Ramiro was tired. He seemed to have been drifting about for months without finding anything worth a second look. On top of that, the erratically unbalanced roar of his engines gave him a constant queasy headache that seemed to be getting worse all the time. Sometimes the sounds he heard the engines make were so bad it actually felt like he was on a rollercoaster. But at present, he couldn’t afford to have them professionally repaired. He needed to find somewhere he could put down to take a proper look at them himself. Overall, his ship, the Kamiński, was in desperate need of some serious attention. Even the command AI was playing up. But he was quite a distance from the maintenance yards on Europa and could barely afford to buy enough water or food to keep himself in space, so he definitely couldn’t pay their prices. Supposedly, he was a miner. Or he would be if he could find anything worth digging up. Perhaps “unsuccessful prospector” would be a better description of his profession at the moment.
In the centre of his control room, a spherical hologram, suspended in the air, displayed the space surrounding him. He knew he must be near the centre of Jupiter’s Greek asteroid group, but even then, the sphere was empty. Theoretically, it should show anything larger than about twenty kilometres across. He expanded the view to a radius of half a light-minute, grabbed a coffee, and sat back to let the image resolve.
Slowly, on this scale, points started to appear. The Greek swarm contains a huge number of asteroids, but they are spread out through an even vaster volume of nothingness. So, not being close to one wasn’t at all surprising. Suddenly, however, a large dot appeared at the edge of the sphere and a green sign reading “588 Archilles” materialised above it. Without hesitation, Ramiro activated an optical view and zoomed in on the dot. An object that looked a bit like a rounded lump of dirty white modelling clay that a child had thrown at a wall a few times gradually swam into focus. The data above it, now containing much more detail taken from the asteroid database, informed him that it was about a hundred and thirty kilometres in mean diameter and was basically a snowball with a bit of rock and a smattering of light metals mixed in. For certain, nothing of interest to a miner.
What it did have though was a large flat plain, about fifty kilometres across, which looked like the surface of a frozen lake. Only that was manifestly impossible. Thinking that potentially he could set down there though to take a proper look at those damn thrusters, he decided to move in closer. Carefully, and using only minimal power, he turned the ship, and then pulsed the thrusters. In a few hours, he would drift near enough to attempt a safe landing. After instructing his AI to wake him when they were within ten kilometres, he floated across to his bunk to try and get some sleep. Later, he was woken by an alarm, unfortunately, not the one he had set in the AI, but a proximity alarm. The faulty AI had obviously failed to wake him. Slipping out of his bunk and looking through a viewport, he thought, just for one brief moment, that he saw a flat white surface coming up at him. An instant later, he was hurled across the control room, his head slamming into the main console. His world went dark.
When he came to, he was floating around the control room, bouncing off walls and other obstructions. Grasping the passing back of a seat, Ramiro pulled himself down and upright and looked out to see where he was. Miraculously, given the almost nonexistent gravity, his ship hadn’t bounced and was still on the surface of the asteroid, albeit lying on its back in a furrow it had ploughed when it crashed. Carefully he checked the status of everything. His air pressure was steady, so the hull wasn’t compromised, and the reactor was still running, so the impact couldn’t have been too bad. So far, so good.
Taking a couple of painkillers and putting on a vacuum suit, he floated out through the main airlock, which was pointing almost directly upwards. Once outside and standing on the ice, he examined the ship to see what the damage was. The main engine nozzle looked like it had taken the brunt of the impact: it was cracked, buckled and completely unusable. On the plus side, however, most of the attitude nozzles were okay. A couple looked iffy, but then they always did. Over his suit radio, he carefully directed the AI which jets to fire to get the Kamiński out of the trench and back up the right way. Once there he activated the anchors, which drilled into the almost polished surface to keep it stable. Then, he went back inside to send out a mayday call.
“Kamiński to all stations. Ramiro Morales. Mayday, mayday. Current position: grounded on 588 Archilles. Main engine nozzle damaged. Requesting urgent assistance. Mayday, mayday.”
The message went out through the asteroid belt and was received by Ralph Jendrick, a miner aboard BettyMae, who was working on a relatively nearby asteroid, about three light-minutes away.
“Ralph Jendrick to Ramiro Morales. Message received. En route. ETA 17 hours.”
A little later, as the signal propagated outward, another reply was received from a ship called Calypso. In space, maydays always demand a response.
“Demar Stewart to Ramiro Morales. Message acknowledged. Be with you in around 35 hours.”
Ramiro received a total of about fifteen replies. And all those ships arrived over the next few days, locking onto each other’s airlocks in a chaotic jumble, attaching to a spare port wherever they could. When it arrived, it turned out that the Calypso was actually a supply ship en route to Ceres. So, seeing an opportunity to sell his stock retail, rather than wholesale, Demar Stewart started selling liqueur and foodstuffs to the ship’s crews. Ramiro himself, realising that his ship was probably never going to fly again, without some serious investment, decided to convert it into a bar. So, after a long conversation with Demar, in which they agreed to split the profits, he completely remodelled the lower deck and hold and stocked it from the Calypso. The miners started coming. By word of mouth alone the fact of its existence spread. There were a lot of miners out there in the belt, and finding a place where they could just park up and relax, get drunk and talk to like-minded people, made it ideal. The Parking Lot – as it became known – quickly expanded into a more or less permanently established trading post. More and more ships started arriving. Other bars, some selling more exotic services than just booze, also opened. Prospecting is a solitary occupation, but occasionally, even miners need some human contact.