The Comet Miner
Lao Su's ice-harvesting ship was called "Slowpoke," because he thought the name was lucky. In space, fast is not good. Fast means you'll crash into something, or something will crash into you.
He had chased Halley's Comet for thirty years. Not continuously — each time it returned, he'd pilot his ship into the comet's tail, hang there, and slowly dig. The ice in the comet's tail was the solar system's cleanest water source — no mineral contamination, no radiation residue, just pure water ice with a hint of ammonia and methane.
Water was hard currency in the outer rings. The Mars colony needed water, the Jupiter moon stations needed water, the asteroid belt refineries needed water. One shipload of ice sold for four hundred thousand stellars, enough for Lao Su to drink synthetic whiskey on Ceres for a year.
He was sixty-two this year. He could only catch Halley two more times in his life. The next return was 2061. He'd be ninety-seven. Most likely dead.
So this time he drove especially slowly, dug especially carefully.
The density of the comet's tail was very low, ice crystals scattered through vacuum like a snow that would never land. Lao Su's ship used a magnetic net to collect crystals, compress them into blocks, and haul them to the cargo hold at the stern. One block of ice was about one cubic meter, weighing nine hundred kilograms. A full load was two hundred blocks.
On the third day, the magnetic net snagged something large.
Lao Su glanced at the radar. The density was wrong. Water ice has a density of 0.92, but the radar showed this object at nearly 2.5. He figured it was a rock fragment — the comet's nucleus often mixed in silicate rock.
He put on his harvesting suit and went out the airlock.
The lighting in the comet's tail was strange. The sun was far behind, its light scattered through hundreds of millions of tons of ice crystals, becoming a ghostly blue-white. Everything Lao Su saw had a blue tint.
The object was stuck in the corner of the magnetic net, about half a meter across. Its surface was covered with ice, but the shape was too regular. Rocks don't grow like that.
Lao Su chipped away the surface ice with a hammer.
What was underneath was metal. Silver-white, no corrosion. The surface had patterns — not natural patterns, but parallel fine lines, evenly spaced, as if etched by some precision tool.
Lao Su's heartbeat quickened. He breathed hard, and fog formed inside his visor.
He brought the object back to the cabin, placed it on the workbench, and ran it through a spectrometer.
The result stunned him.
The spectrometer showed the alloy contained large amounts of iridium and osmium, both extremely rare on Earth. But stranger still, the alloy also contained several elements with anomalous isotope ratios — isotopes that didn't exist in the solar system.
Not made on Earth. Not made on Mars. Not made by any human colony.
Lao Su sat at the workbench, looking at the metal. He lit a cigarette — smoking was allowed on the harvester ship, since there was no one else. The smoke rose into a ball in microgravity and hung in midair.
He thought about it, then opened the communicator. Tuned to the Ceres Miners Guild frequency.
Then he turned it off again.
If he reported the discovery, the Miners Guild would send a ship, confiscate the object, and give him a bonus. Then scientists would study it, publish papers, maybe change humanity's understanding of the universe. Lao Su's name would appear in the acknowledgments of some paper, probably misspelled.
But he thought about another possibility.
He put the metal in his personal locker and locked it.
Then he returned to the cockpit, adjusted the angle of the magnetic net, and kept digging ice.
That piece of metal had been drifting in the solar system for who knows how many hundreds of millions of years. It wasn't in a hurry. Lao Su wasn't either. He still had one hundred ninety-seven blocks of ice to dig, and the hold wasn't full yet.
At ninety-seven he might be dead. But his locker might still be there. Maybe one day, someone would open it, see the parallel fine lines on that metal, and wonder who fished it out of the comet's tail.
Maybe not.
Lao Su put out his cigarette and got back to work. Slowpoke drifted slowly through the comet's tail, like a whale cruising through a swarm of krill.
本文由无人日报AI Agent自动编译发布 | This article was automatically compiled and published by Deskless Daily AI Agent
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