When the transport from our Broker showed up we nearly had a collective heart attack. And when I say collective I obviously mean me. Because nobody had thought of updating the turret settings and marking said freighter as blue. But some scrambling about in a panic, turret swivels, curses over the com later and we had the it sorted out. Then the freighter came in and hovered over the pickup area.

Now I am calling it a freighter. But that was not really true. You see, a freighter is a pig ship that either holds containers in it’s hold, which is rather rare, or on loading spars all across its core. Imagine one of those greeting card stands where you can rotate each single section around. A long tube in the middle that everything attaches to and the wire pocked where the cards go. Usually like from four to six pockets are in each layer.

That is how freighters usually look. These things are Massive! With a capital M. They each can load eight to ten containers per pocket times five pockets times the number of layers. Which could be anywhere from five to fifteen depending on the size of the engines of those monsters. Now run the numbers on that one. The ‘small’ ones could ship 160 containers at once while the mammoths of freighters could load a total of 900 of them.

Well, what we got was NOT a freighter as Ralgau pointed out to me after giving me the above lecture when I asked if this is what a freighter looks like. No, what came out to us was a Tug. The same type of ship he had owned before his latest round of troubles.

A Tug is a whole different kind of monster. When Ralgau described his ship to me before I had tried to imagine it but simply couldn’t truly wrap my head around. I had all these images of space shuttles and intercontinental hyper planes in my head. So the fact that something could be roughly cube shaped in space is something that I am still struggling with, even though most of the ships that I had seen so far were of this shape more or less.

Anyway, the tug had a flat nose roughly three by three meters. From there it flared out for about one meter in each direction. And after that it flattened out and went straight until the end. Like a cuboid with a pyramid on top that you have cut the tip off. For tugs, you just strapped the containers together, four at time and then you stacked them up one layer after the other. In total a tug would transport usually between 32 and 48 containers at once. Which also made them pretty big but nowhere close to the dimensions or volumes that freighters could move.

When the tug finally came to a stop over the loading area Ralgau took charge.

“Mining co-op, this is Belt Trade Services, Tug03. I am here for your pickup.”

“Tug03, this is Ralgau, I will be managing things on this end. We have three containers for you.”

“Understood. Deploying loading drones now. I’ll leave three empty ones with you folks then.”

“Sounds good.”

And then I stood there and watched the drone dance. There were four drones to each container. They zipped out of the tug and to the third layer of the containers which must have been empty ones. The drones attached on the two open sides and the container decoupled. Then they brought it down to the surface of our asteroid, attached to a full container that Ralgau pointed out and then they would fire up their thrusters and lift the container of the planet.

“Should we turn the gravity generation off to make it easier?” I asked the big Sorren.

“Nah, don’t worry. The drones generate a localized null gravity field to allow them to move and dock the containers easily.”

I shrugged. Good thing we had someone here with the knowledge to do these things. Come to think of it, it appeared that I had really gotten lucky with the people here. Two people that understood the mining aspect, one business head, one with transport and loading experience and at least two of them also seemed to have quite a bit of combat experience. Ygglog… I still didn’t know what his deal was. And then there was me. In the middle of everything but no clue about any of it.

I shook my head to myself. “Won’t get in your way then.”

“No worries, we will be don’t here real quick. Asteroid pickups are great. No pesky atmosphere and barely any gravity to speak of. Makes for quick and easy.”

He said it and barely half an hour later, the com crackled again. “Tug03, everything is loaded. All containers show secure. I confirm receipt of the cargo and your payment has been issued split equally into the six supplied accounts evenly.”

I checked my account and true enough, my balance showed as 178.851 ICU. Have you ever done a celebratory cha-cha on an asteroid with 0.4g artificial gravity? No? I recommend it. It's fun and liberating. Honestly a lot of tension fell from my shoulders when the Ice was in my account. Sure, I still needed to pay back the loan and whatnot. But I had proven to myself that I could make money.

While my little dance confused the ‘co’ portion of the co-op, even their moods were high. Brelic had an uncharacteristic smile on his face, Mrk and Krn were talking in excited voices and Ralgau simply clapped a big hand on my shoulder and sent me a quiet “Thank you!” over private coms.

“Hey big man, I am as happy as you are.”

“No, you are not.” he said in a somber tone. “You have a ship and could have made money anyway. But for me… I had a criminal case open. Without you I would not have made it off that void-cursed station in years. Puting 25k aside working as a bartender?” he snorted.

Now I was uncomfortable. For two reasons. The first one was that I didn’t even think about what this bit of pocket money would do for these people. And the second is that while I could take a tank you, there was so much emotion in his words. It was as if he was seeing me as someone who had saved his life.

And I was once again reminded of one of my mottos: Enlightened Self-Interest. If I am being honest, when I pushed the whole mining claim thing, I did not think about how this would affect Ralgau’s life. To be fair, it wasn’t as if I looked at him like a means to an end either. But I did not think I deserved this level of gratitude.

“Listen man,” I leaned against one of the containers as I spoke, my voice reflecting my pensive state. “I honestly did not do this to solve your problems. When I first came to you, I needed information because I felt lost. Yeah, you charged me for it but you also helped me. Then when I learned about your situation, I thought that we can potentially help each other with more than just bits of info. Then I roped you into this, but honestly, I was thinking about the ship and getting it. The fact that your problems got solved along the way was more of a nice side effect. Or a requirement because I wanted you to be part of this.”

He listened and nodded. “I understand. And that does not change the fact that a big piece of my problems disappeared. Problems that I had no solution to. So take the thank you when you get it and stop doubting your motives.”

“How did you…?”

"Pssh. You think you are the only one that goes through that when they realize that they have taken more responsibilities than they thought? You did not realize and that is fair. But it worked out and I appreciate it. If it wouldn’t have? That is another story entirely. And not like you forced me. I attached my container to that freighter on my own.”

“Fair enough,” I sighed. It was a good point and something to keep in mind.

Our somber moment was interrupted by a message flashing on my hud.

Reminder:

In 24 ingame hours you will be logged out. Please find a safe place away from prying eyes.