To most workers, an overseer is nothing more than a glorified office drone. They just sit in front of a computer terminal and write the occasional report to upper management. When they aren't writing, they're probably scolding the people who actually do work. If none of those, they are probably playing video games or watching porn. The real overseers know that's not the case, and none more so than Lenna.

Lenna had many more responsibilities than just shouting at workers and writing up reports. She had to make sure safety guidelines were being followed. She had to manage resource use, and balance production with maintenance. And of course, her shouting had to be productive. There was no point in making a miner or mechanic nervous if it slowed them down. Thankfully, Lenna had shaped up her crew so that they were fairly maintenance free. But it seemed like her crew expanded every week, giving her new hands to train. At the moment she was responsible for about fifty different people. All people she had to keep safe, yet also working quickly enough to create desirable results.

Lenna spent most of her time on the overseer's bridge, where she stood now.  The overseer was surrounded by her entire crew, all lined up on consoles in a circle. Most of the mining equipment could be run remotely, and it was easier for the overseer to keep tabs on everyone if they were in close proximity to each other. Lenna walked behind the miners, glancing at their displays and listening for potential problems. 

A miner looked to his coworker. “Hey Josh, I need a collector over here.” 

“Just dumped a load, I'm headed right for ya!” The coworker didn't look away from his screen.

A mechanic whistled loud enough to catch everyone's attention. “I just finished lunch, so if you need a battery swap or a tune up, I'll be in the maintenance bay. Don't make me go onto the field to fix your wreck!”

Lenna had a clip board tucked between her palm and arm. Despite the name, it was just a PDA that you could use with a stylus. The technology improved, but the name stuck. A second didn't go by where she wasn't changing screens, checking off objectives, or just writing notes. Her new batch of workers were quite reliable and didn't need much supervision. 

The only exception to this was Rose, a brat who lacked the discipline for the job. She wouldn't be so infuriating if she was just bad. Rose had no real desire to work. She treated her mining drone like it was a game, and seemed more interested in the social network on her PDA then working with the people around her. But if she really didn't care about them, why wear such noisy, distracting outfit? Thankfully, Lenna had found a relatively simple way to keep tabs on her: Just look at her social media feeds.

Rosey78: dAy 3: stl no pritE stones    D :

Rosey78: pritE suR d miner NXT 2 me iz checking me out. goin 2 kick Hs (_!_) l8r. <3

Rosey78: Thinking bout ramming my co worker's mining drone. dey won't knO wot hit dem. LoLz!

Lenna hastened her steps until she was behind the brat's seat. The overseer grabbed the top of the chair and spun it around so that Rose was facing her. Only rose was still facing her PDA, texting with one hand while holding her head up with the other.

“What are you doing?” 

Rose didn't look up from her tablet. “I'm practicing new ways to have fun.”

“Like damaging the company's property?”

Rose blew a raspberry and rolled her eyes. “Nah, nobody wants to play with me.” She looked up from her PDA. “But I figured you were using social media to keep tabs on me. You just thwarted my plans too quickly. So I thought it might be fun to just write nonsense and see how you reacted to it.” Rose smiled. “It's interesting, you find property damage a more pressing concern than sexual harassment.”

“Well...” Lenna eyes shifted down to Rose's chest. She was wearing coveralls, but had left the front of her suit open all the way to her belly button. This exposed her black netted bra. “...Maybe we wouldn't have to worry about 'sexual harassment' if we finished getting dressed in the morning.”

Rose snorted. “This job is so boring!” she slammed her fists into the arm wrests on her chair. “I'm so glad I only have to work a six hour shift. I'm a fashion designer, why do I have to muck around with the lot of you?”

“We're trying to establish a civilization.” Lenna folded her arms, tucking her clip board under her shoulder. “There won't be a large demand for vanity until we get a little better established.”

“Tell that to Holla! She's going to start in her own movie pretty soon.”

Lenna smirked and closed her eyes. There was still a faint glow behind her eyelids. “I assure you even she is doing unpleasant work right now.”

“Nuh-uh!” Rose held out her PDA. “Just look at her social feed! She never says anything about shit like this!”

Lenna's eyes opened back up, and her smirk vanished. “She's going to be a movie star. If she complained publicly about it, people would lose respect for her.”

“Whatever.” Rose spun around in her seat and placed her hands over the command console. Holographic joysticks appeared in her hands. “I bet Holla would go crazy doing this job.” She squeezed the trigger, causing her drone to fire plasma shots at a wall of rock. “Honestly, there's no skill at all, you just shoot the walls and wait for a collector to clean up after you.”

