Chewing Rocks (3 page)

Sno checked the content of the raw material coming in from the three wor
king ships. Both the Wittenburg and Bisbee were mining closer to Jupiter than where Sno had been. Both ships were transmitting mainly rock and some ice.

“What is
the Oatman transmitting? I see rock and a good volume of nickel, but there is a trace of something else.” Sno asked.

Vittie grinned again. “Willem thinks it’s copper.”

Sno whistled, “Damn! That’s a huge find. We haven’t seen copper in a couple of years. Oatman must be figuring out what to do with their bonus pay.”

Vittie nodded, “Yep. They have already flashed their wish list to get on the next inbound t
ransport. Willem is sending the Flagstaff to join them. He figures it is too big a find to leave when the Oatman’s consumables give way. They only have another three weeks of food before they have to tag the rock and come back. Willem figures there is another six weeks of digging before they get all of the metal out of that asteroid.”

Sno whistled again in appreciation.

When Sno’s grandfather had been a young man, radical environmentalists on Earth had deemed it almost immoral to feed any natural Earth material into a power converter. Their logic was that everything was recyclable in some form or fashion. Converting material to power would completely consume the material. Even though a power converter could separate any raw material into its most basic components, it still lost some matter to power consumption. So, the theory was that if Earth continued to put Earth material into it’s converters it was doing nothing more than consuming itself and would eventually disappear. No one, on Earth that is, ever mentioned that ‘eventually’ would be hundreds of thousands of years or more.

Gran
dpa Snowden Whyte had sold everything he owned to buy a used lunar shuttle. He outfitted the old girl with power converters and set off into the asteroid belt to look for raw materials to feed a power hungry Earth. Transport of raw materials to Earth was not an issue because a converter could only transmit inanimate objects from one coffer to the next, regardless of conditions or distance.

Organic
matter was another story. No matter how many experiments were tried, living creatures always arrived with their component parts in a non-working condition. They were in perfect shape, just non-working. Even food stuffs lost any nutrient value and hence their usability. If you wanted to get a sub from Mario’s you had to walk down to the corner of Strawberry Avenue and O’Donnell Street and get it yourself. No one had been able to make a converter that could send a sub, not from four blocks away; much less not between planets. And Mario did not deliver.

Grandpa
Whyte set up shop on Ceres and started planning a city. He, his thirteen-year-old son, and a few others chose Ceres because it is almost 950 kilometers in diameter and nearly spherical, making it a dwarf planet or a planetoid. In those early days Ceres was icy with frost at the poles. The early settlers managed to collect enough ice to develop and maintain a self sustaining presence. The ice was mostly frozen inert gasses, but it did contain oxygen and hydrogen, hence water and breathable air.

With water and air from Ceres, they
founded Arizona City. Their town was so named because Grandpa Whyte came from Strawberry, Arizona. The founding fathers had thought Strawberry City was too silly a name for a group of rough, independent prospectors. All except for Maggie O’Donnell aged eight, who was tagging along with her father. She thought Strawberry sounded just peachy. Maggie’s opinion did not carry much weight since all of the O’Donnell clan disappeared on their first trip into the belt, taking Maggie with them. It did, however, give Arizona City a name for two of the main streets.

Nothing much had changed
about asteroid mining since Grandpa Whyte’s day. A mining ship would find any asteroid and chew the rock into small enough pieces to feed into the ship’s converter. The raw material would be transmitted into the main processing plant on Ceres, where the larger converters could split the raw materials into various coffers, separating like items. Once an appreciable amount of raw material was batched, the company would calculate value and sell the product to their customers.

Most of Whyte’s customers were
small independent Earth-side brokers, but they did have clients for ice on Luna and a few research stations around the system. Most customers would buy any quantity of product, from a handful of dirt upward. The transmission costs were negligible so the batch size did not matter. What did matter was the deal the buyer would give the seller. The rule of thumb was, the larger the quantity you had to sell, the higher the price you could set. To Sno’s way of thinking, every sale, no matter what size, generated an attendant flurry of paperwork. That meant one large batch brought you a lot less paperwork to wade through than a group of small batches.

Turning back to Vittie,
Sno said, “Tell Dad to finish the upgrade to the Winslow. He needs to get her back into the belt pretty quick. Those two goobers he hired to run it can barely find rock. They need all the time chewing rocks they can get. And if he doesn’t hurry they will drink up their last paycheck before he finishes. Check the download from Sedona. I monitored a good sized cluster on the way back in and flashed in the coordinates. It is off the elliptical a bit so it was easy to miss. It doesn’t look like a high metal yield, but definitely worth a look-see. Have him send the Winslow to check it out.”

Vittie replied, “I will remember to tell him, but you
should tell him yourself. You two haven’t talked in a long time. You’ve been out a couple of months, remember?”

Sno sighed, “Yeah, yeah. I know.
I’ll get with him before I go out again, okay? First, I am going to go down to United Mech and talk to those s.o.b.s about the p.o.s. jacks they sold me. I mean, really! One jack is a malfunction; two is incompetence, but all four in thirty days is criminal and if I had to suffer because of their negligence, then so are they.”

Vittie did
not say anything. She just smiled.

Sno said, “Ok.
I’ll try to keep a lid on it. At least I promise not to leave any permanent scars. Hey! Where is my apps n’ core upgrade?”

Vittie replied, “You
r dad put it in your locker at the Sedona’s docking slip. He knew you would want it quick when you flashed your return status. He picked out the best of the lot for you. It is almost new. Still has the original box and manuals. If you are going over to see those guys at United, then swing by and meet Miss Queene. She really did us a favor with those upgrades. We couldn’t have gotten half as good for twice as much on the open market. She even went through a pile of them with Willem and helped him pick out your upgrade personally. Imagine, such a rich and powerful sophisticate digging through dusty equipment in the back of her warehouse with a rough, old rock hound like your dad! She is just the nicest.”

