Changes of perspective

I have grown used to being surprised by things out on the Rim. It is the way of things. The simple life isn't. We can wish for it and try to achieve it, but it's not the way of the 'Verse. The 'Verse will throw you curves.

There's three things out here on the Frontier you know will give you trouble. Raiders trying to steal your shit. Reavers trying to eat you. And the Alliance trying to make your lives better by making your lives miserable.

When one of those inevitable things changes, you pause and wonder why. When two of them change, you look for a fundamental shift in the nature of the 'Verse. If all three were to change, I think I'd hang it up and go back to Ariel to drive a desk.

A thing and a half has changed.

The Alliance treating us civilly isn't actually that much of a change. After the fiasco with one of their company commanders griefing us for a good six months, officially under the direct orders of a covert operations commander, but unofficially because they'd gone Loyalist, and their real CO finally putting her foot down, things have been passable. Sometimes, actually, downright peaceful.

They'd even taken up arms on our behalf when the Reavers have been a problem. What I wasn't expecting was for them to proactively send a fire team to Hale's with the express intent of capturing a Reaver to interrogate it and find out just why they'd taken such a keen interest in our little slice of Heaven.

Yeah. That'll turn out well.

Other side of the equation was the Reavers themselves. They had been acting different recently. Actually landing on the surface to effect repairs? Not what we'd seen before. But that's why the Alliance was here now.

And damned if they didn't get what they were after. Don't know how they knew, which raises some other questions, but they managed to capture a Reaver who was on the surface and they managed to get some actual information out of it.

Rather than food, the Reavers were back on Hale's trying to recover some piece of kit they'd left behind when they were repairing their transport. A bit of searching and the Alliance fire team located it in one of the tunnels not too far from where the transport had set down: A big hunk of kit that looked like a cross between a locomotive's power pile and an over sized blender.

The Alliance team didn't know what it was either, and agreed to leave it with us so Sabrina could figure it out. Looked like her kind of kit too. A couple of arm thick power couplings that either fed power in, or sent power out, and a set of what might have been quick release couplers if they hadn't been as big as my head.

What the hell was it? Gut feeling said it was either the accumulator from a boat mounted weapon, or part of their power system. Either way, 'Brina would figure it out and we'd either make use of it, scrap it, or let the Alliance cart it off. Even if it was a weapon, it wasn't like we needed any Reaver built kit.

But damn. Two of the truths from the Rim were in doubt. Something was definitely not right with the 'Verse.