This Old Rock
Authors: G. David Nordley
This
Old
Rock
by
G. David Nordley
VARIATIONS ON A THEME LLC
Private Label Publishing
variationspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events or locations is coincidental.
THIS OLD ROCK
A Variations on a Theme
book/published by arrangement with the author
©1997 G. David Nordley /Ebook edition
©2013 G. David Nordley
Publishing history: Analog Magazine
April 1997; first Variations on a Theme edition May 2013; 1st Edition
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be
reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without
permission.
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“Damn bloodsucking tiny-skulled government bureaucrats!” Dolph
Wigner yelled as soon as the link dropped and returned the
Hopper
’s
viewscreen to a view of their peanut-shaped asteroid. He slapped the worn
upholstery of the arm of the captain’s chair in frustration. “Sasha, I think it’s
a conspiracy to make us buy more junk from the friends of these vampires on
credit. By the time they’re done, we won’t own
half
of this rock!”
“Daddy?” a small, sleepy voice ventured from the compartment
directly under him.
“What is it Tina?” he snapped, much too loud, he realized.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked. “Are you mad?”
Tiny-skulled, Dolph realized, might sound like Tina-something
to his three-year-old.
“Not at you, Tina. Go back to sleep now, okay? Sweet dreams.”
“What’s wrong, love? It’s one in the morning!” Sasha called
from the wardroom below, which doubled as their bedroom. “Is Tina okay?”
“Tina is fine. I was just venting about whoever changed the
requirement on the air lock door motors three months after our shipment left
Luna! Forgot the time.”
There was a rustle of bedding, and his wife made the easy
one-sixth gravity jump up to the command deck from their bed, stretched her
skinny, almost scrawny, body, yawned, and ran a hand through her long, wavy,
hopelessly tangled black hair. He could see her bones; hell, he could see his
own. They’d both been cutting way back on rations and working like demons for
three months. But if they could just get approval, they’d have the old
hydroponics system going and be eating their own tomatoes in another month or
so.
“Can we afford the new motors?” she asked.
He smiled at her and sighed. There were many better things
to do with the night than fight refurbishment supply problems. But every hour
counted.
“If,” he answered, “we can use the old ones, or sell them,
the price difference isn’t that much. The problem is that there’s no way we can
get them here in time for our inspection.”
“They can’t hold us to that, can they? I’m getting tired of
this.”
He nodded. “This” was hanging out in a cramped, smelly,
spaceship swinging around with its nose tied to the end of a hundred meters of
tether when they had five hundred square meters of habitat of ready to inhabit
on the asteroid above them. But until they passed their inspection, they had
three rooms, three meters in diameter by two and half high with a head and an
airlock at the top.
“Look, I can’t do anything about it. It’s the damn
Interplanetary Association’s rules, and if we don’t follow the IPA rules, we
lose the homestead. So don’t vent me about it, okay? I’m sorry, darling.” He
immediately hated himself for snapping at Sasha. She was everything to him; the
only part of the universe that wasn’t trying to stomp him. At twenty-four, he
felt like a ninety-year-old curmudgeon with the world on his back, and
sometimes it showed.
“But it’s not our fault! They can’t make us leave our
homestead for something that’s not our fault.”
“I just don’t know, Sash, I just don’t know.”
They were interrupted by a two-note attention tone.
“Go ahead,
Hopper
,” Dolph told the spacecraft. He
heard Sasha try to suppress a giggle. “Voice only,” he added.
“We have an incoming message from an Inspector Eileen
McCarthy of the local IPA Compliance Authority. She’s C&C on Belt Runner
four-one-two, a light-minute out from Pallas.”
Almost here, then. So it was too late to get anything more
done on the supplies or equipment. They’d pass with what they had, or not. “We’ll
see what she has to say later.” Dolph instructed. “We’ve gone to bed. Acknowledge
and record—I’ll reply tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, Dolph. I’ve sent the acknowledgment. Good night.”
The command deck lights dimmed, and Sasha started pulling
him down to their bed.
∞±∞
Two days later, Dolph took the tram cage up to the tether
axis on the mast at the north pole of their rock. Well, not quite
their
rock yet, he reminded himself, though he had a lot of sweat equity in it. It
was three kilometers across its longest dimension and swiss-cheese-full of
craters, the largest being the football field-wide hole at the top. They’d name
it after Tina, they’d decided, as soon as they had the right to do so.
