Fiction logo

The Lucky Leprechaun

A story about an asteroid miner.

By Chris CummingsPublished 2 years ago 20 min read
Like
The Lucky Leprechaun
Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash

Prologue

The Lucky Leprechaun was an asteroid miner that worked the Kuiper Asteroid Belt. Seamus O'Shaughnessy, the Captain, was also the only crewman aboard, part-owner with his parents, who had retired to Mars. It wasn't always this way; legend had it that Seamus' great grandfather had won the Lep in a decidedly dodgy poker game over 100 years ago. Back then, she needed a crew of 12 to keep everything going. Not anymore, now it was all computers and robots. Seamus spent most of his time checking up on processes that ran perfectly fine without him.

The Lep was one of the early bipod mining ships; the first pod housed the engines, mining, processing, smelting and metal storage. The nuclear reactors, engines, robot maintenance – everything to do with mining could be found therein. The habitat pod could be considered the brains of the ship; it held the master and backup computers, spacious living quarters and ship controls. One of the unique features of the old bipod ships was their ability to generate gravity in the habitat. Upon arrival at a mining site, the pods separated along rails, with the habitat becoming the satellite of the main ship.

Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will.

The worst day of Seamus' life began at 3 am, as most bad days are apt to do. A golf ball-sized meteoroid punched through the side of the habitat pod, drilling through the main computer and breaking into several shards on impact. These spread out in a cone of destruction that flew through the cabin before having enough momentum to pepper the far side with a dozen holes into space. Alarms should have rung; red lights should have flashed. They did not. It did not matter since Seamus was already awake, as one does not sleep through such an event! He tried to jump out of bed and tumbled to the floor; something was wonky with the gravity. A problem for later, as the air was screaming like demented bagpipes out of the holes in the hull. He looked at the entry point and realised it was too big to patch easily; his suit helmet lay on the floor in front of him. Grabbing it, he jammed the back of the helmet into the hole, reasoning that if it could take the vacuum of space when on his head, it should be able to handle the leak. The helmet stuck, creaked and flexed, but stayed there. Good enough. Spinning, he looked for the other holes, realising that since there were so many, their surface area was much greater than the one he just plugged.

He dove for the emergency kit, popping it open on the floor. It was full of useless crap; he had been using it as a toolkit and had to now rummage through it for the patches and goo. He upended the kit and let everything spill out as more and more air escaped; it was getting harder to breathe as if he was on a mountain top. There! Scooping them up, he jumped towards the holes and promptly brained himself on the ceiling. Coming down on his hands and knees, he knelt for a moment seeing stars, yep, definitely losing gravity. Facing the holes, he started patching – goo on the patch, put over the hole, repeat until all the holes were done. He paused for a moment realising the screaming whistling had subsided into a subdued hissing coming from behind him. He turned and looked at his helmet and the hole it plugged, mostly plugged. None of the remaining patches were big enough not to be sucked out. He could get into his suit and let all the air escape, then patch the hole, but a spacer never willingly vacced their ship. To do that, he also needed to put his helmet on, and it was stuck hard against the hole. Stuck hard… Grabbing the goo, he squirted it around the edge of the spot where the helmet pressed against the hull. The hissing slowly stopped.

Seamus took a breath and let it out slowly, then another and another in quick succession. The air pressure inside the habitat was very low. He also noted that now the gravity was almost non-existent. Moving slowly hand over hand to the control deck, he started punching buttons and controls to bring the main computer online. Everything remained dark, and nothing seemed to work. Turning, he looked at the central computer housing and saw the meteoroid had blasted it from back to front. Ok, ok, the backup should work; it was there in case this ever happened. Why wasn't it working? The fuse box! He pushed himself over to it and looked inside. A dozen fuses had been tripped; the main computer was off, obviously, but so was the backup. He reached and flipped the backup's fuse, suddenly there was the sound of electrical shorting, a loud bang, and then smoke began pouring out of the backup's case, thick, black and oily. The fuse popped back to off with a slight click.

