33
“A needle in a haystack,” Blake grumbled.
“I wish.” Antonio didn’t take his eyes off the sensor console. “Give me an electromagnet and I’ll have your needle in no time.”
“Heh,” Blake said. “I bow to your superior physics.”
“Don’t forget it.”
Blake shut his eyes. “Wake me when you find something.”
He lolled bonelessly in the loose grasp of a seat harness. Deep inside the asteroid belt, sans Marvin, they wanted a human pilot on the bridge at all times. Dana was bunking in, which left him. Antonio, no matter the superiority of his physics, had terrible reflexes and a disturbing tendency to confuse left with right. At least the dumb-as-a-stump computer that remained aboard after moving Marvin in his servers into the bunker could spot incoming rocks on its own.
Rikki could have handled a shift. Especially after the arduous harvest, she would have welcomed a change of scenery. Not to mention the spells in zero gee, while Antonio surveyed all the nearby rocks.
But Rikki was suffering from, well, Li had yet to figure that out. Nothing serious, Li assured them. Whatever it was, Rikki wasn’t keeping down much of what she ate. Might be some intestinal flora gone bad in a way her nanites had yet to learn to handle. Might be, though Li had insisted that the possibility was remote, a Dark-native bacterium that had jumped to humans. Might be food poisoning. Might be a nutritional deficiency. Ironic, that last scenario: that a need for some trace element might have kept Rikki from prospecting for a trace element.
“And we’re back,” Blake declared, opening his eyes. “Have you found any big nuggets?”
“Not yet.” Antonio squirmed in his couch, readjusting the straps. “Vanadium isn’t common, you know.”
He knew—or, rather, Marvin had told them. A couple hundred parts per million in Earth’s crust. Undetected to date anywhere in the Dark system. But in Sol system vanadium was common, comparatively speaking, in meteoroids and asteroids.
Why else would they be out here, probing rock after rock?
Blake studied his console. “Looks like another two are coming into range.”
“Yes. Do you want…to do the honors?”
“Sure.” Because it was something to do. Blake tagged the closer of the radar blips and dragged its trajectory data to the comm controls. (As he did, he checked for messages pending. Rikki hadn’t answered his last few emails. He hoped that meant she was getting some sleep.) The long-range comm laser reached out, invisible, for empty space provided nothing to scatter the light. Within seconds, as the spectrometer examined the miniscule bit of glowing vapor boiled off the rock’s surface, they would know a little about the rock’s composition.
“No vanadium,” Antonio said. And a minute later, after the laser hit the second target, he reported, “None there, either.”
Logically speaking, they would end up surveying hundreds, maybe thousands, of rocks before encountering one with vanadium compounds on its surface. They would have flown around much of the belt to find it. That Li hadn’t balked at four of them being gone, possibly, for weeks spoke volumes. Though slow to develop, this dietary deficiency must be serious.
Radar showed they had a while until more asteroids came within probing range. “Feel like a game of chess?” Blake asked.
“No thanks.” Antonio waved vaguely at the datasheet draped across his lap. “Aristophanes data. This is fascinating. On the ground…I never had the time to look at it. The surface temperature readings…”
Evidently, definitions of fascination varied. “Do you see signs there of vanadium?”
“None. But—”
“Enjoy,” Blake said. He began a new email to Rikki. Wish you were here.
*
“Another shift,” Blake announced, yawning. “Much nothing accomplished.”
“I recommend a snack and sleep,” Dana said. “For you, too, Antonio. Whatever there is to be seen will be in the comp when you come back.”
“In a while,” Antonio said absently. Scatter plots and bar charts cluttered his datasheet.
Much ado about asteroids.
Rikki had yet to answer emails, which Blake took to mean she’d gotten a decent night’s sleep. Back at the settlement it was almost time for breakfast. He would rest easier once he heard how she was feeling.
Only as he dawdled in the galley over a sandwich and salad, no emails came to him.
He went back to the bridge. “Do we have contact with home?”
“Euripides is in position to relay,” Antonio mumbled. “Before it sets in…an hour, Aeschylus will serve.”
“You know moonrise and set times?” Blake asked.
The corners of Antonio’s mouth, one at a time, twitched upward. “You don’t?”
“More useful than old Paris subway schedules,” Dana said. “But as for contact with home, here’s a simpler demonstration. An email came in from Carlos a few minutes ago, inquiring about our progress.”
Blake asked, “Anything in the message about Rikki?”
“No, sorry. But it was a short note. A one-liner.”
No news means only no news, Blake told himself.
“This is very…interesting.”
On Antonio’s lap, the datasheet’s graphics were denser than Blake remembered. Orbital parameters. Sizes. Rotation rates. One scatter plot bore the cryptic label Albedo Variability.
Blake asked, “What’s albedo?”
“The fraction of the incident…light reflected.”
Antonio had collected plenty of rocks on Dark. He’d collected rocks from Dark’s moons when the opportunity had presented itself. It wasn’t a big surprise that he would collect stats about these rocks now.
“And Li?” Blake asked. “What does she have to say?”
“No word,” Dana said, “but that doesn’t surprise me. We left them shorthanded.”
“Especially if she’s got a sick patient to deal with.”
“Go,” Dana said. “Sleep. I’ll email Li and ask what’s going on.”
*
“Rikki’s fine,” Dana greeted Blake on his reappearance eight hours later.
He saw she had the bridge to herself. On the radar display, the only nearby objects were receding. An aux display cycled through an album of kid holos.
“Freshly synthed.” He had three drink bulbs of coffee; he handed her one. “And I’m glad to hear it, because Rikki has yet to answer me. What did Li say?”
“Not much. Rikki’s better, and keeping down light meals. She’s home, resting. Li and Carlos are busy with the kids, but one of them checks on Rikki every