Below him was their habitat, deep in a hundred meter
cylindrical pit for radiation protection. A fifty meter-radius squirrel cage of
trusswork, it mounted a couple of big bent sausages and other equipment around
its circumference. Above him was the great dish of their solar collector, a few
kilograms of nearly perfectly reflecting graphene-aluminum sandwich almost two
hundred meters across, it focused on a flat relay mirror. There was enough dust
around the asteroid for him to trace the beam into the big black cylindrical
converter at the top of the mast
He saw few stars on his way up to the docking ring. Their
pole was in sunlight, and would be for another year. He looked back toward the
Sun. Mars was a reddish dot just far enough from the sun to see if he shaded
his helmet window. Earth, Venus, and Mercury were lost in the glare. Even when
he looked away from sun, the sunlit structures around him banished any hope of
dark-adapted vision, mocking his mood with their unsoftened vacuum brilliance.
But Jupiter, now near opposition at the perihelion of the
Pallas association, shown brightly against the black sky. Jove was over five
times as bright as from Earth, and its four large satellites were clearly
visible—he could even see the orange tint of Io. Saturn, way off to the right,
still seemed very distant, but the asteroid Pallas was brighter than Venus from
here, and showed a tiny disk. Sirius, Procyon, Betelgeuse, and Regulus—the
brighter stars got through as well, and the effect was almost three dimensional—he
could imagine the planets on a plane stretching out toward infinity, with those
few bright fixed stars set beyond.
Despite all the work and all the details of things to be
removed, tested, repaired, replaced, and tested again there was still a sense
of wonder that he was out here—the descendent of apes with stone axes daring to
live out here on the doorstep of all creation. He was going to do it. Somehow,
despite everything, he was going to do it.
An instant and temporary comet got his attention. Inspector
McCarthy’s spacecraft was in the final stages of rendezvous, with thrusters
flaring. Like their
Hopper
, it was a standard spin-electric rock hopper—essentially
a smooth cylinder with a two-ring magnetic mirror plasma nozzle at the end—indistinguishable
from
Hopper
on the outside except for the outsize volatile tanks mounted
at its middle and the IPA insignia. It grew smoothly out of the dark and made
the standard mast connection, nose in, rings out. Next to its connecting probe,
a hatch swung in and poured out light. Into the light floated the black shadow
of a spacesuited figure.
“Welcome to 12478, Ms. McCarthy.” Dolph gestured to the
peanut-shaped carbonaceous chondrite below them. The spacesuited figure coming
down the mast to him was obviously female, of average height, and perhaps a bit
hefty the way people too busy to exercise get in low gravity.
She put her helmet to the mast for a moment, then turned
toward him, her face invisible behind the mirror finish of her helmet window. “You’ve
got a sick stator magnet on one of your despin mast bearings,” she announced in
a no-nonsense, almost imperious tone. “I heard it screech after my dock.”
Dolph opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of a response.
The complaint was trivial, as far as he was concerned. The
hollow despin mast held their main elliptical mirror and the docking fixture. Some
torque on the despun inertial mast was inevitable as a ship docked, and it
might momentarily cause physical contact in the bearing if one of the bearing
magnets were a little weak; but if the mast was properly aligned with asteroid
spin axis, that would vanish as soon as any transverse accelerations were
damped. And the asteroid spin period was a leisurely eight hours plus; at that
rate, the damn bearing could be made of taffy.
She, he decided, was deliberately picking a nit, maybe for
psychological impact. Finally, enough time passed so that Dolph hoped he could
just ignore the discourtesy.
“Any equipment you’d like to take down with you?” he asked.
“Did you hear what I said about the stator magnet?” she
barked. “It’s out of spec. Fix it!”
Damned if she didn’t seem serious, he thought. This was not
good. “I’ll get on it as soon as we have you settled,” he temporized.
“
Now
, Wigner. I don’t want my ship torqued away if
the bearing seizes.”
Dolph opened his mouth to protest, thought better of it, and
shut it hard enough that he heard his teeth click. Very well, he’d fix the damn
thing. A quick check with
Hopper
identified the lower bearing as the
problem, and he told
Hopper
to bring him the spare—a pair of thick
nested hoops two meters in diameter.
