Asteroid Number Eight-Three-Five. Morning shift. Year—Twenty-two-fifteen. Monday…maybe.

The alarm went off, a shrill, jangling sound that started me awake. The lights automatically came on, half-blinding me until my eyes adjusted to the glare. It’s too damn early. 

Oh, wait, no, it wasn’t, not on this rock. I groped around the nightstand’s console, found the button to turn off the alarm, and killed the sound. I glanced at the clock on the console—four-fifty in the morning. Glorious. And I’d signed up for a two-year hitch.

My cabin was actually more like a capsule, just large enough to house a mattress and a light blanket, a small night table with a com-link button and an alarm button, and a sixty-by-sixty-centimeter box for my civilian clothes. My boots stood at the entrance.

In the cabins on either side of mine, sleepy, angry voices muttered that they were awake, and they cursed the fact that getting up that early was for the birds.

Only there were no birds on Harry, the nickname for our asteroid. No wildlife. No rivers or trees or hydroponic greenhouses. Nothing but two hundred miners, two trainees, of which I was one, plus the cook, the doctor, one security officer, and ten technicians. 

Call me trainee Gilbert Perlman, although no one ever used my first name in its entirety. Everyone called me Gil, if they spoke to me at all. My fellow trainee was Samantha Carver who handled the mining chores alongside me. 

Samantha—I called her Sam, her nickname, and I was the only one she allowed to call her that—wasn’t my girlfriend, not exactly, but since we were the same age—eighteen in two weeks—it would seem only natural. Added to that, the closest person to our age on this rock was just over thirty. And Sam wasn’t interested in him. 

Our daily schedule consisted of five-hour shifts, fifty miners each, first eating in the commissary and then going off to work. Once our shift was over, we had free time. I used my time to train in the gym and hang out with Sam. There wasn’t that much else to do.

Well, there were other things. The average age here was thirty-five. A third of the miners were women, and they handled themselves as well as any of the men. No sexism here. Either they performed well on the job, or they didn’t. If they couldn’t deal with the workload, then they got a one-way ticket home. 

Everyone had computers, so most of the miners watched old movies or television shows, and they were allowed to send messages to their friends or loved ones once a week. 

As for relationships, they happened. People found places to have their fun, while many of the miners got drunk after their shift was over. Others partook of substances, mainly a drug called Janna-Marie, a powerful marijuana derivative.  

I’d never tried it. Not that I was so perfect, but I wanted a clear head when I worked. Others, though, didn’t think things through. Amphetamines to stay awake and work harder were supposedly used in secret. Drinking was common. We had a difficult job with a lot of hard work, stress, and homesickness, and the shift leaders looked the other way most of the time. 

If any serious disputes arose, the combatants settled it with a punch-up while the shift leaders and the law looked the other way. Childish? Yes, but that was the mindset here. I could handle myself, but I preferred to make friends.

Naturally, at my age, I’d wanted to meet someone cool. Sam was it, but she’d told me that she wanted to keep our friendship going. “I like you, Gil,” she’d said. “But if we do anything and then regret it, we’ll end up hating each other. Give it time, okay?”

Fair enough, and I respected her for that. In return, Sam and I worked on shifts together. We used pickaxes to cut into the rock. Laser pickaxes would’ve been preferable, but they generated shock waves. Shock waves sometimes caused cave-ins, and good luck in getting help when that happened. 

The rock was hard, and it took a long time to hack into. Striking large deposits was rare, but occasionally, we’d find a vein. If someone found it without help, they got the lion’s share of the bonus, so that gave us the incentive to work hard. 

And work hard we did. Swinging a pickax for five hours was taxing. So we learned to pace ourselves, put in a good day’s work, and then rest up. 

Work was one thing, but going space-happy was a major concern. A miner named Ludmilla Verankova lost it during her shift on the Russian rock—nicknamed Sally—and took the lift to the surface. Once there, she opened the door. That was it. Life on an asteroid could be nasty, brutal, and short. 

Honestly speaking, naming an asteroid was silly, but every country that owned an asteroid—there were five in total—had a name. And we were all after tashirium, the rarest ore in the universe.

Named after Tashiro Morinaga, the Japanese astrophysicist who’d first discovered the rare ore over a century ago, it was light, one hundred times stronger than steel, and when refined, it was practically impervious to damage.

Every industry wanted it, not only on Earth, but also on the Martian colonies and a fledgling colony on Venus, as well as on Alphos, and on Gannet Three, both of which were located in the Monavian galaxy, where we were. Because that metal was so rare, companies would pay top credits for it.

Moreover, tashirium was found only on a few asteroids in the Monavian Belt, a circle of asteroids that lay eighty-thousand light-years from Earth. France and Germany had developed the tech necessary to create wormholes many decades back. Using a wormhole brought travelers from Earth to a point many light-years away in minutes.