Chapter One

Everything Dara had fought for was represented by the rock that Uta had picked, but she hating having to stay behind when Tourlene and Eldurn left the ship to fasten the electronic marker to the tumbling surface. She felt like Michael Collins, left in orbit while Aldrin and Armstrong bounced around on the surface of the moon. She never thought about what it would have been like for him before, his friends going on to become household names while he was merely the one who maintained the getaway car. Tourlene was right to be concerned, however; with an entire family of rocks drifting in some sort of uneasy equilibrium, they should wait until they knew more.

"I doubt the field is a result of a collision, at least not in the way you say, Torv." Jurri was peering eagerly into the screen which showed the entire field up close. Torv gave Dara a half wave and she nodded. Jurri hadn't been herself since they'd found the human brain in the drone ship, and it was good to see her taking an interest again.

"What are you thinking?" Dara asked her.

"Any object that collided with the Marée would have blasted pieces all over the place."

"I've run the numbers, and some material is missing," Torv said.

Jurri shook her head, "Just think about it. It would all be missing. Any comet with enough velocity or mass that it could tear a planet right down to its metal core would have been right up there with Theia. There is just no way."

"So what are you proposing?" Torv leaned back.

"It took millions of years before Earth settled after the Theia impact. So there's no way this was that long ago."

Torv nodded. That was a problem. If Marée was a capture from Scholz's Star, then it was relatively recent addition. That didn't allow enough time to recoalesce or find a stable orbit. That meant it could have a fluctuating orbit above the plane; that it might at times be affected by the gravity of Saturn and Jupiter when they were in resonance, although the far away sun with its much larger gravitational hold would presumably help it stay in place.

"You see it?" Jurri demanded.

"You're saying that it couldn't have been blasted apart and then had the time to have more gravitational attraction than the force of the original impact. That there wasn't time for it to overcome that?"

Jurri slapped the hull, as though she were inviting someone to dinner, "Exactly."

Dara listened to them with half an ear. The Marée field became more fantastic the closer they were to it. Since they'd moor to a rock, she couldn't see the whole field in her sensors, but she'd set the computer to building a three-dimensional model. It was crunching the masses and distances, and she could tell she'd overloaded it. She thought about asking Torv to help her with the code, but she didn't want to run to him for everything.

With thousands of bodies of a size that could gravitationally affect one another, and just as many gravitational influences from nearby planets and asteroids, it wasn't possible to predict much about the field. It was hard to imagine that Scholz's Star had lost a planetoid that had then settled into an orbit so quickly, and if it did, why it had such a profound orbital inclination.

"Done," Tourlene said into the reverse microphone she'd set up while they were still approaching Marée. When she came to the cockpit she was expansive, "We have a beacon planted. It codes for all the major rocks--"

"Define major," Rijurn said from the edge of the hatch.

"At least fifty metres. Torv coded it in." Tourlene was obviously done with that line of questioning. Dara grinned at Rijurn. She was earnest, but Tourlene was a force of nature. She could wrestle the rocks into a planet again if she wanted, but she was more interested in mining.

"Your scans turning up anything about composition?"

"Mining again?" Dara shook her head.

"That's what we're here for," Tourlene said simply.

She's not wrong, Dara thought. But she's almost obsessive. "We're pulling in information on the m-types, but metal is always easy. Mostly nickel-iron, some signatures of heavier elements. And the water ices. Carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia. Lots of volatiles." Tourlene looked satisfied. "The silicates are giving problems. Silicon carbide and graphite, hydrocarbons and glycine. But it's the amounts."

"We can build with the metals," Jurri said.

"We really need a larger room to congregate," Dara laughed. "All we do is hang out in the hatch and trade ideas like we're throwing rocks."

"At least Mac's not here," Rijurn agreed.

"Where is Mac?" Dara reached for the call button. "He went out with Eldurn. They were going to try something."

"I don't like the sound of try."

"It was my idea," Torv confessed. "You know that I tore apart one of the fabricators?"

Dara nodded. She hadn't liked that either.

The fabricators were one of the best kept secrets of the Corps. They were widely thought to contain nanotechnology, but it was layered underneath so much shielding and security measures--as well as software protections--that they were almost impossible to open. And if they were opened, they imploded and left nothing behind to hack. They were a fantastically useful device, but the Corps knew what they had. They tracked each item built by their fabricators, and many products were on a banned list. Principal of those was a fabricator. If it was hacked, and no longer sent information to the Corps about what it was building, then it would be quite easy to duplicate. Then the nanotechnology revolution would escape Corps control. If everyone had a fabricator they would have material independence.

"I've run some of the code on this," Torv lifted his hand. It felt normal now, that he wore some kind of super sleeve over his withered arm, but Dara still looked away at the mention of it. She quickly looked back, but no one had noticed. It still felt rude to talk about deformity.

"And?" Dara was angry with herself.

"I think I've cracked them. They're nanotech, no surprise there. But they're not meant to be opened. The coding kills them if the bypasses are broken, and then the software running their processes gets corrupted. It was delicate."

Jurri looked like she hadn't known that's what Torv was doing, "You opened one of those in here?" Everyone knew about nanotech experiments gone wrong. For every success, for every Derian and Vesta, there were a few like Ausonia and Prylis. Rules about nanotech had gotten strict, and not surprisingly, the Corps were the one most involved in regulating the sale of experimental nanos.

