Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Calin Homestead, Planet Castin
Velorum System, Cygni Branch
Jack Calin drove the old solar buggy down the dusty, rock-littered path at the northernmost end of the Calin property. The property, an original homestead on the planet Castin in the Velorum System, had been in his family for more than sixty years.
New age rock music blasted from the speakers, echoing off the sides of the mountains that surrounded the path, Jack headbanging along with the drums as he drove. He bounced and jostled with each roll of the tires, turning the wheel in an attempt to avoid the worst of the rocks and boulders. His ass hurt.
He was on his monthly inspection of the property lines. There wasn’t much up in the northernmost areas of their property where the plains met the mountains. Once upon a time, his grandfather had regarded this area as having the most potential, as far as mining deposits go, on the entirety of their property. How wrong he had been. As it turned out, the rocky plains that led up to the mountains and made up 75% of the Calin property had been home to the deposits that had sustained them. The mountains had never produced much. They needed better equipment to get deeper into them, their grandfather had always said.
The sun gave its last glimmers of the day. That meant that it was going to get cold, and quickly. Jack hated being out past dark. He always tried to make sure that he was back before the sun went down, but that wasn’t going to be the case tonight. He’d have to deal with it.
As the sun sank below the mountains and darkness enveloped him, he worked his way deeper into the hills. He turned the buggy headlights on. They were bright, but not bright enough to make avoiding the larger rocks any easier. He weaved his way through the path, cursing at each boulder he failed to avoid.
It got colder. He could feel his hands going numb, the tingle prickling at his fingertips. It became difficult for him to grip the buggy’s steering wheel. He slapped his hands against it just to put a little feeling back into them, but they ached, and he immediately wished that he hadn’t.
He crawled up the path at low speed, rock faces climbing a hundred feet on either side of the path. The skies were clear, and the two moons above Castin shined brightly in the night sky. They were almost enough to illuminate the path on their own. The closer moon, Calio, was nearly twice as large as the other, Camena. As a kid, Jack had spent many nights staring up at the moons, wondering what was happening on the stations that orbited them, wishing that he would one day see them. He still hadn’t managed to leave Castin, not even for a day.
As he approached the northernmost edge of the property deep in the mountains, Jack could hardly take the cold anymore. Knowing that there was another road that he could take that would shave off eight or nine minutes from the journey home, he wasted no time heading that way once he saw the turn fork off from the main path.
It had been a long time since he had come this way. Or since anyone in his family had, most likely. He had ridden the buggy on this path hundreds of times as a kid. But as he had grown up and become less enthralled with exploring the property, the path had weathered. It was difficult to even recognize where the path was at times, and it had even more boulders than Jack had been dealing with on the previous path. At several points, rockslides had taken out the path and Jack was forced to find creative ways to work around the debris. Luckily the buggy was quite adept. Jack was trading earlier warmth for an even sorer ass, and he knew that he wasn’t going to regret it one bit.
Jack still remembered the path, somehow. He anticipated every turn and dip. As he arrived at a large sweeping righthand curve that came just before he would take off down the mountain in earnest, he saw something in the distance.
At first, he thought that it might have been a light from a mining drone that had gotten lost. But the light was green, and their mining drones has orange lighting. It was so faint at first that he wondered if it wasn’t just a dark-induced hallucination.
But no, it wasn’t a hallucination. As he got closer, the green shine got more pronounced. At first, it looked as if it was floating in midair. But as he neared the light’s source, he could see that it just looked strange because it was reflecting off of the wet stone walls of the hillside that surrounded it.
Jack felt his heart flutter. It couldn’t be.
He pressed the pedal to the buggy’s floor, no longer caring about the boulders, and pushed himself as quickly as he could toward the light. He nearly bounced out of the seat several times as he careened toward the source, his heart racing.
It is. No fucking way.
He pulled up to the green light emanating from the hillside and all of the anticipation left his body as if it had just slid out of him. Within seconds, once he was over his shock, that anticipation was replaced with a sinking feeling. It ate away at his stomach, then it expanded until he could feel the dread throughout his whole body, then expanded further. Jack wondered if he would throw up, and choked back a gag.
