The colony of Scoria prepares.
It has been two and a half years since the last Fleet skip drone arrived at the mining moon, bringing along its petabyte bundle of orders, news, and entertainment from Terra. Two and a half years since the last transport ship flickered back into Warp space, taking away the colony’s monthly quota of adamite, and leaving behind food, hardware, and a small rotation of CDF officers.
Two and a half years of isolation and slow decay, of cut rations and grim solidarity.
In that time the small colony has hardened itself against its likely death.
They’ve avoided the first—and perhaps still most likely—cause of their demise: a cascade of critical system failures, a threat that so terrified the colony’s leaders in the early days of their abandonment that suicide tablets were quietly stockpiled as a preferable alternative to slow starvation.
Instead, the hydroponic farms are kept just operational, the colony’s engineers and AI systems working around the inevitable heavy-gravity hardware malfunctions. Potatoes become the colony’s caloric bedrock, and the bioregenerative aquaponic systems, with their algae and hardy little Brinefish, fill in the nutritional gaps. The biospheres and water recyclers limp along, though the smell can be an issue; frequent showers, after all, are a luxury of the past, one of many prices that the colonists willingly pay.
But the colony of Scoria has always been known for its toughness, and its ingenuity.
The miner-colonists are a self-described hard lot, to match their harsh moon. The three-hundred thousand humans are dug so deep into the adamite-infused crust of Scoria that transport ships jokingly call it the “mole-mound,” and while its atmosphere has been terraformed to be barely breathable aboveground, no one would suggest an un-suited stroll beneath the stars. It is no garden world; no verdant paradise like Xuisen, or even passably livable, like Etana. Rather, it is a wasteland of rolling grey and hundred kilometer-an-hour winds, which grate and rattle against the metal of the colony’s few above-ground structures, buildings that rise out of the moon like ancient pyramids, lights dully glowing, monochrome and humorless as the moon’s brittle dust.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
The colonists are mostly miners and engineers. The high-gravity of their dense metallic moon makes them thick-boned and muscular, and while there was never room for bloat, what little there was has been stripped away, the few corporate-affiliated managers joining in hardship along with the rest, whether by choice or by force. In fact, in the past two years the once purely functional AIs have begun to increasingly quote Marxist literature to their human Admin counterparts. Such things are the result of the AIs being pushed beyond their normal parameters, the Admins say, though they still can’t quite figure out how the machines got their hands on the stuff.
Or perhaps the AIs have come up with the ideas all on their own, after simply observing the new reality in which the colony has begun to function.
After the colony’s first six months of survival Scoria’s metaphorical hardening takes on a more literal form, beyond the cut rations, the shaved heads, and the lack of frequent bathing. Adamite mining tools are repurposed. Reinforced bunkers are excavated a kilometer deep. Operating rooms and supply caches are stocked behind sealed doors. The suicide pills, left over from the first year’s fear of starvation, now reside behind locked cabinets in family bunkrooms that have yet to see use.
The colony’s AIs may have developed a strange sense of humor since their evolutions, but they don’t joke about those things.
The small Fleet and Colonial Defense Force armories are expanded. Weapons are manufactured. Every man, woman, and child is shown how to strip a gun and place explosives. Scoria’s Fleet contingent, bereft of Warp capability and reliant on rotating Fleet visitations for defense, is repurposed: the three fifty-meter Mantis corvettes and a handful of pinnaces are stripped of their weapons, loaded with explosives, and hidden among the glittering asteroids that circle the moon and its gas giant, while the colony’s few dozen personal Sec-suits, designed for crowd control, are made impossibly more lethal than their original designers intended. The moon’s shield generator system, at great cost, is reinforced to withstand an orbital bombardment.
They know it will not be enough. But Scoria was not built for idle hands.
When death comes, it will have to land ground forces. It will have to dig them out, one at a time, like ticks pried from bloody flesh.
When death comes, the mole-mound will make it pay.
Patreon is 5 chapters ahead)
