Enthrallment (start here)

A long short story for paid subscribers

Enthrallment is special for paid subscribers. Ten thousand literary words of hard sci-fi, future worldbuilding, asteroid mining, and possibly the most jaded 19 year-old in deep space risking her life to find meaning in nothing. Below is the official blurb:

A Gritty Sci-Fi Thriller of Betrayal, Survival, and the Cost of Empire

For generations, the Anderson family has ruled the solar system’s mining operations with an iron grip, extracting precious metals and helium-3 from asteroids, moons, and dwarf planets. Their workers toil in the void, bound by century-long contracts, while Earth reaps the rewards of their labor,
unaware that human hands still fuel its utopia.

Honor Anderson is different.

A prodigy among deep-space miners, Honor feels the vibrations of failing machinery through her bare feet and navigates zero gravity like a second skin. But when a routine drill on Haumea strikes something unknown, a gravitational anomaly, a hollow thing lurking in the dark, she realizes the Andersons’ empire
is built on more than just ore.

Or, buy it from Amazon as an ebook.

Free excerpt below the cover image.

Excerpt:

The drill bit was failing.

Honor Anderson felt it through her feet first—a bad vibration traveling up the rig’s skeletal frame. She turned from the observation blister’s glass, where Haumea’s icy crust stretched into perpetual twilight, and pressed a bare palm against the steel bulkhead. The metal trembled. Somewhere below, five kilometers of reinforced shaft trembled with it.

Honor, a young woman of 19, always worked barefoot and without gloves, even in low temps that had the roughnecks shaking their heads in disbelief. But that increased sensitivity has saved lives, so no one gives her a hard time for it.

…

The Andersons have always understood the earth in ways others could not. Not as pastoralists who worship its green-ness, nor as poets who sigh over its sunlit contours—but as surgeons who know its anatomy, its fractures and arteries, the slow pulse of ore that runs beneath the surface like a second, darker bloodstream. They did not love the land. They knew its weight, its grudging yield, the way it gave only to those willing to choke on its dust.

It began, as such things often do, with a man who mistook hunger for vision.

…

The Andersons called it The Long Throw—a two-kilometer railgun etched into Haumea's icy crust like an appendage. Its superconducting coils, maintained across twelve generations, could accelerate a loaded barge to solar escape velocity in eleven seconds flat. The process hadn't changed since the first prototype launched in 2119.

The barges, twenty-thousand-tonne aluminum caskets, cranked out of the extruder in a single piece. No engines, no nav systems, just a dumb projectile shaped like a cylindrical railroad boxcar. Inside, raw lithium, titanium, and helium-3 lay suspended in a heavy slurry. On the outside, the Anderson crest and a barcode for Earth's automated receivers.

…

The thrusters wouldn’t need to burn long. Just enough to nudge her into the hollow’s embrace. After that, physics would do the rest.

Honor turned to the suspension tank. The fluid inside was opaque, milky with oxygen-rich perfluorocarbon and a cocktail of stolen drugs. It would cradle her and keep her alive while the g-forces threatened to turn her bones to powder. She stripped off her coveralls, the cold air raising goosebumps along her arms. No suit. No armor. Just flesh and faith.

She climbed in.

The fluid swallowed her slowly, viscous like oil, cold as anything she had felt before. It filled her mouth, her nose, her lungs, not drowning, but occupying, forcing oxygen into her blood through sheer chemical insistence. Her body fought with her mind. Then the sedatives hit, and the fight bled away.

The last thing she did was trigger the depressurization sequence.

Air hissed out of the barge, leaving only silence. Another necessity. Making oxygen was a luxury she couldn’t afford. As with so much already, she put her faith in those who would catch her in Earth orbit.

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