Richard Standish stops in front of the window beside his desk and looks out at the holding yard. He stands with his frail, slightly bowed back to the window, six meters away, that overlooks the production line. He looks out at what will become the raw materials for the large Aquisitive vehicles and small delivery vans produced in his plant. He contemplates the damaged and worn-out vehicles eight meters below his window. They are stacked, two high, row after row from the railroad cars that bring the vehicles to him all the way to the security fence he can barely make out. Some of the vehicles in the yard are nearly as shiny and new as those coming off the production line behind him. Others have been mangled so that his first thought is for the passenger it may have contained when something went terribly wrong.
Every vehicle in the yard is fragment of a story. He can find many of the facts about these stories in his vehicle records, but now, he seldom does. He has learned that the story he makes up while doing research to find out what actually happened to a vehicle is usually more interesting than the fact-filled files he finds on the web. Passengers almost never die in vehicle crashes and few are even seriously injured. Many of the vehicles were empty when they were mangled, the damage being a result of a natural disaster that took place at or on the way to a holding facility. The few instances Richard is aware of when someone attempted to drive the vehicle manually and lost control, the vehicle may have looked a mess after the crash but the advanced engineering protected the people inside and most suffered little physical harm.
Now Richard spends precious little time at the window behind him. When he arrived at his plant, the desk overlooked the assembly route but he moved it to its current location shortly thereafter. A stream of new vehicles, coming off the production line and then being loaded onto railcars guided by their autopilot, quickly lost its fascination. The first year of his appointment, it mesmerized him but he became indifferent to the never changing scene. On the other hand, the recycle yard changes daily, even hourly and has many stories to tell.
While Richard absent mindedly considers the history and future of the defective and damaged vehicles in the first row of the yard his musings are interrupted by the allcom alert tone and he turns from the window. His gaze settles on the screen. As he waits for the communication from the WO to appear a barely audible assertion comes from his lips, "The raiders have been too active this year."
The WO has grown tired of the raiders' mischief and they are going to make an example of the next group that attempts to take parts from Richard's recycle yard. "We have had more than our share of visitors lately," Richard continues to himself, "and there are more on the way, too bad."
The allcom screen comes to life and the WO's message flashes across it; "THE RAIDERS ARE THREE DAYS AWAY. A DETACHMENT OF THE YCPB, SUITABLY TRAINED AND ARMED, WILL ARRIVE AT YOUR YARD TOMORROW AT 13:00 HOURS, LOCAL. THEY HAVE ORDERS TO CAPTURE AND ESCORT THE RAIDERS TO CENTRAL FOR INTERROGATION." 'And so the WO's plan proceeds,' he thinks.
What is not in the WO message, but Richard knows to be true, is the young officers will arrive in an unmarked personnel car which will be attached to the regularly scheduled recycle train that is on its way to the yard from the west coast with more damaged Aquisitive and delivery vehicles. To help conceal their arrival, the WO has chosen to transport the young police officers to the yard without any obvious signs to disclose their arrival.
Richard does not like having a 'detachment' of Youth Corps police prowling around his recycle yard playing hide and seek with the LND raiders. Yes, the raiders have been more active than usual but he feels their activity is of no real consequence and does not warrant this kind of action. The security at the plant is quite adequate for guarding used vehicle modules. He does not think he needs the Y. C. P. B.'s intrusive assistance. At the very first suggestion that the WO was going to do something to dissuade the raiders Richard's anxiety level jumped and he opposed it. He is sure something terrible is going to happen but the WO computers predict a high percentage chance of success without incident and for all his misgivings, Richard knows better than to argue with his superiors.
