But water will be harder to find—and still harder to keep.
“Waterbot” is about finding—and keeping—water, out in the vast emptiness of the asteroid belt, beyond the orbit of Mars.
And it’s also about the relationship between a very human young man, and the computer system that is the only “crew” of his lonely spacecraft—the nearest thing he has to a companion.
WATERBOT
“Wake up, dumbbutt. Jerky’s ventin’ off.”
I’d been asleep in my bunk. I blinked awake, kind of groggy, but even on the little screen set into the bulkhead at the foot of the bunk I could see the smirk on Donahoo’s ugly face. He always called JRK49N “Jerky” and seemed to enjoy it when something went wrong with the vessel—which was all too often.
I sat up in the bunk and called up the diagnostics display. Rats! Donahoo was right. A steady spray of steam was spurting out of the main water tank. The attitude jets were puffing away, trying to compensate for the thrust.
“You didn’t even get an alarm, didja?” Donahoo said. “Jerky’s so old and feeble, your safety systems are breakin’ down. You’ll be lucky if you make it back to base.”
He said it like he enjoyed it. I thought that if he wasn’t so much bigger than me, I’d enjoy socking him square in his nasty mouth. But I had to admit he was right; Forty-niner was ready for the scrap heap.
“I’ll take care of it,” I muttered to Donahoo’s image, glad that it’d take more than five minutes for my words to reach him back at Vesta—and the same amount of time for his next wise-ass crack to get to me. He was snug and comfortable back at the corporation’s base at Vesta while I was more than ninety million kilometers away, dragging through the belt on JRK49N.
I wasn’t supposed to be out here. With my brand-new diploma in my eager little hand, I’d signed up for a logistical engineer’s job, a cushy, safe posting at Vesta, the second-biggest asteroid in the belt. But once I got there, Donahoo jiggered the assignment list and got me stuck on this pile of junk for a six months’ tour of boredom and aggravation.
It’s awful lonely out in the belt. Flatlanders back Earthside picture the asteroid belt as swarming with rocks so thick a ship’s in danger of getting smashed. Reality is, the belt’s mostly empty space, dark and cold and bleak. A man runs more risk of going nutty out there all by himself than getting hit by a ’roid big enough to do any damage.
JRK49N was a waterbot. Water’s the most important commodity you can find in the belt. Back in those days, the news nets tried to make mining the asteroids seem glamorous. They liked to run stories about prospector families striking it rich with a nickel-iron asteroid, the kind that has a few hundred tons of gold and platinum in it as impurities. So much gold and silver and such had been found in the belt that the market for precious metals back on Earth had gone down the toilet.
But the really precious stuff was water. Still is. Plain old H2O. Basic for life support. More valuable than gold, off-Earth. The cities on the moon needed water. So did the colonies they were building in cislunar space, and the Rock Rats habitat at Ceres and the research station orbiting Jupiter and the construction crews at Mercury.
Water was also the best fuel for chemical rockets. Break it down into hydrogen and oxygen, and you got damned good specific impulse.
You get the picture. Finding icy asteroids wasn’t glamorous, like striking a ten-kilometer-wide rock studded with gold, but it was important. The corporations wouldn’t send waterbots out through the belt if there wasn’t a helluva profit involved. People paid for water, paid plenty.
So waterbots like weary old Forty-niner crawled through the belt, looking for ice chunks. Once in a while a comet would come whizzing by, but they usually had too much delta-v for a waterbot to catch up to ’em. We cozied up to icy asteroids, melted the ice to liquid water, and filled our tanks with it.
The corporation had fifty waterbots combing the belt. They were built to be completely automated, capable of finding ice-bearing asteroids and carrying the water back to the corporate base at Vesta.
But there were two problems about having the waterbots go out on their own:
First, the lawyers and politicians had this silly rule that a human being had to be present on the scene before any company could start mining anything from an asteroid. So it wasn’t enough to send out waterbots, you had to have at least one human being riding along on them to make the claim legal.
The second reason was maintenance and repair. The ’bots were old enough so’s something was always breaking down on them, and they needed somebody to fix it. They carried little turtle-sized repair robots, of course, but those suckers broke down too, just like everything else. So I was more or less a glorified repairman on JRK49N. And almost glad of it, in a way. If the ship’s systems worked perfectly, I would’ve gone bonzo with nothing to do for months on end.
And there was a bloody war going on in the belt, to boot. The history disks call it the Asteroid Wars, but it mostly boiled down to a fight between Humphries Space Systems and Astro Corporation for control of all the resources in the belt. Both corporations hired mercenary troops, and there were plenty of freebooters out in the belt too. People got killed. Some of my best friends got killed, and I came as close to death as I ever want to be.
The mercenaries usually left waterbots alone. There was
