Nobody said Rock Hauling would be easy. Throughout settled space, terraforming is the fuel that drives the interstellar economy. For some worlds, this is easy. For others, lacking resources, or on the periphery, this is an unattainable dream. Throug...
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XII
TOMAS VI
There were other ships now. Distant dots of light on their sensors, or twinkling pinpricks on their long-range scopes.
Tomas watched the display with a rising sense of pleasure. They were about to make their final burn, scudding slower and slower as they approached their destination. No longer were they adrift, far beyond the light of civilization. Now, only some two million miles from the LUMAR array, they were on course to arrive at Tylo within half a week. A little monitor that dangled in it's armature in front of his seat on the bridge, the screen displaying the inner Tyluset system, designators clumping around the only two objects of import. Tylo itself had half a dozen indicators hovering in a loose shell around it. Diplomatic ships to ferry members of the Global Secretariat to and from meetings on Cyrene, or else cargo haulers and shuttles engaged in the long, painfully slow terraforming project. In the space about the LUMAR, nearer to where the Caroline was, twice that many vessels clustered at various ranges. Most either burning towards Tylo, or away from it, to the LUMAR itself, the long torches of drive plumes sweeping along behind. Other ships. Other people. For the first time in a long time, his first thoughts when he had woken up this morning were not of the lingering fear that he'd fail in his mission. That some tragedy would befall the ship and preclude the project, the rising sense of paranoia that seemed to exude from Carcosa, or else the many horrible ways people could die out here, but rather excitement. Excitement for the return. For what awaited them when they finally arrived.
Administrator. It was all going so well. He'd been put in charge of the entire project. A part of him wondered why. It made it easier, of course, if he could manage everything personally, and obviously they hadn't chosen some duster in one of the filhabs, who farmed human waste and bacteria for a living. Dusters were terraformers first and foremost, and maybe mechanics on a good day. Tomas was a greenie. His dossier was a pedigree of science, having grown up in one of the three cities that clustered around Tylo's wobbly northern hemisphere. He had had access to a higher level of education from birth. But Tomas Gallenhorst knew that he'd never overseen much in his life, save for his work studying the asteroid belt. Functionally, it would make sense to choose a member of the Colonial government who had experience with space stations over other worlds, or a Corporate Alliance contract manager.
Perhaps someone out there was pulling the strings. Perhaps they had his best interests at heart. Perhaps it was identitarianism. A Tyloan for a Tyloan station. Perhaps it was just a political ploy by Greenies, to claim that their own social class ran the system, or maybe it was a concession from Dusters.
What it was didn't matter. What mattered was that it was all going well.
As he watched, the blinking indicator closest to them shifted course slightly. It would pass by close to them. Within five hundred kilometers, even. He wondered where it was going. Maybe now that they'd made efforts to seriously begin using the resources of the asteroid belt, other prospectors would start heading out there on their own long journeys, spurred on by their success. It was a warm thought. He hoped they returned at the right time.
