Cobalt

“When it comes down to the moment, this life’s not going to break you.”

Naïveté shapes the start of so many adventures. It was certainly a large part of how I, a history professor, ended up hanging on a tether out the back of a speeding mining freighter while fleeing from a drone swarm in a war zone, but we’ll get to that part of the story.

I suppose what inspired me to explore the mining techniques of the outer Battery Systems was my recent trip to Damon Mines. I’d been invited there by an archaeological team for my expertise on that historical era in the Battery, and mostly, the age of expansion in question has been studied through the macro-movements—the large expeditions and planetary colonizations out into the Western Battery on a grand scale. That’s the main part of the story. What gets missed by most historians and even the peoples of the Indies and Lettered Systems is that a significant number of those outer systems were colonized by very small parties, families, minor corporate enterprises, and even smugglers and bootleggers of illicit materials. So I jumped at the opportunity to investigate Damon Mines firsthand, as it’s a perfect example of one of these small colonies that didn’t succeed—one of the lesser known ghostworlds in the Indies. The towns there are largely frozen in time as they were left centuries ago.

This in itself was fascinating to me, and I may write about it yet in great depth. Certainly more than an article is warranted about these ghostworlds. Now, though, I’m writing about a subject that may seem utterly boring to most people in the Inner Battery, but it’s a subject that enables all space-faring civilization, and this story almost never gets told on Athos. The shame of this glaring omission in our historical narratives is that not only was it critical in the past (and still is in the present) but a huge percentage of us have ancestors who were miners at some point, and some of us descend from long lineages rich, pun intended, with miners.

So after visiting the ghostworld of Damon Mines, I decided to take advantage of the fact I was already out in the Indies to hitch a ride to Alpha-Olivier. My research informed me that one of the largest refineries in the Western Battery was in operation orbiting Kapua, a mid-sized gas giant in the system otherwise designated as Olivier 6.

Unlike many refineries, instead of being constructed and run by a single corporate entity, the early colonizers of the Olivier system, being mostly independent miners themselves, pooled their resources to build a refinery that operated more like a co-op, where independent mining outfits could bring in raw, unmixed, unrefined ores. Out the other side, after processing, they get refined metals and minerals for a stable, well-regulated fee that keeps the Kapua refinery in operation.  And it’s the steady supply of these metals and minerals, in turn, that keep the economies of the Inner Battery running.

The history of Kapua would be a fascinating story in its own right. On this trip, though, my goal was to get aboard an asteroid mining carrier to see how they operated. I wanted to understand the flip side of the planetary mining outposts I’d been studying in detail on Damon Mines. I showed up entirely unannounced, with no contacts, and zero sense of what sort of reception an Athosian history professor would get from the spacehands out there. I figured that with the many thousands of ships that came in and out of Kapua each year, there had to be an operator who wouldn’t mind sharing their understanding of the present state of things out on the front lines of the space mining industry.

As I said at the outset, Naïveté shapes the start of so many adventures.

This one began in my mind with my time on Damon Mines, the romantic notions I had of imaginary conversations I would’ve had with those long-dead miners—the things they could have told me about their lives if I’d only had the opportunity to ask the questions. When romanticism met reality out on Kapua, what I got was a long string of humiliating insults, hearty laughter, rejection, rejection, and more rejection, culminating in what I eventually learned was a bit of hazing or perhaps a practical joke that finally landed me on a carrier.

I was in a cafeteria in the station trying to secure a berth. It was probably something like the two-hundredth conversation of the kind, familiar enough I understood how it was going to go. A group of miners were seated together, staring at me, of course, as I looked so obviously out of place there. So I approached them, explaining who I was and what I was doing. This group laughed at me before I even asked the question. They put together a long string of jokes and insults—mostly about Athosians—some of which were pretty damn funny, I have to admit. Then one of them said, almost as an afterthought, “Hey, maybe Looper’s in. We should send this guy to see Strombo.” That set off a roar of laughter. “What’s the over under on how long it takes an Athosian professor to fill up the bottom half of his suit?” someone else replied, setting off another chain of laughs. “Five hours. I’ll take the under!” another shouted.

“Strombo?” I said smiling along with them. “Do you think he might be interested?”

There was another fierce roar of laughter.

“Oh, yeah,” one of the miners joked, “as long as there’s something in it for Strombo, Strombo’s interested.”

“Where can I find him?” I asked.

The laughter died down a bit.

“I’m entirely serious,” I told them.

“Have you ever got your hands dirty in your life, Athosian?” one of the older miners asked.

“I just spent the past year digging out a dead mining colony on Damon Mines. So, yeah, literally, my hands were dirty every day.”

“No danger there,” one of the miners quipped.

“Aw, what the hell?” the first one who’d proposed Strombo said. “Fella wants to see a miner at work, it’s nothing to me. You can find Strombo’s ship moored off the Key pier, number seven. Ship’s name is the Curiat. Ask for Heder Strombo. He runs a fleet of about thirty ships.”

“Ask to go out with Looper,” one of the men laughed. “He’ll show you a time.”

“I’ll do that. Thanks,” I replied. “As you said, what the hell?”

They all looked at each other for a moment, grinned, and went about their lunch, and I walked off in search of the Curiat.

I tried to find the ship at the pier they suggested—the Key pier—but was denied access when I answered honestly that I wasn’t maintenance or crew. They had no flight plan logged for the ship’s departure in the station flight record, so I knew the Curiat would be at Kapua for at least a few days. When I asked how I could get in touch with the captain, the station master’s crew asked me what I was doing. I didn’t give them the full story, but I said I was trying to meet with this captain Heder Strombo. It turned out the piers had temporary offices for fleet captains in the gravitation of the cylinder while their ships were on a mooring.

When I got down to the Key offices, I learned that Strombo pretty much had his own designated office down there. He practically lived there. With roughly thirty ships coming and going on a continuous basis, he usually came in and moored for weeks or months at a time coordinating his fleet from Kapua.

He was in his office when I entered.

Heder Strombo had a rough look about him and seemed a little jittery and eccentric, but he was hardly intimidating. The sight of him certainly didn’t inspire the kind of reaction the men in the cafeteria exhibited, at least by my reckoning.

“You want what?” he asked me. “To go for a ride?”

“I’d like to learn about what you do, how you operate.”

“You say you’re some kind of historian, Mr. Airee?”

“I’m a professor of history, yes.”

“From Athos?”

“That’s correct. The Capitol at Ithaca, College of Historical Specialties.”

“What does a fancy place like that want from an outfit like mine?”

“To learn how you do what you do, mostly. Miners like you play a critical role in our infrastructure. Most Athosians have no idea how we get our raw materials. I want to see it in action, to tell the stories of the people who keep our society going. There’ll be compensation of course. My department has funds for this sort of field research.”

He scoffed and shrugged his shoulders, getting up from the table where he seemed to be tracking his units on a float screen on one half, while watching some sort of docudrama on the other. The program paused as he got up.

