by Richard Fox
“I don’t like this,” Franklin said. The heavy gunner tried to shift his footing, a useless gesture as the grav plating in his feet held him fast. The recoil from his Gustav would pitch him against the hull like a pinball if he fired the cannon without being held in place.
The asteroid factory, an oblong rock seven hundred yards long marred by billions of years’ worth of impacts, came into view. The asteroid, its name nothing but a series of letters and numbers assigned by the prospectors that cataloged it decades ago, bore a man-made superstructure in its middle. The blocky structure made the asteroid look like one of the old cargo ships that plied the Earth’s oceans at the beginning of the century before anti-grav blimps replaced them.
Beyond the factory was the void, the black abyss punctuated by stars far beyond humanity’s reach. Hale swallowed hard as his eyes followed the cable running from the hull just above the open ramp to where it tethered onto the factory.
“Bad feeling about this one, yeah,” Franklin said.
“You always say that. Some drunk miner probably broke their commo,” Torni said. She closed up the control panel, took a D-ring from her utility belt and pulled some slack from the carbon-fiber cord linking her to the D-ring.
“You first, sir? As always?” she asked Hale.
“As always,” he said as he pulled his own D-ring out and attached it to the tether wire. He grabbed the wire with his left hand and activated the grav plating to latch him to it. Then he looked over his shoulder to his team. The five Marines were weapons ready, fidgeting in place like well-trained hunting dogs raring to be let off the leash. Franklin would stay on over watch until the rest of the team was safely across the tether.
“Treat this as a combat drop until we know otherwise,” he said to his Marines. Some nodded their understanding; others clicked their tongues twice to send their affirmative. Hale stepped into the void, swinging his legs forward momentum to push himself along the tether. A few yards from the drop ship, he brought his body parallel to the tether.
“Let’s go!” He activated the anti-grav lining on the soles of his boots and used the push to accelerate down the tether, pushing his speed to a hair’s breadth below the safety threshold, where any faster would cause friction damage between his hand and the tether and then cut the anti-grav. The asteroid closed as his speed remained constant, no atmospheric drag to slow him. The location mini-map on his visor showed the rest of his Marines on the tether behind him.
Hale’s focus went back to the approaching asteroid factory. Location beacons flashed from the superstructure, but there were no signs of life or power from the bridge. He saw no obvious signs of damage from an attack by Luna extremists or from a collision. Four gigantic spikes attached the mining superstructure to the asteroid, pylons of steel that bit into the rock like fangs.
A hundred yards from the asteroid, Hale swung the soles of his feet into his direction of travel and triggered the anti-grav. The rapid deceleration robbed blood from his head and grayed out his vision despite the automatic pressure his suit squeezed onto his core and thighs to keep his blood in his brain where he needed it most.
A distance meter on his visor ran to zero and the mag plating in his hand automatically cut out. The tether to his D-ring detached and the carbon wire zipped back into the spool on his belt. Now in free fall, Hale toggled his grav/anti-grav plates to bring him to the surface at a manageable speed—too fast and he’d end up as a smear on the asteroid, too slow and he’d be an obstacle for the Marines coming in behind him.
He hit the asteroid hard enough that he had to crouch into his landing. Fine dust spat from beneath his boots. He trained his weapon on the metal structure just ahead of him but saw no sign of a welcoming party, hostile or otherwise, to greet him. Hale took leaping strides toward the structure, using his boots to compensate for the microgravity.
The tether was anchored against the hull, triple grounding spikes dug into the deep blue metal. Atmosphere leaked from where the tether punctured the hull; ambient moisture from the air in the factory shot out into the near-absolute-zero vacuum as tiny flecks of ice. The outgassing told Hale that the station still had atmosphere, but no one was reacting to the hull breach.
Hale stopped next to an access door on the superstructure and slapped a hand against the metal to anchor himself, magnets in his fingertips securing him to the metal hull. The lamprey superstructure was the only man-made thing on the asteroid; the actual mining work happened deep within the rock.
