"Ever the romantic," Re-lee said.
He shook his head. "The ores will not mine themselves."
She nodded. "I understand. Fortunately, I only have three miners this time.”
“It is more than enough,” he grumbled.
1
Phares slammed his tools on the ground.
"I just fixed this," he muttered as he started working on the frames that kept the asteroid pocket stable for mining. The rails ran around the chamber, sliding and adjusting automatically to support the inside of the asteroid as the miners worked.
The rails were supposed to, anyway.
When they worked.
"If you'd fixed it right the first time," came Shoval from behind him, "we wouldn't be back here."
Phares turned and glared at his parental unit. "I didn’t ask you."
"You should have. I would have told you that setting was wrong." Shoval crossed his beefy arms. His purple scales were more faded than Phares's, but he remained as big and strong. Even the bones that stuck out of his shoulders looked harder and meaner than Phares's.
His parental was just more of everything than Phares was.
“It wasn’t wrong,” Phares muttered and gritted his teeth.
“Well, we’re here. If you had done it right, we wouldn’t be here.” He sorted through his own tools, the metals clashing together in his kit, in that way he would do to make Phares crazy.
"I thought I did.” Phares pulled out his gear.
"Evidently not."
He went over the scans and looked at all the rod properties and their network. He also checked the chamber’s work history to see if something else had happened in there, and another technician had been in to fix something.
There had been.
Shoval. Phares gritted his teeth again.
“Why were you down here?” Phares snapped.
His parental glared back at him defiantly. “You don’t have the talent to—”
Phares spun and threw his scanner. The device sparked as it hit the wall, and a casing popped off.
Which only made Shoval laugh. “You really should go back to the mines. You’re not made for this work.”
“Your words are not accurate,” he said, though even to his own ears, it lacked conviction. Children did not fight back against their parental units, of course.
Shoval leaned in. “We wouldn’t be back down here if I was wrong.”
“The blasts knocked the asteroids off course—”
“Excuses don’t fly.” He closed in on Phares. “Lives are lost, and you’re blaming it on the asteroid’s orbital pattern? You didn’t do your job. Plain and simple.”
Everything in space orbited another object of greater mass and gravity. It was how space worked. Asteroids orbited planets, making rings. Or larger ones orbited stars. Maybe planets that never fully formed. Maybe planets that had died in a celestial collision.
The Mining Guild mined all of it for resources.
