Chapter 34: Mining In Space

When those plants grew tall and flowered and hung heavy with plump red fruit, she wouldn’t taste a single bite.

...If she tried, her body would choke and burn... Normal food was dead to her forever.

She was a parasite living on stolen blood.

’I don’t belong in a garden,’ she thought, her fingers digging into the seams of her trousers as a quiet bitter loneliness whispered from some dark corner of her mind.

Then she looked at Camila.

She saw the way she was smiling through her tears, her bronze face shining with hope, the heavy shadow of death finally lifted off the room... and the sting in her chest slowly dissolved into something soft and warm that curved her lips into a tiny fragile smile behind her bangs.

’It doesn’t matter,’ she decided, watching the girl who had hugged her in the armory. ’I don’t need to eat them. As long as Camila is smiling, as long as they can eat and breathe... I’ll tear apart anything that tries to hurt this room.’

BEEP!

A crisp diagnostic chime rang out of the intake vent above the racks.

[Atmospheric telemetry update... The local sensor grid has detected an anomalous 0.04% elevation in oxygen saturation within Sub-Sector 4. Net carbon dioxide has registered a measurable decrease.]

There was a tiny pause, almost like the machine was trying to calculate a value it didn’t understand.

[Crew Unit Camila’s agricultural experiment has generated 420 milliliters of self-sustained breathable atmosphere... While statistically insufficient to support a grown human for more than sixty seconds, the trendline indicates a 99.8% divergence from previous asphyxiation models.]

Before Camila could even finish wiping her face, a brilliant flash of gold erupted in front of Leo’s eyes!

[GLOBAL SURVIVAL MILESTONE ACHIEVED!]

[Milestone: ’First Breath of the Remnant’ (First Self-Sustained Oxygen Generated)!]

[Evaluation: S-Rank Pioneer Action. The vessel has begun producing its own life support independently of system-issued caches!]

[MASTER CAPTAIN REWARD:]

[Universal Survival Points: +50 SP!]

[Current Balance: 792 ? 842 / 1,000 SP!]

The golden light washed over his face and glittered in the glass of the trays.

...Eight hundred and forty-two.

He was a hundred and fifty-eight points from spinning the Cosmic Gacha Wheel again.

A handful more kills, one more big milestone, and that five-meter celestial wheel would tear open the air of the bridge.

"Leo?" Camila sniffled, blinking up at him from the deck. "What is that?"

He waved the panel away with a wide unburdened grin, walked over and knelt beside her in the damp gravel, resting a hand on her shoulder.

"You just bought us fifty Survival Points, Camila," he said, his voice ringing with honest pride. "And you just gave this ship its first breath of real air..."

She looked at his hand on her shoulder, then up at him, and her wet eyes went soft and shining.

[Correct... Against all statistical probability, the Wanderer-7 can now breathe a microscopic fraction of a lungful on its own. The Master Captain is advised not to inhale too deeply, lest he consume the entire harvest in a single gasp of unwarranted arrogance.]

Camila burst into a bright ringing laugh and buried her face in Jin-Ah’s linen cloth, laughing and crying at the same time in the smell of fresh green leaves.

...

The Wanderer-7 slowed along vector Beta-9, its forward thrusters spitting short cold bursts of gas that barely registered against the dampeners.

Through the canopy, the black opened into a rolling labyrinth of frozen stone and shattered planetary crust.

The field was immense.

Thousands of jagged silhouettes drifted across three orbital planes, tumbling in slow silent ballets.

Some were tiny pebbles catching the starlight like diamond dust... others were mountains of basalt and pitted nickel-iron three to five kilometers across.

Thin veils of frozen gas drifted between them, glowing faint turquoise and pale violet where small rocks ground together.

Leo sat forward in the throne with his fingers resting on the crystal cradles as the link hummed at the base of his skull, whispering every shift in mass and vector straight into his lower spine.

"...Astrogation check, Sensei."

"The field is stable, Leo," Ms. Tachibana answered from starboard console one, the silver rings of her talent flaring softly at her temples. "Orbital velocity in this cluster is roughly four kilometers per second. Gravitational shear is negligible... The third cluster directly off our bow shows massive metallic returns. Hematite, titanium veins and concentrated pockets of crystallized tungsten."