Five of his Marines were on the ground and Franklin would land in another minute.
The access panel was unpowered. If Torni couldn’t get in, then Standish would have to cut their way in. A hard breach was noisy enough to alert any defenders and kept the team exposed in a vacuum far too long for comfort.
Torni loped over and knelt next to the air-lock door. She took a void-hardened Ubi—the ubiquitous mini-tablet that had replaced every cell phone and personal computer on the planet within a few years of their introduction by the Ibarra Corporation—and ran a cable into an access port. Her military grade Ubi came with backdoor keys into every computer system on the factory, courtesy of the Ibarra Corporation.
The screen on the access port blinked to life, the Ibarra corporate logo spinning in place as the access port booted up.
Hale looked up at the life pods attached to the superstructure. The standard complement of six were still in place. If the miners were gone, that wasn’t how they’d left the station.
“Someone cut the power line. Batteries died…twenty hours ago. Give me four minutes to get us in,” Torni said. As the team’s dedicated cyber hacker, Torni had proved her expertise on nearly every mission they undertook. Hale had no need to doubt or quiz her further.
“Gunny Cortaro, get that hull breach under control,” Hale ordered.
Cortaro and Corpsman Walsh, their team medic, crouched and launched themselves off the asteroid with an anti-grav–assisted jump. Using their boots to pull them against the hull, Cortaro stood perpendicular to the wall. No matter how many low-G ops Hale went on, watching men and women walk on walls always struck him as unnatural. Walsh jabbed a nozzle into the hull breaches around where the tether gripped into the hull and injected quick foam around the spikes. The foam expanded instantly and solidified in a half second; the graphene and titanium lattice within the foam went rigid to seal the hull breaches with ease.
One less thing to worry about.
Hale felt a sudden vibration through the soles of his feet, Franklin had reached the asteroid.
“Sir, there’s still atmo and gravity inside. A little cold, but nothing else out of the ordinary,” Torni said, reading from her Ubi.
“Can you get the station logs?” he asked.
“No, whatever cut the hardline power cut the data lines, too. I’ve got the sensors on the other side of the air lock and that’s it,” Torni said.
Red warning lights pulsed around the air lock as the door slid aside, revealing the interior compartment, a small space with just enough room for three miners in EVA suits.
“Standish, with me. Torni, get the interior doors open soon as we’re clear,” Hale ordered. He stepped into the air lock and glanced into an inner porthole. Emergency lighting strips ran along where the walls met, ceiling-mounted warning lights flashed “PRESSURE,” most likely from the damage done by the tether.
Standish’s footfalls thumped against the hull as he ran down the wall to join his platoon leader. Gripping the lip of the doorway, he swung himself into the air lock with a gymnast’s grace. Standish banged a fist against the bulkhead twice to signal his arrival and the air-lock door slid shut. Gravity returned as the station’s plating kicked in. Hale felt lightheaded for a moment as his heart brought his blood pressure back to where evolution and Mother Nature intended.
“You think it’s aliens, sir?” Standish asked.
A yellow light pulsated on the ceiling and gouts of atmosphere burst into their air lock.
“There’s
no such thing as aliens, Marine. Everyone knows that,” Hale said. He brought his rifle to his shoulder and aimed it at the door.
“One of these days, it will be aliens and then everyone will be all, ‘Wow, Standish, how’d you know?’”
“Team, go low velocity or shot with your weapons. Punching a hole through the side of the asteroid would be very, very bad,” Hale said over the IR. Their gauss rifles could fire the cobalt-jacketed rounds as a shotgun blast of small bullets, low-velocity single slugs for armored targets and high velocity for use as anti-materiel munitions. The high-energy setting wasn’t recommended for boarding operations, both for the collateral damage the rounds would cause and for the slow rate of fire—the capacitors on their weapons had to build up charge and would suck the batteries dry after a few shots.
