Chewing Rocks Read online

  Vittie looked thoughtful, “I would guess they are in the to-be-filed box. Like I said, you haven’t been out that long. Did you have trouble with the autojacks?”

  “All four went tango uniform just barely out of the packing crates.” Sno barely spit the words out.

  Vittie looked confused, “Tango uniform?”

  Sno shook her head sadly and rolled her eyes, “Earther education not all what it is cracked up to be, huh? Tango uniform; T.U.; toes up, as in how a rat goes when it dies.”

  “Ah,” Vittie smiled. “It is an idiomatic expression.” She swiveled her chair around and pointed. “Don’t look in that stack, darling. Look in the box under the chart table. I think the warranties are there. Was it just the autojacks that gave out or did your core systems act up again?”

  Sno said, “Don’t call me darling, either. I am not anyone’s darling. And Sedona’s core is fine. Some of the applications ran a bit squidly, but it’s nothing so bad I can’t live with it.”

  Vittie replied without a smile, “Until you don’t.”

  Sno nodded, “There is always that.” She grabbed a handful of documents from the box. “Got ‘em. Lifetime warranty, my pleated patootie! I am going to force feed these jacks to those morons at United Mechanical ‘til they choke.”

  Vittie nodded, “That is your call, but I am pretty sure that would void the warranty. Maybe you should let Willem handle the exchange. He just got them calmed down from your last visit. It is helpful to have a pleasant relationship with your suppliers.” She continued, overriding Sno’s response. “And by-the-by, we have good news on the equipment side; Queene Mines did an upgrade on their fleet’s application and core systems. Willem was able to get enough of their old cast offs to retrofit all our ships and some to spare.”

  Sno looked interested, “Really?” A ship’s core was the central control node of the computer. It was just like the part of a human brain that ran the autonomic functions, running all of the processes the ship needed to sustain human life and function without thinking about them: environmental, artificial gravity, collision control, power generation, power consumption and a host of other functions. A ship’s applications or ‘apps’ ran the peripheral programs, like communications and hot water for showers.

  Sno said, “Queene has always scrapped their leftovers in the past rather than let us get any upgrades. I wonder what changed their minds.”

  “I imagine it was their new regional manager Evelyn Queene.” Vittie gushed, “She is just the nicest woman. And she is the daughter of old Rex Queene. Imagine a member of the Queene family coming all the way out here to fix things herself rather than send any number of competent plant managers. You know, she had your dad and me over to dinner last week. She brought her own chef with her all the way from Paris.”

  “Would that be Paris, Texas or the one on Mars?”

  Vittie grinned, “That would France, cheri. Don’t be silly. Paris, Mars isn’t anything more than a dusty research station and I don’t imagine the one in Texas is too cosmopolitan either.”

  “Yes, and the one in France is dirty, smelly and overcrowded with more unwashed, undereducated immigrants from the Middle East and Central Africa than with Parisians. I watch the newscasts just like everyone else. And don’t call me ‘cheri’, either. I know that is just French for sweetheart. Nice try, though.” Sno continued, “So, did Dad run the stuff from Queene through the cleaners yet? Not that I don’t trust Queene Mines, but…well, I don’t trust Queene Mines.”

  Vittie tried unsuccessfully to hide her bigger than normal grin. “Willem ran all of them through the scrubbers and filters twice. They are clean and free of any kind of bug or virus our software can detect. He has already upgraded the Flagstaff and Bisbee.” She pointed at the monitors built into the wall. “They are already back in the belt. Check those statistics against the Sedona’s stats and you’ll see why your Dad worries about you going out alone. He is in the middle of downloading the Winslow. Now that you are back I am sure he will want to stop and upgrade the Sedona.”

  Sno almost shouted, “Ninety-nine point five! Look at the Bisbee; she is running almost perfect. And the Flag is not much behind her.” Sno didn’t need to look at the Sedona’s monitor to see her apps ‘n core efficiency rating was running only in the mid-sixties. She glanced anyway and almost shuddered.

