A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2)

by Dana Stabenow

  “It’s not like you to belabor the obvious, Caleb.”

  So he told me, and the next time Strasser, who had constituted himself as a sort of Belt Representative at Large, was on board we put it to him. “Our in-house computer has a program, Hermann, called High Frontier. We’re using it to register claims. It’s tied in with our astronomical chart, a fax of which you receive upon registration.”

  Strasser had two friends with him and I watched them mutter together for a few minutes. The first time I had seen him, over the cockpit viewer the day of our arrival at Ceres, Hudson’s Disease had had Strasser’s body swollen up like a balloon filled with water and spotted like a Dalmatian. Today, his hair cut, clean-shaven, clean, he looked slim and dapper and maybe even perky. It’s amazing how getting yanked back from the edge of the grave can brighten up your whole year. Strasser growled, “Anyone using the library has a shot at that chart, then?”

  “Yes, and every miner who registers a claim.”

  “Then no thanks. I put my name on a rock, next thing you know I’ve got claim jumpers coming out my ears. I’ve got one of the richest neodymium strikes in the Belt”—one of his friends made a rude noise—”and the only way I’m going to be able to negotiate an exclusive contract as a sole source supplier to a laser crystal company is to hide what I’ve got until the ink’s dry on the signatures.”

  “You may need the legal leverage of an established claim of record in the future, Hermann. And as for your fears of claim jumpers,” I said, and hooked a thumb over my shoulder. “You know Caleb O’Hara, my security chief. This is Lieutenant Lodge, his second in command, seconded to our expedition from the Space Patrol. For a negotiable fee in raw ore they are prepared to guarantee your security.”

  He looked Caleb over critically, then Lodge, as if assessing their chances against Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Lodge looked affronted, Caleb amused. “And how will they do that?”

  “For starters, they’ll tie you in on a tight beam to our comm system so you will have access to us in an emergency. Maile Kuakini’s already got half a dozen commsats in operation. She plans to double that number over the next year.” I described a possible security route and assured him that our scoutship could pour on enough coals to reach him quickly in a real emergency. He still looked skeptical and I said, “Don’t decide today. Think it over. Tell your friends, and talk it over with them. And, Hermann? Think about how much more time you’re going to have for mining if you don’t have to spend it in preparation for repelling boarders.”

  The Belters came around to it in the end. Shortly after the first one hundred miners signed on Lodge acquired the frazzled look of someone who spends a large part of each day fighting her way into and back out of a pressure suit. She and the rest of her people spent most of their time on solarsleds, checking up on the patrols she and Caleb had set up, cross-checking asteroid claims with the haphazard miner’s registry on Ceres, and charting rock coordinates for Belt composites for Archy. The tridee map Archy generated from the registrations gave us a much clearer picture of the twenty or so degrees of the Asteroid Belt that had thus far been explored.

  Crip test-drove the map eight months after our arrival. He left at noon on Monday for 7871No Return and was back before dinner on Wednesday. He went out with a hold full of trading goods. He came back stuffed to the hatch with nickel, an element we were in urgent need of for the making of the alloys necessary to construct our one-shot pressure plates. “Got there and back without getting lost once, thanks to Archy’s map and my navigator here.” He clapped Leif on the shoulder as Mother beamed proudly in the background.

  I concealed my surprise. “Well done,” I said. “I guess it’s safe to let you off the leash now, Crip. Once the word gets out we’ve got a bona fide pickup and delivery service, the miners’ll be calling us.”

  Leif.

  He was an independent, self-sufficient little cuss, all over the ship at all hours of the day and night. At first I was inclined to put the brakes on his activities, but when I saw that he was genuinely welcomed wherever he went, I backed off. After Crip told me how he never got lost with Leif riding shotgun, I told Archy to work up an introductory course in navigation and run it by Mother. If I had to have supercargo on board the Hokuwa’a-Voortrekker, it was going to be productive, contributing supercargo.

