The Asteroid Miners
by
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I guess now is as good a time to start as any. Good, good, no warning bells or flashing icons. Humm!!
What’s that on the edge of the upper right quadrant? It must be a rock coming down from one of the
outer rings. It’s big but it doesn’t act a rock. A rock that big should be falling but this one is holding its
position. No wait, the computer has picked it up now and it looks like it’s going to intersect our course in
about an hour. I think it might be under power. It sure moves like it. I’m going to put out a general hail
just in case.
Damm! It looks like it speeded up again. It’s going to be right on top of us in 30 minutes. I had better
turn on our locating beacon and send out another hail.
What the hell was that? They just fired a laser blast at our Gem. Holy shit, these guys are after our rock. I
sounded the general alarm just as they fired another laser blast but this time it was aimed at the towline
rather than the Gem. That first shot must have been to confirm the compensation of the Gem.
Dwaine came barging in first with Kelly only a minute behind him. Dwaine had gotten up to go to the
bathroom so he had a head start on Kelly who woke out of a sound sleep. Your adrenalin kicks in
immediately when a general alarm sounds and they were both wide awake. I was just starting to explain
when the phantom ship took another shot at the towline. Kelly was the first to understand what was
happening and she just screamed.
They’re pirates. Those bastards are trying to steal our Gem.
The next shot was at our mainline. I guess they decided the Gems towline was too hard to hit.
They can’t do that, yelled Dwaine, we’ve got them tagged. What do they think they’re doing?
Dwaine! Kelly said with great exasperation, pirates don’t give a damm about tags. They’ll just cut them
out and put their own on in place of ours.
I had started to jog the Retros to keep the lines moving so they would be harder to hit. It suddenly
occurred to me that if they didn’t have any luck hitting the towlines, they might start shooting at us. I
barked an order at the other two.
Get into your suits. If they start shooting at us and pierce our hull then someone has to be able to take
over for me.
I was jogging the lines back and forth because I didn’t want to get too far out of position for the burn
down to the Mars Plane If we could hold them off until then we would have a direct line to head office
and we could call for help. This is probably why they had decided not to wait any longer to act. They had
to at least cut the rocks free before we were scanned by the Mars Approach Monitors. Even if they
weren’t able to get the tags off before we were scanned they could always claim that we had lost our
rocks on the descent and they had salvaged them. That might not stand up in a court of law but
possession is nine tenths of the law and they would have a strong case for at least splitting the proceeds
from their sale. The closer we got to our burn window, the more desperate they would get. Dwaine was
back first so I put him on our lasers in the chance he could get a shot at them. Our ships are pretty tough
because of the Steller Steel but our rockets are our Achilles Heel. All they had to do was get a good shot
at them and we are dead in the water and they could do what they wanted with our load.
Kelly wasn’t far behind Dwaine and she manned the radio. She was just starting to broadcast a mayday
when we heard a laser beam bounce off the outside of the pod and the radio went dead.
Things were getting really serious now because it looked like they were going to take us out of the
picture first and then deal with the rocks later. Kelly pointed at the screen and bellowed so loud it hurt
my ears.
Holy crap, there’s two of them. We’re screwed!
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About the Book
The story follows the lives of four ordinary individuals who by happenchance came to be working together. They, like most people were doing their best to get ahead by using the skills they had acquired on their journey through life up to that point. Little did they know that they had other skills that would take them in a completely unexpected direction. They had no hint of the turn of events that would make their names instantly recognized anywhere in the solar system or turn them into global heros.
The storyline is not the only thing that presents the reader with the opportunity to transplant themselves into the story. Almost every challenge that is overcome and structure that is mentioned is possible using technology available today or at least within the grasp of today’s innovators.
The author presents one solution to the reader, but some readers will not be able to resist the temptation to visualize a different and possibly better course of action. This story should provide plenty of food for thought for people who like to problem solve.
There are no magical beings in this story or characters with superhuman powers, so the author felt compelled to include some sexual content.
About the Author
Clarence Hallett is a wannabe space engineer with an overactive imagination and who cut his teeth on books by Isaacs Asimov and Ben Bova. He is co-owner of a patent for a forestry delimbing machine and the owner of a patent for a reaction containment drive unit. He has designed several other devices that may have been patentable as well. When he is faced with a challenge that seems impossible on the surface, he has learned to think outside of the box because experience has taught him that most of the things we think of as impossible are only impossible because we don’t know how to do them yet.
He has spent most of his working life repairing and designing machine systems that more often than not involved working in very challenging conditions in isolated locations. Because of that, he understands the dangers involved with working in unhospitable environments and away from any immediate help where one mistake could very well result in his death.
This is his first attempt at writing, and he has been able to incorporate some very interesting ideas into this story. It is his sincere wish that one of the ideas verbalized in this story will spawn an innovation that proves to be beneficial to us on our journey into the future.