The light’s source was a material in the side of the hillside that faintly glowed green, lighting his face and the buggy in an eerie lighting. The hillside around it dug out perhaps fifty feet, with piles of rocks that had been removed on either side. The areas where the rocks had been cut from the hillside were blackened, scarred from high-intensity mining drone torches. His stomach twisted into a knot and he puked off of the side of the buggy, splashing the front driver-side tire and door.
Chapter 2
Calin Homestead, Planet Castin
Velorum System, Cygni Branch
After a few minutes of staring in disbelief, Jack had pressed the acceleration pedal and continued off down the path toward home. He felt sick the entire way. He could feel the anxiousness building in him with each rock he haphazardly ran over.
How was he going to explain what he had just seen? It would kill him. To know that it was there and they had missed it might just be enough to break the old man.
But he had to tell someone. It looked like there might have been some left. The scraps, no doubt. But some. And a little of that could go a long way. Maybe Anna could get a ticket on a transport ship and new lungs from a wore world medical facility. Or maybe they could buy a new set of mining drones. That’s how valuable even a small amount lerasum was.
He ran over it again and again in his mind. What would he say? How would the old man react? Every different way that this could go, he thought it through, running through how the various members of his family might react in his mind. He was lucky it was a long ride. But there were no good outcomes here. He was the bearer of bad news. It wasn’t death, but it was the closest thing. At least the family knew death. This, they didn’t.
His mind raced. As the lights from the outside of the old, rusted transport ship they called home became visible across the plains in the distance, he could feel himself chickening out. He wouldn’t tell them tonight. He’d sleep on it. Think it through some more. Then he could explain clearly what he saw in the morning.
He parked the buggy and chained it up to the tail repurposed ship that they used as a home, next to the other buggies and the mining drones that were waiting to be switched on come morning. Grandpa had bought the old transport ship at an auction about fifty years previous. It didn’t fly, and hadn’t when it had purchased it, either. He had always intended it to be a temporary home for the family. Eventually, it had become a permanent home.
He leaned against the ship for a moment, angry and confused, letting the cold metal exterior grate cool his already-freezing face. How am I going to tell anyone about this? It will ruin everything. All he could think about was his sister, Anna, and how much this would have meant for her. She was ‘this close’ to a new set of lungs. This is going to destroy her.
Jack opened the creaky front door, shut it behind him, and locked it. He started disrobing. His clothes were certain to be filled with sand that the wind had whipped into the crevices. He’d leave them outside and maybe Anna, his sister, could wash them in the morning.
He stepped inside. Directly to the right of the front door was the open living area where the family spent most of their time when they weren’t mining. The old man was asleep in his reclining chair inside what would have been the common room when the ship was operational and now had become the television feed room, arms folded on his lap, snoring his way through what sounded like a not-so-sound sleep. Jack grabbed a blanket off of the couch next to him and threw it over him. He slept out here most nights.
Jack made his way to the kitchen, his stomach in knots. Every surface was metallic, built to stand the test of years floating out in the black. He didn’t want to have to tell him. But he couldn’t keep it a secret, he knew that much. Someone else would find it eventually. Probably the old man himself. He couldn’t let him find out that way.
He made his way down the hallway toward their quarters and peeked his head into Anna’s room. She was laying in bed, looking at a network hologram show on her bed. She saw him out of the corner of her eye.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” Jack said, forcing a soft smile. “Did you have a good day?”
“Better than most. I didn’t have to go outside at all today, so my breathing was alright. A little worse after dinner but it’s always like that.”
“Good,” Jack said as he rapped his knuckles against the metal wall of her quarters. “Someday Anna, someday we will get you new lungs.” She furrowed her brow, confused by why he would bring it up so randomly, then cast it aside and nodded before returning her attention back to her show.
Why even bring it up? Now it’s going to be weird after she finds out about the lerasum tomorrow.
The house was quiet. That meant that Jar and Val, Jack’ brothers, weren’t home. And that meant that they were almost surely at the bar — a dusty old hole in the wall in town, about fifteen minutes on a buggy from their home.