“I only got two units in right now. If they’ll take you, it’s okay with me, just as long as you give me your word on one thing,” he said almost as an afterthought. “This isn’t some sort of joke? You Athosians come all the way out here to have a laugh at us miners at our expense?”

“No, sir,” I replied. “I just spent nearly a year digging up a mining outpost in the Damon system learning about early expansion era mining practices. I’m serious about this. I’d never make a mockery of you or your profession.”

“Yeah right, fella,” he answered, “come with me.”

There were crew bunks along another wing, spartan little hotel quarters where operators stayed while their ships’ payloads were getting processed by the refinery.

Strombo didn’t say a word along the walk, stepping quickly down to the crew quarters. When we got there, he turned and said, “Maybe Nera will take you.”

He pinged the door twenty steps or so before stopping at a bunk room and rapping on the door with his knuckles. “Open up, Nera.”

A few seconds later, the door opened, and a young woman appeared. “Hey, dad,” she said, squinting and looking me up and down. “What’s up?”

“Airee, meet my daughter Nera. He wants to ride with you, daughter, some sort of historian of mining he is.”

She shook her head.

“You want me to take him out with me?”

I nodded and smiled at her.

“It’s either you or Looper.”

She looked at me again. “Hell, no. This guy looks like a creep. He’s not getting on my ship.”

“Not that I have any intention of pressuring anyone into anything,” I said.

“Nor are you in the position to,” Strombo replied.

“I understand. But a creep? Really? You hardly took one look at me.”

“Yeah, stick this creep with Looper, dad. I don’t want him on my ship.”

Heder Strombo looked at me and grinned. “Guess Looper gets the task ... if he tolerates the sight of you.”

“Better hurry,” Nera Strombo stated, “18 was in the processing bay when I turned in. I bet he’s already filed into the outbound queue.”

We caught up to this Looper as he was preparing to board the mining carrier. Strombo pinged him, asking him to come back to the inner pier. The refinery had already given the ten-minute call to get that empty carrier back off the line.

Looper came back into the staging area, where two other pilots were waiting to take out their ships after him. He seemed shockingly young to be driving any ship, much less a large mining carrier. He was dark-haired, tough looking, with a cocky grin made a bit more impactful by the outline of about a week’s worth of stubble.

“What’s up, boss?” he asked Strombo. “I’m just pulling out.”

“You willing to take on an observer?”

“Observer? Who, this guy? Not a trainee?” he declared, shaking his head. “What’s his problem?”

“He’s some kind of history professor from Athos. Wants to see how mining gets done.”

“Historian?” Looper said, his grin getting wider as he shook his head. “Are you for real, Professor?”

“I am,” I said, sticking out a hand. “Carsten Airee. Pleasure to meet you, sir.”

He didn’t shake my hand, merely looking over at Strombo in disbelief. Strombo shrugged and looked back at me.

“You willing to get your hands dirty, Professor?” Looper asked.

“Carsten, please. And, yes. Always.”

“Things have been getting pretty hairy out by the lines,” he said shrugging. “You got the stones to tag along, I don’t mind the company. Hope you got your affairs in order.”

Looper and Strombo grinned at each other.

A five-minute call rang out through the staging area.

“You good to go?” he asked.

“I’ve been ready since I got to Kapua. I’m anxious to go,” I told him.

“Off you go, then,” Strombo stated grinning. “Enjoy your trip out there, Professor.”

I’d thought it through beforehand, figuring I couldn’t depend on a window of time to return to my room and get my belongings, so I was traveling light with my bag on my shoulder, ready to go for weeks if need be. I thought better of asking any questions before we pushed off, not wanting to give Looper any reason to change his mind.

He was quiet too, making no effort to open a dialogue beyond insisting I strap in beside him on the flight deck before the vessel’s engines were charged up.

The ship was being piloted remotely by the station, so all Looper did in terms of driving the vessel was approve a handshake between the station itself and the ship’s assistant, a George Strombo had installed in all his ships. I couldn’t tell yet which of the two drove the ship primarily, but I suspected Looper would take on more of that responsibility once we got out into open space.

As we began to tack away from the station in the egress pattern, Looper started talking.

“George, pull up the relevant sections on the panel as I call them out. I’m going to give our guest a tour while we’re in pattern.”

“Acknowledged,” the George replied.

“This is a standard 514 cargo ship modified to transport and deploy four inner carriers, which themselves have been customized and refitted to deploy to the surface of asteroids and collect ore. Once the operator chooses a site and deploys these specialized carriers, which we call beetles, they will autonomously gather materials according to a pre-programmed algorithm until they’re full. They ping the ship back and we go pick them up.

“This 514 has also been modified with four Ti-nanoweave blankets that can be deployed to capture small to medium-sized asteroids of light- to medium-light density.

“My job is to select the sites to deploy the beetles and blankets and then stuff this sucker full. Once I do that, we turn back around, bring in the load for processing and repeat. Easy enough so far?”

“Yes, that’s incredibly helpful,” I replied. “Have you trained other pilots, because I think you may have been a teacher in a past life.”

He laughed. “Okay, Professor, whatever you say.”

For a moment there was an awkward silence. I looked over at him as the images of the beetles and other equipment that had been playing on the front panel disappeared and the stars and blackness of space were all that could be seen.

“Pull up an external view of Kapua and follow again, George,” Looper said, waiting for the image to appear before continuing the orientation. “The Kapua refinery is the most critical element of the job to understand. Did you have a chance to see the refinery at all?”

“Not much,” I answered. “I didn’t get in there. I was too busy trying to secure a berth with an operator to see the facility.”

“Okay, well, we’ll go through it then. See, that’s the most important part of the job. If you can’t get the ore or minerals processed, then you can’t get paid for your load, no matter what you grab and haul back with you. And you have to understand that the refinery isn’t some magical box that you drop your ore into only to have it spit out perfect metal plates or cubes of minerals.

“It’s very rare to find a pure deposit of any raw ore. Almost everything has gotten mixed up floating around the galaxy for billions of years, so usually you’ll find a rock with quartz and platinum and iron and carbon all mixed together in some concentration, or something like that, and because each of those things gets processed differently at different temperatures and all that, the refinery can only do so much. You see those tubes that run along the back of the facility there?”

The panel pulled up a clear picture of a network of pipes on the side of the station that faced the gas giant.

“Sure,” I said, nodding.

“Those tubes all flow down to the main pipeline there. It’s a whole magnetized network, and there’s enough flow through there to dump everything down the drain, even the rocks and metals that aren’t magnetic themselves. All the slag and metals too mixed up to get processed—depending on the load it comes in with—it all gets flushed down into the planet’s atmosphere.”

