Jack, food bag trailing behind in one hand, opened the inner hatch after the autocycle. He swam into darkness lit only by the red-lit glow of a few instruments up against one wall. Most likely the environmental controls. After closing the airlock hatch, he floated over to them, flashed his helmet light at the suddenly revealed control panel, and started up the lights, heat and H20 recycler. He flipped back his helmet globe. That done, he started pulling out vacuum-proof packages and tubes from the netbag, trying to figure out how you set a table in weightlessness. He solved the problem by pulling a lightpole tripod over and began tying the straps of various items onto it. By the time the lock cycled again and Colleen entered, he was already arranging things in a nicely stratified pattern of meats at the bottom, salad at mid-level, breads just above and fruit juices at the top of a miniature Christmas tree.
“Jack—do you think it’s OK if I get out of this damn suit? I’ll still have my pajamas on,” she asked with a pleading look, her helmet globe already thrown back. Colleen’s red curls floated in weightlessness, her freckles barely showing in the dim lighting of a few ceiling fluorescents.
“Sure. But I’ll keep mine on.” She gave him a look as if to wonder whether he’d spent too much time in empty space already. But she didn’t question. Which caused him to love her even more. They were two highly independent people who had careers of their own, and they knew when to give each other space. Jack twisted in mid-air and carefully watched the inner hatch as it cycled open to let in Big Foot.
“You weren’t lying—you really do have fresh eats!” exclaimed the red-faced Texan as he entered, already disassembling his suit while upside down. This rockrat, he saw, wore the standard satin pajamas popular with so many in the Belt. There was nothing that could ease the discomfort of tens of hours in a vacsuit more than satin pajamas that insulated tender skin from suit abrasions. Thompson’s pajamas were pink, purple and yellow. With a kick, Big Foot deftly turned himself right-side up, eyes friendly but watchful.
“Yes, we do Mr. Thompson,” Colleen said, now clad only in plaid pajamas, her perfume filling the air. “Do you like Camembert cheese, Big Foot?”
“What! You got that?” He tore his eyes away from the food to stare at Colleen’s curves. “Lady, I’ll eat anything that doesn’t eat me first. Yes! I like it,” said a young man who Jack didn’t think was more than 24 years old, even with the aging effect of a full beard. The Texan smiled a full-toothed, honest grin. He relaxed a little.
“Big Foot—where are the tour—Oh!” called a yellow suited short man just pulling himself out of the lock. “They’re here already.”
Jack looked appraisingly at Mr. Dutch accent, guessing that here was the brains of the outfit and the strawboss of the partnership. Floating before them was a jowly, partly bald, burgermeister-looking man of the sort whose ancestors had built the polders out of seafloor. The kind of man who finished any task he set himself. Gray eyes appraised Jack from underneath bushy black eyebrows.
“Welcome to Sundance claim A12, Mr. Harrigan.” The Dutchman looked from him to the food to Colleen. “And especially to you, Ms. McIntyre. We’re happy for your company. I’m Jacob Wertman, ex-hydraulic engineer at the Noordoost Polder.”
“And I’m Tomas Hernandez Espinel, former pilot in the Spanish Air Force and expatriate from Toledo,” called a voice from the entry hatch. Looking past Wertman, Jack saw an upside down smile on a Hispanic man in his twenties. Hernandez’ mustache was long, black and luxurious. Stupidly, he felt jealous of the Spaniard’s mustache.
“And I used to work at the lithium silicate mines in South Dakota, m’am,” piped up Big Foot from where he floated above the food tree and to Jack’s right. With Colleen on his left, Wertman in front and Hernandez moving out to the other side of the cylinder-lock to store his suit, the little five by five meter dome was fully occupied. But not crowded, considering the cubic space available in a weightless environment.
“Thank you,” they both said to the three pajamaed men, bright in rich satin colors.
While the Sundance crew moved around storing tools, data cubes and obscure equipment, he took the chance for a quick look around at the inside of the dome. Hanging on the sides of the dome were tubular bedrolls, while the concrete slab floor held boxes of supplies, hardware, spare parts and explosives tied down to eye-bolts. Jack and Colleen sat on the slab floor atop a few blankets, their backs to the double-hulled neoprene wall. A small fuel cell sat opposite them, providing power and heat for the dome. Jack looked up, seeing the Sundance crew coming back to settle down or float around the food and their guests.
