Dragons and Stars, Chapter 2: Racing Home

Neal stood in the bottom of the deep shaft and watched as MacHardy wrenched the new drill bits into place on the massive drill. MacHardy’s muscles were nearly as large as the steel piping of the drill press.

“Wahl, I thenk ya for the new bits, you youn’ yahoos,” said MacHardy.

He spoke in the thick dialect of the Ol Myners, the first settlers to land and begin mining in the asteroid belt. He had thick curly red hair and a face like the front of a freighter, but his blue eyes beamed with a good-naturedness that was hard to resist.

“When ya see youn’ Grummel me lad,” he said, “Tell ‘im to mind about his schoolin and if he daren’t i’ll lay a strop onsto him tonight.”

Neal winced at the thought of MacHardy laying a strap across anyone’s behind. But on the other hand, Grummel, seventeen-years old as he was, might not feel anything lesser. Hanna liked to call Grummel “the friendly giant,” a boy even more massive than his father.

But while MacHardy was graceful in his mighty movements, Grummel was bumbling and awkward. Neal remembered a time last year when Grummel had been altogether banned from eating with the others for a week because he had accidentally knocked over the dining room table (for the fourth time).

“Now get on back, ya lazy scallies,” MacHardy said, waving his greasy great hand at Neal and Hanna. “I know you’re jus tryin’ to dodge your schoolin.”

“All right,” said Hanna. “We’ll go. But that means we won’t be able to tell you about the strange forty-year old lady with red hair who landed on the aster’ today.”

“Whoa, then!” said MacHardy, turning. MacHardy was a widower of several years and besides liked a good tale. “Wait jus’ a minute!”
“No,” said Hanna, sadly shaking her black mass of curly hair. “We’ve got to go. Our “schoolin” is waiting for us and we can’t be lazy…”

MacHardy grabbed them both with his great hands, probably leaving an oily grease print on them each. “You young scallies ain’t movin’ ’til you fess up to the tale.”

Neal and Hanna retold their meeting of the stranger woman, racking their brains for every small detail that could drag out the story. MacHardy listened with an earnest and simple fascination.

“Well, I’ll be jiggered…” he would put in from time to time. When at last they had said everything they could think of to say, Neal and Hanna reluctantly said goodbye to MacHardy and remounted their komodos, who were laying on the dirt lazily soaking under a bright floodlight nearby.

Cinching the harness handles in each hand, Neal went first, hissing and clicking at his ride until it got up and waddled to the base of the mine shaft up to the surface. The lizard stood up on his hind legs, balanced on its tail, and then pushed off, floating up the long shaft, occasionally clawing the sides of the shaft to maintain its direction. At the top of the shaft it stuck both legs out to grasp the sides and clambered carefully over the edge.

Neal turned a button on the suit behind the lizards head to adjust electromagnets on the bottom of the lizards suit. When turned on, these were attracted to the iron and metal core of the asteroid, and provided the only real gravity to be had outside the base. On a low setting it gave a slight tug to the lizard that kept it near the asteroid surface but did not weigh it down unnecessarily.

For short distances humans could adjust their own magnet-boot settings and jump their own way to their destination. But the komodo dragons were favored by small independent miner groups for their agility in clinging and racing on the asteroid surface. And komodos have a very low metabolic rate and could be fed as rarely as once a month to supply their energy and growth needs.

Hanna and her lizard crawled over the side of the shaft a moment later. Hanna adjusted her lizards weight setting and gazed down the long slope.

It was seventeen miles back to the home base on the “underside” of the asteroid, nestled in a deep indented saddle of the asteroid, safer there from the meteorite strikes that occasionally slammed into Eros. The base itself, named Providence, was two hundred feet under the surface anyway, with a cavern hangar for smaller space craft and a centrifugal living area.

The living area was a large cylinder that spun underground in the near weightlessness of the asteroid, generating gravity pull to the inside walls of the cylinder. Chairs and beds were bolted to the inside wall of this large cylinder, and the fifty or so people of Eros could walk around in gravity half of Earth’s own. In this gravity, water could be poured, tables set, and bodies lay comfortably on soft beds. But further, this gravity developed the bone and muscle strength of the inhabitants of Providence to protect them from atrophying.

Some of the earliest asteroid settlers had neglected gravity arrangements, and after decades their bones and muscles had weakened so much that many died when exposed to greater gravity. A few such old timers still lived on Eros, living together in a furnished cave near the main Providence base. They weren’t able to enter the Providence cylinder when it was turned on, but occasionally the community would turn off the cylinder and welcome the fragile old-timers in for a community celebration or an evening party.

Neal tugged at his gray lock-suit and looked left at Hanna. She stared back at him, holding his gaze for several seconds. Neal felt himself tensing up like a rubber band. Suddenly they both leaned forward on their lizards and hissed like tea-kettles. Both komodos jumped forward, paddling their legs comically but effectively along the planetoid’s surface, large toes clasping rocks and claws catching on the gravel to propel forward like skittering torpedoes over the asteroid’s turning surface. Out of the corner of Neal’s eye he saw Jupiter hanging above them now. Its red eye glared down on the asteroid from a distance of only two million miles.

The 17-mile trip back to Providence on the other side of the asteroid would normally take an hour and a half — Neal figured he and Hanna would get there in thirty minutes at their reckless pace. Flashing over gravel and past boulders, Neal saw ahead a large crater probably half a mile in diameter. He looked to his left and saw Hanna skimming along towards it on her lizard.

The huge crater loomed in front of him. Stars swung overhead as Neal yanked his lizard down over the edge and to the right to run along the inside wall of the crater. On her lizard, Hanna reached the edge of the half-mile crater and simply leaped forward off the steep cliff, her lizard waving its legs pathetically as it flew high over the deep crater floor. They sank slowly into the crater despite their forward momentum. As he flew along the inside wall of the crater Neal held his breath, watching Hanna nose dive across the expanse toward the opposite wall of the crater. The jump was risky and bold and could easily break bones if they bit it. Not that that would ever stop Hanna.

“Oy va voy!” shouted Hanna over the radio. She kicked her legs down, forcing the lizards legs to drift downwards, splayed out like a frog’s. Then as the perpendicular lizard flew belly first toward the approaching crater wall, she pulled her own legs up to meet the wall. As they slammed against the wall, her legs flexed to slow the collision. A thump of dust blew out into the canyon and blocked Neal’s view.

 

(Copyright 2009, Daniel Routh)