Alkirak – Muedini Corporation Space
Bram’s scalp itched as sweat crawled through his hair. Because he couldn’t scratch his head, his nose twitched. Then his ear called for attention, a bead of moisture tracking the cartilage and running down his neck. Bram curled his fingers inside the thick glove until the urge to open his helmet receded.
Next time he had nothing to do, which would be never, he needed to take another look at the environmental controls on his suit. Sweat wouldn’t kill him, but the poison mist outside was another matter entirely. It’d kill him in the time it took to choke, if he was lucky. If he was unlucky, he’d carry a lungful back up to the terraces and spend a night in agony as his organs dissolved from the inside out—and his skin melted down to meet them.
Blinking sweat from his eyes, Bram focused on the task at hand and leaned forward to set a small ultrasonic device against the stippled patch of rock illuminated by his helmet light. He thumbed a switch, and the tool hummed through his glove. Chinning the helmet display, he cycled the HUD from atmospheric conditions to the readout from the device.
Ten centimeters into the rock, an inky mass spread away in every direction. Iron, most likely. So much iron lay just beneath the surface of Alkirak it was a wonder the planet didn’t sink to the bottom of the solar system—the effects of gravity and the vacuum of space notwithstanding. Iron wouldn’t make him enough profit to justify the expense of pulling it out of the crevasse, however. The Muedini Corporation had the monopoly on anything that was simple to extract in large quantities.
Bram checked his map again. The seam of something different he’d been following extended in this direction. He’d hoped—with a giddy sense of expectation—that it might show up here, whatever it was. Close to a ledge, and accessible from the terraces above, set to provide him with an extra source of income he could mine with ease.
Ease almost being a relative term half a kilometer below the green zone.
The crevasses marring the planet were both blessing and curse. Over ten kilometers deep in places, they provided shelter from the inhospitable surface. Go down too far, however, and poison mists boiled up from the planet’s core. Mining Alkirak had produced a “green” zone that extended downward between two and three kilometers into several of the crevasses. Broad terraces supported a slim variety of flora and fauna, which the colonists added to from time to time as they discovered new species prepared to adapt to the unique biosphere.
The best mining for the rarest minerals lay below the green zone.
Cycling his HUD, Bram looked for the last ping he’d had on the new mineral deposit and prepared to backtrack along the ledge. The seam might have turned into the rock, up (in his dreams), or down (most likely scenario). He had forty minutes to confirm his suspicions, one way or another, before he had to start up. Longer if he cut into the filter time reserved for the climb up to the terraces.
As he stepped back along the ledge, his thoughts wandered around what he could accomplish if he had an extra source of income. He could carve out another terrace, expanding his farm. He could buy a new environment suit, or the parts to upgrade this one and the junker he kept as a spare. The one he should be using for parts. He could add a couple of rooms to his living quarters—not that he needed them. Not right now.
But if he ever started a family . . .
Snorting, Bram shoved that thought aside. He’d have to meet someone first, and folks weren’t exactly lining up to live halfway down a trench on a half-terraformed planet with a former miner turned farmer who wrote poetry in his spare time.
When nothing needed fixing. So, about once a year.
And it all sucked. Because, really, what did he have to write about?
In response, his nose twitched and sweat rolled down the back of his neck. Bram clenched his fingers in his glove. “Less dreaming, more suit fixing.”
A thin light bloomed on the left corner of his HUD. Bram chinned the display, enlarging the map, and grinned. There. The seam did branch. Down, not up or back, but what was another few meters of poison atmosphere? After tucking away the device, he climbed over to the point where the seam curved downward and looked for handholds in the rock.
The ledge he stood on tapered to a point a meter or two distant, but there might be another one just below it. Ledges sometimes ran along the side of a crevasse for a hundred kilometers or so, forming highways of a sort. The green-zone terraces were wide ledges, grouped together. The deeper into the crevasse, the narrower the ledges became.
Bram leaned out and aimed his helmet light down the wall. Through his audio pickup, he could hear grit shifting under his boot soles as he glanced over his shoulder. His left boot slipped, and he grabbed at a small outcropping, pulling himself back upright.
