Second Star (Star Svensdotter #1) Read online

  The only way to make something foolproof is to keep it away from fools. I think I would have felt better about the little Luddite’s death if his life hadn’t been such a waste. All he had, all he could have been, his life’s very essence, was now scattered abroad to the stars. Nothing in his life became him like his leaving it. I gave myself another mental kick for forgetting my pack and fell out of a triple axle. Grimly, I began again. The hell with J. Moore.

  And Grayson Cabot Lodge the Fourth, now that the vulgar expenditure of blood, toil, tears, and sweat in building Ellfive was nearly complete, was making ready to step in and take command, as befit the noblesse oblige of a sixteenth-generation Puritan born and bred to lead, regardless of whether or not anyone was willing to follow. I knew it, I knew it as well as I knew the projections for starstone output for the next thirty days, I could smell Grays’s determination and rapacity all across the sixty degrees separating Luna from Ellfive. I nailed the triple axle on my third try. Also the hell with him.

  After three hours or so I began to feel tired and leaned into a layback, arms extended and arched, came up into a blur, and waited for the ice to slow my blades before stopping the spin with my right pick. I held it, my arms in second position, motionless, the folds of my tiny skirt coming to rest against my hips.

  It had been a long time since I had taken my bow to applause. The sound startled me so that my skates went out from under me and I fell smack dab on my shocking pink fanny. It was Caleb Mbele O’Hara, of course, sitting on the bench next to my discarded shoes. I got up and brushed the ice from my bottom. “How long have you been here?”

  In the dim light I could see the flash of his grin. “Anchorage Olympics, right? I told you I’d remember. You skated in the women’s singles competition. No medal, though.”

  I shrugged and skated over to the bench. I sat down and began to unlace my boots. “I was never fast enough on Terra. I’m too big.”

  “That is a matter of opinion, and, incidentally, not mine.”

  I slung the skates and stood up. “Why the rendezvous?”

  I started down the hill and he fell into step beside me. He bounced a little in the half gee until he got used to it. “I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t think you’d be able to, either.”

  I opened my front door and halted, sniffing the air. “What’s that smell?”

  “I brought you a present,” he said. He was so close behind me I could feel his breath stirring the hair at the nape of my neck. “I hope you don’t object to a little breaking and entering in a good cause.”

  I waved on the light. On the coffee table in front of the sofa sat a hollow glass ball with the top sliced off, half-filled with oval glass pebbles and water. In it floated several large, sunset-colored flowers with delicately layered petals. “Cattleya labiata biensientes,” Caleb said. “October orchids.”

  “They are lovely, Caleb,” I said around the lump in my throat. “Thank you. How did you get them to bloom so quickly?”

  “They were already budding when I brought them up from Terra. And Roger found them some fertilizer.”

  I picked one out of the bowl and cradled the glowing thing in my hand. Behind me Caleb said softly, “On Terra, orchids grow from sea level to altitudes of four thousand meters, from the tropics to above the tree line in the Andes, even in the Arctic. They are hearty as well as beautiful. And sexy.” He took the bloom out of my hand and stroked it down my cheek. “They remind me of you.”

  I met his eyes. “Hearty?” I said.

  He did not smile. “Hearty, h-e-a-r-t-y, an adjective meaning ‘characterized by warmth and sincerity, strongly felt, vigorous, abundant, nourishing,’ ” he said. “And beautiful. And sexy.”

  “This is trite,” I said. “Where’s the box of candy? Flowers, for God’s sake.”

  “Are they working?”

  “Yes,” I said, and hoped my voice didn’t sound as shaky as I felt.

  “Good. That’s all that matters.” Caleb dropped the glowing bloom back in the bowl. “I’m lonely and I’m scared and I’m tired, and I need to make love to you tonight,” he said. He waited, making no attempt to touch me.

  I reminded myself of my conversation with Charlie earlier that evening. “So you’re going to wait?” she had asked with evident disapproval. “Yes,” I had replied firmly.

