The Rock Rats gt-11

by Ben Bova

  As he worked, a memory from his childhood school days back in Adelaide returned unbidden to his mind; a poem by some Yank who’d been in on the Yukon gold rush nearly two centuries ago:

  Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,

  And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;

  With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,

  A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;

  While high overhead, green, yellow and red the North Lights swept in bars?—

  Then you’ve a hunch what the music meant… hunger and night and the stars.

  George nodded solemnly as he checked out the laser’s focus. Hunger and night and the stars, all right. We’ve got plenty of that. And a stark, dead world, too, aren’t you? he said to the impassive asteroid. Come to think of it, you’ve prob’ly got some gold tucked away inside you, huh? Strange kinda situation when water’s worth more’n gold. Price of gold’s dropped down to its value as an industrial metal. Jewelers must be going bonkers back Earthside.

  “George?” the Turk’s voice in his helmet speaker startled him.

  “Huh? What’sit?”

  The kid’s name was Nodon. “Something is moving out at the edge of our radar’s resolution range.”

  “Moving?” George immediately thought that maybe this asteroid had a smaller companion, a moonlet. But at the extreme range of their search radar? Not bloody likely.

  “It has a considerable velocity. It is approaching very fast.”

  That was the longest utterance the kid had made through the whole flight. He sounded worried.

  “It can’t be on a collision course,” George said.

  “No, but it is heading our way. Fast.”

  George tried to shrug inside the spacesuit, failed. “Well, keep an eye on it. Might be another ship.”

  “I think it is.”

  “Any message from ’im?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “All right,” said George, puzzled. “Say hullo to him and ask his identification. I’m gonna start workin’ the ores here.”

  “Yes, sir.” The kid was very respectful.

  Wondering what—or who—was out there, George thumbed the activator switch and the laser began to slash deeply into the asteroid’s rocky body. In the airless dark there was no sound; George couldn’t even feel a vibration from the big ungainly machine. The dead rock began to sizzle noiselessly along a pencil-slim line. The cutting laser emitted in the infrared, but even the guide beam of the auxiliary laser was invisible until the cutting raised enough dust to reflect its thin red pointing finger.

  Be a lot easier if we could get nanomachines to do this, George thought. I’ve got to twist Kris Cardenas’s arm when we get back to Ceres, make her see how much we need her help. Little buggers could separate the different elements in a rock, atom by atom. All we’d hafta do is scoop up the piles and load ’em on the ship.

  Instead, George worked like a common laborer, prying up thick, house-sized slabs of asteroidal rock as the laser’s hot beam cut them loose, clamping them together with buckyball tethers, and ferrying them to Matilda’s bulky propulsion module, which was fitted with attachment points for the cargo. By the time he had carried three such loads, using the jetpack of his suit to move the big slabs, feeling a little like Superman manhandling the massive yet weightless tonnages of ores, he was soaked with perspiration.

  “Feels like a bloody swamp in this suit,” he complained aloud as he started back toward the asteroid. “Smells like one, too.”

  “It is a ship,” said Nodon.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I can see its image on the display screen.”

  “Give ’em another hail, then. See who they are.” George didn’t like the idea of another ship in the vicinity. It can’t be coincidence, he told himself.

  He landed deftly on the asteroid about fifty meters from where the laser was still slicing up the rock. Why would a ship be heading toward us? Who are they?

  Dorik Harbin sat at the controls of Shanidar, his dark bearded face impassive, his darker eyes riveted on the CCD display from the ship’s optical sensors. He could see the flashes of laser-heated rock spurting up from the asteroid and the glints of light they cast on the Waltzing Matilda, parked in orbit around the asteroid. The information from Grigor had been accurate, as usual. There was the ship, precisely where Grigor had said it would be.

  Death was no stranger to Dorik Harbin. Orphaned from birth, he was barely as tall as the assault rifle the village elders gave him when Harbin had dutifully marched with the other preteens to the village down the road, where the evil people lived. They had killed his father before Harbin had been born and raped his pregnant mother repeatedly. The other boys sometimes sniggered that Dorik was conceived by one of the rapists, not the father that the rapists had hacked to death.

  He and his ragamuffin battalion had marched down to that evil village and shot everyone there: all of them, men, women, children, babies. Harbin even shot the village dogs in a fury of vengeance. Then, under the pitiless eyes of the hard-faced elders, they had set fire to each and every house in that village. Dousing the bodies with petrol where they lay, they burned the dead, too. Some of them were only wounded, pretending to be dead to escape the vengeance they had reaped, until the flames ignited their clothing.

  Harbin still heard their screams in his sleep.

  When the blue-helmeted Peacekeeper troops had come into the region to pacify the ethnic fighting, Harbin had run away from his village and joined the national defense force. After many months of living in the hills and hiding from the Peacekeepers’ observation planes and satellites, he came to the bitter conclusion that the so-called national defense force was nothing more than a band of renegades, stealing from their own people, looting villages and raping their women.

