A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2)

by Dana Stabenow

  “Lo how the mighty have fallen.”

  “Shut up, Archy. Claire,” I said, “suit up your crew and get out the assay equipment. I want one medium-sized asteroid, thirty percent silicon minimum in composition, with significant trace deposits of either oh-two, hydrogen, or nitrogen, suitable for launch to Terranova within six months. I want similar rocks staked out for routine launch at four-month intervals thereafter.”

  Claire Bankhead, a Georgia belle and the only person I’d ever seen wearing makeup in freefall, gaped at me. “Medium-sized?” And then she said, “Did y’all say within six months?”

  “Y’all heard me right.” They were all sitting up straight and looking at me with expressions ranging from excitement to disbelief. “Terranova bankrolled this expedition, at not inconsiderable expense to themselves, specifically to facilitate the speedy construction of Island Two. Now we’re going to demonstrate good faith by giving Terranova a return on their investment, and fast.”

  “How?” somebody said.

  “How what?”

  “How are we shipping the asteroids?”

  “We’re going to slap a pressure plate on them and give them a nuclear kick in the pants, same as what powers the Hokuwa’a and the Voortrekker. As soon as the cargo bay is clear, Whitney Burkette and his engineers will be setting up a fabrication shop for one-shot expendable pressure plates. In the meantime, those of us not actively involved in setting up the station will begin cannibalizing pulse units and modifying them to fuel rock shipment from Belt to Terran orbit.”

  “If we use up our pulse units to ship ore, how are we supposed to get home?” Perry Austin wanted to know. She was a small woman, with dark hair cut short in a fringe across her forehead and the alert, inquisitive expression of a terrier at a rat hole. She-was dressed the way we all were, in a silver-blue jumpsuit that looked and smelled the worse for wear. On her collar was a gold pin, three rocket plumes encircled by an orbit and rising to a five-pointed star. Crip wore one just like it.

  There was a slight but perceptible space around her in that crowded galley. Perry Austin was one of those people it surprises you to know are still alive, since they’ve already accomplished more in one lifetime than any ten other people you could name. Born in 1951, she received her doctorate in physics from CalTech in 1973, joined NASA in 1978 to fly shuttle missions twice as mission specialist, and then quit in 1986 after Challenger. She rejoined in 1992 after the Beetlejuice Message caused the creation of the American Alliance and eventually put the combined gross national products of the North, Central, and South American and Pacific Rim countries behind the newly created Department of Space. She was capcom when Challenger II went up on its fatal test flight. She flew second in command to Crip on Enterprise II’s successful test, after which she pioneered the revival of the BDR, short for Big Dumb Rocket, an expendable chemical-fuel rocket series that lifted essential Terran construction materials into geosync for Terranova for four grinding, nonstop years. I hadn’t been all that surprised to see her show up at Ceres ahead of schedule with an asteroid in tow.

  “We’ll start worrying about that five years from now.” I shifted Paddy’s weight on my breast and peeked inside the baby bag. She was sleeping like—well, like a baby, with her tiny fist jammed into her mouth. I congratulated myself once again on my dazzling procreative capabilities and raised my head. “Shipping raw rock is only the start, people,” I said. “It’s always cheaper to ship a finished product than it is raw material. That’s why—”

  “That why there are oil and gas separation centers on the North Slope of Alaska—” Charlie said in singsong.

  “—and pineapple canneries on Lanai—” Simon chanted.

  “—and the Frisbee on Terranova,” Sam chimed in.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m glad you guys have been paying attention.”

  “Only for five years,” someone muttered.

  I ignored her. “Now, obviously this expedition is not ready to begin refining and shipping pure ore. However, we do need to develop an interim plan, a compromise between raw rock and pure ore.” They were intent, listening to every word. No one had actually said “Bullshit!” and stalked out, which I found encouraging. “Shipping ore raw, partially processed, or as a finished product—all these have different values to us, to the miners, and to Terranova. For example, it would be cheap for us to ship the rock raw forever, but eventually not worth the effort of refining on arrival at Terranova.

