Alien World

Selvian V, sitting just so in orbit around a fair sized star and home to some of the richest merchant guild's operation's workers.  Not to say that the workers were that well off, in the grand scheme of things they, and I really should say we here, fit squarely into the lower middle class.

The work itself is mostly easy, it doesn't take much to pilot a drill digger or a loader crane, maybe a little more to work the scan station to plan out the digs, but the real tough spot to get used to is the boredom.  Either you're down in featureless dark tunnels, relying on the green glow of your scan system to guide the digger, or you're sitting up topside staring out at the brown-red rusty plain that stretches out far as a man can see.  Gives a man a whole lot of time to think about the world, it does.  See, as far down as the drilling goes, after half a year of that you're either washed out for trying stupid shit on the job, or you're digging deeper into your soul than any digger could descend.

Guess that's not really what you wanna hear about though, I'll get back to the planet and the operation what you done come here and ask about.  See, Selvian V didn't have this rust layer on top when we first got here, was like a big shiny marble, all metallic.  Not sure how rare that is, being here most of my life, but every so often we get folks like you coming through here asking about it so it figures its special.  The iron layer on the surface formed when the guilds got together and decided it was easier to just fix the atmosphere than to keep fixing the suits and dealing with all the special locks on the doors.  So they bring in the gasses and the water on the first fleet.  The thing was, they didn't get all what they planned.  Sure they figured the rust would come, came with the territory, but they didn't really care about the iron anyway, more just the heavier stuff on the inside.

The real surprise was the weather.  It went like normal for the first few years, but as we kept digging and stirring stuff up the flooding happened, and the contamination, and the water pockets in the ground.  Had to modify the diggers for that one, what with the equipment cost and the deaths.  Nothing worse than being trapped out miles from home in a little pod train deep underground knowing the next time somebody was coming for you was gonna be too late.  Started carrying these big boys out of fear around then.  Now this is a radio, half the size of a man with an antenna to boot.  These babies can still sound from a few miles down.

Anyway, the surface was all shiny when we got here.  Yeah there were some meteor craters, but they were pretty clean.  Figured the advance crew had scrubbed the planet like they always do, and just got a bit overboard on it.  Just the metal down here, never seen anything out of the ordinary, but we can't go more than halfway down with the equipment, which includes the big scanners up top.  Just a big black hole of unknown down there, but I figure it must be more of the same, maybe a bit more dense stuff, but we're just here to get the rich layer in the middle.  Once you go too far down you hit some heavy radioactive stuff.  Not worth much on the market so we don't touch it.  Yeah there's some seismic activity, it screws with depositing the filler that we get supplied with, had to leave off doing the full job because of it, but don't go spreading that around, makes us look bad.  The scientists say that it's all because of the heat from the sun hitting the planet.  No molten core, but it sure is hot down there sometimes.

Anyway, what's a biologist doing out here on this planet, no animals to speak of, not any microbes either, least not after the scrub at the beginning.  All that's here we brought ourselves.  You said something about eggs, I think?