There was a corresponding set of videos that showed the main exhaust, even pictures from within the pipes, and one long shot from a drone that followed the main exhaust pipe along its length as it approached the exhaust port, which spit its contents into a wide freefall that the camera recorded as little glowing spots along the upper atmosphere as the slag began to hit the outer extremes of Kapua’s raging cloud-storms. I hadn’t noticed it with the naked eye as I had come in to the station days before, but there was a constant glow from the sparks hitting the atmosphere.

“That’s it. That’s most of what you need to know. You got any questions on that?”

“Do you have a good sense of what sorts of materials will yield a good return when you see an asteroid in the field?”

“You get a feel for it. George helps. He’s also able to give you a real-time market price for target materials if you come up on something you’re not sure of. Estimates of values. The places we’ll go first, though, those fields are so mined, you pretty much learn what’s there in your first couple weeks out here. Everything’s so well documented and scouted there’s not much surprise. If you want to have a very boring time, I can pretty much guarantee a load of titanium and silica that would pay for the trip and maybe a couple thousand L-Cr on top of it, which Strombo would be okay with, because that covers his costs, loses him nothing, and keeps me hungry to go out again because the payoff’s so low.”

“Let me ask a different way,” I replied. “What makes someone like you good at your job versus a miner who might not do as well?”

“What separates me from a monkey, you’re asking?”

I smiled. “Something like that.”

“Yeah,” he said grinning back. “How far out are you willing to go; how much exploring over how much time; but right now, current climate, it’s about how close you’re willing to get to getting your ass blown to hell by the Trasp. You don’t want to see the Etterans either, for that matter. They’ll both blow anything to hell if they want to, especially these past few months.”

He turned to make eye contact with me. “No risk, no reward. You know that’s what you signed up for, right, Professor?”

I shrugged. “I had a sense for it.”

“You got a death wish,” he declared, half joking. “What’s her name?”

“Who?”

“Okay, Professor, sure. Only one thing drives someone like you farther out from the Indies into the Letters, and it’s got nothing to do with mining.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Right. You end up on my ship out of curiosity?”

“Nobody else would take me.”

“Maybe they don’t have what you’re looking for out here. Anyway, it’s nothing to me, Professor.”

“Carsten, please. You’re the professor on this trip, Looper. I’m just learning.”

“No. That’s too familiar. You want me to think we’ll be friends if you talk to me right. I know better. I haven’t met that many Athosians, but I know when you get off this ship, we ain’t keeping in touch, I’ll put it that way.”

I shrugged. This Looper was a straight talker who seemed to see things just as straight. If he saw what was in the asteroids nearly as well, he’d find his jackpot soon enough.

“How about Airee? That’s my last name.”

“Airee of Athos. That’s all right,” Looper said. “I guess Strombo told you my name back at the station?”

“Looper, yeah. Why do they call you Looper?”

He turned and looked at me funny. “Cuz it’s my name—what my mother named me. Looper Vonn.”

“I thought it was some sort of nickname or call sign or ...” I could see in his face he was taking offense. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’ve just never met anyone named Looper before.”

“There’s Loopers on my world. I guess there’s none on Athos.”

“There’s a lot of people on Athos,” I replied. “I just haven’t heard of a Looper there yet. What is your world, by the way?”

“Moffinga. It’s in the Kappas, just this side of the near-boundary worlds with the Betas.”

“What sort of world is it?”

“All right, I guess. Mostly it’s an Ag outpost. Rich supply of nitrates and farmers, mostly.”

“You don’t strike me much as a farmer, Looper.”

“If I did, I never would have left. Better work here. Suits me.”

The ship seemed to fly loose of the steady progression away from the Kapua refinery. I figured the station’s pilot had loosed the ship to the onboard flight systems.

“Awaiting instructions,” George announced. “A heading please, Captain.”

“You’re serious, Airee?” Looper asked me. “Last chance to tell me what you’re about.”

“How do you mean?”

“If you’re going to piss yourself the second things get hairy, I need you to tell me now. We can go get our titanium and be back in forty-eight hours, and you go on your way. Or, I could show you what this job is all about.”

“I see,” I said. “I was serious. I signed up for the trip you’re taking. I presume you have some sense of self-preservation. That’s good enough for me.”

“You tell yourself what you want. You know the lines are hot out here lately, right?”

“I’ve heard a few things.”

“I don’t hear you objecting, Airee. That’s what I’m hearing.”

I shrugged.

“Off we go then,” he said. “George, let’s try the Turning Bee field—the outer quad. Let’s see what’s cooking there first.”

It was a quick jump to Turning Bee, which wasn’t a system but a name the miners had given to a nearby mining site for a numbered system in the Alphas. According to Looper it had been picked clean over the decades of most of the choice metals and minerals but still yielded a steady output of silica and titanium, as he’d mentioned before. There was also plenty of iron ore on the readouts George presented, more for my benefit than Looper’s. It became clear quickly that whatever he was looking to see in the system didn’t have anything to do with mining there. He had no intention of harvesting Turning Bee. He noticed me noticing this.

“See the traffic. You can figure by the number of higher-tier claims being operated closer to Kapua how things are going near the Trasp boundary systems. If things are busy like this at Turning Bee, it means everyone’s jittery.”

“Makes sense,” I said, nodding.

“That outlay up there,” he said, gesturing to the crush of ships clustered together on the transparent front display panel. “What’s that look like, George?”

“Opportunity,” the ship’s system replied.

“You hear that, Airee? Opportunity. I got my George trained pretty good. Opportunity’s not for the faint of heart.”

“Truth,” I agreed. “Anybody live out here?”

“Turning Bee? Hell no. As I said, all the good stuff’s been stripped out of the system. Couple moons, but the inner planets are hot as hell, no atmospheres, and there’s no sense fighting the heat and the gravity wells. There’s better pickings up the way a little, Airee. Hold on.”

The next jump took us a few more hours out. It was an Indie in between Trasp space and the Letters called Mara Sol, one of the few isolated independent systems that stubbornly held to its original designation on the Athosian star maps. There was a small cylinder group there that had negotiated for their neutrality at the start of the war, according to Looper. Odds were good they’d exchanged something of value for their neutrality. Whatever that was, Looper didn’t seem to know, but he reported that he’d stopped there a few times for supplies and the cylinder group was still intact, completely unmolested—either a bloody miracle or some creative form of neutrality that benefited the Trasp somehow.

Looper had a contact inside the Mara Sol cylinder group, a girl.

“A friend?” I asked him.

“I told you I stopped there a few times.”

“Long enough to make some friends.”

“Or the same one over and over,” he said, grinning.

“I have Tara-Jin,” George announced.

“Looper, you outbound again?” her ping came through.

“You know I’m out here working,” he replied.

There was a delay before her next transmission caught up to us, archaic RF comms.

“How’s your brother?” her voice finally came through again about a half minute later.

Looper sort of grimaced, almost as though it was a subject he wasn’t happy to be talking about in front of a stranger.

