The Delicate Crunch of Marshmallows

Another possible problem occurred to her, and she touched a spot near the seal. It was warm. The tarry comet grease produced much more drag than a properly lubricated seal should. That meant more power was going to the motors which maintained the spin differential with the weightless hangar. The reactor wasn’t particularly oversized, and she could bet that some other energy needs were being curtailed. More important, if the motors burned out, the hangar would have to be detached from the rest of the station immediately. Failing to do this quickly was considered about the worst-case scenario short of collision with an asteroid, and Erica knew the outcome well. If the hangar began to rotate, all hell would break out inside it within seconds, and it would render the entire station unstable within minutes. They would probably have dozens of fatalities and would be set back about two years.

These thoughts were not comforting to a person standing in an area which would be outside in case of jettisoning. She sighed, then matched speed with a handhold on the hangar wall as it rotated by, making her weightless. She pulled once on the handhold to propel her toward the large hatch at the center of the hub.

The hatch of another spoke opened and a female technologist came through with a large magnet coil in one hand. “Can you give me a hand with this?” the woman asked.

“Sure,” Erica replied, grinning and gesturing for the part to be tossed to her. The technologist smiled back and gently and expertly pushed the coil at an angle that neutralized station spin and sent the component directly toward the hub. When they had first started assembly, the trick would have been dangerous, but now it was as routine as tossing a ball. Erica snagged the coil neatly with her left hand, and waited for the tech to join her at the hatch.

They pushed the coil into the airlock together, then cycled through into the cavernous compartment beyond. The hangar was an immense asteroid-steel bottle blown from raw materials by the asteroid miners who had been grinding up native raw materials for rare earths years before Erica’s crew had arrived. The miners had stockpiled enormous quantities of leftover raw engineering materials, and had become adept at simple but effective ways of fabricating structures from them. To build the hangar, they had melted a generous portion of nickel-iron with fusion fire, and made the bottle in just a few days. The thick walls had glowed red hot for a couple of months. After it radiated down to merely scorching, they finished the process by cooling it with gas from comet ice. While the bottle was cooling, they built the spokes.

The hangar was one of the key economy features in Erica’s concept. The zero-g shirtsleeve environment made construction at least a hundred times easier than it would be using pressure suits. Even with the most efficient structure a million Earthbound workers could devise, such a station would have been prohibitively expensive to launch piecemeal, then assemble in Earth orbit. The other option would be to send down materials from the belt, but if they had the capacity to move bulk engineering materials in that quantity, they wouldn’t have needed more ships.

Over a year had gone into fitting the hangar for production, and even so it had the crude appearance of an iron-age industrial plant. It was brightly lit using piped-in sunlight captured by a solar concentrator, not so much to save energy as to avoid the substantial bother of making and maintaining artificial lights. The end opposite the hub was an enormous airlock. Major ship modules and raw materials could egress through it, but it also served as a work area for vacuum and controlled atmosphere work. The most important such task was blowing aluminum foam, formed by pressurizing molten aluminum with hydrogen gas.

Sections of the ship structure were under assembly, moored to the walls with cables. Small teams of technologists were busy working on the engines and crew sections, although fewer people were doing the assembly than were working on components on the shop decks.

Erica donned a helmet and jet belt. The latter was to be used only as a last resort, if you became stranded in midair with no way to push back to the walls. If that happened without the belt, it could take ten minutes of arm flapping and blowing jets of air from your mouth to propel you back to a surface. That was plenty of time for someone to get a video camera, making you the butt of jokes forever. The noisy compressed air jet belt was usually quick enough to let you avoid being caught for posterity, but the echoing hiss also attracted attention to your lack of skill faster.

Erica held a special fondness for the fusion engines, which were her brainchild. She headed straight toward them. A team of four technologists were attempting to mount part of one engine to a major structural brace, and it didn’t appear to be going smoothly.

“Trouble?” Erica asked as she floated in range.