"I'm not saying it was aliens." Said McCormick, seated as he usually was, leaned back in the navigation chair facing upwards and staring disinterestedly at the Navigation consoles arrayed above him, automatically going over the telemetry data of the hundreds of thousands chunks of ice and rock floating around their mining vessel with practiced ease. Sipping cold coffee flavoured jelly out of a pouch through a straw. Like an Asshole. "I'm just saying it might have been aliens."

"For fuck's sake, Donn, there's no bloody aliens out there." Micheál barked testily over the radio. He was never one to engage in the time-honoured spacer tradition of trying to determine whodunnit with regards to destroying the stargate system and scattering the nations of mankind amongst the stars, cut off and lost from Earth.

He was, however, rarely left with much of a choice, because it was either discussing the Starbreak, what they were going to do with their paycheck next time they were grav-side which was almost always either something to do with beer or women. Or else discussing politics, which no one wanted to do unless they were really good friends. So baseless speculation it was then. "We were in space for a hundred years before the stargates, traveling the stars with them for twice that time, and we've been without them for about five hundred. Not fucking once did we find aliens. Not any of us. It wasn't aliens."

"Well can we really be sure? The Old Country wasn't exactly on the best of terms with many of the other nations on Old Earth before Starbreak. Its not like any of them would feel obligated to share news of finding intelligent life if they came across it." McEntaggart offered. The man was normally quiet and thoughtful, more of a peacemaker than anything and was trying to play devil's advocate to appease McCormick and pre-empt Micheál from losing his temper. He typically took the ‘boring’ position that the Starbreak was the result of Earth having another good old rousing round of world-wars. One final send off, wherein the destruction of the stargate system was probably one of many ‘fuck yous’ the Old Countries gave to each other by separating them from their children colonies out in the God-knows-where of the Galaxy before going to town on one another.

It was a sensible assumption, all things considered, it neatly explained why Earth hasn’t gone to the trouble of rebuilding the stargate system, or contacting its daughter nations, after all this time. It didn’t because it couldn’t, either because no one was alive back in Sol. Or the damage was so extensive that out of all the realms of Mankind, the Homeworld was so thoroughly wrecked that it was probably still recovering and in no position to even think of reconnecting the human diaspora among the stars.

Micheál O’Farrell was of an indeterminate position, he didn’t know and didn’t care, it was irrelevant to him, all that mattered was the here and now. Earth was neither, nor where the stargates, Eoin McEntaggart’s current compromise proposal did little to appeal to his objection to McCormick’s absurd speculations by appealing to unknowables.

A practical and pragmatic minded man, Micheál didn’t suffer fools gladly and did not tolerate flights of fancy. It made him dour company when the lads went out drinking, but it made him a godsend when you needed to keep your ship’s drive and engines from going critical in an emergency. It was a wonder the man was even out here on a drive-less mining trawler rather than commanding one of the company’s barges, if not making his way to greener pastures entirely. He certainly had the head for command and the competency to get noticed.

“You’re appealing to imponderables. Even if the other nations did encounter alien life and successfully hid it from the Fatherland and each other, it still wouldn’t be sufficient cause to assume these… aliens shattered the stargates.” Micheál said, a bit more calmly over the radio. McCormick slurped noisily on his packet which just raised Micheál’s hackles further. “And do you fucking, have to do that? For fuck’s sake its jellied coffee, it’s disgusting enough to imagine let alone hear you guzzle that shit down like its stout.”

“Hey lad, we got sixteen more hours to go on this God-forsaken shift, I’m going to need all the wakey-wakey juice I can get.” McCormick chuckled ruefully. Donnchadh McCormick was their desk jockey, their comms man, their navigation specialist, their pilot, their technical specialist and five other job specialisations that pretty much made it impossible for him to leave the ship. He was easily doing the jobs of five men and his body suffered for it from all the stimulants and drugs needed to keep it operational for their long stints out here in unpopulated star systems mining technically unclaimed asteroid fields.

