Jack of Harts

The original surveyors designated Sunnydale’s sole asteroid belt with the ironic name of Cobbledale. Most locals call it the Cobbles, and leave it at that. They aren’t very rich with heavy metals, or anything else for that matter, but asteroid belts are large places and even small amounts of ore are easy to find and mine. That is why the Cobbles are home to an impressive number of mining operations, both small and large. They are also home to several large asteroids that were hollowed out, laced with gravity plating, and pressurized to allow humans to live comfortably. I’ve been in them, and I question any definition of comfort that applies to them. I’ll grant you that I grew up on a wide open planet Earth, so I’m certainly biased, but just stepping inside those tiny little tunnels made me feel claustrophobic. But tens of thousands of people somehow live inside those rocks and swear they love it. I think they might be a little bit insane, but I’m no shrink, so take my verdict with a healthy grain of salt.

The joker who named the planetary bodies of the Sunnydale system was in rare form when he named the three major moons of Torchdale. Char, Sear, and Toast are about as habitable as their names suggest. But after a liberal application of gravtech, the Western Alliance built some very comfortable settlements for the local workforce. They weren’t large enough for the quarter-million or so naval personnel in orbit to have easy shore leaves, but I did manage to spend some time there. Imagine a two or four kilometer square central park surrounded by housing and refineries for the fifty thousand or so people who lived on each moon. They weren’t much bigger than small cities planted in the middle of old impact craters, but if you stayed inside those cities, you could walk like normal and see the blue skies of a planet when you looked up. In a galaxy full of worlds ready and waiting for us to live on, we brought Earth to three airless hunks of rock on the outskirts of a star system at war. There are times that human ingenuity amazes me to this day.