[201-400] THE MECH'S TOUCH

Chapter 355: Tainted Sun

The Barracuda quietly traversed the asteroid cloud and reached Ves after a couple of hours. The corvette turned around and positioned her rear cargo hatch next to the cave. A number of bots began to retrieve everything from the cave, including the thickly-wrapped Tainted Sun.

Ves kept an eye on his freshly fabricated graser rifle. He was unwilling to let it out of his sight for a single second. Even though he trusted the women he hired to crew the Barracuda, he couldn't account for their curiosity. It was better to forestall any problems by maintaining his vigilance.

A handful of crew members such as Jenn and Ushra helped with securing the cargo. While they locked the containers, they noticed Lucky flying straight through solid matter as if it didn't exist.

"What the?!"

"Intruder alert!"

"Hold on, false alarm girls!" Ves quickly interposed when they attempted to draw their pistols. "That's still Lucky. He's just a little special now."

He quickly came up with a sloppy excuse for Lucky's current state. He spun a tall tale about obtaining a special exotic during the Glowing Planet campaign. Since he was already lying about it, he conveniently added that the whole reason for this trip was to figure out a way to incorporate this mysterious material into Lucky.

"So you turned your mechanical pet into an energy being this way?" Ushra replied in a baffled tone. As the ship's engineer, she possessed a lot more expertise in technical matters, so she wouldn't be fooled so easily. "This is amazing. How did you do it?"

"Trade secret." Ves simply replied.

He figured that Ushra still held some reservations, but he didn't need to say anything more. What mattered was that Ves could use the same excuse to anyone else and they wouldn't be able to refute it to his face. After all, the Glowing Planet yielded a bewildering variety of exotics.

Once the crew finished storing all of the goods, the Barracuda turned to head to the edge of the system. Just before she could fire up her thrusters, Ves called a halt.

"What is it you want, sir?" Captain Silvestra asked as she appeared in the cargo bay as a projection.

"Don't leave the Joe System yet. Head towards the red dwarf in the center of the system. Get close to it as possible without damaging the ship. I want to dump a bunch of cargo into the sun."

The woman looked oddly at Ves before she acknowledged his order. Her projection winked out, leaving Ves alone in the cargo bay. Lucky had already passed through the upper deck and played elsewhere.

Since the asteroid with the cave already orbited fairly close to the sun, it didn't take too long to approach the red dwarf. The corvette still took more than half a day to navigate between the asteroids, though the asteroid cloud had become increasingly sparse the closer they neared the sun.

Nowadays, suns served as the ultimate garbage dumps. It only took a brief trip close to the scorching sun at the center of any star system to dump all manner of garbage that needed to disappear.

However, with the current advances in recycling used materials, only low value bulk materials got dumped this way. The cost of transforming worthless junk into usable materials exceeded the cost of shipping them straight into a sun.

The only reason why someone went through the trouble of dumping valuable materials in the sun was if they had something to hide. Ves did not hide his intention to the crew, but he misdirected them by hinting that Ves had employed a very unique procedure on his cat instead of violating a taboo.

As the Barracuda neared the sun, she started encountering some issues. Even though red dwarfs was one of the weakest suns in the galaxy, it still radiated enough energy to scorch a planet as long as it received all of the energy it pumped out in a single second. Proximity to any star entailed a lot of risks.