Episode 408: Resin
Was a Synopsis, now converting to the usual transcription. Thank you for your patience.--Maer.
Air date: 10 Aug 2010
Present: Kim, Maer, Terri, Andy, and Bobby
A wise man once said:
"Let me explain—no, is too long. Let me sum up."
We arrive in Brisbane with medical cargo and find the town in dire straits due to stoppage at the lumber camp and mill upriver. We’re hired by the camp’s new owners, Burnham Corp, to investigate the situation and report it as either a loss or recoverable and if recoverable, secure it. If recovered/secured, it’s a sweet 1000 credits in PDF scrip. Okay, not so sweet. The scrip will have to be converted if we hope to use it. If the camp is a loss, we will receive a reduced fee but with hospital expenses paid.
We go up, discover it apparently uninhabited but with signs of use. And booby traps. Which we trigger one of. Incendiary, burn a building partially down. Oops on us. We find a still and evidence that an unknown party is distilling something out of the wood from the camp, but are not sure what. We take samples and make plans to split up—the women will stay overnight with their weapons and the men will take our dropship, Lagniappe, down river to report our findings to Burnham Corp’s representative, Mr. David Jarvis, and hand over our samples.
It’s when we’re splitting up to leave that Joshua sees the door to a concrete bunker standing ajar where before it was closed tight. Having ridden the adrenaline rush of surviving traps and the fire (and possibly seeking more thrills) Joshua goes headlong into the building. The rest of us have no choice but to follow and either bring him back or deal with what he finds inside.
The following is the account of what happened next.
Friday, 12 Aug 2521
Logging Camp, Brisbane
Blue Sun (Qing Long) system
1500hrs, local time
The door to the concrete bunker gapes open and Joshua doesn’t hesitate but goes to investigate. Rina growls but follows him and Nika does the same. Broad stairs go down into the darkness below, like the steps leading down to a dungeon. Oh boy! The unknown beckons and teases Joshua on. Nika halts his progress and demands a semblance of order and caution. If he wants to go first, fine, but she’s backing him up with her gun. Rina agrees to do the same for Nika. Kiera elects to stand outside to guard the door and Arden goes to stand guard just inside. It’s dark in the bunker, the only light coming from the open door and the grey rainy day outside. Joshua asks Rina for her flashlight, she slaps it in his hand and he takes point. Nika follows and Rina brings up the rear, just as they’ve agreed.
The steps go down about 100 feet, lit intermittently by weak overhead lights, and debouches into a long barrel vaulted cavern of a room about 100 by 400 feet. Dim fluorescent strips light an area toward the far end, illuminating a make-shift chemistry lab. A labcoated figure stands at one of the tables with his or her back to us. The rest of the chamber is dimly lit, with only the occasional overhead lamp throwing oasis of light on a kitchen area here, and a bunk area there. The bunk area has six bunk beds and a dozen foot and wall lockers. A locker door stands ajar and reveals the clothing inside, the beds look to be in use. We take in these details as we creep toward the chemist at the lab. The stench of the still we’d found aboveground is stronger here and as we get closer we can see that some of the rotten wood has been taken to the lab.
Now, it’s not easy walking silently in sopping wet clothing and certainly Rina’s pockets rattle more than most. So it’s not long before the person at the lab table calls out to us to stop, warning us to put down our weapons. Firing them will only kill us all as the room is rigged to go up in flames at the tiniest spark. We freeze, the person turns and holds up a Bunsen burner lighter, one of those trigger activated ones.
We tell him to put down his weapon, he insists we put down ours. It’s a stand off and we go back and forth in this vein for some time. During this we both reveal and find out some things. We find out that the man is Dr. Schweiss, one of the scientists that David Jarvis and Burnham Corp had sent up to the camp to ascertain its condition. Word is he’d disappeared. Not so. Upon arriving with his men, Schweiss noticed and identified the fungus growing on the lumber trees here and realized he was sitting on a gold mine. To wit: the parasitic fungus infects the tree and the tree exudes a resinous sap in self-defense. By some odd quirk of chemistry or whim of intelligent design, the resulting resin is a highly useful compound in the perfume trade and would fetch an enormous amount of money if a method could be found to extract it from the infected wood. Which Schweiss has found and has in fact been spending all the time since his arrival harvesting and extracting the resin. He has already set up a buyer and he is almost done extracting the agreed-upon amount for the deal. He will get a hundred thousand credits to split between himself and his five men and with luck, the amount will be such he’ll never have to work again.
