No Stone Left Unturned

by Kenneth R. Ramsley

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March 19, 2138

To the Committee on Defense Oversight

Mr. Chairman:

Responsible space scientists have already spoken against plans to maneuver large asteroids and other solar system bodies into near-earth L1 and L2 halo orbits.

In addition to the predictable hazards, the potential for space piracy further offers a clear recipe for disaster. Imagine a hijacked asteroid sent crashing towards Earth. Such notions are often dismissed as anti-development fear mongering. Yet the potential for asteroid piracy and extortion – absent regular solar system policing – exists nonetheless.

This is not a speculative observation – as the true events of last September will show once they see the light of day – a story you and others have thus far managed to bury – soon to be revealed whether you ignore this communication or not.

For example – unlike the self-congratulatory testimony delivered before your committee – the International Battle Group ‘managed’ only to annihilate themselves with all hands lost. I know how this sounds preposterous, yet this is what really happened.

Who would benefit from such a loss? Perhaps the same forces who always benefit from the absence of an effective police force – the usual solar system frontier robber barons who so effectively buy the complacency of certain congressional committees.

No matter the official story – our incoming trajectory was obviously designed as a pretext – drawing the Battle Group into a trap. Who were these hijackers? We may never know. Yet what matters most is how this happened at all, not exact who we stood against.

One thing I do know for certain – the true heroes of the situation were the regular minors and support staff who stood across the breach while the entire mining consortium busily congratulated themselves over actions and events they knew weren’t happening.

In addition to this letter I’ve enclosed a firsthand log from the last surviving crew member – my roommate aboard the Hive, Rice Jackson – date-stamped and certified exactly as he transmitted this to me.

In 24 hours, a second copy will be delivered to worldwide news organizations beyond your censorship control – arriving from an encrypted source no one can stop.

Before then, I suggest you either get ahead of the story and come clean with what you really know – or if you must – wait for the truth to be revealed and find yourselves buried by the consequences of a world enraged by just how close they came to oblivion.

In memory of my co-workers and friends lost in this incident – I send this for sake of decency and sanity – and with the hope that no one ever forgets the events of the Hive.

Respectfully Submitted for you Careful Consideration,

Cameron Trenton

Hastings, NE

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Part One

Day 684

7:32am HST

Hi Jamie,

I hope things are going well at school.

You asked about my work up here – right this minute Cam and I are watching our transport ship lifting back into space – leaving half of itself behind. The remaining half is the first of our topside worksites and storage areas and will act as a landing pad for future transports. This is the habitation module – or ‘Hab’ – where we spent several months in-transit. Below the Hab is where we live nowadays – down underground away from solar storms and safe from cosmic rays – at least when we’re not topside getting this place ready for the main crew in forty-nine days.

Officially we’re the ‘self-reliant advance team’ – ‘Rats’ for short – which means that we’re stuck aboard this rock until the next transport passes through this part of the solar system. Most of us will stay on after that – I’ll be here for two years in all – which is how long it will take us to reach L2. That’s the Lagrange point I told you about – four times farther than the Moon. That sounds like a long way out – yet it will be a hundred closer to Earth than any other mining operation. Some on the crew are like my roommate, Cam – helping out until the next inbound transport arrives.

Today we’ve finished to move down into our new underground digs and to mark the occasion, I’m having tea the old-fashion way – heated inside a plastic bag and mixed by spinning it like pizza dough in the air. There’s a bit of gravity here – but not enough to keep most drinks from sloshing right out of an uncovered cup. So once properly brewed, I’ll squeeze this into what looks like a coffee mug with a small sipper opening – just like the cups you had when you were a toddler. Spinning the brew and drinking from a space rated mug is a lot more work than it needs to be. Yet serving tea is as much a ritual as anything practical, and up here where change is commonplace and where anything unexpected can happen at any time – any sort of familiar routine makes a big difference.

The ritual of spinning things leaks into my work as well. Right now my main task is slowing the rotational spin the whole asteroid so we can aim our big maneuver guns arriving with the next transport ship. Most of this is alignment work on the projectile spinning mechanism. The slugs we shoot to maneuver this rock need to fly straight down the tubes of our electro-cannon barrels – and by spinning them, it keeps them just the right distance from the drive coils. Sometimes, with gravity so weak, I’ll spin tools right in front of me so I know where they are—or just stand there for a moment mesmerized as they slowly hover and sink to the floor. I guest I’ve been fascinated with any sort of spinning. As a test technician I once had the job of spinning gyroscopes faster and faster to certify their safely limits – some times too fast according the lab procedures – and more than once they’d explode and fly apart – but that was long time ago!

