Star and the rest of the Ellfive crew are commissioned by the new government of Terranova to mount an expedition to the Asteroid Belt, there to mine for those precious ores in rapid decline on Terra and Luna. They’ve got two ships, solid financial backing from the First National Bank of Terranova and the blessing of the Terran Alliance. Even Star’s mother is along for the ride. What could go wrong?

Author’s Note: The space station Outpost in Handful is modeled after British Petroleum’s Base Camp (aka the BP Hilton) in Prudhoe Bay, where I lived and worked for six years.

Designed by the architectural firm of Wallace, Floyd, Ellenzwig and Moore (I think I got that right) and principally by Peter Floyd, it is an amazing construction, specifically created to aerodynamically minimize snow drifting on the outside and lighten the residents’ gloom on the inside, two neat tricks in the middle of a January whiteout on the North Slope.

I love architects and engineers; they are the ultimate can-do people, and their stories are almost as good as the ones state troopers tell.

About the Dedication

for Joanna Carlson,
a civilized human being

Jo Carlson is my cousin Chris’s daughter. The “civilized human being” is one of those family in-jokes. Jo is now enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, studying either marine biology or graphic design. I personally think she’s majoring in surfing.

Audio Excerpt

Hear an audio excerpt from this book at Odeo.com.

Book Excerpt

How to build a space station…

In a day the Voortrekker was dead in space across from us, nose to tail and tail to nose. 10849Perry’s had let go its leash and been bumped ever so gently into a matching orbit well off the Hokuwa’a’s stern. It was marked with a claim beacon warning off inquisitive prospectors.

Aboard ships, we jettisoned our pressure plates and spot-welded them together so that they looked like a giant round clam. We applied gigantic, fluorescent yellow pinwheels to both sides, tagged it with an eyes-and-ears warning flare and nudged it off in the direction of Ceti Alpha Five. “Now the real fun begins,” I said.

“Easy to say for you,” Dieter Joop grunted. “All right, folks, it show time is!”

Working together non-stop, with time off for food but not sleep, under the fussy direction of Whitney Burkette both ships’ companies had the companionway modules broken out of the holds in fifteen days. During the following month the modules unfolded outside the parallel-moored Hokuwa’a and Voortrekker like the web of a large, tipsy spider. For the next six weeks, led by Dieter Joop’s heavy-duty mechanics a hundred riggers in p-suits played connect-the-dots with the triangular grid frames, looking like fat white flies caught in the web.

Two months and three days later the two ships were linked by curved tubular passageways to form a squarish circle about a hundred and thirty meters on a semi-side. We spent another ten very brisk days fixing guy wires and stabilizers and we were ready to put on spin. Crip and Perry fired their verniers at precisely the same moment and everything we had forgotten to tape to a bulkhead slowly floated down to what was now the floor in our new one-half artificial gravity, enough, like Ceres, to keep our feet and our food down and, with proper care, our muscles in shape. “Silverware!” Caleb said at our first real sit-down dinner in months. “Forks, knives and spoons! Who says there’s no God?”

When we stabilized at twenty-four hour halfgee, Charlie cut the crew’s exercise requirement down to one hour per twenty-four. I started looking for ways to cannibalize excess treadmills into something useful, until Charlie extended her emergency treatment program for hypercalcemic Belters into a regular service. She advertized it in Piazzi City, charged a fee and infuriated me by breaking even the third month she was in operation.

All was not sweetness and light once we had spin, of course. Artificial gravity has its downside, i.e. motion sickness. During the first few days of halfgee, not less than a third of the crew suffered nausea and disorientation. There was a steady stream of walking wounded into Charlie’s inner sanctum until she found the right combination of drugs to steady the stomach until the inner ear caught up with the station’s RPMs. At full spin the twins started to cry and kept crying for two days, three hours and seventeen seconds, at which time they suddenly shut up and went back to sleeping and eating and blowing bubbles. I couldn’t believe I’d ever wanted them to do anything else.