The ‘coffee’ he was currently enjoying was just that, caffeinated jelly capable of being packaged and drank in zero-g environments without issue. It was also laced with specially engineered amphetamines that gave him all the benefit of having endless crackhead energy but not the uncontrollable high that would make him useless for the technical operations he needed to keep an eye on at all times.

For all the crew grumbled about his overly cheerful demeanour and the fact his pay cheque was well over five times their own whenever they came back from a successful stint out in the arse-end of space, absolutely none of them would trade places with him if they had the opportunity. No amount of money was worth living your life as a biological wreck constantly in need of medical assistance just to be able to walk planet side and looking like fresh death warmed over, but clearly McCormick thought it was a worthwhile tradeoff.

It was a rough job at the best of times with the most responsible of companies, space mining. Zonetech Incorporated, however, was not a responsible company. Which was precisely why they were out here, on a fringe system at least two jumps away from the nearest inhabited system in Gaelic space, with no insurance, their workers’ rights waived away willingly, with one man doing the job of five on a driveless trawler with no gravity, working north of twenty hours per shift, for a pay cheque that was only worth a fraction of the sheer tonnage of mined material, in outmoded spacesuits that met the bare minimum radiation shielding requirements and a visor shield that maybe protected you from the blinding glare of the nearest star provided you didn’t look directly at it.

For as bad as those job conditions were, good God was there a lot of money in it. Zonetech made these conditions very clear to every prospective employee before anything was ever signed, with an absolute legally binding guarantee that they would get exactly the fraction of the tonnage of mined material was worth per head per shift. And the per-head stipulation applied depending on how many required positions one was willing to pick up per crew. The actual space walkers going out and mining the rocks couldn’t bullshit that, as they had to actually go out in the void and start cracking stones, but the crew positions on each Trawler?

The system was practically designed to incentivise some poor bastard exactly like McCormick to practically kill himself for the sake of multiple payouts. All so the company could save money on life support systems and continue buying outmoded and older equipment to cut corners. Smaller crew sizes also meant less need to provide amenities, smaller ships that could go faster to get more total tonnage of material back to the waiting barge out on the edge of the asteroid belt.

It was amazingly petty, especially considering Zonetech was ‘wild’ mining out in unclaimed systems and thus didn’t need to pay this or that government any taxation or tithes and claimed a hundred percent of the profits for itself. However, their corner-cutting and penny pinching and rights-waiving allowed them to pay each individual miner far, far more per individual sojourn than most other miners got in two year’s worth of work.

And it was still buttons compared to what Zonetech made on the raw material they got. Honestly it was a wonder more corporations and freewheelers didn’t wild mine more often, but then one would suppose pirates would always be an issue to mitigate any corporate bastard’s greed a touch.

“And besides, how do we know the Stargates were even human made in the first place?” McCormick posited. At this, even McEntaggart sighed audibly, angry garbled noises came over the radio from Micheál’s suit and a muttered, resigned ‘here we fuckin’ go’ from the up-until-now silent Calum Trainor, the fourth of their woefully undermanned five man group.

“Because of the fuckin’ hullabaloo when the Japs bloody invented the damn things you blasted eejit!” Micheál spewed over the comms.

“Well ye-“

“There were fuckin’ wars fought when the Japs unveiled that shit you fuckin’ absolute tool!” Micheál was in full bore now. “They were made to share!”

“Actually, it was the Cascadians that were made to share.” Calum piped up. The avid historian of the group and resident gun nut, he always had a fondness for the old American empire and its successor states in particular. Their culture at least, if not its impact on the world. “They basically forcibly annexed the Japs and forbade its space-based technology from the rest of the world after the Japanese made the announcement that their space based industries out of Mars had mastered hyper-spatial tech to create the Stargates. The Yanks even went as far as to try to gaslight the rest of the Solar system that it was all a hoax to try to keep the tech for themselves.”

