by M. J. Locke
“Are you expecting trouble from claim jumpers?” he asked.
“Yeah,” the pilot said.
Xuan refrained from rolling his eyes. “Do stay sharp, then, won’t you? This will take a while, and I certainly don’t want any trouble.”
“We will. Wait here. We’re going to check things out first.” Which was an odd thing to do—at least for a claim they had permission to test. Xuan figured it was best not to bring this up.
“All right—um, what is your name?” Xuan asked.
“Jesse.”
“Jesse. And you may call me Professor Xuan.”
The young man seemed uneasy. “You wait here, then, Professor Xuan, till I give you the all-clear.”
Xuan finished suiting up and turned on his air. The pilot bled out the cargo bay air, and then opened the side hatch all the way and extended the ramp. The five men left. Xuan perched on a cargo container and waited. Near the back of the bay he saw racks filled with stacks of crates labeled “Glock” and “KBR.” K. B. Rand was a Martian weapons and tactical systems manufacturer. They made missiles and bombs. Glock specialized in rifles and handguns.
Xuan sank against a crate, appalled. What had he gotten himself into?
The pilot reentered ten minutes later and told Xuan it was safe to come out. He joined Jesse at the head of the ramp. The hired hands had posted themselves at positions where they could see the entire site, as well as much of the surrounding terrain. They had their weapons out.
Xuan left Jesse at the top of the ramp, and bounded down onto the stroid to find a good spot to set up. As he would expect of an abandoned mine, all was quiet. Near the shuttle’s nose stood the mine entrance, which was fitted with a metal bulkhead and an entry port. Portions of the stroid’s interior were likely habitable, then. At least, they had once been.
Also nearby were four big tanks, marked as methane, oxygen, nitrogen, and peroxide. They were unusually large. Whoever owned this stroid was obviously a hoarder. Directly behind the ship were what looked like makeshift rocketbike launch ramps. Close to the ridge at the mine entrance squatted two massive machines: a tunneler, spare cables and reels, grinders, a big hopper, and a bagging station. Over all this towered a Brobdingnagian mechanical earthmover for cutting, compressing, and shooting mined ore into space. Racks of smaller equipment parts, several slag piles, and a mountainous midden also stood nearby.
Xuan bounded around, pausing to poke at the ground with a rod. Quite compact, and in some areas there was no dust—only solid nickel-iron ore. Very high quality. He looked up. The sun—near zenith now—moved swiftly across the dark sky, making shadows crawl across the ground. This rock had a rotational period of only a few minutes. It would be good, then, to arrange things so that the sun was rising behind him and into the others’ faces when he opened the back of the machine. It would make it more difficult for them to see what he was doing inside the gravitometer.
Xuan ordered the others to bring his equipment. “Leave the rest there for the moment,” he said, pointing at the bags and boxes lined up at the cargo bay door. “We won’t need any of that unless the gravitometer gives us a low reading.”
He looked for a good place to set up: a place where the ground was firm, stable, and flat. The ore was close to the surface here. Dust and clots of dirt collected in dips and valleys. As a quick test, he dropped a wrench and surreptitiously counted as it drifted downward: sixty seconds to touch down in the dust? Eighty? Quite a bit less than on 25 Phocaea, at any rate. Old claim; big, high-end equipment; well-stocked supplies; high-quality ore: all his instincts were telling him that this rock had been extensively mined—a prime sugar-rock candidate. He only hoped these men were not experienced enough rock hoppers to detect these clues.
He found a spot as close as he could make it to a pile of slag—this would make it harder for them to move behind him while he set up the gravitometer. He prepped the site, sweeping away dirt with a hand brush—tossing small stones and nuggets of metal out of the way—and measured the grade in several spots with a laser level, pausing to wipe away dust that had settled on his faceplate. Meanwhile, the others milled around. The sun set and rose twice while he was prepping the site. He had to time this right.