"Let’s go shopping," Leo muttered.

THOOM!

The belly thrusters fired with smooth muted power as he threaded the needle between two tumbling three-hundred-meter slabs, rolling the ship forty-five degrees to starboard with millimeter precision.

The Wanderer-7 answered instantly, slicing through gaps in the frozen debris without grazing a single rock.

Behind him, Ms. Tachibana’s fingers paused on her console as she watched him do it.

She had watched him fly a thousand times on a simulator screen though it was different, feeling it through the deck.

"Harper, Chloe, Elena," Leo called over internal comms. "Suit up. Cargo bay airlock in five minutes... We’re doing this surgical."

Mining an asteroid field in deep space without industrial drilling rigs was brutal grinding physical labor, the kind that left your shoulders screaming and your gloves full of sweat.

The Foundry Recall could only siphon loose objects within two kilometers... nothing welded into or bound to a bigger mass.

They couldn’t just park off the bow and suck a five-hundred-meter rock into the belly.

...They had to cut the veins free first.

Leo brought the corvette to a dead relative stop barely forty meters off the sheer cratered face of a half-kilometer iron-rich rock the computer had tagged Echo-4, holding her there with tiny ghost-touches of the thrusters.

The ramp lowered with a hiss.

Three figures stepped out onto the jagged surface, their white Void-Weave suits gleaming in the starlight and their boots locked magnetically to the metallic stone.

Elena led the way.

She crossed the frozen rock with slow deliberate steps, her posture rigid and her icy eyes narrowed behind her green faceplate, and whenever she came to a fault line or a dark reflective seam in the stone, she knelt and pressed both palms flat against the cold regolith.

HUMMM!

Emerald light flared from her fingers and traced tiny green fracture lines across the dark rock as her Mechanical Attunement sank deep into the crystal lattice.

"Skip this ridge," her voice clipped through the helmet comms. "Low-grade porous silicate with sulfur impurities... It’s pure slag."

She marched twelve meters north, stepped over a deep fissure and dropped her hands onto a dull grey outcrop jutting from the crater wall, and the green glow pulsed faster and faster in rapid harmonic waves.

"Here." She slapped the stone. "A vein of hyper-dense crystallized tungsten running eight meters deep along this fault... High purity and zero degradation. Harper, score the perimeter along the ninety-degree stress shear. Chloe, break it off the root."

"You got it, Princess," Harper grinned behind her faceplate, stepping up with the recharged Vulcan-IV plasma torch.

She planted her boots wide as the bronze glow of Kinetic Tuning exploded along her forearms to eat the tool’s violent kickback.

FWWWWOOOOOSH... SZZZZT!

A one-meter lance of white-blue plasma bit into the rock, and Harper dragged it along Elena’s fracture lines, carving deep smoking trenches with steady effortless precision as sparks and molten beads of nickel-iron drifted off into the vacuum and cooled into tiny floating pellets.

The second the perimeter was scored, Chloe stepped in.

She slung her carbine across her back, flexed her small fingers once, wedged both hands deep into the glowing half-melted crevice right up to the wrists and dug her heels into the rock as her green eyes flared with scarlet rings behind her faceplate.

SCREEEECH... CRACK!

She wrenched backward with a display of strength so unnatural it sent tremors through the asteroid under their boots, and a two-tonne chunk of solid tungsten ore snapped clean off its root and floated weightlessly out into the void!

"Chunk’s loose, Cap!" Harper hailed. "Tag it!"

Up on the bridge, Leo locked his eyes on the drifting boulder.

"...Foundry Recall."

BZZZZZT... FLASH!

A blinding grid of blue scan lines swallowed the rock and dissolved it into a swirling vortex of particles that siphoned straight through the belly vents into the material buffer.

CHIME!

[Foundry Integration: 1.8 Tonnes of Raw Tungsten-Hematite Ore processed. Capacitor drain: 1.2%... The Master Captain is commended for successfully turning a boulder into dust. Truly, humanity’s intellectual zenith has been reached! Do try not to deplete the primary grid before we acquire enough ammunition to survive our own hubris.]

