The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  Nagara had started twisting his shoulder when he leaped and now the differential angular momentum was bringing his shooting arm around. Jacob was already aiming again. Nagara took the extra second to make his shot and allow for the relative motions. His dart gun puffed and Nagara saw it take Jacob in the chest, just right. The man’s face went white and he reached down to pull the dart out but by that time the nerve inhibitor had reached the heart and abruptly Jacob stopped plucking at the dart and his fingers went slack and the body drifted on in the chilly air, smacking into a vault door and coming to rest.

  Nagara wrenched around to cover the other two. Zak was coming at him. Nagara leaped away, braked. He turned and Zak had come to rest against the translucent organiform, waiting.

  “That’s a lesson,” Nagara said evenly. “Here’s another.”

  He touched the key in on his chest and his force screen flickered on around him, making him look metallic. He turned it off in time to hear the hollow boom that came rolling through the ship like a giant’s shout.

  “That’s a sample. A shaped charge. My ship set it off two hundred meters from Redeemer. The next one’s keyed to go on impact with your skin. You’ll lose pressure too fast to do anything about it. My force field comes on when the charge goes, so it won’t hurt me.”

  “We’ve never seen such a field,” the woman said unsteadily.

  “Outskirter invention. That’s why we won.”

  He didn’t bother watching Zak. He looked at the woman as she clasped her thick worker’s hands together and began to realize what choices were left. When she was done with that she murmured, “Zak, take out the canisters.”

  The woman sagged against a strut. Her robes clung to her and made her look gaunt and old.

  “You’re not giving us a chance, are you?” she said.

  “You’ve got a lot of corpses here. You’ll have a big colony out at Tau Ceti.” Nagara was watching Zak maneuver the canisters onto a mobile carrier. The young man was going to be all right now, he could tell that. There was the look of weary defeat about him.

  “We need the genotypes for insurance. In a strange ecology there will be genetic drift.”

  “The System has worse problems right now.”

  “With Earth dead you people in the artificial worlds are finished,” she said savagely, a spark returning. “That’s why we left. We could see it coming.”

  Nagara wondered if they’d have left at all if they’d known a faster than light drive would come along. But no, it wouldn’t have made any difference. The translight transition cost too much and only worked on small ships. He narrowed his eyes and made a smile without humor.

  “I know quite well why you left. A bunch of scum-lovers. Purists. Said Earth was just as bad as the cylinder cities, all artificial, all controlled. Yeah, I know. You flatties sold off everything you had and built this—” His voice became bitter. “Ransacked a fortune—my fortune.”

  For once she looked genuinely curious, uncalculating. “Yours?”

  He flicked a glance at her and then back at Zak. “Yeah. I would’ve inherited some of your billions you made out of those smelting patents.”

  “You—”

  “I’m one of your great-grandsons.”

  Her face changed. “No.”

  “It’s true. Stuffing the money into this clunker made all your descendants have to bust ass for a living. And it’s not so easy these days.”

  “I…didn’t…”

  He waved her into silence. “I knew you were one of the mainstays, one of the rich Flatlanders. The family talked about it a lot. We’re not doing so well now. Not as well as you did, not by a thousandth. I thought that would mean you’d get to sleep right through, wake up at Tau Ceti. Instead—” he laughed—“they’ve got you standing watch.”

  “Someone has to be the Revealer of the word, grandson.”

  “Great-grandson. Revealer? If you’d ‘revealed’ a little common sense to that kid over there he would’ve been alert and I wouldn’t be in here.”

  She frowned and watched Zak, who was awkwardly shifting the squat modular canisters stenciled GENETIC BANK. MAX SECURITY. “We are not military types.”

  Nagara grinned. “Right. I was looking through the family records and I thought up this job. I figured you for an easy setup. A max of three or four on duty, considering the size of the life-support systems and redundancies. So I got the venture capital together for time in a translight and here I am.”