“So Mr. Liaison, do the aliens charge for these eats?” asked Wertman as he pulled a pepperoni sausage and a chunk of gouda cheese from the food tree. Hernandez and Big Foot likewise helped themselves. Jack reached over to get some sourdough bread and Swiss cheese as Colleen grabbed a juicer.
“Nope. This is free. Call it a sign of friendliness and good faith. And,” he held up an ungloved left hand to forestall the burgermeister’s skeptical frown, “don’t tell me the aliens don’t give away something for nothing. I know that. In exchange for the food my job is to get candid talk out of you folks. So you’re paying,” he reassured the trio of skeptical rockrats.
“What kind of talk, Meester Harrigan?” asked Hernandez from around a mouthful of cold pork cutlet. The mustache moved like a conductor’s arms at a symphony as the Spaniard simultaneously ate, chewed and drank some pineapple juice. Jack, playing a hunch, looked over at Colleen with a signaling look.
“Why, Senor Hernandez,” said his pixie with a bewitching grin, “let’s talk about what it’s really like out here.” Wertman settled back in a freefall float, watchful. “Are you getting a fair shake at the assay office on 1 Ceres? Are the Strelka who patrol this part of the Belt treating you okay? Any claim-jumping? Is the U.N. Space Authority team of Third Worlders trying to muscle you out of your claims?” She smiled even more. “Little things like that.”
Jack watched the facial expressions of the rockrats, wondering if this group of Westerners would be as closed-mouth as the Brazilian and Hindu groups they’d previously visited. The international makeup of the Belt prospectors, which included Italians, French, Brits, Irish, Americans, Argentines, Chileans, Serbs, Kenyans, South Africans, Israelis, Hindus, Egyptians, Brazilians, Finns, Norwegians and people from 60 other nationalities, had already impressed him with how similar this new era was to the California Gold Rush of l849. Many were free-lance entrepreneurs. Some were corporate-backed teams. And some were Compact-indentured nationals of Russia and China who’d been forced to sign over their earnings to their national governments to maintain the farce that the citizen belongs to the state. Most had sold everything they owned, traveled cargo class on leased Compact spaceships, and gone out on a shoestring with equipment that lacked redundant systems, extra fuel, transponders and anything else not absolutely essential. Scores had died. But 8,000 still lived in the Belt and at Jupiter’s two Trojan clusters. Thirty-three had made it to the billionaire class with Type M asteroids rich with lithium silicates. It was a volatile mix.
“Why should we talk?” Big Foot asked, floating two meters above them near the dome’s roof. His expression seemed quite serious. Colleen’s good looks weren’t, he saw, relaxing these people as much as he had hoped. Jack took a sip out of a coffee squeeze bottle before answering.
“Because it can’t hurt, it may help, and the aliens really do want to be friends with us.” Seeing skeptical looks again, he tried once more. “Look, the aliens can’t fix all the problems caused by their visit. But they do care about suffering and injustice. And on Tycho they make damn sure the govreps listen and act. They do,” he glanced over to the silently eating Wertman, “have a position of power.”
“Okay, Mr. Harrigan, maybe you’re right.” The Dutchman, finished eating, laid back in mid-air, hands behind his stumpy neck. “Any trouble with the Big Eight Boys—we fix on our own. We got some heat-seeker missiles that’ll keep their
noses clean. Anyway, there’s plenty of room and icerocks for everyone.” The gray eyes bored into him. “But these aliens, now, we can’t muscle them. And we’ve got complaints, right boys!?”
“Damn straight!”—”Si”—Harrigan heard from the Dutchman’s partners.
“Specifically,” Wertman said, twisting in the air to now look at Jack and Colleen from the side, “we think the damn bat in charge of the Compact assay office shorted us on a two kilometer icerock and a 400 meter chunk of solid thorium. We don’t have the equipment to gauge deuterium, but I damn well know our spectro reading was 87 percent pure on the thorium! But the bat only gave us a barter value of 81 percent. We’re pissed.”
