text: “MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY! To anyone that can hear me, this is Isaac Jameson, the only surviving crew member of the mining vessel Akanu 3! The ship’s engine room caught fire following a micrometeoroid shower and we were forced to land! The engine room exploded shortly after and left a large hull breach! I am stuck on the Pallas asteroid and unable to leave! The other two on board were killed in the explosion! Please respond!” I sent the mayday call and waited nervously for a response. I knew it would take about ten minutes for the signal to reach Mars and another ten for a response to get back. It took twenty-two minutes to get a response. It came from mission control at the Akanu mining headquarters, the company I worked for. They told me a rescue would take about three months to organize and carry out, and that I should check to make sure that the life support systems still worked. I double checked my mining suit for any holes and pressed the button to open the door to the life support room. I found that the life support room was completely unharmed and I turned off the air to the engine room so I wouldn’t lose any more oxygen through the hole in the hull. I realized that I was going to be stuck on Pallas, so I went back into the reactor control room and tried to get the fusion reactor to start again. While I worked I thought about my previous job. ● ● ● I came to Mars on an Ares mining shuttle back in 2183. Ares was the largest and most successful mining company on Mars. Ares paid its miners well, so I decided to get a four year contract job working as a drill operator in the Denning crater mines. Those four years were easily the worst of my life. Life in the mines was miserable. You got up every day, put on your uniform, and had breakfast at the mess hall. After breakfast, you went to the airlocks and put on your pressurized mining suit. Every suit had a twenty-four hour supply of oxygen and a radio. The only way you could talk to others was by using the radio because the air was too thin for sound and the radios were unreliable at best. I don’t know what it was about those radios that made them break so easily. Half the time my radio refused to work because of a loose wire or something, so if I ever needed to tell someone something it was hard for me to know if he had actually heard me. Not to mention it was unbearably hot in the mines and the suit’s cooling system barely worked, so I spent nine hours each day drenched in my own sweat, chipping away at rock walls. In fact, I remember one of the miners in the D2 mineshaft actually died of a heatstroke during my first month of work. They made a big deal about it on the news but Ares didn’t do anything about it. At the end of my shift, I had to walk for a good twenty minutes to get to the airlock before I could take my suit off, and by then I would be practically starved and dying of thirst because it was impossible to eat or drink while I was in my suit. My favorite part about working in the Denning mines was always when I got to stop working. They served us a ton of food after we got back from the mines in the mess hall, but none of it ever tasted particularly good unless it was taco night. There were five mines at Denning. There was the old, closed down D1 mineshaft, then there was the D2 mineshaft, which went down into Mars at a 45° angle. All of the excavation in the D3 mineshaft had to be done with explosives because the rock was too hard to use a drill. I worked in the D4 mineshaft, which was the safest out of the five. The D5 mine was brand new when I started working and the tunnels were not yet wide enough for the big mining equipment to fit yet so everyone that worked there had to mine out the walls by hand with jackhammers and shovels. Miners would always talk about problems they had in the other mines. They said the D2 mine was too hot, the D3 mine was too prone to cave-ins, and the D5 mine was too narrow. Noone really ever complained that much about D4, but it was still bad. I was planning to get another four year contract with Ares when I was nearing the end of my current one, not because I liked working there but because the salary was so high. I was going to renew my contract but then people started to get transferred from the Denning mines to the Cassini crater mines up north. All of the miners that came from Cassini told stories of the place. The Cassini mines were the worst place to be assigned on all of Mars. Cassini was home to the infamous C1 mine. On June 25, 2181, the Cassini colony was devastated by a magnitude 6.2 marsquake. The C1 mine was the only mine at Cassini that remained operational, and it was none too stable. I probably saw somewhere around seven different news stories about massive cave-ins at the C1 mine during my four year stay at the Denning mines. There was no way that I was ever going to the Cassini mines but I doubted I would ever be able to find work elsewhere on Mars. The Ares mining company paid for the shuttle ticket to Mars for all of its employees, but once your contract expired, they didn’t pay for the ticket back to Earth. I guess I was expected to save up eight months worth of pay to be able to afford a shuttle ticket back. If my wife hadn’t lost her job then I wouldn’t have had to worry about sending her almost every penny I made. I didn’t want to quit my job at Ares because I needed to support my wife. I needed to make sure I could find a job that paid more than Ares did so that I would be able to save up enough money to get off Mars and head back to Earth. I spent most of my time in the barracks searching for a job with the small laptop Ares issued me. I figured having experience at Ares might help me get a job working for another mining company. I checked but I couldn’t find anything on Mars that paid better and that I qualified for. I eventually found an