“Come and get it, Starmen!” pealed the voice of George St. George. “Got some more of that engine-oil coffee steaming away, and I managed to whip together some biscuits from some powdered stuff I found!”
Zip’s eyes shot open and took in the neutral walls of the cubicle where he, Mark, and Joe had slept. The faint hum of O344’s system was drowned out now with the rustle of human movement as the asteroid miners gathered around the table.
“There’s some sort of orangy liquid I mixed up from some other powder, too! Probably has some good vitamins in it!”
In minutes the Starmen and miners were tucking in to the best that George St. George could do with the supplies at hand.
After breakfast, the Starmen sat in the lounge. Mark was poring over the printout that he had taken from the power plant on the pirates’ asteroid. He had a digital copy of much of the layout of the asteroid, and information on the power plants, propulsion structures, and sheathing equipment. The papers were filled with charts, maps, and diagrams; a few sections were written in an unintelligible, alien language. He couldn’t even tell which symbols were letters and which were numbers.
“I hope they didn’t use a pictorial alphabet like Chinese,” said Joe, looking over Mark’s shoulder.
“No,” the big Starman answered. “There are plenty of recurring symbols, so I assume it’s a language like our own, with letters and words. Somebody will be able to decipher this without too much difficulty. It’s far beyond my skill, though.” He rubbed his chin. “But I can recognize a lot of the machinery.”
Zip was sitting nearby. He hadn’t spoken much during breakfast. The images of the farm pulled at him again. “Mark, Joe,” he began. He hesitated a moment while they turned to him. They could see he was puzzling through something, and waited patiently for him to continue. “SE says that Zimbardo has targeted Earth with an asteroid over forty miles long. What’ll that do to home?”
Mark was suddenly deeply saddened. Zip always referred to the Moon as home. He spoke softly.
“One of my professors at Starlight University talked about a study conducted in the early 21st century. Back then, scientists started becoming concerned about asteroid impacts, and they built a complex computer model to see what would happen if a large asteroid struck Earth.”