Simple pleasures and traffic jams.
09 Dec 2020Teafox
The closer we get to Betancourt, the heavier the traffic gets. Normally, if I'd be trying to avoid being spotted, I'd wait until things were quieter, and slide in, vents closed and lights off. Amusingly, everyone coming and going is in either a diamondback, an anaconda, or an asp, like we are.We figure it's better to not appear too excited at the prospect of getting a landing pad. The less we appear to be in a hurry, the less attention we'll draw to ourselves. The kid notes that the comms traffic is so heavy, even this early in the morning, that once things start to really get busy, the station might start getting lax in their record keeping. So we have a few hours to kill.
The eleventh planet has some rings and is nicely out of the way, so I figure I'll see if the kid has a taste for the finer points of orbital geology. With the pulse scanner on the fritz, it gets frustrating to get a decent read out, but any belter worth the name can spot fissures and deposits by eye. The kid's a little bored with the whole idea, and only plays along to humor me at first, since we don't have mining lasers or charges. He thought I was kidding at first when I said we'd go and drill by hand, but hey, that's how we learned when I was his age.
That caught his attention alright. It's a shame I only have one working hand drill on board, but honestly, with the little use it's seen, it's a small miracle even that works. A few tethers to keep us from drifting, some armored coveralls, and, regrettably, more zip ties for the kid, and we take him on his first... Well, I guess second space walk. First space walk with with a space suit?
He might be a natural when it comes to flying with thrusters, reaction jets and rock clamps are another matter though. Then again, I remember my first time, it wasn't much better.
Hand drilling is something of a belter tradition. When you're learning, you'll go out into the rocks with your teacher, your family, or whoever else will take you, and when you've gathered enough by hand to afford your first ship? Well, that's when you graduate to being a pilot in your own right. Most of us start out in a second hand sidewinder, or maybe an adder if we're talented. Those of us that like the belt enough, just keep on drilling by hand until we can afford some of the bigger, ship mounted equipment.
Ship based mining is very much more about quantity over quality, but when you're digging by hand? You concentrate on finding the best deposits and damaging the goods at little as possible. There's something satisfying about loosening rock and then reaching in an pulling out a perfect diamond or in this case void opal by hand. With the prices these days, the amount we had after an hour or two would easily cover a small ship like a sidewinder, more than one, if you didn't mind the awful parts that tended to be put in them at the point of sale. No noisy refinery, no waste rock, just the cream of the crop and the smug satisfaction that the next person to find this particular asteroid wouldn't be getting quite as much as they may have expected.
I mop up the melting ice and make sure the suits are stowed whilst the kid examines our treasures. It's nice to see him excited, my first haul felt like a pirate's treasure, and I find myself hoping it's the same sort of feeling for him. It's not enough to quite fill up a standard cargo container, so we'll probably sell these off piecemeal eventually or trade them for good will and small services when the opportunity comes. He asks if he can keep some, and, of course, by right, half of these are his to do with as he pleases. I can't help but laugh when the largest, shiniest one goes in his pocket as a keepsake. The best of his first harvest, a fine keepsake for any belter to pass down to his kids.
By the time we reach the space station, there is a traffic jam of ships. Traffic control is trying to triage ships and give priority to those that aren't planning on staying long. I figure that there's nothing we can get here that we can't get anywhere else in the system, so when asked, we note that we have astrological data to upload and a data packet to download, no need to even disembark. It doesn't get us quite to the front of the queue, but the tower sounds relieved when we tell him we aren't in a hurry. We volunteer to give up our slot twice when other pilots get impatient and start filing emergency landing requests. The ATC made sure our data transfer got priority after that and offered to buy the first round of drinks if we happened to ever come back to the system. Less than a minute and we touched down on the pad, the ground crew hooked up our data link, which finished transferring as the pad spun, and we cleared the mail slot before our initial landing slot expired.
Where are we heading to? Right now, I don't know. I told the kid to pick a direction that looked interesting and was away from the bubble generally. We came in looking like just another surveying ship, we'll leave in the same manner. They won't miss us when we don't come back.
It seems the data sent through from the medical reports is rather more verbose than I expected. It needed a few minutes to decrypt, but it looks like a very short report and then a rather longer document and it looks like a fine cure for insomnia. Of course, this has Morgan's modus opperandi all over it, so I find a stylus and notepad. I'll have to decode it by hand until I'm sure it's safe to put in the computer.