Seamus grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and pushed off towards the smoke. He ripped off the cover and sprayed the burning, smoking computer liberally with foam. Floating there, looking at the mess of the backup computer as the panel sailed past his head, slowly rotating and showing several holes where shards of the meteoroid had delivered their death blow. Coughing from the acrid smoke; absently, he thought he needed to cycle the atmosphere to get the smoke out. The computers were dead; he couldn't do that. The computers were dead. Dead. Nothing worked; nothing was going to work. He couldn't do anything but wait to die…

He sat in the pilot's chair in his suit and a spare helmet and looked out the viewport to the asteroids and stars. The inside of the habitat was smoky and hazy, getting colder and with the equivalent atmospheric pressure of the Himalayas. His HUD told him he had 35 minutes of air left in his tank; he looked over at the spare tanks lining the wall near the airlock. All empty, though protocol said they should be full in case of an emergency. Seamus cursed his lazy, complacent ass. Not that it mattered really, he would die in several hours rather than minutes. As he looked out the screen, he saw the jets of several robots moving back and forth from the asteroid chosen, still doing their job, still working, following orders well after he was a space popsicle. The mining facility would keep mining, smelting and storing metal until the mining computer deemed it was no longer viable, and then it too would shut down. The Lep would become a floating mausoleum of riches for some other lucky miner to discover. Something tickled his mind, something about the robots. The robots keeping on working. THE MINING COMPUTER!

Seamus bolted from the chair and flung himself at the airlock, mashing the button. Damn, no power. He pulled off the emergency cover and manually opened the door. Pulling it closed, he locked it and realised he wouldn't be able to evacuate the chamber. Locking himself to the wall via his spaceline, he blew the outer door. Thirty minutes left. Did he have enough time? He unhooked his line. To make it, he would have to do this the fast way. Activating his magnetic boots, Seamus walked around the habitat hull until the mining pod was directly above him, more than 200 metres away, crouching; he turned off the magnets and jumped. His suit's HUD locked onto the nearest hatchway; there were no outer airlocks on this pod, there wasn't any need.

Twenty-five minutes.

Space, as has been remarked many times, is enormous, really, really big; you could fire a projectile in any of a million directions and never hit anything, ever, even in an asteroid belt. Therefore, it was with some surprise that Seamus was knocked off his trajectory by a basketball-sized meteoroid. He couldn't believe it. Twice in a matter of minutes, he had encountered rogue meteoroids. Fortunately, this time, the one that hit him was only travelling at about 5 km/hour perpendicular to his course, so it caused no injury greater than bruising. However, what it did do was push him outside his jump line to the mining pod; now, he was not going to land anywhere on it or even near it. He was, to be honest, completely screwed. It was at this time that he remembered the jet pack that had been hanging inside the airlock back on the habitat. He had glanced at it and decided it would take too long to put on, and he didn't need it. Dammit, fate had decided that today he was going to die, and it looked like he could do nothing to change that. He looked at his HUD and cycled through the screens seeing if there was anything he could do, anything that would change his trajectory.

As he was looking, he noticed a line of robots go by less than 10 metres away, carrying ore back to the pod and heading back out to keep mining. If only he could get one to come to him, but his space suit computer had limited capabilities and controlling the robots was not one of them. He watched helplessly as they streamed past; if only he could hitch a ride… his spaceline! If he could pay it out and use it like a lasso, working feverishly as he was drifting further and further from both the robots and the ship, he began spinning up the line as it spooled out from his suit. With no gravity or air resistance, he could get it moving in wider and wider circles, now to bring it down towards that next robot… He felt rather than heard it clang onto the robot's body and then wrap itself around, right over the manoeuvring jets that started to cut through the line! He slammed his fist down on the spool in control while he watched the line begin to glow red, then white, then suddenly it parted, and the line snapped back into his suit as the robot reoriented itself and continued its mission. Was the momentum he gained enough? Was it in the right direction? He was moving, but it was so slow, another robot went past in front of him with its ore load. Was the timing going to work so he could snag the next in line? He swivelled his head, looking for the next robot, there in the distance, coming along the same trajectory as the others. He eyeballed the robot and his movement; it would be close… but would it be close enough? Too soon, too late, and it might as well be a million miles.

The robot was going to pass in front of him just a few seconds before he arrived. He was going to miss it. Seamus frantically thought of something he could throw and shoot behind him to give him just a little more speed.

Only one option came to mind.

