A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2)

by Dana Stabenow

  Then one morning Claire tumbled into my office, tripped over the sill, bounced twice in the low gee, and fetched up with her chin on my instep. Her eyes were glazed. She was unable to speak, only gargle. By the time I stopped her hyperventilating and started her making sense most of the rest of the ship’s crew had been attracted by the commotion and gathered around or tuned in to listen.

  “Star!” she said. “Star!”

  “What, Claire?”

  “Gold, Star! Gold!”

  “Gold?”

  “Gold! The whole rock! There must be a hundred cubic meters of the stuff in that one rock all by its lonesome!”

  “So what?”

  “So what? So what? Star, y’all don’t—Archy honey, what y’all got gold selling for on Terra now?”

  “About eight hundred and fifty a cubic centimeter, Claire.”

  “Eight hundred and fifty Alliance dollars per cubic centimeter—a hundred cubic meters—Star, do you realize I’ve just stumbled over a chunk of rock worth eighty-five billion in Alliance dollars?” She was almost weeping.

  “On Terra,” I said.

  She raised dazed eyes. “What?”

  “On Terra it’s worth eighty-five billion. Out here it’s just a chunk of metal, too soft to be any good to us.”

  “What!”

  I led her over to a chair and sat her down gently. I raised my voice so the hundreds of listening ears could hear me loud and clear. Frank had foreseen something like this and had warned me in advance. I’d done my homework, which I proceeded to regurgitate whole from the Encyclopedia Americana. Gold is a soft, bright, yellow metallic element (atomic number 79), I said. It is the most inert of metallic elements, I said. It is also the most ductile and malleable of metals, I said. Twenty-eight grams of gold can be rolled out flat enough to cover twenty-seven square meters, I said. “ ‘Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate,’ ” quoth I, smiling.

  Claire did not smile back. I noticed no one else smiling either, and I noticed I had started to sweat. “Gold,” I continued in the same patient, sane voice, “is a good conductor of heat and electricity. Hardened by platinum we could use it in electrical relays, but since fiberoptics came in we just don’t need that much of it.” I smiled again. “If we were jewelers, it would be different, but we aren’t.”

  I explained all this, and more, in detail, very carefully, to everyone I could pin to a bulkhead. None of it did one damn bit of good. Few listened, and those who did had their own reasons to sidestep the rush. Caleb’s family sort of ran New South Africa and he viewed all Belt gold deposits and gold-mining Belters as potential rivals in an industry that supported the family business. Maggie had contracted her fever two years before, had recovered, and was now immune. Roger was supremely disinterested in anything incapable of sprouting, and Zoya was supremely disinterested in anything other than Roger.

  There were a few others who held tenaciously to sanity, but the rest of the combined crews of the Hokuwa’a and Voortrekker went, to put it in strictly medical terms, bananas. Gold fever, as I learned only too well during those few mad months, is a virus that strikes like a cornered snake, spreads like butter over hot bread, and is about as curable as puberty. Unfortunately Charlie could find no suitable vaccine down in her dispensary. When she wasn’t out prospecting herself, that is. For three months almost every single crew member spent every single off-duty moment they had in vacuum banging on rocks with ball-peen hammers, torqueless wrenches, and their p-suited fists. I wanted to use their heads.

  A few shrewd entrepreneurs made out like bandits. Every person on board station had a pressure suit, it was one of the safety precautions I’d insisted on before leaving Terranova and hang the expense. In the general course of work there were always a couple of dozen out of commission for maintenance, so that a few forward thinkers rented their suits and jetpacks out by the hour. In spite of how crowded people think the Belt is, in a solar orbit conservatively speaking between one and four billion kilometers in diameter, there is a lot of space between rocks. A jetpack hour through vacuum from Ceres seldom produced a close-up inspection of anything but more vacuum. The p-suit excursions became longer and longer, and since the area five degrees to either side of Ceres had been pretty well exploited before we got there nobody made any major strikes. One or two made enough to pay their suit rental. It didn’t slow anybody down.

