Gordan stepped off of the space elevator, down a short hallway, into the hundred meter concrete dome it was connected to and stepped to the side, letting the others walk past him. While his flight out here had been first class, most of the people on the elevator had been locals or workers returning from their job on Euporie. This meant that the car had fifty people on it when it came down, and Gordan was on the ride with them for three hours. He didn’t exactly hate crowds, but he could tell that the life support system wasn’t designed to deal with so many people as the temperature rose by a few degrees above standard and the car quickly developed the smell of ‘the city’, large numbers of people in small confined areas. Still, the ride had been free, which is likely part of the problem. The paid ride, at only five credits, likely wouldn’t have been crowded, as most of those people were probably just taking a day trip to the station. Still, Gordan had to resort to going into a VR simulation in order to deal with the crowding.

After everyone was out of the car the cleaning crew entered. The car was considerably dirtier than the one that had taken him to the surface of Euporie. It was possible they used the dirtier cars for the free bulk movement of people and made you pay for the nice one. He would have to see if that was the case when he left the planet.

As he stepped out of the welcome area and into the larger spaceport, he saw Candice. She had brought a car for him to ride in, but it was outside this dome, in the attached garage dome. Still, first things first. He walked over, pulled her close, and kissed her. They had, after all, been apart for almost five days. When he was done she showed him past the spaceport shops and into a garage. It too was a one hundred meter dome, but layered so that it could store hundreds of electric cars. They got inside the car, which would have been considered a basic luxury car on earth, but was the nicest she could find here, and ordered it to go to the local branch of the real estate office.

It only took them two minutes to get there, including parking. Due to the much larger population density, much larger numbers of parking garages were needed, even with mass transport being popular on this world. They got out and walked down the west hallway to the door of the office building. Most of the buildings around here had a central parking garage with corridors that the various buildings would attach to. This allowed them to maximize the number of cars that could park in each group of buildings. Sometimes garages were also connected with walkways, in case someone had to park somewhere else, but this office building didn’t seem to need that.

They entered the rotating doors that acted as a crude airlock and took the central elevator up to the fourth floor, where the real estate office was located. After they were off the elevator, they went down the hallway to the office. It wasn’t a large office section. There were only four smaller offices, and one of them was given over to a set of comfortable chairs and VR headsets so that people could go on virtual tours of the buildings before seeing them in person. The other three offices had real estate agents, though only one of the three agents actually sold property. The other two acted as property managers for the construction companies in the area, allowing them to earn money by renting out the buildings before they were sold.

Candice introduced herself and, after they verified her identity, the two were allowed to use the VR room. Gordan checked on the various domes that were listed, but they all seemed like they were built with factories in mind. Every building for living in was built for maximum population density, with the only places that even had windows being the more expensive outer apartments. Every building meant for farming was layered, with hydroponics filling every level and all of the lighting being done artificially.

While this was extremely space and land efficient, it meant that, unlike Euporie, the buildings couldn’t be fully powered off of solar. Even with 100% of the buildings being covered in solar panels, which they didn’t do, they wouldn’t be able to bring in enough power to run the entire economy, and most buildings couldn’t be self sufficient with their power production. This meant that this city had a trio of small modular nuclear reactors providing some of their power, as well as getting a few percent of their power from the waste heat of the smelters. While the smelters would usually be set up to run continuously and recycle all of the heat they could between batches, they occasionally needed to be cooled down so that they could could be cleaned or be set up to produce a different material. At those times, water would be cycled through tubes in the machine to produce steam. That steam would go to turbine stations in every industrial zone built for smelting, which would use the steam to produce electricity. With a large enough number of plants feeding them steam, and by having large amounts of steam storage, the turbines could run almost constantly, providing a few megawatts of base load power.

Unfortunately, none of these building designs would work well for anything beside factories. Gordan didn’t mind trying to optimize the building layout to maximize profits. The way in which the farming buildings were built meant that equipment like tractors would never be usable there. He had assumed that he could just build the same thing he had on Euporie and grow cotton directly under the sunlight. Instead, he had to do something a bit different.

This building happened to have an office available for only one hundred per month, so he rented it. It was already equipped the same as the real estate office, with three normal offices and one VR office, so he didn’t need to furnish it. Instead he created a job listing for a civil engineer, offering three hundred credits per month. Until he found one, he wouldn’t be able to implement his farming idea, so, while the rate was three point six times what an entry level position would pay, he didn’t think he was offering too much.