  There were thirty monitors on the wall. One for each ship, or would be if they had thirty ships. The Whyte Mining Company only owned six mining ships and one old tug. The company owned ships lit up the first seven monitors: the Sedona, the Wittenburg, the Flagstaff, the Oatman, the Bisbee, the Winslow and the tug Phoenix. The monitors reflected each ships current status and material flow. The ships were old, but still serviceable.

  Normally most of the other monitors were dark unless Whyte contracted to buy an independent ship’s material. Sno could see four other monitors were lit. She remembered her father had contracted to buy any material transmitted by a couple of mining engineers down from Io. They were on their honeymoon and thought asteroid mining sounded like an adventure.

  Sno shrugged mentally. Maybe chewing rocks in the asteroid belt was an adventure compared to chewing rocks on Io’s mining colony. They would certainly have more alone time. They would actually make a profit on their honeymoon if the value line on their transmission was a good indicator. They were already making enough to pay for the lease on their ship plus all of their consumables.

  “Who are these other three?” Sno pointed at three lit monitors, indicating a connection. All the data was static and had been for a couple of weeks. Normally a ship was in constant communication with the company; for safety reasons if for nothing else. When she was in the belt, Sno often went for long periods of time without an actual conversation, but the ship talked to the company office all of the time. That is, when her apps were not on the fritz.

  Vittie shrugged and smiled. “Willem contracted to a group of gentlemen. And before you say anything: yes, they are from Earth. They had three old mining ships they bought used from Syntheco and wanted to try prospecting.”

  Sno asked, “Any word from them? These screens have been stagnant for a while.”

  Vittie said, “No. They said they would call when they were ready. Willem said if they wanted to be alone, then we would leave them alone. Sound familiar?” Before Sno could respond Vittie continued, “Besides, we don’t have any company assets tied up in their prospecting and we don’t have any liability to them unless they send matter into the coffers.”

  Sno nodded. If the prospectors were even average navigators the three ships should be close to being outside of the belt proper where they could micro-jump the ship closer to their expected destination. Jumping a ship from anywhere near the slightest gravity well was as dangerous as jumping into an area filled with hard astral bodies. Most of a miner’s shiptime was spent moving either up or down the solar system’s ecliptic to empty space where they could micro-jump to more empty space somewhere else before moving into the belt again.

  As Sno scanned the monitors she could see the Wittenburg, Oatman and Bisbee were all feeding matter into their converters for transmission to the coffers of the company’s Arizona City plant. The Flagstaff was outbound and not yet at a mining site. The Winslow and Sedona showed in port at the company docks.

  Sno checked the content of the raw material coming in from the three working ships. Both the Wittenburg and Bisbee were mining closer to Jupiter than where Sno had been. Both ships were transmitting mainly rock and some ice.

  “What is the Oatman transmitting? I see rock and a good volume of nickel, but there is a trace of something else.” Sno asked.

  Vittie grinned again. “Willem thinks it’s copper.”

  Sno whistled, “Damn! That’s a huge find. We haven’t seen copper in a couple of years. Oatman must be figuring out what to do with their bonus pay.”

  Vittie nodded, “Yep. They have already flashed their wish list to get on the next inbound transport. Willem is sen
ding the Flagstaff to join them. He figures it is too big a find to leave when the Oatman’s consumables give way. They only have another three weeks of food before they have to tag the rock and come back. Willem figures there is another six weeks of digging before they get all of the metal out of that asteroid.”

  Sno whistled again in appreciation.

  When Sno’s grandfather had been a young man, radical environmentalists on Earth had deemed it almost immoral to feed any natural Earth material into a power converter. Their logic was that everything was recyclable in some form or fashion. Converting material to power would completely consume the material. Even though a power converter could separate any raw material into its most basic components, it still lost some matter to power consumption. So, the theory was that if Earth continued to put Earth material into it’s converters it was doing nothing more than consuming itself and would eventually disappear. No one, on Earth that is, ever mentioned that ‘eventually’ would be hundreds of thousands of years or more.

