I have to admit, arriving there was actually… anticlimactic. I guess I was expecting some kind of soundtrack to play or some glow around the asteroid or some god rays. Whatever. Instead it was just flying closer to another rock in space. However, I consoled myself with the fact that, at least for the time being, it was our rock in space.

The pilot dropped me out of the convoy when we hit the 10k mark. Then we closed in and he set his ship down in the center of our ‘camp space’ while I parked Rustbucket further to the side. Unloading was done with a mix of elbow grease and button pushing. Meaning that the pilot took control of two bots to get the containers unhooked and set down while we broke them open to get to our things. 

The first order of business was setting up the micro grav generator. We pulled it halfway between our living area and the space where we would have to flat mine the surface for the ore processor. It was then hooked up to its own small fusion reactor and activated. And I have to say, knowing where “down” was helped a lot with orientation. I had read that people that lived in space didn’t have a use for this concept but I wasn’t there yet. To me this weird way of floating and bobbing was something that had my stomach on end. Good thing that this hadn’t been a problem in the ship or the station. 

Then we broke out the mining lasers and started drilling. You see mining an asteroid is the exact opposite of mining from a spacecraft. I had tried the drilling thing when I first started mining from Rustbucket and it didn’t work. On the asteroid however, we drilled. And that was basically all the lasers were there for.

Drill a hole about the thickness of an arm and about a meter deep. Repeat over and over again in distances of about 15 cm until you have a circle of about one to two meters if you want to excavate or in a straight line when you wanted to separate. I guess excavation could be done in whatever shape but circles had proved to be the easiest according to the stuff I had red. 

Then drop in mining bags. These were some kind of metal and carbon fiber mix that was compressed and looked like a tube of a little more than two fingers thick. These bags were connected by a cable and when everything was set up you hit a button and the bags inflated in an explosion like manner and in a certain order. This broke the material that remained between the holes. Then hit the button again and they deflated. And then start removing the rock chunks from the hole and throw them into the container set aside for this. 

Sounds easy enough, right? Well, I had thought so. However… life is seldom as you see it in the movies. Or so my grandmother used to say when I was younger. This work brought that saying right back to my mind. 

I had time to study and watch recordings of people mining on asteroids during my “prep-time”. So I had somewhat of an idea how this would work. I also had Mrk check over my circles and he watched me drill the first 3 holes. Then he gave me the thumbs up, said something along the lines of: “The rest will come with experience.” and bounced off to get his own set up going. 

Ralgau wasn’t as lucky as he did not prepare for it. So he had to redraw his circles and hole alignment twice and when he started the mining laser it bounced all over the place. Brelic took pity on him and hearing their conversation over coms I then felt pity for Ralgau. 

“Go away short stuff.” Ralgau was just growling into his headset. 

“Not before you have at least 3 points in Asteroid Mining.”

“I can handle it.”

“No, you can’t. Feel how the laser is vibrating in your hands? Yeah… oh void…”

I looked over and saw Brelic duck while Ralgau lost hold of his laser and the beam bounced precariously close to where Brelic was standing. Some cursing later and the big guy had it back in his hands and under control. 

“No man. Slow and steady. Ease up you big lug.” came Brelics instructions once more over the com. 

This time Brelic wasn’t fast enough to dodge and a few rock chips bounced off his vac suit. After that they got into each other's faces and had a medium heavy cursing match. 

“You are a void cursed security menace. I swear, we should just have you hauling rocks instead of working with this equipment.”

“You little shit. Better get out of my way before I am using this laser on your ass. Let’s see how fast I can drill another hole there.”

I wanted to intervene but then thought better of it. These two needed to get along and if that was the way for them to find a base to operate from, then so be it. 

By the time they were done with their argument I was ready to drop the explosion bags. “Brelic, Ralgau, could you come over here for a moment?”

“Whats up Malcolm?”

“Just want Brelic to double check something and I might have an idea about your mining,” I shared over com. 

When they were standing around my first hole, I turned towards Brelic. “Could you have a look at the bag assembly and make sure that everything is set up correctly?”