The one thing he could implement, though, was high quality housing. At the Real Estate office they looked over the local land. There were two locations that caught Gordan’s attention. About five kilometers north of the city was a fork in the river that fed the city. One fork went to the east side of the city, to the industrial district, and the other went to the west side, where most of the business and shopping was. This fork, however, formed an almost perfect 120 degree angle between the parts of the river. This meant that he could build a subdivision here which split the different functions into three groups, housing, farming, and shopping. If he decided to process the cotton into fabric here, that could be added to the farming district. The different sections would have natural, scenic barriers between them, and he could have bridges built over the river wherever he wanted the buildings to connect.

The second one was to the south. Eleven kilometers south of the city, along the western bend of the river, were two mineral deposits which were unclaimed, magnetite and malachite. Iron and copper ores. Gordan had once run a mining company, so he was certain that he could do the same here. It would be different than his other investments, however, so it would require a different company be founded to handle the mines.

He checked the price of those two metals. They were worth slightly more than on the other worlds, with the price of copper being ten percent higher than the next highest, and the price of iron being twenty three percent higher. Obviously, the shipments that were coming in from Beelzebub and Cerberus weren’t keeping up with the demand. Still, that didn’t mean that it would be economical to build a mine at that location.

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Gordan contacted a survey company. They had both human and robotic survey groups available. With the surface not being inhabitable, anything outside the domes qualified as dangerous enough that the use of robotic labor was allowed under the local laws. Apparently, one of the first laws they passed was a ban on the use of robotic labor for safe jobs. This was a popular law on Earth, but was often overlooked due to the cost savings of robotic labor. Maybe the people here had decided to copy an Earth law. He might have to look into ways of exploiting that loophole to cut costs in the future. He sent robotic survey teams to both locations. He needed to know if the branch in the river was safe to build at and needed a more detailed mineral scan at the mining location.

The next day he was in his rented office looking over the applications. There were many civil engineers interested in the job, even without the assurance of how long it would last. That pay rate was twenty percent higher than they were hoping for in a job, after all. Most of them made three thousand per year and that rate would put them at thirty six hundred per year. He sent a message to the five most promising candidates. He would hire at least two of them to work here. As they could do their work in VR, since it involved designing buildings and only rarely interacting with other people outside their research group, they didn’t need an actual office. They could share one virtual environment.

The next day he carried out five interviews, scheduled around when the five had time off of their current jobs. That night, while going over their responses, he realized why the people of this city were willing to put up with living in artificial caves and rarely seeing the sun. One of the applicants was from Luna, one from Mars, one from Ceres, one from Ganymede and one from Venus. None of them were from Earth, and when Gordan looked over the population data of the planet he knew why. Only three percent of the people on the planet were, and they were mostly from major cities where living like that was the norm. They were used to not seeing the sky, and as such, they didn’t need their buildings to let them see outside. In contrast, about eighty percent of the non shipborn population of Euporie was from Earth, with another 15% being Martians or Venusians. They liked looking outside. While Mars and Venus didn’t have the best views, there was a certain beauty to the vast landscapes which resembled the two inhabitable worlds of this system. The only other place which had major populations from those two worlds were Cerberus for Venusians and Freya for Martians, being more temperate versions of their homeworlds.

Gordan selected three of the five people he interviewed and they agreed to start next Monday, four days from now. After quickly installing a highly realistic program that was commonly used in the industry, he took a few days off. Candice and he had rented an apartment near the office for two hundred and fifty per month. It was one of the few apartments available which could give you a good view of the outside, the apartment being at the peak of the dome and therefore mostly having transparent roofing. Around the edge was plenty of area where you could look out over the city, though the angle of the roof at that point was fairly steep, so there was a one meter tall wall around the outside of the apartment, behind which many of the buildings functions were hidden.

They visited a few of the local attractions, including the amusement park Candice had visited over three years ago, but spent most of the time alone with each other in the apartment. It felt a bit strange to Gordan to not have a robotic maid, as he had gotten used to Darsy during all of the months he spent on Euporie, but here the law prohibited people from hiring robots for such a job. He could have hired a human to fill the role, but he didn’t feel like risking revealing his and Candice’s sexual escapades to another person. So they worked together to do the cleaning. It reminded Gordan of when he was younger, before he became rich, when he couldn’t afford to hire anyone to clean for him so he did it himself even though he hated doing it. These days he still hated it, but doing it with Candice somehow made it more bearable, like they were just a young couple starting out in a new city.