  “To put it simply, the idea is to start out on this end with a chunk of mixed matter and to finish in Terran orbit with a mass of more or less refined ore, or at least a mass with a reduced amount of slag, to speed up extraction on the Terranova end. The process may be automated, it may have to be manned, we don’t know yet. To that end, I’d like to introduce Maggie Lu, formerly of the Frisbee on Terranova, where she pioneered a lot of zerogee silicate refining techniques. She will be heading up research into this project, which means she will be looking over everyone’s shoulders for the next year or so. Answer her questions and stay out of her way. Anybody who has an idea, feed it to her through—Archy, what shall we name Maggie’s program?”

  “How about Cortez?”

  Charlie snickered and Simon looked offended. I sighed. A computer that can think for itself is a computer that will think for itself. “Thanks a lot, Archy, your opinion of the human race’s motives and methods is always welcome. Call it Klondike.”

  “There’s an asteroid with that name already, boss.”

  “I reckon we could call it Agricola,” Claire said. “He was the first Terran mining engineer worth a spit.”

  “How about it, Archy?”

  “Agricola it is.”

  “If we do come up with this process, and if it does have to be manned, who do we hire?” This from Perry Austin. She didn’t seem so much skeptical as intent on nailing down every loose end. “We only came out with two hundred and fifty people, Star. We’re going to need every one of them right here.”

  “Think about it, Perry. How many prospectors actually strike it rich? As compared to how many strike out?” From the corner of my eye I saw Maggie’s rueful expression. “You ever study gold rushes? The provisioners, the outfitters, made out like bandits, but most of the miners died broke. And those were the ones with the hardest heads; the smart ones gave up and went home before they starved to death.” I looked around the room. “We offer some poor slob who’s had about all they can take of the Great Alone a free ride home, if they’ll just do us these few little chores along the way.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “If Maile’s half as good a communications technician as she thinks she is, Terranova will have the rock’s composition and the expected delivery percentages long before they show in Terran orbit.” Maile gave her happy grin. “They’ll be reimbursed on arrival by a prearranged fee per kilo of refined ore. The more ore refined, the bigger their paycheck. It’ll be in their interest to push the process along.”

  “It’s a long trip home at those speeds,” Charlie observed. “Might want to make it a two-person operation.”

  “Good point. But that’s way down the road. Right now, we’re just looking for rocks with a payload worth more at Terranova than the fabrication costs of the pressure plate and the propellant charges it takes to get them there. Simon, you’re in overall charge of transportation. Crip, Perry, and Sam are your seconds.” I looked at Sam Holbrook.

  “We’re working on it, Star,” he reported. Sam was a tiny Santa Claus of a man with a shock of white hair, twinkling blue eyes, nimble hands, and a boundless, childlike curiosity. “We’re ready to test the program we blueprinted on Ellfive, excuse me, Terranova. When Claire okays our first shipment, Archy’s ready to plot orbit, inclination, and eccentricity on a map showing relative course and speed to the Hokuwa’a. When we’ve nailed it down, we’ll begin computing an interception and a course correction.”

  “You guys just aren’t going to leave anything where you found it, are you?
” Bob Shackleton said sadly.

  “Burkette and Lobos in engineering have the specs and the hardware for the propellant system; check with them after Claire has registered her coordinates with Archy. Archy, run a separate snakeskin on individual incoming data, but no hard copies until you find a rock the three of you think Terranova might like to see rising in the east one morning. And, Claire? I want you to keep your assayer peeled for any uranium oxide deposits you might find. We’re fine for fuel, but it won’t hurt us to have a stockpile in reserve independent of what the miners may or may not bring in. Look at everything and I mean everything, staked or not, that you come across, and feed the data into Agricola. Any rocks you find with significant quantities of oh-two, nitrogen, and hydrogen, tag them for future reference. Although I imagine anything close in to Ceres has been pretty well exploited by now. Any rare or odd elements you stumble across, notify the chemists and me, in that order. Any questions?”

  Claire blinked, shook herself, and pulled her way out of the galley. We could hear her muttering to herself as her feet disappeared up the companionway.

  “Roger.” He was floating in front of the galley viewport, his hand tightly clasped in Zoya Bugolubovo’s.

