Exploration record - Dav's Hope
28 Sep 2019Godthab
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System: HYADES SECTOR DR-V C2-23
Planet: A 5
Place: DAV's HOPE
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This one calls himself as a freelancer. Means that, he does not belong to any organization, corporation whatever, doing business or whatever he likes as a sole proprietor. These days he has been into tuning up his ships, broadening his connection with engineers scattered across the universe to gain opportunity to higher improvements of ship parts.
Parts' and devices' improvement does not happen only by intimacy with the engineers; you gotta bring stuff to them to make it happen. Those stuff are something you do not run across while you are doing trades. You gotta collect junks in a combat aftermath, or scan high wakes around stations or navigation beacons - or drive like hell on the surface of planet or satellite.
The Galactic Bars may be one of the most convenient places to seek information of plum jobs, as well as of attractive places to gather junks, codes and scrap parts. The name of Dav's Hope is what this one hears again and again when a long draught of "Barron's Head" beer is wetting his whistle. The place appears to be a kind of remote mine site, but strangely all commanders zip their lip every time this one asks them what they could tell him about the place.
Alright. This one thought.
A physical visit should worth a thousand words, isn't it?
Even though commanders at the bar shut up like a clam, it was easy to confirm the location of Dav's Hope by the basic function of ships. After several longer jumps by Asp Explorer, this one landed on the surface of the target satellite. A small colony-like site was clearly visible from up above. Although no human signals detected from the site, this one carefully landed the ship at a distance from there - in case the automatic defense system was still alive or skimmers were guarding the place. He unloaded SRV from the ship to drive it for further survey.
The site was actually not a mine site; it was more like a settlement consisting of a small number of residential and office quarters. There were no skimmers buzzing around, nor active turrets to shoot down the infiltrators. Carefully driving SRV forward this one picked up scrap parts scatters across the site. Not very rare ones, but not very common ones either. In the meanwhile, he noticed a constant bleeping sound emitted from a mechanical device nearby. He approached the sound source.
It was a log uplink device of the settlement comms. Out of curiosity this one scanned the device to retrieve the data inside.
"Mining Team 6 - 5/6" - the log read. So there are 6 of these. Before proceeding the read, this one drove around in the settlement to gather all other 5 logs from other uplink comm devices. It didn't take much time to find all 6 logs as the settlement was small enough to check all the device locations swiftly. After sorting the log files in a right order from 1 to 6, this one started reading it on the display.
The log year was 3286. Now is 3305, so it was recorded 19 years ago. Good thing about electric data is it does not rust like metals nor decay like papers so long as it is not destroyed. Most part of the log was the records of communication between a mine site coordinator called Lucy Minneux, and a Corporate Liaison called Nicholas Baker.
In 3286 it seemed the mining activities on A 5 were quite intense, vigorously fueled by the credits corporate behemoths invested, most likely they detected quite a few rare materials were sleeping underneath the surface level. Multiple mining team were organized and allocated to a number of sections in the cave. On the retrieved log, one of such teams - the Team 6 - was desperate to ask for rescue as they were trapped in the cave by the cave-in caused by the earthquake.
Lucy, site coordinator seemed to be far sighted; having known the increase of seismic activities she request the corporate for the permission to evacuate mining teams from the mining caves, but Nickolas, corporate liaison never gave her a green light. Gazillions of credits poured in the site never allowed him to stop the activity - it is easy to imagine.
Lucy was quick to catch the SOS comm of the trapped Team 6 and she rushed to dispatch the rescue team. Corporate recognized the incident and a fast decision was made - to shut the site down completely.
Upon receiving the order to detonate the mine site leaving Team 6 underground, Lucy strongly protested to the order.
You can't do that, damn you. We have twenty people down there! You can't just leave them to die like this. They have families, children. What are you going to tell them?
Those charges are only meant to be used at the end of the operation. We have to do something to get our people out first! We can't just leave them buried alive down there. We have a responsibility!
In response to her protest, what Nicholas told her was a potential dismissal from the site coordinator job, reminding her again to follow the order.
The final outcome was not told in the log - but from the state of the abandoned settlement you can easily tell either reluctant Lucy, or her successor would have pressed the button of detonation. Which means, that twenty miners of Team 6 were killed, buried alive deep down in the mine. In front of the big credits Corporate holds, a human life value gets minimized like this. So now this one knows Dav's Hope is a cursed place, no wonder every commander keeps away from talking about it a lot.
Some would have felt quite angry at the tyrannicalness of mega corporate by learning the story. This one finished reading however, with a calm mind.
Those buried miners would have other choices of work if they had not be skewed by extremely handsome salary. Without life, there is nothing.
Well that's a nice read, this one thought turning the log display off. To learn history of remote places is one of amusements you can enjoy while exploring the universe. No matter if the history was a happy one or not.
CMDR Godthab out.
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