landscape in twenty-meter jumps. In open space, they turned each of us, in effect, into a small, independent spacecraft. They were fueled by cryo-stabilized N-He64, an exotic fuel commonly called meta that was far denser in terms of available energy than conventional propellants. The thrusters were controlled by our in-head software; I told mine that I wanted to move into Formation One, and my backpack gave a gentle kick to my right.
The Marine formation was opening up, creating a more dispersed target in case the bad guys started taking shots at us. The shift also cleared the way for our doughnut, which was accelerating now on its own, moving up the center of the formation and into the distance ahead, homing on the bright star of Capricorn Zeta.
My jumpjet pack bumped again, halting my outward drift. Around me, the Marines appeared to be unmoving, hanging motionless in space relative to me and to one another. The surface of the Earth, however, drifted past at a steady pace. We were coming up on the west coast of Baja at the moment; north, I saw the cloudless ocher expanses of the Arizona and New Mexico deserts; southeast, bright stars strung in a vertical line stretching up into the sky flashed with a steady wink-wink-wink that marked the space elevator over Cayambe, a thread otherwise made invisible by distance.
And moment by moment, the Zeta facility grew brighter, taking on shape and form—an awkward collection of cylinders dazzling in the sunlight, connected at one end to a black rock a kilometer across.
We’d been thoroughly briefed on the Zeta situation, of course, complete with in-head downloads showing every detail of the five-hundred-meter facility. Asteroid mining was a particular target of the neo-Ludd movement, of course, so Zeta had offered them some highly visible propaganda for the watching global netizens back on Earth.
That small and wrinkled-looking nickel-iron asteroid, listed as Atun 3840, was only a kilometer across, but it contained an estimated 2 trillion dollars’ worth of platinum, 2 trillion in iron and nickel, and perhaps 1.5 trillion dollars’ worth of cobalt … a total of more than 5 trillion dollars of commercial metals.
The first asteroid mining had commenced early in the twenty-first century, with robots that extracted precious metals on-site and slingshotted them back to circum-Earth space where they were captured. There, one-ton slugs of solar-purified metal were injected with inert gas, molded into lightweight glider wings, sheathed in cheap, refractory heat shielding, and sent on down for recovery in the ocean … a cheap and highly efficient system still used to this day. The very first of Humankind’s trillionaires made their fortunes with the various space mining start-ups of the 2020s, paid for our expansion out into the Solar System, helped us survive the return of the Ice Age, and ultimately funded the first starships.
Later, it proved more cost effective to nudge target asteroids out of their original orbits and swing them into Earth orbit. Decelerating one large mass, it turned out, was a lot easier than trying it with millions … and safer as well. That fact was abundantly demonstrated when the catchers missed a slug of iridium in 2094 and it slammed into the Lunar farside.
For a century and a half, now, more or less, we’ve been bringing whole asteroids into Earth orbit and dismantling them there, using a couple of close Lunar passes to decelerate them. The AIs managing their vectors are good … and the meta-thrusters used for precision adjustments are reliable enough that even if something—unthinkable!—goes wrong, they can sling the rock into a higher and safer orbit. Hell, they have to be good just to shift the orbit periodically to avoid cutting the space elevator.
But the neo-Ludds are less accepting of the claims and promises of technology. They’re probably best known for their opposition to cerebral implants and the global Net, but orbital mining is a popular target too. This time, they’d made it a literal target by boarding Capricorn Zeta and threatening to drop Atun 3840 on Earth.
The rock wasn’t a dinosaur-killer, but it would make a hell of a mess if it hit. An ocean strike meant tidal scouring continents for hundreds of kilometers inland; a land strike could annihilate a dozen cities and raise a global dust cloud that would wreck our ongoing attempts to beat back the new ice age, and might even knock us all the way into a “Snowball Earth” scenario. These guys were nuts.
And so the president had given the order: the Marines would take back Capricorn Zeta. Negotiations had been going on for a week already, but had been going nowhere. And then a few hours ago a hostage had been shoved out an airlock. The terrorists’ key and nonnegotiable demand—that humans abandon space industrialization—simply wasn’t going to happen.
The kicker was that there were still fifty-four people on board Capricorn Zeta, not counting an estimated twenty tangos. There reportedly also were two M’nangat on board … and that made it an interstellar incident. Our orders were distressingly precise. Our first priority was to secure Atun 3840—which meant capturing the facility’s meta-thruster controls. Second was to make certain the two visiting M’nangat were safe. Saving the miners and corporate officials in the facility came in only at number three.
My tactical in-head showed the doughnut was almost there. A steady countdown was silently running against my field of view. We were twenty seconds now from touching down.
Thirty meters away, Lance Corporal Stalzar’s armor lit up, a dazzling flare of light consuming the torso of his suit. We all heard the shriek …
“Sniper!” Thomason called. “Marine down!”
I was already checking Stalzar’s readouts on my in-head. There was nothing … nothing I could do… .
A second star appeared close to the asteroid’s horizon, opposite the mining station, growing brilliant, then fading. We had countersnipers both up on Geosynch Center, halfway up the space elevator, and on board a Marine transport a few thousand kilometers above and behind us. They’d seen the pulse of the tango’s laser when he’d shot Stalzar, and vaporized the chunk of asteroid terrain where he’d been hiding.
Ten seconds. What had been a bright star, then a gleaming toy in the sunlight, was expanding now into something much larger. Another silent flare of light on the asteroid marked a second countersniper shot. Maybe they’d spotted a tango’s heat signature against the rock.
Five seconds. The rock drifted off to my right. Directly ahead, the silvery smooth surface of the mining facility’s Hab One now filled my forward view. I could see the alphanumerics painted on the hull, and a corporate logo—Skye Metals—sandblasted by orbiting grit. The doughnut was affixed to the hull high and a little to my left. I shifted my vector slightly, aiming for a flat surface nearby. I gave an in-head order, and my AI flipped me end-for-end. My feet were aimed at the station as my thrusters cut in, slowing me. I hit the hull two seconds later, flexing my knees to absorb the impact. Around me, Marines were raining out of the sky, touching down on the hull, then moving toward the doughnut.
I let the Marines go first, of course. As the platoon’s Corpsman—the “Doc”—I was expected to keep up but not to engage in combat. That was the contract U.S. Navy Corpsmen had shared with the Marine Corp for the past three centuries or so: they do the fighting, and we patch ’em up.
The waiting was over. The first Marine fireteam was plunging into the doughnut, headfirst.
The VBSS Mobile Nano-utility Lock is indispensible for Visit Board Search and Seizure ops in hard vacuum, especially when the visit is being resisted by an armed enemy. It really is a doughnut wheel some three meters across, with what looks like a black sheet stretched taut across the hole. It hits the hull of a target vessel or base, and nanodisassemblers on the business side chew through metal, plastic, and active nano sheathing with ease. The black sheet is a nanomatrix pressure shield just a few molecules thick; it holds
