The Asteroid Belt
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The Asteroid Belt
By Stephen Brandon
Copyright 2014 Stephen Brandon
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Author's Note
This book is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, incidents, and dialogue are from the authors imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or other persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Real and fictional locations are used for background only.
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Table of Contents ~(ToC)~
Prologue
Chapter 1 Rescue Mission
Chapter 2 Copied from Journal
Chapter 3 Reprisal
Chapter 4 Attack & Counter
Chapter 5 The meeting and results
Chapter 6 On the move again
About Stephen Brandon
Other books by Stephen Brandon
Connect with Stephen Brandon
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Prologue
A portion of chapter 11 from The Impossible Ambition
Our 3 months of training and work are complete. When our spacecraft were launched from earth the exterior airlocks were all recessed into the hull. That was the first item we had to reconfigure so they then stuck out from the side of each module 2 and 4. In case I didn't mention it earlier, all the modules bolted together and module 5 was designed to be disassembled into I beams. All pressurized modules had two airlocks, one external and one internal with a place on the opposite mating ring to fasten the airlock from any other module. The mating rings where the modules bolted together isn't pressurized. On average it took three spacecraft launched from the surface to make one of the spacecraft we would travel to the asteroid belt in. We combined our cargo drones the same way using disassembled module 5's to bolt them together. Then their electronics were slaved to the crew ships for control.
Tuesday rolled or should I say it floated around after a 24 hour break. The ships launched for the moon this evening and we moved over to our ships for launch in the morning.
Our original three spacecraft plus the one furnished by THE BOARD launched without incident. Even our slave cargo ships started without a hitch. After 8 hours and only two minor formation adjustments we unsuited and started shift rotation.
One hundred and twenty-two days out we caught up with the supply rocket that had been launched early. It was originally supposed to go to the station with supplies, but we convincingly lost it because we needed these supplies in the asteroid belt, but didn't want this cargo on record. After a few main rocket burns and minor thrustor adjustments it joined our formation as planned.
Two hundred and nine days from launch we achieved our designated position and parked the slave cargo spacecraft. Tomorrow each manned spacecraft will head into the belt for our initial survey to locate a main base site. My impossible ambition is almost complete.
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Chapter 1 Rescue Mission
The asteroid located by the crew ship 1 named it Wonderland. We discovered that hollowing out an asteroid using laser drills presented unique challenges. After all who would think that the vaporized rock would act like a jet and cause it to move. We'd located a better location so we used the rock vapor to move Wonderland to a new location. Piloting an asteroid presented a challenge and chances to learn.
Pressure testing the living and working areas of Wonderland taught us that the laser drills sometimes malfunction and that even solid rock leaks, no surprise there. By my journal dating system we were finally able to work inside Wonderland in shirtsleeves on day 794 DFE (days from earth).
Our unique bolt together spacecraft enabled us to start re-configuring the crew ships and cargo drones into mining spacecraft. We had to retrieve all the unmanned resupply cargo ships. Who ever was closest to the arrival point was tasked and we quickly discovered that capitalism was the best method of keeping track of expenses.
Beyond our extensive planning, luck also played a great part in our location and original mining surveys. Alice and James Melbourne proved that on their first expedition in miner 2. They discovered an almost solid metal asteroid consisting of various ores melted together. This was one more indicator one of the theories the astronomers had about the asteroid belt being a planet that disintegrated may be correct. We trimmed their load down and kept some ores to start our own manufacturing at the belt work station we were assembling. The Melbourne's decided that they wanted to visit earth one more time, so they crewed their miner spacecraft back to earth orbit. What they didn't anticipate was the meteor storm that holed their ship and disabled their main rocket. They lived through that and using only maneuvering thrusters managed to closely enough match orbit with the earth space station to be retrieved by tugs.
