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Reily felt a strange vibration through her magnetic boots as she walked towards the docks of Mineral Depot 145C. MD-145C was a refinery in the middle of an asteroid belt that mostly processed tungsten, cobalt and magnesium from massive automated harvesting barges. She was a supervisor of the engineering team that kept the barges running smoothly and oversaw their repair and maintenance. Reily had done some time in a prison colony for smuggling and her status as an ex-convict meant working on a belt, doing dangerous work. 

Every few steps she felt it again, a small vibration, then a delay, then again, and the vibrations started to feel larger. She wondered if the asteroid had become unstable, but that was very unlikely, the facility had been there a long time, and the tremors were coming at regular intervals. Something about this gave her a bad feeling. 

She clicked her radio on to listen in on her team of engineers and heard Paolo's voice saying there was a problem on docking platform 3 with a stuck conveyer. The conveyers between the barges and the refinery ran through long telescoping cylindrical tubes that extended out to the arriving barges and hauled in the ore in large containers that ran on magnetic rails inside the tube. The system was old, but her team was good and they kept things running smoothly most of the time.

MD-145C was run by a private contractor for the federal navy called 'Hoyt Expeditionary and Chemical'  who used the minerals to manufacture ammunition and warheads. The facility had been purchased from the government during a time of relative peace and security for a low price. When a mineral assayer found large deposits of the necessary materials for warheads and railgun ammunition, it seemed, at least to Reily, like war was suddenly on everyone's minds, no doubt the many political lobbyists Hoyt E&C employed had made the case for it. 

Reily had a taste of war, not as a soldier, but as a smuggler. As it turned out you could make a large amount of money illegally bypassing military blockades with looted antiquities and luxury goods. The federation had caught her smuggling a load of chitinous shells from a beetle like creature that grew to be as large as cattle. The shells were carved into bowls and musical instruments prized for their appearance. The shells were glossy obsidian until you held them in the light a certain way and they gave off a rainbow of different hues. Sometimes the rainbows were shades of blue, sometimes they were prismatic with every color, but no two pieces were the same and no two gave off identical rainbows. 

 The federation's enemy in this war were the Mercantile Combine System States, a confederacy of gerontocratic corporations, each a superpower in its own right. The life-extension methods of the gerontocracy were a closely guarded secret and living for the better part of one thousand years tended to entrench one in wealth and power. 

Reily, truthfully, would side with the federation any day if she had to choose, but she had no scruples selling blockaded luxury goods to the MCSS and liberating them of some of their obscene wealth. It wasn't as if she was selling them anything that would bolster their war efforts or aid them in their oppression of the poor. Luxury goods to a more pragmatic person like Reily, were just useless trinkets and status symbols in a game she never had any desire to play. The Federal Navy however still took offense to Reily's comings and goings to and from the MCSS. 

A tremor nearly buckled Reily's knees, something was very wrong. She flicked her wrist and disengaged her magnetic boots and flared her jetpack sending her careening down the corridor towards docking platform 3. As she passed the terminal end of the conveyer system where the containers of ore offloaded into the refinery she saw an entire bulkhead 40 feet high turning concave and convex in tune to the tremors coming through the floor. She flared her jetpack's thruster again accelerating dangerously toward the docking bay, flicking on her magnetic boots and slamming them into the deck to stop herself in front of the airlock. 

The facility was pressurized, but when on duty, her team always wore full exo-suits and helmets because their work frequently had them going in and out of the facility to work on the barges. The suits were equipped with a small omnidirectional jetpack that didn't have much fuel, but could provide about 5 minutes of constant thrust. When used in zero gravity, sparingly in bursts, it was generally enough to get you where you needed to be and back. Accelerate too much however and you may not have enough fuel to slow yourself back down, so they weren't useful for long excursions. 

The outer airlock hatch was blown and air was leaking through the inner hatch where it had become warped from whatever calamity was going out there in the dark on docking platform 3. Reily grabbed a prybar stashed next to the airlock door and pushing against the grip her magnetic boots had on the floor she wrenched the inner door open, sending a gush of air out into space and triggering a lockdown of the floor she was on, sealing the doors she had come through. What she saw confused and horrified her. 