“We’ll do it here,” he said finally, and pulled a paint can and some lights out of his kit. He marked four points on the stroid surface with phosphorescent paint. “Bring that big box and that table—yes, that one. Put them right here, where I’ve marked with paint. Careful! Don’t jostle the box. You might throw off the calibration.”
Two of the hired hands shuffled and wobbled over, steering the box. Space neophytes, Xuan thought. Jesse the pilot brought the table. Xuan had them move the table around while he adjusted leg lengths and took measurements. Then he fired the bolts that fixed the table to the stroid’s surface. He instructed them to put the box on the table and bolt it on. The flood lights he positioned such that they would cast a shadow on him when he stood behind the gravitometer. Sunup came again while he did this, and sundown.
Gravitometers had been around for centuries. In concept, they were simple. A pendulum’s period—how quickly it swung from peak to peak of its arc—depended on two and only two things: how long the pendulum cord was, and how strong the gravity was. It didn’t matter how hard you swung it or how high the peaks were, the period was always the same. The quicker the swing, the stronger the gravity. The slower the swing, the weaker.
Xuan’s gravitometer was designed to measure the very faint gravities of asteroids, a meter-and-a-quarter tall metal box with a light inside and a window through which you could see the pendulum. The box was bolted to a table that had shock absorbers in the legs. The weighted pendulum inside the box was attached to an actuating trigger for the pendulum, and a counter. Since asteroids varied greatly in volume and density, the pendulum length could be varied using three settings. The machine took the setting into account in its calculation. This was crucial to his plan. In addition, the weights could be changed out, to reduce vibrations that might affect the results. This was also crucial to Xuan, as it gave him access to the pendulum chamber to trick the machine.
Xuan had to assume that the men watching him—and they were watching him, though more out of boredom than suspicion—were familiar with the process of measuring a stroid’s gravity. They had probably taken his students out on other claims.
Here was the tricky part. He had to take care not to deviate too much from what they were accustomed to seeing, while making the gravitometer lie about the stroid’s density—but only if the rock was highly porous. Otherwise, the device had to tell the truth, or the measured gravity would be higher now than when it had first been discovered. This, as a practical matter, wasn’t possible and it would clue his watchers into the fact that he had tampered with the instrument.
According to Xuan’s calculation, a fifty-seven-second period for the pendulum swing would put it at its original density. Anything between fifty-seven and about eighty seconds, he could leave alone. Any more than eighty seconds or more to complete an arc meant the rock had big pores, and he’d have to work fast.
The sun was sinking toward the horizon again. Once down, it would rise behind him again in less than two minutes. Time to act. Xuan drew a deep steadying breath, took his wrench and a large screw bolt from his field kit, and radioed Mills. “We’re almost ready. First I’ll do a calibration, then readjust the machine as needed and take the measurement.”
“All right. Fine,” Mills said. “Jesse, you copy?”
“Roger that,” the pilot replied.
“Report his findings as he receives them.”
“Will do.” The pilot moved over next to Xuan and looked over his shoulder at the device. He again touched a glove to his weapon in a mixture of bellicosity and anxiety. Jesse the pilot was obviously even more nervous than Xuan, who surmised that he was not used to his role as a thug.
Xuan released the pendulum and counted in his head as it arced lazily down: one, cryptocrystalline
; two, cryptocrystalline, three … By the time he got to thirty … forty—choi oi! The pendulum had not even reached the halfway point! He stopped the test. His heart knocked insanely against his ribs. Sweat poured down his face and torso. Calm; stay calm.
This rock had to be more than half vacuum. Or ice.
“One last adjustment should do the trick,” he said. His voice quavered. Get it under control. He thought of Jane. Be like rock. He jumped over the table, opened the back of the gravitometer, and wrapped the pendulum wire many quick turns around the bolt. Quickly now, but calmly. Shorten it by half.
Sunrise could occur any second, and he needed to be done with this adjustment before it did. Damn it, Xuan. At this rate you’ll ruin everything, and not just for yourself. Focus! He eyeballed it as best he could, then closed the back of the instrument, as the sun rose again. It’d have to do.
