The High Card
Fiction - by Humphrey Price
It would be my last poker game in the Grand Space Hotel casino if I lost this hand. I was wheeling and dealing at the prospectors’ table, stuffing the game with the last of my cash to get a high stakes pot. I slipped in a marked deck, visible only through my trick contact lenses. My card shark skills are considerable, so I can deal out whatever cards I want. My mark was a red-haired prospector named Cinnabar. Nobody was sure if that was a first name or a last name or if it was even her real name, but she certainly was easy on the eyes.
My name is James Ardby, and like most who were in the game, I’m an asteroid prospector. It’s not unusual for a prospector to be near broke and in debt, and I definitely fit the bill. The telescope on my ship is one of the best, and I had just discovered a binary metal asteroid worth at least several billion. Its closest approach to Earth was in a couple of days, and time was running out. I made the discovery and registered it, giving me limited-time first rights. The rendezvous window would soon be gone, and I didn’t have a booster for my ship to take me out and stake the claim. I was forced to sell my booster several months earlier to pay off a loan that came due. To claim an asteroid, you have to tag it in person. That’s the law. It was designed that way by the wealthy elites to keep the poor riffraff from claiming every asteroid in the sky by sending out cheap robotic craft.
It was an interesting and motley crew at the table. Not quite the United Nations, but close enough. There was the red head, another woman prospector who was from Brazil, a hot-tempered French Canadian bloke, a Korean who was pleasant enough but used an electronic translator that spoke in an irritating voice, a very young and wealthy Mexican woman who was not a prospector but was vacationing, an Australian, a movie star from Hollywood, and me being half African, a quarter Italian, and a quarter god knows what.
When it was my turn to deal, I chose five card draw. Everyone else hated that game, but it was my favorite, the original poker played in the wild west. I made sure everyone received a good hand to kick up the first round of bets. I raised, and others did too. One of the hands I dealt out was leading to a straight and another to a flush, and I made sure they closed on the draw. I gave a fake tell that I was bluffing and then drew three cards to reinforce that idea. I gave Cinnabar a full house after the draw, so she was pretty confident. The problem for her was that I engineered the bets so she had exhausted her stake. She had very few chips left but, with her full house, was desperate to stay full in the game and maximize her take.
As the bets racked up and raised, I offered the lovely Cinn a way to cover her bets. “Looks like your stash is about to run out,” I casually observed with a calculated hint of a smile. “I’ll stake your bets for an IOU.”
She glared at me suspiciously with her emerald eyes. “Why the hell would you do that? Even if you think you’ve got this hand, what’s in it for you?”
“It turns out there’s something I need. I’ve registered a metal binary but don’t have a booster to get there, and the departure window closes in a couple of days.” There were raised eyebrows at the table. Everyone was paying attention. Metal asteroids are pretty rare and valuable. I continued, “Here’s my offer. If I win, I’ll cover your IOU, but the deal is you have to give me a ride out to the binary so I can claim it. It’s a six month trip.”
“You gotta be kidding. Winning this pot is not enough to make that deal worth my while.”
“It is if I give you one of the asteroids in the pair. That’s the rest of the deal, and it’s a pretty sweet deal. But, if you win this hand, you get to just take the pot, minus my stake, and I’ll mosey on to find another way out to my binary.”
Her stare bored a hole in my head for about twenty seconds. “Okay, Jim. You’ve got a deal. Do you want me to sign anything?”
“Nope.” My free hand motioned around the table. “Lots of witnesses here, and my word is good.”
She nodded her head. “We’re on. Put in twenty five thou for me.”
I flashed a grin and shoved out the chips. The bets raised even higher. No one folded, the pot was huge, and I covered Cinn’s bets with my pile of chips. Cinn was sure she had won with her full house until I laid down my four kings. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth around the table, but now I had a pile of cash and a ride out to my binary.
Time was short, and Cinn was broke and not in the best of moods, so she left to get her ship and booster ready. I stayed and played a few more hands to be polite, and I let the other players win some of their money back, but not too much. Then I cashed out and ran to my ship to get the gear I needed and transferred over to Cinn’s ship.
Cinn flew a standard model S39234 prospector’s spaceship, pretty much like mine. It was a basic pressurized cylinder, with a trusswork cage at the front end and a propulsion module at the aft. There were a few windows and a small cupola for viewing and navigation. The interior featured a modest main cabin with a command center, kitchen, dining table, and exercise equipment. The spartan layout included a small enclosed bathroom with a shower, and a tiny private cabin that was Cinn’s room.
