The Tartarus Directive

Chapter 11

The Hub was the heart and brain of all planetside mining operations. In its center was the command module. There, the Hub could communicate with every outpost on the planet's surface and with the Atlas out in orbit, as well as monitor overall operations. From the command module sprung narrow corridors that connected a maze of bunkhouses, cafeterias, workshops, docking bays, storage areas, and an inadequate medical bay.

Griff walked down the cramped, dark corridors towards the command module. The small portholes placed throughout were practically the only source of light on the interior, and the dust storm outside filtered the sunlight to give the place a distinctly orange hue. Though the Hub was powered primarily by solar energy, in harsh dust storms like this the panels had to be retracted to avoid being damaged. Thus the Hub was running on emergency power stores and so all non-essential electrical systems were offline, especially during the day. The floor everywhere was blanketed in a thin layer of coppery brown dust in which one could see like rings in a tree trunk the comings and goings of countless pairs of worn-through boots.

The coarse quilted fabric wall coverings, once a stark white, had been soiled over the centuries of use and disassembly and reassembly with soot and dirt and left in many places in tatters. Griff observed an abundance of graffiti on all surfaces which would lend themselves to it. Centuries of bored, tired, and overworked miners had scrawled their names or epithets or vulgar cartoons all over.

The mining operations, once considered a noble and self-sacrificing professional path for its workers, had become a hive of the ship's criminals--a penal colony. Most of the workers were now unpaid forced laborers--convicts serving their sentences with lethargy. Wherever a convict could be used, a paid worker was replaced. In the cafeterias, the kitchen staff was composed entirely of convicts. Even many nurses in the medical bay and engineers in the workshops were convicts lucky enough to have technical skills excusing them from menial duties.

To attempt escape meant in almost every case death for the convict. There were but a few means of escape. A convict could attempt to stow away on a freight shuttle--some had made the deadly mistake of hiding in a depressurized cargo bay. Even if a convict did survive the trip to the ship, word of his escape would travel quickly and Security Service officers would be waiting to put him on the first shuttle back. Even if he returned to the ship unnoticed, he could but count the days before someone recognized him and reported him and again be returned to the surface. If by some miraculous means he managed to escape completely undetected, his only option was the Warrens. He could live only like a rat in the darkness.

Some convicts desired faster release from their sentence. There had been a number of recent cases of convicts unsealing the hatches to the outside and simply walking out into the poisonous planet to die. It could not be said how many desiccated corpses lay strewn about, half-buried in the sandy dirt of the many planets which the Atlas had visited. No one could say definitively how far these escapees managed to get before perishing, but it was safe to say not very far given bodies were visible from the portholes of the Hub. Naturally, measures had been taken to prevent such suicidal convicts from wandering into the dust to their death. This was not because their lives were valuable, but because recycling corpses for fertilizer was big business on the ship, and it was preferred that corpses remain easily retrievable for such purposes.

Even for those who knew better than to risk escape but also did not wish to end their lives, death was still commonplace. Ventilation in the peripheral outposts in particular was in an awful state. The poorly-maintained scrubbers in the various modules left the air heavy and unhealthy, smelling and tasting of minerals and metal which shredded the lungs and poisoned the blood. Wounds or illnesses were often left untreated and shortages of qualified medical staff and medicine meant that ailments which were commonplace on the ship were often a death sentence on the surface.