Jack feet clanked against the metallic floors as he walked toward the front of the ship, which was the back of their house, where his bedroom was located. He went into his room and shut the door behind him before collapsing on his bed. His room was plain, with barely any posters or decorations hanging on the walls like you might expect for a man of his age, but it was clean. Thoughts of what he was going to have to do polluted his mind. He wanted to act as if he had never seen it. But he couldn’t. He was going to have to tell them, no matter where it went.
Jack waited for his mind to settle enough to allow him to sleep.
Chapter 3
Calin Hiome Ship, Planet Castin
Velorum System, Cygni Branch
Jack never woke up that morning. He had never been asleep. He could hear several people in the kitchen, banging pots and pans. His brothers were up, which was surprising given that he had never heard them come home the night before.
Just do it. Get it out of the way.
Jack sighed a heavy sigh. No use in putting it off any longer. If this blows everything up, at least there was truly nothing that I could do about it. He had to let them know the truth.
He pulled on some pants and a T-shirt and didn’t bother with work clothes. As soon as he told everyone about it they were going to want to go see it. There wouldn’t be any work today. He took his time, trying to give himself any second he could to find another solution other than telling them. But there was none.
He walked out to the kitchen and found the old man sitting at the metal dining table drinking coffee, his white beard with beads of coffee stuck in the mustache. His brothers were in the kitchen working around each other to fix what appeared to be oatmeal and some kind of mushroom sausage.
He took a deep breath.
“I need you guys to listen,” he said.
“What?” Jar, his brother said. “You finally fuck the Warsen girl?” Jar was four years Jack’s senior, and much stronger. His rippled muscles were always visible through the cut-off tank tops that he wore whenever the temperature would allow.
Jar
“It’s serious,” Jack said, trying to impress the importance of what he was about to say with his tone. Val, for once, took his queue and didn’t push back. “I found something while I was doing the perimeter check last night…you guys aren’t going to like it.”
The old man looked up from his com unit. “Well, out with it!”
“I found… a lerasum vein. At the north side of the property, on the trail that juts off just before the north property line. It was all mined out. Just scraps left.
The room was silent for a moment. “The hell you did!” Jar said.
“What!” the old man said.
“Grandpa. Don’t listen to this idiot. He wouldn’t know a lerasum vein if it hit him on the head,” Jar said, giving a wave of dismissal in Jack’s direction.
“It was probably something else,” Val said from behind the long brown hair that shrouded his face.
Val
“Shutup, you two,” Grandpa said as he pulled himself to his feet and waddled his way over to Jack. “Now tell me exactly what you mean. Why do you think you found Lersasum?”
“It was green,” Jack responded.
“Glowing?” Grandpa asked.
“Glowing.”
“But you said it was gone?”
“Yes, well…mostly. There were some scraps left. I came across it, just off the buggy road, up by the dip just after you cross the creek there. I saw it glowing in the distance. When I got closer, I could see that it was lerasum. But it was mostly gone, and there were mining torch burns all around it.”
The old man held his gaze for a moment, as if he was trying to get a feel for whether he was fucking with him. Jack gave him nothing that told him he was, and he saw the life sink from his eyes. He backed up and slowly sat back down where he had been, placed his elbows on his knees, and stared at the ground in front of him.
No one said anything for a moment, they all waited for the old man to break the silence.
“Jar. Val. Go out there with Jack again. See what he found. Make sure it is what he says it is.”
“Do you don’t want to go?” Jack asked.
“No,” the old man said without looking up from the ground. “If someone found a vein of lerasum on our property and took it from us…I don’t think that I could bare it.”
Grandpa
Chapter 4
Calin Homestead, Planet Castin
Velorum System, Cygni Branch
Jack and his brothers had hopped on the speedier of the buggies and took off toward the northern property line in the mountains. Val and Jar badgered Jack the entire ride out there. It wasn’t lerasum. That they were sure of. He was an idiot, or had been confused. The night had played tricks on him. Anything other than the truth — that he had found a freshly mined vein of lerasum in the hillside, and they were never going to get it back. Jar was particularly difficult to deal with. Jar had always been the one that always had to be right. His aggressive personality made him difficult to deal with, so Jack just decided that he would let them see for themselves and not try to convince them.
