“I guess you can’t find everything in one place,” Marc said. “What about silver and gold deposits?”
“Same thing; you’ll be having to set up remote mines to take care of those. But we’ll get them set up. It’ll be like California in forty-nine: small town, lots of small mines, I figure.”
“Hopefully, we can find a collection of mines in close proximity, so we only have to establish one town.”
“You can hope. Anyway, when are you going to let the kids come down?” Paul asked.
“Next week. I’d like to wait until we’ve completed the main channel, but another month seems too long.”
“Darn right it is. They need to get out into the fresh air.”
“That’s what their mothers are telling me, and telling me.”
“Hah, they’ll keep you straight.”
◆ ◆ ◆
“I saw that fight,” Samantha said when Marc made it back to the Sakira for the night.
“What fight?”
“Between you and that big Aussie!”
“That wasn’t a fight, that was just me providing a little education to the work crew,” Marc said.
“So, you’ve been training?”
“Where did you think I was going at five o’clock all those mornings?”
“Running.”
“We ran some, but mostly Blake and I were working out with Kal.”
“I guess he taught you that punch?”
“Palm strike, and yes he did. He says he learned it from Liz, it’s her go-to strike.”
“Then, you’re not worried about him coming back?”
“The Aussie, no. He’s a little bigger than Blake, but not nearly as fast.”
“That’s a relief. I guess I shouldn’t worry about you then. You do know that was a bit Neanderthal of you.”
“As I recall, when I had my DNA done, I did have some Neanderthal genes,” Marc said.
“Funny, but how do you justify brute force to keep people in line? What is this, 1900 Chicago?”
“No, if it was, I’d have just shot him. I didn’t want to waste time arguing about objectives. I could have stood everyone down for the day and explained it all. But he kind of pissed me off, so I took a short cut.”
“I hope you don’t have to take very many more of those shortcuts,” Samantha said.
“I’m afraid I made that lesson too easy. I should have let him take a few shots and bloodied his nose. I’ll take my time next time.”
“You think there will be a next time?”
“Seventy-thirty.”
◆ ◆ ◆
Marc’s Comm woke him up the next day. “Your first asteroid is here,” Captain Desjardins reported.
“I assume it’s the one we’re putting on the surface.”
“Yep, those big grav-drives didn’t have any problem getting it here fast.”
“Okay, I’ll be up in thirty minutes.”
“We’ll have it waiting for you.”
Marc spent the morning watching them lower the asteroid into place. It was obvious that they didn’t need his help, his only contribution was selecting the site. They broke the asteroid into smaller chunks in space so they could bring one of the chunks down to the planet’s surface. Finally they landed a one-hundred-meter by fifty-meter chunk of rock next to the lot that they’d designated for the polysteel foundry. It was pretty exciting, momentous actually. They’d excavated the site so that the grav-drives would be accessible once the asteroid was down. They needed those drives to make the big freight haulers they would need to bring in the limestone and other materials they would be mining.
As soon as it landed, Paul went out to check on the quality of the iron ore. He took samples from several spots to run an assay on. “We’ll let the scientists tell us how they did picking this one, but I’d say it looks like they did a good job,” Paul told Marc.
“That’s good; I’d hate to find out that I’d wasted my morning watching them land a useless piece of rock.”
“Pretty amazing sight wasn’t it,” Paul said. “Something to tell the kids about when I have them.”
“Yep, the second time in known history that it’s been done,” Marc said. “The Paraxeans landed theirs six weeks ago.”
“Yeah, too bad we couldn’t be first.”
“There’ll be plenty of firsts in the next few months,” Marc said. “Your kids will be dutifully impressed.”
“They’d better be.”
“I’m heading back to the office to do actual work,” Marc said. “I’ll see you later.”
◆ ◆ ◆
By the next day, they’d mined about one ton of iron ore from the asteroid. It hadn’t taken much to get started, and the miners were having a good time.
“Careful you idiot!” Paul yelled when he came out to check on them.
“What’s your problem?”
“One of those expansion bags could explode and take your head off, or it could make the others collapse and that layer of iron ore you’re trying to sheer off could slam back down and crush your foot. Just because we’re not in space doesn’t mean you can ignore your safety protocols!”
As if to accentuate his point, one of the bags exploded.
“See! Now get back to work and do it right, or I’ll find some other miners, and you can go work in the greenhouses!”
◆ ◆ ◆
Once they had excavated a good section of the main channel, the engineer came out and inspected the hole.
“We’re digging right on top of a sandstone layer down here. I don’t think we’ll need to do any compaction. We’ll separate out the sandstone and grind it up. We can backfill with it once we have the tube done.”
“So when can we start making the tube?” Marc asked.
“If you’re in a hurry, we can start making the tube behind the excavator. We can divide the channel into two-hundred-meter lengths. Make a separate ramp for each section. Once one section is done, we can start the tube. We’ll just follow the excavator, four hundred meters behind it.”
“I’m always in a hurry,” Marc said.
“Okay.”
By that afternoon, they had erected scaffolding to hold the tube up above the bottom and keep things level. They ran the system on the ground to test it out and to create a ten-meter length of the tube as a starter section. Then they moved that into
