Terry's special delivery came in the form of a letter from one of his contacts.
Years of travelling from salvage site to salvage site had garnered him a network of trusted individuals. These contacts had either worked for Terry in the past, or were aware that a lead to the next big motherload of alloys would reward them with a potentially big payday - that is if their lead proved fruitful.
"It's possibly one of the biggest finds that I've ever had," Terry said. "That's if nobody has stumbled across it in the last 200 years."
Terry and Val sat off to the side in the inn's dining room. It would be an hour or so until the suppertime rush hit. A scant number of people sat arrayed at an assortment of tables - enjoying an afternoon tea, or an early dinner.
Terry had sent his wife and son to their room to unpack and get settled. Keth, along with the cart, was directed to a nearby storehouse to unload Terry's personal inventory of metal that had been brought along.
"Can you trust your person to leave it alone until we get there?" Val asked. "What keeps them from making off with the metal themselves? Or even part of it?"
"Nothing," Terry smirked. "They could find a site, dig everything thing up, and sell everything themselves. They might even get a decent payday out of it. Thing is for many, the money will eventually run out. What then? See, if they sign on with me, I not only give them a generous finder's fee, but I also put them on payroll. All they have to do is demonstrate that they are still looking for new sites. If they find one, there's also a bonus if the site remains undisturbed until I get there. It's not always successful, but it works for most people." he paused, and took a sip of coffee.
"And for the people that it doesn't work for?" Val knew she was being baited into asking this.
"Well," he grinned. "They stop working for me."
"That sounds ominous."
"I suppose it does!" He laughed. "No, I don't do anything...dark. They just get blacklisted from working for not only me, but from my network as well. It can get very unprofitable for them after that."
"That's a little less ominious," Val held a thumb and forefinger about a half-inch apart. "But only a little."
"There's something you're not considering."
"What's that?"
"A lot of what's out there is crap. Unless you have a metalmancer with you, and keep in mind I'm talking about one that's as least as powerful as you, usable material that you can recover with just hand tools is pretty limited. That's partly why this is a big one."
"And you still haven't told me what it is."
"So, you know how the war ended?" He leaned back in his seat.
"They ran out of resources," Val recalled. Her father had told her the story. "They were using a type of oil as fuel for most of their machines. It was abundant at first, but the war dragged on and on and it became rarer and rarer. The same thing happened for metal. By the time a ceasefire was called, it was too late.
"The records show a lot of people starved in the next few decades. A lot of the farming was done by machine, and without the fuel to run these machines, or the metal to make the parts to repair them, they just couldn't produce the same volume of food. People had to go back to the old ways of doing things."
"And that's why my sister and I got.... I mean get work every spring plowing fields."
"Yes, you metalmancers have kind of thrown a monkey wrench into things."
"So, what's that got to do with this?"
"When the war ended, A LOT of the former military bases were stripped of anything useful."
"And?"
"I said A LOT. Not All."
"So you're telling me that you've found one of these bases? Why wasn't it stripped at the end of the war?"
"Because, it was abandoned before the war ended."
Val lifted an eyebrow, "And wouldn't they have still taken anything valuable when it was abandoned then?
"Yes, they would've taken anything valuable to THEM. But perhaps not valuable to US."
"I'm not following."
"When oil started to run short, both militaries started to pull back on the numbers of vehicles that they were using. They stored a number of them, not a great number, but a number of them at various underground caches. You see, both sides had hoped that new deposits of oil would be found and they would be able to bring these machines back to life and back to the battlefield. Thing was, that never happened so a number of the caches were simply abandoned a few years before the end of the war."
"And you think you, I mean your contact, has found one of these caches?"
"They seem to think so. I had the luck of stumbling across a bunch of old military records in my journeys. Most of it is useless, personnel forms, supply requisitions, duty watch reports, but once in a while they can tell me the site of a battlefield, or abandoned facility. For years I've been seeing mentions of vehicle caches, but I've never actually stumbled across one.
"And how did you find this one."
"Needle in a haystack. Buried amongst all those documents was a letter from a Lieutenant Barnes to a Major Barnes. You see, Major Barnes was the Lieutenant's uncle, and the Lieutenant thought that his relative had enough clout to transfer him away from a "tank graveyard" and get him reassigned to where the action is."
"So, he mentioned the location?"
"Not exactly, but he mentioned a nearby town. It's a city now."
Val looked wide eyed, "Don't tell me it was Cain's Point."
"No," laughed Terry. "We wouldn't be that lucky would we. It's near a place called Ulareg."