To protect his find from claim jumpers and more importantly the rightful owners of the property, Burnham Corp, Schweiss and his men have devised an elaborate ruse to keep everyone away: they’ve rigged the camp to appear haunted. In his view, Rim folk are superstitious and easily convinced of otherworldly hazards, and would leave the camp alone.
Of course, our arrival has scotched that.
And in the give and take of this meeting, we reluctantly give up our weapons. Rina, surprisingly enough, gives hers up first, leaving her rifle and her pistol and extra clips on the floor. Nika and Joshua do the same. We also reluctantly reveal that two more of our party are still out there.
Topside, Arden is standing by at the door to the bunker when it starts to slide shut. Like a man trying to thwart a closing elevator door, Arden throws himself against the moving edge … and finds that this door as considerably more power behind it. There are packing and shipping crates, military style, stacked against the walls of the bunker and Arden drags one over to the shrinking doorway. The crate is heavy and slows him down and he barely manages to wedge it in the opening. The crate holds for only a short while before it crumples with a shriek of metal and the door slams shut, locking Arden in. The controls are unresponsive and he has no option but to go down the stairs and join the others.
Outside, Kiera sees the doors closing and tries to hold them open. She fails. There being nothing else to do, she sits with her back to the door and keeps watch. She thinks she sees something in the trees above the camp, but cannot be sure.
(I can’t entirely remember how Kiera comes to be talking to the man but let’s just say he’s there. Kim, tell me how it came about, okay? I’ll put it in.)
Watching the man talking to his companions on the comm, she gets the idea that the man isn’t military or military-trained. If anything, he’s pretty inept. He argues orders right in front of her, giving away the fact that whoever he and his friends are, they’re inexperienced and quite possibly disorganized. She might be able to work that in her favor.
(More stuff I can’t remember)
Back in the bunker, we tell Schweiss that we were sent to investigate the condition of the camp and are to report back in a day or two under two weeks. Surely Schweiss can get what he needs inside that time and peel out before our deadline? We can declare nobody was ever here, that the camp wasn’t haunted or filled with survivalists or Reavers. We get paid, Schweiss gets what he wants sight unseen, everybody wins. Schweiss isn’t buying it. In the end, we’re given the choice of harvesting the wood at gunpoint for Schweiss or getting shot where we stand. We choose to live. We’re frisked for weapons, Rina loses her pocket tools and her vest, and we’re all trooped topside to the generator room. They lock us in and promise to bring us food later. Kiera’s already working the angles with the man she’d met before and arranges to have a bucket brought over to us for a latrine. We put it at the farthest end of the 40 by 20 room.
The generator room is filled with the generator and assorted tools and equipment and scrap that generator rooms collect. Rina’s busy crawling all over it looking for things she can use either as a weapon or a tool to get us out of here. Kiera’s looking to do the same for shivs. Arden’s just being a sarcastic pain in the ass. Nika declares enough is enough and extracts a promise from her crew: no improvised weapons from Rina, no more negative snark from Arden, we all cooperate with our captors and work. Joshua did a Read on Schweiss and despite Schweiss’s threats, Joshua is reasonably sure the man has no intention of killing us. Therefore there’s little advantage to antagonizing the opposition.
Rina gives her promise to her Captain without argument. Kiera and Arden follow a bit more grudgingly, but agree. Joshua, being the dedicated non-violent person of the group, has no problem agreeing to the conditions. We’re given MREs shortly thereafter and when we’re done wolfing them down, we settle as best we can and sleep til morning.
