by Rich Kroll

Created on: June 13, 2008

The Wreck of the Bertrand Ares

"In an unprecedented effort, SpacMin has coordinated a fifteen hundred plus ship expedition to the Casper-Viscetti comet. This comet fell under Saturn's gravitational force four years ago calving it into millions of smaller fragments. Since then, SpacMin has been plotting an operation for the comet's return. Today, the heliospheric mining commission announced that its fleet is on its way."

Felicity Jones sat with her feet up on the counter watching the newscast on the forward screen between the toes of her shoes. She bounced her shoes back and forth turning the video stream into a fractured flicker. From time to time, she giggled softly.

"Captain on deck."

Captain Fallon Boyd stood behind his helmswoman glaring into the back of her head. "Would you mind taking your boots off my counter?"

"Not at all, Captain."

"And turn that crap off."

"Yes, Sir." She switched off the broadcast replacing it with navigational charts of Saturn's rings.

"Give me com to all decks, please."

"Com all decks online."

"Attention all hands. This is the captain. We are several days behind the rest of the fleet. This does not mean that we will not be fulfilling our quota. We will. It just means that we'll have fewer margins for mistakes. So, we're not going to be making any mistakes. Is that understood?"

"Yes, Captain," Felicity answered as if she were speaking for the rest of her shipmates. She was annoyed at the way the captain intimidated her, but his crews brought home higher than average shares. That she liked. A little humility was a fair price for the higher end of the pay scale. She had shipped on other miners that had not paid anywhere near as well. As the saying goes, "Pain first, pleasure last, is better than the other way around."

"Zero, I want full spectrographic analysis as soon as we're in range. Nana, keep me abreast of any changes to capture field status. I don't want to close on a target without enough field strength to take it. Jones, I want plots updated every minute on potentials in our zone, plus possible conflicts with orbitals and hostiles." Captain Boyd had a habit of referring to other mining ships as "hostiles". It was not that he was overly competitive. He just liked the way it sounded and thought that it promoted his crew's team spirit.

When the Bertrand Ares entered scanner range, the news was not good. Most of choice fragments had already been captured or vectored by other ships in the fleet. The remainder were quickly reaching the point

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