“Good as gold, babe. What’s the chatter?”

“Now I know you’re going out. ‘What’s the chatter,’ he says.” Tara-Jin’s tone betrayed her disappointment. The long silence between responses was deeper confirmation.

I was about to ask about the system, whether there was a lot of mining here, but Looper put up his hand and shook his head before I opened my mouth.

“I don’t hear anything privileged, Looper, you know,” Tara-Jin finally replied. “The silvers have been quiet at the pub the past few weeks—quiet and steady.”

“I’ll stop by soon, babe. Not this run,” Looper replied. “Gotta strike, you know.”

“I hear,” she replied after another long pause. “Careful out there, Looper.”

“Always, babe. I’ll bring you something on my next stop. I promise.”

He gave a hand signal to George to close the call.

“Care to translate?” I asked him.

“Oh, that. They have a monitoring station on the cylinders. They catch transponders, light signs as best they can. It’s a pretty dark system, so they can actually see pretty good, comings and goings  through the sector. Tara-Jin works in a pub where the silvers—that’s what they call the officers in the station outpost—anyway the silvers eat in her pub. They talk a lot until there’s something they don’t want anybody knowing about.”

“Any idea what that is?”

“Look, Airee, nobody’s fooling around about the way it is out here. You’ve been out by Damon so long or whatever, but everyone who’s got a feel for things out here can sense it.”

“What do you think?”

“The Trasp are going to do something. I don’t know what it is, else they wouldn’t be too good at their jobs now, would they? And the Trasp, say what you want about the bastards, they’re good at their jobs.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “What’s it mean for you?”

“Well,” he replied, looking up to the front panel reflecting on the possibilities. “Could be that means they’re so preoccupied killing Etterans they don’t bother with a mining ship extracting a little metal here and there. Could be that once they go weapons hot they shoot anything out here that moves. And we don’t move faster than anything they’ve got in their arsenal. So, same as always, I guess. Who knows? We take our chances.”

“But not here in Mara Sol?”

“What, mining?” he replied. “There’s no good mining here. I’m going to take us right to the edge of the Trasp border. Jayfair.”

“Is that an Alpha?”

He blurted out a laugh. “Not for like sixty years, Airee. It’s a graveyard as far as anyone who used to live there is concerned. If anybody’s mining out there when we jump in, you’ll know the Trasp are distracted. You usually got about twelve good hours from the time the first ship starts poking around before frigates jump in. Scoop and screw.”

It was a quiet trip out to Jayfair. Looper unstrapped and floated in the crew compartment, dozing. He suggested I do the same. I never loved the idea of floating around the insides of a spaceship hurtling across the galaxy, so I got out of the jump seat, stretched out a bit, and then buckled back in, loosening the straps so I could sleep comfortably. It felt like a full night’s sleep by the time I woke to Looper’s preparations for the approach to Jayfair.

I half expected to see a phalanx of Trasp frigates on the display waiting mid-system to jump to our sides and annihilate us. We got a different surprise instead. There were at least a dozen transponder lights on the display panel.

Looper exhaled. “Every hustler on Kapua!”

On second look, there had to be nearly twenty ships in the system.

“Something’s popping somewhere. Hang on a minute, Airee,” Looper said. “ST-18, Looper pinging. What’s on the clock?”

While we awaited a response, Looper explained that the miners kept track of who’d been there the longest. Given the regularity with which the Trasp showed up in the system whenever miners did, they were fairly certain there were surveillance stations hidden somewhere, but there were also concentrations of rhodium and osmium that had paid off the risk far more times than not.

“I even lost a beetle and all four blankets screwing out of here one time,” Looper said. “Showed up at Kapua stuffed with three beetles packed full of high-grade rhodium.”

“How did Strombo take that?” I asked him.

“Are you kidding? He was ecstatic. He bought a new beetle for that junker, all new blankets, and still made nearly ten thousand L-Cr on the run.”

“Pen-4, Onyx here,” a voice pinged back. “We’re on sixteen hours out here, Looper, and one of the Goshens was here hours before us. If there was ever a time … If you’re going to hit it, let us know how it went on the back end.”

“Received, Onyx. If you don’t hear from me by the quarter turn, tell Strombo where he’ll find his lost freighter shot to hell.”

“Sixteen hours?” I said.

“Too long to risk putting any gear out here, Airee, even if I wanted to. Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“I’ll tell you on the way,” he said to me, gesturing for George to open the transmission one last time, before declaring to the fleet: “Tell them back at Kapua that Looper’s cashing out.” He didn’t wait for a response; instead, Looper instructed George to make the next jump.

He offered me something to eat after we were cruising. I told him that I was starting to get the sense that I wasn’t the one with the death wish. I’d detected some seriously cold energy from him while Looper was signing off with those other miners at Jayfair. I figured there was only one place we could be heading now, pressed right up against Trasp territory having passed up a rare shot at Jayfair at a time that system wasn’t being closely guarded. We had to be going into Trasp space, with Looper looking to raid an even richer mining secret that might have been passed down by word of mouth through generations of miners out in this boundary region.

He shrugged when I put that proposition to him.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“Of course, I don’t have to answer,” he replied.

“No pressure, I mean,” I told him.

Looper shrugged.

“What’s the story with your brother?”

He scoffed and shook his head, muttering Tara-Jin’s name under his breath.

“She didn’t betray any trust,” I insisted. “ She had no idea I was with you. The thing is, I have a sense there’s a connection.”

“Connection? To what?”

“To this. You and your brother.”

He shrugged. “So what if there is, Airee?”

“I actually don’t have a death wish, Looper. I’m out here to learn about mining, but what I really care about isn’t some abstract history of mining techniques. I want to know who the people were who brought the materials that built all our cities, all our cylinders and structures.”

“Yeah? They’re all dead. What’s to know?”

“They aren’t unlike us, though, I figure. The reasons they did the work they did probably isn’t all that different from you.”

“Don’t get yourself all twisted, Airee. I still do this for the money. The thing about all those crazies back at Jayfair and the others is they’re all young like me, looking to hit big and buy their own ship. So we risk getting blasted to hell.”

“How would Strombo react if he found out you were taking his freighter into Trasp territory.”

“He’s insured. Ships don’t come back every now and again. He’d break even and get a brand-new ship out of the equation. If he could find five more pilots as crazy as me, he’d do it in a second.”

“Okay,” I said, probing with a look.

“Is that a good answer?” Looper asked.

“Yeah, that’s a good answer. You don’t have to tell me about your brother.”

“And you don’t tell me about the girl.”

I shook my head. “It’s not about the girl. It’s what I said.”

“So there is a girl?” he replied, grinning. “I knew it.”

He was very proud of himself.

“What’s her name, Airee?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” I told him. “I’ll give you a name if you tell me where we’re going.”

“Not a name. I’m no fool. You give me her name, and I’ll tell you our destination. You might wish I hadn’t, but I will.”