Colleen looked over at him with concern on her face. They’d heard rumors about the Arrik techmale in charge on 1 Ceres. It was adding up to a pattern he didn’t like. He wondered if Colleen’s brief visit with the Arrik T’Erees T’Say might help get rid of a bad apple in the barrel of human-alien relations. He decided to go all out.
“Jacob, that concerns me. I’ve heard similar reports. Tell you what,” he proposed, pointing at the Sundance crew with a drumstick, “let me call up a Strelka friend who has patrol duty out here. They’ll cross-check any spectro reading you got on this rock, and then file it directly with 1 Ceres. Also, Colleen here can put in a word with the Arrik Ruler’s wife about that old assay problem. Let’s get this straightened out right away. Agreed?”
The Dutchman looked at his partners, at the food, at Colleen for a long few seconds, and then back to Jack. His look was a “show me” one.
“Agreed. But tell me, how did you know we had something worth assaying?”
“Because you’ve been out here three months, and rockrats who can’t find stuff leave or die after a month. So, odds are you knew exactly what to expect from this rock we’re on. Right?”
Wertman gave him a slight grin, while the other partners fell to eating a second course. It would take at least a few hours to call in the courier ship Brilliant-Green-Sky, depending on where in the Belt they roamed. But showing his fellow humans he could produce for them was important to Jack. He handed a waxed wedge of Camembert to Colleen, hoping she’d decide to sing a few of the old English love songs he liked so well. Maybe My Lady Greensleeves would calm the hearts of this buggy crew.
♦ ♦ ♦
Two hours later the Strelka globeship had shown up, taken his message from inside the dome, traveled to the nearby thorium rock, casually vaporized some of it using its fluorine-argon laser, and called back to Jack they got a reading of 87.2 percent thorium. Wertman had then pointed down at the rock they sat on and asked for an assay of it. The globeship cut through the asteroid’s surface of carbonaceous regolith to confirm the rock they sat on was 92 percent titanium. Wertman, Hernandez and Big Foot, after yelling madly at the news and breaking out a bottle of champagne, had listened intently as Colleen spoke on a ground-to-tachlink directly to T’Say about one techmale named T’Orik T’Anum. The Arrik promised an immediate investigation and recompense to Sundance based on the Strelka assay.
Jack, with a full stomach and a wonderful lover, felt good. The Sundance crew was obviously highly interested in Colleen’s curves, smells and femaleness. But they were under control. They’d adapted to the Belt. They’d learned self-discipline. And they’d learned how to barter-Trade with the Aliens. He wondered how well the rest of humanity would adjust.
♦ ♦ ♦
Four hours after the globeship had vectored in to help, and one hour after they’d taken their leave of the Sundance rockrats, Colleen had her sat-vid shoulder unit aimed to carry live their approach to 1 Ceres.
“Wish I could have caught our rockrats chatter live on my sat-vid unit,” she said over the suitcom.
“If you had turned it on, they wouldn’t have chattered like they did.” Jack watched the navscreen as their approach vector lined up on the 945 kilometer wide dwarf planet that held one-third of the mass of the entire Belt. The vector avoided 23 other craft in orbit above the ball of rock and ice, or headed down to land at the Compact base dome. “What’s the news from the rest of the solar system?”
Colleen leaned forward and changed the comwave frequency of the buggy’s radio. “We’re now tuned into CNN’s SystemNet radiocast,” she said.
“Fuck,” he said in reaction to what they both heard over their vacsuit earbuds.
The underground Church of the Revealed Word of Christ had reappeared, this time in an unholy alliance with some soft-headed EU NeoMarxists and Libyan Protectorate jihadists. Hours ago the three groups had tried to sabotage coastal DOS plants in the U.S. and Europe, but fortunately alien and human defenses fried the buggers. What really sickened Jack was the quoted outcry of an apologist who accused the federales of brutality for executing “poor disadvantaged people whose only fault is that they grew up in the wrong environment.” The apologist had gone on to say that family heritage explained why the terrorists were forced to “use violence in the fight to redistribute the wealth of the capitalist exploiters” of disadvantaged people.
He sighed.
It had been only twenty months since Contact, and already the Earth was slowly coming apart at the seams, while others desperately tried to hold the pieces together. What would the future be like three or four years from now?