  The hell with it. Woman’s at best a contradiction still. “I wanted you the day you walked into my office,” I said with my usual subtlety.

  “I know you did, so why the song and dance?”

  Three or four answers presented themselves, and I said finally, “I’ve been alone a long time.” It was the truth, if not the whole truth.

  “So have I,” he said. “Together is better.”

  I smiled at him, and he smiled back. “Let’s find out,” I said over the thudding of my heart, and took his hand.

  On the way into my bedroom we tripped over his duffel bag. Caleb Mbele O’Hara was always very sure of himself.

  — 5 —

  Thinking Big

  There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

  —Niccolo Machiavelli

  WHY DID THE Mayflower cross the Atlantic?

  To get to the other side.

  We’re always going somewhere, up from Africa into Eurasia, across the Alaskan land bridge into North America, from Tahiti to Hawaii, from Plymouth to Plymouth Rock, from Terra to Ellfive. Simon’s genetic imperative in action.

  Now we’re heading for the Asteroid Belt.

  The proper term for the individual objects orbiting between Mars and Jupiter is “minor planet.” Asteroid means “starlike,” which asteroids are anything but. Some frustrated astronomers went so far as to refer to the small, rocky bodies gyrating around Sol between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter as “the vermin of the sky.” Their disgust and frustration rose from the fact that to accurately predict asteroidal orbits it is necessary to calculate the gravitational attraction of each of the major planets on each asteroid, and then the perturbing effects each asteroid has on the other.

  This massive compilation of data proved so exhausting that there were serious proposals to abandon study of the minor planets altogether. No such luck. By now we know that Mars’s gravitational pull determines the inner edge of the Belt, more or less, and Jupiter’s pull defines the outside edge, more or less. The Belt is somewhat toroidal, like the Doughnuts, and is as wide as the distance from Sol to Terra. More or less.

  Here’s the deal: The only rule of size, shape, orbit, inclination, or composition of individual asteroids is that there isn’t one. Tiny Hidalgo has an orbital period of nearly fourteen years and has howdied with Saturn. In 1937 Hermes came within 760,000 kilometers of Terra. Icarus has an orbital period of thirteen months, but there are other rocks that take even longer than Jupiter to make a 360 around Sol. The bulk of the asteroid belt is only somewhat inclined to the plane of the ecliptic in which the planets revolve, but Feodosia has an orbital inclination of over fifty-three degrees.

  See what I mean? Albedo readings indicate compositions varying from carbonaceous chondrites to nickel-iron metal, and while Ceres with less than a third the diameter of Luna is dense enough to provide a surface gravity strong enough to keep your food and your feet down, provided your food and feet start out that way, the combined mass of all asteroids including Ceres has been calculated at not more than ten percent of Luna’s, which has less than a quarter the diameter of Terra.

  There are almost as many theories about the formation of the minor planets as there are minor planets. The original theory was that a planet broke up, with four variations on the major theme: 1) that the breakup was caused by an explosion, origin unknown; 2) that a too-rapid rotation caused a deterioration and eventual disintegration; 3) that a tidal disruption did same; 4) that a collision between two planets did same. Later telescopic studies advanced the notion that the planetesim
als developed along with the rest of the solar system from a swirling nebula of gas and dust that gradually agglomerated into larger and larger bodies. Some astronomers speculate that Chiron was once an asteroid; others consider the Trojans, orbiting sixty degrees ahead of and behind Jupiter, and incidentally the site of the first uranium finds in the late twentieth century, to be lost satellites of Jupiter and not asteroids at all. Phobos and Deimos look like asteroids; Io, Europa, Ganymede, and the rest of Jupiter’s satellites could have been asteroids transformed into moons by the red giant’s gravitational pull.

