The Miner's Tale

The slow, steady beat of the proximity detector. The scanner’s subtle tone. The song of the cutting laser. When everything was all perfectly in tune, everything just flowed. Time stopped and the rest of the universe ceased to exist. Something always brought you out of it though. Either the ore container filled up, or there was a radio call from one of your crewmates, or some idiot decided to attack you.

That was how it all started on that one particular day. The wailing of the threat identification system snapped me back to reality. It didn’t look like much on the tracking console, but the small incoming vessel had a high energy signature, and was heading right for our spot in the field. He clearly wasn’t a miner, so he had to be a ‘bug’. They were more of an annoyance than a threat, hence the name, but you couldn’t afford to ignore them. They liked to sit on the edge of the asteroid field, watching us, scanning for unattended containers or a lone hauler carrying high value cargo back to base.

This one had chosen his moment carefully, waiting for Dobbs to be away on his run to the station. Now there were only two of us guarding the ore we’d spent that last couple of hours collecting. I’d been mining around Neo-Vega for over twenty-five years, so I knew most of the dirty little tricks these parasites used. My ship didn’t look like much; maybe that was what had drawn them in. The Mercury Star had been an old ship when I’d bought it. The hull was covered in dents, but that was hardly surprising considering all the hours we spent surrounded by flying rocks.

When I checked my crewmate’s position I saw that she’d drifted off with the ‘roid she was cutting, and she was now a good two minutes away.

‘Max, we got a bug incoming!’ I told her. I could barely hear her response with the signal bouncing around the asteroid field so much, but I got the message that she was on her way.

As the bug closed in, I switched over from the mining to the combat laser. The bug made his intentions clear by firing off a few shots in my direction, no doubt hoping I’d flee in terror. Most miners ran when they were attacked, figuring that a couple of hours’ worth of drilling wasn’t worth getting killed over, but I was damned if I was going to let some taffer steal my rocks.

I stayed where I was, next to the container. When the bug got into close range I unloaded a volley of laser fire into his front shield and he got scared. He broke off from making a direct attack, taking a sharp turn to get out of my firing arc. I watched him move out to what he thought was my maximum weapons range, then he started circling, sniping at me with his side-mounted laser.

This guy wasn’t too smart, I realised. He hadn’t reckoned on the fact that mining ships have one advantage over most every other class; manoeuvrability. I was easily able to track him with the nose of the Mercury Star, giving my combat system a good fix on his trajectory. He hadn’t even bothered to vary his speed or course, which told me he'd probably engaged an autopilot while he controlled his gun manually.

While my targeting solution came up to ninety-nine percent, I set all my weapons to overcharge, saturating their energy cells for one big shot. I fired everything at the point in his perfectly circular trajectory where I knew he was going to be, and he took the lot. In one go he lost his shields, his engines and his flight controls. He span out and clipped one large asteroid, then slammed into the middle of another.

The glare from the explosion lit up my cockpit, blinding me for a second. When my eyes had readjusted it took me a minute to realise what I was looking at. The hole in the asteroid was filled with a bright, shimmering, silvery metal. I’d seen something like it before, but only ever in fist-sized lumps, or tiny grains embedded in other ores. This asteroid was full of the stuff, and it looked pure.

I was still sitting there, staring at the asteroid, when Max showed up.

‘Rellin? You there?’ she said.

‘Max, do me a favour. Scan that rock in front of me and tell me what you think it is.’ I heard Max’s scanner whirring in the background, then the string of expletives when she got the same result as I had.

‘There’s no way,’ she said. ‘It can’t be.’

‘Xendrium,’ I said.

‘The scanner’s wrong. A rock that size would be the biggest chunk of xendrium anyone’s ever found, by a long way,’ said Max.

‘My scanner says the same thing. They can’t both be wrong.’

We sat there, desperately trying to disbelieve what our scanners were telling us, until Dobbs came back from the station. We got him to fire off a sample return probe. The little drone flew out and collected some of the rock, then took it back to Dobb’s ship. He ran it through it his analyser.

‘Definitely xendrium,’ said Dobbs. ‘The purity’s off the scale. At current market rates, this asteroid’s worth trillions.’

