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Shierkhan - Please Help ID The Artist Of This Work?? — Description
SALVAGE

Selina stood beside her husband and Captain, arms folded and eyebrow cocked in an expression of dubiousness at what she was seeing.
"So, you're kidding right? This is an elaborate joke??" She finally said, turning her head to regard Sinjihnn.
"No, I'm not kidding. This is a good job." He said, feeling her gaze but not giving in to the impulse to turn his head in her direction.
The two of them were standing just outside the time-ravaged perimeter fencing of an old terraformer monitoring and nav-relay station, having walked the short distance from Shrike to where they could get a closer look.

It'd seen better decades, long ago, before the atmo and biosphere had been established on the Border moon. One had led to corrosion in various forms, the other had led to plants patiently claiming the near-ancient prefab block-buildings and old transciever dishes.
Stations like this had been essential back in the very earliest days of Humanity's arrival in the 'Verse. Terraforming back then required a lot of local monitoring and as mankind had expanded his spacefaring in the pre-Cortex days, local nav-relay stations were needed to keep things flying in a decently timely fashion given the complex orbital mechanics among the 'Verse's suns and worlds.

Now, they were forgotten relics of the distant past.

Looking the old facility over with narrowed eyes, Selina lightly tapped a sensitized spot on the temple-piece of her shades, slid the tip of her finger back along the length of the arm a bit, and her shades went crystal-clear.
"Wow, even worse than I thought. But, at least we don't have to mess around with spacesuits and all that. Those transciever dishes though…gonna be a bitch t'move them."
Sin clapped a hand on her shoulder, his mood better now that she was starting to see the potential in the job.
"No problems, all this is scrap, this is a smash-and-grab. I want Sharie and King poking around the buildings for anything still semi-functional or able to be broken down for parts, but the rest of it is just bulk scrap."
"Okay, it's scrap, and I live on a salvage ship…so what am I not getting here??" Selina asked, knowing there was something here she wasn't fully aware of.
"Something that's eluded a lot of people's attention for decades and decades, so don't feel bad." He said, smirking.
"You gonna tell me what's the smirking about?" She asked, eyebrow still raised speculatively and gaining a slight smile at the minor game between them.
"What do you know about Osmium and the other similar metals?" He asked.
"Osmium…not much. Heavy metal??" She admitted and asked.
"It's rare, expensive, and there's a good amount around here we can dig out." Sin told her, the smirk becoming a broad smile.

Roaring past them at speed just then was the extensively modified and franken-built MF-813 Flying Mule that served the ship as a vehicle of myriad abilities.
It had been purchased second-hand, and they'd used parts from one that had been wrecked to augment it. The augmentation of the propulsion and drive system had been desired as they'd welded and bolted frame-extenders reaching backward, as support for the pickup-truck type extended cargo box. A reinforced roll-bar mounting additional high-powered driving and work-floods had been added, as well as a crane taken from a wrecked towing vehicle, and a universal towing hitch at the rear below the tailgate's bumper.
The propulsion and drive system was nothing less than two MF-813 systems mounted to one vehicle, allowing it to handle much more weight and travel considerably faster than a stock model. An aspect of the vehicle that King, the ship's pilot, loved to take advantage of being something of a caffeine addict and a velocity-junkie.

Captain Sinjihnn Du'Maur glared after the vehicle moving rapidly away.
"You know, I just had a flash of foresight, and I know how I'm gonna leave this life. It won't be Reavers, Alliance or any of that…one of these days I'm going to be run down by my own Mule, by my own pilot." He muttered in dark gallows humor.
Selina took his arm in time-honoured feminine fashion, the sideswell of her very luxuriantly endowed bust pressing warmly against his arm, her smile was bright and wide.
"Not going to happen. If anyone's going to end you it's going to be me. I'll kill you in bed before then…and you'll die a very happy man." She said, squeezing his arm affectionately against the side of her breast.
He looked at her with a lopsided cross between a smile and a smirk.
"You're the only woman I know who actually makes that sound like a fun evening." He joked.
"You have no idea." She said lasciviously and playfully as they started walking along the path blazed by the Mule through the nearly hip-height wild grass towards the buildings in the distance.