  He ran away again, this time to a refugee camp, where well-clad strangers distributed food while men from nearby villages sold the refugees hashish and heroin. Eventually Harbin joined those blue-helmeted soldiers; they were looking for recruits and offered steady pay for minimal discomfort. They trained him well, but more importantly they fed him and paid him and tried to instill some sense of discipline and honor in him. Time and again his temper tripped him; he was in the brig so often that his sergeant called him “jailbird.”

  The sergeant tried to tame Harbin’s wild ferocity, tried to make a reliable soldier out of him. Harbin took their food and money and tried to understand their strange concepts of when it was proper to kill someone and when it was not. What he learned after a few years of service in the miserable, pathetic, deprived regions of Asia and Africa was that it was the same everywhere: kill or be killed.

  He was picked for a hurry-up training course and sent with a handful of other Peacekeeper troops to the Moon, to enforce the law on the renegade colonists of Moonbase. They even allowed the specially-selected troopers dosages of designer drugs which, they claimed, would enhance their adaptation to low gravity. Harbin knew it was nothing more than a bribe, to keep the “volunteers” satisfied.

  Trying to fight the tenacious defenders of Moonbase from inside a spacesuit was a revelation to Harbin. The Peacekeepers failed, even though the lunar colonists took great pains to avoid killing any of them. They returned to Earth, not merely defeated but humiliated. His next engagement, in the food riots in Delhi, finished him as a Peacekeeper. He saved his squad from being overrun by screaming hordes of rioters, but killed so many of the “unarmed” civilians that the International Peacekeeping Force cashiered him.

  Orphaned again, Harbin took up with mercenary organizations that worked under contract to major multinational corporations. Always eager to better himself, he learned to operate spacecraft. And he quickly saw how fragile spacecraft were. A decent laser shot could disable a vessel in an eyeblink; you could kill its crew from a thousand kilometers away before they realized they wer
e under attack.

  Eventually he was summoned to the offices of Humphries Space Systems, the first time he had returned to the Moon since the Peacekeepers had been driven off. Their chief of security was a Russian named Grigor. He told Harbin he had a difficult but extremely rewarding assignment for a man of courage and determination.

  Harbin asked only, “Who do I have to kill?”

  Grigor told him that he was to drive the independent prospectors and miners out of the Belt. Those working under contract to HSS or Astro were to be left untouched. It was the independents who were to be “discouraged.” Harbin grimaced at the word. Men like Grigor and the others back at Selene could use delicate words, but what they meant was anything but refined. Kill the independents. Kill enough of them so that the rest either quit the Belt or signed up with HSS or Astro Corporation.

  So this one had to die, like the others.

  “This is Waltzing Matilda,” he heard his comm speaker announce. The face on his display screen was a young male Asian, head shaved, eyes big and nervous. His cheeks seemed to be tattooed. “Please identify yourself.”

  Harbin chose not to. There was no need. The less he spoke with those he must kill, the less he knew about them, the better. It was a game, he told himself, like the computer games he had played during his training sessions with the Peacekeepers. Destroy the target and win points. In this game he played now, the points were international dollars. Wealth could buy almost anything: a fine home in a safe city, good wines, willing women, drugs that drove away the memories of the past.

  “We are working this asteroid,” the young man said, his shaky voice a little higher-pitched than before. “The claim has already been registered with the International Astronautical Authority.”

  Harbin took in a deep breath. The temptation to reply was powerful. It doesn’t matter what you have claimed or what you are doing, he answered silently. The moving finger has written your name in the book of death, nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line; nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

  By the time he’d made his eighth ore-ferrying trip, George felt dead tired. And starving.

  He turned off the laser and said into his helmet microphone, “I’m comin’ in.”

  The Turk replied only, “Copy that.”

  “I’m sloshin’ inside this suit,” George said. “The power pack needs rechargin’, too.”

  “Understood,” said Nodon.

  George unhooked the power pack and toted it in his arms back to Matilda’s airlock. It was twice his size, and even though it weighed virtually nothing he was careful handling it; a mass that big could squash a man no matter what the ambient gravity. The law of inertia had not been repealed.

  “What’s our visitor doin’?” he asked as he sealed the lock’s outer hatch and started pumping air into it.

  “Still approaching on the same course.”

  “Any word from ’im?”

  “Nothing.”

  That worried George. By the time he had wormed his way out of the ripe-smelling suit and plugged the big power pack into the ship’s recharging unit, though, his first priority was food.

  He half-floated up the passageway to the galley.

  “Spin ’er up a bit, Nodon,” he hollered to the bridge. “Gimme some weight while I chow down.”

  “One-sixth g?” the Turk’s voice came back down the passageway.

  “Good enough.”

  A comfortable feeling of weight returned as George pulled a meager prepackaged snack from the freezer. Should’ve loaded more food, he thought. Didn’t expect to be out here this long.

  Then he heard a scream from the bridge. The air-pressure alarm started hooting and the emergency hatches slammed shut as the ship’s lights went out, plunging George into total darkness.

  CHAPTER 18

  Amanda was aghast. “You refused to sell at any price?”

