Spice Mining
The industrial-scale, high-risk extraction of melange from the open desert.
Call it a hazardous trade and you're understating it. Spice mining depends on split-second coordination between three moving parts. Lumbering crawler harvesters rake the surface for pre-spice masses. Spotter aircraft scan for the first signs of a worm on the move. Ornithopter carryalls stand poised to snatch the crawler off the sand before the worm reaches it. Every run is a countdown. The harvester's own vibration calls worms up from below. A crew slow to pull out loses the machine, and often themselves, to the creature closing in. The risk never scared off the money. A single successful haul was worth enough to make spice mining one of the most profitable and jealously guarded industries any House could hold on Arrakis. Harkonnen crews ran the operation before Atreides administrations inherited it. Both depended on workers willing to gamble their lives on a trade that kept the Imperium's economy and its ships moving at all.
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