They thought he was an idiot. But he had been ten years old when the Volsnick‘s had found their lerasum vein on their homestead about ten miles away. They had invited all of the neighboring homesteads over to see it for themselves, and the entire Calin family had gone. He couldn’t help but remember how it had looked. It was the only rock he had ever seen that glowed. They had left a few weeks later, and they hadn’t seen the Volsnick’s since. Their plan had been to move into the Core Systems and live an easy life. He often thought about them, and their boy, Heemi, that had been his friend, and wondered if they had made out alright.
Lerasum was an exceptionally strong metal with an extremely high melting point. It was used to augment ship plating, environment domes, and in ship reactors, to name a few. But it was rare. At least in this part of the galaxy. To find a Lerasum vein, if it was of at least decent quality, could mean that your children, and your children’s children, and their children, would live easy lives. A big vein could go several generations farther. And from what Jack had seen, this had likely been on the bigger side.
Jack hung off the back of the buggy, his goggles placed firmly on his face to keep the sand out of his eyes. It was even bumpier than it was riding in the front. Val was driving, his long brown hair getting in his way as he drove.
“There is no chance in hell there is lerasum up here,” Jar said. “Do you know how many times Grandpa had this place surveyed? The mountains are dead.”
“He missed something,” Jack said bluntly. They continued attempting to argue with him for the majority of the ride there. Finally, when they crossed the bridge and came around the bend, they took the trail that jutted off the main. A few minutes later Jack pointed to a faint green glow in the distance.
“There.” They continued to roll toward it.
“For fucks sake,” Val said. The glow was unmistakable if you had seen it before. There was nothing in nature, at least here on Castin, that had that look except for lerasum.
They pulled up alongside the carved hillside and hopped out of the buggy. They stared in silence. They stared, their mouths hanging open. After a minute, Jar made his way down into the carved-out hillside where the vein had once been. It was about twenty feet deep and six feet across. He rubbed his hands along the walls.
He whipped around. “This is fresh.”
“Fresh? How fresh?” Val responded.
“Too fucking fresh. A day. Maybe two or three.”
“Wait…you’re saying that whoever did this, they were up here mining this out in the last few days?” Jack responded.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Jar said. “And what do you mean ‘whoever did this?’ Who the fuck do you think did this?”
“My money’s on Cassidan,” Val said. Jack didn’t really give it too much thought. Val had had an ongoing beef with Cassidan, but the guy was too stupid to pull something like this off. Jar rolled his eyes.
“Anyone who did this would need drones that are equipped to even mine lerasum. It isnt’ exactly the easiest thing to mine. And they’d need a lot of them to do it quickly,” said Val as he rubbed his hand on the glowing green metal. “It really is beautiful.”
“Look at this fucking hole!” Jar said, his arms outstretched toward the hillside that had been carved away. “How much do you think was in here, Val?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Well…I’ve never mined Lerasum….obviously. But if it was anything like titanium, I’d say a tonne, maybe more.”
Jack’ mouth dropped. “A….a…tonne? As in 1,000 killograms?”
“It’s a guess.”
Jar kicked the dirt in front of him. “A TONNE! A FUCKING TONNE? Lerasum goes for a hundred thousand credits a kilogram. Jack, how much is that?”
“It’s….one hundred million credits.”
Jar’s eyes went wide. Val let out a moan and fell to his knees. For a second Jack thought that he might weep into his hands. They sat in silence for a few moments, taking the number in. One hundred million credits. That is enough money to get Anna a new set of lungs and live rich for the next five generations. That’s enough for some future relative that I’d never even meet to blow and be famous for it.
“We can’t tell Grandpa,” Jack said.
“Tell him what? Of course we have to tell him. He sent us out here.”
“No… the amount. Let’s just tell him it looked like a small vein. He said he would never want to come out here and see it. Let’s not let him think that he missed out on his jackpot after being here for sixty years.”
“He’s going to feel like that no matter what,” Val replied. “Plus, there is still mineable lerasum here. We can’t just leave this shit sitting here.”