You ask why I’m here. I guess these days it’s for the practical experience more than any sort of entertainment or adventure. One day the Jovian frontier will open and for every expedition to places like Europa, they’ll need a dozen technicians like me – so that’s when I’ll have my adventure. Why the call this place the ‘Hive’ – I suppose so it feels more like home. There’s an official name for this rock and I suppose I could look it up. But nobody uses it.

If I don’t wind up aboard the Europa mission – I suppose I can always grow potatoes at my place on Ellesmere Island. More likely I’ll remain among the ever-expanding Diaspora of space-borne pioneers living in some routine corner of the inner solar system with little reason to rejoin civilization. Familiarity and routine root most people to a place – even inhospitable places like potato-shaped rocks orbiting the sun so far from home that the Earth is nothing more than a faint blue dot in the sky. But I do look, and I do wonder, and I do notice when things change in that sky.

Beyond the worker bees, there’s always somebody like me kicking around every mining site – a closet romantic pining for entertainment and adventure at the trailing edge of his career. Maybe that’s why I always bring so many cameras and telescopes – just to look ‘out there’ in my spare time – wherever ‘out there’ may be.

Observing live space imagery isn’t part of our job descriptions. But the idea of a front row seat on the passing Universe viewed through various live camera feeds catches on once my fellow Rats see this for themselves. And instead of watching the usual media channels, most wind up with at least one extra screen set to the stars passing overhead.

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Day 677

8:05am HST

Good morning Jamie.

Far below the old Hab module with its famous ‘coffin-quarters’ and the smell of extended human habitation – we’ve been excavating warrens of rooms and tunnels. Even still, we’re cramped down here like bees crawling over each other getting ready for the next phase of the project when a wave of ‘worker bee’ miners arrives aboard the next transport.

Some describe ‘asteroid habitation’ as something akin to living inside a huge block of Swiss cheese – with bubbles of all sized down here forming the rooms and tunnels for hallways – but this hardly conveys the proper sense of the frantic activity.

Those with North American ancestry prefer the image of Midwestern prairie dog towns, while workers from the UK talk about hedgehog borrows and rabbit dens. Just like many things we describe up here – I suppose we mostly select our own localized metaphors as a way of making the place seem more like home. The frantic pace is one notion shared universally. In forty-two days the main contingent of worker bees arrives, and if we value our lives we’ll have another fifty crew quarter modules built by then. We’re all on double shifts digging tunnels and mining out rooms, pitching ore onto the surface unprocessed to carve out the space. I don’t normally run mining equipment – but until the whole facility is mined out – it’s all hands below deck.

The program mangers back at headquarters see this build-out period as a big overhead commitment and do everything they can to cut corners. You’d think we were mining toothpaste and ordinary gravel for all the penny-pinching. But we’ve got a better crew than they realize, so we’re pretty good at getting the job done on time, even though we do nothing but whine and complain in our reports.

The main worker bee crew is due forty-two days, and are unlikely to endure any excuses about unfinished crew quarters after riding packed like silage for six months aboard a transport ship – with the famous smell of habitation keeping them company the whole way out. And we all know how we’ll have a revolt on our hands if those worker bees arrive with no place to stay. So we really don’t need anyone back on Earth threatening us to get our work done – we already know the stakes.

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Day 676

9:18am HST

Besides digging this prairie dog town, we’re also working to slow the rotation of this and reorient the North Pole for this peanut shaped rock. We’ll use the ‘Big Bertha’ maneuvering guns arriving with the worker bees in forty-one days to make the big push for L2 and getting ready for those is my next big task. Later I’ll handle navigation and schedule most of kinetic ‘shots’ for all the maneuvers to L2. It’s an amazingly complex plan that we designed over the course of many years with help from several orbital design teams cross-checking to make sure we get this right. There’s only a few ways to make this work, and no limit to all the ways it won’t.

Halo orbits are used to remain in a circle traveling around the actual L2 point. Once there, the Hive will drift in a slow two-week-long circle looking a lot like we’re in a polar orbit above some real planet – yet the ‘planet’ is simply one of those odd gravity nulls in space where the force of gravity from everywhere adds up to zero. These aren’t real orbits and are simply used as a way station-keeping using the least amount of orbital maintenance. The orbit will be so lazy and slow with instabilities so weak that we’ll fix our trajectory simply by the force of mining shipments leaving the asteroid.

It’s not very much work at that point, yet eventually objects at L2 will wander off, so somebody needs to keep an eye on this, especially since ‘wandering off’ includes a non-zero chance of wandering into the Earth. There’s quite a bit of debate about the wisdom of bringing asteroids into halo orbits – just for this reason. And like many people up here, I realize I wouldn’t have a job unless we were willing to take the risk

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Sample End