As we undocked from our berth with Cinn in the pilot’s seat, I was up in the cupola to take in a spectacular view of the slowly rotating toroidal space station as it receded into the distance with a magnificent luminous blue curved Earth looming overhead. Although mostly populated by rich space tourists, the Grand Space Hotel was a hangout for prospectors, scientists, engineers, and Space Force guardians on short leave. It was the hot spot in low Earth orbit. From the cupola, I could see the front of our ship which sported a tasteful painting of a scantily clad buxom red-haired vixen taking a bite out of a red apple and, in regulation font, the stenciled name of the vessel, Cardinal Cinn.
A couple of orbit change burns and an hour and a half later, we arrived at the parking orbit where we docked with a commercial robotic taxi booster to take us up to the high elliptical Earth orbit where departure boosters were parked. The taxi dropped us off at Cinn’s booster, and the Earth looked pretty small from way up there.
The booster was impressively huge, fully fueled, and ready to fly. I was drooling at the sight. Cinn could pull a lot of delta V with that puppy, which was just what I needed. It was a far sight better than the old booster I had sold off.
Cinn and I went through checklists and prepared for the departure burn. The Earth loomed larger by the hour as we approached perigee at 200 km altitude. When the time came, we received final authorization from Space Traffic Control. “Cardinal Cinn, you are cleared for departure burn.” The burn was good, and as the Earth receded into a pale blue dot, we were off on a month-long transit to catch up with my twin metal asteroids.
We configured the ship for artificial gravity and spun up to 3 rpm, giving a nice one quarter g in our living quarters. The AG made exercising, eating, going to the bathroom, and lots of other things easier.
With both of us having been on long hauls before with other crews, we knew the drill for getting along. We took turns preparing meals and divvied up the chores. Cinn spent a fair amount of time in her cabin with the door closed. Once we settled in for the long haul, Cinn and I worked together nicely. I never kiss and tell, but I will say that in general we were pretty friendly, which is a good thing for a six month mission together in a confined space.
Then it was time for the rendezvous burn. We despun and fired up those big engines. When they shut down, we were flying alongside my binary at a safe distance. Using the small thrusters, we slowly closed in on the target.
As we approached the asteroid pair, we eagerly gazed through Cinn’s telescope to see how it looked. The asteroids were really close together, maybe even just touching. That could be a disaster. Contact binaries were extremely difficult to deal with. As we got closer, we could see that one of the pair was a beautiful clean metal asteroid, but the other was not. It was an ugly rubble pile. The two bodies were just touching – a contact binary. I was not expecting such a disappointing outcome.
Cinn was obviously devastated by our situation, and we avoided discussing it until we completed the final rendezvous and were station keeping with the pair from a distance of about a quarter of a kilometer. Something didn’t look quite right. My gut told me that the center of rotation wasn’t where it should be. I made a few calculations and did some hard thinking. “How much extra propellant do we have?”
My charming red-haired companion shrugged and replied, “Probably a couple of tons. Maybe more.”
“That should be more than enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“To push the metal one. Increase the energy of the system. Get those two bad boys separated.”
Cinn’s mood brightened. “Do you really think that will work?”
“I think so. These two aren’t too big, and they are barely in contact. You can even see them roll against each other, so they haven’t gotten glued together. It won’t take a lot of push to get them into a higher orbit around each other and a safe distance apart for capture. Are you game to give it a try?”
She thought about it and then led off the negotiation we both knew was coming. “Yeah, I’ll give it a try, but this is my ship and my booster. I didn’t come all the way out here to bag a worthless rubble pile. The IOU implied that I was getting half of a metal binary.”
“You may have interpreted the IOU that way, but I just said you would bring us out here for me to claim one of the pair, and you would get the other one.”
“You said it was a binary with two metal asteroids.”
“That’s honestly what I thought.”
“I’m taking the metal one.”
“I’m the discoverer of the binary, and I have the rights to the claim, so it’s my choice. I’m really sorry it turned out this way.”
Cinn was becoming agitated, and her face was beet red. “You won all my money in that damn poker game, and I think you cheated. The rubble pile isn’t even worth retrieving. I’m going to be broke. I’ll have to sell my booster, and I’ll be out of business.”
“Been there, done that.” I kept my voice calm to avoid escalating the situation. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s get a deck of cards, and we’ll draw for it. The high card gets the metal asteroid.”