The sensors on Hale’s suit read a standard atmosphere of pressure and ambient temperature over freezing. He could remove his helmet and be just fine but his face had limited ballistic protection. Hale tapped a green button to open the inner door, which slid aside without fanfare.
Silence greeted them. Standish and Hale stood stock-still, ready for whatever might come around the many corners in the passageway. Hale triggered the megaphones built into his helmet.
“North Atlantic Union Forces boarding party, come forward and be recognized,” his voice boomed through the station with the subtleness of a thunderclap. The command echoed, then died away. No response. For the first time on this mission, Hale felt unease. There was no obvious reason for the station to be empty. Where was everyone?
Cortaro and Franklin were the next Marines to enter. Hale took his top sergeant aside while Standish and Franklin pulled security.
“What do you think?” Hale asked Cortaro.
“No one here. Only other place they could be is in the factory. Maybe there was an industrial accident and they’re held up in a life pod,” Cortaro said.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking,” Hale said. He pulled up schematics for the station on his forearm display and programmed a route to the factory within the asteroid. Direction arrows lit up on his and the rest of the team’s visors.
The Ibarra Corporation’s Lamprey class factories arrived on asteroids with little more than a life-support facility, 3-D printers and minimal crew. The printers used the asteroid’s own mass to create the mining robots and smelters that hollowed out the asteroid. After a few months, an asteroid the size of the Marian moon Phobos could be changed from just another space rock to megatons of rare earth minerals needed for terrestrial manufacturing.
In the decades since the Ibarra Corp harvested the first asteroid near Ceres, space mining had advanced almost to the point where the human crews could be replaced by robots. The work came with enough danger from rogue impacts, cosmic rays and the occasional industrial accident that the crews earned enough to retire from the workforce after a few years on the job. A whole crew hadn’t been lost in years, which was why this mission made Hale’s skin crawl.
Because his job was command and control now, and not to pull the trigger, Hale fell behind his Marines as they made their way through the station.
Vincenti, the team’s communications specialist, came up to an open hatch and stuck his rifle barrel around the entrance. The camera attached to the muzzle fed into his visor, which he fed to Hale through their shortwave infra-red network.
Vincenti’s camera focused on the unmanned bunkroom: beds with rumpled blankets, Ubis with paused video screens and clothing left all over the room as if a pack of teenagers slept in there, not grown professionals known for their strict attention to detail.
“Someone left-a in a hurry,” Vincenti said, his Italian accent adding vowels to the ends of words that didn’t need it.
“Where’d they go? Air locks haven’t been opened in weeks, no life pods jettisoned,” Franklin said. The big Marine, one of the few Hale had ever met that could lift and fire a Gustav gun without augmented armor, sounded more worried than Hale had ever heard.
Standish ran ahead, sweeping the corners at the end of the passageway with fluid grace. The wall beyond the hallway was raw asteroid, the jagged craters and hard angles of its formation never smoothed by the touch of air and water like the mountains of Earth. Yellow and black chevrons bordered a shiny metal door that led into the asteroid proper.
Standish tapped at the blank control panel, then signaled for Torni to come forward when there was no response.
“Lieutenant Hale?” an icon for their drop ship popped on his visor.
“Hale, go.”
“The Breitenfeld is burning back to the fleet. Our recovery window got cut to thirty minutes. What’s your status?” the drop ship pilot asked.
Hale grit his teeth in frustration as he considered a series of replies, each less diplomatic than the last. The Breitenfeld, the escort carrier he and his Marines operated out of, was supposed to stay within support range until this mission was complete. Even if Torni opened the door to the mine in the next ten seconds and they found the crew conducting business as usual, they’d be hard-pressed to make it back in time.
“No sign of the crew. No idea what happened to them yet either,” Hale said. He set a timer countdown on his visor and looked at the mine entrance. Torni was hard at work as the rest of his Marines looked at him with anticipation. The call to the drop ship was private, but every Marine out of boot camp could tell when the lieutenant was on the channel with higher headquarters. A new set of orders in the field was rarely a cause for celebration.