  “We’re not your kind. Why can’t you give us a chance, grandson?”

  “I’m a businessman.”

  She had a dry, rasping laugh. “A few centuries ago everybody thought space colonies would be the final answer. Get off the stinking old Earth and everything’s solved. Athens in the sky. But look at you—a paid assassin. A ‘businessman’. You’re no grandson of mine.”

  “Old ideas.” He watched Zak.

  “Don’t you see it? The colony environments aren’t a social advance. You need discipline to keep life-support systems from springing a leak or poisoning you. Communication and travel have to be regulated for simple safety. So you don’t get democracies, you get strong men. And then they turned on us—on Earth.”

  “You were out of date,” he said casually, not paying much attention.

  “Do you ever read any history?”

  “No.” He knew this was part of her spiel—he’d seen it on a fax from a century ago—but he let her go on to keep her occupied. Talkers never acted when they could talk.

  “They turned Earth into a handy preserve. The Berbers and Normans had it the same way a thousand years ago. They were seafarers. They depopulated Europe’s coastline by raids, taking what or who they wanted. You did the same to us, from orbit, using solar lasers. But to—”

  “Enough,” Nagara said. He checked the long bore of the axial tube. It was empty. Zak had the stuff secured on the carrier. There wasn’t any point in staying here any longer than necessary.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “One more thing,” the woman said.

  “What?”

  “We went peacefully, I want you to remember that. We have no defenses.”

  “Yeah,” Nagara said impatiently.

  “But we have huge energies at our disposal. The scoop fields funnel an enormous flux of relativistic particles. We could’ve temporarily altered the magnetic multipolar fields and burned your sort to death.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No, we didn’t. But remember that.”

  Nagara shrugged. Zak was floating by the carrier ready to take orders, looking tired. The kid had been easy to take, to easy for him to take any pride in doing it. Nagara liked an even match. He didn’t even mind losing if it was to somebody he could respect. Zak wasn’t in that league, though.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  The loading took time but he covered Zak on every step and there were no problems. When he cast off from Redeemer he looked around by reflex for a planet to sight on, relaxing now, and it struck him that he was more alone than he had ever been, the stars scattered like oily jewels on velvet were the nearest destination he could have. That woman in Redeemer had lived with this for years. He looked at the endless long night out here, felt it as a shadow that passed through his mind, and then he punched in instructions and Redeemer dropped away, its blue-white arc a fuzzy blade that cut the darkness, and he slipped with a hollow clapping sound into translight.

  He was three hours from his dropout point when one of the canisters strapped down behind the pilot’s couch gave a warning buzz from thermal overload. It popped open.

  Nagara twisted around and fumbled with the latches. He could pull the top two access drawers a little way out and when he did he saw that inside there was a store of medical supplies. Boxes and tubes and fluid cubes. Cheap stuff. No DNA manifolds.

  Nagara sat and stared at the complete blankness outside. We could’ve temporarily altered the magnetic multipolar fields and burned your sort to deat
h, she had said. Remember that.

  If he went back she would be ready. They could rig some kind of aft sensor and focus the ramscoop fields on him when he came tunneling in through them. Fry him good.

  They must have planned it all from the first. Something about it, something about the way she’d looked, told him it had been the old woman’s idea.

  The risky part of it had been the business with Jacob. That didn’t make sense. But maybe she’d known Jacob would try something and since she couldn’t do anything about it she used it. Used it to relax him, make him think the touchy part of the job was done so that he didn’t think to check inside the stenciled canisters.

  He looked at the medical supplies. Seventy-three years ago the woman had known they couldn’t protect themselves from what they didn’t know, ships that hadn’t been invented yet. So on her five-year watch she had arranged a dodge that would work even if some System ship caught up to them. Now the Flatlanders knew what to defend against.

  He sat and looked out at the blankness and thought about that.

  Only later did he look carefully through the canisters. In the lowest access drawer was a simple scrap of paper. On it someone—he knew instantly it must have been the old woman, or somebody damned like her—had hand printed a message.

