A few days ago I finished a complete draft of Far from the Spaceports which I was happy with. It’s not quite a final version, and there’ll be another couple of edit sweeps, but it’s nearly there.

So to celebrate that, here’s a longish extract from near the start, as Mitnash discovers something of why he is being sent out from Earth to investigate some fraud. The scene takes place on Earth, at Mitnash’s place of work in Finsbury Circus, London. The actual release date is a few weeks away yet, as I run through final edits and the process of getting kindle, epub and physical copies ready.

Elias swirled an ident onto the wall screen. It dissolved away the ECRB logo to show instead a top-down view of the asteroid belt, unevenly coloured. There was a deep red area to the left, fading quickly through orange to yellow and green. There were a couple of other red patches, but nothing so striking as the first one. I looked at it for a few seconds. It seemed perfectly graduated at first glance, but as you studied it, little irregularities appeared here and there, anomalies in the superficial smoothness.

Little white blobs appeared roughly where you might expect them. Ceres was well away from the centre of the red area, about a radian anticlockwise. Mars was almost opposite Ceres, as well as a long way in-system. Jupiter and a whole shoal of moons were almost directly out into the cold from that red epicentre.

The Jovian data was almost all green, and bore no resemblance to the glaring red directly inwards. I blinked. Elias laughed.

“Funnily enough, we did think of comparing that ourselves. But full marks for thinking of it.”

“Why the difference?”

“There’s actually no reason they would be the same. The Jovians get a separate feed from any of the belt settlements, or Mars for that matter. Reutberg sends out EOD London rates and benchmarks to all the outstations at the same time, plus all of the calc methodologies to derive the rest. Of course the arrival time varies per station in exactly the way you’d expect, but there shouldn’t be time for anyone to take advantage.”

“This is just arbitrage?”

It sounded a disappointing end to what had started out as an interesting problem. Arbitrage was an old business – it went back at least as far as when our ancestors were trading goats for grain or shiny beads. If you were a shiny bead trader with a quick pair of feet and an appetite for moderate risk, you could juggle the trade in goats and grain to your advantage and – with a good dollop of luck – go home a richer man. But it was hard to do in a massively connected world, and friction in the margins meant that those who tried it today regularly lost the game.

There were no short cut alleyways that the modern shiny beadsman could take to get ahead of his more ponderous fellows. Reutberg sent all the information out in synchronised fractalised packages, all at the same time, and everything went at light speed. The fastest systems available kept all of the triangulated rates aligned. Unless somebody had quietly invented a wormhole, or figured out how to curve space to order, there was no way to get ahead of the system. And if someone had come up with such a thing, I was quite sure they would be using it for more than a bit of petty market fixing in the asteroid belt.

I leaned forward, touched the white blob closest to the red centre.

“I suppose I’m going there? Is that Pallas?”

“No, not even close. Pallas is round again from Ceres, in the bottom right of the plot. Those are called the Scilly Isles. There are a good number of people scattered on those rocks. It should be easy enough for you to blend in. Somewhere on those islands you should find the root of the problem. Or at any rate some good leads.”

“Who am I this time?”

“Bored coder, wannabe miner with what you think is a foolproof way to find precious metals. Rare earths in particular. Learn all you need to about commodities for the rest of today, from extraction to dealing. And it would do no harm to refresh on benchmarks too.”

He looked again at the timepiece.

“Time’s up. You have an orientation session on rare earths from one of our economists in twenty minutes on level five. Then another one with an ex-miner who will tell you all about detectors and display analytics. Then another one with me straight after that, when we’ll go over the details in the secure pod on level three. You leave tomorrow morning.”

Look out for Far From the Spaceports in just a few weeks now…

And here for fun is an ESA picture of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko as seen by the Rosetta probe…

Here’s a bit of fun from the Work-in-Progress science fiction novel Far From the Spaceports. Mitnash is one of the main characters, and he is talking to the lady running the guest house on the asteroid Bryher where he is staying:

“Get away with you, Mr Mitnash. I’ll wager that can’t be done. Look now, were you wanting the chicken or the fish tonight?”

I hesitated, not being very sure. She laughed.

“No point spending too long deciding. It’s all guinea-pig anyway. I just prepare them a mite differently and you’d never know they’re the same animal. And it’s what you’ve been having everywhere else on Scilly.”

“Truly?”

“To be sure. Tell me now, where did you eat when you arrived on St Mary’s?”

“Taji’s.”

“And what did you have? His Venusian azure duck wrap?”

I nodded, and she carried on, “So did you really think he pays to ship real duck all the way out from Earth? Just to cook it and put it in a wrap? No, Mr Mitnash, all his menu is actually guinea-pig, but he’s very good at disguising it. For just me here, I only need one male and half a dozen females. Taji has three males and thirty females. Or something like that. So now, would you like the chicken or the fish?”

Look out for more extracts, and further news of Far from the Spaceports over the next few weeks. All being well, it will be published this year…

Meanwhile, here’s a recent NASA picture of the asteroid Ceres.