  What was I supposed to do? Forbid any extrastation activity? The most I could do, within the purview of the “freedom to pursue life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” clause in the expedition’s articles, was limit it. Should I declare all expedition pressure suits company property and forbid their use on off-duty time? Sure, if I wanted to preside over the first outsystem mutiny. I’ve never been one to piss into the wind, so I was willing to humor the madness long enough for everyone to get the gold fever out of their system.

  And then one of Charlie’s medtechs was killed in a fight over a glittering rock no bigger than a p-suit helmet that turned out to be nothing but silicates, and low-grade silicates at that.

  Charlie called me from her clinic when Lodge brought the body in. “I’ll be right down,” I said. “Archy, impanel a jury and assemble them in the galley.”

  “Yes, Star,” he said soberly.

  I reached for my dress tunic and went down to Charlie’s place of business to examine the body. It was a typical p-suit decompression death, not pretty, fortunately fatal. I gave orders for the burial service, recycling of the body and repair of the p-suit, and went down to the Hokuwa’a’s galley. Enlarged to feed the crews of both ships, it was the largest room on the station.

  The seven-member jury was generated at random from the ship’s roster. I handed out the jury armbands, one at a time, the last to Mother. She wouldn’t look at me. She pulled the armband up above her right elbow and took her place on a bench sitting against one bulkhead. I presided from another directly across from it. The defendant sat in a chair in the middle of the room with Lodge standing behind him looking as grim as I felt, one hand on the laser pistol strapped to her side. Witnesses, by ship’s law as many as could crowd into the space remaining, stood shoulder to shoulder around the room, and I knew everyone else had downed tools and was standing by their monitors and communits. The entire station was still, more still than it had been since final assembly, the kind of stillness that was thick enough to choke on.

  “Archy,” I said, “load Orestes.”

  “Orestes program loaded and running. Hear ye, hear ye, this first ship’s mast is now in session aboard Space Station Hokuwa’a-Voortrekker, Esther Svensdotter presiding. It is 2:30 pm Greenwich Mean Time, the sixteenth day of July, 2010, on this the five hundred thirty-second day of the Terranovan Belt Expedition. The jury will stand in the presence of the law.”

  The jurors rose to swear the oath of loyalty to the expedition’s articles. The plain, unequivocal words strengthened and comforted, as linguist Helen Ricadonna had designed them to back on Terranova. When the jury resumed their seats, their backs were straight and they wore a united expression of grim determination.

  The trial didn’t take long. The defendant, one of Dieter Joop’s engineers, waived counsel and admitted to striking the deceased, shattering his visor and causing suit decompression. Two witnesses corroborated his statement. The jury brought in a conviction without leaving the room. Their faces were a collective gray as they announced their decision in a vocal poll, each of them pronouncing the verdict one by one. Then it was my turn.

  I was furious with myself for not acting sooner to put the brakes on the gold fever. I was angry at the engineer, too. A guilty-of-murder verdict was a hellacious burden to place on his shipmates; if his sense of morality couldn’t or wouldn’t do it, then simple good manners should have been enough to have kept him in line. I set my teeth, swallowed hard, and said, “Micah Reardon, you have been found guilty of the heinous crime of murder by a jury of your peers. How say you?”

  Reardon, whom I was glad I knew only slightly, sh
ook his head once. “Let’s get it over with.” His face was white and he spoke without raising his eyes.

  At my breast Paddy stirred, her thumb in her mouth, her bright blue eyes alert. “Then rise and hear the sentence of this court.”

  He rose. His knees were shaking so badly that Lodge put a hand beneath his elbow to support him.

  I swallowed again, trying to moisten my suddenly dry mouth. “Micah Reardon, having been found guilty of murder, this court sentences you to immediate execution. Lieutenant Lodge, take the prisoner in charge. Members of the jury, follow me.”

