A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2) Read online

  She shook her head, I was pretty sure not in admiration of her little sister’s many talents. “You climb a wall no one else can climb, cleave a dragon in record time, swim a moat in a coat of heavy iron mail. Lancelot had nothing on you. No,” she said, holding up one hand to stave off my rebuttal. “Don’t bother. You’ve always got a mission, Star, and you always go at it in a straight line. When something or someone gets in your way you go over them or you go through them or you go around them.” She sat back, her lips curving. “Okay. Let’s see you get around this. Or I should say, these. You named ’em yet?”

  “Sean and Patricia.” After Patricia Sioban O’Malley, Fenian, poteen brewer, ballad singer, Crip’s dead love, my dead friend. Ellfive patriot and martyr, although she would have hooted to hear herself so described.

  “Paddy for short?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’s the Sean for?”

  “Caleb’s father.”

  “What was he like?”

  “From what Caleb’s mother told me, a great, roistering bear of a man with a laugh the size of Africa herself.”

  “Good names.”

  “We think so.”

  “Speaking of twins—I’m thinking of writing a paper.”

  “Oh, God, not another? You’ve practically got your own byline in the American Journal of Medicine as it is. What’s this one about?”

  “The effects of unfiltered cosmic radiation on human conception. Did you know the odds are up more than twenty percent that a woman conceiving upstairs will deliver twins? IQs are up, too, maybe not significantly when you consider the smarts of the average spacer, but they are up.”

  I looked down at my belly and intoned, “A super race. And now, live from Ellfive, in-tro-DU-cing, homo”—I searched for the proper adjective—“homo superlitavus!”

  “Yeah, right,” Charlie said, shifting gears from deep thinker back to big sister, “not if you’re any indication.”

  “I’m hurt.”

  “But it’s worth looking into.”

  “Umm.”

  We sat in silence for a while. Talking about children who came in extra smart naturally led my thoughts to Elizabeth, so I wasn’t surprised when Charlie said, “I wonder if Elizabeth knows.”

  Charlie rarely and Simon never spoke of their firstborn, by now studying the lore of the universe somewhere on the other side of the galaxy. For them the loss was still too new, too acute for even the most casual reference. For me, too. Elizabeth had been my friend, my coconspirator from the day she looked up at me from her crib and signed “hello” with clumsy baby fingers. With some difficulty I said, “I don’t know, Charlie. I’d like to think so. The Librarians could be watching us and we’d never know it. We didn’t last time.”

  “No.” She said the word softly, sadly.

  · · ·

  Only half a dozen of us rated cabins; between me, Caleb, and Caleb’s orchids, mine was a tight fit. I rolled over in our bunk and stuck my nose in a bunch of phalaenopsis and sneezed. The twins high-kicked in protest and I groaned. Caleb woke up enough to rub my belly with one huge, comforting hand. “Ha,” he said sleepily. “Trapped you.”

  Caleb was the size of Sasquatch and the color of coffee with cream. His hair was a cap of short black curls. His mouth was wide and his grin wider, over a chin that was very square and very firm. Someone had been just dumb enough or just lucky enough to get just close enough to hit him in the face, one time. It had bent his nose and left a scar that twisted his right eyebrow up and gave him the look of a benevolent Lucifer. His eyes were lake green and limpid and he was looking at me out of them. “Better?”

  I snuggled back against him. “Better.”

  He rubbed my belly. “Not long now.”

  “No.”

  His hand moved farther south. “And then another six weeks. Too long.”

  “Too long,” I agreed.

  He was quiet, his hands warm and strong on me. “Now that you’ve got two in the oven, how do you feel about abandoning your first child?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Ellfive. Sorry, Terranova. All thirty-two kilometers of your handmade space habitat, including two farming toroids, zerogee manufacturing module, astronomical observatory, and solar power station. You just gave her away. How do you feel about that?”