opening at a company called Akanu mining. The company had only been in operation for three years but if I was able to get the job I would make three times as much as I did working for Ares! They needed people that had experience working with mining equipment on either Mars or The Moon. I did some more research on the company and found out that it already had two spacecraft that were able to pull up right next to an asteroid and use a robotic scoop to grab chunks of rock that would be knocked loose during a mining operation. It actually looked like I had a fair chance of getting the job so I applied immediately. It only took two days for me to get a reply. I went in for an interview and was hired on the spot. Apparently, they were having a hard time finding qualified people that were willing to go to the asteroid belt. They put me in as part of a crew of three. I was going to be working with Richard Higgs, an engineering technician and Joseph Dewalt, a former commercial shuttle pilot. We were going to fly to the Pallas asteroid in the asteroid belt and start a mining operation there. The trip took three months. During that flight, I mostly did small maintenance tasks on the ship and made sure the life support systems were running like they were supposed to. Richard was in charge of making sure the ship’s onboard fusion reactor and engines stayed running. Joseph was in charge of making small adjustments to the ship’s speed and trajectory. We all watched movies and read books in our spare time. The three months went by quickly and we were just about to land on Pallas when we started getting pelted by micrometeoroids. Most of them were too small to do any harm and bounced harmlessly off the ship’s hull. The engine was the only part on the ship that was vulnerable because it didn’t have any hull plating, unlike the rest of the ship. It got hit a couple of times and the coolant system must have failed because a fire started in the engine room. Joseph managed to land on Pallas using the secondary boosters and told me to cut oxygen to the engine room so that the fire would burn out. He went with Richard to the airlock where we kept our space suits. They put their suits on so that they could breathe in the engine room that was at that point, running out of oxygen and full of smoke. I’m not sure what went wrong but after they went into the engine room there was this loud explosion. I honestly don’t know what caused it. The fuel tank must have ruptured or something. ● ● ● I messed around with the fusion reactor for almost an hour before getting frustrated with it and giving up. If Richard were here, he would have had it running by now. Richard was always good with stuff like this... But now I was all alone on an asteroid with the closest civilization three months away. I still needed a way to keep the life support system powered and the ship’s batteries were running low. I went back into the cockpit and found the controls to the solar panels that were on the ship. I rotated them to face the sun and the ship’s batteries started to charge up. I would have to re-orient the solar panels every couple of days to keep them trained on the sun, but it looked like I was getting enough power out of them. I had plenty of food. The ship was still stocked with enough food to feed three people for four months if it was rationed out. Now that I was the only person left on the ship, I had enough food to not have to worry about rationing it out. I had plenty of food, water, and oxygen to last me until rescue came. I had a lot of everything, but most of all I had a lot of time. I had three months to kill before I was rescued and I honestly had no idea what I should do to pass the time. The only productive thing I could do would be to attempt to mine out a small section of the asteroid and verify that it actually contained valuable minerals. Pallas was expected to contain large amounts of platinum and chromium but there was only one way to make sure. I put on my suit and got the mining equipment ready. I double checked my suit and moved into the airlock, holding a jackhammer. I was going to look for anything valuable. I had to run a tether from my suit to the ship to make sure I wouldn’t float off into space. My suit also had boots that resembled very large cleats that I would have to use to anchor myself to the surface of Pallas. I pressed the button to cycle the airlock and pushed by boots into the ground. I walked out about ten yards from the airlock door and started up the jackhammer I was holding. I started chipping away at the rock and bits of it flew off into space. I went down about four feet and noticed something shiny. I wasn’t sure what it was so I dug down a little deeper and caught one of the chunks as it flew past me. I looked at it closely and realized that it was extremely high-grade chromite, an ore of the metal chromium. This was a huge discovery! I had been able to prove the existence of chromium on Pallas within the first ten minutes of digging. I started making plans on how to dig out more of the stuff as I made my way back to the airlock. When I got back inside the ship I went straight to the cockpit and radioed to Akanu. I told mission control that I was alright and that I could easily survive the three months it would take them to rescue me. I also told them that I found chromite and was planning on mining out more of it to bring with me when I was rescued. It took twenty-two minutes for a response again. They told me that they were not expecting me to still try to do my job. They said that I could bring back whatever I dug up and they would pay me a large share of the profit. I could probably mine out enough chromium from Pallas in three months to get a shuttle back to Earth and be set for life. I wouldn’t have to worry about money ever again. Until then, I’m stuck on this rock with nothing to do but dig.