  Down in the cargo bay Lodge placed Reardon against a bulkhead. The jury was issued a sonic rifle each out of the locker placed there for that purpose. They lined up opposite the convicted. Mother’s face was expressionless, her small hands on the sonic rifle deft. Lodge asked Micah if he wanted a blindfold. He said yes. We waited. When the cloth was tied round his eyes she stepped back and I said, “Ready, aim, fire,” and it was done.

  The sonic rifle was developed early in space colonization when the need for a weapon firing other than solid projectiles became evident in an environment precariously maintained against killer vacuum behind a quarter-inch titanium shell. It sent a jolt of laser-amped suprasonics to short-circuit the autonomic system. It was quick, clean, and quiet, and they say a painless way to die. There was only one way to find out for sure. Certainly Micah Reardon died easier than Charlie’s medtech had.

  “Are you all right, Mother?” I said after the sonic rifles were back in the locker.

  “No, dear,” she said, her voice strained, “I am not. Crippen?”

  They left. Hand in hand.

  I went back to my cabin and found Caleb and Sean waiting for me. He put the twins to bed, and then me.

  “Did you know about Mother and Crip?” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Nobody ever tells me anything.”

  “Possibly because they expect you’ll see what’s right under your nose.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “It’s none of my business,” I said.

  “True.”

  “She is eleven years older than he is.”

  “Also true.”

  “But it really is none of my business.”

  “No.”

  “I guess I just assumed, when Dad died, that that was it for Mother.”

  “Evidently she doesn’t agree. When did your father die?”

  “He went down off the Aleutians in 1996,” I said. “I couldn’t get home. It was right in the middle of the Cycle 23 flare incident.”

  Caleb caught at my hands. “Relax. You’re going to tie that blanket into a knot.”

  “Come to think of it, I caught Crip whistling last week, charting coordinates into the flight plan program. I should have known something was up. I’m glad for him. I didn’t think he was ever going to recover from Paddy’s death.”

  “But it really is none of your business.”

  “Right. Crip and Perry have more in common, though.”

  “Probably why they never got together.”

  I lay there thinking about Mother and Crip. It was easier than lying there thinking about Micah Reardon. Caleb must have felt the same way. Later that long, long night I heard him mutter, “ ‘A half-dead thing in a stark dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold.’ ” I twisted around to stare up at him, and looking a little self-conscious, he said, “After you recited that bit at Maggie I got Archy to read me some Service. It fits, doesn’t it?”

  I don’t know why it comforted me to know that, over a century before, the Yukon had had its own Micah Reardons, but it did. I burrowed deeper into Caleb’s arms and willed myself to sleep.

  The next morning I got up at six, bathed and changed Paddy, and went to breakfast. I ordered scrambled eggs and toast in the galley and sat down next to Simon.

  “Business as usual, right, Star?” Charlie said from his other side.

  “Shut up, Charlie,” Simon said.

  “How you could permit Mother, of all people—”

  “Shut up, Charlie,” Caleb said, forking scrambled eggs into Sean’s mouth.

  “I beg your—”

  “Do shut up, dear,” Mother said from across the table.

  Charlie shut up.

  · · ·

  After the medtech’s death and the Reardon execution gold fever abated aboard the Hokuwa’a-Voortrekker. One day Parvati Gandhi, in company with two engineers, one mining and one mechanical, came to me and said, “We got an idea.” They spoke fluently for a half hour. They had answers for all the questions I asked. The result was that we hauled in what remained of Claire’s asteroid, called 10863Ophir, and set up a solar smelter and a zerogee rolling mill. Parvati and Company began fabricating knickknacks and novelty items in their off hours. When they’d built up something of an inventory, they began selling it to Belters at an exorbitant price. Suddenly miners were sprouting hoop earrings so heavy they caused lower back pain and slave bracelets so enormous they couldn’t fit beneath a pressure suit. When the practice spread to my people I thought for a while I was going to have to institute a dress code. My all-time favorite gold innovation was the twenty-four-karat thunder mug in the john at Maggie’s Place, although I never felt really safe sitting on it—too soft and kind of slippery. It took weeks to talk Caleb out of the baby bottles and by then they were weaned and out of danger.