“Do we have anything that can even mine it?” Jack asked knowing the answer.
“No,” Val replied solemnly.
***
The sun was high in the sky when they started heading back toward home.
Val had been quiet the whole ride home. Jar less so, but even he was somewhat restrained from his typical self. The buggy kicked up dust as it jostled around on the rocky plains heading back for home.
“We’re going to kill them,” Val said. “As soon as we figure out who it is.”
“Mmmph,” Jar said. “Figure out who it is? We know who it is.”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to cast blame. This could have been anyone,” Jack said.
“Oh please. We share the god damn property line with them, Jack. That vein wasn’t more than a ten minute drive from their property line. We know who is responsible.”
“We also share a property line with the Carson’s….and the Dairn’s, if you want to get technical,” Jack said.
“The Dairn’s are on the other side of the fucking mountains, Jack. It wasn’t the Dairn’s. How are they even going to get their mining drones over here.”
Jack thought for a moment. That’s a good point. “Air drones,” he said. “It would be small trips and take them awhile, but who knows how long it was being mined. We haven’t been out there for almost six months.”
“Air drones?” Val said, turning around and whipping his hair against the back of his head. “Seriously? You think they sent dozens..maybe hundreds of airdrones, over those mountains to carry the lerasum back a piece at a time? No! It was either the Carson’s or the Vilge’s — but I don’t think the Carson’s would do that.”
“That’s fucking right,” Jar interjected forcefully.
“OK, no probably not. Even so, we can’t just go accusing the Vilge’s. If we can’t find where they have it, we have no proof that they did it. And we won’t get it back. We have to go about this smart,” Jack said.
“Smart my ass,” Jar said, beating his fist against the dash. “We need to go over there and take it. Those fucks have been getting the better of our family for decades. Now they are going to take our wealth! Our fucking birthright”
Jar had a point. The Vilge clan was about the worst people that Jack had ever met. They shared a property line on the northwest side of the Calin property and they had had run-ins throughout the years. The eldest Vilge, Canov, was a tough, leathery old man who listened to no one. Over the years Grandpa had learned not to push too far with him, as he bit back. They squabbled over land ownership, land maintenance, and pricing — since they both largely mined iron and platinum on their properties — they often butted heads over supply levels and shipment times. When they both shipped together, they got lower prices at the port.
Crossing the boundaries and mining the Lerasum was too in character for the Vilge’s. It made too much sense. But it wasn’t good news. They were the type to do anything to hang onto it, which meant that they were going to have a hell of a time getting the lerasum back.
The Vilge’s
Chapter 5
Calin Hiome Ship, Planet Castin
Velorum System, Cygni Branch
Grandpa grabbed the small of his back as he bent over to pick up the kindling that lay next to the firepit outside of the rusted transport ship that he called home.
He felt a hole in his chest as he carefully prepared the kindling into a precisely stacked tee-pee on top of the wild brush that he had pulled from the ground.
It had been awhile since he had felt like this. Or maybe he felt like this all the time, it was hard to know. He had tried for decades to push his failures out of his mind. He had become pretty adept at it, too, able to continue on living despite the unbearable weight of his mistakes. But this mistake would outweigh them all if it turned out to be true. It was something else. Too much for his spirit. It dragged it all back up in all of the worst ways — the stench of failure that he felt encircling him every single day. A life wasted. A whole family’s lives wasted because he made the wrong call.
He should never have moved, to this god-forsaken planet. When the ring had first opened to the Velorum system, there had been such promise. An asteroid belt that contained an array of metals and minerals, along with a mountainous planet that early scans had flagged as littered with a wealth of deposits.
There had been a lot of buzz about the Velorum system. There had been a gold rush of sorts to claim homesteads there from the moment the ring gate to the system had opened. Of course, no one was actually interested in gold so much anymore. But platinum, iridium, palladium, osmium, ruthenium, rhodium, and with some luck, lerasum. Those were the metals that people were chasing when they came to Velorum.
