Memento Luna

DW01 Beyond The Frontiers/10

Small colony/moon where Nickie has decided to drop off the Skaines whose ship she had captured. she made tgis announcement to them:

It’s a tiny little spit of a colony at the ass-end of nowhere. Communication is limited, and it gets a single commercial trading vessel each solar year. My research tells me there are only three months to go until this year’s vessel shows up. So just hold out ’til then, avoid getting eaten by a feral Tamagotchi or whatever, get picked up, and you should all be happily home in…eh, about five months, give or take. So get ready to disembark, and remember that if you try to break my ship, I will step on you.”

The dock at Memento Luna could scarcely be dignified with the term, really. It was open-air and tiny, with only enough space for four ships considerably smaller than the Penitent Granddaughter to dock at once, so the Granddaughter wound up occupying two spaces. There were docking workers, of course. The colony was too low-tech for the entire matter to be automated. But there were only a handful of them, and when Nickie tuned into their radio chatter, they all sounded like they were minimum-wage students working through a school break. It seemed that an unscheduled battleship dropping into orbit was the most exciting thing that had happened in months.

Durq would rather stay on with them. Better chance of surviving. The Skaines being unloaded weren’t pleased about the conditions of the colony, and they made their thoughts known as they shouted and raged and picked senseless fights with each other. The gaggle of Skaines was milling about in irritated bemusement. The continued chatter of the dock workers made it seem like a scene straight out of a really bad comedy.