“Yeah, yeah.
I get the picture. She’s a saint. But she is still an earther. She’ll be here, put on a good show, let the worker bees clean up the mess and then she will go back to her gravity well and sit on her fat behind.”

Vittie replied, “Try not to judge too quickly
, mi hija. She fired the entire management team at Queene Mines right off the bat. I hear she wanted to make them walk home.”

“Home?”
Sno snarled. “Ceres is home. Arizona City is home. Sedona is my home. You’re showing your own stripes, earther. If you want home, then go home.”

Vittie smiled, “
Thanks for the suggestion, but I’ll stay. That was a slip of the tongue. I should have said ‘their’ home. You know, I do think I am home now. Since everyone here is so nice and welcoming I wouldn’t even think of leaving.”

“O
oooh, passive-aggressive from gravity girl. How refreshing! And don’t think that I forgot about you calling me ‘me ha’.” Sno pronounced the phrase phonetically. “It sounds cool and I don’t know what it means. I am going to look it up. When I find out what it means then it goes on the list of things you can’t call me. Tell Dad I went down to United Mech, and yes I will stop by and see Miss Queene. Cell her and see if I can get in.”

“Really,” Vittie said
, “Evelyn is a genuinely lovely person. She admitted her father personally sent her out here to clean up this Queene Mining office. I guess it is way down in profits. She even showed your father some of their recent financial statements. She wants his advice on bringing Queene’s profits up. I saw those ledgers too, and she has a big job ahead of her.”

Sno said, “Well, cell her for me
.” She tucked the autojack warranty certificates into a pocket and stormed out onto Strawberry Avenue. If she went to United Mechanical first she could turn toward Mario’s and might get to say hi to her dad. However, Queene Mine’s office was the other way and she would rather get the meeting with Miss Queene out of the way first. Business before pleasure and she was sure it would be a pleasure to tangle with those cretins at United.

“Yeah
,” she thought. “Leeches and scrotal sacks sounds about right.” All she had to do was get through a quick meet-and-greet with some rich, overfed socialite who was in space playing business without tossing said office weenie earther into a hydroponics leech vat.

Chapter 3.0

Evelyn Queene had been staring at the
Queene Mines accounting department general ledger report so long she lost all sense of her surroundings. The desk-communicator’s buzz brought her back to herself, breaking her concentration. She hated these interruptions. She just could not imagine any Christian being more enthusiastic about reading their Bible than she could get about reading a good balance sheet. It was as if the money was talking to her.

“Excuse me, M
iss Queene,” the voice said.

Queene did
not recognize the voice, but she knew it had to be one of the dozen or so administrative people in the front office. She did not even realize she did not recognize the voice, to her it did not matter. They were just the necessary cogs keeping the machine running to feed her family’s wealth and power.

Evelyn Queene
knew in her heart of hearts that family, wealth and power were all one thing. They were the trinity of her life. That trinity was all there was and all that needed to be. She would bury anyone or anything that interfered with her devotion to the trinity.

The voice continued,
“Sorry to interrupt, but Vittie Encarcion from the Whyte Mining Company just called. You know, she is the office manager over at Whyte? She said Chastity Whyte’s mining ship recently docked. You know, Chastity is Willem Whyte’s daughter? He is the owner of Whyte Mining. Anyway, Miss Whyte is on her way over and wanted to speak to you for a few moments. I can just send her away when she gets here, if you want.”

Queene gritted her teeth in frustration. She may be in the backwater of this solar system, but that did
not mean she should have to put up with such rambling idiots. She would love to space the whole lot and start all over, but this staff was the raw material she was given.

She looked at the smallish man s
itting quietly in a corner chair. He looked up from the book he was reading. She smiled at him.

The man
did not smile back. He knew the smile was not for him and he knew he was not required to smile back even if it had been.

Wallace
was listed on the organizational charts as her executive assistant, but he had no head for business whatsoever, nor could he type or file. He was not an attractive man, nor was he homely. He was just the type of bald little man who could disappear in a crowd, or go completely unnoticed in a meeting when Queene excused herself from the room. His dull eyes seemed to miss what was going on around him, but in truth, his eyes missed nothing and neither did his ears. He could and would mirror back to Queene every word, every whisper, every backroom deal, every rumor, gossip and backstabbing comment so prevalent in Queene’s world. Plus, the man did not register on any electronic sweeps like so many of the devices relied on by other corporate officers.

She put a smile in her
voice and spoke sweetly into the comm, “No, dear. The interruption is quite alright. I will be glad of the break, to get away from these dreary accounting figures. I can’t seem to make heads or tails of them anyway. Please try to remember that I do know Vittie and Willem. They are some of the most pleasant people I have met so far. And that is really saying something, because Ceres is filled with such wonderful people, as you yourself know. So, if either one cells again, please just put them through to me.” Queene continued, adding a conspiratorial tone to her voice, knowing full well that the rest of the office could hear her as clearly as if they were in her office. “As for Miss Whyte, well, we have all heard she can be a handful haven’t we, dear? I am sure she is delightful in her own special way, bless her heart. You just send her in and see if you can get someone to volunteer to bring us in refreshments when she gets here.”

Queene let a genuine smile escape when she saw the comm light shut off. “Good
,” she said to herself. “It is time to meet the heir apparent to Whyte Mining. Willem is a nice man. Maybe too nice to run such a successful business, small as it is.”

She looked at Wallace and continued, “
He is going to be easy to convince it is time to retire. See what you make of the daughter. We need to see where she stands. If we can take over Whyte and maybe even pick up the pieces of that wreck Synethco, we might be able to turn our gross profits around in half the time.”