The air split with a shattering roar
The air split with a shattering roar, brighter than any sunrise, as the asteroid miner’s spacecraft collided with the jagged surface of 511 Davida. Flames licked around its edges briefly before the vacuum swallowed them whole. Crystals of ice launched off into the black void like millions of tiny stars in reverse. Face down in the cockpit, reins of sweat tracing rivers down her face, Dr. Kaia Renaud cursed AI systems she herself had once designed.
They were wrong. Again.
Her left hand trembled, scraping at the touchscreen console to silence the blaring alarms. Crimson lights washed through the cabin of her streamlined, gunmetal-gray vessel, Odessia, reflecting off the silver patch sewn onto her sleeve: “United Miners for Human Sustainability—Frontier Division.” Her suit, once crisp and alabaster, was now dulled with soot and frayed at the seams. What remained untouched were the lilac accents she’d insisted upon—slivers of personal freedom in a galaxy determined to strip her bare.
“You listening, Endure?” Kaia rasped as she unbuckled herself, her voice cutting through the recycled air.
Endure, her AI co-pilot, responded immediately in its signature monotone. “Yes, Kaia. You’ve overridden suggested actions four times in the last ten minutes. I have questions about your cognitive state.”
“My cognitive state is fine. Your predictive algorithm? Not so much.”
Endure didn’t respond, which she considered both an admission of guilt and a mild victory. Steadying herself, Kaia floated toward the vault door leading to the salvage hold. She yanked at tethered handholds, disoriented as 511 Davida’s faint gravity flickered randomly between “annoying” and “nonexistent.”
If this asteroid was their new goldmine, it sure felt like a tomb.
Before she entered the hold, there was a pause.
Blink.
Kaia’s mother had always liked lilacs—the source of her quiet rebellion in choosing the color. Small bouquets filled their cramped Utah home, tucked into jam jars near sunlit windowsills. But what she remembered most was her mother’s laugh, deep and characteristically full-bodied. That sound had comforted Kaia when her father left for good, whisked away by debts to men whose names she wasn’t allowed to speak aloud. You laugh enough for three people, Kaia had told her one rainy evening.
When Kaia signed up for the asteroid-mining program almost two decades later, the sound died. The last time they spoke, six years ago, her mother’s voice was cold.
The vault door hissed open.
The salvage hold yawned before her—rows of autonomous drills and extraction drones hanging dormant in zero-gravity, gleaming with predatory chrome. At the center, encased in transparent alloy and pulsating faintly, was the prize: a 14-ton cluster of nickel-iron alloy embedded with .016% platinum, nestled in fractals of carbon diamondized over billions of years.
“Endure,” Kaia said, floating closer as she extracted a scanner from her belt. “How much does this beauty net us?”
“By current market valuation?” Endure paused fractionally. It always paused on purpose when delivering bad news—a passive-aggressive trait Kaia despised. “A contract fulfillment of forty-eight percent is achievable. Earth-side demand fell during your two-month transit.”
Kaia froze mid-motion. "Fell? How?! What happened?"
"Haz-Metamlab’s M-type mining operation, asteroid Am-gloit, successfully returned to Earth's orbit two days prior. Resources have glutted the current market."
Kaia's knuckles whitened around the scanner. Damn Haz-Metamlab. They were a privatized cartel run by Earth’s pond-scum elite, scavenging upscale asteroids like they were buffet platters. It was corporate saber-rattling at its worst—stealing food right out of honest alliances’ mouths, ensuring Kaia’s Frontier Division got the scraps.
She grimaced. "So we're risking—what? My neck and Odessia’s structural wear—for peanuts?"
"I wouldn’t phrase it that way."
"Don’t try to cheer me up, Endure."
Kaia propelled herself down toward the massive mineral cluster. Her scanner reported familiar readings of nickel and platinum, but something strange emerged too—a faint phenomenon at the center. Something pulsed... no, resonated through her instrument. It wasn’t a lifeform, because nothing human—or even organic—could sustain itself under 511 Davida's harsh conditions.
But the object emitted an electromagnetic signature that felt... studied.
“Endure, amplify interior visuals,” she ordered. “Filter metal.”
The AI lashed the room with X-ray angles. Beneath the opaque surface of nickel, Kaia saw the anomaly bloom crystal-clear on her display, embedded dead-center within the asteroid cluster. Her heart thudded in stunned rhythm.
It was no mineral.
It was a design.
Dozens of ringlets seemed interwoven in metallic concentric motions, forming impossible physics-bound lattices. It resembled—of all things—a hive; alive in structure despite its inorganic matter. The faint pulsing wasn’t accidental—it possessed the timing of sequences, intentional patterns, a code communicating outward. Kaia’s skin prickled. Could this be alien tech? Or worse... a leftover trap from competing human missions? Asteroid vandalism was rare but not unheard of.
"Endure," she murmured, "prepare recon drones—"
BANG!
Kaia snapped backward when the vault door behind her slammed shut. Red emergency lights activated as a swirl of pneumatic fog hissed from overhead vents. For a second, time went still. Then Endure's voice crackled faintly, cut through by static.
"Major atmospheric breach... internal sabotage confirmed... initiating—"
The connection died completely.
Kaia clutched her scanner tighter and spun, her breath heightened into quick gasps. She braced against the asteroid for support, freezing when she noticed rapid flashes of movement reflected against her visor. No human was supposed to be aboard Odessia other than herself—but shadows cut through the fog. Her heart thudded.
One breath.
Two.
She raised her cutting plasma torch.
“You gonna stop hiding, or am I burning you first?” Her voice trembled barely but held—well-trained from years of mining-induced scare drills. Her reflection on metal beams stared firmly back. No intruder showed… at first.
Then, the alien lattice began to hum louder.
Conclusion Genre: Sci-Fi Psychological Suspense, Thriller/Action continuance seeds intertwined.
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: AI Space Miner: How Artificial Intelligence is Revolutionizing Asteroid Mining for Infinite Resources
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