The Spires of Ganymede

[Selena_Benitez]

"...What was that?Did I hear you right?Mining is for rednecks and idiots?Do I look like a Xenos to you,son?Mark my words,mining is one of the last honourable professions available to a man like myself in this day and age.

Maybe you think being a police officer is honourable?Oh,sure;maybe from time to time you'll rescue some trader from an ion storm,but you don't have to be an officer of the law to help a guy out.The rest of the time you're just the puppets of whichever government is in power.Don't give me that crap about how you keep the pirates at bay,because nine times out of ten you fellas turn up after the horse has bolted and they've made off with my wallet and half my cargo.File a report,move on...

Pirates?They're just piggybacking on the hard work of others - maybe it'll help you survive from day to day,but there's nothing to be proud of in that.

So maybe I could sign on with one of the corporations,crew one of the thousands of trading vessels that are the lifeblood of any economy.That's dangerous,right?Watch the news - piracy is on the rise throughout the sector and traders are more at risk than ever!Maybe not,though.Most pirates aren't stupid;they know that if they destroy a ship and it's crew,well...there goes any future profits to be reaped from that.And if they try to take too much from the traders,the traders stop making a profit and move on...do you see where I'm going with this?It's all checks and balances.Swings and roundabouts.Any pirate worth his salt won't kill a trader outright,not if the trader doesn't force him.It's bad for business.

And so we come to my favourite thing - mining.A profession for a man with a soul.I can see it already - you think mining is blasting away at ore until your cargo hold is bursting,or you die of boredom. In some cases,you'd be right. I leave that kind of mining to the to the robots.

Let me tell you about what I do.Believe me when I say there's nothing in this galaxy I'd rather be doing.

I mine diamonds for the Manhattanites with more money than sense,who have nothing better to spend their credits on than a sparkly piece of carbon. Now,any fool knows that the place for diamonds is Omega 11.Specifically, the Van Rohe belt.What that fool doesn't know - and most of the general population,I might add - is how to get to those diamonds. If it was anything bordering on easy that belt would have been mined dry by now. I didn't get this nice tan here from sunning myself on Baden Baden.

This is how a typical voyage might pan out. I fly my ship down from Baltimore shipyards where it'll have been undergoing repairs for the best part of a month - if I'm lucky everything is roughly in the same place - and I take it down,down down...through Rheinland and straight onto Omega - 11's one and only oasis;Solarius Station. Eighty-seven lives were claimed building that hunk of junk,and the only thing on the menu is Synth Paste well past it's sell-by. Needless to say,if you wanted a place to kick back and relax then you probably should have stopped at Baden Baden. This place exists to keep the diamonds flowing into Rheinland,and it does that job pretty well.

At this point the Spire is moored to the station,safe in the shadow of Schutz for now.We're not mining yet,and we won't be for a while.Working in a radiation storm takes planning - you have to plan every little detail.We'll start off by sending out little sensor drones,maybe three hundred...we send these drones into the belt,and we map the belt.Well,parts of it anyway...damn thing's huge.Using the data we get from the probes we'll predict where the largest deposits will be when we finally take our ship out,you have to take into account how close you're gonna get to the sun,how long a deposit will take to run dry,that kinda thing.And we'll be keeping an eye on the sun too,watching for any solar flares that might be brewing up.The big solar flares you get from,say,the sun in New York might knock out interstellar communications for a few hours.Here in O-11 they'll kill you if you get too close.This whole process takes a couple weeks usually.Might seem crazy,it's hard to appreciate the dangers of a radiation storm billions of kilometeres wide until you've experienced it for yourself.

So once we've collated all our data and planned everything we'll be doing down to the last second,we start up the Spire's engines and head right out there into the belly of the beast.As soon as the ship clears the shadow of Schutz you can feel it - the radiation sickness coming on.And the heat.The latest shielding technology can only do so much against a dying sun - working in temperatures above forty degrees celcius is pretty usual for us.

