4.10 Gotta Make Money
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When I woke up eight hours later I noticed two things. Well, to be fair, I noticed a whole bunch of things. But the first two were that I did not have a hangover, which I am sadly prone to, no matter how little alcohol I consume and the second was that I had not received a well rested bonus. So the conclusion that both things might be connected seemed reasonable. If you get drunk, the hangover and the buff will negate each other. After all, minus one plus one comes out to zero.

The next thing I noticed was that my com was frantically blinking and that the messages were from Ralgau. 

“Hey man, just woke up. Everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. Just trying to get started. While you were having your beauty sleep I started pulling information together. So I have an initial estimate for setting up the claim plus, got the information to file the settlement of my personal case, contacted a few people if they want to start a claim with us, pulled a few contracts...”

“Duuuuude. Which part about I just woke up didn’t you understand,” I interrupted his monologue. Honestly, his enthusiasm was overwhelming when you had just crawled out of bed. I needed a moment to restart my brain.

“Do you have something that could count as breakfast and coffee in this bar of yours?”

“Pfft, I do have breakfast but I don’t know what this coffee is. Get your Quirt behind in gear and come over. We can discuss when you are awake.”

“Mhmmm,” I yawned. “On my way.”

The way to the Rambler was a known one to me by now and I didn’t even bother putting it in my minimap. The place was refreshingly empty and quiet. I plopped down on one of the bar stools and gave Ralgau a challenging look. He in turn grinned, shook his head and then proceeded to put a bowl of something that could have passed as porridge in front of me. Which was then joined by a big cup that contained something hot and steaming… and green.  Damn, what a tease. 

Without actually speaking I started spooning the porridge in my mouth which was warm and creamy and had faint notes that could have passed as cinnamon. I gave it a mental six out of ten. I really, really wanted a coffee but I guess that was just not in the cards and the green drink needed to suffice. It tasted weirdly fishy. Which was just yucky in the morning. No more than a one point five out of ten. However, I noticed that the effects were similar to those of my cherished black gold. So I adjusted the rating to two of ten. 

After about 15 minute of silence, Ralgau looked at me expectantly. “Ready to talk now?”

“Not yet but if you speak slowly I am ready to listen.” I gave him my best award winning smile to which his reaction was another snort. 

“Okay. As I was saying before, I pulled information together on setting up a claim. It should be no problem to get it approved but we need initial equipment which neither of us have. So that is something we need to buy or rent. I also pulled all the information together to get my personal case settled and paid off. I reached out to three different people about joining us in forming a co-op on our claim. And I dug through the bulletins to find some well paying contracts to get some money together.”

“Sounds good, ”I nodded. “What’s the damage on the equipment going to be?”

“If we buy used, all together about 60k. If we buy new, about double that.”

“And renting?” 

“About 350 per day.”

“What now?” That seemed like robbery to me. I mean, it would be cheaper in the beginning but after half a year or so you would be paying more. The difference was between starting earlier or later. The problem was that we needed to provide 800 units of ore for the claim and then we had to pay another 350 ICU on top of that to get the equipment to work the claim. 

“Plus the 25k for your settlement,” I added. “How much can you contribute financially to this endeavour?” 

“I have roughly 3500 ICU available,” Ralgau replied, making a face. 

I had to admit that this was really a bad result considering that he needed to get a total of 75k together just to get himself and his ship released.

“I have about 14.5k…” On a whim I checked my character sheet and my account balance showed as 13.484 ICU. Daaaaamn. Nearly a grand on our outing yesterday. “Nevermind, I have 13.5k available but some of that needs to go towards security and I really want to check on the CLON contracts. I guess the latter might have time until we head to the claim but I am not flying around out there without system security keeping and eye out for me.”

He nodded. “In that case I have two contracts here that might catch your interest. One is paying 0.9 ICU for 5.5k Endrite and the other pays 0.8 plus another 0.1 if you deliver within a 45 hour deadline for 25k Endrite.”

I pulled up my interface and quickly did the math: 0.8 times 25k plus another 0.9 times 5.5k came out to 24.950 ICU. If I could make the deadline, I would get a bonus of 2.500 ICU. All in all not bad on the money side.

“Would you do me a favor and check if there are any survey maps for sale and if so, how much they cost. I only need Endrite and density percentages.”

Yeah, I suck. I could have checked myself. But I would have to walk over to the bulletins and manually go through them. Ralgau could query them through his connector. So he had it a lot easier. Also his eyes had already unfocused, which meant he was already checking and he hadn’t complained about it. So he didn’t mind. That line of reasoning led to me only feeling slightly bad about asking him to check. And then I decided that I would hold off on spending all the cash on a connector since I had a walking connector that was voice activated. Yay me. 

“There are some. 11.5k for the cheapest but it only has a 34% coverage of the belt.”

“Nevermind that then.”

Which means my option was the 13.5% one I had mined for the Solarwind contract. Which meant five and a half hours to get there, then 320 ore per hour for a total of 79ish hours for the deadline contract. Yeah, no extra money for me. Plus another 17ish hours for the other contract. Plus another 5.5 hours back here. Damn, 106 hours or roughly four and a half days to make 25k credits. A long time. 

But, add to that our current account balances and we could get out to the claim and the ship in around five or six days. For that I was willing to suffer through the boredom of sitting in the belt. Speaking of which…

“Hey, how would I go about doing an info dump about anything claim, asteroid mining and salvaging related to my ship's computer?”