“And you’re going to cheat and get the high card.”
“I won’t cheat. Scout’s honor.”
“I’ve heard all about your reputation, Jim. You’re no Boy Scout.”
“You’re right. I was a Girl Scout.”
“C’mon.”
“Yeah. My big sister was in a Girl Scout troop, and they let me join. Really. I never got my gold award, though.”
Cinn stared me down with a mean look, but I could see she was calming down. I floated over to the box where we kept the poker stuff and brought out a deck of cards. I held it out. “You shuffle.”
She didn’t make a move, and I thought she wasn’t going to go for it. I kept holding the deck out as we locked gazes. After half a minute, she reluctantly reached out and took the deck. Cinn floated to the dining table, and I sat opposite her. She carefully inspected the cards and made about a dozen shuffles.
I said, “I’ll cut the deck. You can watch as closely as you want.” She watched me like a hawk as I made a simple cut. “Do you want to pick the first card?”
“No, you pick. Right off the top.”
I slowly drew off the top card and turned it over. It was the one-eyed king.
“Crap,” she muttered, under her breath.
“Your pick,” I said.
Cinn had a resigned look of hopelessness as she drew the next card. She gasped as it was revealed to be the ace of hearts. Cinn was in shock, and my expression was one of extreme distraught and emotional devastation. I won’t tell you what I said, but I had a few choice words. More than a few. I excused myself to the toilet facility for privacy, explaining that I wanted to cry alone. She respected that and retreated to her private quarters barely able to hide her joyful mood.
Half an hour later, we met again under calmer circumstances. We each ate a bland and boring ready-to-eat meal while we worked out the details of how to boost the metal asteroid. The contact binary was rotating at an imperceptibly slow rate. That’s why they were so close together. Their orbital energy was just too low. We were aiming to fix that.
We measured the metal asteroid at about 17 meters in diameter. We lived and breathed asteroid prospecting, so we each silently did the mental calculations. If it was a solid metal asteroid, which it looked to be, it would weigh about 20,000 metric tons and the raw material would be worth something like three billion dollars after it was delivered into a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon. That would be a pretty good haul for Cinn. If it all worked out, she could retire at a young age if she wanted to.
The rubble pile was just an ugly jumble of worthless rocks ranging in size from one meter diameter boulders to pebbles and sand. Sometimes rubble piles were sort of glued together, but all of the rocks in this one looked to be sliding around in a loose turmoil as the two asteroids slowly wobbled against each other. It was a scary looking monster, and we hoped it wouldn’t start throwing off dangerous rock projectiles as it got jostled about.
I’d been taking mental notes on where the center of mass of the rotating system was ever since we arrived, because it just didn’t look right, and it was obvious to me that the rock pile was not as dense as the metal asteroid, but it was way more dense than a typical rubble pile. Cinn was so focused on the metal asteroid that she never noticed or paid attention to that.
We were going to use a non-standard mode of operation, so we had to make adjustments to the guidance algorithms. The booster wasn’t set up for pushing a 20,000 ton mass, and it would be confused about blasting away at high thrust and seeing almost no acceleration. We adapted the fault protection parameters to keep the booster from automatically shutting down when that happened. If we screwed it up and things went off-nominal, we ran the risk that the flight computer would just give up, reset, and go into safe mode. Then we would essentially have a dead booster for a few minutes until it rebooted. We worked together on it for about two hours and decided we had done the best we could.
It was time to rest up for a few hours. She slept in her room, and I slept in my usual spot, strapped into a chair at the command console. We got up, ate energy bars, and prepared for our crazy maneuver. I climbed into my EVA suit, and Cinn helped me check it out and get cycled through the airlock. The suit was tethered, and I was using an umbilical for oxygen to preserve what was in the suit’s tank, just in case. With a bundle of equipment strapped to one side of the suit, I used handholds on the exterior of the ship to traverse to the trusswork cage in front.
After securing the bundle to the cage, I removed the three contact arms one by one and fastened them in position in the front of the cage. Normally they were used like landing gear for setting down on a large asteroid, but we were going to use them for making contact to push an asteroid. After I was satisfied that they were correctly positioned and securely in place, I opened the side gate to the cage and retreated inside the sturdy trusswork for safety.
Cinn piloted the spaceship to approach the metal asteroid from the trailing side and line up with its center of mass. She slowly closed in to contact the target at just the right spot. In my position in the cage, I had a nice close up view as the three legs made contact.