I thought about it for a moment. Wherever we were going we would get there eventually, but I also figured I might build a little more rapport if I gave him her name. He’d never be able to piece it together anyway.

“Her name’s Carly.”

“Carly? And you thought I had a funny name? She must be some kind of special to drive you out here, Airee. She’ll think you’re one crazy bastard if you tell her about this run, I’ll bet. That’s if she believes you.”

“Yeah?” I said, pausing and gesturing for him to uphold his half of the deal.

“We’re going to Richfield,” he stated, and I could tell instantly he wasn’t putting me on.

“What! Wouldn’t suicide be quicker?”

“Quicker, for sure. But there’s no chance of return on that. I figure I could do day runs for Strombo for ten years before I save enough scratch to get my own ship. I didn’t come out from Moffinga to spend half my life working for someone else. One lucky pass at Richfield and ten years is tomorrow.”

“One not so lucky pass and tomorrow’s not happening, Looper. You are crazy.”

He shrugged. “I thought you said you studied this stuff. What did you think miners were about? That’s it. That’s the history. You’re going to get to live it. All those ships back behind us, the canaries in the coal mine. You ever heard that one?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one.”

“Where we’re going, there’s no canaries, Airee. Jackpot or bust. What do you think Carly would say about that?”

“I’d say she wouldn’t believe me if I told her.”

“There’s maps,” Looper said, shrugging. “I’m not the first to try. I got a plan. We’ll be in and out in six hours. We can take our own pictures, share them with your girl. Plus, if I cash out, I’m not going to stiff you, Airee. You can bring her back something nice.”

I’d said it enough earlier that I’d bought my ticket. I was on the trip Looper was taking, and if he was going to Richfield, so was I. I figured we should take advantage of the long jump in to get prepared. I asked him what he knew of the system and shared what little knowledge I had.

Unfortunately, I’d never studied the systems along the Trasp and Etteran boundaries in great detail. I knew the basics. Richfield, along with Burning Rock, was one of the two worst hotspots of the West Battery War. It was aptly named, teeming with asteroids famously rich in number and quality, which astronomers believed were the byproduct of a collision between an outer, rocky dwarf-planet and a similarly rocky rogue world that had smashed each other into a trillion pieces in the system’s astronomical past. Richfield was located directly between the two warring empires, and prior to hostilities the system’s ample resources were shared amicably between the Etterans and the Trasp. Since the war’s outbreak, though, little had been shared between the two powers save violence and animus.

On Athos, any mention of Richfield was almost always followed by a number, a deathcount unfathomable to a people untouched by war. What the number usually told us was the current temperature of the conflict. When it rose into the tens of thousands, the tensions were warming. In the hundreds of thousands, it was time to pay attention. Mostly, it hovered in the hundreds or low thousands. Still, I couldn’t fathom how Looper thought we could possibly jump in, drop the mining gear, work for six hours, and collect it again before jumping out again unscathed, or alive for that matter.

“There’s risk,” he told me, “Sure. But if I’m right, it’s not as bad as anybody thinks. Richfield is filled with listening stations and mines, drones from both sides.”

“That’s not exactly a compelling reason to go in, Looper.”

“Great, Airee. Nice one. See, though, during the last two offensives, both the Trasp and Etterans pulled fighting ships from the systems where they didn’t need living fighters, and Richfield, because it’s so well covered with automated probes, neither side could sneak in and get a real foothold without the other being able to respond. My bet is that nobody’s actively patrolling it right now.”

“And the automated systems?”

Looper shrugged. “I don’t think they’re scanning for cargo carriers, Airee.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The Trasp and Etterans both have civilian ships. They have to mine too, right? They move cargo same as us.”

He was certain. Looper’s certainty was so convincing I got the sense that he knew something he wasn’t telling me.

“All right then. If we’re going in, let’s discuss this plan of yours,” I told him, “starting with ingress and egress.”

“Look at you, Airee, the history professor sounding like some military commander.”

“You’d be surprised the little things I’ve picked up in my travels.”

We sat at the display for hours going over the system. The maps he had of the outer fields weren’t detailed enough to home in on specific asteroids, but there was data on certain regions. It became clear that someone had been there before—whether it was Looper himself, another miner, or from some stolen Trasp or Etteran reconnaissance wasn’t clear. But Looper had a very specific area and ore tagged for extraction: Cobalt.

There were deposits of rare purity spread throughout the field, and it was always in high demand as one of the key components in active nanosheets, among a great many other applications.

“There’s also a good chance we can score some lonsdaleite in that area,” Looper said.

“Isn’t that manufactured?” I asked him.

“I’m surprised you even know that. Don’t you study history?”

“I have taken science courses,” I quipped. “I did quite well in them.”

“Not well enough to know that we can’t make lonsdaleite chunks the size of your fist, Airee. It’s an impact formation, choice material. Richer than the Cobalt. If we spot a rock and it’s practical, we bag it.”

“As I said, you’re the professor out here,” I told him.

We went over the ingress, at the pole of one of the mid-system planets. From there it would be a long crawl in the planet’s shadow out to the field where we’d set the gear, collect, and, if we were still in one piece, make the first possible break back to safety.

We were still five hours out, so we both tried to grab some rest. Looper suggested we get our suits on. “Just in case,” he insisted. Then we headed up front and strapped in.

I struggled to shut my eyes. My entire body was jittery. I could feel tension in my throat no matter how hard I tried to relax and breathe. I must have dozed off, because I didn’t remember sweating, but I suddenly opened my eyes in the middle of a jarring approach, and I was soaked in sweat.

I must have let out a yelp.

“Hold on to your shit, Airee,” Looper’s voice came through my helmet.

As planned, it seemed we’d jumped in mid-system, risky enough on its own. But very much not in the plan was approaching the planet so close we took a 514 cargo carrier into a slingshot maneuver that had us pulling at least 3Gs. The deck was rattling something fierce with each micro-adjustment George was making to our flight path.

“What the hell?” I shouted. “Looper?”

“She’ll hold together,” he shouted back.

It was at that moment I realized the dull gray planet out the window wasn’t the mid-system giant we’d discussed earlier, but a dwarf planet in the outer belt we were practically on top of. Ingress and egress, I thought. Looper had a plan, all right. I just wasn’t privy to it.

Do you have a death wish, Carsten? I asked myself. I didn’t think so, but all the signs had been there, and here I was hurtling toward my death. And, somehow, I knew this wasn’t the last surprise of the day.

Suddenly, there was a thunderous smack that shook the ship around us. The shock seemed to originate from the cargo section behind the passenger compartment.

“The hull has been breached in the cargo area,” George announced. “Assessing damage.”

“Don’t worry. It’s not pressurized,” Looper declared. “We carry rocks.”

George displayed the small puncture and announced that there was no damage to the ship’s systems or the beetles inside the main compartment.

