“Ring currently stacked; retro-boosters firing at one quarter. Intensifying . . . now.” The overseer’s white-gloved hand pulled a lever and another two hundred boosters attached to the Earth-ward facing side of the asteroid fired, counteracting the blue planet’s gravity and guiding the asteroid towards the folded-over metal ring.
“Distance closing. Thirty-five miles. Thirty. Twenty-five. Firing tractors now.” The hand pushed a button to the lever’s right. Magenta beacons lit up at even intervals of the silver ring, their tractor beams attaching to the imperfect, pitted sphere of iron, cobalt, and nickel, all of which were under a thin layer of carbon silica dust, some of which would be added to the iron to make structural steel.
The asteroid jerked to its starboard side as the beams made contact, its stroll through upper Earth orbit turning into an apparent collision-in-waiting. Still, the overseer remained calm; this rock wasn’t even that big after all. “Activating the second ring stage . . . now.” She said, not even looking at the control panel before hitting the last lever to the right.
The ring’s couplings detached, with the boosters on the upper half firing slowly, then doubling their output once they obtained sufficient distance from the lower half so the exhaust wouldn’t damage it. The semi-circle of metal looped over the top of the asteroid, and once it was a full 180 degrees from its lower half, fired its own tractor beams at a lower intensity, guiding it towards its other half. The asteroid’s poles kept rotating even as its equator was firmly locked in place.
“Activating third ring stage now.” The overseer said, the two-sided ring splitting again, this time creating a vertical axis rather than a horizontal one, linking over the asteroid and stopping its spin with their own magenta tractor arrays.
The rock was brought to a stop with the ring fully encircling it, tractors still firing to keep it in place. “Stasis achieved. Send in the painters.” The overseer said, her job now primarily oversight as the dozens of painter drones marked the most accessible ore veins with their magnetic pigments of rusty red for iron, silver for nickel, and dark blue for cobalt; the drones were as effective as their color system was unimaginative.
“All sites marked. Send in the scoops.” Another unoriginal name. The drones would scoop up the carbon silica dust covering the top of each vein, loading up before putting them into the station’s pre-smelting chambers. There were two scoops for each painter drone, with nearly 200 flying onto the asteroid. Their tripod legs anchored into the surface while two of their four arms did the actual scooping, the remaining two carrying tanks that were to be filled. Once a tank was full, it was magnetically attached onto the drone’s back and was replaced with another. This process was repeated seven times before every tank the drone carried was full.
The drones flew back to the station with their full payloads, depositing the dust into the pre-smelting separator, which filtered the carbon from the silica in a process whose details the overseer had forgotten two minutes after her company trainer explained it to her on her initial tour of the station. Her job was extraction, not production.
“Scoops are done. Your turn drillers.” She smirked; even in the vacuum she swore she could hear the whirr of the drills and the chuckles of their operators as they left the station, using the tractor beams to propel their 50-foot-long modular rigs onto the asteroid, and saving some fuel in the process.
Each drill landed in the perimeter of a painted zone, their pilots bouncing in their cockpit chairs once the treads landed. They activated their drill rigs, the white arms extending into red-and-yellow talons which stabbed into the asteroid’s surface, cracking the rock before hammering down into the veins of ore below, shooting blasts of compressed air to create dozens of crevices, then firing explosive charges into said crevices before they could close.
One by one, the drillers confirmed their payloads had been dropped before taking off and returning to the station, a dozen rigs per docking bay.
The overseer checked the sensors to be sure one last time. “All rigs returned. Detonation in three . . . two . . . one . . .” within a microsecond of the detonator being pushed, streams of rock exploded out from the asteroid, only to be caught by the tractor beams; the scoops flew out, repurposed to catch any ore from the explosions.
“Veins opened up. Send in the cranes.” A series of larger docking bay doors opened immediately below those which the drill rigs had just entered.
The cranes looked at first like the excavator cranes of centuries past, large, boxy rigs with a revolving set of scoopers attached to a long neck. The only difference at first glance was the engines attached, necessitating a much bulkier rig to hold up against the heat, not to mention the vacuum.
