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⚒️ Safer Mining, Everywhere

by Joel Glover

“There are some sensible precautions we can all take to reduce the risk of piracy or predatory attack.”

The corporate HR drone stood at the front of the room, in the blue quarter-zip shirt with the hydrogen atom logo and mining hammer embroidered on it.

Trixie yawned behind her palm. It didn’t do to show how bored you were at a mandatory training event, no matter that you were bored almost to death.

When the publicly stated goals of the Company are “Safer Mining, Everywhere” then everybody needs to smile through Health and Safety briefings.

Even the Business Development team.

“The most important thing is Data Security.”

This had been a topic in every meeting Trixie had ever suffered through at Cavendish. Forget the external facing mantras, slogans, and strategies, the most important thing to Cavendish was maintaining the proprietary information on which the company stood. Secrecy was the rock on which the empire was built.

“We do not discuss trade secrets. We do not discuss processes. We do not discuss Cavendish.”

The screen behind the trainer lit up with the logo, cerulean on white, with a border in the same blue bleeding around the edge of the slide.

“There have been times,” the trainer said, “when this rule has been forgotten.”

The logo was replaced by the moth-eaten blackness of space. The image cycled through several magnification settings, the pins and shellfish shape typical of a well established mining platform. Shuttles and peregrine ships swam silently around it, carried by the tides of commerce and greed into the asteroid belt and moons which were smeared across the background of the image.

“This is Hurşidabat Station.”

The magnification flicked back one level, a blue ring remaining like an iris around the station’s pupil.

Something monstrous and otherworldly began to obscure the galactic wheel, a bleak nebula that occluded everything.

“Hurşidabat Station had a population of thirteen thousand souls, and was the main port for another three hundred unaffiliated vessels.”

The thing swam closer to the Station, which disappeared behind its manta-winged shape. The recording paused.

“That was the last view of Hurşidabat.”

The woman sighed.

“This is four hours later.”

The station reappeared, free from the inky stain of the invader. Several of the crustacean clusters had been torn loose, tumbling slowly away from the corpus, propelled by the leaking remnants of their atmosphere. The school of ships, which had been in its environs were gone, smashed to glittering sand.

The image jumped closer, closer, closer, until the axe-smashed tin can structure of the station’s torso became visible. Torn edges glowed, red ruins superheated to gas, cooling in the vacuum.

“The reavers came, as far as we can tell, for refined rhenium. A node of such significant weight its discovery could have caused a seismic shift in pricing of the mineral.”

Everyone in the room flinched. You did not have to be a miner to understand how much rhenium that was—there wasn’t an employee of Cavendish who didn’t speculate in some way on the minerals markets, even if that was passively through their pension funds.

“Exactly.”

The trainer’s face was stern, angry.

“Someone couldn’t help themselves, they had to start placing trades and letting their family know. It created a data cascade, small, but discernible. The images you’re watching are from the nose-cone of the Interventionist Battle Cruiser sent to protect the employees within Hurşidabat.”

The trainer stepped out from behind the rostrum. The carbon fibre of her legs flexed beneath her sinuously.

“There were no survivors, at Hurşidabat.”

She paused.

“None.”

Trixie shuffled in her seat.

“There are, sometimes.”

Reavers were, universally, enthusiastically carnivorous. When there were survivors they were missing limbs, at the very best. Some reaver crews treated the human eye as a particular delicacy, to be consumed first. Some only consumed the internal organs, finding the actual flesh of a human being unpalatable.

“So if you could all refrain from gossiping, your friends would appreciate it.”

The trainer strode out of the room, confident on the limbs provided by Cavendish Healthcare Service, after the incident.

She left behind a susurrus of whispers, human nature being what it is.