I haven't mentioned my crew yet,but I will now.Normally I ship out with about twenty of them.Eager young things with too little experience to get work mining on another ship,or maybe they think it's going to be an adventure,or they feel like they have to prove something to the world - point is,they're usually on my ship for the wrong reasons. Don't matter much to me.All that matters is they will break their backs working for the paycheck I'm offering. They don't take to the radiation storms too well,and most of them quit after their first trip out to O-11.I don't know,maybe it's because I grew up on the edge of nowhere,but the radiation doesn't seem to affect me so bad.And I,uh...have certain medications to ease the dizzyness.

Now we're out in the Van Rohe belt,blasting away,hauling in those diamonds - great,everything is going to plan - until some unwanted guests show up. Maybe you think it's worth my time to hire someone to keep an eye on the sensor read outs,so as we might see someone sneaking up on us.Fact is,it's near impossible to make out small ships in between the interference from the radiation and the asteroids,so we don't.A huge mining ship,backlit against a dying sun on the other hand - that's fairly easy to spot.Usually it's one of the Red Hessians pay us a vist,and they're not such bad people.My first few encounters with them in O-11 were a little hairy.The shareholders decided it was best the crew didn't have access to any company money or even their own back accounts while under threat of piracy,so...we don't.They gave me this little note to read out to pirates instead,let me read it for you:

'In order to deter theft it is the policy of Petersen Mining Services Incorporated that employees to not have any access to credits - company or personal - while on duty.PMSI will neither pay ransom money or play any part in hostage situations.We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.Thank you have have a nice day.'

Have a nice day!That's all that stood between me and getting blasted into dust by a wing of Hessians!They realised I wasn't kidding eventually,and had to settle with making off with some of the diamonds every time they caught me out there.Hessians I can live with.

Corsairs on the other hand...

I met a lot of Corsairs where I grew up.I learned one thing about them - they have absolutely no respect for human life,except for that of a Corsair.I've yet to come up against a Corsair who proved that theory wrong.

I ran into a couple of them in the Van Rohe belt a few months ago.They had been shadowing us in their Titans as we mined for a few hours now,and we were sure that they waiting for us to fill our hold before they struck.There was nothing for it but to keep mining though - we couldn't go back to Solarius and wait for them to leave,because the Spire's hull can only take so much radiation and there sure as hell ain't the parts to fix it on Solarius.So we finish up mining and set a course back to the station.The Corsairs are on top of us in seconds.We exchange the usual pleasantries and then they start asking real strange questions that set me on edge.

'How many does it take to pilot your vessel?' they ask.

'One.Me.' says I.They're going to hijack the vessel and make off with the whole damn thing,I'm thinking.

'Apart from yourself,how many people are aboard?'

'Twenty-three.What has that got to do with anything?!Hurry up and name your terms,some of us have seen a little too much sunshine today!'

They go quiet for a few minutes.The radiation is taking it's toll now - we've been out in it for the last seventeen hours - and the ship's hull is starting to breathe it's last.But what can we do?We're defenceless.And then the comm crackles to life again,and the order comes for everyone to leave the ship via the escape pods.Except me.Dumbly,we obey.

As I watch the last of the escape pods shoot away,I think I'm a dead man.I don't know what the Corsairs are playing at,but I'm a dead man.

The Corsairs tell me I to leave,and I don't think - I just do.I turn tail and head for Solarius as fast as my dying ship will carry me.I look back in time to see the Corsairs tractoring in the last of the pods.

None of 'em were heard from again,of course.The 'sairs,they've been shifting a lot in the way of flesh lately - human organs and the like.They're damned well not growing them on trees.

The trip back to Manhattan that time was the coldest,loneliest one of my life.A successful voyage by my shareholders standards - what were a few lives when these kinds of profits were involved - but I didn't give a damn about these diamonds.Not like I knew 'em that well,not like I could have done anything to save 'em,but God!Not a one of them was a day over twenty!Some folks whisper Corsairs are cannibals,but I don't believe that for a second.They have a fleet of ships that can almost rival a House,and they have to eat people to survive?But they're savages,alright.Farming the still-alive for organs,that I can believe.They ain't got no conscience about that kind of thing.

And here's the thing,the thing that really-


"Sir,my colleague and I noticed the Cardamine in your hand as soon as we came in.Please stop talking;you're under arrest."

---