I touched Rustbucket down and let out a breath. Flying half blind wasn’t my kind of fun, especially when you were trying to land your ship manually in a cave on an asteroid in space. I am sure there were upgrades for the ship computer to assist with that but because my asteroid miner was never intended for these kind of things, there was none of that.

I adjusted the lights… and there she was…

I wanted to say she was beautiful. But I was lacking words right now. It was weird, I can say that flat out. It had a really weird shape. And I was really torn between calling it ugly or pretty. I just couldn’t decide.

“This is…,” Ralgau trailed off. Apparently he had a similar reaction to seeing the ship.

“Yep!”

“I mean it looks…”

“I feel the same way.”

“I have never seen anything like it.” I was looking at him and he seemed mesmerized. You know, in the train wreck kind of way. And I really felt similar.

Okay, let me describe it so you get an idea: Imagine a really big tube. Then you press on the top and bottom until it isn’t really round anymore. Then you take the front third of that and squeeze it together in a somewhat triangular but rounded form. Something similar to the front of one of these 17th century sailboats. Then you add another, smaller but also flattened tube on each side, running from the ‘nose’ in some kind of wave pattern all the way to back and bottom of the ship. Then you paint it in a really crappy matte black.

And when you look at it, you know this could look amazing but at the same time it looks like crap somehow.

Honestly, it reminded me of a friend of mine. He has this thing for old time american muscle cars. He buys them and then restores them. Waste of time and money in my opinion but it makes him happy. He had bought a 1971 Plymouth Hemi Cuda at some point. And he was soooo excited to show it to me when he got it. But the thing had sat for about 80 years in a barn in the middle of nowhere, was full of dirt and bird shit and the few places where you could actually see the coat, it looked like someone had tried to paint it with a paint roller.

In short, it had a lot of potential but looked like crap. Similar to my find.

“Hey, record the ship and we are going to look at it from all sides. Then we can search in the sysnet what type of ship it is.” Ralgau suggested.

I nodded my head, closed my visor and enabled my helmet cam. Then we slowly took a walk around the ship. Ralgau was about to close in but I held his arm.

“What’s up?”

“Watch this.”

I picked up a piece of rubble and threw it at the ship. When it closed within a certain distance, something like 5 meters maybe, the shield flared up and the rock was repelled. There was a bit of an afterglow and then the shield was transparent again.

“Oh void.” was Ralgau’s reaction to what he had just seen. “You know what that means?”

“Yeah, that we need to find a way to get through the shield to be able to get into it.”

“Well, yeah,” he nodded. “But it also means that this ship was parked here and the power source is still active. So we can assume that all of its technology is still in place. And if we can get it out of the rock, it would probably still work.”

I scratched my helmet. It was such an automatic move to try to scratch my hair…

“Well, to be honest, it never occurred to me to think this ship would not be functional.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously. If I would have thought for a moment that this was just some scrap heap, I wouldn’t have gone with the whole claim idea. I assumed that this would be my new ship.”

“Yours? More like ours. You do know that you need a crew for this one if you want to fly it.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because this is at least cruiser size. And that means you need between 11 and 25 crew to operate it. However, you probably need more to fix it up. It seems that it is still functional but at the same time, you don’t know if it is just the shield and power core that are working but you have no clue what kind of state the rest of the ship is in.”

“Yeah, dang. Cruiser size though?”

“For sure. Might even be specialized cruiser.”

“What is specialized cruiser size?”

“How to explain that? You know it isn’t really a size. But cruisers are in general very versatile. So because of that, they can be gunships, exploration ships, small scale science ships, etc. Each one of them is at its core a cruiser and has the same crew requirements. But the specialization requires extra people if you want to use it.”

Void! That meant that not only did I have to get into the ship but also hire a crew of 20ish trustworthy people. Why could things never be easy?

After recording the whole ship and the cave and how it was “parked” in the asteroid, we headed back to Rustbucket. It turned out that our free shift was already nearly spent and so we headed back to grab some food and sleep.

* * * * *

The excitement of our excursion was followed by another two cycles of mining our asses off with our free time filled by research for Ralgau and planning the excavation of the ship for me. And while I had basically no knowledgeable about mining or salvaging operations, the last few cycles had at least given me a basic understanding of the former.

Our mining routine had further developed to the point where our resident couple would focus solely on drilling and excavating material. They had the most experience with it and were simply the fastest. Then Brelic and Ygglog came on shift and while Brelic would also mine, our insectoid would mainly transport material to the crusher and feed it. And when Ralgau and me popped up, we rarely ever got to mine because we were so busy transporting and processing. It was very rare that we got the whole load cleared before the next shift rolled around.

Our storage area had also gotten pretty filled up. At the end of my last shift I had looked at the numbers. Our containers were filled with roughly 440k of Endrite, 290k of Soldrite, 22k of Pyzite and a whopping 88 units of Quitalite. And we only got the latter because Brelic decided at some point to dump a load into the processor as a test. However, the yield was so little that it made more sense for him to mine and for us to focus on the first two minerals. So we basically sat on a value of just shy of 360k ICU. After the split that would leave me with 60k to my name.

To be honest, I had expected this to earn more after my enthusiasm after our setup on this rock but at the same time I would not complain. In the end making ice here was simply not the priority. This was just a way to get to the ship and get it out of the rock without huge interference.

Last cycle we also had a brief discussion about where we wanted to go from here in the short term and we all agreed that we would chip in 3k each to put an agent on retainer. Considering the rates I got when I mined for contracts, the pittance that LoGov paid was just shit. This meant that after our first delivery tomorrow, we would actually get a much better price. Hopefully.

My head filled with plans of making money, getting the ship going and looking forward to a bright ingame future I was just about to fall asleep when I was rudely awakened by a nasty sound. For a moment I was disoriented and then I realized that it was the alarm we had tied to the turret’s sensor network. The network that was scanning our surroundings to make sure that no non-blues were getting to close.