My next day started… well, it started differently from how it ended.

When I crawled out of my shelter I felt rested and good with myself. I had a good few hours of sleep, was sporting my well rested bonus and had just finished a chocolate nutri bar. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to drilling more holes but you know, you do what you can and making money is something I could do.

I understand that some people reading my story will come to the conclusion that I was just a greedy ass that got sidetracked by the promise of money. However, that's simply not true. I had different goals. I wanted to explore the galaxy, find new cool stuff and boldly go where no one had gone before. But that was in the future.

Right now money was a variable that I had some form of control over and that meant I was working on it. Checking my character sheet and seeing changes on it was incredibly satisfying. The problem was that my skill growth had somewhat stalled because the higher the skills got, the more difficult it was. But the thing with money is that it had always been the opposite. As my grand-dad used to say: God poops on the biggest pile. Or in a more modern version with the same intention: You need money to make money.

I stood outside my shelter, arms crossed in front of my chest and I just drank it in. I was standing there, the surface of an asteroid stretching out before me. Slightly cratered, rocky surface. It wasn’t huge, so I saw the curve quite clearly. Beyond that close horizon… space. Like literal space. Just this. This was an equally humbling and inspiring experience. I felt small, inconsequential, insignificant. And at the same time I felt pride for how far I had come and I knew that I would leave my mark on this universe. Okay, on this game. Whatever. It didn’t feel like a game to me.

I had once been to the Grand Canyon. And the majesty, the size, the pure power of nature I felt there brought tears to my eyes. This right now, it felt the same and very different. Because it was even more. Not a canyon to hike along and measure yourself against nature for a week or so. No, this here was measuring myself against others and against the power of creation.

Yeah, whatever. Call me crazy. It’s how I felt that morning.

The day changed when in the middle of the shift I got a com request from Nirazera.

“Hello Nirazera. Nice to talk to you again.”

“Mister Solo, as polite as ever.” I heard the smile in her voice.

“I hope that there are no hard feelings between us about me not accepting the job offered and that you could bring it to a satisfying conclusion.”

“Thank you for asking, no hard feelings but I also will not talk about jobs that I have been entrusted with. I hope you understand.”

I nodded, realized that she could not see me and spoke out loud: “Yes, of course. I actually appreciate that policy. I myself have something that I hope you could handle for me.”

“Oh, I am intrigued. You seemed very new around here and now there is something you need me to handle?”

“Well, you see, we were approached by a, let’s call it not entirely legal organisation and when we refused to do business with them, they didn’t really take our no as an answer. Since then, they have been causing some trouble.”

“Oh. And which organisation are you talking about?”

“Does the name Red Moon mean anything to you?”

“Hmhm, it does. As you said, not exactly a legal enterprise but they don’t hesitate to throw their weight around. Does this have anything to do with the claim operation you are running?”

“Yes.” I hesitated for a moment. “You are suspiciously well informed about my business.”

“Ah, mister Solo…” she chuckled. “You see, I found you interesting and maybe a little mysterious. And I like to keep tabs on interesting people. Although I did not know that you had a misunderstanding with the Red Moon. What can I do in this case? Set up negotiations?”

“No, I actually have no interest in negotiations. At least not at this moment. However, we have a couple invested in the claim but they have no desire to be here while this conflict is happening. So they left the claim to stay on Belt Station until this blows over or is resolved.”

“I see. And I guess that has something to do with your accident on station? I heard you took a nasty fall?”

Fuck, she really was well informed about me. For a moment I thought she might actually be in with the Red Moon and informed them. But that didn’t really make sense. For one she had me approached about a job earlier that was in a totally different area. On top of that Ralgau had vouched for her and her independence. Didn’t mean she wasn’t hired by them but I trusted her to be not one of them. And if she was hired, I hoped there was some kind of fixer code that would not let her accept multiple opposing contracts. In my opinion that would just be bad for business.

“Yes, it has. I would like to make sure that my associates don’t have accidental ‘falls’ while on station.”

“How refreshingly straightforward.” she cooed.

