Erebus Mining Group
Deep-space extraction in places a human body is a liability. Erebus has the worst safety record in the Sphere and the calmest public file, because almost nobody has ever been anywhere it operates.
Overview
Erebus works the hostile end of the system: cloud-platforms in the acid of Hestia, the sulfur wastes of Io Forge, the fuel-skimming complex at Jove Anchorage, and a long tail of airless rocks with a single rig and no name worth printing. Asteroid ore, gas-giant volatiles, and the raw feedstock that every other corporation converts into something people recognise.
It is the least visible of the secondaries and among the most necessary. TerraMech cannot build without Erebus. Orion cannot arm without Erebus. Nobody writes about Erebus.
The company's culture is the culture of places that will kill you for a procedural error. It is unsentimental, technically excellent, and completely uninterested in how anything looks. Erebus executives are the only corporate officers in the Sphere who routinely have been to the sites they run, because there is no way to understand the business from an office and the company does not promote people who have not.
Character
- Asteroid and gas-giant extraction — the raw end of every supply chain
- Operates exclusively where humans should not be, and staffs accordingly
- Blunt to the point of rudeness. No public-relations instinct at all
- Company towns under domes — Erebus Hold is a world stripped to bedrock with a population that has nowhere else to go
Where it stands on the Labour Question
Erebus is an incumbent, and the least apologetic one.
It held catena stock when the ban came down and it holds it still. Its Instanced work the sites no living body can be insured into — the continuous, unglamorous, lethal maintenance that the argument in the Senate is careful never to describe out loud.
Erebus defends the ban without pretending its reasons are moral. Ask an Erebus officer why the restriction should stand and you will get an honest answer about supply and price, delivered without embarrassment, which is more unsettling than the pious version and considerably rarer.
And its inventory is depreciating. Nothing lost at an Erebus site is replaceable, and the sites lose things.
Relationships
- TerraMech Industries — Erebus digs with TerraMech machines and TerraMech builds with Erebus ore. Neither could substitute the other in under a decade
- Atlas HydroCorp — competes for the same ice bodies from the opposite direction; Atlas wants the water, Erebus wants what the water is sitting on
- Lumen Freight & Trade — Erebus produces mass and Lumen owns when mass arrives. The relationship is bad and permanent
- Blackstar Finance — insures the least insurable operations in the Sphere, at prices that reflect it
Status
Essential, invisible, and running out of the workforce it will not admit it depends on.