  Fuchs nodded grimly. Some of the blazing fury he had felt during his meeting with Humphries had burned off, but still the smoldering heat of anger burned deep in his guts. Only one thing was certain: he was going to fight. On the way from Humphries’s office to their hotel suite Fuchs had made up his mind once and for all. He was going to wipe the smug smile from Humphries’s face, no matter what it cost.

  Amanda was in the sitting room of their suite when Fuchs barged through the door, angry and impatient. He saw the expectant look on her face and realized she’d been waiting for him all the while; she’d never gone shopping or done anything other than wait for his return.

  “I couldn’t do it,” Fuchs said, so low that he wasn’t sure she’d heard him. He cleared his throat, repeated, “I couldn’t sell to him. Not at any price.”

  Amanda sank into one of the small sofas scattered about the room. “Lars…what do you expect to do now?”

  “I don’t know,” he told her. That wasn’t quite true, but he wasn’t sure of how much he could tell her. He sat in the chair next to Amanda and took her hands in his. “I told him I was going back to Ceres and start over.”

  “Start over? How?”

  He tried to smile for her, to hide his true thoughts. “We still have Starpower. We can go back to prospecting, I suppose.”

  “Live aboard the ship again,” she murmured.

  “I know it’s a step backward.” He hesitated, then found the courage to say, “You don’t have to come with me. You can stay on Ceres. Or … or wherever you would prefer to live.”

  “You’d go without me?” She looked hurt.

  Fuchs knew that if he told her his real plans, his true goal, Amanda would be terrified. She would try to talk him out of it. Or worse, once she realized that he was unshakable, she would insist on staying with him every step of the way.

  So he temporized. “Amanda, dearest… it wouldn’t be fair for me to ask you to live that way again. I’ve made a mess of things, it’s up to me to—”

  “Lars, he’ll kill you!”

  She was truly frightened, he saw.

  “If you go back to the Belt by yourself,” Amanda said urgently, “he’ll have someone track you down and murder you.”

  Fuchs remembered Humphries’s words: You’re a dead man, Fuchs.

  “I can take care of myself,” he said grimly.

  Amanda thought, I’ve got to go with him. Martin won’t strike at Lars if there’s a possibility of hurting me.

  Aloud, she said to her husband, gently, soothingly, “I know you can take care of yourself, darling, but who’s going to take care of me?” And she reached up to stroke his cheek.

  “You’d go with me?”

  “Of course.”

  “You want to go with me?” He was filled with joyful wonder at the idea.

  “I want to be with you, Lars,” Amanda said softly, “wherever you go.”

  To herself, though, she said, It’s me that Martin wants. I’m the cause of all this. I’m the reason my husband is in such danger.

  And Fuchs was saying to himself, She wants to be away from Humphries. She’s afraid of him. She’s afraid that if I’m not near enough to protect her, he’ll steal her away from me.

  And the embers of his anger burst into flaming rage again.

  WALTZING MATILDA

  The emergency lights came on, dim but better than utter darkness. George groped through the shadows along the narrow passageway from the galley to the closed hatch of the bridge. He tapped the code on the bulkhead keypad and the hatch popped open slightly.

  At least there’s proper air pressure in the bridge, George thought as he pushed the hatch all the way open. Hatch wouldn’t have opened otherwise.

  Nodon was sitting in the command pilot’s chair, eyes wide with shock or fright, hands racing along the console keyboard. The regular lights came back on, but they seemed weaker than usual.

  “What th’ fook happened, mate?” George asked, sliding into the copilot’s chair.

  “I got an electric shock,” said Nodon. “A spark jumped from the panel and the lights went
out.”

  George could see the kid was checking out all the ship’s systems. The control panel’s displays flickered almost too quickly for the eye to register as Nodon raced through one system diagnostic after another.

  The kid’s good, George thought. I made the right decision when I hired him.

  Nodon was a skinny youngster who’d claimed to be twenty-five, but George figured the kid was barely out of his teens. No real experience, outside of working on computers back on Ceres, but he had an intensity, a bright eager desire to succeed, that made George pick him as his crewman for this mining job. George called him “Turk” but Nodon was actually a Mongol, with the decorative spiral tattoos on both his cheeks to prove it. He claimed he’d been born on the Moon, of miners who’d fled Earth when the Gobi Desert engulfed the grasslands of their ancestral homeland. He was all bone and sinew, skin the color of old parchment, head shaved bald, big expressive deep brown eyes. He’d look damned handsome if it weren’t for those bloody scars, George thought. He was trying to grow a moustache; so far it was nothing more than a few wisps that made his upper lip look dirty.

  Sitting tensely in the command chair, flicking through diagnostics almost faster than George could follow, Nodon wore only a comfortable sleeveless mesh shirt over a pair of ragged shorts.

  “The power generator is off-line,” he said. “That’s why the lights went out.”

  “We’re on batteries now?” George asked.

  “Yes, and—”

  The alarms hooted again and George felt his ears pop. The airtight hatch slammed shut once more.

  “Jeezus God!” George shouted. “The bugger’s shootin’ at us!”