We went back and forth for a while hashing out the details while I took a break from mining. After some time we got to an agreement. For 5k ICU per day she would make sure that nothing would happen to Krn and Mrk while on station. She told me that this is basically offering this service to me at cost because she wanted to see what I would do in the future and for the promise to let her know if I ever left the system.

While the latter sounded a little stalkerish to me I agreed. Considering that she knew most of the ‘interesting’ things that had happened to me, I decided that letting her know ten seconds before crossing through the gate would be neither a hardship nor an extreme risk.

She sent me a request for five day payment and I confirmed it and saw my wallet icon blinking. A quick check showed me that I was down to 293k ICU. Worth it if it kept the mining couple safe for now.

When I went back to mining, my mind spun around the rest of the information that she had given me.

It turned out that Ralgau was more or less correct about the structure. However, the Red Moon itself was the racketeering and blackmail branch of the Black Dragon Syndicate. Both were multi system organisations and while the Black Dragon Syndicate was involved in one way or another into any kind of illegal activities, the Red Moon only had a somewhat small presence in each system.

What gave me pause though was that Nirazera told me that they always had at least one cruiser sized ship in the systems they operated in. I guess we seriously underestimated the threat these guys posed. Even our new secret weapon would not do much against a cruiser that came knocking.

When questioned though, she told me that the cruiser was under control of a System Lord, which in my mind was a bit of a pretentious title, and the people we ran into were most likely under a squadron captain that would in the end report to the System Lord. So as long as we bloodied the captain’s nose without causing the Lord’s involvement, we should come out okay.

I stopped my contemplation when I got startled by a notification:

Asteroid Mining skill increased.

Current Skill Level: 16 / 100

Nice. I was still smiling to myself when I heard Brelics voice on the coms.

“Malcolm, Ralgau, incoming.”

Right after, the tactical view of the sensor net populated on my hud. Yep, two red dots incoming. The fact that they were marked red meant that they were the Red Moon ships that had annoyed the claim while I was offline. The dots were marked with a ‘1’ and a ‘2’.

All turrets were currently tracking the ‘1’. I zoomed the tactical view out similar to how I used the survey skill before. While doing that, I made my way to the storage containers since I figured that the last thing they would shoot at was the thing that made the money on the claim.

When zooming out the view switched into pseudo 3D. Which means the hud now projected the asteroid surface in addition to turret positions and range ‘bubbles’. The max range for the missiles over double the range of the lasers. Optimum range a little over 1.5 times.

The moment that number one crossed the optimum bubble of the missiles the launcher symbol switched to green and then yellow. When I looked over to the turret I saw… nothing. It was like a fireworks rocket. Not really giving you any indication other than a flash when launched a bigger flash when hitting something.

I followed the projected trajectory on my hud. Unexpectedly, the missile didn’t fly straight towards the ship but instead it projected a curved flight path. It also projected the flight path of the ships, which had them come in over the shelters. However, as soon as the missile launched, that flight path had changed and now showed them splitting up and leaving the range bubble in the shortest possible time, which meant they must have been flipping and burning directly. The curve of their flight paths kept changing as they kept accelerating. It was actually very interesting to see.

The missile kept curving after the ships until it disappeared from the hud. I didn’t even see a flash. Interesting. Space combat was weird.

However, the thing that drove the nail into the coffin of this day was not this conflict. It was when I was woken up by a huge crash in the middle of my sleep cycle. The asteroid shuddered like there was an earthquake. I was bounced around in my shelter like crazy. The 0.4 gravity doing basically nothing other than slowing the kick to the ceiling down a little and then accelerating the rebound to the ground.

After I got my bearings and caught myself on the shelter wall enough to no longer flop and spin about, I waited until the shocks ceased which did not take long either. I also started yelling into my com if anybody knew what was going on but could not get a straight answer either.

Ygglog and Brelic should have been out and about running the shift while Ralgau and me had our sleep cycle. But neither one was answering my shouts on the com. When I finally made my way out of my shelter I saw two things immediately.

The Young’s shelter was shredded.

And where Rustbucket should be sitting on the asteroid, there was nothing but a fucking crater.