An asteroid is captured and mined, and a city is built inside. The world's outcasts are shipped out to the benefit of their society, and the detriment of Earth's.
Manuel Rodrigus is a detective in a Midatlantic city's police department. The only case he cannot solve is a string of serial killings with no usable clues. Darryl Whitherspoon drives a truck in a northeastern town. While eating breakfast, he notes articles on a recently found Near Earth Asteroid. Darryl meets Arthur Flannigan while working and tells him of his dream to go to the stars in a hollowed out asteroid. After a few years, Flannigan recruits Rodrigus to head the Police Department in the new City built inside the captured NEA. Whitherspoon is recruited to manage the warehouse. He meets a teacher who explains the new teaching system they will use, one of the maintenance supervisors, and one of the computer experts. When the city leaves the system to colonize the stars, a serial killer who targets gays and does not leave clues appears. Will Master Detective Manuel Rodrigus solve the case, or will the friends of Darryl Whitherspoon trace the culprit using their computer skills?
Excerpt
Thursday mornin', while fortifyin' my eyelids with coffee, I booted my computer, opened the news, and read the banner headline: Near Earth Asteroid Will Strike. That grabbed my attention. I stopped makin' breakfast to read the article, even though the media usually sensationalize almost everythin' beyond recognition. I wanted to see just how accurately this story portrayed the science.
The article talked about one of the "periodic asteroids close to Earth's orbit," also called Near Earth Asteroids, gave the probable dimensions of the rock, then said it "could destroy the world." I doubted that would happen, a hit that cracked the planet halfway to the core, or formed a new asteroid belt, but if it was big enough, it might shake things to the mantle and life would have to start again.
Accordin' to the article, astronomers ran the NEA's orbit through a super computer, and by continuin' to follow the orbit into the future discovered that in two more crossin's, ten or eleven years from now, it could hit earth. Maybe. Some Big Science media personalities pooh-poohed the findin's sayin' that every time the rock passed near a planet or the sun heated the asteroid and caused vapors to jet the orbit changed slightly, so since no one could predict the orbits accurately, we were safe. Others pointed out that it never came close enough to a planet for gravity to affect it, and the small changes caused by random jets of heated gas would not change the orbit significantly, so we must prepare. One scientist named Randolph said that this was an asteroid, not a comet, and asteroids did not spout hot gasses. His calculations pointed to a near miss, or possibly a new moon sometime in the future since it would fly past Venus and slow enough for Earth to capture it. I don't know enough about gravity, physics, or whether asteroids have hot flashes to have an opinion. I just drive a truck.
At the bottom of the article was a link to several other science articles, blurbs of interest about possible causes of asteroids, a mention that some asteroids, which experts thought included this one, contained metallic nickel-iron mixed with iron and magnesium-silicates available for minin'. One scientist said this one asteroid had more resources than America used in five years. I checked them out, being a fan of Science Fiction and Science Not So Fiction, the facts storin' themselves in what little I had of a brain, there to churn around each other until they finally found a place to hide and never return.
Another main article, just below the asteroid piece, explained how astronomers usin' a newly designed space telescope with light amplifiers more powerful than the Hubble and electronics to block out light even as dim as stars, found a non-solar system of planets. This system circlin' a not so far away star consisted of several large planets located in slightly elliptical orbits, similar to our system, and hints of other smaller planets in the proper places, with one faint hint havin' a spectrograph that included a strong oxygen line, whatever the hell that was. Then I looked at the time and ran, late for work again. Learnin' about spectrographs and planets of other stars could wait.
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