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Upon A Midnight Clear
Upon A Midnight Clear
Upon A Midnight Clear
Ebook28 pages22 minutes

Upon A Midnight Clear

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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On Christmas Eve, somewhere out in the Asteroid Belt, a lonely prospector happens across something he never expected to find.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 3, 2011
ISBN9781465936486
Upon A Midnight Clear
Author

Ian Thomas Healy

Ian Thomas Healy is a prolific writer who dabbles in many different speculative genres. He’s a ten-time participant and winner of National Novel Writing Month where he’s tackled such diverse subjects as sentient alien farts, competitive forklift racing, a religion-powered rabbit-themed superhero, cyberpunk mercenaries, cowboy elves, and an unlikely combination of vampires with minor league hockey. He is also the creator of the Writing Better Action Through Cinematic Techniques workshop, which helps writers to improve their action scenes.Ian also created the longest-running superhero webcomic done in LEGO, The Adventures of the S-Team, which ran from 2006-2012.When not writing, which is rare, he enjoys watching hockey, reading comic books (and serious books, too), and living in the great state of Colorado, which he shares with his wife, children, house-pets, and approximately five million other people.

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Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am rounding up to four for one reason - the character of Mona. I love how Healy handles her. The story is a bit predictable (especially if you have seen a certain sci-fi show), but it is well written. The characters are actually developed and the story edited. It's pretty good.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Heartwarming and realistic sci fi short story, if that's not an oxymoron, and it's firing on all thrusters. Four and a half stars.

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Upon A Midnight Clear - Ian Thomas Healy

Upon A Midnight Clear

Ian Thomas Healy

Copyright 2011 Ian Thomas Healy

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover design by Ian Thomas Healy

Rob Stabler squeezed back into the cramped airlock, exhausted and running low on O2. Fifteen hours in the 'suit and nothing but aching joints and negative sample tubes to show for it.

Asteroid mining was simply impractical. Unlike in the old Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century movies, the Asteroid Belt wasn't a raging torrent of whirling, spinning boulders. A miner could burn his drive for days before he'd come across a piece of rock of any significant size, and what he found was likely to be carbonaceous or stony and therefore useless for all modern purposes. Why should he bother to range out so far from the Inner System in search of the rare mother lode of metal when corporations were strip-mining on the Moon? Or on Io and Titan, quenching the Outer System's thirst for metals and organics? It was expensive and wasteful of resources to try to exploit what few resources were available in the otherwise-empty orbital slot between Jupiter and Mars.

All that changed with the discovery of 2208 Phobos Base.

It was early morning on September 5th when a piece of rock, hurtling around the Sun for millions

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