Diaz stared at her. “That’s insane. The cable will whip. It’ll cut the rig in half.”
“Ma’am,” the engineer cut in, a kid named O’Brien with freckles and a terrified voice. “We can’t launch. The emergency beacons are hard-wired to the rig’s power grid. If we abandon ship, we’re just floating coffins. No one will find us out here. This belt is 300 million square kilometers of empty.” astro offshore
Back on Ceres Station, the inquiry board called it a “catastrophic geological failure.” The shareholders called it a “learning opportunity.” Diaz stared at her
For the forty-three souls aboard the Astro Offshore Platform 9 , or “The Hanging Giant” as the veterans called it, that truth was a religion. They were the roughnecks of the Final Frontier, tethered to a rock called Ceres in the asteroid belt, drilling for helium-3 to feed Earth’s fusion-hungry reactors. It’ll cut the rig in half
“We’ve lost the lower habitation module. Rupture in Section C. Twelve souls unaccounted for,” Diaz replied, his face pale.