“There's plenty of skill.” Lenna unfolded her arms. “It just appears simple because you're not trying to be productive.”

“Productive rock smashing...” Rose chuckled. “You've been doing this for a month, did you find anything interesting?”

“We found traces of metals that are very close to the ones on earth. Even though you don't see anything, all of that rock contains ore that we can use.”

“I don't know overseer, this is all making me very sleepy.” A few seconds later, Rose started to mock snore and leaned her body to the right. This caused the mining drone to spin and scatter its plasma shots all over the place. Some of them were even hitting the ceiling, which could potentially cause a cave in on millions of credits worth of mining equipment. The drones were just too heavy to recover in the event of a cave in. Lenna dove in beside rose and struggled with the controls, but the brat did everything in her power to ensure her miner was shooting erratically. Lenna took the back of her hand and flung it into Rose's face, flattening her nose. She followed through with her strike, causing rose and her chair to fall over. The head rest kept Rose's head off the floor, but it was still a pretty bad tumble. The teenager's hands quivered from the shock. She reached for her face to feel her nose, smearing the blood around as she did so. “I-It's broken!” Was all Rose was able to reply with. A few of the miners had been watching Lenna's meeting with Rose, but the recent commotion had drawn everyone's attention to the fiasco. But Lenna was unaware of all that, or maybe she just didn't care. Her eyes were trained on Rose's console monitor. Her miner was looking directly at a blue glow. There was something shining so brilliantly it could be seen through the rocks that surrounded it.

“Evacuate the mines.” Lenna didn't look away from the screen. “I want one collector and a precision drone to come to Rose's miner. Everyone else is to leave the mine and dock with the bridge.” The other miners knew better than to question their overseer. But not Rose. Despite her injury, even she was able to appreciate what she was seeing. 

“W-what are we looking at?” The shock was starting to subside.

“It's unknown.” Lenna placed her hands on the edge of the console, still not looking away from the screen. “You might have discovered a new substance.”

“M-me?” Rose set her chair back up and sat in it, though she stayed outside of Lenna's reach. “Does that mean I get to name it?”

“If it is a new substance, you can name it whatever you like.”

Despite having her nose broken, she smiled and powered up her PDA to tell everyone the good news.

Meanwhile, a single collector and a special precision mining drone appeared on screen. The precision miner had a smaller photon bullet that made it ideal for chipping away rock without damaging ajacent structures. It could also use a traditional drill for low heat, low impact applications. 

“Time isn't a concern, we're ahead of schedule. Whatever it is, it could be unstable.”

The precision operator began the delicate operation of cleaning the rock away from the mystery object. Everyone's sense of wonder grew as the glow was slowly unearthed. Before long, a glowing blue fluid poured out of the hole.

“So it's not ore.” Lenna waved her hand at the screen. “Build a make shift bucket out of rock, fill it,  and stow it on the collector. Then evacuate the last of the mining equipment.” Lenna turned away from the monitor and marched towards the hatch. “I'm going in on foot. Have the mechanics begin routine maintenance. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

Rose turned to Lenna. “But what are you doing?”

“You'll see.” Was all Lenna said before disappearing out of the hatch.

…

After a few minutes, the overseer had come back. Rose was a little surprised by her quick return.  “So what did you do?”

Lenna drew her vein buster. “I shot an entire tube of explosives near the glowing liquid that remained. There's a lot of it.”

“Because?”

“Do you need to ask?”

Rose was in too much pain to react strongly to anything. “Didn't you collect a sample for some scientists to examine?”

“I did.” Lenna's thumb moved over a button on top of the vein buster. “But all of the scientists are focusing on food at the moment. It could be weeks or months before they even decided to look at the sample I've collected. Hell, the sample might even spoil before anyone gets a chance to look at it.  I can't wait that long to see how volatile this is. I have a crew to run, and I refuse to mine around something without knowing how volatile it is.” There was no objections from anyone, there wasn't time for them. Lenna's thumb mashed the button on top of the Vein buster. The “boom” following the button press was a lot bigger than it should have been, and the following quake was enough to throw the overseer onto her back. 

A monitor hooked up to an exterior camera showed blue flames erupting out of every cave leading into the mine. Boulders rolled down the side of the mountain, and the cave entrances were hidden behind a veil of dust. It would be several minutes before things settled. “Well” Lenna said while standing back up. “Bad new is that we probably have to dig those passages out again. Good news is that we still have access to all of our equipment, and we might have just discovered a possible fuel source on this planet.”

Rose had managed to stay in her seat. “Okay, so it's highly volatile?”

Lenna looked at the outside video feed. “It would appear so.”

“In that case, I'm going to name it Lenna-lolium.”