When I woke up, I checked the results of my mining operation and did a little happy dance. Of course I managed to bang my knee again in the cramped space and banged my elbow on the bulkhead edge but I guess that was to be expected by now. I cussed at the piece of junk that was my ship anyway.
By mining a deposit that had twice the density than what I had started with, I had doubled my output too. That resulted in mining level 16 and just under 2100 ore to go. In 6 hours I would set course to the space station and my new life would finally begin.
In the meantime I went back to the survey scanner and the hole in the asteroid and tried to make sense of the shape of things in there. But no matter how I turned and twisted my vision there was nothing to it but weirdly angled blue lines that should not be there and nothing else. And these lines were all sharp angles and curved lines, weirdly and for some reason it did not look natural.
I chuckled at my own thoughts. Yeah right, I am a specialist on asteroid belts now. I wasn’t really sure that they were not supposed to be there but considering patterns and all I “assumed” that they were not supposed to be there. Yes, again I did air quotes in my head. In the end, I was pretty certain that flying in a junk ship after being pressed into a labor gang already made me the butt of many jokes and I wasn’t taking any risks by assuming.
That brought up another thought. You know when you have been by yourself for too long and without any other entertainment, when you start having whole conversations in your head and find yourself super hilarious. I was at the point where my wittiness cracked me up.
So, for entertainment, to occupy myself, and in an attempt to make the best of my remaining time, I dedicated myself to grinding my survey skill. Considering how I had boosted my productivity because of it I decided that it might come in handy in the future.
I mapped another 7 deposits and was awarded with an interface message notifying me that my survey skill was now 4. Zooming back to the hollow I was hoping that I could now understand a bit better what I was seeing but it still didn’t give me any more information. In the end, I closed the survey interface and was about to vent my frustration when I saw the blinking message light on my ship’s screen. It was Foreman Len-dren again, this time with an automated message.
“Miner Malcolm Solo, your contract volume of 10.000 Endrite has been delivered. Your contract is hereby closed out. A commendation for timely delivery has been added to your personnel file. Please proceed to Belt Station. Coordinates have been transferred into your nav computer and a course has been plotted.”
Oh, so my ship was hacked and would now deliver me to my evil overlords?
I quickly pulled the programmed course up on the monitor and scratched my chin. We would pass the hollow asteroid pretty closely. The problem was that the opening was on the other side. I really wanted to have a look at whatever was in that hole. Shrugging I punched the autopilot button.
Universe tremble! Malcolm Solo is coming!
The lights on the cockpit flashed to purple, I assumed that meant autopilot took over, and the ship started turning. Then it accelerated. Which meant that it passed slightly less slowly by the huge space rocks. When we were in the last stretches of the belt it banked sharply and the AI gunned it. In moments we were up to traveling speed which was a measly 2480 meter per second or roughly 9000 kilometer per hour or 5500 miles per hour. Yeah, when I did the math on that I realized that it wasn’t actually that measly. But you know, space is big. Like really, really big. With a capital B. So even though the ship went fast, it didn’t seem that way. And by the way, I did not do the math in my head. I think I could have but I was lazy and punched the formulas into the board computer.
I watched fascinated as asteroids of all shapes and sizes came into view. Some spinning faster, others slower. Some had slightly different shades and reflected light differently. Honestly I had been sitting in this belt for the last week or so and thought myself already a spacer. But seeing more than a few miles, speed-crawling by the asteroids, seeing the whole of the blue sun for the first time, glancing at millions of stars that may well hold my future… well, there were no words for it.
It was utterly humbling and a total thrill at the same time. My emotions were in turmoil and I wiped several tears away.
I set an alarm on the board computer to notify me when we would pass by the hollow asteroid and continued sightseeing. At some point I must have fallen asleep in the chair as the beeping of my proximity notification startled me awake.
* * * * *
Good thing that my distance gauging skills in space suck. It took nearly an hour from waking up until I was actually near enough the hollow asteroid to disable the autopilot. That was a good thing because it allowed me to come fully awake and drink something that I wished could have been coffee and munch on a meal bar. Berry flavour this time.
