Harmony Chapter 20: A survey

Filed: Harmony @ 5:36am on May 13, 2014 No comments yet! :(   Word Count: 730
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This entry is part 20 of 27 in the series Harmony

Harmony

Supper was just like any other supper, except that this time, my mind was elsewhere, despite Mark being most closer to me than usual and Cassiopeia, sitting in front of me, kept touching my legs with her feet in a feeble attempt at flirting.

But I could only think of earlier this afternoon when I was with Rita in the CMC.

Back then, I was limited with what I could do, but now that my sex drive was taken care of, I had an evening excursion planned.

As soon as I was all filled up, I excused myself from Mark and company and almost ran to the CMC, or more importantly, to the automated warehouse behind it.

The space port is deployed as is and is composed of multiple sections identical from one planet to another.

There is a the space port itself, which allows shuttles to land. There is the CMC where I was which is usually the nerve center of the colony.

There is, like mentioned above an automated warehouse with an automated refinery which is able to automatically extract minerals from raw ore.

Some mining colonies simply output their mine to the automated warehouse, allowing it to separate the exportable ore (as programmed in the CMC) from the useless rocks or the parts the colony wants to keep, producing either bags, bars or filling containers to be used locally. I know that’s how Sigma 8 gets some of their materials: they dump raw ore and get cement, metal bars for constructions, etc…

The geothermal plant under the port powers it all.

So, I started with the CMC and made sure I had full access to the entire warehouse. There could have been individual containers locked to a specific company or individual, but this was a communist paradise meaning nothing was off limit!

However, I also had to make sure there were no processes in course: I really didn’t want to get killed by a crane or an automated forklift: it’s not accident that the system is fully automated, you are not supposed to walk in it while it’s working.

Normally, the CMC has real inventory of the warehouse, but it needs to be programmed properly for the system to work. With 60 years on automatic pilot, I had strong reservations…

And I was right to be!

The first thing to look at in an automated warehouse is the pending goods section. This is the part of the warehouse where the automated factory is able to process something imported into the system for which there is no default action programmed in the CMC, which are usually either Export to Earth or place in the local use warehouse to be picked up.

This section of the the warehouse is usually verified daily by CMC operators and as soon as a new product is placed the default is adjusted.

So, I opened the human access door, which had a pile of  dirt piled in front of: it had visibly not been opened for a while.

The door cracked open, I entered and the lights turned on after my presence was detected. As soon as my eyes had begun to scan the room, I fell on my knees crying. The surplus from the exports was now insignificant in my plan for an empire.

The massive  room was filled with metal bars and containers. There was at least 10 piles of good delivery standard gold bars stamped and numbered covering half the side wall, with roughly twice as much silver bars covering the rest of the left wall and parts of the back wall.

Tungsten bars filled the rest of the back wall, which are now essential to ship building and worth more than Gold. There were quite a few platinum and palladium bars.

But the biggest find was the secure bins of several rare earth elements like over  a ton of Osium, a lot of Neodymium, Scnadium, Lanthanum and even some very valuable Lutetium-175, normally found only in trace amounts and now every important in space craft construction.

Exporting this entire room at once would make me one of the richest people in the galaxy, provided I had first secured the independence of our colony because otherwise, my father would get a sizable portion of this find.

This was my first room opened. I couldn’t wait to discover what else I would find…

Sigma-8 is a very surprising planet after all!

Not being allowed to wear clothes is a small price to pay to start an empire…

 

 

Series Navigation«Harmony Chapter 19: Taking my manHarmony Chapter 21: Stephen’s family»

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