  With the help of Mitchell Observatory in orbit next to Ellfive the Belt had become more familiar territory, and more provocative, and independent prospectors as well as geologists sponsored by each and every Terran government were sniffing around the Trojans. Before long news of monster uranium strikes was commonplace on the cube. Rumor and speculation took their place right next to truth in these reports, due in part to the spectacular imaginative capabilities of Belt miners.

  Now, the average Belter is not that great a liar; he is simply unable to tell the precise truth. This seems unnecessary; the Belt lends itself to exaggeration anyway, but Mohammed Bahktiar made the first discovery on Achilles and his subsequent actions set the standard for behavior ever after. He shook a kilogram of almost pure U-235 out of one cubic meter of his claim. This was better than anyone had ever done in the history of mankind, but he was unable to resist gilding the lily. He said he took out five. Nobody believed him and there was a lot of snickering before and behind. On a bet K. C. Kennecott filled a breaker box with a couple of shovelfuls from his claim next door just to prove the lie, and panned out two kays to the c/m. A couple of klicks over Smokey Stover swore his claim would produce a thousand Alliance dollars to the half meter and sold it to Olga Chernenko, who pulled fifteen hundred per cubic centimeter, to Smokey’s great and vocal disgust. And that’s the way it went—the Belters continued to lie valiantly, and their claims kept outrunning their lies.

  The most significant and the one unassailable proven fact is this: The Belt is 167 million miles or 270 million kilometers or 1.8 astronomical units out from Terra, take your pick, so none of these mining finds would have been possible without safe, swift, and economical space travel, which even in the 1980s still seemed decades away. Then in 1992 the first message from the Beetlejuicers came in via the Odysseus II Space Probe and Project META, and the resulting scramble to acquire high-ground acreage to extend the hand of friendship to our alien brothers, or to provide a line of defense against alien invaders, take your pick, left no Terran nation capable of inventing, buying, or stealing space travel earthbound.

  The United States, with a space program crippled by the Challenger explosion and three decades of an unwise specialization in manned space travel, dusted off an old plan by General Atomic to build a nuclear starship. Project Orion was a nuclear bomb-powered rocket ship planned in 1958 to have them shining their shoes on Saturn’s rings by 1970. When you consider that one B-53 thermonuclear bomb had an explosive yield of 9 million tons of TNT or 750 Little Boys or 30 MX missile warheads, this was not such a farfetched idea. Then the Test Ban Treaty of 1963 prohibited atmospheric testing of atomic bombs, and the final blow came when Wernher Von Braun’s chemical rockets were chosen to carry out the Apollo program. Project Orion was relegated to a dusty file and the occasional nostalgic mention in Scientific American.

  You could say that Project Orion went out with a whimper and came back with a bang. The leaders of the newly formed American Alliance—then only the United States, Canada, and Japan—were agitated by a populace hysterical over the Beetlejuice Message. After the announcement of the Mars expedition, they were understandably nervous that the United Eurasian Republic—still only the USSR—was going to beat them skyward yet again. So they negotiated the historic SALT VII agreements.

  SALT VII banned nuclear power in all but transportation and generation fields and provided for watertight verification. The ink on the treaty (for which Frank Sartre as key scientific adviser won his first Nobel) was hardly dry before the American Alliance handed a blank check to the newly created Department of Space and told them to solve the fallout problem in the Orion’s exhaust and get it operational as in yesterday. They did, and LEO Base, GEO Base, and Copernicus Base came in ahead of schedule and under budget, at which time Frank won his unprecedented second Nobel, this time sharing it with Helen Ricadonna.

  The Orion starship was powered by the controlled velocity distribution of nuclear explosions. DOS called them “pulse units,” the Space Patrol called them “charge propellant systems,” and Colony Control called them “Express-class freight carrier propellant charges” but they were nothing more or less than nuclear bombs modified into nuclear fuel after SALT VII. Nuclear bombs were made with plutonium, which was bred from uranium. There are two kinds of uranium—uranium-235, the only naturally occurring fission fuel for the making of nuclear energy, and uranium-238, which is not naturally fissionable. U-235 was rare on Terra and virtually nonexistent on Luna, and if the Martians had found any significant deposits they weren’t saying. U-238 had been plentiful on Terra at one time and breeder reactors can convert it to plutonium-239, which is fissionable and therefore suitable for building the bombs that powered the Orion starship that would get us to the Belt where we could find more uranium to build more bombs to fuel more ships.