“Just pull up the information on the bulletins and then save them to the ship computer via com request. It’s a lot more convenient and safe if you have a connector but anybody can do it from the bulletins as long as the ship is in com range.”

“Could you?”

“Nope,” he shook his head. “Only the official crew can do it. And since your vessel is a one-man boat, you can’t add me to the crew manifest. You could hand ownership over but then the impound order would extend to your ship and you would be serving drinks next to me.”

Yeah, not going to happen. Guess I have to do it the manual way. 

“Okay, flick me the contract info and I am going to get out there. I’ll contact you when I am sitting in the belt being bored. Or when I have questions. And if you have any news, send a com request my way. And let’s get the claim registered in our names, starting in 6 days. We should be good to go then.”

“So you want to go with the equipment rental?”

I nodded. “Makes the most sense. I want to get out there. If you knew what is waiting on that rock, you would be too.”

“Looking forward to finding out but looking even more forward to get out of this bar,” he smiled excitedly. 

 

* * * * *

 

The next four days passed in a flying crawl. Or a crawling fly. I am not sure. I had watched trids about wars IRL. And one of the expressions that was often used was that a battle usually consisted of hours of waiting with minutes of frenetic activity. If that was truly the case then I was in a huge battle for the last few days. However my high activity periods consisted of trying to make the grid cutting faster and more efficient when it happened and then wait around for hours while the actual mining happened. 

This time I then used to read through the huge amount of information that I grabbed before heading out. Educational. Although I have to admit I grabbed two novels just because. By now I had made it halfway through the first one. 

I had also visited the CLON office before leaving the station as I really didn’t want to end up running into some kind of permadeath issue. However after investigating the prices, I abandoned that endeavour and had rather spent 2.5k on another five days of system security coverage. 

The way the CLON system was set up was very interesting. You would go in, specify the amount of skill points you wanted to cover, then a scan was done and you paid your due. Apparently during the scan, the system connected to the n-link which would then update their database in the moment of death. The best thing was that the assured connection range was 15 light years. So even if there wasn’t a CLON office or satellite in the system, as long as the closest one was within 15 LY, the company guaranteed revival.

And from what the customer service AI told me, it could even go further but the signal clarity would degrade so badly that it was hard to actually assure the latest information. Which meant that they would then take the latest saved record as a template and update whatever information they could receive. So there was no assurance that your skills or memories would actually be up to date.

However, there were a few downsides. The first one was that death needed to be confirmed by the system. In cases where it wasn’t 100% certain that the former body was dead, a new one wouldn’t be printed. So traveling further than 25 LY away from the closest receiver was not a good idea because the system might not realize you just died and no confirmation, no re-printing.

The next downside was the price. A general re-print without skill preservation, which meant you would be re-printed with one skill point in any of the skills you possessed during the initial scan cost “only” 5k. But as soon as you wanted skills preserved things quickly became really expensive. Currently I had 42 skill points across the board. The price for that re-print would be 29.2k. At 50 points it would be up to 31.2k. However it really became expensive from 100 points on.

To be honest, I had no idea how I was supposed to handle that. On the other hand, from a game design perspective, it made sense. For one, it was a major money sink and would go a long way to prevent hyperinflation. And it would keep people more focused to not spread their skills too far around. Leveling a skill from one to ten was fast. Picking up ten different skills and you would already have 100 points to protect. So specialisation to save money didn’t seem like a bad idea. 

Anyway, the third downside was that implants were considered proprietary information and the CLON printers did not have the necessary licenses to reprint them. So while you would save the skills, there was no saving the implants. Although I guess you could always try to find your own corpse, drag it to a medical facility and then have a doctor transfer them between bodies. I tagged that idea as “something to keep in mind”.

After that it was an autopilot trip to the asteroid, firing up my trusty square cutting and mining script and leaning back. Or rather read a lot about asteroid claims, business, security, mercantilism and industry. I even picked up a text titled “Running A Mining Co-Op for Dummies”. 

Anyway, it didn’t take me long to get my first mining skill up and by the time both contracts were finished, my skill was sitting pretty at 32 points and my account at 35934 ICU. I had also unlocked Pyzite as a mineable mineral. However, I could not survey it because my survey skill was still below ten, which I tried rectifying by surveying for Saronite ever since the message popped up but I was only able to get it up to nine. And let me tell you, trying to grind it while your ship is in autopilot to the station is a bad idea… violent sickness included. 

Besides that, it seemed that Saronite ran more or less in parallel with Endrite. Asteroids that I had previously surveyed showed that when they had high concentrations of Endrite, the Saronite concentration was in the same ballpark. In the limited sample size I had, I had not found one rock where the density differences were bigger than three percent.

Apart from that I had spoken a few times with Ralgau and we had refined our plans. He also told me that he found 4 people that wanted to join the claim and were ready to meet me when I got back. Apparently 11% Endrite wasn’t as much of a deterrent as I had thought. The only problem was the money side of the whole operation and we would have to discuss that further in person. 

So now, four and a half days later I was relieved when I heard the clonk and hiss of the airlock connection at Belt Station. I had fun mining and making money and all. But sitting for so long cooped up in what basically amounted to a sardine can was not exactly in my definition of fun. As I cycled the airlock I was excited to metaphorically stretch my legs and meet the new folks.

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