Michelle's smile stayed with her as she made her plans to check in with the team. All those years of watching Scrap Alphas and Fetcher's Fee – and now here she was, a real salvager ready to find some serious treasure.

Her smile lost a bit off the corners, however, as she spent time with the first member, Ames the explosive specialist Fox, in her workshop. Michelle had had some reservations over whether or not to see Rafferty the medic first on account of her continued wooziness and memory gaps, but she decided that Ames was waking her up just fine.

"So, you're trained in using standard explosives?" Ames was asking her.

Michelle nodded.

Ames laughed hysterically. "Pah! Mere fireworks, my dear. Good for a display to entertain the pups, but if you wanna put a hole in something, this is your weapon of choice!" She produced a spherical device that glinted brightly in the overhead lights. The Fox grinned widely; Michelle almost recoiled from those shiny fangs. "This is a mix of tremium, Mocon-D4 and a grain of inactive Procoline." Ames put a finger to her muzzle. "Shh... she's sleeping. Don't wake her up!" She bounced the bomb in the palm of her paw. "And don't handle it roughly."

"You mean like you're doing?" Michelle whimpered.

Ames nodded spasmodically, ruffling her curly red hair and making her long ponytail swish. "Yes! This is highly irresponsible! Don't do this!" She pointed to what she was doing. "It's been designed – by moi – to deliver a concentrated blast that cuts right through obstacles without causing too much seismic backlash. Great for unstable areas." She continued to bounce the device, picking up another and juggling them both. "And once more, I must emphasize that these need to be treated with the utmost care. Do not do what I am doing!"

Michelle was keen to move on. "What's next?"

Ames dropped the bombs roughly onto a work surface, letting them roll, and picked up a baton-like object with a pistol grip. "This is the detonator." She gave Michelle a goofy grin coupled with a lascivious wink. "I love squeezing this thing."

Michelle stifled a sigh.

"Wanna see it in action?" Ames gripped the detonator tightly and pressed the trigger.

Overwhelmed by a jolt of pant-wetting terror, Michelle screamed at the top of her lungs and covered her eyes with her paws. After doing so for about twenty seconds, and realizing that everything around her wasn't going up in a storm of flames and sparks, she sobbed herself to a stop and lowered her paws, tears rolling down her muzzle.

Ames laughed. "Relax! The frequencies haven't been matched!" She checked the detonator and frowned. "Wait. This isn't the right detonator." She reached back to the work surface, dropped it there, and produced a similar but still somewhat distinct device. "This is the one for the spheres!" she tittered. "Oh, and look at that – the frequency is live. Tch." She shook her head. "Imagine if I actually had pressed the trigger on this. Ooh, I am a furbrain today. Hee."

Michelle made her excuses and left.

***

With that harrowing episode concluded, meeting with Daggett the marine salvager was next. Lina had tasked him with running through the operation with her, and so he had everything set up by the time Michelle got back to the commons. It was just she and he there; the others had cleared out so she would be able to concentrate.

The Otter sat at the table with Michelle and pointed a remote at the vid-screen nearby, suddenly pausing to glance at Michelle. "Now," he opened, "how much do you remember about the operation briefing before we all went into the icebox?"

Michelle blinked. "Not a whole lot."

Daggett nodded, his whiskers and ears twitching. "Aye. Well, lucky we've got it all in here." He pressed a button on the remote. The screen turned on, displaying a reasonably detailed orbital view of a medium-sized planet with vast expanses of ocean and smaller pockets of green land. "Symba Prime," Daggett announced. "A world located in the middle Summerkin Sector, it's mostly ocean and has a small population and its main industry consists mostly of fisheries. That is our destination."

Michelle felt a twitch of misgiving in her doggy gut. "This is a marine job, isn't it?"

Daggett nodded. "Yep. Why, you afraid of water? Never swum?"

Michelle licked her chops, trying to blot out memories of swimming class. It wasn't easy when you were five foot nine and looked like a convulsing stick insect when you got in the pool. "Yeah, I've swum. I'm built to swim, being a Dog. I'm just not much of a diver."

"Come on," Daggett teased. "You've trained for this, right?"

Michelle snuffled. "Yeah. I'd just hoped we could work up to marine jobs when I joined."

"Luck of the draw, pooch," Daggett said nonchalantly. "We work the jobs we're assigned." He cleared his throat, looking back to the screen. "Now, you've heard of Shiffrin Mining, right?"

"Well, they're, like, the biggest company on Omaril, so, yeah," Michelle told him concisely.

Daggett chortled. "Great. Good to hear you're in the know. We can skip through the nine pages on the company, then, and..." He kept tapping the fast-forward button on the controller. "Ah! Here we go. Little while back, one of Shiffrin's remote seabed excavators took a header into a trench off the coast of one of the main settlements on Symba Prime." He stopped yet again to glance at Michelle. "You familiar with formium?"

