The Mining Colony now comprised eight modules, plus an inflatable dome that was attached directly to the asteroid. The robots had spent several weeks welding a three-meter-diameter ring onto a circular groove that they had prepared on Amalthea’s surface. The inflatable had been mated to it about a hundred days ago, and filled with breathable atmosphere. It was not quite a shirtsleeves environment, since the asteroid was cold and chilled the air in the dome. And many of the robots’ normal operations produced gases that were toxic, or at least irritating. But that wasn’t the point of having a dome. The point was to recapture and reuse the gases used by the robots’ plasma torches, making it possible to excavate and reshape the asteroid much faster than had been possible in the early days, when all of those gases had leaked away into space. Since then Dinah’s complement of robots had been heavily reinforced by newer and better versions of the same basic models that had been shipped up from Earth. And Dinah herself was now managing a crew of twelve, working in shifts around the clock. They’d been expanding the tunnel she had carved into the asteroid long ago to protect her circuit boards from cosmic rays, making slow progress on hollowing out the asteroid, carrying bits of metal away to a bigger and better smelter that was turning them into steel. Since there was no real place for it in Izzy’s master plan, they’d been putting that steel to work in reinforcing Amalthea’s structural connection to Izzy, feeding back into the political argument again.