Establishing the Parking Lot

Ramiro was tired. He seemed to have been drifting about for months without finding anything much worth a second look. He had a permanent queasy headache from the unstable roar of his engines, which just seemed to be getting worse all the time. In fact, sometimes they were so bad it was like riding in a rollercoaster. But at that time, he couldn’t afford to get them fixed professionally. He needed to find somewhere that he could put down to take a proper look at them himself. His ship, The Kamiński, named after a Polish explorer I’m told, 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 anyway, with his recent record, he could barely afford to buy enough water and food to keep himself in space. Supposedly, he was a miner. Or he would be, if he could find anything worth digging up. Perhaps ‘unsuccessful prospector’ might be a better description for his occupation at that time.

In the centre of his control room, like in most ships, hung a spherical hologram of the space around him. He knew he must be close to the centre of Jupiter’s Greek asteroid group, but even then, his sphere was empty. In theory it should be showing anything bigger than about twenty km diameter. Expanding the view to a radius of half a light-minute, he grabbed himself 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 over a vast volume of nothingness. So not being close to one wasn’t at all surprising. Suddenly though, one larger point appeared at the edge of the sphere, and a label, in green light, which materialised above it read ‘588 Archilles’. So, he switched to an optical view and zoomed in on it. An object, looking 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 with far more detail taken from the asteroid database, informed him it was about a hundred and thirty km in diameter, and that it was basically a snowball, with a bit of rock and a smattering of light metals mixed in. Definitely nothing of interest to a miner.

What it did have though was a large flat plane, about fifty km across and which looked like the surface of a frozen lake, only that was obviously impossible. Thinking that potentially he could set down there and get a proper look at those damn thrusters, he decided to move in closer. Carefully, and using only minimal power, he turned the ship, then pulsed the engines. In a few hours he would be close enough that he should be able to bring it down safely. Telling his AI to wake him when they got to within ten kilometres, he pushed off and drifted across to his bunk to try and get some sleep ahead of what was going to be a busy few hours. After a few hours though 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 out of a viewport, for just one brief moment, he thought he saw a flat white surface coming toward him. Then he was flung right across the control room, hitting his head hard on the main console. His world went dark.

Somewhat later, when he came to, he was floating around the control room, periodically bouncing off walls or other obstructions. Grasping the passing back of a seat, he pulled himself down and upright, and looked out to see where he was. Miraculously, given almost non-existent gravity his ship hadn’t bounced, and was still embedded in the surface of the asteroid, albeit laying on its back in a furrow it had ploughed as it crashed. Carefully he checked the status of everything. He wasn’t losing air pressure so the hull wasn’t compromised, and the reactor was still running, so the impact couldn’t have been that great. So far so good. Taking a couple of painkillers and putting on a vacuum suit he went out through the main airlock, which was pointing almost straight up. Once outside he examined the ship to see what the damage was. The main engine nozzle looked like it had taken most of the impact, it was cracked, buckled and completely unusable. On the plus side however most of the attitude nozzles appeared okay. A couple looked iffy, but then they always did. Over the suits radio he carefully instructed his AI which nozzles to fire to get The Kamiński out of the ditch, and back up the right way. Once there he activated the anchors, which drilled into the polished surface to keep him steady. Then, drifting back inside, he sent out a call for help.

[Kamiński] Ramiro Morales. Mayday. Mayday. Current position grounded on 588 Archilles. Main engine nozzle damaged. Calling for urgent assistance. Mayday. Mayday.

The message went out across the asteroid belt and was received by another miner who was working on a relatively nearby asteroid, about three light-minutes away.

[BettyMae] Ralph Jendrick to Ramiro Morales. Message received. On route. ETA 17 hours.

A little later, a second reply was received as well.

[Calypso] Demar Stewart to Ramiro Morales. I hear you also. Be with you in around 35 hours.

In total Ramiro received about fifteen responses. And all of those ships arrived over the next couple of days, locking on to each others airlocks in a chaotic jumble. Just attaching to a spare port wherever they could. It turned out that the Calypso was a supply ship, on route to Ceres, so seeing an opportunity to sell his stock at a premium retail price, rather than wholesale which he was expecting, Demar Stewart started selling liquor and foodstuffs to the various miners.

Ramero himself, realising his ship was probably never going to fly again without some serious investment, started pulling its hold and lower deck apart. And after a while had opened it up completely and converted it to a bar of sorts, which, after they agreed to split the profits, Damar stocked for him. Customers flooded in. There were a lot of miners out there in the belt, and finding somewhere where they could just park up and relax, get drunk and talk to like minded people, or occasionally brawl, just made it work. The Parking Lot — as it became known — well, its reputation spread, miner spoke to miner, and it became a more or less permanently established trading post. More ships started arriving. Other bars, some selling additional services, more exotic than just booze, opened up as well. After all prospecting is a solitary occupation, and somewhere that lonely a miner can get a bit of friendship or love — even if it’s paid for — with no questions asked, was always going to succeed.