The large cylindrical docking tube that carried the ore lifted up nearly to the ceiling, then came crashing down to the deck, slamming against the floor, nearly shaking her out of her boots. Then the entire tube swung back up towards the ceiling straining as it bent and buckled. Paolo came through the radio swearing and yelling that, Raymond, a junior engineer was still on the barge. That's when Reily suddenly realized what was happening. It wasn't just the conveyer tube jumping up and down, the mining barge had failed to turn off its reciprocal stabilizing thrusters when it attached to the conveyer and was trying to stabilize itself, first by thrusting upwards, then downwards, creating a harmonic resonance and overcompensating each time it flared its massive engines against the tensile strength of the docking cylinder. 

Reily heard Paolo again, "It's going to tear the whole facility apart!". 

He was right. 

Reily shut off her boots and flared her jetpack towards a tool locker and dug out a massive grinding saw, then spun, aimed herself at the point where the cylinder was flexing up and down and flared her jetpack again. She twisted and triggered her boots and locked them onto the cylinder being tossed around with each motion of the barge. She was tossed upwards and nearly lost her grip on the handheld saw, then bent down and fired up the spinning blade, angling it towards the support beams on the corners of the cylinder. 

"I have to cut it loose." She managed to squawk back at Paolo.

"You can't do that, Raymond's still on board. I can't raise him on the radio, he must be unconscious."

"There's no choice, it's going to take the entire facility apart." She said back to him, resolutely. 

The saw sliced through one corner beam on the exoskeleton of the telescoping tube and she was nearly thrown from her position on the cylinder as the up and down motion suddenly became unstable and started moving left to right as well on the now-uneven support structure. The whole facility shuddered as two explosions occurred. One deep inside the refinery and one onboard the flailing barge. Flames shot out of several blown bulkheads on the barge. 

Reily turned and started sawing the other corner beam. She barely cut into it when the violent motion of the tube ripped it clean off and the cylinder groaned and ripped open beneath her feet, severing completely from the station, then slamming against the deck one last time and dragged along the platform before being yanked out into space as the attached barge launched itself out into the belt.  

Reily heard Paolo say, "Oh my God, Raymond!"

Reily slammed her jetpack thruster wide open towards the outer opening of the docking bay and burned an arc turning a backflipping circle through space above the refinery towards an exterior landing platform where an old frigate was parked. The frigate was called the Beta Fish because it had solar sails resembling the fins of the small fish. The ship could also fly under the power of massive retrofitted hydrogen thrusters. It was the personal vessel of the captain of the mining operation, a stumpy, cranky man named Jennings. It was allegedly a prize he won in a high stakes card game. Reily flew towards the platform and angled for the outer hatch of the Beta Fish. She scraped her boots along the surface of the old ship and triggered the magnets, nearly breaking her ankles inside the boots. She bent down and blew the hatch, leaping into the pilot's seat. She frantically began powering up the ship, flared the hydrogen thrusters to full strength and scorched the landing platform beneath her. If she managed to survive what she was about to do, Jennings was certainly going to kill her. She brought the frigate roaring around in front of a burning trail of hydrogen towards the direction the mining barge had been thrown and sent the Beta Fish hurtling after it. She saw a small dot through the heads up display and began putting the Beta Fish into a landing sequence. The large landing foot magnetized itself beneath the ship as the barge grew larger in her display. She began to decelerate matching the velocity of the barge and angled the magnetic foot towards it. She started working the controls of the maneuvering jets manually and tried to match the rotation of the barge then brought the two ships together locking the landing gear onto the massive mining barge's surface. 

Reily began the task of arduously turning the entire barge and the beta fish around so that the powerful forward thruster was facing opposite their direction of travel and began trying to slow both vessels down. A warning light went off about the landing gear, but the magnetic foot seemed to hold as she carefully slowed down. It took the entire fuel tank of hydrogen to slow down the massive barge, still full of ore. Reilly brought the craft to a standstill in the middle of the belt and went outside to see if she could retrieve Raymond and bring him onboard the Beta Fish. The barge was still venting gas, but the flames had mostly died out. She found Raymond unconscious stuck beneath a terminal. She lifted it off him and carried him back inside Jennings' frigate. They didn't have enough fuel to haul the massive barge back to the facility, but they could wait for a tow. Reily zoomed her display in on the facility to inspect the damage for the first time. Docking bay 3 was a mess of debris and the explosion from inside the facility had come from one of the ore smelters. It had ripped a hole in the ceiling, but the facility was otherwise intact. 

"Reily, what the hell was that?" It was Jennings coming through the Beta Fish's communications array. "What have you done with my ship?" 

She responded, "Raymond's hurt boss, we need a tow back to base. Have Paolo prep the medbay."