Not content with merely being poisonous, the mists also left a greasy residue on everything they touched.
There was another ledge, more than a short drop down. He’d need to come back with better climbing equipment, unless . . . Maybe the other ledge wandered up to meet this one? It’d be a couple of days before he could make another trip down if he didn’t check now.
Bram moved carefully along his ledge until only the toes of his boots clung to a narrow sill. He balanced by digging his gloved fingers into regular holes in the rock.
If only he’d thought to bring an anchor or two.
“We’re just looking today, right?”
His breath was hot and unpleasant inside his helmet. Bram chinned the display and dug the ultrasonic device out of his thigh pocket. Might as well see if the seam passed by here before angling downward.
He pressed it to the rock and thumbed the switch. His breath hitched as the glow of his find filled the display, now occupying the entire lower left-hand corner of the map. Jumping up and down on a narrow ledge would be stupid, so the giddy sensation that had been crawling around his gut since he found the seam would have to suffice, as far as celebrations went, until he got back to his terrace. Or until he identified the mineral. He hoped it wouldn’t be useless, but it could be mundane.
Pulling the device from the rock, Bram shoved it toward his pocket and missed. He reached for it, cursing as the tool bounced off his fingers and tumbled into the swirling mist below. Bram swung his arm back up, and one foot slid from the ledge, his heavy boot threatening to drag him out over the crevasse. He scrabbled at the rock in front of him, searching for hand holds, and stuck one gloved finger into a hole just as his dangling weight pulled his other hand free.
His left foot kicked into the mist. His right boot slid off the ledge.
Bram had half a second to look up at the finger he’d managed to wedge into the rock, less than a quarter of a second to wonder if it was going to hurt when the weight of his body tore it loose, about an eighth of a second to imagine leaving the finger behind and the pain of amputation, before he was falling into the dark, an uncharacteristic yell echoing from his helmet pickups.
He didn’t fall far. The ledge below his was wider than it had appeared, and Bram landed heavily enough to force air from his lungs. His helmet collided with the wall behind him, and one of his legs tried to measure the distance between the not-really-that-wide shelf and whatever lay below it.
Purple and green spots danced across his display—his vision dimming and brightening as he struggled to breathe. If he passed out, his body would remember that most basic function, right? Bram blinked again, multiple times, and listened for the alarm signaling a suit breach. For several long seconds he heard nothing but a ringing behind his ears and the panicked thrum of his blood.
His finger hurt.
That probably meant it was still attached.
His vision continued to fluctuate. Thoughts careened around his skull, leaving lightning imprints—words, images, memories. A vision of wide green terraces climbing the side of each crevasse until they basked beneath an atmosphere designed to tame the sun’s radiation. Blue skies. Trees. Community. A family.
You are such a dumb fuck. Thirty years of experience mining in adverse conditions and here he was possibly venting precious oxygen into a cloud of poisonous gas while lying broken and bleeding on a ledge well below the green zone of a barely habitable planet.
The ringing in his ears subsided into a single insistent beep. Bram blinked, drew in a painful and shuddering breath, and dropped his chin to access his HUD. His suit had a tear on the back of his hip. Because he was lying on it, he hadn’t vented an appreciable amount of air. How much poison mist would creep in when he moved to repair it?
Okay, okay. Think fast. He had a patch in a thigh pocket. Experimentally, Bram lifted one arm, then the other. Both his gloves were intact, but the finger that had held his weight for those stupid seconds felt as though it had torn loose from his knuckle. His right hand throbbed. Left hand, then.
He reached across his body and flipped open the appropriate pocket. Extracted the patch and squeezed the corner to activate the sealant.
“One, two, three . . .” He rolled off his hip, reached back, and slapped the patch over the breach.
The alarm fell silent. Bram lay back and breathed for a moment or two while his filter unit struggled to account for the small rip. Then he sat and looked for a way up. His helmet light glinted off something on the ledge next to him: the ultrasonic device. Dried sweat pulled his skin taut as Bram grinned. “Well, how ’bout that.”
He thumbed the switch and put the device to the rock next to him. His helmet display lit up from end to end. He’d found it, the end of the seam, and it was big.
Big, beautiful, and all his.