Chewing Rocks Read online

  Chewing Rocks

  By

  Alan Black

  CHEWING ROCKS is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or a used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The Publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  2009, 2013 Copyright by Alan Black

  Smashwords edition

  Cover Art by Amy Black

  Thanks to Duann Black for her editing services

  All rights reserved.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is also available at most online booksellers in the dead tree edition, as well as many brick and mortar retailers.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1.0

  Chapter 2.0

  Chapter 3.0

  Chapter 4.0

  Chapter 5.0

  Chapter 6.0

  Chapter 7.0

  Chapter 8.0

  Chapter 9.0

  Chapter 10.0

  Chapter 11.0

  Chapter 12.0

  Chapter 13.0

  Chapter 14.0

  Chapter 15.0

  Chapter 16.0

  Chapter 17.0

  Chapter 18.0

  Chapter 19.0

  Chapter 20.0

  Chapter 21.0

  Chapter 22.0

  Chapter 23.0

  Chapter 24.0

  Chapter 25.0

  Chapter 26.0

  Chapter 27.0

  Chapter 28.0

  Chapter 29.0

  Chapter 30.0

  About the Author

  Author’s Bio

  Other Books by the Author

  Praise for Other Books

  Dedication

  Again…to my wonderful wife whose constant interruptions while I am writing make it all worthwhile.

  Chapter 1.0

  Sno jammed the chisel point of a broken autojack into the crack on the asteroid’s surface. Since she did not expect the thing to work, she didn’t extend the stabilizers. Snapping line on the jack, she shot a tether into the rock face. The heavy, powered equipment was broken, but there was no sense in having it float away into space. She mashed the power button even though the controls appeared to be fried. Nothing happened.

  She shot another tether into the face of the asteroid, the piton blasting into the hard rock. She grabbed the free end of the line and braced both boots of her EVA suit against the jack. Muscles strained as she pushed against the machine using it like a pry bar. She hoped to open the crack wide enough to retrieve her last piece of working equipment that was frustratingly stuck in the same small seam. The EVA suit’s enhanced muscles vibrated with the effort. Nothing moved.

  Huffing in frustration, Sno kicked the autojack. She knew kicking without benefit of gravity is next to useless. Even in a powered suit the lack of leverage would send her spinning backward off the asteroid. But she needed at least one working autojack or this trip was finished.

  Chastity Snowden Whyte was captain of the Sedona, a Whyte Mining Company ship. Of course, calling her captain was only a formality since she was, as always, working alone. Sno had been asteroid mining on this trip for only a month and already three of her four autojacks were malfunctioning. Sensors showed her that somewhere on this five kilometer sized chunk of rock was a fairly large deposit of some sort of heavy metal. It was the heavy metal that would make this a profitable trip or a solar-system-sized waste of time.

  The tether jerked Sno up short as she spun away from the asteroid, pushed away by her kick. She reeled herself back to the surface, cursing in frustration. Now both machines were irretrievably fouled. From a small pouch on her suit’s thigh, she extracted a thumbnail size piece of putty specially formulated to remain pliable even in the vacuum of space. She shoved it into the seam between the two jacks. Taking a detonator from another pouch she tamped it into the putty with a gauntlet covered thumb.

  She snapped loose the tether and jumped for her ship hovering overhead. She did not use the suit jets, not for lack of power, but because she didn’t need to use the suit jets. Power was one thing she had plenty of, just feed more raw rock into the converter and you had all the power you could use. She did not use the suit jets because she could make this hundred meter jump on one leg, in her sleep, carrying a rabid puppy without a harness or leash. She had been flying thru zero gravity before she could walk and chewing rocks since she was fourteen.

  Sno did not jump straight towards the Sedona. Even though her ship appeared to be stationary above the non-moving asteroid, it was a trick of the eye; an optical illusion. You could not even tell by the stars beyond the ship. The glare of the sun, unhampered by any atmosphere, washed out all of the stars. The sun itself looked as if it was spinning and rotating in a twirling orbit. She had parked her ship in a flat astro-synchronous orbit over one end of the tumbling asteroid.

  Having grown up outside of Earth’s gravity well, she subconsciously calculated the spin of the asteroid and the rotation of the Sedona. The physics of linear movement between two tumbling bodies, moving at separate speeds in an almost gravity free environment without any atmospheric friction would have taken most computers several minutes to calculate.

  Sno used the oldest computer known to man, trusting her wetware to calculate the perfect jump. She could not have described the desired arc necessary to jump from the asteroid to the ship anymore than a ten-year-old Earth-born boy could describe the arc his bicycle would take coming off a homemade ramp on a long sloping driveway. He just rode the bike, knowing where he would come down…mostly. Like those same boys sometimes missed their jumps and ended up with bruises and abrasions, Sno missed sometimes. However, in her case she had suit jets to push her to her destination if she did miss the jump.

  In actuality, Sno jumped away from the Sedona. The movement of the two bodies cooperated enough to curve her jump to match the ship’s erratic orbit. Rather, she jumped straight and the ship curved in its orbit to meet her.

