Years ago, when the hydrogues had forbidden skymining, Cesca had called upon all clans for innovative options to gather hydrogen across the Spiral Arm. Kotto was a wealth of ideas. While the Isperos station was being established, tunnels dug, smelters built, he'd managed to rework the process chain of ekti reactors to make them more efficient. He had also invented the blitzkrieg scoops used to gulp hydrogen from gas-giant clouds, hit and run.

Somehow, Roamers always managed to do the impossible. She drew a deep breath, content with what they had achieved.Yes, impossible things. Like her relationship with Jess. But Cesca had even found a way to bridge the gap with the man she loved, after so long...

Years ago, while betrothed to Ross Tamblyn, she had fallen in love with his younger brother. After Ross was killed by the drogues, she and Jess should have had the luxury to find happiness together. But when Cesca was chosen as the new Speaker, and Jess found himself the head of his family's water business, they had put off their feelings. She and Jess had agreed that the Speaker must be strong and completely focused, at least until the crisis was over.

It had seemed like a reasonable decision at the time.

Less than a year later, they'd become secret lovers and now had finally agreed to announce their wedding plans in six months' time. Six long months... but at last the end was in sight. She would take her small measure of happiness wherever she could.

In the meantime, she needed to concentrate on her duties as Speaker.

Kotto led her into a shielded control bunker lined with ceramic tiles. "We call this our 'luxury lounge.' " Eight Roamer workers sat at stations watching the outside activity through observation screens, monitoring the shipping crews in the night-side shadows.

Isperos was bathed in the furious corona of the unstable sun, like a stone in a furnace. Giant mobile mining machines and surface smelters operated just on the night side of the terminator, where the crust had recently been baked. The machines scooped the surface layer and processed it into metals, separating out useful short-half-life isotopes created by the rain of cosmic rays.

"Our clans have always been proficient at mining outer-system asteroids," Kotto said, "but those rocks retain useless lightweight elements, ices, and gases. Here on Isperos, the sun does all the processing for us. Nothing left but the purest heavy metals." He spread his hands. "We just form them into ingots and put them onto the railgun launcher. Perfectly simple."

Cesca doubted anything about Isperos was "perfectly simple," but she admired the technical audacity. The Big Goose would never have taken such a risk.

Outside on the scabby surface, flattened road cuts led away from mining operations on the terminator line. Automated ferries delivered pallets of processed ingots to a kilometer-long railgun launcher, an electrically powered system that fired the projectiles into space, just barely reaching escape velocity. At a safe distance from the churning sun, Roamer cargo ships rounded up the drifting treasure. Traders delivered the metals to other Roamer construction sites or, more lucratively, to Hansa colonies whose industries needed the black-market resources.