In A Starship's Wake

Chapter 46: Tour Of An Asteroid

Armor was a peculiarity of Teton Sector culture. Few others made it a habitual form of dress for anyone other than soldiers or law enforcement, if even they wore it. After their spat with the Temorran Kindred Joseph and Tyrone had planned to wear theirs more often, and Joseph had been less consistent about it than he knew he ought to be.

Fortunately Rebecca silently reminded him. She wore hers almost all the time aboard Great Mandan Laker. Her close shave with death on the Comet must have made the protection of armor plates, instead of just a sealed jumpsuit to withstand vacuum, a comfort for her. With her example, he began to wear his more frequently.

Joseph was a little concerned what the miners would think when two members of the freighter crew showed up in body armor, but he needn't have worried. The man who emerged when they showed up outside the control room also wore an unusually heavy style of armor, and barely seemed to notice theirs. He introduced himself as Rhett Acker and promptly began their tour.

"I don't need to tell you we hollowed most of our facility out of the asteroid," he commented as he led them toward the living quarters. "I'm sure you could tell that much from outside."

Joseph noted as well that most of the walls in the hallways were just the native rock, without any effort to spruce them up. This condition didn't prevail everywhere. Rhett let them into his and his wife's set of rooms to show them what the interiors were like. Here plaster had been applied to even out the rough spots left when the rooms were carved. White, blue and green paint in nice, if rather uniform, shades had been applied to make it look very much like the inside of a planetary house or station apartment.

"So far we've managed to arrange things so every set of quarters or public space has an actual exterior window." Rhett gestured to the wide one in his family's living room, smaller only by a little than that in Great Mandan Laker's lounge. "I'm sure that won't last forever, as much as I like the idea. There's only so much surface area on this rock. Still, I'll keep it going as long as possible. I never liked station apartments that I couldn't see out of."

"They're not so bad if you're never in them," Nathan commented. "They're the kind of place for unwed starmen. You just need someplace to sleep when you're on your home station. If you ever wind up home for more than a week you notice how boring that is."

"Exactly," Rhett agreed. Out of the quarters, they started back toward the operations areas of the station, but he led them up a single wide staircase for a side trip first. "This is the part I'm personally the most proud of." he said as he reached the top and stopped before a set of double doors. "We didn't start work on this until everything was operational, and we still aren't finished, but it's fairly impressive already."

Inside the doors was a church sanctuary with a high, vaulted ceiling. Joseph's eyes widened in astonishment as he stared around the place. Pews complete with hymnal racks, the pulpit, the baptismal font, and most of the other fixtures were in place, carved meticulously out of the stone. Occasional bits of the asteroid's valuable metal ores were visible in many of them, left behind as decoration rather than plucked out to sell or covered over as they were in the quarters.

At first Joseph didn't see what made it unfinished. Once he'd given the place a solid minute's examination, he realized that the alter wasn't supposed to poke out of the wall in their design; it was only half carved, with still more work to do behind it. Still, it was very close to a finished place of worship.

"Impressive," he murmured. The rest of the crew nodded.

"Thank you." Rhett grinned. "We don't have enough people on the station to call a pastor yet, of course. We'll get there one day though, and we wanted to be prepared. We play recordings of the service from our old church on Tuesday mornings, when they reach us in our ultralight transmissions. We watch them in here now, even though it isn't finished yet. Maybe it's just us, but it always felt weird to watch them in the lounge or the cafeteria."