We’re taken out and given a hasty breakfast in the mess hall, then taken to the woods and put to work. One of the men explains the technique of harvesting the infected resin wood and warns us not to try any funny business—he and his men are armed with rifles and will shoot us if we try to escape. We work with due diligence, harvesting hunks of wood about the size of a shoebox. We try not to breathe the dust from the chainsaws in. The fungus can infect people if taken in via open wounds, leading to multiple infections of the internal organs. Lovely.
And over all of us, the rain continues to come down. By lunchtime we’re all soaking wet and fatigued by the work and the strain of keeping warm. We eat and Nika and Kiera engage our guards in conversation. Nika’s working the strategy of perhaps getting the guards to see us as a non-threat. Kiera’s trying to get intel out of them—what they’re doing here, who they’re working for, what they think they’re going to get out of this deal, do they really think they can trust Schweiss? Arden manages not to be too sarcastic and Rina keeps her mouth shut. She knows she’s outgunned and she has the safety of her crewmates to think about. Had she been alone, she’d have tried something by now… but she’s not alone and the repercussions should she fumble won’t fall to her alone, either.
Working in these conditions isn’t incredibly safe and it’s not long before one of us is injured. Nika’s hand-sized chainsaw slips and cuts her across her calf. The cut isn’t deep—a miracle—and she can stand, barely. But the cut is deep enough to be serious nonetheless. All work is halted and Arden demands his medical bag. It had been taken from him along with our weapons. The guards insist we use their kit instead. We do and it’s obvious it’s not enough. We carry Nika to the camp’s med bay and on the way, Arden and Kiera discuss their options. Kiera’s of the mind that we should excise the wound to eliminate the risk of fungal infection. Nika is quite understandably upset by this and vetoes it. Arden backs her up and urges a less drastic treatment. He cleans the wounds by less invasive means and bandages it. Nika stays in the infirmary and she’s given a reprieve from work. The rest of us go back outside and work until dark.
And that becomes our routine for the next 11 days. As we work on and convince Schweiss of our cooperation, our living conditions change somewhat. We’re allowed to sleep on beds in one of the bunkhouses. We’re given better food. Nika goes back to work after a few days. We harvest enough resin for Schweiss to reach his target and the day arrives that we can go free.
Wednesday, 23 Aug 2521
A ship lands in the lower end of the camp, near the gates and as we’re led to our dropship under Schweiss’s guard, Nika and Arden look backwards at the meet-and-greet happening down-camp of us.
As we expected, Schweiss’ partner pulls a double cross, shooting one of Schweiss’s guards down where he stands. Nika grabs Arden by the collar and runs them both to the drop ship. Joshua is already in the dropship manning the pilot’s seat as Rina preps her engines for takeoff. Kiera’s getting a rifle ready to go. Nika and Arden jump aboard and this is our chance to burn jets out of here… And Nika orders us to Schweiss’s aid.
When the dust settles, we have our weapons and gear back. We also have one of Schweiss’s men down and the duplicitous partner gone with the suitcase worth of resin extract that we busted our asses to distill. Schweiss is out his retirement fund and his men are out of their cut. Kiera tries to convince Schweiss to work with her and her father’s company to develop the resin but Schweiss refuses. He chooses instead to present his findings to Burnham Corp. Burnham Corp rewards Schweiss with his old position in the company, official recognition of his contribution and a little bonus. His men are taken care of where applicable and we’re left scratching our heads why Schweiss went back to Burnham Corp.
Because we were able to recover the camp and turn it over to Burnham, David Jarvis pays us the 1000 credits in scrip. We’re still on the hook for 518 to Byshek, his cut of the salvage and we need to convert the 1000 in scrip on an Allied world before we can give him anything. It requires a trip out to Boros or Hera—the two closest places with the authority and Cortex connections to make the scrip into money we can use. We still have mechanical and tech salvage to sell, we still have the dropship Lagniappe with no plans to sell her.
One interesting thing happened during our forced stay at the camp—a message was forwarded to Lagniappe, an ad for a personal robot. Joshua is quite taken with it and it seems that he just might start saving for one. Lord knows why. Time for wondering on that later. For now, we are grateful for what we’ve got and lick our wounds and count ourselves lucky that we managed to survive.
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