Shelley never planned to leave Earth—she barely wanted to leave her neighborhood. A single mother scraping by on sporadic gig jobs, she spent years juggling bills, rationing food, and shielding her young son Leo from the worst of it. When her rent tripled in a month and the shelters overflowed, she became desperate and reached out to her sister. She signed up for the Intergalactic Mineral Authority to become a Minewalker on distant Colony 55. The pay was enough to secure Leo’s future—medical care, schooling, a stable home. But she couldn’t take him with her and she knew this would be a one way trip because even if she could return after the 10 year contract, he would be more than 40 years of age by then. So Shelley left Leo safely with her sister, promising the Crusk Corporation would be sending half her salary in credits to them every month. Her sister called her a fool, but couldn’t say no to the monthly credits which were quite a handful! A Minewalker is the poor soul who straps into an exosuit, steps out onto unstable alien terrain, and literally walks the surfaces, spelunks the caves, climbs the mountains to tag valuable deposits of Ridium. They do this before anyone else dares set foot there. They navigate volatile crusts, shifting gravity pockets, bioluminescent fogs, and all the weird, twitchy lifeforms that evolved in ore-rich hellscapes. Their job is half scout, half human canary — mapping safe paths, identifying structural weak points, and clearing out micro-threats before the mining crew and automated rigs roll in. Most Minewalkers (if they survive long enough) develop a sixth sense for the ground beneath them… like they can hear fractures singing a little too high, or smell the humidity change right before something explodes out of the shale. The company calls it “hazard intuition,” but the workers call it “staying alive.” They’re the first in, the last out, and if things go south, the Crusk Corporation shrugs and writes “equipment failure.” Minewalker Shelley is number 5677. So many have come and gone that the Crusk Corporation doesn’t even put their real name on their name tag. Shelley knows that she is signing up for a gig that chews people up — but she’s stubborn enough, and desperate enough, to lace up anyway. All for her boy, Leo.
