Up Against It - M. J. Locke [148]
Xuan had fooled the machine! He did not allow his relief to show, but made a big deal out of tapping out a calculation on his heads-up. “Hmm. I’m getting a reading of about 0.0102 gee, or a net decrease in density of about fifteen percent. Sorry, gents. It looks like this claim is a bust. No chance of there being enough ice to trouble with here.”
“You sure of that reading?” Mills said. “Jesse?”
“Everything seems on the level, sir,” Jesse said, after a pause to run his own numbers. “The original claim was twelve thousandths of a gee, and according to the gravitometer readout, this one is around eighty-five percent of that. Not much room for ice in this rock.”
“Above two thirds, it’s a turd,” one of them said. The rest chuckled.
Mills said, “With all this big equipment, on a hundred-year-old, nearly pure nickel-iron rock? Seems strange.”
“Not so strange,” Xuan replied. “I’ve seen many such rocks. The owner stakes a claim and then dies, or leaves, and nobody else picks it up.”
“Hmmm. Perhaps you should measure again, just to be sure.”
“I can, if you like,” Xuan said. “But it won’t change the result.” His heartbeat was loud in his ears.
A pause. “Fine. Wrap it up.”
Xuan allowed himself a slow, deep breath.
* * *
Kam, Amaya, and Geoff did a straight-in, reverse-power descent, well over the horizon from the ship’s line of sight, rather than the more fuel-efficient orbital flyby and gradual descent they normally used. Geoff thought these measures were a bit much; it was not all that unusual for there to be confusion about claims. It would be embarrassing if the testers were just some guys from the university, and found out about the precautions Geoff, Kam, and Amaya were taking.
They had to be careful about dust. You kick up dust in a low-gee environment, it goes way up and takes days to settle back down. So they touched down a few kilometers from the mine entrance and rode their bikes slowly over the craggy, metal-ore terrain, avoiding craters and valleys where dust collected and always keeping the hill that was Ouroboros’s main “mountain range” between them and the ship. They passed the heat exchanger, a set of big iron pipes in a shallow trench, and the chemical plant, three distillation towers with surge tanks, heating units, and racks of pipes.
Soon they reached the hill that housed the mine entrance. Just over the ridge stood the ship—they could see its top fin. Joey Spud’s earthmover, which he had named Cronus after some deity who had swallowed his children whole, towered above the ridge, its metal arms reaching hundreds of meters into the dark sky.
The heat vent they planned to use was a tin stovepipe that jutted several meters into the sky, starting about halfway up the rocky hillside. First they headed up the hill to scope out the activity at the ship. They lay down at the crest, crawled forward—an awkward process in their pressure suits—and peered down. Five people were milling around while a sixth poked at the ground with a stick. The five mill-arounders had weapons. That seemed ominous—but there were pirates and claim jumpers out there. Geoff didn’t want to jump to conclusions.
“They’re still doing the setup,” he said. He pointed. “The guy in the light blue suit, the one with the stick, that’d be Professor Xuan. That’s a university-issue suit. First they’ll take some gravitational measurements, and then they’ll take soundings. They’ll be a while.”
Amaya crept farther over the hill’s crest, and rolled over—ever so slowly—to check for the vent from that vantage point. Then she crept back to join them. “I think we’ll be OK,” she said. “The top of the pipe is below line-of-sight from where they are.”
“Good. Let’s do this. Kam, keep watch. Warn us if they head this way.”
“Right.” Kam got out his binoculars, and Geoff and Amaya leapt back down the hillside.
They worked quickly. Amaya hooked her pony up to the emergency line, and