Diamond Kiss Carbon

by Kenn Brody

Cal Tench remembered this was the day he would finally meet Hui Zhang. He fairly leaped out of bed with the exhilaration of finally holding and kissing his beloved bride-to-be. For several months of chats and pictures and promises, he had oscillated from despair to delight. Hui was from China and Cal was from Pennsylvania, and 8,500 miles was a long way to conduct a love affair. 

Well past her usual bedtime, Hui Zhang, on China Standard Time, carefully folded her cheongsam and put on modern clothes. The nights were getting cold in central China. Before she packed she had to talk to her beloved, her future laogong, the husband she would cherish for the rest of her life.

The only language they shared was English. 

Her slender figure and deep, dark eyes appeared on Cal’s window screen, obliterating the image of the garbage-strewn alley outside. On Hui’s slate, Cal’s hair was rumpled and his toothy smile lit up his bearded face. Neither spoke right away. They just looked at each other’s pictures. Cal had other, more intimate, pictures of Hui pasted on his wall. 

“Doctor Hui, I need a house call. Can you come over right away?”

“Doctor Cal, I was going to ask you the same thing. I’m love-sick over you.”

“Well, then, the cure is simple. I’ve arranged a private pod for us on the Colombo Stalk. Two weeks of sex and cuddling will cure us both, yes?”

“Oh, how did you arrange that, Cal? I thought those were only for real estate magnates on Tiantang and SpaceX Station.”

“Umm, we had a little money left over after buying our asteroid mining equipment. The license fees were waived by the Mars consortium, since we were only interested in rocks anti-orbit from Mars.”

“My dearest, are you sure that is wise? There are no rescue stations in the asteroid belt so far from Mars.”

“Not at all sure, but this is our best chance to escape a dead-end life. And it still looks like war or rebellion against the Global Alliance is coming. We both lost family members in the last war. Isn’t it better to take a risk for wealth and happiness together? Better than simply waiting for some bomb, some chemical agent or some manufactured plague?”

“Yes, dear. I am with you forever, dear.”

Dear Hui, I’ll never get used to the Confucian concept of a faithful wife.

Hui Zhang was the physician who discovered a cure for the Ebola Plague, a quick killer that had been modified by gain-of-function genetic engineering in an outlaw African laboratory. It was a decade after the decimation, the collapse of all the advanced economies, and it precipitated the attacks of half a dozen militant opportunist armies. Half-built apartment houses and sprawling barracks-style housing littered cities. Power was spotty and governments tended to be authoritarian or worse. Only the Mars Confederation had survived intact, and it controlled asteroid mining resources through a bureaucratic system of licensing and safety inspections.

“What did we finally get, my love?”

“A converted Spiderminer, a Habitat One in decent condition, and an antique Class 3 Hauler. Five years’ rations. Deep radar and a Watson AI. Aaaand…”

“Yes? More?”

“10 kilos of your favorite tea.”

“Will we have enough water for all that tea, my love?”

“Our first goal is to mine an iceball and use the Hauler to take it with us to the outer belt.”

“Yes, my love.”

“Dammit, Hui, you are a medical doctor, not some personal concubine. Please! I trust your judgment.”

“You are a genius neurophysicist, my dearest, and I do agree with your choices. You did well, my love. It will not be easy, but we will be together, no matter what.”

No matter what. Can I really live up to that standard? But, she’s worth it. I know she is really worth it.

With a sigh, Cal ended the contact. He had the woman of his dreams, the chance of a lifetime. The barren life was almost behind him now.

He boarded the ballistic shuttle to Colombo, Seychelles and carried his one suitcase to the Stalk Platform. It looked like any vacuum tube station. Nothing was visible from the Platform except the colored walkways filled with passengers, the freight robots and the automated turnstiles. He showed his QR code to the proper turnstile and was directed to his VIP private pod.

Cal was so nervous he actually twitched. Would Hui find him as attractive in real life? Would she be the slim, beautiful woman he saw in their vids? It was so easy to fake a vid. Some people would do anything to escape decaying cities on Earth. He paced back and forth.

A long-haired woman in a tank top and leggings approached, dragging an oversized suitcase. His view was blocked by a kiosk selling whiskey to rich passengers. He moved to get a better view. It was her! She saw him, ran, the suitcase tumbled, she righted it and in a minute she was in his arms, her silky hair flying in his face, her kisses ignoring the crowds. She smelled like heaven. She jumped and wrapped her legs around him. She weighed nothing in his arms, and the world got brighter. 