  “Roger,” I repeated. He looked around. “The minute we have spin, break out the geodomes and get the meat and milk vats set up. Much more of that regurgitated slop out of the galley and Caleb’s likely to go into a decline.” At my breast Paddy burped agreement. “Remember, we are farming for sale as well as for our own consumption. I didn’t see anything on Ceres but the standard hydroponics tanks”—I looked around at Caleb and he shook his head—“and none of the claims are big enough to support a really varied crop yield. By now, everyone in these parts is probably more than a little tired of manual pollination.” I smiled. “Many of you come from Terranova. I’m sure you remember what the first years were like. Whatever we grow, we can probably sell for its weight in platinum.”

  “Couldya crack that whip a little louder, boss?” Archy said. “I think you mighta missed one or two people.”

  · · ·

  In a day the Voortrekker was dead in space across from us, nose to tail and tail to nose. 10849Perry’s had been let off its leash and been bumped ever so gently into a matching orbit well off the Hokuwa’a’s stern. It was marked with a claim beacon warning off inquisitive prospectors.

  Aboard ships, we jettisoned our pressure plates and spot-welded them together so that they looked like a giant round clam. We applied fluorescent yellow pinwheels to both sides, tagged it with an eyes-and-ears warning flare, and nudged it off in the direction of Ceti Alpha Five. “Now the real fun begins,” I said.

  “Easy to say for you,” Dieter Joop grunted. “All right, folks, it show time is!”

  Working together nonstop, with time off for food but not sleep, under the fussy direction of Whitney Burkette, both ships’ companies had the companionway modules broken out of the holds in fifteen days. During the following month the modules unfolded outside the parallel-moored Hokuwa’a and Voortrekker like the web of a large, tipsy spider. For the next six weeks, led by Dieter Joop’s heavy-duty mechanics, a hundred riggers in p-suits played connect-the-dots with the triangular grid frames, looking like fat white flies caught in the web.

  Right away we ran into one of those problems you pray you’ve planned for and usually haven’t. I’d been EVA for thirteen-plus hours, supervising—the unkind would say getting in everyone’s hair—when I heard a small but nonetheless distinct crack! I froze in place, floating halfway between the Hokuwa’a and the Voortrekker. Small but nonetheless distinct cracks! are the last thing anyone needs to hear in vacuum, because the only sound you hear in vacuum comes from you and your pressure suit. Small but nonetheless distinct cracks! usually presage larger and more distinct cracks! that presage suit failure and suit owner failure shortly thereafter. I wasn’t putting any more stress on my suit until I knew exactly what had caused that unnerving little sound. “Archy?” I said softly into my communit.

  “Boss?” he responded, equally softly. “Why are we whispering?”

  “I just heard a cracking sound, like something in my suit is splitting on me.”

  “Oh,” he said, “probably we should do something about that.”

  I was starting to sweat. “Could we do something about that soon?” I said, almost singsong.

  In the same singsong Archy replied, “I think so, boss, security’s on its way, hang on now, don’t move, stay right there.”

  “Where would I be going?” I sang.

  “I don’t know but they’re on their way,” he sang back.

  “When are they going to get here?”

  “They’re almost there, okay, boss, there’s the sled, okay, the waldo’s out, okay—gotcha.” I felt a gentle tug at the back of my suit where the waldo remote latched on to the emergency eyebolt and I felt myself being tugged rapidly backward. In the blink of an eye I was stuffed into a lock, the lock was cycling, and I tumbled out into the Voortrekker’s galley. I made new time shucking out of my pressure suit and thanked whatever the gods may be that the twins were with Charlie.

  “What’s wrong, Star?” Perry Austin said, appearing from the companionway.

  “I don’t know, I heard this—” The lock cycled again behind me and Simon rolled in. Impatient hands yanked his helmet off. He bounced it off a bulkhead and Perry had to duck the ricochet. “Shit!” he bellowed. “Helmet polarizers never burned out at this rate at Ellfive and there we were 150 million klicks closer to Sol! What the hell is going on?”

  I scrambled after my own helmet and examined the visor. Sure enough, I found a hairline fracture beginning at the top of the frame. “Is it just ours, Simon?”

