lake. Sand as far as the eye could reach. It radiated peace and quiet and yet it was a place where dark business was done. The moon Daymar reminded me of my childhood on the desert planet Ashana. My thoughts sank in the quicksand of memories.
A warning sound suddenly brought me back to the present. My radar had made contact. Unfortunatelly, at the stash house I had as destination. I was thinking about aborting my mission, because with my Prospector I could not stand a fight. Then I saw that it was an Aurora, the energy signature was very weak. She had landed 200m from the outpost and had shut down the engines. It was not an immediate threat. No one was on board. Nearby, I could not find any people.
I landed right in front of the building and did not turn off the engines. Just in case I had to leave quickly. After leaving my Prospector, I looked around again. The higher rocks around were suitable for an ambush. A sniper would have good visibility from the cover.
There was a package in front of the entrance to the outpost. Something was wrong here. It looked like a delivery had gone wrong. But where was the pilot who brought the package? Was he in the building? But why had he left the package outside? My thoughts raced, but I did not get the puzzle together. I went up the stairs to the airlock and looked back. The package lay lonely in the sand, like a buoy in the sea. I shrugged and went to the airlock.
With a hiss, breathable air flowed into the lock, the inner door opened. Chaos, garbage and disorder was everything I saw. The room was a single garbage dump. It was nobody there. I put Wallace’s packet on a shelf. Then I saw a note that was for me. I should fly with my Prospector to the planet Hurston. At the M&V Bar in Loreville, a contact person and a particularly lucrative job would be waiting for me.
My curiosity was aroused. What kind of job could it be to need a small mining spaceship? But first I had to go to Port Olisar to fix my scanner.