“Two weeks with you, my love!” she crooned. 

The pod announced, “Doctor Cal Tench, please enter now.”

The door dilated and he carried Hui into the pod, put her on a bunk and fetched their suitcases. The pod had a bunk just big enough for two people, a settee, a washbasin/toilet/shower module and a mirror/screen. It was the size of a closet.

“A bit cramped, but we better get used to that. The Habitat isn’t much bigger.” 

The mirror/screen showed “Private Pod 23, auxiliary freight Pod A2411, occupants Cal Tench and Hui Zhang, Bill of Lading HERE.” The Bill included all the supplies being brought up the stalk from Earth. Their main equipment waited for them at the top.

Hui poked the mirror into window mode. The stalk, a diamond fiber cable a meter thick at Earth base, glistened in the tropical sunlight, beaming a rainbow into their pod. The motion was smooth and they accelerated up the 29,500 mile stalk as counterweighted pods descended on the other side.

They hadn’t stopped kissing. Cal stroked her hair and kissed her eyes. He turned her around and held her breasts. 

“Would you like me to undress you, Hui?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Wo ai ni, laopo.”

“I love you too, dear husband.

Everything from that point on was “Yes, dear.” She was a dream and he was so happy to have her, to love her, just to be with her. 

Meals came on wrapped trays from a service a few pods upstalk. It was as good as anything they had to eat in the meager public kitchens at home. There was coffee, tea, beer and wine. Hui drank some wine, no beer and lots of tea. Cal finished her wine and whatever beer he could get. They read, talked, cuddled, made plans, made love in every position the pod would allow, and slept wrapped around each other. 

Slowly, they got lighter. The first station came. They were glad to get out and bounce-walk around in .5 G, visit a few shops with goods too expensive for them, and returned to their pod early. They were an inexhaustible entertainment to each other, so many ideas, so many life events to compare. 

“My love, we are like two parts of one person coming to put our parts together again.”

“Synchronizing. Yes, darling Hui, we are.”

“Does the adventure scare you, my dear?”

“It scares me shitless, Hui, but as long as I have you, it will be OK.” Cal was worried mostly about Hui in danger. Without her, it didn’t matter anyway.

At the top of the stalk, in the Mars Embassy, Tiantang Station, they got married in a civil ceremony. It was a symbolic event, but Cal knew it satisfied Hui’s desire. They gave each other rings with small diamonds. Hui adopted the English name of Honey Tench, although Cal still called her Hui.

They got their asteroid permits and titles to the Habitat and the Hauler, moved aboard, checked in with Watson, a clone of the original Watson V AI, and slowly swung away from Earth into a long Hohmann orbit towards Mars. They would slingshot around Mars and head out into the dim reaches of the outer asteroid belt. 

On their first spacewalk to check the tethers and sensors, the stars did not twinkle. They were hard and sharp as diamonds against the black of space.

The tethers were taught, the attachment flanges showed no signs of strain, and the sensors all checked out except for the Polaris starsight, which made their precise navigation a bit more difficult. 

Cal irised the outer lock to the Habitat and detached his own safety cable before he transferred Hui’s to the inner lock. He reeled in her cable and reattached his own.

“Cal, that is dangerous. I should do your cable first.”

“Hui, if I lost you, I would have no reason to worry about my safety cable.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Will we be able to navigate without that starsight?”

“I’ll fix it on my next spacewalk, Until then, it hardly matters. We don’t have a fixed destination, so anything roughly where we ought to be will be good enough.”

“Yes, dear. I trust your navigation, my love.”

Watson really does the navigation, not me, but for her sake I will double check it.

They found their iceball, a dirty chunk of water, gravel and soot about 10 clicks across, shaped like a crooked peanut. It was an unstable configuration. The two lobes were probably not connected by anything solid. Landing the Spiderminer on either of them took precise navigation. 

“Hui, please monitor my approach. I’m going to have to control the Hauler manually.”

“I’m on it, dear. Lining up on the nearest lobe?”

“They’re spinning around each other and around an axis through both lobes as well. I think the far lobe will turn toward us and make it a bit easier. Tricky, though.

“Watching the far lobe now, dear.”

Everything in space is in some kind of orbit, nothing stands still. It was like parking a semi on a speck in a whirlwind. The gyrations of the iceball were dizzying. There was one flat spot on the far lobe big enough for the Hauler and the Habitat, but the Habitat was on a tether. Turning the Hauler, tricky as it was to control the crude thing, made the Habitat swing wide. The tether dragged the Hauler out of conjunction with the landing spot. The peanut turned, the landing spot approached, the Habitat swung around and got sideways.