“Sure thing.” 

I held my finger up towards Ralgau to signal him to give me a moment. Brelic looked over the holes, the bags, the cabling. 

“Yeah, looks good.”

“Okay, fire in the hole!” I yelled excitedly and hit the button. A puff of dust was all the indication I had that something had happened. I punched the extract button and the bags deflated and the gas was stored back in the canister. I looked at the hole and it was filled with chunks of asteroid. I pulled up my character sheet and with the last hole drilled, my skill was up to 7. I had kept an eye on it whenever I leveled up and it seemed that it followed a fibonacci progression. Which means leveling this past level 20 would be horrible. Or a life sentence.

“Brelic, I got it from here. Thanks man.”

I saw his faceplate nod in my direction. “Make sure he doesn’t kill any of us,” he growled before turning and walking towards where he was building his own shelter dugout. I did some quick math in my head after checking the time. It had taken me about 10 minutes to mark the circle, 20 minutes to drill the holes and get it crushed. I was sure it would take me about another 20 or 30 minutes to get all the clutter removed. So let’s say the best case scenario was 50 minutes per circle and we would need to repeat the process 8 times to get the 4 meter circle of the shelter dug out. Then cleanup and setting up the shelter. 

“Listen, why don’t we pool resources? Work together, play to our strengths?”

“What do you mean?” Ralgau asked.

“I did some math and the quickest I will have my shelter set up will be in 9 or so hours. And I am done with my first circle already. However, I can easily crash on Rustbucket. So I think it will make more sense if we pool our resources. I drill and blow the stuff up and you haul. That way we can have one shelter for you down in half the time. I am sure that I won’t be able to keep going for 10 hours straight.”

“Mhhhmmm…” he growled.

“Listen, not everybody is good at everything. Can we all learn it? Sure! Is that effective? In my experience not. So I suggest, we get your shelter down, crash out for 4 hours and then get mine up. That way we should be on target to get the container area smoothed out before they are dropped off. You down?”

He exhaled loudly. “Okay, let’s do this… and thanks for switching to a private channel before this discussion. Give me a fight and I am good but this mining thing is just not for me it seems.”

“No worries dude.” I slapped on the back as I walked by to get the next circle set up. “I trust the Youngs and Brelic with mining. I’ll trust you to have my back if the Red Moon shows up.”

In the end it took us a little over five hours to get the first shelter down. The issue was that cleanup took a bit longer than anticipated. First we needed to get a catch net set up over the area because rocks shooting into space at a high velocity aren’t a good things. They keep going until they hit something. Then more drilling, more hauling. Taking the net back down. Getting the shelter box in. Stepping back and activating the set up routine. 

Everything then went automatically. It reminded me of when I was camping with my grandpa when I was really young. We had booked a trip out north. When we got there, he had pulled out a round bag and when he threw it on the ground it did some weird spiral movements and suddenly there was a tent. 

The shelter was similar in a way while being totally different at the same time. It was a dome couple about two meters high at the highest point and four meters in circumference. Yeah, not a lot of space but then asteroid mining wasn’t really a vacation sort of activity. It was covered in a hard transparent material over a layer of photovoltaic cells. Underneath that insulation and whatnot. The bottom was the same minus the solar cells. So a small but sturdy hut. 

When I looked around I saw that the Youngs were already done with their shelter. Mrk was helping Ygglog while Krn was giving Brelic a hand. Both seemed to be nearly done as well. Which surprised me because they had worked most of the time alone. Not sure if this was something that came with higher skill or what. 

Talking of skill, when I had hit level 10, I had gotten the ability to overlay the positioning for the circles and the holes on my interface HUD which made the process somewhat faster because I did not need to mark them down anymore. So that was a win. Which still did not explain Ygglog’s speed as he had mentioned not to have any mining experience. Might have to ask him at some point. 

But in the end, with the shelter set up, I headed to Rustbucket while Ralgau crawled into his new ‘house’. I had some water and a ration bar and crashed out after setting my alarm to four hours from now.