Inhalt

Copyright

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter One

The spaceship Nimbus cut steadily through the vast expanse of space until Earth was nearly in sight. It was a relief on a number of counts. The endless void was the purest form of cabin fever. The insignificance of existence was never more stark after a jaunt into the black nothingness of everything beyond the beacon of Earth. The crew hadn't eaten proper food for eighteen months and - more importantly - had a sick crew member with an illness that had so far proven to be a mystery to their brilliant medical officer Dr Michael Cooper. Try as he might, Cooper had not managed to explain what was wrong with Angel. The captain continued to press him on this strange affair, sometimes to the point of irritation as far as the doctor was concerned. The two men were not friends and it seemed to inject an aura of distrust and suspicion into what was a puzzling and harrowing situation. The constrictive nature of the Nimbus did not help matters. Ships like this were not designed for a large crew. They were designed to save money.

The Nimbus had been on a routine mission to mine small Zantium deposits on the deserted planet Betamax. Betamax was a planet that had never really been claimed. Both the European Federation and the Asia-Pacific League believed they had rights to the planet but neither apparently cared enough to make much of a deal about it. The European Federation in particular was notoriously bureaucratic so their disinterest was a relief. European Federation starships were often trapped in space dock for months at a time waiting for the relevant paper work and regulations. If you had to contest a claim to a planet with the European Federation you'd soon be filling out forms and appearing in court as often as you took a leak. The crew of the Nimbus were different and flew under no flag. They were not a corporation or an alliance of nations but mercenaries. Even modest amounts of Zantium made a big difference to their Bladzik credit accounts on Earth and if the planet was empty of other humans mining the surface that was fine by them. But then David Angel had become ill after working on Betamax and they decided to terminate their mission a month early even though there were - by a conservative estimate - still around 27 microzarks of Zantium in the quadrant they had been drilling.

The men worked at the bottom end of the drilling market. They seized chances left by the more ruthless corporations. All the major deposits of energy in the known universe were taken and out of bounds. Men like this had to find the places that were forgotten or no one else wanted to go. Their employers were equally thrifty and flexible. To get a foot in this lucrative market you had to be prepared to do the jobs that no one else would. And this was where Betamax came in. The planet was hardly the stuff of corporate dreams. Betamax was a desolate rock forever shrouded in darkness. Electrical storms ravaged the sky and gave the planet the atmosphere of a haunted house hidden in the stars. It was a grim and hostile place that you wouldn't send your worst enemy to mine. Betamax was so little known it often failed to appear on Star Maps. It was one of many thousands of planets and asteroids that companies had looked at and bypassed. They would leave this world to more foolish and desperate people. They preferred to drill where Zantium was plentiful and there were colony buildings that were elaborate and fitted out with home comforts. They liked to create distant empires in the stars where they knew the Zantium would flow for decades and even centuries.

Betamax was discovered over fifty years ago but no one had shown any great interest in this nightmare world. There was no life, no microbes, no water. Betamax was largely forgotten and bypassed ever since Japanese Space Rangers had taken remote readings of the atmosphere and designated it to be a place that would not yield enough Zantium to ever make a major operation there worth the effort. And so it was that the planet got a joke name that only the most forensic historian versed in popular culture from centuries past would understand. Just the briefest look at any readings that filtered back from Betamax were enough to have surveyors scurrying off to search for more fertile pickings. There was something plainly foreboding about this distant. It just wasn't worth the hassle. The big companies didn't dirty their hands with worlds like this where the conditions were harsh and the Zantium available was unquantifiable.

What of Zantium? What was this precious resource? Zantium was much prized, as much even as oil had once been in Earth's past, but it was famously elusive and scattered in the dust of the great void. If you wanted to mine Zantium in any significant quantities you had travel far into space and invest in De-Rig Alpha technology for extracton purposes. All of this was hugely expensive. Zantium was the third most used power source on Earth now after Sintek 7 and Wham. It was unstable (the great Zantium disaster of 3029 had seen the Dutch city of Amsterdam almost completely destroyed) but worth its weight in gold. There were attempts to ban Zantium (especially in Holland) but vested interests (the president of the European Federation was a former director of a company that mined Zantium) prevented this from ever becoming a realistic proposition. Profit always trumped safety and no one cared about the environment.

In the mess hall, some of the crew of the Nimbus ate around the white circular table in the mess hall and waited for Captain Jack Virgo to let them know when they would dock with Earth Station Nine and be put on a transit shuttle back home. The company they had been working for was named Logistics Galaxian Firma and would take charge of the cargo of Zantium that had just spent months winding its way through space with the Nimbus. Logistics Galaxian Firma was a minor fly by night operation and had a dubious reputation amongst the more powerful corporate intergalactic movers and shakers but you could make a lot of money with them if you didn't mind a few clouds of chemical dust and a ship that had seen better days. The Nimbus was a small ship by interstellar freight standards but Virgo and his men could carry more than enough minerals to make a handsome living.

The downside to the work was the time away from Earth and the wearying travel. It took a hardy person to be willing to leave home and spend the best part of two years on a freighter or mining Zantium in a haze of green dust on some godforsaken planet but it paid well and that was the important thing. One more job and the crew would be set up for life. All except for David Angel, a man with an insatiable appetite for gambling. However much money he made you can be sure that Angel would lose it in the end playing Whip Poker or betting on the robot horses at the track. But money was the least of Angel's problems now. He was in a coma and they still didn't know what was wrong with him. In all the planets and asteroids that had been found and stepped upon by humans, nothing like this had ever happened before. Angel was a genuine medical mystery.

Betamax was an unsettling nightmare world of dense billowing fog, desolate rocks and strange eerie pulsating lights. They were glad to leave in the end but its haunted nature had been sufficiently negated by the thought of bonus paydays for the extra Zantium they had managed to extract from the surface. The men had worked in shifts using the shuttlecraft, each spending two or three days a time on the planet. The work was largely automated but the drills had to be set and programmed and this was painstaking and tedious work. Because the company had limited resources, the drills were old and they didn't have too many spares. If one of these drills malfunctioned you could forget about flying in a replacement. This was a huge corporation with starships in orbit full of supplies and state of the art equipment. The resources of the Nimbus were finite to the extreme. Drills had to be watched at all times to look for any sign of trouble. If one of the drills went down it meant the mean would be lucky to see a bonus for this arduous mission.

Once the Zantium deposits started to yield weak returns in one spot the drills and their equipment would be moved and programmed again. A vibranium chamber was used to collect the Zantium and the shuttle runs returned the boxes of the precious resource to the Nimbus whenever the shift patterns changed. Angel had been supervising the drilling near the shuttle when he was taken ill. Four other men were on the surface overseeing a second extraction point and Angel's only company was Doctor Cooper. Cooper had made a rare appearance on the planet to take soil samples and seemed inordinately interested in a rock formation far beyond the drill site.

"What are you looking at?" Angel had asked through the intercom of his protective helmet.

"I believe this planet may possibly once have been home to a civilisation of sorts," mused Cooper distractedly.

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 27.03.2022
ISBN: 978-3-7554-1024-9

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