"That's why they're working outside." Torv looked at them, "We're going to need help. We can't cobble together a planet-sized habitat on our own, not even with a hundred people from Below."

Dara frowned. She liked to think that they'd left the appellations of Below and Above behind them, but old habits of speech died hard.

"So what did you do?" Jurri pressed against the wall as though she wanted to dent it with her body. Dara watched her hands. That was always her friend's tell. When she was upset, she smoothed her clothing.

Torv looked at her hands as well before he tried to answer. "I had them pry open the case outside, and solder some connections. I've been working on it from here. Not super complex code. Anyone could crack it."

They weren't convinced, but Torv had already proven to be more insightful than the rest.

"And what's the plan?" Tourlene asked.

"If I can get them rallied, then I think we can begin to spin metal from one of the nickel-irons. We're going to need structures. We can begin with a metal dome and then close it in."

"Like Derian?" Rijurn grabbed Jurri's arm.

"That's the idea. But we'll need to capture the ices first, and then weld it together. And for that we'll need equipment. It's a bit overwhelming."

"It's a logistics problem," Jurri said. "Come."

Dara grinned as she led Torv aft. "Engine control room?" she asked Tourlene.

"The container," the woman replied. "She wants to show him the terrarium."

In a whimsical moment Dara had brought her childhood terrarium with her as they fled Garonic. It had spent most of the trip sealed into a cupboard, but when it was released into Jurri's care she used it to remind herself of what they were doing. It helped get her past the terror of the eviscerated brain the Corps had sent out in probes. Now it was apparently going to be a model for their new habitat.

"He's right," Tourlene said. "We can't do this on our own. And if the people from Below are coming, then we're going to need habitats. And quick. I say let him try. I was going to propose blowing up one of the smaller metal rocks. Run it as an experiment."

"How would you do that?" Rijurn took Torv's seat as soon as he vacated it.

"Solar mirrors."

"Ah." Rijurn knew the technological hurdles just as well as the rest of them. With the sun less than a quarter as bright as it was on Earth, they would need huge mirrors to concentrate its rays enough to melt a solid asteroid.

The tech itself was almost brutish by comparison with using the delicate fabricators. A hollowed out metal asteroid would be filled with volatiles, and then sealed and spun up to a certain rotational speed. Once the mirrors were focused on it, and it was spinning fast enough, the exterior would gradually melt. The layers of metal would protect the interior from the heat until the entire asteroid was nearly melted, and then the volatiles would reach optimum temperature and, despite the pressure of the asteroid sides, flash-steam in seconds. As the material expanded, it would blow the molten metal into a ball.

Cold metal could be deformed by explosive forming, but that only worked with homogenous materials. An asteroid consisted of hundreds of compounds and elements, and that meant it would fly into pieces unless the exterior were made plastic from heating. Then it might, if everything went well, form the walls of a chamber. Such a brute force approach would not necessarily result in a symmetrical chamber, but theoretically its shape could be refined by keeping the chamber spinning and using centrifugal force to push out on the chamber walls as it was heated. Even if one of the sides blew out as volatiles expanded to flash-steam, that could be resealed later or used as an airlock. They were only looking for a quick way to roughly shape the chamber walls.

The experiment had been done on metallic asteroids in the early days of the belt colonization, although as refining methods improved, they tended to use disk spinning to shape materials. Lives had been lost with the former method, and more than one asteroid had been blown into fragments.

"You see how it is," Tourlene grimaced. "We need the nanos whether we want them or not."

The splendor of the sky never lost its glory. Dara was long past ready to sleep, but she kept the view screen on the blasted pieces of rubble and snowballs which made up the Marée field. Large irregular pieces showed where their rounded edge had once been a surface of a planet and others were simply jagged or shorn cliffs and mountains. She wondered what it had looked like originally. It might have been an inner planet of Scholz's Star, and maybe even one that harboured life. She tried to picture the fragments glued together again, a kind of kid's project of a planet. It might have had oceans, and that was where the water had originated. Although they would have to be oceans the depth of those on Europa. Amongst many of the fragments floated a glitter of ice, and chunks larger than their combined ship gently bumped the larger pieces. If Jurri was right and it was only slowly reassembling, then the gravitational tug of too many small pieces must have been to blame.

"Still looking?" Rijurn's eyes were half closed.

"It's still hard to believe that we're here," Dara pointed to Torv's usual seat. "Just think, if Mum's right, then the field has been gradually coalescing for less than a hundred thousand years. We've arrived in the nick of time, geologically speaking."

"You're going to lose your nick, if you don't come to bed."

Dara groaned but followed. She stripped in the hall because of the narrow cubicle, and then crawled in with Rijurn. She wasn't sure when they'd gone from comforting one another over the Corps' horrifying inhumanity to the relationship they were now beginning, but it was soothingly comfortable. There was too much to be done to be concerned about long term plans, and with a hundred ships burning through the Dark toward them, there wasn't time to sort out their feelings.

"We'll have to talk about the ships with Garonic. Figure out what they want in return," she told Rijurn but she just groaned and offered her back. Dara plotted while the ship drifted in the Marée field. She wondered if their gravitational pull was enough to gather dust on their hull. Or even impede their engines. She made a mental note to ask Mac when she woke the next morning.

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