Cinn’s voice came over the comm. “How’s it look, Jim?”
“Fantastic, Cinn. Outstanding work. You can be my favorite pilot any day.”
“You ready to roll?”
“Yep. Go to town.”
Cinn fired ‘er up, and I could feel a faint vibration as I held onto the bars of the cage. At first everything looked great. Our contact with the target was rock solid, and the ride was smooth. The booster was thrusting on one throttled-down engine, and the attitude control algorithms were guiding the engine gimbals to keep it lined up through the center of mass of the metal asteroid. Cinn called out, “Acceleration stabilizing at point three balls two seven g,” which is .00027 times the acceleration of gravity on Earth. Not much, but over time it adds up. After ten seconds, we had increased the velocity of our asteroid by almost three centimeters per second. Then all hell broke loose.
The metal asteroid was pulling away from the rubble pile, but as the edge of it scraped through the scree, rocks and sand were kicked up like an explosion that threw out debris in all directions. Sand and pebbles whizzed through the bars of the cage, smacked into my suit, and pinged off my visor, making a few pits and scratches along the way. Then a half-meter sized boulder flew right toward me at high velocity, and I reflexively winced and threw my arms out in front of the visor. The boulder slammed into the side of the cage and bounced off. I have ever since had a great appreciation for the cage feature on the S39234 series ships.
With the impact, the contact arms were knocked out of position, and our vehicle jackknifed with respect to the asteroid, with the front end, where I was, rotating and slipping so that only two of the legs were still in contact, and they had skipped off center. The booster end was rotating ominously toward the rubble pile. Our Frankenstein fault protection fix shut down the booster engines, which was good. The flight computer got confused and crashed, which was bad. Just before the booster shut down, the thrust vector went off track and added spurious rotation and translation to the vehicle. I could see that the aft end of the booster was going to pivot into the rubble pile.
Over the com, Cinn said, “Jim, the booster’s dead.”
“Can you stabilize our position with what you’ve got on the ship?”
“I’m trying. The torque I’m getting with the thrusters and reaction wheels on the ship is just not enough to overcome the inertia of the booster, and I can’t translate away without spinning up the booster in the wrong direction.”
“I’m heading for the booster to see if I can do anything.”
“What can you do? Be careful. Watch out for thruster plumes.”
“Roger.”
The cage door was slightly bent from the boulder impact, but with my adrenaline pumping I was able to force it open and exit to the side of the ship. I pulled myself hand over hand as fast as I could toward the booster. Just as I was reaching for the first hand-hold on the booster, I was violently jerked backward, losing my grip and flying off toward the rubble pile. I forgot about the tether and had reached the end of my rope. It was a classic amateur EVA error and one that I might not recover from.
From my new vantage point sailing though open space, I could see that the side of the booster was going to hit the rocks soon. The skin on the tanks was thin, and the booster would probably rupture, shooting out liquid hydrogen propellant under pressure, sending us flying god knows where, and leaving us with no propulsion to get back home. I slammed into the rubble pile sideways, but luckily my suit wasn’t breached. I kicked off to head back to the booster and pulled on the tether with my gloved hands to help guide me back. I banged hard against the side of the ship but was able to grasp one of the hand-holds before I bounced away.
I pulled the quick releases on the tether and the umbilical, so now I was on suit internal power and life support and had no safety lifeline. My heart was pounding, and the visor was fogging from heavy breathing. I made it hand-over-hand to the aft end of the booster as it was about a meter away from impact with the rocks. Clutching the rear structural ring, I kicked off to place my boots on the rubble pile and stood between the booster and the asteroid. Like Atlas, I was going to hold up the Earth and try and prevent impact, but unlike Atlas, I was likely to just get crushed. My boots were falling through the loose rocks, and I was swimming and treading though them with my legs to keep them underneath me while I was pushing as hard as I could on the rocket overhead.
Cinn’s small thrusters and the reaction wheels on the ship were definitely slowing the rotation of the vehicle, but the fragile side of the booster was still moving ever so slowly toward the rocks. Even though the impact speed would be snail-pace slow, the enormous inertia of the rocket stage would carry it through to crush the side, and probably me too.
My feet kept sinking through the rubble like quicksand, and I was buried up to my waist. Then I found a solid purchase beneath my feet and stabilized myself directly below the rocket, pushing it as hard as I could. The ship’s reaction wheels provided only a piddly torque, and the thrusters were twenty pounders. I figured I was pushing with at least a hundred pounds, so I was essentially adding a hundred pound thruster into the mix.