“I’m not going to leave you here, but if we miss the Breitenfeld, we’ll be out here for weeks waiting for pickup and we’ll miss our ticket to the colonies. So…hurry the hell up,” the pilot said.
“We’re working on it,” Hale said. “Why the sudden change in plans?”
“Admiral Garrett wants the entire fleet together ahead of schedule. You want me to patch you through to him?” the pilot said, half-joking.
“No grav on the other side,” Torni said as she backed away from the door and tucked the butt of her rifle into her shoulder. Franklin moved to stand in front of the door, his Gustav at his hip and ready. A scanning laser speared out from his helmet and ran up and down the door, ready to touch whatever lay beyond. Torni and Standish were on either side of him, weapons ready.
The quad barrels on Franklin’s machine gun whirled to life.
Warning lights flashed around the air lock and a buzzer sounded.
“Remember, low-velocity rounds,” Hale said.
The access door slid open with the hiss of a blade leaving its scabbard. A single figure in a heavy mining suit, bands of reinforced graphene plates on top of heavy graphene weave, stood beyond the doorway. The miner had one foot mag locked to the deck while the rest of his body floated in the air like a doll hung out to dry. A red and black veneer on the inside of his faceplate hid his countenance. A rent in his suit ran from his backbone through his side and light from deep in the factory shown through the gash. Old blood floated in the air in amorphous blobs before flowing through the air lock and falling to the grav plating with soft splashes.
“Oh boy,” Standish said.
“No life signs,” Franklin said. The heavy gunner moved forward, Standish and Torni on his flanks. Franklin, using his grav linings to keep him on the deck, stepped around the dead miner and locked his feet into place a few steps later. Standish and Torni pushed off the deck and went airborne.
Hale grav-stepped past the body. A quick glance at the wound made him think it was the result of some sort of blade, not a projectile. He stopped next to Franklin and the view took his breath away.
The interior of the asteroid was hollow. The entire rock was nothing but an eggshell around a vast cavern of…some sort of machinery. Gleaming silver columns ran down the spine of the cavern from top to bottom. Robot arms peppered each column, frozen in whatever routine they were running. Ammunition crates were stacked along the flanks of the cavern, grav-locked to each other and the deck.
There had to have been tens of thousands of crates, some large enough to hold the rail gun shells used by the fleet’s cruisers. Forklift robots, little more than two giant pairs of calipers attached to a gravity drive, were stationary in the air. Standby beacon lights flashed from their metal cores.
“Sir, what the hell is this?” Cortaro asked.
“Not a mining operation, that’s for sure,” Hale said. He tried to open a channel to the drop ship, to no avail. “Vincenti, what’s blocking our commo?”
Vincenti grabbed his Ubi from his hip and sank back to the deck. Walsh took his place on the asteroid wall.
“Got a floater…two, make that four,” Standish said. Gun camera pics of four separate bodies hanging in the air or rolling against the rock walls popped onto Hale’s visor. Two of the bodies floated amidst black blobs of blood; one lacked legs and the last was split from shoulder to hip.
“Crew complement is six. Where’s the last miner?” Cortaro asked.
The forklift bots’ blue lights went yellow, then started flashing. The bots rose into the air, their grav drives resonating from a slight thrum into a heartbeat pulse of static. The bots swung toward the Marines and accelerated.
“Um, sir,” Standish said.
“Open fire!” Hale shouted. The Marines’ gauss rifles snapped as the electromagnets in their weapons shot bolts at the new threats. The bolts sliced through the air and smashed into the forklift bots. The bots were void hardened, designed to take micro-meteorite hits and keep functioning. Bolts ricocheted off mandibles and sent the bots spinning through the air. A careful shot from Torni to the grav drive of the closest bot shattered it into pieces. Another disintegrated with the force of a grenade.
Franklin’s Gustav smashed two bots into fragments and stitched a line of bullets across the nearest silver column before it annihilated the last of the bots. Spent bolts ricocheted off the far walls and sent off sparks where they collided against the bare rock.
