Hard Rain

It had been a hard rain that month, three hundred people just hadn’t come back to base, twenty seven more had managed a garbled mayday before losing contact, fourteen had actually been found, or what was left of them anyway.

The radiation sickness from a new system killed you slowly, with the amount of debris from the protoplanetary disks you were always running the risks of losing shielding from impacts. Some of the more impetuous thought they could get away with it, but those hours bathed in the beta and gamma flows added up.

It was such a simple premise, go out to a proto star and build a base above the ecliptic, just let the miners and prospectors do all the hard work. The rings of debris were a cornucopia of rare elements, all there in the open for you to pick up instead of being buried miles under a planet’s crust.

Mining a new planetary system was always hard, not just because of the radiation; they never told you that those lumps of rock were the size of football fields, flying at speeds of 50 km/s or higher. You had to be brave to work out there, some of the new recruits never even made it past the first month. Climbing back on the supply ship after they found out what it was like, choosing to sign their lives away on indentured service contracts for the price of the passage home.

People normally didn’t last long anyway, but this month was bad, this month was a hard rain and everyone suffered.

WC : 263

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