No one else managed to find an asteroid as valuable as Alice and James, but they found what was needed to make us self-supporting. We had no idea what our mining and shipments to earth were going to do to the global economy. However some of our planners from THE BOARD had ideas what the politicians might try. Their plans to counter these ideas and taxes were only off by a few decades. In certain ways we were successful beyond their dreams.
Year four here in the asteroid belt had its problems. Lost miner spacecraft and accidents were expected. Luckily casualties were few, but our population wasn't that large. We still made progress and approached self-sufficiency. We even manged to build most of a spacecraft from local materials. We were still dependent on earth for computer modules and other items to create a diverse environment.
It wasn't until late in our fifth year in the belt that the governments on earth started looking the other way when pirates stole our shipments on earth. Then a cargo of cryogenic animal fetus was left on the dock for two weeks to spoil. Someone even had the idea to give a large shipment of computers an EMP to ruin them and I assume they thought that they could force our dependency on earth that way.
We've been monitoring all earth communication that have enough signal strength to be coherent. To test my suspicions I had a message sent to the earth space station informing them of problems here in the belt and requesting specific medical supplies, food, and solar panels. Days later I got the reply I was afraid of. Food packaged for long term storage was in short supply just like medical supplies. The earth station even stated that they would ship us seawater and told us we'd need to distill it ourselves.
Late in our sixth year here one of our cargo ships was boarded and confiscated by the UN Space-force. They claimed it was a hazard to navigation and then when our lawyers objected they claimed it contained contraband cargo. Tons of ore is contraband?
Alice Doctor started ordering the evacuation of Tim's cave and certain other trustworthy personnel to the space station. THE BOARD declared that she was acting paranoid when she brought up her conclusions about the political situation and rumors that her personnel had heard.
By my journal on day 2500 the UN declared the privately owned space stations, the moon settlements, and the asteroid belt UN protectorates. The next day a UN military force invaded our spaceport on Montserrat. Luck was with the ground crew. They'd listened to Alice and had an emergency ship fueled and ready. Because the UN invasion force didn't know enough not to fire into buildings and fuel storage tanks, the resulting explosions killed 80% of the invasion force. Then they declared that the asteroid belt community had started a war
against them.
Eight days later our spaceport in Chile was invaded. That invasion force simply claimed they'd found illegal weapons and the criminals there ran off into the jungle. Our side of the story is that the only spacecraft left on the ground was in the process of launching when the invasion force was spotted on radar. The last members of the ground crew made it safely to orbit as our space stations left orbit. That was unexpected by the UN.
They scrambled their forces and launched missiles a few days later. Luck or secret prior planning was with two of the space stations again. It wasn't until the earth moon L4 space station was hit that everyone discovered that they were launching missiles with nuclear warheads. By then the earth space station and workstation were far enough out that they considered themselves safe. The only problem was that they'd used most of their fuel dodging missiles that had gone ballistic. As a result I took our newest spacecraft named Free Enterprise, loaded it up with fuel and supplies, and launched toward rendezvous with the earth workstation. On day 2682 we fueled them up and then proceeded to Mars L5 hoping that the ice asteroids we'd discovered earlier were still there. They were.
The earth space station was on a trajectory for the Sun-Venus L4 point. Every Lagrange point we'd investigated had asteroids in them. They informed me that they had oxygen left but no hydrogen and were limited on food. They were completely ballistic. I adjusted Free Enterprise's trajectory and calculated that we'd reach them in 43 days.
We made it and refueled them. Then they had a choice to make. Trajectories calculated gave them two choices. First was use all the fuel I gave them and use Venus as a sling point to get to the belt, or go inside the orbit of Mercury and use the Sun and still have some fuel left for maneuvering. Frederick chose the second. Six hours after we'd completed our maneuvering burn we received a faint call informing us that a belt ship calling itself Trojan 2 would rendezvous with us after he looped the Sun. He claimed he was decelerating at 3 G.
We completed our acceleration burn using the Oberth effect to launch us toward the belt. Twelve days later we received another call from Trojan 2.
~(ToC)~