  If you’re from the System and you’re reading this on the way back home, you’ve just found out you’re holding the sack. Great. But after you’ve cooled off, remember that if you leave us alone, we’ll be another human settlement someday. We’ll have things you’ll find useful. If you’ve caught up with Redeemer you certainly have something we want—a faster drive. So we can trade. Remember that. Show this message to your bosses. In a few centuries we can be an asset to you. But until then, keep off our backs. We’ll have more tricks waiting for you.

  When he popped out into System space the A47 sphere was hanging up to the left at precisely the relative coordinates and distance he’d left it.

  A47 was big and inside there were three men waiting to divide up and classify and market the genotypes and when he told them what was in the canisters it would all be over, his money gone and theirs and no hope of his getting a stake again. And maybe worse than that. Maybe a lot worse.

  He squinted at A47 as he came in for rendezvous. It looked different. Some of the third quadrant damage from the war wasn’t repaired yet. The skin that had gleamed once was smudged now and twisted gray girders stuck out of the ports. It looked pretty beat up. It was the best high-tech fortress they had and A47 had made the whole difference in the war. It broke the African shield by itself. But now it didn’t look like so much. All the dots of light orbiting in the distance were pretty nearly the same or worse and now they were all that was left in the system.

  Nagara turned his ship about to vector on the landing bay, listening to the rumble as the engines cut in. The console phosphors rippled, blue, green, yellow as Central reffed him.

  This next part was going to be pretty bad. Damned bad. And out there his great-grandmother was on the way still, somebody he could respect now, and for the first time he thought the Flatlanders probably were going to make it. In the darkness of the cabin something about the thought made him smile.

  Dark Sanctuary

  (1979)

  The laser beam hit me smack in the face.

  I twisted away. Hot orange light seared my field of view. My helmet buzzed and went dark as its sunshade overloaded. Get inside the ship. I yanked on a strut and tumbled into the yawning, fluorescent-lit airlock.

  In the asteroid belt you either have fast reflexes or you’re a statistic. I slammed into the airlock bulkhead and stopped dead, waiting to see where the laser beam would hit next. My suit sensors were all burned out, my straps were singed. The pressure patches on knees and elbows had brown bubbles in them. They had blistered and boiled away. Another second or two and I’d have been sucking vac.

  I took all this in while I watched for reflections from the next laser strike. Only it didn’t come. Whoever had shot at me either thought Sniffer was disabled, or else they had a balky laser. Either way, I had to start dodging.

  I moved fast, working my way forward through a connecting tube to the bridge—a fancy name for a closet-sized cockpit. I revved up Sniffer’s fusion drive and felt the thump and tug as she started spitting hot plasma out her rear tubes. I made the side jets stutter, too, putting out little bursts of plasma. That made Sniffer dart around, just enough to make hitting her tough. Lurch, weave, lurch.

  I punched in for a damage report. Some aft sensors burned out, a loading arm pivot melted down, other minor stuff. The laser bolt must have caught us for just a few seconds.

  A bolt from who? Where? I checked radar. Nothing.

  I reached up to scratch my nose, thinking, and I realized my helmet and skinsuit were still sealed, vac-worthy. I decided to keep them on, just in case. I usually wear light coveralls inside Sniffer; the skinsuit is for vac work. It occurred to me that if I hadn’t been outside, fixing a hydraulic loader, I wouldn’t have known anybody shot at us at all, until my next routine check.

  Which didn’t make sense. Prospectors shoot at you if you’re jumping a claim. They don’t zap you once and then fade—they finish the job. I was pretty safe now; Sniffer’s strutting mode was fast and choppy, jerking me around in my captain’s couch. But as my hands hovered over the control console, they started trembling. I couldn’t make them stop. My fingers were shaking so badly I didn’t dare punch in instructions. Delayed reaction, my analytical mind told me.