“Yanks?” McCormick asked.

“Derogatory slur for the old North Americans, there’s also Leafs but I’m actually not sure what that one is referring to in particular and its only really the far northerners of the continent who got testy with the name.” Calum explained.

“Right, the yanks, whatever.” Micheál said, taking a solid breath through his nose to calm himself. “Their bullshit pretty much caused the first Inter-Solar war. Nearly bloody destroyed Earth, after that everyone got the rights to their own gates in order to keep the peace.”

“And that’s why...” Micheál continued. “The Stargates. Weren’t Made. Nor Destroyed. By fucking aliens.”

“Hmph.” McCormick grumbled. “Alright smartarse, what do you think caused the Starbreak?”

“I don’t know, could have been anything.” Micheál said testily.

“Like what?”

“Like… Like I dunno, another Solar war.” Micheál said, circling back to the boring answer.

“Nah, now I’m curious. You hesitated for a second there, I want to know what you think happened, not what everyone in an Ivory Tower determines on high to have happened because they cut themselves shaving with Occam’s Razor one time too often.” McCormick replied, Micheál let out an audible breath over the radio but was quiet for a second before answering.

“I think… It might just be us.” He said after a moment. That got everyone’s attention.

“What?” McEntaggart asked.

“Think about it, what we know about the Stargates was when they turned on, they’re immediately locked on a star system, right? No telling which one or where, can’t change it once its locked, you roll that bloody roulette and you get what you get, aye?” He said as everyone kept quiet as he worked out his thoughts. It seemed it was taking him some time, as if he didn’t want to say aloud what he was thinking. “Well what if our gate… was the only one that fucked up? What if there was some computer error, or-or hyper space hiccup or some such nonsense that’s beyond our knowledge?”

“What if its just us that got fucked over and no one’s trying to reconnect anymore?” He finished.

“… For five hundred years?” Calum asked tentatively after an uncomfortable silence. “Surely someone would try, at least. God knows we have.”

“Whose saying they didn’t? Maybe they did.” Micheál conceded, but there was no heat in his voice, no joy at voicing a theory that got through to everyone. “But at the end of the day you have to cut your losses. Maybe the Old Country did everything it could to try to find us, we’d have been a big loss to them, but they’d have to get a new stargate again eventually, restart a new colony somewhere else, start investing in that one. Get businesses and trade going again to sustain themselves. They’d have to, the way Sol was set up we had no enemies, but we didn’t have any friends either. Eventually interest in trying to reconnect with us would wane and they’d just… Move on. And its just us out here. On our own.”

There was no more conjecture after that point. It was not one anyone cared to engage in, neither to contradict nor agree with, because that’d mean entertaining the idea. A solar war, aliens, hyper-space storm, an act of God, anything was better than the idea of being… abandoned, because at least that meant people couldn’t connect with them. It didn’t mean no one wanted to. The five of them continued to work in mostly silence for the next hour or so, the mood soured by dark contemplations, the quiet broken only by necessary communications regarding dig depths, charge setting, telemetry data and so on.

It was a productive if miserable hour and would be exactly what a Zonetech supervisor would want to see a crew doing for the entirety of their ungodly long shifts. That is, if the cheap bastards ever bothered to shell out to have their supervisors receive the hazard pay necessary to actually look over their shoulders. However, all good things must come to an end, and as is typical, McCormick broke the silence.

“Right so… Larry’s when we get back?” he asked. There was some mumbled assent to the idea of visiting the on-ship bar when their little trawler made it back to the Zonetech Barge ship, The Meanderer. The little bar was technically a company property, but in actual fact on lease to a former miner who couldn’t quite leave the industry after losing both his legs. Instead opening the bar on one of Zonetech’s busiest wild-mining barges.