Sighing and nodding his head in resignation, he took several deep breaths and undid his air bottle. Swivelling his body so that his back was now travelling towards the robot’s path, he put the butt of the tank into his stomach and aimed the nozzle away from him. He had to time this just right, too much, and he would fly past, too little, and he still wouldn’t make it. He’d been a spacer since before he could walk, he couldn’t give you the maths, the vectors or anything like that, but like any good spacer worth his salt, he could eyeball a problem like this and time it just right. Or so he hoped. He turned the nozzle, and a jet of air blasted out; he kept his head turned watching the robot, judging the distance, the speed, the angles and then nozzle off! Reconnecting the bottle, he took a few deep breaths and, while turning back to the robot, looked at how much time he had left. Seven minutes, his shoulders slumped; even if he did catch this ride back, what could he do in seven minutes. His funk only lasted a few seconds; he focused on the robot again, one problem at a time Seamus, deal with this one right now. He had timed it perfectly, bumping into the robot gently. He wrapped his arms around it and rode it into the mining pod as he watched the seconds tick down on what remained of his life.

He needed to find a new tank and fast. As the robot pulled into the pod, he pushed off to land on the gantry that ran along the side from end to end. There was a control room at the front of the pod, leftover from the days when it took an entire crew, and where he would find the mining computer. Maybe, just maybe, it would have air tanks there. Seamus didn’t know, he had been in the mining pod only a handful of times, and those had been when something needed fixing that the robots couldn’t handle or when the Lep was in the dock being refurbished. He had been focused on the task at hand, not sightseeing.

Two minutes.

Arriving at the control room, he yanked on the door; it didn’t budge. LOCKED! No, it was an airlock; he remembered this room was the only place on the pod that could be pressurised. He cycled the airlock mechanism, and the door clicked. Fortunately, it had not been pressurised, or he would have had to wait for it to remove the air, an ironic twist, he thought, dying of asphyxiation while watching the room in front of you fill with air. Seamus quickly moved through the door, and sealing it, began pressurising the control room. The pressure gauge was coming up slowly; he looked at his air levels. Fifty seconds! That was it; he would have to risk it. He turned off his suit’s air supply and began releasing his helmet; the gauge was still moving terribly slowly. He popped his helmet, and as he did so, his ears popped in the low pressure, painfully equalising. He took a tentative breath, the air was thin, stale, metallic, rusty tasting, but it was good! He let himself relax for a moment; he was still alive. Trapped but alive.

The control room was covered in a fine layer of dust, evidence of its disuse. Seamus looked around; well, there weren’t any air tanks here. He scanned the controls and monitors. It was possible to view the different parts of the mining pod through a number of cameras mounted throughout. There were buttons to switch between cameras and a small joystick to swivel and zoom the one you were currently viewing. They were the same cameras he could access from the habitat pod, so he was familiar with what they showed. Maybe there was something on their screens that he had always dismissed, something that now would prove to be vital. He started flicking through the screens, not seeing anything worthwhile. Wait, that last one, in the distance, in a corner. He swivelled and panned the camera, zooming it in. The image was grainy, but there was a stack of air bottles there! He zoomed out a little and saw a sign above the stack. “Expired Air Bottles – to be recycled”. Expired? How old were those bottles? Seamus thought about the last time the mining pod had a crew; geez, they had to be 30 to 40 years old! No way was he going to use something that old. He cycled through the other cameras; only one other had anything remotely looking useful, a storeroom halfway down the length of the pod, and he had no idea what was in it, but perhaps….

Seamus sighed and turned his mind to the other problem he had. Retrieving the mining computer to use as the main ship computer in the habitat. It was an older and dumber model, but it should work well enough if he loaded the older out of date command software on it. However, this computer also operated the propulsion systems, so he could not just shut down the mining and take it. If he did, even if he got it working in the habitat, the ship would be going nowhere. Of course, the mining computer had its own backup computer, but it was even older, and it wouldn’t take the command software. He would have to switch the system over to the backup, uncouple the main mining computer and then take it back to the habitat. He decided to wipe it and install the needed software here, where everything worked—checking that the lights on both computers were all green, he reached for the large red switch on the console that said, “BACKUP – MAIN”. He hesitated, then realising he had to do it, flicked the switch decisively. The lights in the control room flickered, then brightened and remained on. He swept his eyes across the console; everything seemed to be working ok… nothing showing red… it worked! He let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding and grinned. Disconnecting the main mining computer, he carried it over to another console, plugged it in, and began wiping it. His suit computer had the zipped main software install file, and he transferred it to the computer to begin the install. Relaxing, he leaned back in the chair and put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes.

That’s when the sirens and red lights started.

