In the old cultivation myths, the asteroid belt was the Shattered Ring of Heaven: the scattered bones of ancient star-gods who had died in the Great War of the Nine Firmaments.
To Austin, standing on the airless surface of Asteroid Iron-Crag with a four-foot measuring wheel, it was a three-hundred-and-twenty-six-mile-wide ball of nickel-iron, black rock, and high-grade silver-steel ore. It needed a surface-grading permit and a dust-control plan.
Back on Earth, Austin had worked on everything from sewage plants to highway bypasses. He had done earthmoving at an open-pit copper mine in Utah and a limestone quarry in Indiana. There, gravity and water made life easier. Water trucks kept the dust down, and gravity kept fifty-ton rocks in the dump trucks where they belonged.
Here, gravity was barely zero point zero two five times Earth’s. Even a small mistake could send heavy equipment drifting away. If a six-foot boulder fell off a moving conveyor, it did not land with a thud. It bounced three hundred feet into the black sky and drifted for twenty minutes before the solar wind carried it away.
The dust was worse. Billions of years of micrometeorite strikes had ground it into jagged, static-charged powder. With no air or meaningful gravity to settle it, a dust cloud could hang in the vacuum indefinitely. It worked its way into hydraulic seals, scratched helmet visors, and shorted out high-voltage insulators.