“My wife, Sasha, is in the ship down-tether, waiting for
you,” he told the inspector. “I’ll be done in twenty minutes or so.”
“My ship’s at risk and I want to stay here and watch this,”
McCarthy told him. “Get to it.”
He looked up and saw her jet from her air lock to about ten
meters out from where he was working, and take up a position with her back to
the sun. She crossed her arms and floated there, motionless on her backpack
gyros. He assumed she was staring at him.
“Roger,” he replied, trying to keep the irritation from his
voice, nodded to her and got to work. The job wasn’t that big, actually. One of
Hopper
’s spiders had brought the new bearing as they’d talked, and with
smart fasteners decoupling themselves from the telescoping joint, all he had to
do was ease out the old bearing and ease in the new one before light pressure
on the solar collector pushed the mast out of alignment by more than a
centimeter.
He had it done in fifteen minutes.
“Can we go in now?” he asked. “Sasha’s holding lunch.”
“She’ll have to hold a bit longer.” McCarthy jetted over to
the mast and held her helmet against it for a long time, then seemed to be
satisfied. Dolph told
Hopper
to feed their conversation to Sasha so she’d
know what was going on.
“Twenty-first century?” McCarthy asked at length.
“Early twenty-second,” he replied evenly. “It’s an old
Cislunar Republic mining survey station for the twenty-fourth Kirkwood
association, last inhabited in 2093. The CLR left when Mercury opened up.”
“I know all that,” McCarthy snapped. “I date things by when
they were built, not when the last people left. That shaft is a hundred years old
if it’s a day. No later than 2092, I’d say; it’s titanium, probably lunar. They
punched out hundreds of these set-ups back then. Anything after that would have
been local glass, because that’s when the rock chewers got smart and fast
enough to make it cheaper. You did the joint yourself?”
“Yes. The original bearing is down on the crater floor. Wouldn’t
move.”
“Vacuum welded. They used glazed rollers—okay for a few
years, but you have to keep them moving. I won’t redline your job, but that
magnet going sour was a symptom the thing’s been wowing a bit. You put a large
mirror on that shaft.”
“We’re going to grow grapes, so we got as big a mirror as
the specs allowed—”
“And, to save money, the smallest bearings,” McCarthy
interrupted. “And on top of that, you put it as far up as you could. Everything
away from the direction of goodness. Maximum stress: not smart.”
“It computed, Inspector.”
“Tell me about it,” she sniffed. “Artificial intelligences
lack both art and intelligence. Look, I said I won’t redline your provisional
on that alone, but you’ll need to fix it, understand? I know an outfit at Chao
Dome...”
“Mercury!”
I’ll bet you do
, Dolph seethed. But he
said, “Yes, Inspector. Why Mercury? Mercury is as far in to Sun from here as
you can go!” She wasn’t even inside yet, hadn’t much more than glanced at the
habitat, now they were already looking at nine months for a shipment from the
South Pole of Mercury, and paying probably another EU to get free and clear of
the IPA bureaucracy. Damn! They could have lived for a year on Mars for an EU.
“Mercury is the nearest solid thing to the center of the
asteroid belt,” she said. “Think about it. With their electromagnetic
launchers, delta-v is beside the point, and Mercury revolves around the sun so
fast that it’s never more than 90 days for a launch to any place in the Belt. Anyway,
you could probably print it for a small intellectual property fee. Now, what’s
your problem with Mercury? You don’t like their connections?”
What the hell? Dolph thought. Was she reading his mind, or
had she just been through this with so many newcomers that the question was
second nature? He considered the question rhetorical and acknowledged the
lecture with a negative grunt.
McCarthy gestured to the crater below. “Standard turn of the
century habitat down there?”
“Not anymore,” Dolph snapped, then stared at the habitat as
he counted to ten.
The crater was four hundred meters across and almost
precisely on the asteroid’s spin axis. The habitat centrifugal frame, an open
lattice box of cables and tubes as long as a football field and half as wide
could rotate in the crater like the spinner on a child’s game, giving them
lunar normal acceleration at the tips. It was static now, though, to make their
work easier; the asteroid’s minuscule gravity was enough to hold tools and
supplies on the habitat walls. He and Sasha had spent the last two months
turning living quarters originally meant as Spartan accommodations for a dozen
survey personnel into a comfortable home for three, following the requirements
stored in
Hopper
’s cybernetic brain to the bit.