Transference Station by Stephen Hunt Page B

ecosystem impact assessment reports lined up for this mission. But when we drop out of hyperspace, I’d like to have half a clue as to what I’m going to be finding at the other end.’
    ‘I suppose so,’ said Sebba, her clipped tones heavy, as if she were a mother being interrupted at her desk by a too demanding daughter. ‘It’s a twelve planet system with a class M sun. Very, very ancient, but still fairly stable as far as the stellar mass is concerned. No supernova in sight yet. The fourth planet from the sun is the one we are interested in, gravity twenty percent higher than standard, but nothing you’d need to wear exo-armour for. Atmosphere is breathable without filters or suits, if slightly oxygen rich. The sun’s expanded corona is warming Abracadabra, and its environment is currently thick jungle across the majority of the planet. Continental drift has consolidated the land into a single landmass which we have named Nambia. No sentient life-forms, but plenty of native non-sentients. Mega-fauna, mostly, adapting to conditions similar to Earth during the late Triassic period. Probably quite similar to how life on Earth will end up evolving when the sun enters its final stage. There’s an irony there, don’t you think? The circle of life ending up more or less as it began’
    ‘I’ll leave the philosophy to you,’ said Lana. I’ve got enough worries with just staying solvent . ‘How hot does it get dirt-side?’
    ‘It’s fifty degrees during the night,’ said Sebba. ‘You’ll find it tolerable enough if you’re wearing smart clothes with fibres set on a low temperature. I wouldn’t care to work down there in basic ship fatigues, though.’
    ‘Where’s your base camp?’
    ‘We’re at the foot of Nambia’s largest mountain range, that’s where we’ve been tunnelling. A double lined laser fence protects the camp, along with automated sentries on continuous duty. The mega-fauna have learnt fast that we’re not in the food chain. Cooked up a zoo’s worth of species trying to breech our perimeter to get to that point.’ She didn’t sound upset about the slaughter. But then, working for DSD was always going to be dirty work. Lana had known that much before she set out. She just hoped she wouldn’t end up feeling any less clean by the end of the mission.
    ‘How many staff on the surface?’
    ‘Twenty, not including myself. When I left, the team were clearing a landing strip in the jungle for your heavy lifters to come in.’
    ‘That’s not enough staff to run a mine, is it?’
    ‘Said the captain running a ship of this size with only six crew.’ Sebba shrugged. ‘We might ship in extra grunts to supervise the robot mining equipment at a later date, but DSD wants to keep this operation as tight as possible for the obvious reasons.’
    ‘How long is it going to take for you to extract your initial payload?’
    ‘How long? Well, that remains uncertain. The provisions we took on board will last us for a long time, if necessary. Let’s simply say as long as it takes… rare ores are considered rare for a reason. But it’s somewhere under the mountain range, that much we’ve already ascertained.’
    Lana groaned inside, but didn’t give the old harpy the pleasure of a reaction. Turning the Gravity Rose into a carousel ride in Abracadabra’s orbit while Sebba leisurely pottered around the surface of her jungle world wasn’t what the skipper had envisaged. And I’m not in the least bit worried that Calder will ask for shore leave in range of this old siren, either. ‘Well, you dig the rubble out, I’ll ship it to Transference Station.’
    ‘Oh, we won’t be taking it back to Transference,’ said the professor. ‘We’ll rendezvous with a buyer for a deep space cargo exchange. I have the coordinates for the meeting in a sealed file, to be opened when we’ve made our first big strike.’
    ‘What?’ Lana was puzzled. ‘Surely the best price is on the open market? And in the Edge,