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in the planet's oceans.
    The atmosphere was too thick to breathe, but that didn't matter, since the air was mostly ammonia and methane anyway. The surface was hot and the atmosphere crackled constantly from permanent lightning storms.
    The planet 43q15x17-32 was uninviting enough that no one ever casually visited it. Even among life-origins xenobiologists, only the most enthusiastic, or the most desperate for a paper devoted to something on which nobody else was working, ever bothered to come to study--and few of them were willing to stay very long. When the xenobiologists who did visit later mentioned the planet, they called it the "Rock" in a tone that strongly suggested it was unpleasant.
    Then there were the miners, who also called 43q15x17-32 the "Rock," though more in a tone of despair. They didn't count as visitors, though, and so far as the Confederation of Human Worlds knew, they weren't there at all.
    The miners were convicts from St. Helen's, serving sentences anywhere in duration from five years to life. "Life" was a nominal sentence, though; the environment was so harsh and the work so onerous that almost nobody managed to survive five years. Even the soldiers and sailors who guarded the mining operation were disciplinary problems who were posted to the Rock in lieu of court-martial and prison. In order to prevent mutiny, the soldiers and sailors were billeted on an orbiting space station and spent only one week in four planetside. More, they were promised that upon successful completion of a tour of duty, negative entries in their records would be fully expunged and they would be honorably retired on pensions equal to eighty percent of St. Helen's median income--which was considerably more than most of them could ever hope to earn through any activity that wouldn't put them at risk of serving as miners on the Rock themselves.
    The St. Helen's mining operation on the Rock was a tightly held state secret. It had to be--the original evaluation of St. Helen's by the Bureau of Human Habitibility, Exploration, and Investigation had determined that the planet didn't have desirable metals and rare earths in sufficient quantity to make mining commercially viable--information that was easily accessible to anyone who felt like checking. So it was generally known among those who traded with St. Helen's for refined metals that the mining operations were somewhere off-planet. Exactly where was a state secret. After all, the mining operations were highly lucrative, and there were four human worlds closer to the Rock than St. Helen's. Any of them could make a strong case that 43q15x17-32 was in its legitimate area of possession, and that by exploiting the Rock's mineral wealth, St. Helen's was engaging in interstellar piracy.
    There was precedent for such a claim. In the twenty-third century, Steinenborg brought a similar charge against Alhambra for mining an inhospitable world called Hell. The Confederation Supreme Court found in favor of Steinenborg, though by the time the court passed judgment, there had been a rebellion on Hell and the world gained independence.
    Nonetheless, Alhambra was required to pay reparations severe enough to impoverish it for a generation.
    Unfortunately for St. Helen's, We're Here!--a planet settled by one of the first waves of colonists from Earth, and the planet nearest to the Rock--found out.
    "I'm picking up some anomalous EMR, Skipper," Lieutenant Hope Bluebird said. She was the communications officer of the We're Here! navy heavy cruiser, Goin'on.
    "Tell me about it," replied Commander Moon Happiness, captain of the Goin'on.
    "Looks like bleed from a focused burst-comm."
    "Where?"
    "Seems to be coming from the Rock. I'm also picking up what looks like kinetic drive signals along the burst-comm track. But it doesn't look right for drive engines. Too small, more like a shuttle. Too far out for a shuttle, though. A couple of AU."
    Captain Happiness thought about that for a bit. A couple of AU out