Situated closest to the comically ill-maintained Gravity-tube that ran the length of the ship. The relatively high gravity making it a very comfortable location to quite literally put up your feet and get drunk off your ass when your stint was done for that month and you waited for the jump back into civilized space.

Everyone went there, it wasn’t much of a question, it was either that or trying to live in the uncomfortable, not-quite-high-enough gravity of the residential dorms, situated too close to the outer hulls to benefit enough from the gravity tube’s pull to live comfortably. So everyone spent time in or around Larry’s, day drinking, eating, gambling, talking or watching the extremely time delayed and distorted sports updates whenever a company communication ship jumped in system to trade news and updates with local company assets in a system before jumping out again.

“You still owe us a round, Donncadh.” Calum said with a smile in his voice. McCormick snorted.

“I’ll have you know, everyone knows you cheated at darts.” He protested.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“How the hell do you cheat at darts?” Micheál demanded incredulously. “Everyone can see your score. You lost fair and square, so suck up and pay up.”

“Now, see, that’s why you’ll never find a woman, O’Farrell.” McCormick said with a chuckle. “Can’t take an obvious joke.”

“I’ll make a fuckin’ joke out of you lad if you don’t watch yer lip.” Micheál said with obvious heat in his voice.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen.” Eoin McEntaggart said placatingly, though you could tell by the lift of his voice he was enjoying the exchange. “You’re missing the point. None of you will be getting any women.”

“Aye, because fuckface over here will scare them all away.” Calum laughed, shooting down Eoin’s set up before he could get his own joke in. “Yais remember when he was drunk off his arse and tried chatting up the fucking barge captain without realising who she was?”

“The fact she played along until realization dawned on him made it all the funnier.” Micheál agreed.

“Hey, at least I still went for it!” Eoin said defensively, now thoroughly disliking how quickly the tables turned on him. “More than I can say about any of what you cowards would do.”

“Ya stumbled all over your words, rifted up a belcher in her face and almost puked over her shoes in yer fear. You’re lucky you only got sent to de-ionize one of the stabilizing fins on the hull that week.” McCormick said. “Any and all ship women are off limits, you should have known that by the uniform at least if nothing else. Had her husband been on deck at the time, you’d have had a bad time of it.”

“But her man has no rank!”

“He also isn’t bound by company rules either and we’re in wild space. Bad things happen out here lad.” McCormick said warningly, though not unkindly. “Anyway, this is our last shift before our stint is done. Maybe you’ll have better luck dirt side.”

“You coming down with us this time, Donnchadh?” Calum asked.

“… Nah. You know me, space is my home now. Sides, there’s plenty of fun to be had on stations. You fellas haven’t lived until you’ve danced naked in a zero-grav-“

It was around that point that Patrick, the fifth man of the team, tuned out the rest of them. Reaching up to his helmet, sliding a rounded panel over where his ear was roughly located and depressing the switch found there. Turning off the radio chatter and switching his suit’s internal radio systems to synthesized sounds and his own personal playlist. Or he would if the company allowed them to play their own music while on shift. Bastards. The sound synthesisation was a fairly complex system of sensors around the suit that detected vibrations in the tools and environment around a space-walker.

It then interpreted these vibrations and projected approximated sounds throughout the suit, primarily in the helmet, but localization was important to help the space walker identify potentially hazardous situations by approximating where a ‘sound’ was originating from with regards to where they were floating at any given moment. Extremely important when operating around dangerous equipment in the void, whether in a derelict craft or out mining

It was initially developed a half century after the Starbreak as an experimental means of identifying faulty fuel lines on ships in void conditions when proper tools were not available, based off of an unimplemented Stargate era design from Old Germany someone found knocking around in an archive somewhere. It soon quickly became an invaluable addition to most void suits, environmental suits, and even personal space craft and armours. Not just for its initial use of hazard detection, but an invaluable means of maintaining mental health in the void.

