But living in Ceres offered something that shipboard life could not duplicate. Company. Society. Other people who could visit you or you could drop in on. Strolls through the corridors where you could see neighbors and say hello and stop for a chat. The corridors were narrow and twisting, it was true; natural lava tubes through the rock that had been smoothed off enough for people lo shuffle through in a low-gravity parody of walking. Their walls and ceilings were still curved and unfinished raw stone; it was more like walking through a tunnel than a real corridor. And there was the dust, of course. Always the dust. It was worse in the tunnels, so bad that everyone wore face masks when they went for a stroll.
Lately, though, people’s attitudes had changed noticeably. There was an aura of expectation in the air, almost like the slowly building excitement that the year-end holiday season had brought when she’d been a child on Earth. The habitat was growing visibly, week by week. Everyone could see it swinging through the sky on their wallscreens. We’re going to live up there, everyone was saying to themselves. We’re going to move to a new, clean home.
When Lars had first told Amanda about the orbiting habitat, she’d been worried about the radiation. One advantage of living inside a big rock was that it shielded you from the harsh radiation sleeting in from the Sun and deep space. But Lars had shown her how the habitat would use the same magnetic radiation shielding that spacecraft used, only stronger, better. She studied the numbers herself and became convinced that the habitat would be just as safe as living underground—as long as the magnetic shielding worked.
Lars was up on the unfinished habitat again with Niles Ripley. He and the Ripper were working on a recalcitrant water recycler that refused to operate as programmed. Meanwhile, she was running the office, routing prospectors’ requests for supplies and equipment to the proper inventory system, and checking to make certain that the material actually was loaded aboard a ship and sent to the people who had requested it.
Then there was the billing procedure. Miners were usually no problem: most of them were on corporate payrolls, so whatever they owed could be deducted automatically from their paychecks. Prospectors, though, were something else. The independents had no paychecks to deduct from. They were still searching for an asteroid to mine, waiting to find a jackpot. Yet they needed air to breathe and food to eat just as much as did miners working a claim. At Lars’s insistence, Amanda ran a tab for most of them, waiting for the moment when they struck it rich.
Strange, Amanda thought, how the system works. The prospectors go out dreaming of making a fortune. Once they find a likely asteroid they have to make a deal to mine its ores. That’s when they realize that they’ll be lucky if they can break even. The prices for metals and minerals roller coasted up and down—mostly down—depending on the latest strikes; the commodities markets Earthside were hotbeds of frantic speculation, despite the sternest efforts of the Global Economic Council to keep things under control.
Yet there were just enough really big finds to keep the stars in the prospectors’ eyes. They kept doggedly searching for the one asteroid that would allow them to retire in wealth and ease.
The real way to make a fortune, Amanda had learned, was to be a supplier to the prospectors and miners who seemed to be rushing out to the Belt in steadily increasing numbers. They did the searching and the finding, the mining and refining. But the people here on Ceres were the ones who were getting rich. Lars had already amassed a small fortune with Helvetia Ltd. Humphries’s people were piling up bigger and bigger sums in their bank accounts, too. Even the twins, with their virtual reality bordello, were millionaires several times over.
The real profits, though, went to the corporations. Astro and Humphries Space Systems made most of the money; only a small percentage of it stays with people like Lars and me, Amanda knew.
Amanda rubbed at the aching back of her neck. It had become stiff from staring at the wallscreen for so many hours on end. With a tired sigh, she decided to call it a day. Lars would be coming in soon. Time to scrub up and put on a clean set of coveralls for dinner and maybe take a walk to the Pub afterward. Before shutting down for the day, though, Amanda flicked through the list of incoming messages awaiting her attention. Routine. Nothing that needed immediate attention.