The Iron Asteroid

Mark Edmonds

Description

Out where the rubble of dead planets collect, a mining operation is totally destroyed. Witnessed by a crew of ‘Rock Jocks’ while harvesting a high yield field, they narrowly avoid injury due to one man’s effort to adapt to a new employment policy. Against the odds they survive, only to discover that what they saw was no accident and the people responsible know that they are alive. Taking matters into their own hands, using anything available they take on the challenge, with Hi-tech gadgets and personal exoskeletons, some innovation and outside-of-the-box thinking nothing is impossible. Add a little behind the scenes political assistance and the outcome is inevitable.

Sujets

• Science Fiction
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris NZ
• Date de parution: 23 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669880165
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE IRON ASTEROID









Mark Edmonds



Copyright © 2023 by Mark Edmonds.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2023900643
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-8018-9
Softcover
978-1-6698-8017-2
eBook
978-1-6698-8016-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.



Rev. date: 01/11/2023






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CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen



ONE
C OMING AWAKE.
Opening my eyes.
Great. The matt white of the wall not more than a metre away is still there. It stretches all the way to the end of the bunk where a door lies, and on the other side of which is a rack full of clothes. Well, a rack full of clothes implies a collection of items totalling more than six, and while three pairs of work overalls, two shirts, a jacket (of uncertain ancestry) and two pairs of well-worn jeans could be called a ‘rack full’, it could just as easily be called a bunch of crap hanging around, waiting for a fire.
The opposite end of the matt white wall has a small cupboard underneath a shallow drawer cowering below a small bench. A mirror inset flush into the wall above completes the décor at that end of the wall.
Directly opposite my head is a door, or perhaps ‘the door’ might be a better term.
For only 50 percent of my weekly wage, I am able to call this two-metre-by-two-metre space my room.
Stretching out, I swing my feet over the side of the bunk (I hesitate to call this thing a bed) and sit up.
Another day, another dollar.
Pretty much exact actually.
For every credit I make, the company manages to get 90 percent of it back by day’s end. First is the rent, then the food, the clothes, the boots and anything else they can dream up. Maintenance levy, kitchen levy, entertainment levy, bond repayments, insurance fees.
The upside is that what I have left is easy to save. The downside of that is the reason it’s easy to save. There’s nothing to spend money on here. Gambling, of course, but that’s never going to make me rich, so I don’t even bother.
Everything is provided.
So long as all you want to do is sleep, eat and work.
The fact that ‘everything is provided’ is what got me started in this line of work.
‘Nothing required’, said the ad. ‘Everything provided. Food, accommodation, entertainment. Save for your future’.
Eighteen, young and dumb, well, dumb enough to believe the ad anyway.
And broke.
So sign up I did. Nearly ten years later and I’m still not a millionaire, that’s for sure.
What I am is a rock jock. I go out every twelve hours in a souped-up, one-man rock grapple. I get into a thing like an exoskeleton with huge booster rockets strapped on it and go find valuable rocks and bring them back for the ore grinder to munch up and separate into whatever munched-up rocks become.
It was quite scary for the first few months, and then it became interesting once I’d figured out how to operate the thing properly and challenging once competence became confidence, and with confidence comes excitement and adrenaline until finally common sense rings a bell and all you’re left with is boring. The constant risk, documentation, constant pushing for better numbers and more efficiency, briefings, meetings, talks, seminars, trainings, updates, rules, regulations, and with just a little bit of luck, someone might slip in a few hours’ work.
Good luck with that!
That was only about nine and a half years ago.
I’m one of the old dogs now. The average lifespan of a rock jock is only seven years, five months and three days.
Roughly.
Ten, twelve years ago, these rock grapples were attached to bloody great two- or three-thousand-tonne barge things that took a crew of five and a shitload of fuel to do what one of these little Exo grapples can do in half the time and a fraction of the cost.
That’s what the ad never said.
We were trained by this outfit as the first guinea pigs. They had a site on an ocean world, and their R and D department had just altered the grapple tech from their water environment to a vacuum environment, and hey, presto, space grapples.
And those of us who survived to sort out the odd, small glitch carried on into an ever-blossoming industry.
We invented the systems, the rules, the techniques. We figured out how to use these new toys, not just how to make them do what we wanted them to do, but how to take that skill and use it to its full potential. We figured out what controls went where and what we needed to have to do a task, what needed to be interchangeable and what we could make multipurpose.
The tech got copied, improved, mass-produced, and now it’s commonplace.
In this system anyway.
I’m coming up to the end of my second five-year contract. Since I signed up last time, there have been some changes mainly because of increased competition and the increased availability of secondhand Exos.
The earlier models were not real long-term things. It’s possible to upgrade to better parts, but it costs a lot.
The corporations are starting to contract collection out now to private contractors, and that’s where the money is at the moment. Of course, their bean counters have been at it, so the contract stipulates that you have to procure everything off the corporation. Rental accommodations are at premium prices, and all the other things are ridiculously expensive because there is no competition for the basics like food and fuel and the maintenance facilities, etc., so they get most of it back, but it still pays better than wages, and the possibility of sourcing something cheaper to somehow increase profits exists.
With thoughts of my impending renegotiation looming in the near future, I adorn myself in tight-fitting G Spec overalls, grab my trusty ‘lucky’ jacket and head for the cafeteria.
Passing down the hard-white corridor of the cafeteria, clear openings line the walls, showing images of what’s inside. Tap an opening and the picture becomes three dimensional, ready to be removed, already automatically deducted from your debit account, along with a management fee and a tip for the service provider.
Two high-energy muesli bars, a box of fruit juice (an unknown fruit type from an unknown planet), a self-heating meat-type snack box (no animal hurt in the making of these meals) for lunch and a box of crackers for munching on, and I’m out of there and heading for the docking bay.
With five minutes to spare, I top off the drinking water canister and scramble into the exoskeleton control shell. This is like a high-backed La-Z-Boy lounge chair opened out, but standing almost vertical, with armrests at ninety degrees, ending in multifunction joysticks, upper and lower arm sensors, upper and lower leg sensors, foot sensors, and lower, middle and upper torso sensors. A helmet drops down for head orientation sensors and a pair of lenses over the eyes that follow the pupils so that the external cameras can follow your eye movements. Pretty much the same as wearing virtual simulation goggles. I look through the lenses at a curved LCD screen in front of me that carries live input from the outside cameras. I also have two smaller heads-up displays for analysis and location functions, apart from the nominal function displays for real-time operational management. What all this stuff means is that when I twitch a pinkie, 25,000 KPA actuators move the corresponding pinkie on this two-hundred-tonne carcase.
That little pinkie can move lots.
And to stop the ‘lots’ moving me, I have multiple gyroscopic auto-locating power packs, really big ones that can counteract much more than what I can do with a pinkie.
Once I’m sealed in, I join a group or ‘pack’ of five other Exos, and we get latched onto a frame that then gets coupled to a tractor unit along with three other frames. That takes us out to our designated work zones where we get dumped.
This is where we can make money.
Or not.
With a good team, it’s possible to gather a heap of material each shift. When the team has a few newbies or some of the union types or the standard no-hopers, it’s hard to make anything.
These guys I’m with at the moment are all pretty good. One of the advantages of being one of the ‘old guys’ is that the young fellas who want to make a buck try to team up with me because they know that I know what I’m doing, so I generally have a good team, and placement in my group is kind of sought-after.
The system I’ve established is a wee bit outside the company policy, but so long as no one goes to sleep and no one gets hurt or tells anyone, it works well.
Dependi