The sound of jackhammers is lost to the vacuum of space. The five man team in their orange space suits cut into the asteroid they were on breaking up the rock into small enough chunks to load onto their ship and take to the nearest trading facility when the next cargo ship came through.
The system, Sol, the place, asteroid RX-384-B in the asteroid belt between Mars orbit and Jupiter orbit.
The music playing through the helmet speakers to pass the time crackled out and then was replaced with a dull fuzz.
“Damn. Lost the blasted signal…”
“We must be moving behind that cluster that was coming up. Don’t worry about it.”
“Aww, and this is the last day before we go back. We gotta have music to pass the time…”
“Oh no you don’t. Not this again.”
“Too late, Jamis. Sides, it’s classical.”
Over the speakers blared out fairly heavy music. Not that the music was unbearable in and of itself, but at such a high volume, it could be rather annoying.
“Mahan, I don’t care, turn it off!”
“Cut it out you two. We’ll be done in a few hours and heading back. Once we’re out of the asteroid shadow we can pick up from the relay satellite again. So knock it off you two. Mahan, cut off the music.”
Mahan sighed. “You’re the boss…”
The music that flooded the speakers ended as abruptly as it had began, and the miners went back to work. For several hours, they worked in the silence of space, only broken by a few words of conversation every now and then. Finally, they had filled up their last load with ore.
“All right. Good work, men. Jamis, are all the tools loaded?”
“Just about, sir. We just have to load up the last of the rock and we’ll be ready to head back to the landing site. Mahan and Renald are already at the ship with the other half of the load.”
“All right, let’s get it done and head back.”
As soon as they finished loading the rover, they got in and headed back to their ship. They never dug far from their ship, so it didn’t take them long to get to it. They drove the rover into the cargo bay (which took up most of the ship’s mass), and parked it beside another one. They closed the hanger doors and started locking the ore loads and the rover down, then they entered the smaller, forward section of the ship.
“Sir, is everything locked down?”
“Everything’s taken care of, Renald. Where’s Mahan?”
“He’s in the cabin with Will. Since everyone’s aboard and everything’s locked down, I’ll head to the bridge and we can head out.”
The leader of the group nodded, and the two of them went to start the ship’s engines while Jamis went to the crew cabin to tell the others they were about to take off. After several minutes warm up and final preparations and checks, the ship’s landing thrusters fired and it lifted slowly off of the rocky surface of the asteroid. The weak thrusters easily broke the ship out of the gravitational field of the asteroid. Once the ship cleared two kilometers from the surface, the four major engine ports on the back of the ship flared to life. Instantly, the ship bolted forward and began its rapid acceleration away from the asteroid cluster.