  “Hell no, it’s not just ours!” he yelled. “Visors’re cracking like peanut shells out there! What the hell’s wrong with them?”

  “I don’t know but we’d better fix it and fast. Another five minutes EVA and I’d have been freeze-dried.”

  Marco Venezia jury-rigged a smelter to boil down silicates and alkali to make replacement visors while Sam Holbrook studied the problem. In the meantime the work went on at half-strength and half-assed, one companionway module at a time with a two-hour crew rotation and visor replacement, which was probably excessive, but better safe than sorry.

  Marco got the smelter up and running. Then we had to wait around while someone went out and found the right kind of silicates, which with Maggie on board did not take as long as it could have. Turned out there were traces of various metallic oxides in some of the ore samples; Simon’s new visor was a delicate chartreuse, which lent his five o’clock shadow an interesting hue. Whitney Burkette’s was hot pink. His walrus mustache looked especially bristly behind it. A couple of days after Whitney had it fitted Sam came to me with a big grin and an electronic whatsis the size of a fingernail paring. “What’s that?” I said.

  “It’s why the polarizers were burning out. It’s the UVS.”

  “The what?”

  “It measures and monitors UV. You can get them for five cents apiece on Terra; twenty-five for a buck.”

  “Are they all defective?”

  “A good percentage. Somebody slipped up in quality control. I’ve ordered all UVSs in for testing and replacement on a rotational basis.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “It won’t be that bad; I’ve pulled everyone off the line who has training in p-suit maintenance.”

  “How many replacement UVSs we got?”

  “Almost enough.”

  “Can we make more?”

  He squinted at the tiny part, dwarfed by the lines on the palm of his hand. “Eventually. In the meantime the glass visors will have to do.”

  “They’re heavy, though.”

  He looked at me and said chidingly, “Dear darling Star, it don’t matter a whole hell of a lot out here, do it?”

  Two months and three days after we began our Herculean labors, the two ships were linked by curved tubular passageways
to form a squarish circle about 130 meters on a semi-side. Another ten very brisk days fixing guy wires and stabilizers and we were ready to put on spin. Crip and Perry fired their verniers at precisely the same moment and everything we had forgotten to tape to a bulkhead slowly floated down to what was now the floor in our new one-half artificial gravity, enough, like Ceres, to keep our feet and our food down and, with proper care, our muscles in shape. “Silverware!” Caleb said at our first real sit-down dinner in months. “Forks, knives, and spoons! Who says there’s no God?”

  When we stabilized at twenty-four-hour halfgee, Charlie cut the crew’s exercise requirement down to one hour per twenty-four. I started looking for ways to cannibalize excess treadmills into something useful, until Charlie extended her emergency treatment program for hypercalcemic Belters into a regular service. She advertised it in Piazzi City, charged a fee, and infuriated me by breaking even the third month she was in operation.

  All was not sweetness and light once we had spin, of course. Artificial gravity has its down side, i.e. motion sickness. During the first few days of halfgee, not less than a third of the crew suffered nausea and disorientation. There was a steady stream of walking wounded into Charlie’s inner sanctum until she found the right combination of drugs to steady the stomach until the inner ear caught up with the station’s RPMs. At full spin the twins started to cry and kept crying for two days, three hours, and seventeen seconds, at which time they suddenly shut up and went back to sleeping and eating and blowing bubbles. I couldn’t believe I’d ever wanted them to do anything else.

  In transit, the ships had been pressured to one third of an atmosphere, and everyone had sore throats from yelling out what they wanted to say because sound does not travel well in less than a full atmosphere. It had been a dry trip as well and we immediately started pumping hydrogen into our air supply. The smell at one third had been bad but tolerable; at full pressure there was a strong and immediate necessity for the air-conditioning system to kick into high. It did, and worked fine, until a careless mechanical engineer ripped open a tool kit before we had full spin and the air was filled with nuts and bolts. We were picking them out of the air filters and our nostrils for three days, and Charlie had to do at least one emergency tracheotomy after a p-suit tech inhaled a washer the size of a dime. Maile thought it all quite hilarious.