  I lifted his hand to my cheek. “I didn’t give her away. She grew up and moved out. I am now a dictator without a constituency.”

  “And as all good dictators know, once you have had free run of an autocracy, a democracy can feel pretty cramped.”

  “Mmm.”

  “And so awa-ay we go.”

  “Mmm. Caleb!” I twisted around to meet his eyes. “I just realized. I didn’t even ask you if you wanted to come.”

  He kissed me. He took a nice long time over it, and it was filled with the promise of things to come. When he lifted his head his eyes met mine and for once their usual lazy amusement was gone. When he spoke, it was like he was taking a vow. “Whither thou goest, Star. Whither thou goest.”

  I had to struggle not to cry and I am not a weepy woman. “I love you, Caleb,” I said, when I could speak.

  The lazy amusement was back in a flash. “Naturally. What’s not to love?”

  · · ·

  Over the next ten days Whitney Burkette taught a comprehensive course in ship propulsion, from construction and maintenance to detonation. The man had a walrus mustache and a walrus’s appetite for women; I knew that from pre-Caleb experience. In addition, he was a pompous ass, but when he was done teaching that class there wasn’t one of us who couldn’t dropkick an Express. Theoretically, anyway. And his real specialty was zerogee construction.

  Claire Bankhead taught exogeology. One of her ore samples got loose and floated down a companionway to be inhaled by Maile, who was sleeping with her mouth open, which gave Charlie something to do. The rest of us slept and ate in shifts, studied hydroponics and astrogation and p-suit maintenance and zerogee first aid, read, marched on treadmills, and got more pregnant.

  And, hourly, the Asteroid Belt got closer.

  · · ·

  The proper term for the individual objects orbiting through our destination was “minor planet.” Asteroid means “starlike.” Asteroids aren’t. Astronomers call them “the vermin of the sky,” which is understandable when you realize 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. In the solar system there are ten planets, a hundred moons, and a minimum of fifty thousand asteroids.

  Who wouldn’t refer to an object that caused that much tedious work as vermin?

  The Asteroid Belt is sort of the shape of a doughnut, as wide as the distance from Sol to Terra, and fills up the space between Mars and Jupiter. The only rule of size, shape, orbit, inclination, or composition in individual asteroids is that there isn’t one. 1566Icarus has an orbital period of thirteen months. 1Ceres takes four and a half years to travel the same distance around Sol, and 944Hidalgo, fourteen. Yes, years. Ceres is less than a thousand kilometers in diameter, Icarus, little more than one. 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.

  With the help of Maria Mitchell Observatory, the Belt had become more familiar territory, and more provocative, and by 2005 independent prospectors and energy company-financed expeditions as well as geologists sponsored by every Terran government that could afford it were sniffing around the Trojans. Before long news of oxygen, hydrogen, and uranium strikes were commonplace on the trivee.

  None of these mining finds would have been possible without safe, swift, and economical space travel, which development of would not have been possible without The-War-of-the-Worlds hysteria created by the Beetlejuice Message in 1992, which caused in part the USSR’s invasion of (or voluntar
y confederation with, depending on whose history book you were reading) the Warsaw Pact countries and the European Community.

  Then, in 1996, the United Eurasian Republic went to Mars.

  Well. The United States promptly formed the American Alliance with Canada and Japan and negotiated the historic SALT VII agreements, banning nuclear power in all but transportation and generation fields and providing for watertight verification. Frank Sartre won his first Nobel for negotiating the treaty. The ink was barely 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 of yesterday.

  To the surprise and pleasure of those of us who since the Beetlejuice Message had been working our butts off on the heretofore underfunded habitat project, suddenly all things were possible. LEO Base, HEO Base, Copernicus Base, and Ellfive were completed ahead of schedule and under budget, at which time Frank won his second Nobel, this time sharing it with Helen Ricadonna.

  No bucks, no Buck Rogers, I think I heard someone say.

