WILDCAT

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Eighteen steps down the tunnels from the elevator, and the lights go out. The whole network from that point on will be shrouded in darkness. Make a right turn, follow the helmet’s Pathfinder, and continue onwards. Thirty two steps later, there’ll be a ridge line. Be careful of the Autoservs, they’re programmed to mine, and they swing pickaxes without checking their rears. Turn left at the struts and follow the thrum of heavy machinery, into the main room of Hollow Site Twelve. From here, there’ll be floodlights at equidistant intervals, mostly to illuminate the seismic monitoring and LADAR stations.
Jori Stane kept all these instructions in his head as he walked, the heavy feeling of his suit made him breathless, and the brisk pace he took the corridors to avoid staying in the dark for too long wasn’t helping. Every now and then, he’d pass by an Autoserv, striking away at the sides of the tunnels, or hauling ore to the dropoff zones. Their faceless heads would blink at him, reflecting back his own helmet lights like the eyes of a cat. They needed no light to work, and they gave no complaints, plinking away at the dense metal core of the asteroid.
It didn’t help that to the right of him was a sheer drop down into the asteroid’s heart. It happened to be Jori’s destination, but he would have liked to avoid the holes in the wall.
Now the ‘windows’ through the rock were the only light source, letting a scant few plumes of light from the floodlights through. But Jori kept walking, plunging back into the darkness, and away from where the Autoservs had gone a bit too far with their picks and drills.
They would continue until the tunnel was wide enough to lay down transport tracks, then a new Foreman’s office would emerge somewhere along it, then the tunnel would widen even more and form a new expansion zone.
And on and on the operation would go until the whole of the asteroid was hollowed out. They’d started at the nearly-molten core no less than three years prior, on the orders of some shady organisation they only knew as E.
The pay was good, but the conditions were abysmal, and the rates at which they demanded ore were even higher. Still, it beat working for a Corp, who wouldn’t even pay them as much. And the organisation had supplied their own Autoservs.
That last part settled somewhere in his gut, but for the life of him, Jori couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing. The robots were too human, and yet they weren’t at all. They were made of faceless black metal with one single blinking lens in the centre of their heads. Their joints were exposed, the whirring they produced as they walked down the crew corridors to their charging ports woke him up every single time it happened, and left him wondering when he would wake up to find one of their human=but-inhuman silhouettes darkening his doorway;
He banked to the left at the strut, spiralling up out of the ground and darting up into the rock/metal ceiling. Jori’s Pathfinder program fizzled a little as he passed underneath it. He left the strut behind, going back over the instructions in his mind as he walked, his fists balling and unclenching as he took each step.
The tunnel sloped downhill, and he eventually made it to one of the many entrances to the central quarry of the asteroid. An expansive, cyclopean room full with mining machinery assembled on-site. More autoservs lined the walls of each level, ceaselessly carving new paths out from the hollow room like ants.
In the centre of the room was a wide shaft that extended downwards all the way down to the asteroid’s core. In the ceiling of the Hollow Site was the same tunnel, extending upwards to the surface of the asteroid, covered by a habitation dome. Ice from the asteroid was hefted up by pulleys and winches to feed crops and be filtered as drinking water, while down came heavier machinery that couldn’t fit in the personnel elevators.
The hole was dug by a combination drill and generator when the crew first made landfall. Its purpose was simple; to reach the centre of the asteroid and start pumping out antigrav. A cre would go down after it and set up the pulley system to fuel the generator, and the first mining crews would follow, picking the richest deposits and startin the mining process.
And so Hollow Site 12 was born. Now there were drills, conveyors, and stacked offices all around the growing quarry .There was even a massive machine on treads, half the width of the chamber, with a drill the size of a Longsword. 
His destination sat at the heart; the Supervisor’s office, marked in black and tan stripes and sitting atop two grey containers used as an away-from-home break room for when the worker’s didn’t want to journey up the elevators just for an hour or two of downtime.
Climbing the stairs to the Supervisor’s office, Jori ignored the gaping maw not twenty feet to his side. Surrounded though it was with guard rails, he didn’t even want to look at it. Maybe mining wasn’t the best profession to enter into with an innate fear of heights, but it’s the one that paid the most in the expansionist years of the UEG, and he wanted to catch the tail-end of that boom, even though most mining was done planetside instead of on barren rocks with no atmosphere.
That just made their line of work all the more lucrative.
Jori pushed the door to the Supervisor’s office open, stepping inside and shutting the door behind him. In an instant, the noise of grinding machinery and pulsing scanners ceased, and the gentle sound of a ticking clock replaced them all. Jori took a breath and felt himself uncoil.
Until the supervisor looked up from his desk with the beginnings of a scowl on his face.
“Can I help you, son?” he asked.
Jori stepped forward, popped his helmet off, and smiled. “Jori. Covering for Alexi, he’s called off sick.”
Sighing, the SUpervisor sat back in his chair and tossed his tablet stylus down on the desk beside his coffee cup. “Alexi’s always sick with something. Don’t get yourself roped into his shenanigans.”
“Well,” Jori held his hands out. “I’m down here now. I’d prefer to just get the shift over with.”
The Supervisor sat there for a while, tapping his fingers on the desk. He reached out for a metal coffee cup, swigging down the contents and sighing. “Fine. You rated for digger duty?”
“I think so.” Frowning, Jori’s eyes went out the triple-paned windows and stared out at the massive digging machine outside.
“You either are, or you ain’t. Yes, or no?”
Jori looked back at the man and nodded. “I completed my certificate, yes sir.”
“Good.” The Sup’ stood up, picking up his helmet from somewhere behind the desk. He motioned at Jori with it. “You’re working a six’er on point, dig her into the West wall.”
“Got it.” Jori said, placing his own helmet over his head. 
The Sup’ stepped past Jori and out of the office. Jori followed him, stepping down the stairs towards the tall, imposing digging machine.
Jori and the Sup’ stood at the base of the digger’s ladder. The Sup turned to Jori, slapping him on the shoulder. 
“Good luck,” he said. “She’s been temperamental these past few shifts.”
Jori nodded, stepping forward and hooking his fingers onto the ladder rungs. “I’ll keep that in mind, sir.”
He climbed up the ladder towards the cockpit, settling into the hard, roughshod seats and sighing.
Not the most glamorous of jobs, and not even necessary, perhaps. But, as long as the credits came in, Jori would keep hauling himself down to the Hollow Site, picking up his work detail, and mining until they told him to stop.
With a turn of the key in the ignition, he grabbed ahold of the sticks, and hauled the driller to work.
Category:Short stories
Category:The Weekly