At the last minute, the Habitat got between the Hauler and the iceball.

“Fuck! It’s gonna smash the Habitat!”

Cal rotated the Hauler into reverse and gave it full throttle. The tether went slack and came taut with a wrenching twang. Watson screamed “Collision! Collision!” Cal vectored 90 degrees and hit the throttle again. The Habitat missed the iceball by no more than 20 meters. By the time Cal could recover, the Hauler, with its tow, was a hundred clicks away from the iceball and moving fast in the wrong direction. 

“The iceball is receding at 40 clicks, dear.”

Drenched in sweat, Cal answered, “Hui, let me get the tow stable, and maybe we ought to check the tether. It took a huge shock load.”

An hour later he was in a spacesuit again. One of the attachment flanges was bent at right angles. No tool was strong enough to bend it back, and at space-cold temperatures, it might snap if it was bent again.

He re-entered the Habitat and Hui made tea.

“Relax dear, let me help you.” She massaged the knots in his shoulders and arms. 

“Hui, what do we do now?”

“Asteroid mining was never supposed to be easy, dear Cal. Doesn’t the Spiderminer have a welding attachment? Would that work, dear?”

Should have let her handle the piloting. I’m going to kill us both out here.

Cal sighed, “Now that I think about it, yes, it does. I’ll set it up and go outside to monitor it.”

“Be careful, dear. I need you. Would you like me to take a look at the starsight and see if I can align it again?”

“Hui, what would I do without you?” 

Cal released the robot, an eight-legged thing the size of a refrigerator, bristling with attachments, from the underside of the Hauler. Four magnetic feet found purchase on the hull. Two sharp pronged feet probed the bent attachment. A claw appeared on one forward leg and clamped onto the bent flange. It strained. The flange bent. The robot braced its four feet and got another purchase. The fixture straightened.

Cal heard nothing in the airless space, but he felt a snap through his boots. Yes, there was now a crack in the flange. Thank God the tether was not under any strain at the moment. He had stopped all the acceleration just in case. Any error in judgment was fatal out here. He thought about Hui and froze. What the hell was he doing taking her asteroid mining? It was a death sentence.

He took a deep breath and set the robot to welding mode. Its laser heated the flange red hot and he applied a welding rod to the crack. It was a good serviceable job. He hit it with a spanner. There was no “clank” in the vacuum, but the spanner bounced off and the flange held. 

Extra cautious, he checked the attachment at the Habitat end. It was sound.

Hui had tea for him when he re-entered. “It’s fixed, Hui. The robot idea worked. Both ends of the tether are OK, I think.”

“I knew you would do it, dear.”

“Did you have any luck with the starsight?”

“Yes, dear. It was too damaged to fix on Polaris, but I got it to fix on Deneb, and adjusted the nav program. I think it will be OK now.”

How would I survive without her?”

The second attempt on the iceball went much better. Hui, working with the telescope and Watson’s nav system, gave Cal the thrust and vectors to make a clean approach. The Hauler fired its anchors into the iceball. They reeled in the tether and set the Spiderminer to harvest the cleanest part of the ice.

They worked well together as a team. Hui did the guidance, Cal did the supervision and the robot did the heavy work. Five tonnes of ice went into the tanks of the Habitat and another hundred tonnes, in a fat egg-shaped bundle, was wrapped in a spider-spun web and fastened to a secondary tether. Ice, a source of oxygen and hydrogen as fuel, was a commodity of value beyond just water.

They had their homestead.

“Love, why are you sad? We have our Habitat, our water, food, everything we need. We are out to seek our adventure. Why the down face, dear?”

“Hui, I’m sorry.”

“What are you apologizing for? I looked around. There is no other woman hidden here.”

Cal laughed, “No, it’s not that. There could never be any other woman but you.”

“Then what, dear?”

“I had to borrow money to buy this equipment, this Habitat, Hauler, the Spiderminer.”

“Oh, but that is not such a big problem, dear.”

“I borrowed it from the Mars Federation Bank.”

Silence.

“They will come after us. When?”

“It was a two year loan. We have a few months.”

“And if we cannot repay the loan?”

“They take everything and dump us in space.”

Silence and reproachful looks from Hui.

She sits up straight in her seat and looks Cal in the eye, “Then, my dear, we must find our fortune very quickly.”