But each rig one had an extra touch; one of modules which appeared to just be extra bulk was actually a holding tank, complete with a sensor and tractor beam, the sensor picking up the chemical signature of the element(s) being mined for, and then sorting each element to their corresponding compartment within in the tank. With that time-saving measure, excavations took place in a tenth of the time, if not less. The iron compartment was particularly useful, as it converted the raw iron ore into pellets, speeding up the steel-making process considerably.
The overseer smirked as she saw her favorite rig pass by, the Emerald Tardigarde, named after the vacuum-surviving animal (a few of which were almost certainly floating between the station and the asteroid) and the gaudy necklace worn by its operator, who dug it up himself near his hometown in Douglass.
The rigs fanned out form their hangar bays, with two to four assigned to each excavation zone, setting down softer than the drills out of necessity before getting to work. The overseer lost track of the exact time as always, but each rig’s pace sensor was blue or green, with the odd yellow in there too, so no cause for concern, especially as the pings came in that capacity had already been reached on a few of them. They’d already extracted more than enough ore for their first order, structural stuff for an arena expansion down on the plains. The excavators had the iron for the steel and concrete, with the scoopers providing the carbon and silica for the steel.
“All full iron rigs, dock at Electric Arc Furnace Array 3 to remove your payloads.” Roughly twenty rigs did so, with drone mechanics hooking hoses to the rigs’ iron compartments, hoses which led to conveyor belts that carried the ore to the furnace, electricity flitting around the metal cylinder like a Tesla coil, its inside a diamond-lined oven operating at the heat of .6 sol, a couple notches below the lining’s melting point.
The conveyors and hoses carried upon tons of iron ore pellets to the furnace, with each melted instantly by its lightning. Once the ore was fully liquified, the carbon gathered and filtered from the scoops was added in at .25% total mass as per the contract’s requirements. Upon leaving the furnace, the molten mixture was cut into beams, rebar, and a few decorative pieces for the project, with each different form getting its own conveyor line, as well as its own cooling line, with cold air followed by a quenching in the formula of the week, with the cooled metal headed finally ending up in the deployment pods.
The pods themselves were pyramidal, though aesthetically rather different than their Egyptian predecessors, with their bodies dark gray instead of white, and their tips black instead of gold. The tips were designed to take the brunt of the heat on re-entry, directing the heat away from the parachute engines which would allow for at least relatively calm landings, though there would still be craters.
Turning to the screen at her top right, the overseer saw the pods were fully loaded. She punched in the coordinates to the landing field, adjusting the latitude by a couple seconds so the pods didn’t touch the farm to its West. “Pods firing in ten . . .” she said. As she finished the countdown, six pods took off from the station, the blue of their parachute engines soon overwhelmed by the yellows, oranges, and reds of atmospheric re-entry.
Dawn broke over the shallow hills and their mismatched fields of amber; it was accompanied by half a dozen flaming comets with cores of dark gray metal turning canary then gold then red-orange then scarlet as they entered the atmosphere, slamming into the pockmarked valley below, each thud and plunk shaking the ground and sending teal-colored chalk dust into the air.
On one side of the valley, a few dozen engineers and logistics techs prepped to move another shipment, their work camp replete with enough tools, vehicles, and lifter drones for a job double the size.
On the opposite side of the valley from the workers was a mere two men, seemingly out for a picnic.
“I fucking knew four would go East of center this time; told you it would be the same overseer as last month putting in the coordinates.” James smirked, only a couple hairs out of place even after the impacts.
“Lucky guess. Everything I saw made me think it would be a push at three. Damn wind.” Mike rolled his eyes as he made the transfer; James turned his volume was turned all the way up so the ding of the payment notification could be clearly heard by the workers across the valley.
Mike gave one last dirty look to James before turning to his drink. As he rolled his eyes at the sky, six teams of employees clad in orange coveralls, white hard hats, and opaque visors began to open up the pods. The real work wasn’t even halfway done.