  Grandpa Snowden Whyte had sold everything he owned to buy a used lunar shuttle. He outfitted the old girl with power converters and set off into the asteroid belt to look for raw materials to feed a power hungry Earth. Transport of raw materials to Earth was not an issue because a converter could only transmit inanimate objects from one coffer to the next, regardless of conditions or distance.

  Organic matter was another story. No matter how many experiments were tried, living creatures always arrived with their component parts in a non-working condition. They were in perfect shape, just non-working. Even food stuffs lost any nutrient value and hence their usability. If you wanted to get a sub from Mario’s you had to walk down to the corner of Strawberry Avenue and O’Donnell Street and get it yourself. No one had been able to make a converter that could send a sub, not from four blocks away; much less not between planets. And Mario did not deliver.

  Grandpa Whyte set up shop on Ceres and started planning a city. He, his thirteen-year-old son, and a few others chose Ceres because it is almost 950 kilometers in diameter and nearly spherical, making it a dwarf planet or a planetoid. In those early days Ceres was icy with frost at the poles. The early settlers managed to collect enough ice to develop and maintain a self sustaining presence. The ice was mostly frozen inert gasses, but it did contain oxygen and hydrogen, hence water and breathable air.

  With water and air from Ceres, they founded Arizona City. Their town was so named because Grandpa Whyte came from Strawberry, Arizona. The founding fathers had thought Strawberry City was too silly a name for a group of rough, independent prospectors. All except for Maggie O’Donnell aged eight, who was tagging along with her father. She thought Strawberry sounded just peachy. Maggie’s opinion did not carry much weight since all of the O’Donnell clan disappeared on their first trip into the belt, taking Maggie with them. It did, however, give Arizona City a name for two of the main streets.

  Nothing much had changed about asteroid mining since Grandpa Whyte’s day. A mining ship would find any asteroid and chew the rock into small enough pieces to feed into the ship’s converter. The raw material would be transmitted into the main processing plant on Ceres, where the larger converters could split the raw materials into various coffers, separating like items. Once an appreciable amount of raw material was batched, the company would calculate value and sell the product to their customers.

  Most of Whyte’s customers were small independent Earth-side brokers, but they did have clients for ice on Luna and a few research stations around the system. Most customers would buy any quantity of product, from a handful of dirt upward. The transmission costs were negligible so the batch size did not matter. What did matter was the deal the buyer would give the seller. The rule of thumb was, the larger the quantity you had to sell, the higher the price you could set. To Sno’s way of thinking, every sale, no matter what size, generated an attendant flurry of paperwork. That meant one large batch brought you a lot less paperwork to wade through than a group of small batches.

  Turning back to Vittie, Sno said, “Tell Dad to finish the upgrade to the Winslow. He needs to get her back into the belt pretty quick. Those two goobers he hired to run it can barely find rock. They need all the time chewing rocks they can get. And if he doesn’t hurry they will drink up their last paycheck before he finishes. Check the download from Sedona. I monitored a good sized cluster on the way back in and flashed in the coordinates. It is off the elliptical a bit so it was easy to miss. It doesn’t look like a high metal yield, but definitely worth a look-see. Have him send the Winslow to check it out.”

  Vittie replied, “I will remember to tell him, but you should tell him yourself. You two haven’t talked in a long time. You’ve been out a couple of months, remember?”

  Sno sighed, “Yeah, yeah. I know. I’ll get with him before I go out again, okay? First, I am going to go down to United Mech and talk to those s.o.b.s about the p.o.s. jacks they sold me. I mean, really! One jack is a malfunction; two is incompetence, but all four in thirty days is criminal and if I had to suffer because of their negligence, then so are they.”

  Vittie did not say anything. She just smiled.

  Sno said, “Ok. I’ll try to keep a lid on it. At least I promise not to leave any permanent scars. Hey! Where is my apps n’ core upgrade?”

