away, color rising in her cheeks. “No one sent me. I came on my own centime.”
That surprised me. And explained a lot.
“What is the nature of the anomaly?” I asked once I’d digested that information.
“Neither this asteroid nor SU-4222H should be in their respective orbits.”
“Should be?”
“I do not believe their orbits are natural. I think the mine sites are rich with heavy metals and rare elements because they were the original sites for the engines that pushed the asteroids into place.”
I smiled. “But humans haven’t been here long enough . . .” I trailed off as she shook her head and the implications started to sink in.
“It was not a human project. And I think it ended catastrophically.”
“But, that would mean—” I shut my mouth. I am not normally so slow on the uptake, I swear, but everyone knew that, despite exploring thousands of systems over hundreds of years, humanity had found no sign of an alien civilization, living or dead.
“That I’m crazy?” she said with what I took to be a bitter smile.
Remembering Renaud, I shook my head. “No, not crazy.”
She cocked her head, looking unconvinced of my sincerity.
“Oh, I don’t know the maths, but . . .” I trailed off. I am not a superstitious man, and don’t give much credence to madmen, but this would cost me very little, and might just be something my mother would be proud of, were she to learn of it. Decided, I turned to Dr. Dumont. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to ask for another inmate to join my crew.”
“Oh?” she said, brow raised in question.
By then I had a few years practicing Gallic shrugs, and offered one of my best. “He might shed some light on your mystery . . .”
MINING
“Lighter NBC-EB, we are two minutes out.” The lighter pilot’s broadcast was in the clear and over all channels.
“Stand by one minute at present range, lighter NBC-EB,” my foreman, Mohammed, said. “We are detonating.”
“Copy, standing by one minute.”
We had already cleared the trench, and once we’d all checked in, Mohammed detonated the string of explosives. As the rubbling charges shook the slurry of icy stone beneath my hovering body, I took a moment to survey my little kingdom in the big black. AL-1517B is shaped like a mangled kidney. My new mine site was on the face of the inner curve on the sunward side, about ten minutes from the main colony. It was shaped like a rectangle of about two hundred meters by one hundred meters.
Prison-orange hardsuits and IFF beacons, glaring to both the naked eye and on my HUD, swarmed back into the trench carved about waist high right through the middle of the long axis of the rectangle. In a matter of moments, mined material was on its way to the refinery.
One of the lessons I’ve learned in my time is that smooth is fast in most things. And my crew worked with a smooth precision that made them very fast indeed.
“You are clear to land, NBC-EB,” Mohammed said.
I watched as Renaud’s ride crested the extremely short horizon and began its descent into the irregular, shallow bowl carved into the asteroid’s surface by human tools. I called up production data from the site on my HUD while I waited. I smiled at the numbers. Mining might not be something I had any training for, but I do know how to assemble and run a crew. Even in my absence, they had produced significantly more rare metals and elements than any of the other teams working AL-1517B. Part of that was luck, of course: we were following a vein of material the previous team had uncovered before ending their term and vacating for home and eventual out-processing. But every member of my crew was well motivated: I needed something to keep my mind off my situation, and they wanted those little extras pleasing me, and the warden, secured.
Procuring Renaud’s immediate release to my crew and quick transport out to the mine had cost me some favors, but nothing out of pocket. Such an inexpensive arrangement would have been