Monday he greeted the three people at the office and briefed them on what he needed them to design. First came the housing. He needed a standard building which could fill the role of luxury housing and be capable of being reconfigured into a family home. He showed them the two variations of the standard apartment dome he had built on Euporie. At first one of them complained that the job was more like architecture than civil engineering, but upon seeing the design he was interested enough that he no longer complained.

Next came the farming dome. He had seen how farming was done here, and how he was doing it on Euporie, but he wanted something in between. For one, they didn’t need all of the sun that hit the dome. Even with sunlight being dimmer than on Earth, with more of it in the infrared part of the spectrum than the visible part of the spectrum, they still didn’t use 100% of the light that hit them. They also didn’t need most of the spectrum, so if it could be cut out and used to produce useful light, that would work as well. Third was the that the sun never set. Most places dealt with this by simply shading the dome when the sunlight wasn’t needed. That, however, meant that half the sunlight was being wasted.

Gordan left the team working on those projects and went to his desk where he checked the survey data. The robots had returned yesterday, but he had put off looking at the data until now. The Northern sight was mostly stable, as long as you didn’t get too near the bank of the river. The river appeared to have carved into the rock at that location, and most of the normally several meter thick regolith level had gotten blown into the river by the occasional gusts of wind resulting from the hot and cold sides trying to equalize their temperature. This resulted in the regolith only being between twenty and thirty centimeters deep. The rock in the area was sedimentary, however, so anything built near the edge of the river risked breaking off layers of rock. For that reason, any bridges would need to be anchored far from the edge and possibly with a pillar in the middle of the river. Other than that, the ground was mostly flat and uniform.

The southern sight was also a bit different than expected. The purity of the minerals were within one percent of what the orbital survey said, but orbital scans couldn’t estimate how large the deposits were. It seemed that the copper deposit was several times bigger than the magnetite deposit, having around ten megatons of the material as opposed to the one megaton of magnetite. That was a bit disappointing. The iron deposit might not even pay for itself. Iron was currently selling for five credits per ton. Assuming you could get around eight hundred kilotons of iron from the deposit, that would only be around four million credits. If it was the only deposit, the cost of setting up a mining operation would likely cost about that, making the mining operation dubious at best. But this location had copper. Even with it no longer being used for electrical wiring in most electronics, with graphene replacing it in most cases and room temperature superconductors acting as transmission lines, it still sold for eleven credits per ton at the lowest. The yield from Malachite was lower than magnetite, as the ore didn’t just include oxygen, but water and carbon dioxide. That meant that the projected earnings from selling the copper, carbon dioxide, and water was possibly as high as sixty or seventy million.

Furthermore, outside mines could be manned by robots instead of humans, cutting the costs of production. For this reason he started looking into the costs of various buildings associated with mining. First was the cost of the mining facility and storage. This could be done with a fairly standard one hundred meter dome, costing around five hundred thousand for a basic dome with loading/unloading equipment, robot repair and recharging areas, and places for the human maintenance staff.

An ore processing facility would require a lot of heat, which meant a lot of air needed to be processed. A standard plant for this purpose should cost around one million, and be able to support two smelting/refining operations. The refining operations would also cost a million each. Due to the amount of material he was hoping to process, though, he was planning on building four smelters, thus requiring two air processors. All of these would require a turbine station and steam storage, another million credits, but he would be able to produce enough power to run all of his operations and still export a bit of power.

Adding in another million for the road to connect it to the city and the cost of buying enough robots to keep the mines producing full time, and the operation would come to eight and a half million. If claiming land here cost the same as the standard rate on Euporie, that would add half a million per square kilometer. So, all in total, nine million credits. It would be a very long term investment, but they would only have to sell around 820 kilotons of copper to pay for the base cost and maybe 1500 kilotons to start turning a profit. With the ability to process around one hundred tons of ore per day per smelter, that turned it into a twenty and a half year investment until it earned a net profit, assuming they could process 400 tons per day and sell all that they produced. Quite a good investment, considering that his investments on Euporie would take longer to pay for themselves.

For the next week Gordan made all of the arrangements to make this happen. He claimed the land, hired local contractors to build everything, and registered a new company, McDowell Mining. Together with McDowell Luxury Goods and McDowell Real Estate, it became the third business he had started. Three months later the mine would be ready to start earning money. 28.39 million left.