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The crew rattled back and forth in their rover as it made its way to the destination point. Tracy looked down at her device and tried to read any available reports about the operation today. The Asteroid had been unnamed and simply assigned the number 8743, generally a sign that the company had done little research or had limited information on the object.

The screen showed some basic statistics:

ASTEROID 8743:

DIAMETER: 5.3KM

MAKE-UP: UNKNOWN, CHARACTERISTICS INCLUDE CAVES, ROCKY SURFACE, NO OXYGEN, NO HYDROGEN

ASSIGNMENT:
PLATINUM
COBALT
NICKEL
RUTHENIUM

REPORT BACK ANY ABNORMALITIES:

LAST LOG:
(changed 124 Earth Days Ago)

Tracy was puzzled by what she was reading. The need for secrecy seemed absurd, these were normal minerals that even companies used, of course governments would need these as well for non-nefarious things. Platinum, Cobalt, and nickel are all standard minerals required for space operations and construction of craft, etc. Ruthenium was being used to continue to make cheap electronics and solar panels. It was the whole basis for the intergalactic mining industry. It seemed odd to Tracy to keep such sensitivity around common elements they mined all the time.

‘Who was stationed here before us?’ Tracy asked the crew.

‘Nobody, except the builders. They’ve been here for two weeks.’ George said.

‘Nobody’s been here before us?’ She questioned, again.

‘That’s what the builders were saying a few days ago at lunch. We’re the first to mine this one.’ George responded.

‘What the fuck do they know? They’re builders, their job is the same no matter where they go!’ Dillon interjected.

Tracy remained silent, puzzled by the empty entry. Someone logged something 124 days ago about this place.

As the rover made it’s way to its destination, it scraped the start of a road with it’s plow in front. The plows had a small grinder at the bottom that would crush rocks into small pieces remnant of gravel. These were temporary roads, the kind that went over the hills and not through them. Due to having less gravity, the rovers were equipped with what would be akin to tank tread that was studded with spiked gripping texture to keep it fixated on the rock. This however didn’t always alleviate this issue, the rover crested a small hill and lifted slightly off the ground, almost immediately beginning a slow decent down the other side of the hill. Briefly, out of the window, the ground disappeared, revealing only endless space. The crew members began to float up, being stopped by their harness. They could feel the rover rotating back to face the asteroid, the ground coming back into view the crew simultaneously let out a rising excited holler. As the roller coaster rover tilted back to face the surface, it rattled the crew and bounced a few more times before rolling slowly to a stop. The rover arrived at its destination and gave a cheery set of instructions:

‘YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT MINING LOCATION 6. PLEASE GET OUT AND GET TO WORK. REMEMBER SAFETY IS PARAMOUNT, BUT SO IS PRODUCTIVITY.’

The crew groaned, opening their doors and pulling themselves out, it was much easier now with the limited gravity, but the suits were still heavy. The crew left the gear and made their way slightly bouncing away from the rover to reveal a slight depression. In front of them was a gaping entry to the cave they were mining. Tracy used her device to verify the correct location. Maddie looked up at the archway entrance, it was roughly fifty feet above where they stood. The cave could have housed the entire mining operation camp. Unfortunately, the rover wouldn’t be able to make it down the slight decline of the cave, forcing the team to haul to tools themselves in several trips.

Sunlight was different on the asteroid. Tracy could feel the heat from the sun, but it wasn’t warming like on Earth. The light lent no new colors, but only made the gray stone appear more bleached white, giving the ground an almost chalky appearance. The light was almost a warning, that although the asteroid was cold, devoid of life, you may also get cooked alive by the radiation from the sun. The suits helped with this, as the crew entered the cave they wished they had that dangerous light, it was suffocatingly dark in the cave.

There was nothing more terrifying to Tracy than these first 20 steps or so in complete blackness, even the light mounted on their suits were absorbed by the void, with nothing to bounce off of, nothing to reveal. The absence of sight, smells, and the only sense of touch is a confined space suit. The only thing anyone on the crew could hear was the heavy breaths of other crew members through their communications systems. She looked at the handheld device which glowed a bright green, showing her face. They were as close as they were going to get.

‘We’re going to set up here,’ Tracy said.

Once the team’s small operation was set up, they rested for a few minutes.

‘LACK OF MOTION DETECTED! PLEASE RETURN TO WORK, IF YOU ARE INJURED, REACH OUT TO BASE CAMP FOR ASSISTANCE. SAFETY IS PARAMOUNT, BUT SO IS PRODUCTIVITY.’ The intercom blasted from their suits into each members’ ear piece.

The crew rose from the ground and began excavating. The team leader looked out among her team, each had a small light shining on the wall where they were working with a larger set of lights and materials in a center area where they initially set up their operation. Tracy picked up one of the tools and began chipping away at the side of the cave, still wondering who was out here over a hundred days ago before the camp was built.

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