Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9) by Laurence Dahners Read Free Book Online Page A

sixteen kilos of other platinum group metals. Now, that much metal is worth about three million dollars, however, separating and delivering it has significant costs that cut into the profits. So those methods were going to take a looong time to get us out of the red considering the substantial startup costs we’ve had. We’ve really needed a better method to break the asteroid down to portable fragments.”
    Ell said, “And are you having any luck?”
    “Oh yeah! We’re trying out a new method. We expect it’ll be much better. We’ve got this new engineer. AJ Richards? He and Carter DeWitt, our head waldo driver, broke our asteroid in half. Here, let me put up some video.” He mumbled a moment to his AI and the screens in the room popped up with a deep space image. “Here, you’ll see that the waldoes have pulled all our mining equipment off of 2021 MG12. Here’s the blast.”
    A puff of material shot out from around the narrow part of the slightly dumbbell shaped asteroid. It separated into two roughly equal pieces that floated slowly away from each other.
    “We’ve sped up the video.” The two pieces floated away from each other at a faster pace, then began pivoting so that the freshly broken ends that had been facing one another now faced outward. They bounced back toward one another a little, obviously tethered to one another with something unseen.
    Ell said, “You have a graphene cable that we just can’t see holding the two fragments together?”
    “Got it in one! The video’s going much faster now but you can see that they had some small rocket engines mounted on the two pieces. First they kept the pieces from recoiling back to crash into one another. Now they’re using those engines to spin the fragments slowly around one another.
    “In this next segment they’re suspending some ‘catcher cones’ over the outer ends of the fragments. Braun pointed to some big four sided conical structures that looked like they’d been welded together using typical waldo space welding techniques. So, now our mining waldoes melt chunks off the asteroids that fall into the cones.”
    Brian’s eyebrows went up, “How are you ‘melting chunks’ off of it?”
    “We have parabolic mirrors set up closer to the sun. We focus a mirror’s light on a port. With the focal point right on the port, the beam can pass through a pretty small port. Exiting the port, the light passes through a big sapphire lens that turns the now spreading light into a beam. Waldoes out at the asteroid point the port-lens combo at a piece of the asteroid and use the beams to melt areas until they’ve cut a chunk loose. Because of the low spin rate the pieces fall very slowly down into the steel cones.” Braun waved his hands around pointing to different features on a diagram that had popped up on the screens. “Inside the cones we first have a ‘catcher screen’ that stops any fragments that are too big so the waldoes can cut them down further. The ones that are small enough to go through the screen fall into a series of ‘hollow ports’ as we call them. They’re huge obliquely oriented ports that have holes in their disks so that the chunks can fall into the port even when it’s turned off. The AI turns the hollow port on for a microsecond at a time, which even though they’re large ports, doesn’t take much power because the port’s consuming energy for such a short time period. It does take a very large supply cable though. When the port goes on and off, it cuts right through the fragment. So, it chops the chunks of asteroid into thin wafers. The wafers slide a little farther into the cone and a big port with the opposite obliquity chops the wafers into little rods. They fall a little farther to a third port that cuts the rods into little chunks. Then we port the little chunks back to earth through a smaller port.”
    A murmur of surprise rose in the room. Ell said, “Earth?”
    “Yeah. It’s easier to separate the various