  All of which was partly why I was determined on an Ellfive-sponsored Belt expedition, but only partly.

  Island One of the Ellfive habitat project was almost complete. The bulk of material to construct Island One had come from Luna. But Luna was growing in population herself, and we were already hearing noises about cutbacks in supply once the existing contracts for Island One were filled. Island Two was a mere skeleton, and to flesh out that skeleton we would have to find other sources of supply for essential life elements such as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, et cetera, et al., not to mention the ores we needed for manufacturing. So someone had come up with the obvious solution of mounting an expedition to exploit the Asteroid Belt, and to man that expedition we were tapping into the Ellfive work force, five thousand strong, some of whom said decidedly they had gone far enough. But there were others, still driven by Simon’s genetic imperative, who wanted to keep on going. After commissioning the entire matter would be taken out of our hands, but I was determined that Island Two was not going to be strapped for material through shortsightedness and a lack of planning on our part.

  I walked into the staff meeting the following Monday and into the middle of a discussion on Terra’s slow, painful move toward a unified planetary government, delayed, according to a sardonic Crip, mainly by those who still believed the Trilateral Commission was poised to take over life as we know it.

  “Does no one read history anymore?” Whitney Burkette said, looking disdainful.

  “I heard that,” Sam Holbrook said emphatically. “If the Russians thought Afghanistan was a bad dream, running France after the post-SALT VII invasion was pure nightmare. The Trilateral Commission, even if it existed, running all of Terra? Give me a break.”

  There was a chorus of agreement, which I silenced by rapping my knuckles on the table. “Order, children, please, order,” I said. “We don’t give a damn how they do it downstairs, remember? Let’s get down to the business at hand. At the end of the last meeting we had some questions on just what this expedition would be shipping in from the Belt. I’ve got a few answers for you. Ready? Okay.” I sat down and called up my notes on the viewer in front of me. Charlie passed down a steaming cup of coffee and I fortified myself with a long swallow before wading in.

  “We’re planning this expedition to ship raw materials back to Ellfive for the construction of Island Two, but shipping raw rock is only the beginning,” I said, looking around the table. “It is always cheaper to ship a finished product than it is raw material. That’s why there are oil and gas separation centers on the Arctic slope, pineapple canneries on Maui—”
r />   “The Frisbee on Ellfive,” Simon pointed out.

  “Exactly. Obviously this expedition will not start out ready to refine and ship pure ore, but we need to develop an interim plan, a compromise between raw rock and pure ore.”

  “We got that far last week, Star,” Whitney Burkette said.

  “By way of introduction, Whitney,” I said. “May I continue?” He inclined his head graciously. “Thank you,” I said, and Charlie rolled her eyes at me. “Shipping ore raw, partially processed or as a finished product—all these have different values to us, to the miners, and to Ellfive. For example, it would be cheap for us to ship the rock raw forever, but eventually not worth the effort of refining on arrival at Ellfive. So the trick is to develop a cheap, quick, in-transit method of processing, using parts of the asteroid itself for propulsion but leaving the essential minerals in place. To put it simply, the idea is to start at the Belt end with a chunk of mixed matter and to finish in Terran orbit with a mass of more or less refined ore, or at least a mass with a reduced amount of slag, to speed up extraction on the Ellfive end. The process may be automated, it may have to be manned.”

  “If we do come up with this process, and if it does have to be manned, who do we hire?” This from a dark, heavyset man with jowls that wriggled when he spoke, who did not seem so much skeptical as intent on nailing down every loose end. “We’re only going out there with two hundred and fifty people, Star, and we’ll need every one of them.”