  I didn’t try to force an intimate family relationship between us overnight. Maybe it was the easy way out, but we were, after all, total strangers. Mother and our DNA were all we had in common. There were only so many routes I could take in expressing my displeasure over her manipulation of my future, not to mention my body parts, and taking it out on a ten-year-old boy wasn’t one of them. The truth was I didn’t know what to say to the kid. I went into labor practically in his face the first time I saw him. And Grays was his father. Lodge was his cousin. Tigers breed true, so they say.

  He did spend a lot of time with the twins, who adored him. And when he wasn’t riding with Crip he followed Caleb around; that boy never turned down an opportunity to go anywhere, which all by itself was a character trait that convinced me he was my son, genetically at least.

  We didn’t spend a lot of time together, though.

  — 6 —

  Staying in Motion

  Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

  —Sir Isaac Newton

  MINING IN ITS ESSENTIALS is the same anywhere in the system. Exploration techniques involve geological inference, remote sensing, and drilling for samples. The tools, with adaptations, remain the same. There are the core drillers, the thump trucks, the spectroscopes. Loonies might use optic cannons where Terran roughnecks use a rotary drill; the result is again the same, a ten-meter length of cylindrical core sample extracted for dissection and analysis by the resident geologist.

  Each area of excavation does have its own local problems. On Terra the high gee causes rock falls and the atmosphere permits the seep of poisonous gases such as hydrogen sulfide. On Luna, regolith, the powdery surface dust, gets into everything, tripling maintenance and replacement costs and tech hours in repair. In the Belt, there is no atmosphere, no regolith, and more often than not little or no surface gravity. But because Mother Nature always, always gets the last laugh, the human factor leaps in to fill this breach of natural obstacles.

  Vacuum is cold, cold and black. Sol is a bright shiny ball somewhere over your shoulder, but it offers no warmth. A billion stars twinkle brightly all around you, mocking your craving for light, and it isn’t long before the cold seeps into your bones, slowing your physical reactions, and the dark seeps into your heart, slowing your instincts and initiative. You’re tired all the time.

  And when you’re tired or exhausted, fatigued or just plain pooped, then is not the time for you to handle a substance that seems almost malevolently human in its determination to put parts of you into orbit around Pluto. In the first year after our arrival in the Belt, Charlie handled over a hundred cases of trauma resulting from severed limbs, usually hands, caused by the careless handling of nobelite, TNT, plastique, Meltall, Nukite, Crackette, and any and all other explosives known to man, including a few original and frequently fatal concoctions indigenous to the Belt. It got so she could tell how long someone had been mining in the Belt by how many fingers and toes he had left.

  If, after an accident, the claim’s partners got the injured miner’s suit to seal at the nearest joint immediately after the accident, there was a chance to save his life and the possibility of prosthetic replacement for whatever was missing. Charlie got pretty good at jury-rigging longshoring hooks for hands and waldo claws for feet. Faced with injuries more extensive, she got out the long sleep serum and told Archy to enter the miner’s will into the station log.

  I was in her clinic once when a miner died that way. He was one of the bad ones, with burns over eighty percent of his body, ruptured lungs, and three missing li
mbs. How he’d lived long enough to make it to the station was anybody’s guess, and Charlie’s skill and the machines were all that was keeping him alive now.

  He coughed and wheezed. “Am I going to make it, Doc?”

  She put her hand into his remaining one. “No, Bill,” she said steadily. Charlie never lied to a patient.

  “How long?”

  “A few hours.”

  “Shit.” He coughed again and spit up blood. She wiped his mouth. “I’ve got a wife. Couple kids. Downstairs. Haven’t seen them in ten years.” I thought his eyes filled; I couldn’t be sure because I found it hard to look at him.

  “Where downstairs?” Charlie said. He didn’t answer immediately. “Where downstairs, Bill?”

  His face twisted and he groaned. She reached for an injector. It must have been some kind of painkiller because his expression eased. Panting a little, he said, “Missoula, Montana. Shakespeare’s the name. Elizabeth. Evan and Craig. My partner on Caliban knows the split, he’ll—” He began coughing again.