  It was our first experience with industry for individual profit among the crew. Incorporating it into the station’s bookkeeping was loads of fun. Belters traded raw ore for the finished item, after expenses the station took a modest percentage, and the remainder was divided between Parvati and her group, Parvati getting the largest cut because it had been her idea. We were in the market for as much raw ore in small amounts as we could get for experimentation and our own manufacture; the ore the station was shipping back to Terranova was in much larger quantity.

  Maile was one of the blessed few who had remained happily immune from the gold fever. She methodically went about her business, which entailed setting out commsats and putting the station on a direct, dedicated skip band to Terranova. Her first priority, set by me, was in linking us up to the Hewie monitors surrounding Sol so we’d have a continual readout of solar activity. I’d lost too many Fivers during the Cycle 23 flare. The construction of the Helios Early Warning System had been a direct result of that terrible event, and the arrival of the Librarians’ ship from a refueling stop on Sol had scared me enough to require continual and enhanced updates.

  After Maile had a steady readout from the Hewies and had invented a course-speed-and-composition (CSC) schedule for outbound rocks, she turned to the news and other more personal matters. The lag in transmission both ways made it impossible to hold normal conversation with Terranova and messages received that way did lack a certain sort of immediacy. We settled for prerecorded weekly messages for business and monthly messages for personal. Savvy miners who knew their physics crowded into the radio shack with messages of their own to send—for a small fee, naturally.

  After a few months of this, Maile came to me and said, “I got an idea.” She talked for a while, I gave her my blessing, and she began compiling news from around the system and broadcasting it on Channel 9 each evening at nineteen hundred. Necessarily delayed, it was still more recent and more accurate than either the faxsheets on the bulletin board or the gossip around Piazzi City. From the first Maile had a loyal following. She bracketed her broadcast with two hours of rock and two hours of jazz, and after Charlie set up a yammer she extended the program with weekend symphonies and operas. After a while she began accepting advertisements. Before long, KBLT was paying its way. “And we might start thinking about a trivee station,” she said cheerfully.

  “Did we bring a trivee transmitter?”

  “No.”

  “Can we build one?”

  Maile thought about it, and shook her head reluctantly. “No point in it. We
can’t manufacture trivees yet.”

  · · ·

  Two and a half years into expedition operations Terranova had taken delivery of the first two rocks. We got better with practice; within the next year we had over five asteroids in transit. Once we got the proportions between mass to move and thrust to move it down correctly, and an alloy strong enough to stand up to the propulsion system and cheap enough to build throw-away pressure plates, it was simply a matter of moving both up and out of the Belt and lighting a match. Drop-kick propulsion wasn’t what you’d call sophisticated, but it got the job done. Sam Holbrook, assisted by an enthusiastic Leif, plotted and schemed and sweated over ways to assist the propulsion process with gravity slings from any celestial body that happened to be even marginally along the route. Once he delayed a launch for three weeks until Mars was in the right place. It was just long enough for Terranova to get wind of it and Frank Sartre started firing messages down the communications network that ranged from aggrieved to agonized. Sam finally let the rock go, bounced it off the outer reaches of Mars’s gravitational field, and moved up the rock’s arrival in Terran orbit by six weeks. The messages from Frank stopped.

  “Guess he’s decided we know what we’re doing,” Sam observed.

  · · ·

  I was satisfied enough with the operation to turn my personal attention elsewhere. I’d had this idea that had been nagging at the back of my mind since before we left Terranova. I hadn’t meant to lay it out so soon but I was pretty certain it would complete the cure for gold fever and prevent its ever recurring, at least on board the Hokuwa’a-Voortrekker. I was mentally working out my sales pitch at dinner one evening when Mother said, “What is it, dear?”