Credit: Jamie Tufrey

The Holdin' Aces was pulling two gees in a hard retro burn, and Asa Greene was doing the driving. Holden Burke just watched for warning lights and begged the universe for a lucky break. The universe was stingy with luck, though, especially for asteroid miners. Their last two trips had barely broken even. This was Holden's last chance.

"Damn!" Asa, Holden's business partner, flipped through displays on the navigation system. The screens flicked by too quickly for Holden to follow.

"What is it? Another ship? Out here? Asa, you swore no one would be working this rock."

"Huh? No, no ships. Damn!"

"Not a bug." Holden punched up a radar display on his own console. "Please tell me it's not a bug." A bug on their jackpot-to-be would be bad. Game over. They'd just have to pack it in and go home broke.

No one really knew where the first bug had come from. The best guess was that it had originated somewhere near Lambda Scorpii – the scorpion's tail. It had ridden into the Solar System a little over a decade before on the end of a half-kilometre-long stream of high-speed ions and made its home on Ceres. From raw materials mined on the asteroid, it had built more bugs. Now there were hundreds of the bootstrap bots jetting around the belt. They chewed up asteroids and ferried the juicy bits back to Ceres to feed a massive construction project.

The scientists studying the Ceres Gate were convinced it was some kind of matter receiver, large enough for ships to pass through. They haggled over terms like wormholes and hyperdimensional translation, but the gist of it was clear. Humanity's first contact with an alien race was imminent.