“Yes, very quickly.” His voice trails off and he looks away. Guilt, a ghost that he does not want to acknowledge, stares in his face.

The next “day”, ship’s time, Hui and Cal direct Watson to compile a list of valuable elements and the known characteristics of asteroids that have have them. Crystalline iron, very valuable. Chondrites, hard, rocky asteroids big enough to have collected heavy elements. Old iceballs with lots of tritium. Interlopers, with orbits that show they came from outside the solar system.

Watson, constantly mapping nearby objects, comes up with a list. There are 5 objects closer than one month’s passage. There is not enough data to choose among them. There are several other promising objects out to three months passage, but that is pushing things.

Cal wraps his arms around Hui, buries his nose in the perfume of her hair. Even after long confinement, she still smells good to him. He closes his eyes. 

“Choose for us, Hui.”

“I cannot. Please, dear, you choose.”

Cal opens his eyes and points to the third object on the list. It is not an iceball, and it has a density of 3.4 grams per cubic centimeter, according to radar and lidar data on its orbit. It’s denser than most rocks, not as dense as iron. Probably gravel and iron.

“We will go there,” he announces.

Like every object in the Belt, it is spinning, slowly. Not tumbling, spinning around an axis that indicates it has a regular shape. As they approach, the radar return is sharp. It can’t be just a pile of gravel. 

It has facets. Iron forms facets, so do some rocks.

It is half a kilometer in diameter.

They maneuver onto one of the facets, but the Hauler has trouble setting anchors. 

By now, Cal and Hui work together as a finely tuned team. Cal holds a gentle thrust against the asteroid while Hui spacewalks and sets the landing pads with quick acting epoxy. She places small chemical charges to release them later.

“It’s very hard stuff and looks glassy, Cal. Sintered, maybe?”

“Could you get a sample?”

“No, it was really hard, dear.”

“No problem. The Spiderminer has that laser. After we eat and rest, I’ll go out and set it up.”

The Spiderminer blasts off a chunk the size of Cal’s fist. Watson analyzes it while they rest. Hui goes to look at the results.

“Cal, dear, please look at this.” 

There is a glow in her eyes.

“Carbon? Face centered cubic array? My God, that’s diamond! We’re sitting on a diamond half a kilometer in diameter!”

“Is that really possible, dear?”

“Well, it’s under us. Let me do a little research.”

Cal calls up Watson’s library service and reads for an hour.

“Yes, my love? What did you find?”

Where to start? “Hui, when a star of a certain size dies, and it has burned all its hydrogen and helium, it’s left with a core of carbon. If it’s too small a star to fuse carbon, it stops there. So you have quintillion tonnes of pure carbon at a few million degrees Kelvin, under tremendous pressure. It’s a dense, hot plasma of carbon. But it cools. A little piece of diamond forms. The gas condenses on the surface of that little diamond, layer by layer, forming a perfect crystal by gaseous deposition. They grow crystals on Earth that way, but not diamond crystals. Then some collision breaks up the star and we have these enormous diamonds loose in the universe. Somehow, one drifted near here and got captured, probably by Jupiter’s gravity.” 

“Dear, that has to be so rare as to be impossible.”

“Impossible is our fortune. Because it’s nearly impossible and rare, we are now sitting on, let me see, 5.2 billion cubic meters of solid diamond.”

“How much would that be worth, dear?”

“Billions. Lots of billions. A trillion dollars? There may be perfect VS1 diamonds the size of a house in there. There may be billions of wedding band size diamonds. Did you want a diamond ring, Hui? You got one!”

They sit there, eyes glowing, big grins on their faces, until they realize they have everything they ever wanted. Love, companionship, wealth, freedom, it’s all theirs. They hug and kiss and make love until they are hungry, eat and just stare at each other.

“We did it!”

“Yes, dear, we did!”

Cal sighs, “But we have to cut it. It’s too massive for our Hauler.”

So, the next day, ship’s time, they begin to map the diamond asteroid with deep radar, lidar and sound waves. It takes days. Watson records the data and produces a map of the cleavage planes. That is the way to cut the crystal.

Spiderminer lasers tiny holes along a cleavage plane. Cal sets microcharges, connects them to a detonator and Hui smiles as she announces “Fire in the hole” and fires them off. A lovely cleavage, a smooth facet, appears. But the piece does not cleave off clean. It is still attached, perhaps by some deeper imperfection in the crystal.

Hui goes out to inspect the cleavage plane. She peers into the crack. It’s perhaps a hundred meters deep. She can’t see anything at the bottom.

