Quoted By:
"Asteroid mining is slow work. In the heyday of humanity's stellar expansion, Sol's asteroid belt was littered with hundreds of mining stations: ranging from hulking refinery nodes operated by planetary polities to smaller, habitat-like structures inhabited by independent prospectors. Vast fleets of mining ships picked away at pre-designated targets, traveling on mass-efficient ion thrusters to improve yield margins. On their return trajectories, their drive beams would throw icy gusts of ion wind against my home planet's artificial magnetosphere. Cyan highlights above a red planet.
I began patrolling inside the Mars/Jovian belt a few decades after tritium mining peaked. More exotic - but also more efficient - fusion cycles had quickly pared down system-wide tritium demand. With the exception of a few dozen water harvesters, nearly all of the stations had been abandoned: mouldering in the shadow of nearby asteroids with most of their components stripped. Salvagers - some legitimate, most not - dove in and out, stripping away hull cladding in search of precious alloys.
I never bothered with them. The RAIN's predecessor lingered in the asteroid belt for one reason: to escape the prying eyes of orbiting observatories and lunar screening fleets. Just as the RAIN is doing now.
A few hours after finishing her retrograde burn, I eased the RAIN into a familiar insertion arc: copying both the speed and angular momentum of the average Mizarain belt-object to avoid detection. As she floated, her tactical readout populated with prospective targets. They were hundreds of semi-automated Mizarian mining drones, bright spots on the RAIN's passive sensors as they stripped tritium using low-yield magnetic beams.
As we crept towards the three massive stations responsible for steering the drone fleet and refining their output, we considered the feasibility of mounting another intrusion attack. There was nothing stopping us - at least not from a cryptographic standpoint. If anything, MERRYGATE informed me that the drones were even more primitive than the transport fleet she had handily commandeered a few months ago. They relied entirely on their parent-station for navigational guidance, making them ideal targets for comm-spoofing.
No, that wasn't the problem.
