Dusters…

Mankind has moved quickly and recklessly into space. As with everything man has ever done, it has brought forth both the terrible, and the fantastic. JVB June 2008

I will preface this post by saying this story will be spread out over a long time. It is in "the works" and as I don't have an editor, please feel free to leave comments as the glaring errors become apparent to any regular reader. I will try to post sections of the story weekly, I am trying to make this worth reading and I love sharing my scribbling here on the blog.

Having outgrown the Earth and its natural resources, we are left with no choice but to go through space to neighboring planets, to reap whatever bounties they possess. It has been a multi national effort.
It began with the Moon and the limited mining there, which wound up not being profitable. It did provide the lessons of off world mining and the many problems this entails, most of which were manmade. Even when the US, China and Russia jointly gave over rights to mine the Moon to the private sector, the field of probable takers were not enthusiastic. That was only until one company, Welhaven, seized an opportunity to dispose of Earth’s nuclear waste there, for a fee.

Everyone jumped on board with this concept and the Moon was trashed. The Welhaven Company made billions of dollars for their efforts, shooting thousands of containers of trash at the moon with a magneto- accelerator. Today, no living thing can walk on most of the Moon’s surface safely. The spotty red and blue piles of containers are visible from Earth with the naked eye, the areas look like purple spots.

Large corporations lead the way into space and spawned new commercial enterprises all over the nearer solar system. One of the largest operations is the harvesting of liquid methane from Saturn’s moon, Titan. This “product” provides the energy needed by many other mining operations across the Solar System. Welhaven lavishes in the profits. They all but own shipping and regulate/tax traffic too.

There are no “claims” to sites filed or honored anywhere off Earth, it all comes down to who gets there first. This leads to corporate security force clashes, when one company tries to get into a business that another has already dug into. The Governments of Earth wanted to litigate and manage the off Earth operations, but without a unified voice in the matter, chaos has ruled.

Any “off world” law passed by one nation is ignored by the others. The race to space, to plunder and to profit, overwhelms all common sense and all laws. The United Nations has been unable to reach beyond the very air they breathe and is considered a joke by many.

The problems of off Earth travel became obvious early on. The space routes used by corporate transports quickly became polluted with their ship’s exhaust; to the point that their use was in jeopardy. The pollution lingered and moved along with the orbit of the planets.

Welhaven Industries, again, stepped up and offered a possible travel lane “cleaning service”, but would not go forward with the offering, until all of the larger off Earth companies signed onto their contracts. The argument was; if we clean a lane, it will benefit everyone who uses it, so everyone out there has to pay for the service. It was business brilliance and blackmail at the same time. Welhaven was ready to start operations and no one else wanted to invest in their own solution alone.

The largest companies pressured the smaller ones to sign on, and Welhaven developed and deployed their fleet of shipping lane cleaners. Using the latest super conductor technology, these ships are able to sweep clean huge commercial space traffic lanes.

These ships and their crews were soon known only as Dusters. No one had an idea of what lay ahead of them…