  She grinned to herself, without any real humor, as she slid next to the Sedona, “Good jump! I give it an 8.5 on the Whyte meter; great accuracy, but lacking in style and grace.”

  Snagging a stanchion near the ship’s ore processing hatch, Sno toggled her suit command panel to activate the ship’s repulsar field generator. She could not hear the generator in the silence of space, but she felt the vibrations through the stanchion as the field spun up. Without waiting for her ship to send her confirmation that the field was at full strength, she snapped out the ‘fire-in-the-hole’ command to the detonator.

  A small puff of dust blew from the asteroid, the dust drifting rapidly into the gravity netting near the hole. The charge should not have been large enough to do more than open the crack wide enough for Sno to pull her equipment free. She flinched as a small chuck of rock spanged off the repulsar field directly in front of her.

  “Okay,” Sno said, “That was stupid. It was one small hole for mankind, but one huge hole for me.”

  She shut the repulsar field off and jumped back to the asteroid landing feet first only inches away from the first jammed autojack. She could see the chisel point was free in the widened crack. The equipment was he
ld in place by the stabilizers. She could see the ‘life-time guaranteed’ shaft had twisted.

  Sno popped loose the stabilizers from the asteroid and snapped them into place against the jack’s handle. She opened the back panel on the autojack and flipped the homing switch. She grabbed the jack that had been jammed into the crack and spinning it in an arc, tossed it into space away from the Sedona. She did not stop to watch the homing gear take over to fly the jack snug up to the equipment air lock hatch. She unsnapped the tether on the second jack, the one she had been using as a pry bar, flipped the homing switch and flung it spaceward.

  She looked around her. All that was left on the asteroid was the gravity rock netting with a net-drone at each corner and the tether piton clamped into the rock below her. She decided to leave everything else in place. She still might be able to mine something of real value other than just rock if she could get one autojack working.

  The spectral analysis on this particular M-type chunk of rock showed a high probability of iron-nickel compound. Only about ten percent of all asteroids fell in this category. Each of them gave off a white or slightly red hue. However, only a fraction of the ten percent actually contained any appreciable amount of metal. This rock’s albedo reflected high white electromagnetic radiation indicating an elevated expectation of metal. The rock was small enough and far enough outside of the normal mining fields to have been overlooked for years.

  Those asteroids that did have metal usually kept it buried at the core, so a miner had to chew through all of the silicate-chondrite covering to get at it. Any rock had value, but not much. Chewing rock was just barely a break even activity. It was a chore done only while trying to dig out more valuable commodities.

  Without a working jack Sno could not get at the metal and would have to head back to port with her balance sheet teetering on the knife edge of the profit color shift. She had chewed enough rock to cover her air, food and water charges, but not enough to push her into any profit, certainly not close to bonus pay levels. A good sized find of metal could make a whole year’s profit. A small finding of ice, or better yet, crystal would help, but so far all she had done was chew rock.

  Not that she expected to find ice since she was well sunward of the 2.5 A.U. ice lines. Most asteroids this close in sunward would be S-type; just silicate rocks with some metal, but no carbonaceous compounds. If she had chosen to mine closer to Jupiter’s orbit than toward Mars she would have been in the area where about seventy-five percent of the asteroids would be C-type; rocks with carbonaceous compounds and a higher probability of ice. She would also have found a higher percentage of other mining ships, charted areas, and worked over rock debris.

  The earliest asteroid miners had only taken valuable commodities leaving the rock behind. In the last few years it had become profitable enough to strip any rock down to empty space, even feeding dust into the rock chamber for conversion to power or transferring material to the company’s coffers.

  Sno preferred to chew rocks where no one had chewed rocks before. On this trip she was even outside of the main belt, both sunward of the Zone 1 Kirkwood Gap and above the twenty degree orbital inclination.

  Sno jumped back to the ship. When she’d left the ship to start her mining shift, she’d left the outer hatch to the equipment room’s airlock open. She tossed the offending autojacks onto the deck. Rather than back out of the airlock and go around to the personnel hatch, she pulled the hatch closed behind her and spun the dial to re-pressurize the airlock to the equipment room. She set her suit to adjust its internal gravity from the ten percent gravity she used for EVA work to the comfortable one-third gravity she normally set on the Sedona’s grav-stat.

  She backed the suit onto the auxiliary suit station built into the bulkhead, hit the toggle to unsuit and tried to breathe normally, relaxing as the ship went about unsnapping, disconnecting and detaching lines, feeds and hooks.

  Her thoughts returned her to the fouled and broken equipment. She knew her frustration and anger levels were high. So much so that she had almost made a serious mistake with the blast putty. “No, three mistakes,” she corrected herself, ticking the errors off on her fingers. “One: not shaping the charge correctly. B: not waiting for Sedona to tell me the repulsar field was at full strength. Third: not spreading the rock netting across the blast area.”