“Time to measure,” he said. He returned to the front of the device, cocked and retriggered the pendulum. As it arc’d downward, on its now-much-shorter arc, he said, “What we are hoping for is a period of substantially greater than fifty-seven seconds. The longer it takes for the pendulum to complete its arc, the more likely we have a good sugar-rock candidate.”
While he talked, the others came over to watch.
“Please!” he snapped, and they all jumped. “Don’t touch the table. You’ll throw off the measurement. It’s a sensitive instrument.”
All of them edged nervously away.
They waited almost twenty minutes—the device required ten full arcs to complete its internal calculation. He counted in his head; it looked as though the average swing was coming out at about sixty seconds or so. A much shorter period than the real thing … but would it be enough? Then the display on the device’s front gave its reading.
Xuan had fooled the machine! He did not allow his relief to show, but made a big deal out of tapping out a calculation on his heads-up. “Hmm. I’m getting a reading of about 0.0102 gee, or a net decrease in density of about fifteen percent. Sorry, gents. It looks like this claim is a bust. No chance of there being enough ice to trouble with here.”
“You sure of that reading?” Mills said. “Jesse?”
“Everything seems on the level, sir,” Jesse said, after a pause to run his own numbers. “The original claim was twelve thousandths of a gee, and according to the gravitometer readout, this one is around eighty-five percent of that. Not much room for ice in this rock.”
“Above two thirds, it’s a turd,” one of them said. The rest chuckled.
Mills said, “With all this big equipment, on a hundred-year-old, nearly pure nickel-iron rock? Seems strange.”
“Not so strange,” Xuan replied. “I’ve seen many such rocks. The owner stakes a claim and then dies, or leaves, and nobody else picks it up.”
“Hmmm. Perhaps you should measure again, just to be sure.”
“I can, if you like,” Xuan said. “But it won’t change the result.” His heartbeat was loud in his ears.
A pause. “Fine. Wrap it up.”
Xuan allowed himself a slow, deep breath.
* * *
Kam, Amaya, and Geoff did a straight-in, reverse-power descent, well over the horizon from the ship’s line of sight, rather than the more fuel-efficient orbital flyby and gradual descent they normally used. Geoff thought these measures were a bit much; it was not all that unusual for there to be confusion about claims. It would be embarrassing if the testers were just some guys from the university, and found out about the precautions Geoff, Kam, and Amaya were taking.
They had to be careful about dust. You kick up dust in a low-gee environment, it goes way up and takes days to settle back down. So they touched down a few kilometers from the mine entrance and rode their bikes slowly over the craggy, metal-ore terrain, avoiding craters and valleys where dust collected and always keeping the hill that was Ouroboros’s main “mountain range” between them and the ship. They passed the heat exchanger, a set of big iron pipes in a shallow trench, and the chemical plant, three distillation towers with surge tanks, heating units, and racks of pipes.
Soon they reached the hill that housed the mine entrance. Just over the ridge stood the ship—they could see its top fin. Joey Spud’s earthmover, which he had named Cronus after some deity who had swallowed his children whole, towered above the ridge, its metal arms reaching hundreds of meters into the dark sky.
The heat vent they planned to use was a tin stovepipe that jutted several meters into the sky, starting about halfway up the rocky hillside. First they headed up the hill to scope out the activity at the ship. They lay down at the crest, crawled forward—an awkward process in their pressure suits—and peered down. Five people were milling around while a sixth poked at the ground with a stick. The five mill-arounders had weapons. That seemed ominous—but there were pirates and claim jumpers out there. Geoff didn’t want to jump to conclusions.
“They’re still doing the setup,” he said. He pointed. “The guy in the light blue suit, the one with the stick, that’d be Professor Xuan. That’s a university-issue suit. First they’ll take some gravitational measurements, and then they’ll take soundings. They’ll be a while.”
Amaya crept farther over the hill’s crest, and rolled over—ever so slowly—to check for the vent from that vantage point. Then she crept back to join them. “I think we’ll be OK,” she said. “The top of the pipe is below line-of-sight from where they are.”
