The legend of Danny Engall, part 1

Terry always waits until the last second to put the thrusters on and it drives me nuts. I understand why he does it, because a lot of people do it, but I feel invisible in the cockpit here with him and I might as well be just another chunk of rock like we've got strapped to the back.

He's trying to find that sweet spot, the place somewhere between the dock and the station where our inertia runs out just enough to make it just barely energy-efficient to start using the thrusters. He can feel it. Heck, I can feel it, I've been doing this long enough. Where we slow down just enough. Then he eases the throttle forward light as a breath and the hopper picks up speed without any jerks. Very smooth. He's been doing this for ten years.

Terry is a very, very good pilot. There are a lot of very good pilots here. I'm a good pilot myself, but I'm never going to have that genius feel for the controls like they do. This place attracts people who like to be very, very good at things. Because there's a lot that can go wrong up here, and sometimes if you give yourself a millimeter too much on either side you're toast. Situations like that don't happen all the time, but they happen enough that mining has once again become the system's Most Dangerous Job.

Terry Spratt doesn't look at all like the kind of person you'd expect to be a hot-shot pilot. He's short and thick-lipped and curly-haired and has a boy's high voice, and cares more about getting home and watching the World Series of Poker than about bragging how that last run went. He doesn't look like a hero and he doesn't look like the kind of guy I'd have expected to change my life.

I came up here five years ago because I didn't know what the hell to do with my life. I had been working as a handler for a huge border collie breeding and showing operation, I lived and slept and practically breathed dogs, and then Mojo--the guy who started it all, the champion, the number one sire, and probably my best friend--died, and the owners expected me to carry on with the new generations and I just couldn't. It was the oddest thing but as I tried working with the pups and tried working by myself as a groomer for a few months, I came to this realization that I wasn't sure if liked dogs at all. I just liked Mojo. I had since I first met him at my cousin's wedding. He was why I ended up working with the McHones for fifteen years. And I had no clue where to go from there. All I knew was dog handling.

So I came up here. I signed up as a miner and got my suit and my tools and got to work on the asteroid and I hated it more than I could ever have thought it was possible to hate anything. I remember hearing the alarm in the morning and waking up in my dark bunk and wanting more than anything else in the world to pull the covers over my head and lie there while my roommates shook me and shouted at me and eventually gave up and went off to breakfast... the only reason I didn't was that I knew I'd signed a contract and I knew if the company had to pay to ship me back home I wouldn't dig myself out of that hole for years. And I went through that for literally the first year and a half here. Almost every morning. I would finally get up and jam my legs into the legs of the suit and tie the arms around my waist and get to the mess room just as they were putting breakfast away, and have some cold cereal and just make it onto the hopper I was sharing with two kids from Canada who were happy as hell to be here.

Through the entire day I'd have a running commentary in my head on the outrage and stupidity of everything I saw and did. "God, Caleb is an asshole. Is that the fifth time he's walked off without anchoring the hopper? If I fucking get killed because of him... Christ, do you think they could afford to spend more than five dollars on the joints on these suits? I can't even touch my toes, let alone pick up anything I drop. What the hell is Jason doing? Why is he using the #5 drill? If he breaks that thing and we have to go back..." all day long. It's funny but some days I think about half of it was about dying.

I was scared of dying, all the time. I would say there's death all around you up here, and there is, if you think of it that way... the vacuum and all... but somebody really only dies every few months, and with thousands of miners crawling over these rocks that's a pretty good rate of survival, all things considered. But I kept thinking about it and thinking about it and I was convinced it would be me next. Because of something Caleb or Jason did, or just some random asteroid collision, or a tear in my suit. I couldn't keep my mind off it. And I was angry and scared all the time.

That didn't really start to change until the day Caleb crashed the hopper into the side of GR8290 or something and broke his leg, and we had Terry flying us for a few days until some other guy took over. I was really out of it that first day Terry was with us. I remember being really mechanical, sealing my suit up and getting in the hopper and sitting there across from Terry not caring who he was, and looking out at the stars like all the sky was just black paper with holes poled in it. Nothing felt real. My system was fried with adrenaline by then, cortisol, just so exhausted all the time that I was only half there. I felt like a robot. I was totally resigned to the fact that I couldn't get out of the job and I was just going to keep going like this for another three and a half years until my contract was up. I remember talking with Terry and Jason as if I were there. But there was a buzzing in my ears and nothing was real.

I climbed out of the hopper door and felt my boots stick to the rock, and I shouldered one of the drills and went right off to a "corner" of the rock where I knew there was some platinum. And I worked at it all day, thinking about how I was going to be in the next crash, and that'd be it. And about how to worm out of that fate. I wanted really badly to transfer to another team but I knew I was at the bottom of the totem pole and anyway, what if I got stuck with someone worse? Some of these young kids were really crazy. I could deliberately injure myself and end up back in hospital with Caleb, but that'd only last for a little while. I ground miserably at the rock holding the platinum in place. It was very long and very quiet and eventually we got back in the hopper and went home and I stayed in my bunk the rest of the night.

It wasn't until the next day that I really talked to Terry. We landed on another asteroid and again I got out and went over to where I knew there was some platinum, and he came over and looked at what I was doing.

"How long you been up here?" he said.

I was irritated. "A year and a half," I said.

He nodded in his helmet, toeing the dust that was kicking up into nowhere. "And they still got you stuck with that kid?"

I wanted him to stand a little further off so he didn't endanger me, didn't get in the way of what I was doing. It's hard for me to split my attention. I didn't know what to say to him. "Well, yeah."

He watched me drill for another minute without saying anything, which really irritated me. I noticed his squinty eyes then and his slow-looking lips. "We had a guy up here a year ago... maybe before you came... named Danny Engall. He's with Dynacorps now. He had the same kind of feel for ore that you do."

I didn't know Terry from Adam then, and I'd certainly never heard of Danny Engall. "I don't think I have any kind of a feel for ore," I said, leaning hard into the drill.

I could tell when Terry shrugged in his suit. "I could believe that you think you don't. If you've only been here a year and a half and haven't worked with anyone other than Boy Wonder over there. But I've been up here almost a decade and believe me, you do."

So what was I supposed to say to that? "What good is that going to do me?"

Terry chuckled.

He eventually wandered back to the hopper and spent the rest of the day catching transmissions and playing with the settings. I thought he was being a lazy bum and maybe he was, but I didn't know then how much of a right to that he'd earned. We talked a little bit the next day too, about my supposed feel for ore, where it was and how to get at it, and then I didn't see him. Some guy with red hair and freckles took over as pilot until Caleb got back and I don't even remember his name.

But it was only a couple weeks more of dead misery until I got transferred to Terry's hopper, and then I was too busy to think about dying for a long time.