  Sno recognized that her mood swings were sliding from one end of the happy spectrum all the way to the other not so pleasant end. She was sure it was not a bi-polar issue, but just that she seemed to have lost her grip on her emotion control levers. She would flare into seething anger and forget about it the next. This time she had no intention of forgetting her anger over the broken autojacks.

  The asteroids in the belt may not be tightly packed across this portion of space, but they had more or less settled into a delicate dance around each other. A loose rock, whatever the size, slamming into one of its neighbors would shift trajectories and throw off the movement of the dance. One such out-of-synch wild rock could start a chain reaction that could destabilize whole regions of asteroids.

  With a delicate chime, the suit popped open and let in a blast of cool air. Sno sighed and twisted free. She stepped down the ladder to reach the deck. True to rock miner superstition she reached up and patted the suit in the chest about where the heart would be as if saying ‘Thanks for the ride’. Even with her six foot five inch frame she could still only reach to mid chest on the massive power suit.

  Sno ran her hands through her red hair, fluffing it back out where it had been mashed down by the suit’s helmet. She bent at the waist, twisting and stretching to get out any kinks, her lean muscular frame flexing easily.

  She wanted to immediately get the autojacks on the workbench and start tearing them apart, but after more than a dozen years of mining, she knew better. She hated the plumbing in mining suits; therefore the first order of business was a trip to the head. Then she needed to indulge herself in a brief stop at the galley, for a protein shake if nothing else. And as always, she needed to make a stop on the bridge to check all systems.

  Besides, she was nude and the ship’s air always felt a bit too cool after the snug comfort of a power suit. She had not worn panties because they get in the way of the suit’s plumbing. She may not like suit plumbing and had not used it, but she had plugged it in. She wanted to be prepared if she needed to use the facilities. She had not worn a bra, because she just did not need one, not in a suit, not in the ship’s one third gravity, not even when she worked out in the gym under full standard gravity.

  Sno had left her jeans, t-shirt and sneakers in the suit room next to the personnel hatch. She did not feel any sense of embarrassment as she padded quietly along the corridor because she was alone on her ship.

  Sno was only quiet on the outside; inside she was snarling, “I am going to skin those morons at United Mechanical. I think I will start with that smarmy earther with the greasy ‘stache. Bastages! All of ‘em! Lifetime warranty, my sick Aunt Sadie! Brand new out of the box autojacks that aren’t worth the airspace they take up and neither are those S.O.B.s that sold ‘em to me. I don’t know what Ernie was thinking hiring on earthers. Ernie is at least a Martian. He should know better. Maybe I should tie them naked in the hydroponics’ leech vats. Let the leeches feast on their worthless scrot sacks. Yeah, if I gotta wait for replacement parts from Earth, that is what I am gonna do: leech vats!”

  Chapter 2.0

  “Hey, Red.” Vitoria Encarcion called out cheerfully as Sno stepped through the doorway into the Whyte Mining Company’s offices. “You’re back way too soon. We barely had time to fumigate from your last layover.” Vittie was officially the company’s receptionist/office manager. Before Vittie had immigrated up from Earth six months ago and started dating Sno’s father, the Whyte Mining Company had not needed a receptionist, much less an office manager. All of the day-to-day tasks had been handled by Willem: the CEO, CFO, CIO, COO, janitor and Sno’s father all rolled into one.

  “
Suck vacuum, gravity girl,” Sno snarled back. “I told you not to call me Red.” Sno didn’t like Vittie. The woman was eternally cheerful. She may have eased some of Dad’s workload and certainly his stress levels, but she was still a gravity-fed earther. Sno was a third generation asteroid miner and as proud of that fact as of anything else in her life. Almost as proud as the fact that she was space born.

  Vittie smiled, “Yep, you also told me not to call you Chastity, Miss Whyte or even sweetheart, but I can’t call you Sno. That is a weather condition, not a nickname.” Vittie knew Sno did not like her, but she did not let it bother her because over the last few months Vittie had come to realize Sno did not much like anyone.

  “Where’s Dad?” Sno snapped.

  “He is out getting brunch, lunch, lupper, or whatever meal we are supposed to have at this time of the day. Want me to cell him and get him to bring you something?”

  “No. I ate on the Sedona while going through docking maneuvers. Plus, unlike a lot of people around here, I’ve got work to do.”

  “He went to Mario’s for subs?” Vittie grinned, throwing the information out as a question.”

  The Whyte Mining Corporation was headquartered in Arizona City on the planetoid Ceres. Ceres was the size of Texas and it was the biggest chunk of rock in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but it was not much of a planet. Arizona City was Cere’s only town and it was not much of a town. It’s restaurants were even less stellar. Mario’s Subs, Suds, Spuds and Grub Pub was the best of the lot and Sno’s favorite. Still, she was not about to change her mind after she had said no the first time.

  Sno snarled, “I said no. Do you need a map to a dictionary or can you guess the meaning of no by the context of the conversation? Never mind. Did you or Dad get around to filing the warranties on the last shipment of jacks or are they still in the to-be-filed box?” She began to dig through stacks of data chips and their associated forms.