  And then the Librarians’ ship arrived to pick up Archy and took Elizabeth away instead and any argument about whether or not we were alone in the universe was put to rest once and for all.

  Our spaceships weren’t quite as snazzy as the Librarians’. Our entire vehicle was only 125 meters long and looked like the bishop piece from a chess game, with an aft pusher plate that was 57 meters across. We rode up front, with the freight modules between us and the fuel storage, and the freight modules and fuel storage and the pressure plate between us and ignition, about a hundred meters. It never felt like nearly enough of a safety margin. After TMI and Chernobyl and Seabrook, there wasn’t enough room in the universe to put between me and fission. I’ve been to Hiroshima. Eighty thousand dead on impact, a hundred forty thousand by the end of 1945, and they were still counting inherited genetic defects handed down by survivors well into the twenty-first century. Solar flaring is my personal bogey, but next up is traveling in an Orion ship. Once they work the kinks out of a fusion drive, or think of a way to speed up solar propulsion, I’m jumping the fission ship.

  What’s all this got to do with a mining expedition to the Asteroid Belt?

  Everything.

  The Orion starship was powered by the controlled velocity distribution of nuclear explosions DOS called “pulse units” and the Space Patrol called “charge propellant systems” (and Simon called nuclear farts) but which were nothing more or less than nuclear bombs modified into nuclear fuel after SALT VII. Nuclear bombs were made with plutonium, bred from uranium, which was in short and diminishing supply on Terra and Luna. Which was why we were going to the Belt. The Librarians plugged into stars when they ran low on fuel. This is a trick we have yet to learn.

  The original Orion starship, conceived in the late fifties and constrained by late fifties and early sixties technology, had been expected to take anywhere from three to six months travel time from Terra to Mars. Technology had improved somewhat between 1963 and 2008, and we expected to be a little over a month and a half in transit, 47 days Ellfive to Ceres, at 5.7 million kilometers per day, or a little over 238,000 KPH. The Librarians probably parked faster than that.

  Hurtling beltward in our little tin can, we fine-tuned the plans we would put into effect after our arrival. Our stated purpose was to find and ship raw materials back to Terra geosync so Ellfive could complete Island Two on schedule. What the job boiled down to was, we were going to be throwing rocks at Terra and missing. That wouldn’t take a lot of finesse or, once the operation got going, much more than a standby monitoring process. With this kind of crew, ambitious and too bright by half, tedium was bound to set in pretty fast. In vacuum 1.8 AUs from Terra is not a good place to be suffering from boredom. You get bored, you get careless. You get careless in vacuum, you get dead real fast.

  “So?” Charlie said.

  “So we think of something to keep ourselves occupied. Where we’ll be, we’ll have two important things, the only two really essential items.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “One, unlimited raw materials. Two, unlimited solar power to fashion those materials however we wish. Start thinking up projects.” I grinned, and it was a dirty, low-down, sneaky kind of a grin. “Preferably profitable ones.”

  “Gimme a fer instance,” Simon said. Nothing got Simon’s attention like the word “profit.”

  I shrugged and spread my hands. “Use your imagination. For example. As time passes in the Belt, some depletion of essential minerals will become inevitable and we will need new ways of processing low-grade ore. Certain bacteria and fungi, either naturally occurring or artificially created, are known to have an appetite for rocks and metals and generate their own energy through metabolism. Standard Oil and Solar’s been using polyporus versicolor on Terra for years to turn lignite into a water-soluble liquid. The liquid is then treated with an artificial fungi, which turns it into methane for fuel, which is then sold at a very handsome profit. I don’t see why we can’t at least investigate the possibilities of similar refining processes during our stay at Ceres.”

  “Well, as long as we’re there,” Charlie said.

  “And using electrophoresis in zerogee to purify biological materials such as enzymes and hormones makes—”

  “Insulin and interferon,” she said. “They’re already doing that in the Frisbee.”

