Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

The Hippodrome

Adam looked out from high rise window and out over the dark, glistening metal of the midnight city. Inside his chest something thrilled with the beating of his heart. Overhead, looking up at the vast field of stars, he could almost see the warping of the artificial atmosphere that held the city in place upon this craggy asteroid.

His asteroid.

It was a long story, sort of difficult to explain, but back when he was still a member of the UNSC he had gotten in contact with a realtor of sorts, this Tesraki was a contractor for a large mining company that was selling the rights to land in asteroids for acres on the dollar, the only stipulation on the contract was that the asteroid HAD to provide a net profit that was higher than its maintenance. And of course with prices that low, Adam didn't see why he shouldn't own his own asteroid and lease it over as a docking station or a waypoint of some sort.

Back then he hadn't foreseen what was going to hap, but he had purchased the deed to the asteroid through a third party, which meant while his name was on the deed, it wasn't in GA records. That is kind of how the Tesraki preferred to do business as letting someone know who owned what assets was often a bad idea in their cutthroat world of economics.

So, he had a penthouse on the moon and a random asteroid.

For a little extra income, he had leased some of the land out to a shipping and warehouse company, who built a small station on his asteroid and paid him in rent every few months or so. They were quiet and its not like they could do anything to mess up his asteroid while he thought about something better to do with it.

After a while, the small asteroid turned out to sit in the middle of a relatively strategic shipping route, mostly moving textiles, and another company had come in offering to "terraform" the asteroid as it were, though the meaning of the word was far removed from its original sci-fi roots, or like the reality of what they had done on mars.

Now when he said small asteroid, he wasn't exactly giving the hunk of rock enough credit.

If it had been in closer orbit of a planet, it would definitely have counted as a moon, in fact, based on calculations done by the mining company, the asteroid had actually been misclassified as an asteroid and should have been marked as an exoplanet,

It was bigger than Pluto after all..

So, when he said small asteroid.

What he actually meant was small sizzed moon.

Yeah, yeah, he knew those things were two completely different objects and hardly worth comparing, but if he thought too much about the fact that he owned his own exo-planet, he'd probably jump high enough to exit its gravitational pull and float off into space.

Even so, the company they had been working with had set down gravity field generators, and then pumped the correct mixture of breathable atmosphere out onto the rock. They had left the generators out for a while, while the asteroid collected nearby dust and rocks with its newfound earth gravity, and when that was done, they had gone about building residential areas for the workers on the waypoint, hotels and.

Eventually

Cooperate buildings.

Before he knew what had happened , he was the owner of a small moon and the small city that came with it.

This was a fact he had kept in his back pocket with some difficulty, but the last few years had seen him too busy to visit his little moon, and he wasn't aware of just hos much they had done in his absence.

But now things had changed.

His little resistance force was in need of a base of operations, and everyone had been delighted to find the moon waiting for them, or asteroid or exoplanet or whatever it was.