Max called up every miner and hauler she knew, promising them a cut of the profits if they could keep their mouths shut until the sale went through. With all of us working flat out it took almost fifteen hours to extract and ship every last ounce of the precious alloy. Only when the entire rock was safely stored in our silo on the station could we relax and celebrate our good fortune.

I was one of the last ones to the party, by which time everyone was pretty far gone, except Max who didn’t drink. On the giant display above her office was the image of Ceru Lea Solette, our lord and master. She owned the proclate, the territory we mined in, but she let us keep whatever we found. In return all we had to do was pay rent, and promise to protect the territory from any outside threats.

When I walked in Ceru Solette was giving a speech congratulating Max and her crew on the find. She blathered on, and on, with everyone looking up at her image on the screen, but what they were really looking at was the ticker underneath listing the unit price for xendrium. We’d been lucky with the timing of our find. There were always rumours of wars between the various cerus in the system and xendrium was a major component in missile warheads. The unit price had been rising steadily for weeks, so everyone was keen to sell off our stockpile before it started dropping.

Dobbs bumped into me, swinging a bottle of cheap brew around and singing.

‘Come on Rell, you’re not drinking!’ he yelled over the noise of the party. I grabbed his arm and tried to talk to him. He dug his hand in his pocket and took out the nugget of xendrium he’d retrieved with the probe.

‘Here. A souvenir.’

‘I think we should wait it out,’ I yelled. ‘Sell if off slowly.’ I wanted to hear Dobbs’ opinion on the matter, but anything he might have said was drowned out by the dangerwave baseline of Max’s favourite song. Max started dancing around her office, then noticed me.

‘Hey Rellin!’ she screamed in my direction. When the others saw me I was lifted up and carried around the hangar to raucous applause and cheers, but I felt more like sleeping than celebrating.

When the unit price reached the arbitrary figure that Max had set in the trade computer, it triggered the sell order. Our whole stock of xendrium went onto the market and was swallowed up in milliseconds by the bots who patrolled the exchange. A long line of numbers appeared at the bottom of the display. This was our profit from the sale. I came out with the most; over four billion credits. The others weren’t far behind, but most of them were so drunk they didn’t realise how rich they were until the next morning. By then I was gone.

I grabbed a few hours sleep on my ship, then fired up the engines of the Mercury Star and left the station, or tried to. Outside there was a fleet of media ships, all bombarding me with messages and requests for interviews. Once I was clear of the station control zone I muted the radio and ignored them. Some of them tried to follow me, but when I entered the asteroid field, their pilots backed off and turned around. My mind quickly settled in to the old routine. I flew around the rocks, precisely matching their movements and focusing on not getting crushed. My mind wandered, writing a shopping list of all the things I wanted. I could have the best retrieval beams, the latest mining lasers, a totally new rig, custom built to my own spec, and I could hire mercenaries to protect me, so I didn’t have to rely on Max and the others.

Out of habit, I drifted to the same place I was yesterday, where I’d found the xendrium asteroid. It was where our crew always mined. There was another ship here, I noticed, and it wasn’t one of our crews. I was about to tell them to clear out when I noticed my radio was still muted. When I opened the channel there were a lots of people all talking at once. I could hear arguments about who was here first and threats being made over who had claim to what. I did a quick scan of the area and there were more ships off to the side of me, behind, below and above, hidden behind asteroids, floating in and out of view.

The more I looked, the more ships I saw. They ranged from tiny shuttlecraft to great big freighters, all desperately trying to avoid the moving rocks and each other. A few were kitted out for mining, but most weren’t. I saw people using the wrong lasers, people with no means of collecting what they were cutting away, people with concussion charges blasting big holes in random asteroids before moving to the next one. They were all looking for xendrium. None of them held the mining rights to the territory, and the damage they were causing would take weeks to clear. The Ceru would go crazy when she found out, and it would be our crew she’d call to deal with the mess.

Someone must have spotted me. A ship suddenly cut in front of my mine, almost causing a collision. They gawked at me from their viewport waving an imaging scanner in my direction, trying to get a shot of the famous Rellin Suln. I backed off, nearly hitting another ship coming at me from behind. There were more ships arriving all the time and things were only going to get worse. It was just a matter of time before there was a major accident, and I was determined I wasn’t going to be the cause of it.