As sound synthesisation did wonders to allow spacers the ability to ‘ground’ themselves by providing much needed ambience to their environment and a psychological connection to what they were doing that the conditions of the void coupled with the alienating nature of most space suits separated them from. The fact that intellectually everyone knew it was an illusion was immaterial, the human psyche appreciated the connection all the same. Pity it always assumed the same generic spacey ambience for every single asteroid belt he had ever operated in, he knew it was to be expected but some procedural variety based on environment would not go amiss.

Also the fact it allowed most people to operate for longer in hostile conditions, lowered turnover and accidental injuries in most space-borne industries by a substantial margin and generally proved more amicable to the psychic wellbeing of most spacers. Which only helped void borne industries flourish. Not a few academics and economists credit the invention to greatly aiding in the recovery and return of the Irish colonies to functional space faring status, given the explosive growth of economic activity that occurred when making living in the void even marginally more bearable beyond the almost barbaric spartan utilitarianism of the Stargate era.

So that’s what he was listening to now as he hammered a spike into the rockface below him, looping his suit’s cable retractor onto it before pushing off from the asteroid he had just prospected. It was primarily made up of nickel with some cobalt admixture, nothing special but there was a fuckton of the stuff and if he had the rights to the rock all to himself it’d set him up almost for life provided he decided to live dirt side and do nothing too extravagant with his wealth. As it was, it was just a valuable pay cheque.

He had spent the hour traversing the entire ‘roid in a grid pattern to map out the best places to put charges to cause the thing to fracture enough to get a majority of the valuable ore. Another hour drilling, digging, planting, charging, and covering the charges. Another hour still to plant spikes all across the rock and then pull out the ludicrous lengths of high-torsion flex-net from his personal dock and wrap the rock in a space age fisherman’s net like a babe in swaddling clothes.

He reached another asteroid after a good ten minutes of careful descent, adjusting his ‘fall’ with manoeuvring jets. As soon as his feet hit the rock and he was convinced he wouldn’t go jumping off, he thumbed the button on his suit’s retractor cable set up around the voidsuit’s waist. The tiny charge in the spike tying it to the prospected rock blew, freeing his cable and allowing him to retract it safely. He coughed in the stale air of his suit as he raised his left arm, flipped open the solid plastic cover over the controller for his dock and began manoeuvring the little drone with well-practiced motions of his fingers over the tiny controls attached to his arm.

The dock was little more than a large, hardy storage cylinder with manoeuvring jets attached and a computer to allow control and guidance by the miner. A slapdash drone used to ferry the miner’s tools and especially the lengthy rolls of flex-nets as he rock-hopped around the belt. The bright orange hexagonal cylinder’s lights beeped in confirmation of receiving commands from his controller as it manoeuvred to fly closer to the new asteroid and hide in its shadow. Patrick followed it around the rock, all but hugging the asteroid as he pushed himself along it, assisted by his suit’s jets to push him along at speed until he was well in the shadow of the roid.

“Patrick here.” his smooth baritone voice called out over the suit’s comms, he chastised himself before reaching up and switching on the communications again. Of course if the trawler needed to communicate with him it could bypass his suit through brute force, but unless that was necessary, once his comms were muted he may as well have been alone. He turned to look about him as he turned on the communications, lowering the atmospheric sound synthesisation and letting the chatter of his team fill his ears.

His heads up display showed him his vital signs and other suit systems via voice command and always showed his location vis a vis his teammates and their trawler through orange blips at the edge of his visor that would move to the centre of his vision when he turned in their direction. Showing distance, suit integrity, vitals and other information about his teammates at a glance. “Patrick here, ready to crack an egg.”

“Affirmative, Paddy. Charges?” McCormick said, switching comm channel between the trawler and Patrick’s suit for the confirmation process, silencing the others. The conversation would be recorded for every blast so no one wanted a fuck up or their process interrupted by unruly banter that might cause vital information to be missed.

“Primed.”

“Christmas wrapping?”

“With a bow and everything.”

