A Good Time

There are some tunnels that lead up to the surface that are mostly forgot.  A lot of these are sealed so unless you have a way to cut them, and you can do it without getting noticed, those are no good.  Others have sour air and those are hard to run unless you have good gear - and no one has good gear.  There are some that still work and that aren't monitored though.  The best ones lead into the bact farms because no one wants to go there and they change up so much that no one knows anybody, so even if they see you no one gives a fuck.  If you can find some of these then it's easy getting places you can find some good stuff.  If you do find a good one then you have to sit on it and probably there's lots of fights over it.  It gets pretty rough too.  One of the worst fights we had was over a choice tunnel that Lad found.  He came back from a splunk all tweeking but trying to not tip anyone - he lost a finger one time cause he's got a real bad tell - but everyone knew he found something.  We punched it up and it wasn't in the files so we knew it was a good one.  Anyway that one was sweet and we made a good run off it, but we got jacked on the way back and it was real bad.  Some folks got hurt really bad, some folks got dead.  It's easier to jack a crew on a run than make a run but it's sour doing that and I never let us do it unless we had to. Sometimes you have to do stuff.

Sometimes you get lucky though and one time we got a tunnel that went all the way up to the surface.  That time was a good one, we spent a lot of time up there even though there was just sand and stuff mostly and nothing to grab or eat or anything.  I liked just looking up at the sky.  Most folks can't stand that because it feels like anyone could see you out there and a few folks really don't like looking up at the sky because it gives them a bit of a freak, but I liked it lots although you can't really see the sun or nothing with all the dust.  You can see the patterns in the dust though.  The code I got off that pilot guy says that the dust is suspended in atmo and that goes real high so that even when it's not blowing on the ground it is still floating up high in the air. It gets hotter up there and that makes it move around more so you can see it and the parts that are hot or cold and the light behind it and it's really interesting to see how it moves. I think so anyway.  The code says it's only around the equator that you can even breath cause the atmo is hot enough and moving enough to lift some of that dust so anywhere else you go you'd choke on it all.  What a shithole planet.

That was the time that we found that pilot too, and that was a really good time.  The ports are all totally locked up and you can forget about ever finding a way into those or even seeing any ships unless you have a chip in you.  Some times some crazy bastards will land outside the ports though - it's not really hard to sneak in because you'd be crazy to do it.  The dust really messes up with sonics and EM sniffers which means its hard to find someone landing.  It's not as hard to spot them as it is for them to land though.  This crazy pilot we found had really messed up his ship anyway and we got a lot of good stuff that time.  That was the time that I was boss too, and I wanted to run it really cool and not rush it because I figured that he'd be ready to bust us up some and he wasn't going anywhere.  I knew he'd be sweating too because of the stories you hear and I was going to work that.  Some of the guys got rough with me because they wanted to just run it fast and they thought I was scared or something, but did a beat down on Cross and they remembered that I was Eloi and not some punk kid.  He was cut pretty bad but I didn't kill him and no hard feelings.
Anyway my way played out and it turned up good because that pilot guy was smart enough to deal fair and so everyone got what they needed and I got what I wanted too which is plus.  We brought him to the city and he let us have the core and anything we could pull off that ship before someone came.  Some of the folks wanted to cross him but I did it fair and I got a lot of code that he probably would have flashed if we were playing him, and some of that was really interesting too.  That all turned out really good for me actually.

Next: Working