After a few minutes, the ship steadied. Rather than getting into a pointless argument with Looper about the situation, I chose to take a deep breath and a good look around and imagine we weren’t screaming into an area where a rock fifty times bigger than the one that’d just hit us wasn’t waiting to smack the ship’s flight deck square in the face. After I’d regained a little composure, I noticed I was staring out at the most incredible spacescape I’d ever beheld.

The field, rather than appearing like the sea of dull rocks I’d always envisioned a dense asteroid belt to be, looked far more like a sea of luminous stars. It was almost like we were diving into a lake of glitter with the points of light folding in on each other in waves as we passed by. It was so breathtaking I didn’t say a word for nearly an hour as we cruised in the darkness, Looper talking through the flight adjustments with George along the way, a new urgency to his tone I hadn’t heard before.

“You all right, Airee?” Looper asked at one point.

I think he must have thought I’d passed out. My silence surprised him.

“I’m fine,” I replied. “Just enjoying the view.”

“You’re something else, Professor. You actually do have stones.”

I turned to look at him and shrugged.

As the flight smoothed out, I had a chance to make some observations. There were thousands of tiny points of light in every direction, a rare celestial phenomenon in itself, but among that debris of a primordial natural cataclysm were the many thousands of remnants of a human cataclysm as well. Some of those bright points, undoubtedly were the remnants of Trasp frigates or Etteran battle carriers. It was impossible for us to know the tactics or even envision the ways the millions had perished out here over the course of the war, but they were out there, scattered across Richfield. I could feel the weight of it, even as I could feel the tension of being there, the doubt if I’d ever return. How did I end up here? I had the thought again: do I have a death wish?

I could have picked an uglier place to lie in eternity. Richfield was one gorgeous graveyard.

Looper was talking through the cosmography with George. The route, again, seemed pre-planned, and the asteroids the system pulled up for prospect were talked about in terms of drift, which presumably meant they’d been mapped recently at other locations. George was plotting adjustments with thrust and gravitational boosts to avoid burning during deployment. Burning the engines at pickup was going to be unavoidable, but if we were lucky enough to go undetected until then, the response time of any interceptors might be too late to get to us.

When we’d done enough gravitational braking using several large asteroids and thrusters, Looper popped the beetles out of the carrier one-by-one along an approach to a large single asteroid. George had calculated their approach vectors and Looper approved them. They were going to pop down on the surface with some serious force even firing their thrusters full-on.

Looper turned to me with a grin, “This isn’t a non-contact sport, Airee.”

Briefly, Looper and George reviewed the spectroscopy on the target asteroid. It was exactly what Looper had been hoping—a large ball of small accreted fragments of high-purity cobalt ore. And just like that, all four beetles were deployed.

“Start the clock on the beetles, George,” Looper barked with appropriate urgency. “And bring up the trajectory. We got anything small enough to bag on the way?”

On the way to what? I immediately thought.

George brought up several options.

“No, no, and no,” Looper insisted immediately at the sight of the first several asteroids. “Something closer, even if they’re small.”

“If we brake here and use thrusters instead of main engines,” George suggested, displaying a large asteroid and its surroundings, “we can set at least two before we hit our target.”

“No need to be secretive at this point,” I said to Looper. “I’m along for the ride whatever happens.”

He didn’t answer me.

“It’ll have to be two, then. Spectroscopy.”

George displayed the two rocks that totaled the most prospective yield. Looper had been right: lonsdaleite—both targets were high probability for moderate composition, as well as diamond and graphite and assorted other rocks, all of which were next to valueless.

“Yeah, those two,” Looper told George. “Pop the blankets when you’re ready. It might not be a bad idea to have a spare on-hand anyway.”

Looper didn’t say anything over the course of the next hour or so before he deployed the blankets, alternating between tracking the progress bar of the hoppers, checking on our course, and scanning system readouts for any sign our presence had been detected.

Like the beetles, the blankets came packaged with their own propulsion—an array of small drones designed to position the blanket around the payload and tie-up the package. I doubted they were designed to deploy at speed, but it struck me that if the target object was at least somewhat cohesive, rather than a ball of loose gravel bound by gravity, most of the asteroid might hold together as the blanket folded around it.

We continued to slow on approach to the two blanket deployments, gravity braking several times, along with the occasional burst of thrusters. We’d still yet to fire the main engines.

Then, one at a time, Looper fired the blankets, watching the display as they slowed, unfolded, and crashed around their targets, wrapping most of the matter inside while sending pieces flying off into the darkness around the blanket.

“Is that loose rock going to be a problem on the back end?” I asked, expecting Looper would probably ignore the question.

“Least of our problems, Airee,” he replied. “Ready for the payoff?”

We were about to cut close to a large asteroid almost directly in our trajectory, another course adjustment, I thought.

“Drop one,” Looper barked at George on approach.

I was surprised, because that asteroid was way too big to bag—maybe a half kilometer in diameter, but as we rounded it and drifted past, I could see, in a flash, out of the corner of my eye, there was a light blur behind it that looked decidedly non-natural—sharp, straight lines. But we were gone too fast for me to make out what it was.

Looper pulled it up on the front panel. “It’s still there!” he said, almost giddy with excitement. “Hell, yes!”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. The object, seemingly floating in orbit of that small asteroid, was a medium-sized warship, an abandoned Etteran starfighter to my untrained eyes, and, again, to my untrained eyes, it looked damn near pristine, save for a break in the open canopy.

“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed almost involuntarily at the realization.

“This trip was never about Cobalt, Airee. A few missiles on that thing are worth the whole payload of metals if she’s still holding. The ship itself? Who knows?”

We both watched breathlessly as the rear cameras captured the blanket’s approach, half-bathed in light, as the asteroid’s gravity pulled in the blanket, which deployed, its drones firing as it entered the asteroid’s gravity well, whipped around the light side of the asteroid and caught the starfighter like a net folding around a winged-bird. Two of the drones died on impact, George announced. Still, Looper was ecstatic.

By then, the progress bar on the beetles was at forty percent. Looper and George were discussing how to tack back around to pick them up.

“Isn’t that just asking for trouble?” I said. “Why not just take the fighter and screw instead of getting greedy?”

“I didn’t know it would still be here, Airee. If either side’s drones had spotted it, they’d have either salvaged it or shot it to bits. Therefore, I had to drop the beetles to make sure we got something from this trip. And there is only one thing better than a lot of money ...”

He left the statement hanging there. “More money?” I suggested.

“Are you sure you weren’t one of us in a past life?” he asked me.

“Anything’s possible,” I said.

It became clear as the ship continued to decelerate that we would have to burn in order to pick up the cargo, but still, miraculously, we were cruising undetected on a circular route through the belt, arcing back toward the beetles, which were fast gobbling up cobalt. The positive side of such a dense asteroid field was the numerous opportunities for gravitational course adjustments along the way. The negative side we smacked right into: five more hits on the way back around to the beetles—small, stray rocks slapping off the rear cargo section, each time jolting my heart into my throat.