Back aboard Shrike, Ronon and Smythe were laying out salvage gear and equipment, not the least of which was Detcord and it's triggers with two control units. They worked in the main cargo hold, a cavernous space fully able to drydock an '04 model Firefly. Ronon dropped the reels of Detcord beside the toolkits and associated belts. Two of the kits and belts were already gone, with King and Sharie, who had been tasked with doing recon and prioritization regarding the choicest bits versus the bulk scrap and junk. Ronon tested one of the electrothermal mini-torches as Smythe checked the Detcord controllers.

The two men could not be any more different and still remain within the same species.

Alistair Smythe was tall, leanly built and in well-kept shape by any standards let alone those for a sixty-year-old man. His hair and moustache were trimmed masculinely short and precisely neat, his dress and demeanour best described as 'impeccable'.

Ronon by comparison was even taller at 6'5 in bare feet, dreadlocked, had a moustache and beard combination that while trimmed quite well enough was nowhere as precisely kept as the ship's Doctor's. He wore clothing he'd made himself or genuinely rustic homespun-type purchased at trading posts on backwater moons that made up for in durability and ease of repair what it lacked in modern styling except among the modern-primitive set.

This in contrast where Smythe looked like he'd stepped through space from a main street off a high-class Londinium boroughhood, Ronon looked like nothing less than what his appearance promised; Trouble, serious, and plenty of it.

Even their respective occupations were mirror opposite.

Smythe was one of the most conscientious and skilled Physicians in the 'Verse, while Ronon did the kind of work as the ship's Security Chief that ensured people in Smythe's profession got plenty of practice and a steady flow of coin.

"Ya think we're gonna find anything worth the trouble here?" Ronon asked the Doc.

"Mmmm, hard to say. But even the bulk scrap should bring in some good coin, and if we find some equipment that's managed to survive in decent shape a museum might pay well for it." He said, sorting out connectors.

Ronon fired one of the compact but amazingly powerful minitorches, the ignited propane-oxygen mix was further excited by an electrothermal coil assembly which drove it to high-energy plasma levels. The flame jet was only two inches long but reached temperatures of up to six-thousand degrees. Releasing the trigger it shut right off, and he put it aside with the others that;d been checked already and moved on to the power-drivers with swap-out tips for every kind of rotational fastener ever made by mankind.

A ways away, eyes watched the goings on at the abandoned facility with interest, spending not a few seconds appreciating the form of Shrike's Executive officer.

"Yeah, looks like we could get something good outta this job." The watcher muttered half to himself.

"See anything interesting?" Came a bored-sounding redundant query from the man beside him.

"Y'could say, yep." The watcher said grinning widely, returning from a visual sweep to the tall female form, and zooming in on her splendidly curved rear as she walked away from him, enjoying the feminine sway of her hips.

"Not a high-coin outfit, from the looks'a that hover mule. They seem t'know what they're doing though and alla them is armed." The watcher said.

"Yeah, fine. This is the outers, everyone out here with a lick'o sense is armed. Whatcha see that put the lift in your tone?" The watcher's companion asked.

The binoculars were passed over, with some reluctance.

"Location's locked in, sweep around and you'll see for y'self."

It took the other man a bit, but when he finally found the source of the first man's interest he whistled through his teeth, long and low.

"Well looks like this job'll have some fringe benefits. Scoop her when we take the salvage and we'll have some fun on our trip back then turn her over and make some good coin besides." He said.

"Just what I was thinking." The first watcher said.

Selina made her way over to where Sharie was stymied by a door that just refused to open.

"Tried everything but explosives or a minitorch." Sharie said as she arrived.

Selina poked along the doorjamb with the tip of a knife, thumped the door experimentally while watching the same spot where door met jamb.

