Week 11 Journal #1

Elena walked onto the hangar deck, squinting as she was overwhelmed by the deluge of echoing rock music and welding equipment. As the door slid shut behind her, she grabbed a set of sound-suppression earphones off the wall, and began walking to the last berth on the port-side of the hangar, passing non-descript shuttlecraft, and short-range patrol ships.

There, she found the same sight she had found every time she had made this trip. A lair of legs jutted out from an access panel to the engine bay of the Isis, intermittently accompanied by a shower of sparks from the welding going on inside. The cabin access door stood open, belching an overpowering guitar riff from the audio equipment inside.

Elena sighed, and keyed a control alongside the cabin door. It slid shut, bottling the music inside. The legs inside tensed for a moment at the unexpected silence.

"What is it, Elena?" the Captain’s voice came from inside the engine bay.

"Jerry’s been trying to reach you for fifteen minutes. We got the go-order for the rendezvous."

The welder fired up one more time, finishing off the task it was on. Alan gently wriggled out from the compartment. "Jerry got you out of bed to tell me that?" he said as he reached for the tattered old T-shirt draped over the open access panel to wipe his hands and face.

"It’s 0400, sir. You’ve been in here all night."

"Couldn’t sleep. Besides, with everything else going on, I don’t exactly get much down time anymore to work on her," he said, patting the Isis like a favorite pet.

"I still can’t believe you can afford all of this. I mean, gravity plating in there is better than anything I’ve seen on any Alliance cruiser."

Alan finishing resealing the engine compartment. He arched his back, crackling several vertebrae back into alignment.

"I made a lot of money when I was an engineer on mining ships in the field," he said, as he reached into a cooler stashed behind one of the landing pylons. He threw one bottle of water to Elena, and opened another for himself as he walked around his creation. "Mining crews get paid by the kilo; equal shares for the whole crew, except the Captain, who usually gets double. We were out on some rock in the middle of the field. We’d found a concentration of platinum."

"Platinum?" Elena questioned. "Pretty rare in the field, most of it has to come from Earth or Mars, and in pretty small quantities."

"Mm-hmm," Alan replied, "it was way above what should happen naturally. It was like someone had dropped a transport full of the stuff there eons ago. It was more than we could ever hope to haul in a single trip. The ore holds were all full, and the crews had started filling any open space they could find with as much loose ore as they could carry."

Alan paused as he took another swig of water. "I refused to let them put any ore in the engine room. I sealed the hatch to the compartment, and called up to the Captain and told him the ship would not take this amount of load. None of them would listen. All they saw were the dollar signs in their heads. Stupid…"

Alan stopped for a moment, remembering his friends among that mining crew.

"We got away from the asteroid okay, but as soon as they tried to change course for the trip back to Mars, the gravity plating failed. The whole ship went zero-gee, "he recalled painfully. "You could hear all that ore bouncing around in the halls. The emergency bulkheads couldn’t seal because of all the junk in there, tearing the ship apart from the inside out. Section after section depressurized. I managed to get a pressure suit on a couple minutes before the hatch to the engine room was compromised. By the time I was able to get the gravity plating back at minimal power, the entire ship decompressed. Out of sixteen crew members, I was the only survivor."

"Oh my god," Elena said.

"I managed to get enough power online to limp the ship back to the mining station from the engine room. I was happy to get out of there alive. My share of the profit was more than enough to quietly retire on Mars. I got contacted a month or two later by a lawyer for the miner’s union. They had sued the mining company on my behalf."

"Why?"

"The mining contract has a negligence clause… If a crew member knowingly, through action or inaction, contributed to the disaster, they lost eligibility for their share. The Union had it included in all contracts to make sure the mining company didn’t make crews take more risks than they already did. Since the entire crew was negligent, none of their shares were valid. As a result, I was entitled to the entire profit from the haul, not the mining company. After the Union took their cut of the settlement, I ended up with ten times more than I would have taken otherwise."

Elena shook her head in amazement. "Why didn’t you retire then?"

"There’s not exactly a lot to do out here, you know? If you’re not mining, and not in the military, you’re pretty much just sitting around. Most retired miners blow their money on booze, drugs, and whatever else they can find on Mars. I started buying spare parts from all over the Solar system to build myself a little pleasure boat. I got audited a few times; the Alliance got a little worried with my purchasing supplied from the EU and SAC. In fact, this little ship is what got me back into the military. They put me in the shipyards to keep a closer eye on what I was up to until they were sure I wasn’t going to lead a revolution or something."