  Vittie replied, “Your dad put it in your locker at the Sedona’s docking slip. He knew you would want it quick when you flashed your return status. He picked out the best of the lot for you. It is almost new. Still has the original box and manuals. If you are going over to see those guys at United, then swing by and meet Miss Queene. She really did us a favor with those upgrades. We couldn’t have gotten half as good for twice as much on the open market. She even went through a pile of them with Willem and helped him pick out your upgrade personally. Imagine, such a rich and powerful sophisticate digging through dusty equipment in the back of her warehouse with a rough, old rock hound like your dad! She is just the nicest.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I get the picture. She’s a saint. But she is still an earther. She’ll be here, put on a good show, let the worker bees clean up the mess and then she will go back to her gravity well and sit on her fat behind.”

  Vittie replied, “Try not to judge too quickly, mi hija. She fired the entire management team at Queene Mines right off the bat. I hear she wanted to make them walk home.”

  “Home?” Sno snarled. “Ceres is home. Arizona City is home. Sedona is my home. You’re showing your own stripes, earther. If you want home, then go home.”

  Vittie smiled, “Thanks for the suggestion, but I’ll stay. That was a slip of the tongue. I should have said ‘their’ home. You know, I do think I am home now. Since everyone here is so nice and welcoming I wouldn’t even think of leaving.”

  “Ooooh, passive-aggressive from gravity girl. How refreshing! And don’t think that I forgot about you calling me ‘me ha’.” Sno pronounced the phrase phonetically. “It sounds cool and I don’t know what it means. I am going to look it up. When I find out what it means then it goes on the list of things you can’t call me. Tell Dad I went down to United Mech, and yes I will stop by and see Miss Queene. Cell her and see if I can get in.”

  “Really,” Vittie said, “Evelyn is a genuinely lovely person. She admitted her father personally sent her out here to clean up this Queene Mining office. I guess it is way down in profits. She even showed your father some of their recent financial statements. She wants his advice on bringing Queene’s profits up. I saw those ledgers too, and she has a big job ahead of her.”

  Sno said, “Well, cell her for me.” She tucked the autojack warranty certificates into a pocket and stormed out onto Strawberry Avenue. If she went to United Mechanical first she could turn toward Mario’s and might get to say hi to her dad. However, Queene Mine’s office was the other way and she would rather get the meeting with Miss Queene out of the way first. Business before pleasure and she was sure it would be a pleasure to tangle with those cretins at United.
/>   “Yeah,” she thought. “Leeches and scrotal sacks sounds about right.” All she had to do was get through a quick meet-and-greet with some rich, overfed socialite who was in space playing business without tossing said office weenie earther into a hydroponics leech vat.

  Chapter 3.0

  Evelyn Queene had been staring at the Queene Mines accounting department general ledger report so long she lost all sense of her surroundings. The desk-communicator’s buzz brought her back to herself, breaking her concentration. She hated these interruptions. She just could not imagine any Christian being more enthusiastic about reading their Bible than she could get about reading a good balance sheet. It was as if the money was talking to her.

  “Excuse me, Miss Queene,” the voice said.

  Queene did not recognize the voice, but she knew it had to be one of the dozen or so administrative people in the front office. She did not even realize she did not recognize the voice, to her it did not matter. They were just the necessary cogs keeping the machine running to feed her family’s wealth and power.

  Evelyn Queene knew in her heart of hearts that family, wealth and power were all one thing. They were the trinity of her life. That trinity was all there was and all that needed to be. She would bury anyone or anything that interfered with her devotion to the trinity.

  The voice continued, “Sorry to interrupt, but Vittie Encarcion from the Whyte Mining Company just called. You know, she is the office manager over at Whyte? She said Chastity Whyte’s mining ship recently docked. You know, Chastity is Willem Whyte’s daughter? He is the owner of Whyte Mining. Anyway, Miss Whyte is on her way over and wanted to speak to you for a few moments. I can just send her away when she gets here, if you want.”

  Queene gritted her teeth in frustration. She may be in the backwater of this solar system, but that did not mean she should have to put up with such rambling idiots. She would love to space the whole lot and start all over, but this staff was the raw material she was given.