  “We’ll get it to them, Bill,” Charlie said soothingly.

  As the miner’s pain grew worse, Charlie doubled and tripled his painkillers. She talked to him as long as he could talk. She held his hand until it grew cold in her own. When he was gone beyond all possible hope of reviving, she disconnected all her useless equipment methodically, one tube or wire or needle at a time. She straightened his torn clothes as best she could. She smoothed his hair from his forehead. Lastly, she lay gentle fingers on his eyes and drew his eyelids slowly down, and stood next to his bed, her hands folded, for a few moments.

  When she turned, her eyes were filled not with sorrow or pain but with rage. Charlie was unlike Mother in that she could hate, and unlike me in that she could hate only once. Charlie hated Death. When Death had the temerity to snatch a patient out from under her care, Charlie didn’t think of it as fate or karma or a destiny that shaped his or her end. It was Death, using trauma or disease to cheat Charlie and Charlie’s skill and Life, in that order of importance. She fought him for her patients claw and fang every step of the way, and she took it personally when he beat her, which wasn’t often.

  It was almost more than I could bear, but I knew better than to offer sympathy.

  If the miner worked alone, and unlike Bill Shakespeare so many of them did, after a fatal accident their bodies became a part of Belt debris, drifting in space forever or until discovered by some startled passerby. Later it would be standard operating procedure for each claim to have a resident, accredited explosives expert, and when the miners formed a guild they made it mandatory, but that was many years away. In the meantime, Charlie worked long hours, Mother Mathilda held a lot of funeral masses, and Brother Moses made a killing selling St. Joseph medals. St. Joseph was the patron saint of the working man and Brother Moses claimed to be plowing the profits on the sale of each medal into a Miner’s Disability Fund, for disbursement to and support of disabled miners. Very few lived to take advantage of it.

  · · ·

  It was a good thing I set up a schedule for delivery that I knew couldn’t be met. During the testing period, the first rock we slapped a pressure plate on didn’t go anywhere because the pulse unit detonated too close to it, blowing a neat hole right through the center of the plate and the rock. It was a tremendous explosion, quickly snuffed out in vacuum, oddly the more terrifying because we couldn’t hear it. Two days later the remaining rim began breaking up. We ducked the debris for weeks, and Archy expressed his dissatisfaction with the extra load it put on the station’s space anchor.

  Intimidated, the transportation team cut back so drastically on fuel for the next attempt that the result was the tiniest possible puff of dust where the controlled-velocity distribution of slag impacted against the plate. There was no perceptible degree of movement out of the rock’s plane of rotation. A week later we were still waiting. Two weeks later the rock had moved maybe half a meter.

  Third time’s a charm, so they say. The third time the pulse unit misfired. The fourth time it didn’t go off at all. We waited for twelve hours as the fuse hung fire. Finally Crip said over his commlink, apparently to the Belt at large, “I’m not going down there to see what’s wrong. Are you going down there to see what’s wrong?”

  The response was instantaneous and unanimous.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Nope.”

  “Not me.”

  “Not hardly.”

  “I don’t rightly reckon so.”

  “Mrs. Lu didn’t raise no dummy.”

  “I was born at night, but not last night.”

  Eventually, over Bob Shackleton’s objections (”Oh, hell, there goes another milepost marker!”), we torpedoed the rock and its dud for the protection of any unsuspecting prospector who might wander into the area. By then we were getting crafty and were doing the testing downarm. The new test site was about ten million kilometers from the station on that ecliptic so the debris went wide before it got as far as the station. Which it never should, since we’d angled the detonations to erupt in the other direction. Theoretically. In the Belt, we were discovering Murphy’s Law worked overtime.

  The days and weeks slipped by and so did my six-month deadline for the first shipment. I extended it three months. It passed. I gave the rock-throwing team a third deadline and they missed it, too. I was unhappy and said so. “It’s a damn sorry day when my own handpicked team of experts can’t do a simple thing like start a little pebble moving through space on a preset course,” I informed a staff meeting. “Get on with it, dammit. This is starting to look like the timetable for the old STS program.”