  I was scared. Prospecting by yourself is risky enough without the bad luck of running into somebody else’s claim. All at once I wished I wasn’t such a loner. My mouth got dry. I forced myself to think.

  By all rights, Sniffer should’ve been a drifting hulk by now—sensors blinded, punched full of holes, engines blown. Belt prospectors play for all the marbles.

  Philosophically, I’m with the jackrabbits—run, dodge, hop, but don’t fight. I have some surprises for anybody who tries to outrun me, too. Better than trading laser bolts with rockrats at thousand-kilometer range, any day.

  But this one worried me. No other ships on radar, nothing but that one bolt. It didn’t fit.

  I punched in a quick computer program. The maintenance computer had logged the time when the aft sensors scorched out. Also, I could tell which way I was facing when the bolt hit me. Those two facts could give me a fix on the source. I let Sniffer’s ballistic routine chew on that for a minute and, waiting, looked out the side port. The sun was a fierce white dot in an inky sea. A few rocks twinkled in the distance as they tumbled. Until we were hit, we’d been on a zero-gee coast, outbound from Ceres—the biggest rock there is—for some prospecting. The best-paying commodity in the Belt right now was methane ice, and I knew a likely place. Sniffer—the ugly, segmented tube with strap-on fuel pods that I call home—was still over eight hundred thousand kilometers from the asteroid I wanted to check.

  Five years back I had been out with a rockhound bunch, looking for asteroids with rich cadmium deposits. That was in the days when everybody thought cadmium was going to be the wonder fuel for ion rockets. We found the cadmium, all right, and made a bundle. While I was out on my own, taking samples from rocks, I saw this gray, ice-covered asteroid about a hundred klicks away. My ship auto-eye picked it up from the bright sunglint. Sensors said it was carbon dioxide ice with some water mixed in. Probably a comet hit the rock millions of years ago, and some of it stuck. I filed its orbit parameters away for a time—like now—when the market got thirsty. Right now the big cylinder worlds orbiting Earth needed water, CO2, methane, and other goodies. That happens every time the cylinder boys build a new tin can and need to form an ecosystem inside. Rock and ore they can get from Earth’s moon. For water they have to come to us, the Belters. It’s cheaper in energy to boost ice into the slow pipeline orbits in from the Belt to Earth—much cheaper than it is to haul water up from Earth’s deep gravity well. Cheaper, that is, if the rockrats flying
vac out here can find any.

  The screen rippled green. It drew a cone for me with Sniffer at apex. Inside that cone was whoever had tried to wing me. I popped my helmet and gave in to the sensuality of scratching my nose. If they scorched me again, I’d have to button up while my own ship’s air tried to suck me away—but stopping the itch was worth it.

  Inside the cone was somebody who wanted me dead. My mouth was dry. My hands were still shaking. They wanted to punch in course corrections that would take me away from that cone, fast.

  Or was I assuming too much? Ore sniffers use radio for communication—it radiates in all directions, it’s cheap, and it’s not delicate. But suppose some rocker lost his radio, and had to use his cutting laser to signal? I knew he had to be over ten thousand kilometers away—that’s radar range. By jittering around, Sniffer was making it impossible for him to send us a distress signal. And if there’s one code rockrats will honor, it’s answering a call for help.

  So call me stupid. I took the risk. I put Sniffer back on a smooth orbit—and nothing happened.

  You’ve got to be curious to be a skyjock, in both senses of the word. So color me curious. I stared at that green cone and ate some tangy squeeze-tube soup and got even more curious. I used the radar to rummage through the nearby rocks, looking for metal that might be a ship. I checked some orbits. The Belt hasn’t got dust in it, to speak of. The dust got sucked into Jupiter long ago. The rocks—“planetesimals” a scientist; told me I should call them, but they’re just rocks to me—can be pretty fair-sized. I looked around, and I found one that was heading into the mathematical cone my number-cruncher dealt me.