  “It’s a free marketplace,” I said. “And at last count there are between five and eight thousand miners in the Belt, with more arriving on every ship. We’ve got a market. All we have to do is define it, fill the demand, and count our take.”

  “And you want us to find something to sell them that they literally can’t live without?” Charlie said.

  “How will we distribute this theoretical take?” Simon said. “Between the ship’s crew, allowing for expenses and Terranova’s cut, I mean?”

  I hid a grin. “We’ll work out an equitable split on crew shares when the time comes.”

  · · ·

  We were running out of training programs and planning seminars and Caleb was beginning to wonder aloud what orchids sautéed in oleo might taste like when Crip called for the crew to strap themselves in their couches and brace for braking. The vibrations from a mighty, shipwide cheer almost sent the Hokuwa’a half a degree off course, but we were already performing our lazy somersault on verniers. When the pressure plate was facing into the wind, so to speak, Crip dropped a series of propellant charges and ignited them one at a time. Our speed dropped by half, and we sighted our first asteroid. Another cheer threatened to cause us to intercept it, and I was glad I’d insisted on the portholes.

  Due to a few erratically moving rocks in unexpected places we were a day late braking for the orbit that would take us into Ceres. Crip, Sam, and Simon had a blasphemous time recomputing the trajectory, and at that Denise had to ride the joystick on three different occasions to avoid collisions. Communication with the Voortrekker, a week behind us out of Terranova, went blurred and erratic as soon as we put the first rock behind us. “We’ll have to set some commsats out of the plane of rotation, first thing,” Maile said.

  “Agreed,” I said. “Have you heard anything yet from Piazzi City?”

  She and I and Caleb were crowded onto the flight deck, trying to raise Ceres on what we knew was the Belt’s standby frequency. “Nothing. Nothing at all. You’d think we’d have gotten something from one of the outlying claims, at least, but we haven’t heard a word.”

  “We did come in kind of skewed,” Crip said. “They may be blocked, or still out of range. They don’t have a very powerful transmitter.”

  For three days we drifted in space. There was no traffic, no chatter over the net. It was as if we were on the very first wagon train ever to travel the Oregon Trail. When I said as much to Caleb he replied, unsmiling, “Yes, and I’m seeing hostile Indians behind every rock.”

  When we finally matched orbit with Ceres, Crip cut the maneuve
ring thrusters and turned to me. “Now what?”

  The cockpit was crowded. The twins kicked out protestingly. At eight and a half months, they were anxious to get out into the real world, although not half as anxious as I was to get them there. “Still no communication with Ceres?” I said.

  “No,” Maile said. “I’ve picked up a few garbled sentences here and there, but I can’t tell if it’s something someone just said or it’s been floating around for years. I get better response from Terranova even though it takes twenty minutes.”

  I gnawed my lip. “I don’t like this,” I said. “I don’t like this at all. Caleb?”

  He nodded. “I’ll put my people on standby.” He left.

  “Put Ceres on the viewer, Archy,” I said.

  The viewer above the instrument panel showed us a large, pitted rock, seemingly lifeless and stationary. It stood alone at the center of a black stage against a distant backdrop of shimmering, unfocused stars. “Archy, call up the Piazzi City coordinates. Okay? Launch a remcam.”

  There was a sharp snap and the pop of jets from the hull somewhere aft. We waited. Shortly, Ceres faded from the viewer. It was replaced by a low-level sweep of some bumps that may or may not have been the roofs of Lunabuilts, submerged into the surface of the asteroid.

  “Look, over there. Lights.”

  “Archy, left and down.” Archy’s remote zoomed in. The lights were mounted on poles, over hangars, personnel locks, what looked like freight bays. All were deserted. What space-buggies and solarsleds we saw were grounded. There wasn’t a sign of life to be found anywhere.

  Maile said, with a cheerful smile, “Why do I keep expecting someone to jump out and yell ‘Boo!’ ”