  “How about the Atlas rockets, when nine out of ten failed at launch?” Simon said brightly.

  “It’s just that we’ve never done anything like this before, Star,” Crip said.

  “What the hell’s that got to do with it? People have been doing new jobs since one of us thought up the stone axe. So shipping ore from the Belt to Terran orbit is a new job. Get with it!”

  Crip flushed a dull red and stamped out. He also whipped his team in line enough to run a series of three perfect tests on asteroids graduating upward in size. For the fourth, fifteen months after our arrival, we launched 10849Perry’s, which had in fact assayed out at a twenty-one percent grade of that good old heavy stuff that made spaceships go. “Is that medium-sized enough for y’all?” Claire wanted to know.

  “Well,” I said grudgingly. “As long as it was there.”

  We estimated ETA Terranova in nine months, which meant they would be receiving their first shipment in just under twenty-two months from our departure. “Fairly well done,” I said, and had to turn away from the team leaders’ collective expression to hide my grin. “By the way,” I said over my shoulder. “Mayor Panati promised us a bonus if they received the first shipment of ore in under twenty-four months. Twenty-five percent of annual salary in a lump sum distribution. It’s being held in escrow at the First National Bank of Terranova, along with your salaries. It’s not much, I know, but—”

  Whatever else I might have been about to say was lost in the ensuing uproar.

  You want to know the secret for getting the best out of your employees? Here’s one formula for you:

  A) Hire the best.

  B) Cut them in on the take.

  C) Tell them precisely what you want them to do.

  Last, and most important:

  D) Leave them alone. Or try to.

  Works for me.

  The next rock we sent off was much smaller but almost eighteen percent titanium ore, a lightweight metal that holds its shape up to very high temperatures, much in demand for pressure plate and spaceship hull composites. Although we launched it seven and a half months after Perry’s rock, due to the asteroid/planetary lineup at the time of launch, we skipped it off a gravitational field here and there and it would arrive less than four months later. The third rock was essentially a whole bunch of technetium, which does not naturally occur on Terra, or
on Luna, in any significant amounts.

  Terranova needed it. Terranova needed everything we could throw at it. Island One had about run Loonie miners off their legs; Island Two, if not supplemented by material from the Belt, would leave nothing behind on Luna but scorched earth. And although the Apollo expeditions determined that Luna had oxygen to spare, she was poor in three elements necessary for human life: hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. This led to an accumulation of horrific lift costs from Terra, and upon completion of construction left Terranova heavily in debt to the American Alliance. That situation had prompted the frantic construction of the zero-gravity manufacturing module, the Frisbee, so we could start paying off some of that debt even as we were incurring more.

  Island Two would be different. Analyzing the albedo of the asteroids from Mitchell Observatory had confirmed that the Belt was rich in carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen. In planning our expedition we had calculated exploration and processing costs down to the last Alliance dime. When we added up the numbers, the general consensus allowed as how the trip might be worth it, if only we could find the right minerals in sufficiently large deposits to make recovery and transportation economical and rapid. No matter how much the astronomers and the exogeologists reassured us, we told ourselves, we weren’t going to believe anything until we saw it, smelled it, tasted it our own selves.

  But after we got there—zowie! The abundance of Terran-poor elements was staggering. Silver, platinum, copper, nickel, potassium, and uranium in quantities that, if Archy and Simon never thought us up a new star drive, would keep us beetling around the solar system for the next five centuries. Cerium and erbium went into metal alloys essential to life in space; they were present in abundance in the Belt and ours for the taking. Neodymium, holmium, and dysprosium were used to make laser crystals and Belters had struck them so rich that LCM, Inc. eventually sent a representative out to Ceres to open a purchasing office. We found one asteroid a hundred meters in diameter estimated at containing four million tons of nickel. If we could have set it down whole on Terra it would have paid for the expedition’s trip out and part of its projected five-year stay.