Looper laughed whenever one hit. Performative bravado, I hoped. Otherwise, he really was a madman.

We were coming up on four hours by the time we neared on the beetles. We had to slow to meet speeds with the asteroid. There was no more avoiding it. The beetles, laden with cobalt ore, were going to need assistance from the 514’s portable rockets to reach escape velocity, and from there it was a delicate operation to get all four back through the drop door and secured inside the rear compartment.

It wouldn’t be a large or long burn as we were coasting fairly slowly by then, but that light would go out like a wave, and even with the light-noise in that very noisy asteroid field, unnatural light was certainly something defensive systems were attuned to detect. The question wasn’t whether we’d be seen, it was when.

“Start the clock,” Looper suddenly declared.

We burned to a stop. The doors opened and four booster rockets shot out of the rear compartment. The beetles were sitting, chock-full, awaiting pickup.

The boosters shot down fast with laser precision, affixing themselves, two-by-two, to fittings on the sides of the beetles. The first two beetles were in flight within minutes.

While I was transfixed by the loading procedure, Looper was watching our perimeter with equal focus. George, the ship, Looper: they were like a singular machine unto themselves. I was fearful the pickup would take a long time, but once the first two beetles were inbound to the main craft, the boosters detached, and the thrusters took over, while the boosters themselves, immediately, burned and returned to the surface of that blue-black metallic rock to pick up the two remaining beetles.

“I do not know what happened when those two planets collided,” Looper stated, staring up at the readouts on the display, “but one of those little worlds was filled with some rare ore in its core, boy. You ever seen anyone getting rich in real time, Airee? History right here, Professor!”

From the time of that first burn, all four beetles were loaded and secured in less than twenty-four minutes.

“Secure on the flip. Burn when ready,” Looper commanded George before turning to me. “Hold onto your shit, Airee.”

The second the engines fired, our new strategy became self-evident: grab what we could and go. There was no more sneaking around. Looper kept his eyes fixed on the panel, and still, nothing anomalous was showing.

My heart had never beat so fast for so long. It was almost like the lump that had formed in my throat had become another permanent organ, and my God, it was tight.

Within the following hour, we’d slowed and loaded the first lonsdaleite asteroid.

“Is this even worth it?” I asked Looper as the cargo netting was pulling the payload tight against the inside wall of the rear carrier compartment.

“There’s a reason,” Looper insisted. “It’s worth it.”

I think he understood my question: why not just go for the starfighter and leave the damn rocks to eternity?

I didn’t interrupt him while he and George were securing the cargo. Then, we made ourselves visible again, another long, hot burn.

After the roar of that old engine died down, Looper answered my question. “If that inner carrier’s empty, it’s too big a space to secure a ship of that size. That starfighter will bounce around like a bead in a rattle, pull the whole ship apart. But if I have a load secured in there half-full, we can tie the ship down on top of it. Funny you should ask about that, Airee ...”

I was about to ask him what he’d meant by that and then it dawned on me. “No way in hell!” I shouted. “Looper, you don’t mean?”

“It’s got to be tied down in the carrier. That fighter’s not exactly a standard load. We’ve got winches, cables, and netting.”

“To hold down a damn Etteran starfighter through an FTL jump?”

“Sure,” Looper replied in a tone that suggested the question itself was stupid. “It’s all titanium nanoweave—the blankets, the netting. As long as the load’s secure, nothing will shake that thing loose. It’s just a question of taking out all the slack. I need your help, man.”

“You think I know what I’m doing?”

“Necessity makes or breaks the man. You strike me as a guy when it comes down to the moment, this life’s not going to break you. You’ll do fine, Airee.”

I exhaled audibly.

“That’s the spirit,” Looper laughed. “Let’s see what all those rock luggers back at Kapua say when I show up to work next month in an Etteran starfighter!”

Looper’s 514 burned and slowed again to pick up the second bag of lonsdaleite. Every second, both Looper and I were fixating on the perimeter of the display. Still, the screen read clear.

I can’t believe it. I said to myself, thinking we might somehow get away without being detected.

Seconds after the burn began, George called out a contact.

“Oh, shit,” Looper said, reading the panel, and then muttering under his breath. “Gonna be close.”

It was close. George didn’t have a clear enough fix to determine a speed or heading, but after a few minutes, finally George confirmed what we both already understood: “The contact is changing its attitude.”

“It’s seen us,” I said.

“It’s seen something,” Looper replied. “We’re mostly in the dark. We could still look like a rock to it. We’ve got time.”

I exhaled.

As we approached the starfighter, I asked Looper what the plan was, how we were going to pull it in.

“I don’t know, Airee. It depends on what they do,” he said, pointing at the display. “We improvise.”

I did my best to breathe deeply, trying to bring my heartrate down as we approached. More contacts had appeared on the display panel alongside the first.

George had to burn a bright streak through a long stretch of dark space to pull the ship to a stop behind the asteroid. Surely, we were spotted then, but still, Looper didn’t want to park the 514 out in the open while we were securing the starfighter.

I thought to say something to dissuade him—that surely, we were cutting it too close—but there was no way he was getting talked out of it. We’d either bag that ship or die trying.

“Can you fly a drone?” he asked me.

“I’m no pilot,” I answered. “Very basic.”

“Spacewalk?”

I shook my head.

“Okay, Airee. Follow me.”

When the ship stopped, he unstrapped and made for the rear hatch to the cargo compartment. There were crawlways that ran alongside the cargo, and we pulled ourselves along the ribs of the hull toward the back gate. Looper strapped our spacesuits together on a tether.

“We’re going to ride out on the drones,” Looper announced. “Don’t worry, George is flying us. We just have to hold on until the blanket flies us out there. Once we wrap up the ship properly, George will swing around and pull us in, easy as.”

Looper could hear me breathing fast.

“What am I supposed to do once we get the ship inside?” I asked him.

He gave me a quick set of instructions I didn’t fully understand—something to do with securing the ends of tethers inside the mouths of the winches on the hull. The winches would do the rest.

“You’ll get it,” he said.

Then the rear doors opened. My hands were locked around the webbing on that blanket, which was more like a block than a blanket, packed as tight as a crate until it deployed. And then we were in space, flying through the infinite. I went from breathing way too fast to not breathing at all.

Looper was holding on across from me, looking right at my panicking face.

“Breathe, Airee. Breathe and enjoy the ride.”

The drones were packed in an ingenious way, so that they could drive the blanket, break off, and then deploy. Our job was just to hold on as we curved around the dark side of that asteroid.

I began to breathe and marvel. I definitely didn’t have a death wish. I knew it then. How could I forfeit one single experience in this universe! At the same time, as close to death as I felt in that moment—closer than I’d ever felt before—I’d never felt so alive.

