Kaylee’s Lament

Part Twenty-Five

Prospect Station was a sleepy little commercial space station orbiting around the only appreciable planet left around a red star. The planet was a mottled brown terrestrial world that had a thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere and virtually no water of any sort. When it was first discovered, the exploitation rights were sold to a speculative terraforming corporation interested in developing the world. The poor condition of the sun, and the near total lack of an Oort system to provide cometary ice, made it a weak candidate for terraforming. Life could not exist without air and water, and it was too gorram expensive to import from other systems. So the idea of terraforming the 11,000 mile wide rock was abandoned, and the company that owned the rights converted their exploration facility into a small fueling and supply depot for surveyors and colonists headed for the further reaches of the Rim.

During the War, Prospect got an economic shot in the arm when the Alliance used it as a supply dump for Operation Onslaught, a punishing push into the Rim worlds that ended in disaster for the Alliance at the Battle of Riker’s Field. While Prospect was built up in preparation for a second major push, the Battle of Serenity Valley effectively ended the War , and with it most of the potential for Prospect Station to become more than a quiet little fueling station.

Today that was just what it was. Only a hundred and fifty or so souls inhabited the station that had, at one point during the war, held a hundred times that many for a few short, miserable, cramped and uncomfortable weeks. Now more than eighty percent of the station was deserted and depressurized. No one came to Prospect unless they were headed somewhere else. And even that was getting rarer.

Which made Prospect an ideal, out-of-the-way place for Serenity to refuel.

It was a little out of their way. It added an additional twelve hours to their journey, but it still put them in Trinity with plenty of time befor