“Yes,” he said. “Colonize them, if you like. Stake claims. You could build whole habitats, mines, fabrication units, fusion plants…”
She breathed in sharply. “Wow — I can see that, but I can’t imagine working or settling on rocks all bumping about—”
“They wouldn’t be,” he assured her. “The first job would be to stabilise them. Move them out a little — you’d get that as a by-product of working them, or we could fire off a tiny acceleration burn on the drive, move the ship in relation to them — then tether them in place with massive buckyropes.” He shrugged. “Or use attitude jets. It’s an engineering detail.”
“But what would be the point? I mean, OK, we could mine them, but what’s the point of settling them? Inside the ship? It would be just playing at colonization.”
“Even if it was, it would be good practice,” Horrocks said, “but they needn’t be inside the ship forever. The cone surface is segmented. Whole sections of it can swing open. That’s how the rocks get loaded in the first place.”
“So we could settle and someday… move out?”
“You got it.”
She leaned back, gazing above his head. “That sounds wonderful,” she said. “So what do we have to do to get this going?”
“Well,” he said, “like I was saying, it’s just an idea that a few of the crew have come up with. I’d want to see it discussed a bit more widely, among the old hands especially. Thrash out the feasibility. And I suppose you’d have to get the Council’s blessing, though technically I’m not quite sure if it has standing in regard to the rocks. Raise funding from founder capital, maybe by swapping for other stakes that are… at a discount right now. Oh, and I guess you’d have to see if any of the ship generation were interested.”
“You must be joking! They’d jump at it!”
“I’ve seen a few today who wouldn’t.”
She waved an airy hand. “The slackers? They’ll join in too, you’ll see, but who cares if they don’t? You’ll get enough of us going for it, that’s for sure.”
“Great!” he said. “Ah—”
“What?”
“There is one drawback. The legal situation.”
“How’s that?”
“When we first came up with the idea we checked the Contract.”
“You’re telling me it has no provision?”
“Oh, it has a provision all right. Not for this situation, exactly, but it’s very specific about who can vote and who can’t. About who is in the Complement. Crew, of course. Founders and ship generation over sixteen, as long as they live in the habitat. The habitat, not the ship. It definitely has provision for people moving to nearby celestial bodies in the same orbit. Which applies to the rocks in the tanks.”
“You’re saying we’d lose our votes?”
“Possibly. Very likely.”
He expected her to balk or bridle at this, but she just stared off into space for a moment. “Hmm,” she said at last. “How many of us could move out in six months?”
“Oh, a few thousand, I should imagine.”
“Ah!” Her face cleared. “That’s all right. There’ll still be plenty behind who can vote.”
“You know how they’ll vote?”
“Once this gets going — oh yes.”
“Well, I’m sure you know how to spread the word.”
Her face fell a little. “Yeah. It’s just a lot more difficult these days.”
“There’s a rumour going around,” he said, “that the Council is thinking of lifting the comms restrictions.”
“I haven’t heard it”
“It’s bandied in the cones.” He drained his cup and rose to leave.
“Do you have to go?”
“Yes,” he said. “To be honest, this isn’t the only place I want to visit. Spread the word in person.”
Her nod was firm, her look a little disappointed. “Good idea. Come back sometime, OK?”
“Sure.”
When he looked back from the doorway she was already writing.
14 366:02:12 00:17
Haven’t written much recently. Nor received many comments. Is anybody still reading this? Is anybody else still biologging?
Oh yes. I see you are. Those of you who haven’t come out here yet, and are still just talking and planning, planning, planning.
Well, this is for you. I haven’t written much because I’ve been doing things. And because it’s exhausting out here. It’s exhausting but it’s fun. It’s pioneering. It’s what we were born for.
Out here… Let me just pause for a moment and clarify a point of terminology. Words are important. I see from a quick search through the biologs that most of you refer to us in the cones as “in there.” We’re not “in there.” You are: you’re in there in the habitat. We’re out here.
It’s not outer space. But it’s hard vacuum (well, hard-ish), it’s free fall (well, microgravity), and it’s black all around. An aperture on the sunline burns in the sky like a nearby sun. The rocks we’re working on are hundreds of metres across. Most of them are less than a kilometre apart from each other, so it all looks like a child’s cartoon illustration of an asteroid belt rather than the real thing, with millions of klicks between one and the other. It’s a bit like being in a Ring, but without the collisions and the ablation and the micrometeorites going like sandblasters and the dying full of holes in a cloud of blood and stuff.
But it’s still the real thing. If you want the full illusion of being outside, you can tune your eyes to the external view and see the stars — and those of the planets that are visible at the moment — just as they would be if they were outside your faceplate. That’s cool, but admittedly you can do that anywhere in the ship. And somehow, we don’t feel the need to. Being in this enormous space is enough.
Because we really are pioneering. These rocks have never even been prospected! If they’d ever had to be processed, they’d have been refined and sifted for useful minerals and organics before the slag was thrown in the drive. But I’m sure a lot would have been missed. Apart from anything else, we’re doing real science. These rocks are after all from the Red Sun system, and some of them date back to its formation, and we’re actually finding out stuff that I’ll bet their own scientists back there haven’t got round to yet. Well, maybe not, but it’s new to us, and it’s fun finding out secrets four billion years old. Delicate crystal formations; complex organic molecules; microscopic bubbles trapped in the rock or ice, of gases with curious isotope ratios; shock patterns that indicate or suggest that at least one rock out here was chipped off a larger body, which some have identified from the records as likely to be Red Sun VII 14.
All right, that’s exciting to me, but maybe not to you, and anyway we’re not out here to do science. Science is a sideshow. The main event — events, rather — are mining and extracting, synthesising and building. We’re building habitats! Real habitats we’re actually living in, and that one day — soon, I hope — may orbit freely around the Destiny Star on their own.
Nobody’s got the habitat of their dreams. (Mine needs a much bigger asteroid.) Everybody has had to divvy up or share. For this rock we’re on it’s a team: me, Grant, a few people from Far Crossing, and the New Lamarck crowd. Of course there are more machines than people, which makes it feel more crowded but also makes things happen fast. We’ve already got a beautiful cluster of diamond bubbles that look green from outside with all the plants within.
Nobody’s doing the exact project they’d planned. Again, most of these are tagged to specific features or moons or rocks, so they’re not relevant at the moment. That doesn’t matter. There’s a whole lot of projects we’re working on with the crew, both because it’s valuable experience and because it’s trade for the expertise and resources we get from them. (Any accountancy software experts still hesitating? There’s work for you out here.)
Oh, and speaking of work, anybody with power-engineering ambitions should just drop everything and emigrate here, because you’ll never get a better chance to hone your skills and serve a sound apprenticeship with old crew hands. Fusion power plants aren’t strictly necessary here, but they’ll be useful in the future. Same goes for missile and laser batteries. We’re building plenty of them, there’s a whole industry going on (amazing the explosives and fuels you can cook out of gunk from carbonaceous chondrites, and the reaction and refinery paths are way complex and cool). They’ll be sold around when we move out. Likewise the power plants. Like I said, the opportunities in that line are amazing. We are building a lot of fusion power plants.