Our cabin was located in Mother Whale’s skull. A bearing pipe anchored in the rock spun us at one rotation per minute to generate one-third gee of artificial gravity. That was the best we could get. If the cabin radius were any shorter or longer, the angular velocity any slower or faster, the crude solution would have made us feel terrible – whether due to us getting sick from near zero gravity or us getting smashed against the stone walls of the cabin.
There was chronic osteoporosis, muscle loss and decreased immunity, but these seemed less painful than cardiovascular and cerebrovascular degeneration, vertigo caused by Coriolis forces or depression due to enclosed spaces and sleep deprivation. No matter what, most of us had several hours of work outside the cabin each day, where we were exposed to high levels of cosmic radiation. This of course made mortality rates among interstellar miners far higher than that of any fisherman or laborer back on Earth. Though we maintained normal human functioning through gene therapy, amifostine treatments and compulsory fitness, the most appalling labor conditions on Earth looked like cocktails at the beach bar to us.
Freckles likened us to Pinocchio, a character from an old fairytale about a puppet who was turned into a real boy by the skillful hands of his carpenter father. His nose grew when he started to lie. His most famous misadventure involved him getting swallowed into the belly of a whale.
Humans were truly strange creatures. Even after we had forgotten our own names and families, we couldn’t help but remember such odds and ends.
*
Hermit Crab traveled out the mouth of Mother Whale into the deep starry sky. I watched the ship traverse from the edge of one screen to the edge of another. I couldn’t turn away, afraid it might suddenly disappear. A man slapped his hand on my shoulder and squinted a reluctant grin. It was Baldy.
‘I heard everything you said. But I gotta remind you, brother, Freckles ain’t easily provoked.’
I flashed my own reluctant grin but didn’t say anything. Baldy was a gossip. His curiosity never waned even when overloaded by physical labor.
‘Hermit Crab… Hermit Crab, reply. Everything normal?’ I commed to Freckle’s channel.
‘Hear you. Everything normal. I’m looking at some space ice cream that’s about to get scooped by my giant spoon here…’ My headphones hissed with the sound of Freckles mischievously slurping at her mic.
My arm was prickly with gooseflesh. I forced my attention back to the console. ‘I’m initiating gamma ray and X-ray spectrometry, scanning surface and subsurface elements for volatile components to ensure everything’s okay…’
‘Alright, Uncle, I know you prefer a slower tempo, but I’m a bit anxious today. Maybe it’s my cycle, you know. I want a big scoop of ice cream, so I’m gonna get out that big hot spoon.’
Obnoxious electronic music blasted into my headset, shredding my eardrums. I tore off the headset and cursed, ‘Bitch!’
Under normal circumstances, Freckles would be right. The chemical and physical properties of C-type asteroids were usually as obvious as they were benign. Such asteroids fragmented easily and contained minimal volatile content. All she should have to do was bring Hermit Crab’s two long claws – her ‘spoons’ – down into the surface of the asteroids covered with dust and dry soil. She would add heat to melt the water ice among the salt hydrates and clay minerals, then separate the water from other contaminants by distillation. The claws then pumped the water into the spiral shell of our Hermit Crab, where other mineral resources could be handled. That was the first stage of processing.
After that, Hermit Crab’s job was to spin the nanoweb that would haul asteroid fragments via an ant-chain back to the refining workshop in Mother Whale’s belly. There, more complex chemical and physical processes could deal with the asteroid’s other resources. Through refinement, the minerals could be formed into high-density magnetized projectiles. In the tail section of Mother Whale, there was a launcher with an accelerator a full kilometer in length that would launch our haul at defined coordinates. It achieved the largest possible delta-v with minimal energy consumption. The recoil was evenly distributed throughout Mother Whale via an exceptionally designed slider structure to avoid undesired divergence of our path.
In flat space, so distant from any gravity well, we had no need to obey the tyranny of Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation. After a period of time – days, months or years, depending on price – the receiver would pick up the valuables at a point in low Earth orbit. The purpose of the materials – whether for plotting a coup, building a palace for a love, or disrupting global futures markets – made zero difference to us.
This was in essence the whole business – minimize production cost and maximize profit – same as it was in ancient history.
We ourselves were among the production costs too negligible to count.
*
Freckle’s sense of control was uncanny. It gave you the illusion that Hermit Crab’s two mechanical claws were synched to her body movement rather than manipulated by joysticks. Her arms fluttered high like the wings of a white crane just before the claws thrust into the asteroid’s surface, splashing up a plume of dust and debris.
‘Square Face, check it out! Let me show you how it’s done.’
Sensors signaled temperatures rapidly rising as compounds began to undergo phase change. Values and curves on my monitor metamorphosed in color and shape. Everything appeared quite normal except for the pressure curve.
Some anomalous data caught my eye. I had a vague ominous feeling even before my backend processing calculated its menacing conclusion. The density of the meteorite was about forty percent lower than that of similar meteorites,