When I finally disrupted the autopilot, my cockpit lost its purple light and went back to the normal amber color. Then I slowly and painstakingly moved closer and around the nearly 60 kilometer diameter asteroid. I actually did all of this manually but really really slowly because my last attempts of manual maneuvering and what it did to my ship were still fresh in my mind. Plus my board computer tried to be helpful. In fact so much so, that the flood of proximity alerts and warnings about this and that started to become so much that I had the hardest time concentrating on flying. The thing is that I did not yet have enough experience to disable some of them.
Only 3 hours later I had circled around the huge rock (yeah, not a space racer yet) and my ship was holding steady with what turned out to be a cave rather than a hollow. How survey scanners can skew your perception. I inched closer and closer and closer to the opening, compensating with the ship’s thrusters for the asteroid's rotation.
The problem was that by doing so I blocked the little light that was there and could see nothing but blackness before me. I wished that Rustbucket would have come equipped with a searchlight. Even a flashlight that I could shine out of the window would help. But during my mining time I had not discovered anything that could serve that purpose.
Pulling up the 3d map I had created during my scanning visits I got busy on my monitor. I wrote a short script that would switch the mining laser’s teleport function off. It also overrode the basic “aim for ore” command that the lasers had. Then I set up 2 aim points. One to the top of the shape and one to left of it.
By now I was familiar enough with these things that I estimated I would have about a minute before enough rock would melt to cause any trouble. I halved that time in my mind, committed to err on the side of caution. Then I flipped the switch.
And was instantly disappointed. I had hoped that the light I had seen when I had watched the lasers at work before would give me some visibility. But nothing. I still saw the yellow beams shoot out from my ship and hit the rock where I had aimed them but the cave remained just as dark. The only illumination came from the spots on the wall where the rock started to glow.
And then I slapped my head. Because I remembered my physics classes. You know how in sci-fi shows the lasers shooting around are red or yellow or purple? Well, I had an old physics teacher that used to go on and on about how they do it wrong in the movies and trids just for effect. And then he explained that a laser is basically light that goes into one direction. You can only see that when it passes through something that disturbs the beam and some of the photons start bouncing and reflecting. Basically you see a laser in space only when it hits the target or passes through a gas cloud or space dust. Or something like that. It’s been a long time since my physics class.
So that means that the yellow laser beams I am seeing are some kind of helpful tech overlay on my screen so I have an easier time to aim and all that. Visual confirmation help. But that did not help me here.
Annoyed with modern tech I switched one of the lasers off. The other I slowly moved closer to one of the edges I had seen in blue during my surveys. Bit by bit I came closer. The rock retained a light glow for about 10 seconds before cooling down again. I also activated the automatic log recording everything I did.
Finally I was close enough to the edge that I could see the glowing rock reflect on a surface. But that was all I could make out. I spent the next 1.5 hours tracing the outline of whatever it was that I had found my log recording it all.
And then I made a mistake. I slipped on the controls ever so slightly and the laser hit the surface of the object instead of the rock. Immediately a blue shimmer ran over the entire surface of the thing and for a moment I could see a metallic shape. It looked organic but then again not. There were sharp edges and corners that did not fit with plant or animal life. And at the same time it had curves that were the very core of organic life.
“OMG!” I exclaimed as the realization hit home. It must be some kind of derelict ship. It looked nothing like Rustbucket or even anything that I had seen game designers put together before. It was waaayyy bigger than my current ship. The whole thing was simply incredible.
I vowed to myself that I would come back for it in the hopes that nobody else came for it first. I wondered what its history was, what happened to the owners and what I would do if I got my hands on it. And what kind of salvage rights applied here. And all kinds of other stuff. You know, Space Treasure Hunter. Yes, that sounded more like it. Forget mining.
Incredibly excited and bummed that I could do nothing about it right now I backed my tiny old mining ship up and once I cleared the hole and then the asteroid I reactivated the autopilot to resume course to the station. Then I leaned back in the chair and let my thoughts drift. What if I really could get my hands on that ship?
