The Ice Mines of Chana, Part 4
19 Oct 2016TheDarkLord
Chana 6, Chana. Faulcon deLacey Anaconda “TDL Agamemnon”.June 3302.
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3
Claudia had successfully distracted me for much of the time it had taken to fit the mining gear to Agamemnon, and we had been through the station malls buying what she needed for the trip. It was time to get on with the work. I was still a little grumpy about the poor quality of some of the components, but it was easier to get on with the mining than it was to go hunting for better parts.
We were headed for Chana 6, which was a little under two thousand light seconds from the star. This showed as a better quality ice ring than most others in the system. Chana 9’s was better still, but that was a long way out. And pirate activity looked like it was lower here than in the inner planets.
With a bang from the frame shift drive, Agamemnon dropped into normal space 20km from the ring, approximately 1km (radially) into the ice. I pointed straight down towards the ice asteroids, and pushed the throttles all the way forward. Although it was entirely psychosomatic, I still felt a chill as the lumps of spinning ice surrounded the ship. Starlight reflected, refracted and diffracted around us, causing a pale blue glow like a terrestrial sky. Individual crystalline surfaces on the roids glinted in the sun, bathing the cabin in a glitterball light.
It was beautiful.
Claudia sat next to me, staying true to her word to keep out of the way. She looked bewitched.
Rather than fire up the mining gear immediately and start blasting away, I gently piloted the vast Anaconda between the hunks of ice. We pitched and rolled and yawed at a slow pace, the engines virtually idling, sliding through the narrow spaces like a Venetian Gondola.
After a quarter hour or so, Claudia unbuckled herself, and came over to my seat. She sat on my lap, carefully draping herself across me and the console, between the throttle and stick. She put her arms around my neck, and transferred her gaze from the ice panorama outside to me. I gently pulled closed the throttles, and there was a brief, quiet roar from the reverse thrusters.
“Thank you for showing me this,” she said. “This system has dealt me a harsh life. I had no idea that there was such beauty here.” She leaned in and kissed me passionately for what seemed like hours, our hands roaming over each other, removing items of clothing. She unbuckled the seat belts, then the belt on my flight suit, before dragging me to floor of the bridge. She climbed on top of me, and although my view straight up was of the ice ring, the asteroids could not muster any competition for my attention compared with her naked beauty. I focussed on her, the gorgeous blonde that I had known for almost two days now.
The deadline for 112 tonnes of Methanol Monohydrate advanced ever closer as the only deployed hardpoints on this ship remained on the bridge.
***
“Scan detected,” announced Agamemnon’s shipboard computer. I woke with a start. Claudia lay on top of me, still snoozing. She’d dragged some clothes over us for warmth. An Asp Scout flew over the ship.
“Next time you should fill your hold with gold,” the pirate cackled over the radio.
“No fucking gold in ice rings, you fucking moron.” I thought grumpily. Pirate “banter” was beyond idiotic, but then I suppose I thought that way about piracy as a profession nowadays. I patted Claudia on the ass to wake her up.
“Hey baby, work to do,” I said as she drowsily opened her eyes. She groaned, and rolled off me. I stood up and grabbed some of my discarded clothes, putting them on before sitting in the pilot’s seat. The scanner showed 10 contacts, which looked to me to be another miner, three pirates, and six Internal Security Service ships.
I pitched the Anaconda down, and gently pushed the throttles forward, moving away from the other contacts. Mining was an activity of solitude for me. We drifted ten, twelve, fifteen kilometres from the contacts, and were on our own once again.
“Can I get you anything?” Claudia shouted from the galley.
“Mining is a beer-drinker’s job,” I replied.
“Really?” She replied, re-entering the bridge with two glasses of beer. “You fly half a billion credits of ship, surrounded by things to hit, with a constant danger of piracy, and you’re drinking alcohol?”
“Get used to it, hen!” I said, with a smile. I powered up the refinery, and cycled through the firegroups to bring the mining gear online.
Claudia plonked herself back in the co-pilot seat, handing me one of the glasses. “Can I help with anything now we’re out here? I’d like to help. If I can, I mean.”
“I’ll get things started, so you can see how it works, and then I can assign the refinery controls to your station, if you like?”
“OK,” she replied with a level of enthusiasm that I felt she would be unable to maintain for the duration of the expedition.
Although I was only planning on using the mining lasers, Agamemnon deployed all of its hardpoints. Claudia gasped as the two large turreted pulse lasers rose to the topside of the hull. I picked a roid at random, and fired a limpet from the Prospector at it.
We’d started. I was set fair for the long haul.