Lighting up

The place was dead for a Saturday night. All the old regulars were there, but the younger crowd was conspicuously absent. The Cosmic Lighthouse was about to go dark.

Back in the day, the Lighthouse was the place to be and be seen. The lone club on Aoede, a cold rock in the middle of the Delta quadrant, it was the only place for a drink in a two parsecs. If you wanted companionship for the night, it was the only stop for three parsecs.

Finding Ganymede gold on the dark side of the planet was the first sign of trouble. Miners from every corner of the galaxy descended on the hard rock sector, and new clubs sprang up like interstellar mushrooms.

Flush with new currency, poser clubs had all the bright bells and whistles the Lighthouse didn’t. The younger miners flooded the modern bars, leaving the veteran space cowboys to nurse their brews alone.

Treigan Castiliano, the Lighthouse’s bartender-slash-proprietor, stood behind the wormwood bar, wiping the same glass for the hundredth time. Looking out over the sparsely populated tables, Tre grew angry at the patrons who still showed up every night. Until they gave up on the Lighthouse, he couldn’t give up. Their loyalty was wearing him out, and he was too tired to keep fighting progress.

He had made up his mind. The bar would go dark, but the Lighthouse was going out with a bang. Those mangy gold diggers would see that beacon light up all the way to the Upsilon District.

An old ship’s bell was used to signal Last Call. Tre rang it for a solid minute, waving off any attempts by regulars to get another drink.

Once he locked up the massive front doors, and turned out the lights, Tre went down stairs. Had his patrons known about the ten pallets of ammonium nitrate infused kieselguhr, they would have taken bets on the blast’s success.

Tre sat on the basement steps nursing a beer before setting the explosion in motion. He tipped back the bottle to get the last drop, then lit the fuse with a match from a box of vintage sulfur-tipped wooden sticks.

The crater left after the Lighthouse blew up took up five acres, and was 50 feet deep. It also exposed the richest vein of Ganymede gold ever found. Treigan Castiliano was now wealthy enough to buy the whole sector, if he had survived.