Up Against It - M. J. Locke [16]
But troubles were many, space was vast, and rescue craft were few. Those who had chosen to fall off the treeways not fully stocked were given a lower priority than those who had simply gotten caught in a crisis not of their own making. And this meant that children frequently ended up as victims of their parents’ pigheadedness and poor planning. Reading reports of the frozen bodies found on faraway stroids always pained her. But in a wilderness society where there wasn’t always enough fuel and air and water to go around, people fell out of touch all the time, they had little choice.
“Will do,” Aaron said.
“What about odor management?”
“I’ve cut the control system back by thirty percent,” he replied. “It’ll gradually get more pungent, but won’t be really bad for a week or so.”
“Well, but we are going to have an extra twenty or thirty thousand people coming in from the burbs,” Tania said.
Aaron shrugged. “I accounted for that. I checked the actuarial stats for significant violence and suicide impacts, and kept us below that line.“
“OK, is that it?” Jane asked. Aaron nodded. “Resource accounting,” she said. “Any good prospects from the citizenry?”
Aaron said, “The banks report a small but steady trickle of ice claims coming in. A few sugar-rock reports, but none have panned out. I do not expect them to alter our numbers appreciably.”
“Sugar rocks?” Sean looked confused. He was a fairly recent Downsider émigré.
Tania explained, “The First Wave miners used to hoard methane and water ice inside their claims, as they tapped them out.”
Aaron said, “It’s usually a waste of time to bring them in—a large amount of effort for only a little ice—but once, forty or fifty years ago, a sugar rock made a big difference for the Eros cluster. The university is pairing up with the banks to investigate the claims.”
“Every little bit helps. But we can’t count on sugar rocks to save us. Could you send me your resource balancing calculations?” Jane asked Aaron. “I want to run through them myself, see if I can squeeze anything more out of the system.”
“Of course.” He pulled up his waveface and sent her some files.
“So,” Jane said, “other ice sources. Perhaps from one of the other clusters?”
Sean replied, “Our fellow stroiders—the ones inclined to help, anyway—are all too close to depleted themselves. Saturn, Mars, and Earth are all near opposition—too far away to do us any good. Jovespace is our best bet. I’ve already authorized an emergency expedition. They are outfitting a tug and barge, and will leave tomorrow—I mean, this afternoon.”
“How soon can they get us ice?”
“Eight weeks, earliest. More likely nine.”
A five-week gap. Not soon enough!
Aaron said, “I have received word from Ilion on an interesting lead. A three-million-ton shipment of methane ice is coming Down from the Kuiper belt, destined for a construction project on the moon. That’s the only major ice shipment within four months’ travel of us.”
“What? But that’s all we need! No way anyone would refuse us a reasonable deal. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Aaron looked apprehensive. “Well, there’s a complication. The ice is owned by Ogilvie & Sons.”
Ogilvie & Sons. The Martian mob. Shit. She pinched her brow. “Where is it now?”
“Hitting a parking orbit near Ilion, late today.”
Most of the ice that sustained the space colonies came from the Kuiper belt. It took a really long time to ship ice from out there. The Kuiper belt was much farther out than people realized—at least thirty times as far from the sun as Earth; nearly ten times as far out as the Phocaean cluster. This left little margin for error. Still, it was much cheaper to ship ice from the outer system than it was to try to lift it from the outer moons’ gravity wells.
With Kuiper objects, all you had to do was give the ice a nudge, and down into the sun’s gravitational well it came, faster and faster, like a big dirty ball of ice rolling