"Keep the sarcasm in reserve, box," Leo muttered, watching the capacitor bank. "Ship power’s at 98.8%... We can do this all day."

For the next two hours the crew worked like a synchronized machine.

Elena mapped the veins with her fingertips, Harper carved the seams, Chloe tore multi-tonne blocks loose with her bare hands, and Leo beamed them into the belly of the ship.

Deep in the lower decks the Foundry Core roared at full heat.

Ultrasonic grinders pulverized the ore, magnetic centrifuges spun the slag out and the ammunition presses slammed down.

CLANK! THUD! CLANK! THUD!

Glowing cylinders of solid tungsten were stamped, quenched in liquid nitrogen and machined into twelve-kilo penetrator slugs, then fed straight up the conveyor into the magazine under the dorsal turret.

CHIME!

[Turret Ammunition Replenished: 120 / 120 S-Rank Tungsten Penetrators Loaded!]

[Secondary Foundry Buffer: 8 Tonnes Raw Tungsten / Titanium Stored!]

Leo let out a long relieved breath as the ammo counter on his HUD flipped from angry red to a brilliant safe green.

The turret had its teeth back and he didn’t feel like he was flying around with an empty gun anymore.

"Take five, ground team," he called. "Recalibrating drift to clear the next ridge..."

Down on the rock, Chloe sat on a smooth basalt ledge swinging her legs over a shallow crater and watching the stars wheel past, humming something tuneless into her helmet.

Elena stood five meters away scraping grey dust off the sleeves of her white suit with fussy little strokes, but her shoulders were looser than they’d been all day and her eyes were already hunting the next ridge.

Harper wandered back to the lip of the lowered ramp and sat down on the diamond-plate edge with her boots dangling over the void.

Leo suited up and came down the ramp, the water packs in his suit freshly topped off from Camila’s new filtration cycle, and dropped down next to her with his own boots hanging a few centimeters above the black.

"Hydrate, Bell."

Harper took a long greedy pull from her drinking tube and let out a loud sigh.

"Man... Camila’s water tastes a hundred times better than that iron-flavored crap we drank on the hauler."

"Tastes like actual spring water," Leo agreed, sipping from his own.

They sat in easy comfortable silence for a while with the hum of the ship coming up through the ramp into their backs, watching a two-kilometer iron asteroid tumble slowly past five hundred meters off the port bow, the starlight catching the frost on its ridges and scattering silver sparks across the dark.

Harper glanced at him sideways with a small genuine smirk.

"You know... sitting out here on the edge of a spaceship over a rock in the middle of nowhere... it kind of reminds me of that summer after sophomore year."

Leo blinked at her. "You mean when we got stuck on the roof of Old Man Henderson’s auto shop?"

"Yeah!" Harper laughed, bright and ringing in his helmet. "Three hours trying to get your sister’s stupid drone out of the exhaust fan, and then the ladder gave out! We were stuck up there in thirty-five-degree heat with half a bottle of warm soda...!"

"And you tried to jump onto the dumpster," Leo chuckled. "I had to grab your belt with both hands to stop you breaking both ankles."

"You almost ripped my shorts in half, you jerk!" She punched his armored shoulder with her eyes sparkling.

For three seconds her eyes lingered on his profile... the sharp line of his jaw through the faceplate, the dark hair falling across his brow, the quiet steady strength in his eyes.

’He’s still the same boy from that roof,’ she thought, a fierce flutter tightening in her chest. ’Except now he’s keeping six of us alive in the dark... and I still can’t tell him how I feel without making it weird.’

Her freckled cheeks flushed pink.

Before he could notice the air change, she shoved her shoulder into his and rolled her eyes with an exaggerated scoff.

"Anyway, Cap. You were clumsy back then and you’re clumsy now. If I see you slip off this ramp, I’m letting you drift until you apologize for throwing that pillow at the AI."

Leo laughed.

"Fair enough."

He bumped her shoulder back.

She didn’t move away and neither did he.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!

A tactical warning blared through both their helmets at once.

[Hostile bio-signatures detected. Four Level 1 Void Stalkers emerging from lava tubes inside Echo-4. Heading for the cargo ramp. Contact in eight seconds... seven... This unit suggests moving.]