“Alright, picking you up now on my monitors. Safe distance?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Shielded?”

“Got a rock almost as big as the target between me and it.”

“Dock?”

“Secured.”

“Vitals check out alright, suit integrity confirmed, charge ping in acceptable range. Only twenty nine?”

“Estimations and regulations would say I’d only need twenty for the size of the rock, but I want to be sure.” Patrick confirmed.

“Well it’s why they always give us a million of these things. Alright. Flex-net integrity secured, tonnage calculated, running telemetry calculations now.” McCormick said at last, the conversation lulling into an exhausted silence as he ran the numbers on potential failure states, such as charges not going off, or going off out of sequence, and potential spread of debris should the net system fail and the rocks go spinning off into the void. Eventually he got back to him. “Alright, you should be good, Paddy. Go ahead and blow it.”

“Team gonna be alright?”

“Ran the worst possible simulation, they’ll be fine even if you got minced.”

“Wonderful thought.” Patrick said ruefully, McCormick chuckled.

“It's why I make the big money. Ready when you are, lad.” McCormick confirmed, turning his mic off. It was a courtesy and one technically condemned by regs but everyone did it. By turning off his mic after preliminary checks he wasn’t technically contravening regulations as the comms were still being recorded for the duration of a blast process. However, silence on his end and the muting of the rest of the team allowed the suit’s sound synthesisation to come back online.

Which in turn allowed a miner the subtle pleasure of being in the void and ‘hearing’ an explosion go off. Of course, with sound synthesizers this cheap it sounded nothing like how the charges would sound if they went off in the atmosphere but it was satisfying all the same, you took what you could get in the void.

Pulling himself over the roid until he was just outside of its shadow and the target asteroid was in sight, he held up his hand so the suit’s sensor suite could pick up the explosion. He didn’t risk more than his hand however, no matter how much he wanted to see the egg crack, it wasn’t worth risking a full solar glare to the visor. He took a few deep breathes as he unhooked the detonator grip from its holster along his belt, flicked through a few settings with his thumb on its on screen display and audibly confirmed the connection between it and his charges’ distinct signal when prompted by his HUD. It was set to go, he flicked the cap, counted to three and depressed the detonator.

The satisfying staccato burst of the charges going off in sequence around the rock rumbled through his suit’s synthesizer faster than real sound would actually travel in atmosphere, he didn’t feel it of course but he could imagine it as his eyes focused on the display readout in front of him. The blasts were calculated to crack along projected faultlines in the rock to break it down for easy storage and transport on the trawler, rocks being rocks of course all the debris would be irregular, but it allowed miners to sort the wheat from the chaff and prioritize valuable ores from worthless irradiated space rock.

Although even the rock was worth something to construction companies and various industries dirt-side that specialized in using space borne materials for mundane purposes, that wasn’t what they were there for, however.

He kept his breath steady as the tension readouts on the flex-nets filtered back to his suit as they struggled to contain the expanding debris. They only had to hold for so long before the momentum bled off as the rocks strained against the enclosed net and each other. The nets came out in sheets and had to be locked to one another with high tension titanium hooks that would hold the nets together after the initial blasts cracked open the rock and shook loose the spikes initially tying the net to the asteroid.

Smaller debris would of course flit through both the netting and the gaps between net sheets but that was an acceptable sacrifice if you still retained well over north of ninety percent of the roid’s mass in your net. Thankfully the nets held with no large segments breaking loose amongst the belt, and he idly watched as smaller debris shot past the asteroid he was hiding behind that his suit’s sensor’s picked up moving at speed. He’d wait there another ten to fifteen minutes for the space around the asteroid to clear before moving around to secure his catch and await pick up from the trawler.

“Alright, Paddy, textbook job. Good work.” McCormick said as his mic switched back on. “Nearly a hundred tonnes too, hopefully not too much of that is going to end up as waste.