We rounded the asteroid and floated up on the starfighter. It was poorly wrapped in that first blanket, which had managed to pull the lost ship back into the shadow of the asteroid. The drones slowed to a stop so Looper and I could let go. He gave the package a push and grabbed onto the tether at my waist. We floated there in the darkness together. Then the blanket deployed, wrapping neatly around the starfighter and crossing the lines to close off the package on the other end.

“We’re going to ride this sucker in,” Looper said. “You’re doing good.”

He directed me to the top of the ship, and we both hung on to the blanket’s reinforcing straps while George backed the 514 to us. Again, I was breathing too fast.

“So what about Carly?” Looper said, turning to me. “Tell me about your girl.”

I started laughing. “Now’s a good time, you think?”

“Why not, we’ve got a few minutes to kill.”

“Or be killed.”

He smiled, “Or be killed,” he agreed.

“She’s not my girl,” I stated. “She dumped me. Actually we never even really ... I don’t know. She picked me up at Damon Mines while I was working on the dig, took me on ... well what is now the second most incredible adventure of my life, and just when I thought things were going somewhere, she dumped me right back where she picked me up, and I haven’t heard a word from her for months. Like it never happened.”

“That’s cold,” Looper said.

“I don’t know. I used to hate her when we first met.” I paused. “That’s not fair. I never hated her. We argued. It was contentious.”

“I bet she’s scared of you, Airee.”

“Or she doesn’t think about me at all.”

“Do you believe that?”

I shrugged and thought about it. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t believe that.”

“Then you gotta go find her when this is over. Trust me. She’ll see you a different way.”

“Yeah, if I ever see her again. Finding her is the problem.”

“You will.”

We could make out the rear end of the 514 now by the dull glow of the thrusters approaching in the darkness.

“What about you, Looper? Your brother?”

He shook his head inside his helmet. “It’s no big thing.”

“Tara-Jin was asking about it.”

“It’s not just a ship I’m saving for, Airee. My older brother lost a hand in the Letters service. I don’t know if you’ve ever met anyone like that before, but some of the gear the LSS lets pass for prosthetics is damn near medieval. So he’s in pain a lot and his hand doesn’t work right. I heard some other patients in the LSS on Alpha-Richard talking about it. If you’ve got money, they’re fixing people up on Tressia. They’ve got good doctors there. It’s expensive as hell, but they fix people right. Not like those Letters doctors.”

“I actually have seen some of their body work,” I told him.

“So you know?”

“Yeah, I know. That’s a hell of a noble cause.”

Looper shrugged. “Family,” he said. “It’s what you do.”

George was right on us by then, the glow of the lights in the back compartment surrounding us. Suddenly, we were back inside the 514 again, touching down gently.

“You know we could’ve just stayed on the ship?” I said.

“Airee, just because you don’t know what I’m doing, doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing. There’s a reason for everything I do. I don’t got time to explain it all to you.”

“Fair enough.”

“Watch me and do what I do,” he said, undoing the tether between us. “Hold onto the netting till you get to the hull and clip on the safety line as soon as you get there.”

Looper turned around and hooked his hand under the strap, pointing to a line that was pulling the netting across the opening to space.

I noticed, in that moment, that I was breathing like it was any normal day. He’d calmed me down. I wasn’t scared shitless anymore, and I watched as the netting came in toward us, mimicking Looper as he pointed to the lines that followed behind the net, and mirrored what he was doing on the other side of the ship, ducking through the netting, diving to the corner opposite him, and feeding those lines through the winch’s teeth. Then, as Looper talked me through it, we repeated the process with the other corner, cinching the ship down tight to the payload.

At just that moment, I realized that I hadn’t secured the safety line as Looper had instructed. I scrambled to pull myself along the hull, grasped the line, and clipped in.

“Brace, Airee!” Looper shouted. “We’re burning.”

I turned and looked back toward him just in time to see the entire cargo compartment shoot right out of view as the engines fired and I flew out the back.

So there I was, dangling in open space by a line and a harness, and all I could think in the moment was, Shit! Oh. Damn what a day!

“Good thing you got that line on, boy,” Looper shouted. “Just hold there.”

“I didn’t think George would fire the engines with the doors open,” I said.

“They’re right on us, Airee. We gotta move!”

The safety line was on a winch, and thankfully it was tested to far greater loads than one Carsten Airee; otherwise, Richfield would have been my graveyard that day.

Our escape from the system was no less of an adventure. Looper and I had to scramble up the cargo compartment to get strapped in for our mad dash away from the rapidly closing Trasp drone swarm. Then we chanced a one-minute FTL hop through the thinnest portion of the asteroid field to escape the drones, followed by another nearly blind jump out of the system as another set of automated defenses rushed toward us. And through it all, I realized I wasn’t shitting bricks, nor had I melted into a puddle of useless goo inside my suit. I’d tied off the lines; I’d pulled myself back to the hull; and I’d kept up with Looper on our way to the flight deck, all without losing my guts or my perspective.

Once we were out of the system, George dropped the ship out so we could plot a course more definite than that last-second blind jump. I mentioned something about the ride back to Kapua. Looper shook his head.

“Delta-Omega,” he told me. There was a drydock there where he could park the starfighter and have it salvaged without too much trouble. He wanted to keep the whole thing quiet until the ship got sold. After all, he never really wanted the starfighter, he wanted a mining ship of his own and reckoned he could probably swing three used ones and pay for his brother’s hand, depending on how much market-ready lonsdaleite was in that payload.

Delta-Omega was a twelve-day transit, and along the way, Looper Vonn and I got to know each other fairly well. He wasn’t so crazy as everyone back at Kapua thought. He had a calculus—one that took him right to the edge of sanity, one that ended up paying off quite well.

He was right about us, though. As we disembarked, there was a sense of finality to our time together. We wouldn’t be keeping in touch. He asked for my digits. I refused at first, but he insisted, said it was a matter of pride—a pride, I decided, I had no right to refuse him.

He transferred five-thousand L-Cr and apologized that he couldn’t do more. “I haven’t got paid on that Cobalt yet, Airee,” he said.

“I have money, Looper. My family does.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, nodding. “You Athosians. You can find your way back to Athos from the Deltas okay?”

“That’s if I go back to Athos. I don’t get out this way often. New people to meet.”

“Old people to find again,” he said. “Good luck with that, Airee. What are you going to tell all those other professors about mining?”

I laughed. “It’s not as boring as they think. That’s for sure, and neither are you, Looper. I’ll look for Vonn Industries on the exchange in a few years.”

“I’ll look for your memoirs, Carsten Airee. Airee of Athos. I’ll have George read it to me while we’re bagging rocks.”

Naïveté shapes the start of so many great adventures. If that is the case, and I believe that it is, what shapes the end of them, I wonder.

Perhaps it’s the start of new adventures—new people to meet, and sometimes, the same people all over again.