Jack knew that the world economy was slowly stabilizing after the tech and social shocks of Contact. Russia and India had not invaded South Africa, as the black side of the net said was their prior intention. The Hindu fundamentalists had been shoved out of India’s national ruling coalition, in favor of pragmatists who wanted to get rich from coastal DOS plants, lithium silicate mining and free-fall labor for the Russians and the Ziks. The EU governments, still coping with the shock of England’s departure, were focused on leasing Compact spaceships for Belt mining and deuterium extraction from the clouds of Jupiter and Saturn. Around the world, most people were following China’s focus on “let’s get rich” rather than push an outdated ideology. Only the Islamic Caliphate, a few NeoMarxists and Hartman’s Penitents were still fixated on killing the visiting aliens. Fortunately, they were a very small part of humanity. Based on what they’d seen in their tour of the Belt, Jack felt humanity’s future was bright. And the patience of the Compact aliens with human jihadist types encouraged him. Surely humanity was growing up.
Later on, he realized he’d forgotten to factor in how bloody giving birth to new life was.
DEPARTURE
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In his Attack Room in the Military Compound of Hekar, Conflict Commander T’Klose watched 73 Human-leased and Compact spaceships approach and depart from the web of busy commerce that surrounded Hekar. The thin green lines of their vectors ran through the ceiling-high hologram that glowed before his Command seat. Every ship’s identifying numbers, contents and species were noted in traffic-control ideograms adjacent to each vector track. The defensive picket shell of Gosay, Strelka, Horem and Zik light assault craft maintained a careful watch at l,000 kilometers out, and conducted pass-by inspections of each incoming ship. As they had done for the two years since the initial Human Contact. Still, he maintained the security alert. All Arrik knew that instant readiness to fight was an essential ingredient in preserving one’s freedom. And the life of his new-one. Around him, his multi-species staff performed their jobs at Tactical, Detection and Defense blocks, where were a duplicate of those on the forward Command Deck of Hekar.
His Strelka Tactical assistant, Ferocious-Green-Feelings, was coiled in her basin to his left, her scales reflecting the blue shimmer of her Detector flatscreen. She stirred.
“Commander! Cargo supply craft 437 is exceeding the maximum approach speed!”
What? No!
“Dispatch Brilliant-Green-Sky for an emotion-check flyby! Contact and direct subject spaceship to halt its approach,” he ordered, leaning forward.
“Complying,” the Strelka said.
“Defense, activate all directed energy weapons. Put th
em on auto-fire at anything within a hundred Horempads,” he whistled.
The Zik Grade 1 Defender in charge of the ship’s beam weapons eyed him and Ferocious with two perceptor stalks. In milliseconds the Zik activated all weapons pods and set the ship’s equatorial lasers and beamers to auto-fire.
“Ready to defend,” clacked Nomik the Zik.
On the screen ahead, ideograms showed the cargo vessel accelerating up from the normal 4,000 kilometers per hour approach speed for any vessel within 5,000 kilometers of Hekar. It was 900 kilometers out from his home.
Ferocious jerked in shock. “Humans! Intent to harm us, says my Brother-In-Thought! Speed, now 9,000 kilometers per hour. Seven seconds to impact.”
“Hekar! Backup. Now!” he yelled to the ship’s sentient computer. “Nomik—fire all beams!”
In the hologram the intruder’s track ran blood-red, heading straight for Hekar, accelerating madly. To one side, the blue dot of Brilliant-Green-Sky pulsed, discharging neutral particle laser fire at the intruder. The beam missed.
“Four seconds,” Ferocious hissed.
“Firing!” clacked Nomik.
On the holo T’Klose saw fourteen laser pods fire at the incoming ship. Most missed as the ship used attitude jets to change its vector line. One hit.
An infrared glow flared at the nose of the craft. But it kept coming, accelerating madly as its fusion pulse drive flared a long stream of golden flame.
Hekar itself vibrated slightly.
In the hologram, a brilliant red light flared brightly, pushing a thermonuclear fireball kilometers out from the now-vaporized cargo ship. The fireball blossomed just two hundred kilometers from the outer skin of Hekar.
“Too close!” he yelled. “Hekar! Why didn’t you send the tachpulse destruct signal earlier!”
Retread Shop 1: First Contact Page 32