“Projections put nearly sixty percent as target material according to my prospector tablet.” Patrick confirmed for the record. McCormick snorted.

“Better than expected but you know how projection margins are. Alright, blast confirmed, miner safety confirmed, vitals normal, suit integrity nominal, nets held, objective secured, marking for pick up. Ending the recording log now, sit tight Paddy, I’ll be around in an hour or thereabouts.”

“Grand so.” Patrick acknowledged. He pushed off from the rock as the radio chatter from the rest of the team filtered back in once McCormick cut the tunnelled feed with the trawler. Floating over to his dock he gripped one of its external handholds as his jets slowed his momentum. Opening the control panel on the top of the dock he piloted it manually to float himself and his gear around the asteroid that shielded him, activating the glare shielding on his visor as he rounded the rim of the rock and made his way towards the target asteroid.

It was a right mess, a hundred tonnes of space rock huddled together like shrimp caught in a fisherman’s net. The entire mass listing out of its normal orbit as the remaining momentum of the rocks shifted. The entire thing would be loaded onto the trawler for automatic sorting long before it listed too dangerously off course so that wasn’t a problem. He navigated through the rapidly diminishing debris field until he was in the shadow of the asteroid, parking his dock about five metres from the net and hooking a cable between the drone and the net.

Then he did as he was told, floated back over to his dock and positioned himself as best he could in zero gravity, to ‘sit’ on the dock, which was the flattest, most regular surface he was going to find out here, and waited. Watching the universe pass him by as he listened to the banter of his much more talkative teammates and idly monitored their positions, mentally calculating their distances from him and from eachother along this segment of the belt.

They’d be screwed if a pirate jumped in system and decided to mosey along the likely mining spots for the chance of an easy score, that was the real big risk factor in wild mining. On the one hand, there were unbelievable profits to be had, on the other, potential press ganging, slavery, murder and worse things besides. You didn’t do wild mining if you had something to live for. He didn’t know any of his teammates’ stories, he didn’t really want to, and he did his damnedest to hide his own, even if it wasn’t anything nefarious.

He was Patrick O’Neil to them, and just Patrick O’Neil, just another dirt-sider paddy looking to make it big on the fringes of civilization so he could live life nice and easy and nothing else besides. It pained him that he had to give his real name for the contract to be legitimate, he’d avoid it if he could. Thankfully only a few people he had met in the company had made the connection between his name and his distinct, if refined, Threshwater accent, and all it cost him was a few knowing smiles but not much else.

It was a petty reason to throw your life away for the chance of getting rich enough, fast enough to build it anew according to your own rules. He knew that, he knew he was being proud and selfish, but he didn’t care. He had made the decision to get out from under his father’s shadow and his legacy of madness and had stuck with it, one of the lessons he was genuinely thankful his father had instilled in him during all those years raising him as if he actually was something he was not. The more he thought about his father though, in the intervening years since he had attained his majority and immediately invested in his own mad plan for independence, the more guilt he felt. It wasn’t fair, not on either of them, it never really was. He resented his father for foisting his delusions on his life, but he couldn’t help but pity him.

And now here he was, five years later. Every waking moment not spent working extra stints every year on wild mining with back up teams was spent on education: learning the ins and outs of spacecraft maintenance, piloting and operations, vehicle repair, drone construction and programming, hydrogen cell disposal and everything an independent space farer would need to know to survive on the bare minimum in the void.

Weapons training and self-defence courses, militia training courses for more advanced gear and weapon system familiarization, mercenary economics, memorizing the major and minor ports of call of the outer colonies, the Old Law legal system which was the only one that really governed the stars between the major governments as well as local planetary variations, banking regulations, prospecting rights, salvage claims…

It was an exhaustive and exhausting process, and it bordered on near manic obsession at times for him. More than once he grew sincerely concerned if the same delusional madness that had afflicted his father was congenital, and that he himself was displaying early signs of his own permutation of mental illness through his monomania. But it had been worth it, he had as many certifications and permanent licenses as any legitimate space faring prospector and operator could want, recognised by all the governments in the five systems and every port beyond. As for experience, well, that would have to come in time.