My muscles were strained and burning, but the rocket kept mashing toward me. Then, as I was almost ready to collapse and give up, it stopped. With renewed effort, I pushed as hard as I could, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, the booster began moving away. I had given all I could, so I relaxed and held on. I stomped around a bit, and whatever I was standing on underneath the rock pile sure seemed hard and solid. Maybe it was a huge boulder or some kind of solid core.
“I was watching you through the video cameras,” Cinn said over the comm. “I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to distract you, but you did it. You saved the booster and our asses too. Nice work, Jim.”
I tried to respond, but my lips and throat were dry, and no sound came out. I popped out the water straw inside my helmet and glugged down some water. Then I croaked, “Well, you did some nice flying, and you jockeyed the wheels and thrusters better than anyone could. It took everything we had to save the ship.”
The booster continued moving away, and it dragged me out of the rubble pile as I held on. After I was free, I did a cursory check for suit damage and used the handholds to get back to the airlock. By then, the computer had fully booted up, and Cinn was in complete control of the vehicle. While she maneuvered the ship to a safe position away from the binary, I coiled up the tether, plugged in the umbilical, and tidied up the equipment. When I cycled in through the airlock, Cinn helped me out of the suit, and she gave me a very long hug, even though I must have smelled awfully bad.
I showered and changed to clean clothes while Cinn whipped up a pretty nice dinner. We didn’t say much while we ate, but then we both went into the cupola to take a look at the binary. It was beautiful. The metal asteroid and the rubble pile were now in a new orbit around each other and separated by about six meters. It was going to be tight, but we should have enough clearance to be able to bag them for retrieval. The confined space of the cupola was pretty cozy, and Cinn was definitely in a friendly mood.
After a good long sleep, we had breakfast and got to work bagging the all-metal prize. I went back out on EVA to place Cinn’s capture system on the cage at the front of her ship, then climbed into the cage to watch. Again, we approached the metal asteroid from the trailing side in its slow orbit.
Asteroid capture is always a tricky operation, but I wasn’t too worried. By now, I had complete confidence in Cinn’s driving. When we were lined up perfectly with that beautiful piece of interplanetary metal, she deployed the capture bag. Spindly mechanical arms unfolded, pulling out a sturdy fabric cylinder big enough to hold the small asteroid.
Like a game of French bilboquet, Cinn put the ball in the cup by flying the deployed bag around the asteroid. As soon as it bottomed out, motorized cables pulled taut like a drawstring bag and tightly closed around the precious hunk. I exited the cage and used a jet pack to fly around the cinched bag and make sure it was completely secure.
“How’s it lookin’ out there, Buck Rogers?”
“Looks great, Cinn. Nice flying, as always. The docking port on the bag hub is clear and in perfect position for a SEP tug to connect. I’m going to get back in the cage, and then you can disconnect the ship.”
“Roger, Buck. Let me know when you’re ready.”
When I was safe in the cage, I gave Cinn the word, and she undocked the ship from her capture bag. “Nice,” I said. “Now I’ll set up my capture rig, and we’ll bag the rubble pile.”
“I’m happy to do that, Jim, but are you sure you really want it? It looks completely worthless, and the tug ride back to DRO will be expensive.”
“Yep, it’s my baby. I at least want to bag it. Then I can decide later if I’m going to bring it back.”
“Let’s do it then.”
We repeated the bagging operation with my rubble pile, and it went without a hitch. Each of the two asteroids was now wrapped up like a Christmas present, ready to be retrieved by a robotic ion drive tug and diverted into a long-term stable distant retrograde orbit around the Moon where all prospectors’ asteroids and comets were legally registered and stored for mining.
It had been a long day, and I was happy to cycle into the ship and celebrate. While I showered, Cinn configured the ship and booster for artificial gravity and spun up to one quarter g. I emerged in fresh clothes and offered to fix dinner. First things first, I opened my booze box and handed Cinn a bottle of pinot noir and a wine opener. “Can you open this for me? It’s pretty good stuff.” I rummaged through my bag and brought out a large can. “I’ve been saving this for a special occasion. This is confit du canard from Toulouse, France.”
“What’s that?
“It’s duck.”
“Canned duck? I can’t believe you brought that. Is it any good?”