"Rust-sealed, almost welded shut. Simple enough." She said, rearing back and driving her bootheel into the door just above the handle with it's thumb latch. Rust showered from where it'd been sealed to the jamb by the corrosion, and the door ground open on squealing hinges.

"Cheaper than explosives. Simpler, too." Sharie said, leaning in through the door and shining a small but powerful flashlight around, not failing to notice the sheared-off latch-bolt of chrome steel that Selina's kick had snapped like a dry breadstick, and said nothing about the frightening and intimidating display of physical power so casually done.

Sin had finished his walk around, having taken a good look at things and gotten a good idea where to start and how to deal with some of the bigger items like the transciever dishes. He'd spotted some caribou and deer as he'd done so, which led him to changing some instructions.

"Ronon, do us all a favor and put in some time hunting. There's caribou and deer around here and any chance we get to stock up on real food that we don't have to pay for I plan to take advantage of." he said over the radio link.

"I'll get on that soon as the gear's been checked out." Came Ronon's reply, which sounded pretty pleased.

"Good enough." Sin said, already looking forward to the results he could expect from Ronon's skills.

A ways away and two floors up, King was busting the hardline for the local computer network out of the concrete with a narrow-faced sledgehammer, doing his best to hit to either side of the grease-pencil tracing line so he didn't accidentally damage the hardline. It wasn't worth much, but it didn't cost anything to apply a little bit of care.

And, like most males, he enjoyed being able to indulge in some sheer destruction for a valid reason.

Sharie was working a short distnce away dismantling the old computer network itself, it was composed of fifty separate elements, each built like a really powerful and slender desktop model…albeit from decades ago. These days, a single mid-range desktop model would be able to easily handle the entire task list for the antiquated network.

The monitors had been a bust, as they hadn't been built with the same kind of ruggedizing as the network elements had, but would still be worth something as scrap.

King came over, wiping sweat off his face and leaning on an old desk, breathing hard from his exertions against the slowly yielding concrete.

"I am so glad this place isn't in the equatorial." He said, pouring himself some water from the container they'd brought, then digging out an energy bar from the small carry bag of food, offered one to Sharie, who smiled by way of thanking him, but shook her head.

"I'm not hungry, besides lunch is in about an hour." She said, watching him devour the bar in three bites.

"Then I'll call this an appetizer." He said around a mouthful of blueberry-granola-honey energy bar. They were one of the Captain's more recent attempts to replicate store-bought so as to save coin and indulge his hobby. The last batch had been perfectly tasty, but the texture required a good soak in hot coffee or tea to soften them first. These were like chewing old spacesuit insulation, but chewable nonetheless.

Sharie did pour herself tea from a thermos, and took a short break from undoing the network, a process slowed by the safe-connect connectors that each made sure the cables never got accidentally pulled out of a socket during operation.

"This is one of the rare times I'm tempted to take a page of the 'Ronon Dex Manual of Electronics'." She said, sipping tea and eyeing the rest of the elements she hadn't gotten to yet.

"Lemme guess, just yank the connectors straight out?" King asked.

"Close, but I'm not strong enough to do that, I'd have to make do with some heavy cable cutters. It'd sure speed things up." She said, doing some quick mental math as to how long it'd take her to finish the rest of the elements.

"Right now, I'm looking at another twenty-four hours of doing nothing else but unhooking these things." She explained.

"I don't think the Captain'll mind if you speeds things along with the cutters. You know him longer than me, so whatta you ponder on it?" King said, trying to be helpful.

"Thing is, while each of the connectors and their cable is only worth a couple of plat, there's more than five hundred of them here. I start cutting them up, that means a good sized chunk'a change flushed right out the airlock." She said.

King nodded, understanding the point.

"Yeah, that would be better off in our pockets than the scrap bin. I'll give ya my hands when I've done busting line outta th'wall." He said, leaning over and having a close look at one of the connectors.