He now had more than enough money to purchase his ship and he had been doing a lot of thinking in that regard, and a lot of ‘window shopping’ as it were. By the end of it, he’d be throwing nearly a million gold ounces worth of credit down the drain and be more or less penniless.

However, that was life as a spacefarer. You had opportunities in terms of salvage, prospecting and transporting that could gain you wealth an average ground pounder could only dream of accruing… You just also lost the same amount of wealth almost as quickly between fees, maintenance and repairs, upgrades, replacements and taxes. Oh God, the taxes. Play your cards right and this would never be much of a problem, and you could live comfortably, with the entire void as your plaything. Fuck up and you could end up working as a dockworker on some godforsaken domed habitat on some rock time forgot on the edge of civilized space for the rest of your life.

That was the life Patrick had chosen for himself. Not for the wealth, not for the romance, but because it gave him the most options. Options he wouldn’t have if he let his father have his way and convinced him to stay back on Threshwater, to continue his education and to one day inherit his imaginary ‘empire’. He had to leave, it was the only sane thing to do, it simply had to be done. Now however, with his goal finally within reach, with all his checkboxes marked and preparations made to finally live his life how he wants to he found himself with remorse.

He would be leaving, that was for certain, and he’d be leaving his father alone with his delusions. Well not quite, the man would be quite well taken care of, he’d make sure to check in from time to time to make sure of that, even if from a distance. But that wasn’t the problem, if he was going to be a man about this, if he was going to be able to face himself in the mirror from then on, he was going to have to make the old man understand. Even if all he could get through to him was that he was leaving for good.

The shift timer on his display blinked briefly to let him know another hour passed, knocking him from his ruminations. He let out a breath and flexed his fingers, tensing and relaxed his muscles. Despite the stimulants he was already tired, and he still had another dozen hours left on his shift, officially anyway, shifts never ended until the limit was passed and everything was docked, loaded, catalogued and sorted. Then they had the company’s permission to pass out tied to their bunks and plot a course for the main barge, allowing the navigation computer to slow walk them there if the pilot couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer.

And this was the last shift of his last stint with his team. He knew they’d want to celebrate properly, so he didn’t tell them, he’d planned to quietly pack his things and leave, but not before, for once in his life, actually take them up on the offer to have drinks down at Larry’s. It’d be his way of saying goodbye at least, just one night of drinking with the lads rather than being dragged dirt side to some God awful club and spend who knows how long trapped in a bender with them all. Afterall, he figured he deserved at least some time to just unwind, now that he had accomplished what he had set out to do, before starting the rest of his life. God only knew where he’d end up after this, but it had to be better than the gun barrel of a life on Threshwater he had been staring down all his days beforehand.

It had to be.

He pushed himself off the Dock as he saw the looming shadow of the trawler block out the star’s light from behind him, casting his section of the belt in shadow. He turned to regard the angular block of a shape, rusty orange paint and ionization scarring along the hull giving it a distinct profile against the stark whites and greys of the surrounding rock field and the empty inky blackness of space beyond.

McCormick chattered away in his ear as the receiving bay opened and a dozen or so high tension cables and dock drones, blue this time to indicate they belonged to the trawler specifically, made their way to his position. The drones took the cables to pre-arranged positions along the netting around the cracked asteroid and Patrick got busy hooking the cables to the indicated locations and attaching the drones as well.

The entire operation was then retracted up into the trawler, with he dock drones activating their jets to push and guide the haul through the surrounding rocks to safely guide it to the barge without issue. Patrick held up and let it drag him and his dock as well up to the ship. As its colossal mass loomed above him, his resolve hardened. The time had come to say goodbye to the world he knew and welcome the troubles of his new life with open arms.

Whatever the cost may be.