To Dream in the City of Sorrows by Babylon 5

in her logbook as an FGP, a Fool’s Gold Planet. Looked good on first glance, but on closer examination, worthless.
    Oh, there was plenty of diridium gas in the atmosphere, often a sign there was Quantium 40 in the planet’s crust. But what little Q-40 was present seemed to consist mostly of improperly formed crystalline structures, or was too tainted by other minerals to make extraction economical, let alone profitable in the way a megacorporation like Universal Terraform would insist upon.
    She would have the probes bring back some carefully selected core drills and rock samples to be examined later by the corporation scientists for other things, known and unknown, although she didn’t want to waste too much energy or cargo space that could be better used for samples from a more likely planetary prospect. And she would still carefully survey and map the planet. But for now, she had an hour to kill. Sakai took off her headset, yawned and stretched. Oh, the glamorous life of the professional planetary surveyor, she thought. Travel to distant, exotic worlds! Be your own boss! Discover untold riches! That had been the promise when she had embarked upon this career after the war ended and she had finished her hitch in Earthforce. And it had proved to be true – partially. The work did pay well in fees and in commissions when a planet proved rich with Quantium 40 – the rare substance that made interstellar travel possible – or contained other valuable resources. But the bulk of the “untold riches” belonged to the corporations she contracted out to.
    And she was her own boss, as much as any independent contractor was, though as more and more of the smaller surveying companies were being elbowed out by the megacorporations – a move encouraged by EarthGov in the interest of “science, safety, and efficiency” – she had begun to feel at times like just another corporate employee, but without the medical benefits or retirement plan.
    And she had certainly traveled to many distant worlds. True, most Class 4 planets, the type that usually contained Q-40, looked pretty much alike, but she had seen some beautiful and amazing sights on those planets and on the few potentially habitable planets she had been hired to survey. Unbroken rings of massive volcanoes continually erupting fire on one hellish planet. A beautiful blue-ocean planet swirled with continent-size swaths of orange-and-green colony organisms that glowed with an eerie but beautiful silver light when the planet’s face turned toward the night.
    All from orbit, though. By the nature of her job, she never landed, merely observed and recorded from above. Landfall surveys, which were large, expensive, and highly specialized operations, were only undertaken after she had returned and the data she brought back had been scrutinized for months. Which meant, in reality, she spent months at a time in the cramped confines of her survey ship.
    She loved her ship; it was dependable, maneuverable, and efficient. It didn’t have a jump-point generator, but most survey ships didn’t. Only Earthforce and some of the larger corporations could afford to build ships large enough to generate the power necessary for one of those.
    And it wasn’t luxurious. The cockpit looked like the refitted cockpit of the old freighter that it was; one chair, a console, and a jumble of instruments, vents, pipes and wiring, metal and plastic. Just behind the cockpit was her narrow bunk area; some fold-down, compact exercise equipment, necessary for long stints in zero-g such as this; storage containers for her condensed, freeze-dried food supplies; a small toilet area; and a decontamination chamber, which doubled as a shower. The rest of the ship was taken up with the air and water processors and other life-support systems, the fuel tanks, the engines, her survey equipment, the satellite launch bays, and the sample bay.
    A good surveying ship had to have a first-class sample bay, and she had