“Good. Let’s do this. Kam, keep watch. Warn us if they head this way.”
“Right.” Kam got out his binoculars, and Geoff and Amaya leapt back down the hillside.
They worked quickly. Amaya hooked her pony up to the emergency line, and then they disconnected and lengthened her main air tubes with spare tubing and duct tape. Next Geoff brought the tubes up over her head so her pack could be lowered separately. They got the main tank hooked back up and tested, and then Geoff duct-taped the air tubes to the shoulders of her suit, so the lines couldn’t be easily pulled out. He gave a couple of sharp tugs. “That should hold.”
She removed the pony bottle and stuffed it into her utility kit. Then she clipped her kit to her suit. Geoff hooked the tether to her harness.
She looked up at the top of the stovepipe. Geoff knew she was thinking about what had happened to Carl, trapped outside with no air. Geoff said, “If you get in too tight a squeeze, give three sharp jerks on the tether, and I’ll pull you out—with my bike if need be.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
“Good. Hang on.” Geoff ran her tether around a boulder, and secured the other end to his bike’s handlebars. Then he took hold to brace her.
Kam radioed them. “They’re setting up the equipment now. Nobody’s looking over this way. They must not have got us on radar, coming in.”
“Maybe not.”
“There could be more people inside, though. I thought I saw some movement through the cockpit portal.”
“All right. Thanks.”
Kam said, “I know you’ll ace it, Amaya.”
She gave him the spacer OK sign: left arm crooked with the glove touching helmet crown; right arm straight out and up at a forty-five-degree angle.
“Ready?” Geoff asked. In answer, Amaya gathered up half the slack in her tether and clipped it to one shoulder. Geoff handed her the main air tank. She gripped it in one hand and leapt up to the top of the stovepipe. As she arced over the pipe, she grabbed hold with her other hand. In a single motion, she swung atop the vent and landed in a crouch, balanced on the top edges of the pipe. Amaya gave another OK sign and flipped on her helmet light. She dropped her airtank into the vent and dove in after it.
The tether in Geoff’s hands tightened suddenly, nearly pulling him off-balance. He braced his boots against a boulder and started giving out slack. He heard her breathing, heard the rustlings as she descended the vent.
“Amaya, talk to me.”
“Past the vertical section,” she radioed. “Sliding down the incline.
Infamous bottleneck turn just ahead. About six meters. Hang on.” A pause; rustling. She pinged his waveface, and in his heads-up he saw what she saw: a small tunnel receding into darkness. It narrowed to a funnel, just ahead. Along the pipe’s inner edge was the power and radio conduit they had put in last year. She could not cut through it, as it was a live line and the shutoff switch was inside the mine. It had not been in her way before. Dangling in the center of their shared vision was Amaya’s airtank, attached by its tubes to her helmet.
“How are your lines?”
“Holding up. No leaks.” Another pause, as she moved downward. “OK, here’s the bottleneck. Moment of truth.” She shoved her utility kit through. Next she turned the tank lengthwise and shoved it through the narrowed opening. Geoff could see it resting on the tunnel floor just beyond.
“Testing the line. Two tugs.” Her headlight danced around, and he felt the line pull twice against his grip. “You felt it?”
“I felt it. You’re good.”
Nothing happened for a moment, except her breathing. He watched her air lines swaying. “Take your time,” he said. Another pause. “Amaya?” he asked. No reply.
“She all right?” Kam asked him, from up on the hill.
That’s it, he thought. This isn’t going to work. “Come on back, Amaya. I’m pulling you up.” He tugged, but she resisted, wedging herself against his pull with her arms. “No! No. I’ve come this far, I’m going through. More slack. More. Motherfucking asswipe shitberries!”
With that, she forced her way into the opening. Geoff held his breath. Her hands flailed in front of his vision, trying to gain purchase on the sides of the tunnel beyond the bottleneck. More than a minute passed, while her light jumped and jerked. This is insane, he thought. We shouldn’t have done this. But then the scene in his waveface shifted.