Earth Unaware (First Formic War)

boards to accommodate them. Victor would have to reboot the drill before it recognized the stabilizer, but his lifeline carried hardware lines to the ship, and he could do it from here using his heads-up display. He blinked and called up the display. The helmet tracked his eyes, and Victor gave the necessary blink commands to reboot the drill. When it came back online, he saw on the display that it recognized the stabilizer. “We’re in business, Mono. Now for the retros.”
    They replaced the drill paneling and flew up to the retrorockets. Victor looked to his left as he went. The Italians were gone. A small dot of white in the distance might have been their thrusters, but it could just as easily have been a star. Victor looked away. Back to work.
    The installation on the retros was more difficult since their mod inputs were so dated, and Victor had to make an adapter from parts in his tool belt. Mono asked questions every step of the way. Why was Victor doing this or that? Why wouldn’t he try this instead?
    “That’s how we do it, Mono. We make do with what we have. Corporate miners have stores of spare parts and resources on their ships. We have nothing. If something needs fixing, we pull out the junked parts and use our imagination. Now let me ask you a few questions.”
    It was then that the instruction began. Victor passed the tools and pieces to Mono and asked him questions that didn’t explicitly tell Mono how to finish the installation but that pointed him in the right direction. That way, Mono was discovering the steps himself and seeing the logic behind everything. It was how Father had trained Victor, not only letting him get his hands on the repair, but getting his mind in it as well, teaching Victor how to think his way through a fix.
    As Mono worked, Victor allowed himself another look out to space. There wasn’t a trace of thrusters now. Just blackness and stars and silence. Victor wasn’t a navigator, but he knew the big asteroids that were currently in this general vicinity, and he wondered where the Italians might be going. It wouldn’t be anywhere close, of course. In the Kuiper Belt it took several months to travel between asteroids. But even so, maybe Victor could guess.
    He closed his eyes. It was pointless. There were thousands of objects in the Kuiper Belt. They could be heading anywhere. And what good did it do to know their destination anyway? That wouldn’t change anything. That wouldn’t bring Janda back. And yes, he wanted her back. He realized that now. He had never been physically affectionate with her in any way that wasn’t innocent. And yet now, when he couldn’t have her, he suddenly longed for her to be close to him.
    He loved his cousin. Why hadn’t he seen that before? I’m exactly what the Council feared. Whatever they think of me now, I deserve it.
    Mono was asking him a question. Victor returned to the task at hand. They finished the installation and then made their way down to the blast site on the asteroid.
    In mining terms, the asteroid was a “lumpy,” or a rock rich in iron, cobalt, nickel, and other ferromagnetic minerals. Miners used scanners to look for concentrations of metal in the stone, which they called “lumps.” The more lumps or seams of metal they found, the higher the metal-to-stone ratio. No lumps meant the rock was a “slagger” or a “dumpy,” a worthless chunk of nothing.
    Victor and Mono touched down on the asteroid. Their boot magnets were set to the highest setting, and the minerals in the rock were just enough to hold their feet to the surface. They walked to the lip of the mineshaft and looked down. The laser drill had burned a nice circle into the asteroid, though not with a continuous cutting motion. It actually fired a series of close, single bursts that perforated the rock to a predetermined depth, creating a tight ring of holes. Miners then broke the narrow walls between the holes with the shake-hammers, then pulled out the rock in chunks, building the shaft.
    But this shaft wasn’t deep enough. The miners hadn’t yet reached the lump. When they did, they’d bring in the cooker tubes and refine and smelt the metal on-site, shaping it into cylinders that could be floated back up to the ship. It was tedious, hard labor, but if the lump was big enough, it was well worth the effort.
    Victor found a spot on the inner wall of the shaft where the steam sensor could be installed, and then called up Marco. “We’re nearly