Michelle waggled her head. "I've heard of it. Mineral, right?"

Daggett tapped his muzzle. "Bingo. Symba Prime is bursting with the stuff. In fact, it's one of the greatest sources in the Core Republic. And formium is valuable. Real valuable. Ten times the value of tesmium, and fifty times that of horprax." He flipped the screen to an image of a large tracked machine that looked like a cross between a bulldozer and a combine harvester. "Unit Seven-Five-Fifty, codenamed 'Reef Eater', had just finished its last pass on a particularly rich seam of formium when it crashed." He swivelled his chair to face Michelle. "We have been tasked with boarding Reef Eater and getting that formium. The company would do it, but their salvage crews are busy with a job on Symba Prime's second moon. Enter us." He hoiked both thumbs at himself.

Michelle sniffed. "Wonderful. I'm up to date."

Daggett switched the screen off and brought up the lights. "Great. Are you still having a bit of trouble with the grogginess and memory blanks?" His musteline expression shifted to mildly concerned.

Michelle rubbed her head. She was, no doubt about that. "Yeah. I'll check in with Rafferty."

"Yes. Do that," Daggett told her.

***

Michelle met with the medic in the Lougheed's infirmary. She sat on the cot there while Rafferty went over some charts. After several minutes of doing so, the Squirrel looked up at her. "Yeah. Thought so. Michelle, it says here that you have a hormonal imbalance." He scrolled further down the page on his screen-sheet clipboard – referred to as such for tradition's sake rather than its inherent purpose – and frowned. "Excess levels of testosterone, in particular."

Michelle rolled her eyes. "Yeah. I was hoping we could gloss over that. Maybe you could take the deep voice, massive paws and staggering height as read."

Rafferty snickered, not maliciously. "Michelle, this may be the reason you had an attack in the hibernap tube. Individuals with chemical imbalances have an increased vulnerability to cryo-temporal shock." He twitched his muzzle. "Usually it's not a huge issue, but it clearly is for you. So I'm prescribing you these." He reached into a drawer next to his chair and pulled out a small plastic capsule. "Take two of these and you should start feeling better. The tiredness and memory loss should subside."

"Yeah, well, I don't sleep all that well anyway," Michelle told him. "But thanks." She took the pills and stood to leave.

***

"So this is your first time outworld, Michelle?" Lina asked brightly as she and Flink sat across the commons table from Michelle. "Must be exciting."

Michelle swallowed a wave of nausea. She hadn't even been thinking about that. "Um, yeah."

Flink snorted a laugh. "Lemme guess," he said, his big front teeth whistling haltingly as he spoke. "You got the idea to be a salvager from TV."

"Yeah," Michelle replied.

"Us, too," Lina squeaked. "I was addicted to Fetcher's Fee as a cub."

"Me too," Michelle said. "Scrap Alphas, as well."

Flink nodded. "Yep. Saw all that loot and decided I wanted a bit of it for myself."

"Well, I did want to be a salvager at first," Lina put in. "But instead, after training, I was told that I had the potential to be a team leader for the OSA. So I did that instead."

"Why'd you quit?" Michelle asked her.

The Badger's face lost its smile. "Uh..." Her paw went to her arm. "I... um... I don't really want to talk about it." Her eyes lost focus and became clouded with something Michelle couldn't decode.

She shrugged. "That's okay, I suppose."

Lina mumbled wordlessly, apparently to change the subject. "Anyway, I fell back on my old craft." She grinned widely and looked at Flink, her large hoopy earrings swaying. A bright orange streak in her otherwise black hair caught the light, shining brightly. "And I gotta tell ya, it's been a natural move. Right, Flinky?"

Flink showed his considerable array of angular, flat teeth. "Sure."

"Are you looking forward to your first new world?" Lina asked Michelle. "Symba Prime! It looks nice."

Michelle scratched her ear, still bothered by Lina's spaceout. "Uh, yeah. Sounds good."

As if on cue, a soft electronic tone came over the ship's PA system. "Attention all crew members," Rafferty's voice said from the speakers. "Symba Prime is within visual range. We're here, people."

"Talking of which," Lina chirped. "We have a good few hours, so..." She turned to the Beaver. "Flink, go check everything over in the hold. Make sure the sub don't leak. I'll get Rafferty to check the controls and test the air cans."

Flink grunted and stood. "You got it, Team Leader." He shot her an affectionate smile as he left.

Lina giggled. "So," she said to Michelle, "everything okay with you? I'm Team Leader, so it's my job to know and make sure you're doing alright."

"Just let me take my pills and I'll tell ya," Michelle told her wryly, producing the capsule.