Gravity on this chunk of diamond is so weak Hui can jump right off at escape velocity. So she is not worried about falling. The crack is wide enough for her slender body even in a spacesuit. She wedges herself part way down and pushes.

Nothing is ever still in space. Everything is in orbit, moving, spinning. Stresses on the weak cleavage plane change as the asteroid rotates. It isn’t much of a change, but it’s enough. Van der Walls forces between the cleavage walls are in play. The crack closes. 

Cal, in the Habitat, hears her screaming over the suit radio channel. Slowly, slowly she is being crushed.

Cal activates the Spiderminer and remotely guides it to the crack, wedges it in place. The crack stabilizes. Hui is quiet, he can see her biometrics. She is still alive. 

Cal scrambles into his spacesuit. He grabs whatever tools he can find, some rope, some tackle. Hui is not so far down in the crack. He can just reach her. He uses a combination of levers and the robot to widen the crack. He pulls Hui out of the fissure. She is conscious but not moving.

She weighs nothing in the slight gravity. He carries her carefully to the Habitat. Weight is nothing but inertia is everything. He cannot move her quickly without causing more injury. Getting her through the dilated iris into the airlock is difficult. He is terrified of hurting her, he is terrified of losing her.

He gets her helmet off. He cannot figure out how to get the spacesuit off her without doing more damage.

“It’s alright, dear. Just tell me once more.”

“I love you, dear Hui. Please don’t die.”

“I will love you forever, my husband.” But her eyes close and her bio signs go flat line. She is dead, and now that she cannot be hurt any more he gets her spacesuit off. Her spine and pelvis are crushed, her spleen is likely perforated. Blood is pooling in her open spacesuit. 

Cal cannot bear to look at her wrecked torso. He closes the spacesuit as best he can and puts her outside, in the shadow of the Habitat, where the temperature is close to absolute zero. He sits beside her, crying, his helmet completely fogged, until he begins to run out of oxygen.

He manages to return to the Habitat. He manages to breathe, to eat a little. He cannot sleep. He is consumed by guilt. The ghost is now his personal demon. It was his idea to go asteroid mining. He chose this rock. 

He does not want to go outside and see her face again, but he does anyway. She is perfectly preserved, her frozen face serene and still beautiful. Sadness and loss, like a great dull knife, saws at his gut.

I’m a neurophysicist. I have her brain, perfectly preserved. I have a diamond crystal. Can I do this?

He doesn’t want to desecrate her. He wants to preserve her. She can lie in state, here on the outposts of the solar system. He can take as much of the diamond as he needs and pay off the debt, do something noble in her name. He has lost Hui, but he has the diamond. No, it was not a fair trade. Not at all. But it’s what she worked for.

Cal knows he isn’t thinking clearly. He has a radical idea. He feels impelled, pushed and pulled by the demons of loss and guilt. 

It’s what I can do for her. It’s what she would want.

It takes him a few hours to map her brain state with the Habitat’s medical scanner, one which Hui herself built.

It takes him much longer, ship’s days, to map her to the myriad nodes and imperfections in the asteroid. Watson, who works on similar principles, has the convolutional code. Using the Spiderminer’s laser and Watson’s detailed instructions, he codes Hui into the diamond, forever. 

He sets up the voder unit and the transponder over the spot where she died. In the cold vacuum, the cleavage plane has almost vacuum welded itself shut. Only a long scar shows now.

Back in the Habitat, he hesitates. 

“Watson, activate the receiver and translate.”

Her voice comes through with just a bit of crackle, but it is her voice, “Is that you, my dear husband? What happened to me? Where am I?”

He is crying. “It’s me, dear Hui. I put you in the diamond. You will live forever, my love.”

“In the diamond? Will you be here with me?”

“Yes, my love.”

“Then I will be content.”

But Cal is far from content. He has done something unspeakable. He crawls around the diamond asteroid on his hands and knees, looking for a spot that might be her. He bends down and kisses that spot, as best he can through his helmet. He crawls some more.

He goes back to the Habitat and gets drunk on the last of the wine. He hasn’t slept in a while. He is getting to the point where he has delusions. The Mars Federation Bank has come to cut him up and take his asteroid. No, that’s still a month away. But that should not be a problem. They can take a small piece for payment.

Take a piece… of Hui? Hui is the diamond! It must never be cut! He cannot cut Hui!

He lost Hui. He cannot cut the diamond. In a moment of clarity he realizes he has — nothing.