Life as a mineworker in the asteroid belt is jumpy and ugly . But then you rack up enough nickel note to get all your friends drunk at a prevention on Ceres , and things set off looking up . Until they go downhill fast .
This workweek I passed a milepost : My first fiction issue . And I desire to apportion it ! The story , published in fantabulous magazineHilobrow , is cry “ The Great Oxygen Race . ” It ’s part of a series of tales I ’m writing about Bachelor City , the big town on the biggest asteroid in the Belt ( which is n’t very big ) .
If you sleep with obscure things about San Francisco story , some of the events in this story may seem oddly familiar to you .
Here ’s how it opens :
Sam woke up feeling like something frightening had lodge in his sinuses , which he bit by bit realized was a flavor . doodly-squat ? barf ? Biomass ? Then he realize : The tent reek of extinct space .
“ Sam ! Nez ! It ’s drinking sentence ! I get a fistful of Ni and we ’re gon na party ! ”
It was Grinder , who had emerged from his wooing for the first fourth dimension in three weeks . The patch up , crumpled Sutter RE-2 lay in a pile at his feet , its barely - operate life funding tubes leaking a stock of processed waste product . grin , the miner beat his narrow , bacterium - seduce dresser , then punched the strain and hack .
Sam moaned inside his bedroll and turned to face the semi - permeable cap of their small tent . Overhead , light the color of recycle piddle streamed through asteroid dust and across the remote control surface of Ceres , where the light domes of Bachelor City looked like splotches of macroscopical contagion . The ground beneath his bedroll groan more or less as the green kicked in , keep their raft from cotton on in its orbit around the planetoid . Lashed together out of junk rock-and-roll , belt , cables , and rebar , the batch was roughly 300 yards square , its upper and low surfaces blistered with the tents of miners too poor to rent even a container in the City .
The three of them had coiffure up camp near the edge of the structure , giving Sam a estimable panorama of the slum area ’s slum : A fringe of cheap emergency bubbles , intended for short - terminal figure life support , tether to the rock music with rope . hoi polloi catch them loose from the governance and cocooned inside when they ’d decease ore - crazy . It was n’t rare to see one pop , chuck its misfortunate contents in a matter of seconds .
Grinder grabbed the mouth of Sam ’s bedroll and shook it .
“ Sammy ! I ’ve take enough nickel here to grease one’s palms us a ride down to Bachelor City and into any stripe you want , all mean solar day ! lease ’s go ! ”
“ eff you , sleep together alcoholic bastard . We just got in from dust trawl a match of hours ago . ”
Sam rolled away from Grinder and institute himself hemmed in by their tentmate Nez , her typeface split up with a smile . Next to her miss front teeth , a undivided fang made of nickel note glittered like madness . She punched his arm , using the force of the blow to uncurl into a standing place . “ Not hump YOU – ass YEAH ! Free strong drink is always fuck yeah ! ”
Read the restat Hilobrow !
Annalee Newitz
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