Seamus vaulted forward to stare at the backup computer’s screen:

> NUCLEAR CONTAINMENT FAILURE IMMINENT

> COOLING RELEASE VALVE INOPERATIVE

> MANUAL RELEASE OF VALVE REQUIRED

> CONTAINMENT FAILURE IN 4:37 MINUTES

He smacked his forehead; they had upgraded the cooling system during the last refit. He was supposed to have updated the propulsion software in the backup, but he had put it off, forgotten about it. Great! So, he had to get to the reactor, at the other end of the ship, get to the release valve, which was hidden under the whole bloody lot, turn it and hope it worked, in less than 4 minutes now, with only 1 minute of air left in the only tank he had left. He looked at the monitors as he picked up his helmet. Storeroom or expired bottles? Only enough air and time for one or the other. Making his choice, he sealed his helmet and punched the emergency decompression button next to the airlock door; dust and air swirled past him as he launched himself down the long corridor towards the aft of the pod.

Seamus pulled himself hand over hand as fast as he could, picking up speed until he was literally diving down the corridor. He came up to the storeroom; turning his head, he watched the door flick past.

Twenty seconds of air left.

He could tell already it was becoming thin, tangy. The cache of bottles was just ahead; he flipped end to end and put his feet on the floor and hands about the rail to slow himself as rapidly as he could. His helmet HUD was blinking rapidly to warn him that his bottle was empty. Frantically, he searched the bottles to see if any still held even a partial fill. Already he could feel the effects of carbon monoxide and dioxide poisoning slowly creeping over him. He knew he had less than a minute, maybe two before he would fall unconscious, then die.

He blinked away heavy eyelids, sleep; what was he doing again?

The flashing red light jolted him awake, a surge of adrenaline helping him focus. He looked at the bottles again; one seemed to catch his eye; there at the back, he pulled himself to it and wiped the gauge, HALF FULL! Quickly he undid his old bottle and let it float away; fumbling with the new bottle, he brought it up to the connector. His hands wouldn’t work correctly; they kept fumbling the thread.

He stopped and breathed the poisonous air deeply in and out, calming himself. Then, moving in tiny, incremental movements, he threaded the new bottle home. Air came whooshing into his helmet, and he gagged. It smelled of old metal, fart and something else even more indescribable, but it was air, and he was breathing again. The HUD blinked a few times and then told him he had forty-five minutes left. He breathed deeply and flexed his fingers and toes.

He had set a timer on his HUD for the release valve; it was now down to two and half minutes. Bloody hell, he set off again, building up speed as quickly as he could.

As he fell through the pod, he thought to himself; what comes next after going from the frying pan to the fire?

Seamus found the gangway down to the release valve, surprisingly it turned without complaint, and he felt through the pipes the movement of the cooling liquid. The countdown said forty-five seconds; the lights kept flashing.

Thirty seconds,

Twenty.

Ten.

He closed his eyes and waited.

Zero.

Nothing, the lights were still flashing, but it seemed that the reactor wasn’t going to blow today.

Making his way back to the control room, Seamus stopped at the storeroom and opened the door. It was full of replacement parts, tools, and not a single air tank. He just stared, shut the door, and kept going. Arriving back at the control room, he checked the backup computer’s screen. Everything was operating at nominal values. He considered upgrading the cooling software but decided he had pushed his luck enough that day! The lights were still flashing because it needed someone to reset the switch, slowly he reached over and turned them off.

Gathering up what would be the new main computer that had finished its install, he considered how he would get back to the habitat pod. He could jump…, NO! In a slot on the console was a computer tablet that could control one or all the mining robots manually. Taking it, he found the nearest exit out of the mining pod, called over one of the robots and rode it home in what felt like luxury and ease!

Fitting the new computer was a pain, but it seemed easy after everything else he had been through. He turned it on, and nothing happened! The fuse box! Grinning sheepishly, he flicked the main computer fuse on, and it purred to life. Across the central console, all the lights turned green. The air in the habitat cleared, and Seamus cautiously took off his helmet and breathed in; it tasted pure, clean, and good.

The next thing he did was take two of the empty air tanks over to the refilling station and slotted them in. While he waited, he took the old bottle from his suit and looked at it; turning it over to read what had been written on it by a long-gone crewman.

Filled by: Ed Murphy. Notes: “This bottle has expired, but you know what I always say ….”

Seamus started laughing; he laughed until he cried. Bloody Murphy’s Law had been sitting on his shoulder the whole day through.

Sci Fi
Like

About the Creator

Chris Cummings

I have lived in 3 different countries and travelled the world, and what I have discovered is that people are pretty much the same the world over. We all want to belong, to help others and to be loved. I write to feel those things, Enjoy!

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.