And Castin, the planet where the Calin clan had ultimately settled, was supposed to be the hotspot in the entire system. Early scans and test run mining operations had found rich deposits of iridium, platinum, and ruthenium. Of course, mining down a gravity well wasn’t ideal for large corporations. They would much rather stick to asteroids and low-gravity environments where the mining was cheap. But for a family? It was a huge opportunity.
Then, about two years after the ring gate opened and while initial homesteads were still being parceled out — the Colona Mining Company found the richest lerasum deposit that had ever been discovered. Tens of thousands of tonnes of lerasum were discovered not farther than two hundred and fifty miles from where the Calin homestead would eventually be located. Interest in relocating to Velorum I skyrocketed overnight.
The old man hadn’t originally planned to relocate to the Velorum system from Colat, where he had been born.
But, two events happened simultaneously that made it too good to pass up. First, his grandfather had died, leaving him with more than 350,000 credits. It was a decent amount. Large enough for him to live a pretty decent simple life for a long time without working. But he had just found out his wife, Svana, was pregnant with their first child, and he wanted more for them.
The second event was that a friend of his, Nestor, another miner for Vana Mining Corp., had bought a homestead ticket to Velorum, before his mother had fallen ill and he had decided to stay in the Colat System.
The tickets were in incredibly high demand. Nestor had received his through a lottery. Nestor was asking for 175,000 credits for the rights to a homestead in the Northernmost quadrant of the main continent on Castin.
The old man, then young, had enough to cover the ticket and the startup equipment that he would need to get mining. Within three months, he and Svana had relocated. He bought an old ship, which had since been replaced with a newer but equally worn ship, to use as a home. It was waiting for them, hooked up to a power and waste source on their homestead, when they arrived.
And he began mining. Things were good, for a spell. The easily-identified veins had made their first few years plentiful. The problem was that everyone’s first years were plentiful as well. The plot of land had been somewhat rich with platinum and iridium. At the time, he had also had high hopes that he would one day find lerasum in the mountains on his property.
But soon the easily mined veins were running thin. Drilling into the thick shale ground of the plains or mountainous region was grueling work. It was worth it if he had a lead on some lerasum, but generally avoided doing so for titanium in those early days. Of course now, with less to mine, it was commonplace.
About fifteen years after the ring to Velorum opened, the ring gate from Velorum to Eridani opened. Initial deep scans had showed a high likelihood of several mineral-rich asteroids and moons, along with a planet that appeared to be a solid candidate for colonization.
As it turned out, Eridani was that and more. Rich Iridium deposits littered the two gigantic asteroid belts that orbited the system’s star. Large lerasum deposits were found on several moons. And so the interest in Velorum quickly waned. What had been seen as a gold rush system was quickly overshadowed and left to rot.
The years had dragged on, and the lerasum never came. Never a single vein. And he had to live with it — the shame. The shame of knowing that he had chosen a planet that was barren. Of knowing that he had started a family somewhere that they could never prosper. And on a whim at that.
He lit the small scraps of paper that he was able to put together and lit the kindling ablaze. He watched as the flames enveloped the kindling and then set a larger piece down on top. He watched until it was enveloped.
He felt blank. As if his body contains no emotion. You would have thought that there would be sadness there. But there was nothing. Only the lingering stench of failure resonated deeply into his core.
“Hi Papa,“ Anna said as she approached the fire that had now grown into a roaring small bonefire. “Are you OK?“
“I’m fine, “the old man said, shuffling one of the fire logs until it was just right.
They sat in silence for a moment, taking in the small fire on the sandy floor of the Castin desert.
“You know,” the old man said, not looking up from the logs. “That lerasum would have bought you new lungs….it would have gotten us off of this god-forsaken planet.”
Anna nodded and sat in silence for a moment, thinking of how best to respond. “It’s okay Papa, you didn’t know,” Anna said, grabbing his hand.
“It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t good enough. It was there under my feet the whole time. I spent my whole life…and bet the lives of my family…on this planet. And it was always there. Our ticket to heaven. And I missed it.”
Anna buried her face into his side. She meant to comfort him, but he felt nothing.
“Go inside please Anna,” the old man said through tears. “Before your breathing starts acting up.”
