Author's Note

the last posting was accidental, sorry.

Chapter 3: Step 1!

I stared at the moon worth of asteroid. It was too deformed to be called a planetoid, but this one alone rated double decker Ceres. The scans were iffy, but there as estimated to be 9 similarly, but increasingly smaller, sized masses nearby. If the scans of the iron and carbon were correct, I could make enough steal to forge a starbase almost 2/3 the size of THE Moon. Too good to be true, but here it sat before me, awaiting the touch of drill and sweat. Eager to become a home, or at least it was in my mind's eye.

My mind's eye had 20/20 vision, and with it I gawked at the possibilities.

My oxygen reader burped, warning me that I had just used a whole percent of my power getting here. I was tempted to recharge, but I barely had enough to respawn in a clone. Rule one of being an engineer, always have a clone and the power to be respawned. I'd lost a couple friends a hundred or so years back in a asteroid shower. They had a station to respawn at, but they'd used the last of the power making a pool table.

I learned to make smarter friends soon after.

I did have enough energy to spare to open the door, and the vastness of space greeted me eagerly with only the thin plasma envelope between us, spread across the door to keep in the air. I smiled at the slight blue shimmer that kept my breathes from being my last, and affixed my helmet.

The plasma field that kept in the air was made using a series of uniquely charged magnets along the door's edge. It was a invention of my father's before he passed away. He told me once that the easiest way to innovate was to look to the past. He told me that scientists had known about plasma shields using magnetic fields since the 2000's. I'm not sure I believed him, but his invention worked nonetheless.

I wonder how many people used this now. He had only shared it with his friends, and I had only shared it with the few I had made in my few centuries of life. Had someone else discovered a better way of doing this? Had someone invented shields for their entire ship? Humanity was so spread out that I wouldn't be surprised if some colonists had been reduced to using stone tools inside of dome habitats they couldn't even comprehend anymore.

A bleep from my energy level moderator warned me that I was wasting time again. The asteroid was 2 feet below my ship now, and I grinned as the soft "ka-chunk" as the landing gear attached to the rocky surface. It was time to get some uranium!

I stepped off my ship and onto the black streak of precious fuel I had parked next to. The gravity of my ship holding snuggly outside of its confines thanks to the projectors embedded in the armor.

First, I slipped off the bag part of my pack and nailed it to a uranium poor spot a foot or two away. Next, I swung out my drill, taking a firm grasp of it with both hands, and leaned down to rest the sharp pick end to the ground.

With one flip of the switch it roared to life, shaking my whole body as it dug into the ore below my feet. my thruster pack gave me a helpful boost, keeping me from jerking up and loosing my grip. I smiled as I slowly burrowed into rock and uranium for what seemed like the thousandth time, but for all I knew it could be.

I felt cheer well up inside of me as a almost euphoric jerk was shaken from the drill, signalling what was perhaps the second best moment in an engineers life, hitting a nugget of pure uranium.

I immediately gave my drill's ore detector a massive power boost, bringing my suit to 50%, but it was well worth it to getting a better resolution on the field and the full scope of my dig.

My jaw dropped. There were hundred of pure uranium deposits in this strata of ore alone. I was in Heaven, Valhalla, Shangri-la! Those raiders must have gotten me, and I'd been taken by valkyries to Freya's field of perpetual plenty. I could live here thousands of years and never run out. Hell... asteroids like these were better than a moon! I could found a fucking nation on strategic reserves like this. If I took the time to bring the asteroids together and link them, I could call myself and emporer...

And these were mine... all fucking MINE!

This also meant that I'd need some serious guns on whatever home I built, and more for each asteroid I tried to claim. Doing that alone would be impossible... but who could I trust to share in the wealth of this find?

Dwarf was a pirate now, as cool as that was, it was iffy too. There was no one else who... Fade? Could I still trust Fade? It'd been years since we last talked last... met.

No, he'd probably long forgotten me. I'd be doing this solo.

My mood soured, I turned back to my drill and got to work. I used the techniques my dad had gotten from his dad and so on to remove the first solid uranium chunk. Zero-G mining and gravity assisted mining were vastly different beasts. Zero-G was all about taking your time and ensuring that what you were mining didn't drift off into oblivion, wasting all of your work. Gravity mining was all about time efficiency, every second was a second of power being used.

That meant doing large chunks at a time.

The first hunk of uranium broke free with a large *Crack* resounding through the asteroid and into my suit. It was a satisfying sound. I lifted it up and slid it into my bag. It was easily 3 Kilos. That was more than enough to power my ship now, but I didn't want to start up the systems without more to put in.

So I got back to drilling.