“You’ll find out. I’ll microwave some rice and frozen veggies to go with it.”
The duck was fabulous and so was the wine. I shared a bar of extra dark chocolate for dessert. We chatted for a while and were pretty relaxed by the time we polished off the bottle. Cinn and I swapped prospector war stories, including our great finds, our perilous adventures, the scoundrels who cheated us, and the ones that got away. When we ran out of stories, Cinn and I made short work of cleaning up, and then she retired to her quarters for the evening, probably to make arrangements for hiring a tug to bring back her heavy metal baby. I fired up my laptop and scheduled the retrieval for my rubble pile.
The five month ride back to Earth went smoothly. We read a lot of books, binge watched old scifi shows, and played poker. We’d eaten most of the good food, so we were down to nibbling through freeze dried stuff for the last few weeks. At least we weren’t getting overweight. Cinn’s booster got us back to high Earth orbit, and a taxi got us down to low orbit where she dropped me off at my spaceship. We said our goodbyes and didn’t see each other again for a long time.
I lived out of my ship for the next two years with occasional visits to the casino at the Grand Hotel, and my poker winnings provided me enough to live on. It was a happy day when the ion drive tug delivered my bagged-up rubble pile into orbit around the Moon. I still didn’t have a booster, but I didn’t need one to get to lunar orbit and assay my rubble pile. It took almost a month to get there on a weak stability boundary trajectory.
After arriving at my rubble pile and docking with the capture hub, the first order of business was to open up the bag and free the asteroid. I went outside on a one-man EVA in a jet pack. It took a few tugs here and there to release all the cinches, but I got the bag opened up all the way. I held on to the cage in front while I remotely piloted my ship to back away with the bag, and the ugly rubble pile emerged into open space.
I jetted over and stood on the thing, as much as you can stand on something with almost no gravity. I picked up a rock and threw it into the bag through a hole in a net I had rigged over the opening. It bounced around in the bag, but the net kept it from flying back out. I picked up more rocks and threw them in. I had to use a crowbar to dislodge some of the stubborn boulders. After a couple of hours, I had removed enough rocks to see what was under all that ugly scrabble.
With the jet pack holding me in place, I leaned into the spot I had cleared. My heart raced as I gazed upon a smooth clear glass-like surface. Even though this is what I had suspected, I was still overcome with emotion. Tears filled my eyes, which is not a great thing in zero g in a space suit. I had to shake my head to get them to fly away.
For millions, perhaps billions of years, this hunk of ancient solar system flotsam had been a sister to Cinn’s chunk of metal that may have been forged at the core of a long-destroyed proto-planet in our solar system. This clear transparent crystal I was looking at was also formed under intense heat and pressure. With shaking hands, I removed the thermal absorption tester from my utility belt and held it against the glassy surface. Yep, it was solid diamond, a huge hunk hidden under that covering of loose rocks.
I cleared away more of the rubble and jetted all around my gem taking video, photos, and spectrograph readings. I found a small knobby crag on one side, so I positioned myself with the jetpack thrusters and got out a hand-held laser, hammer, and a chisel from my tool pouch. With the laser, I cut a groove at the base of the crag. Then, I went to work with the hammer and chisel.
It was hard work, and I almost gave up, but then I got lucky with one of my blows, and the crag cleaved and separated. There was a nice raw diamond about the size of a bowling ball. Stowing my souvenir in a sample bag, I cycled back into the ship and registered my new property with the International Space Mining Claims Commission.
After a good night’s sleep and coffee, I completed final checkouts and waved goodbye to the largest known diamond in the solar system. My 15,000 ton gem is assayed today at 75 trillion carats and valued at more than one hundred trillion dollars. I have a team of diamond cutters who shear off pieces of the rock for sale to industrial buyers, jewelers, and scientists. My ship has been renamed King of Diamonds, with a painting of the one-eyed face card next to the regulation stenciled lettering. I keep it docked at the hotel and pay an outrageous parking fee.
I still use my lucky telescope to discover new asteroids. It’s my hobby. I sell my finds or give them away to people I like. I’ve steered a few of them Cinnabar’s way. She still enjoys going out and bagging new ones. Cinn suspects that I cheated in our draw for the high card out at the binary, but I would never admit to that. As for me, I’ve taken up residence in the presidential suite at the Grand Space Hotel. Everyone calls me Diamond Jim. I’m the star of the poker table, and I never cheat anymore. Well, almost never.