“And there you have it,” Isa said with a little less stridency. “‘Fuck that,’ you say. Well, Col, You had a choice to make, and you made it. It was me or that goddamn nomad life, and you chose the Belt. How’s that working for you, by the way?”
“It’s working great, as a matter of—” He stopped midway and shook his head. “Cute.” He sighed and reached for his yeastwine, which had gently fallen to the floor. He took a squeeze, looked at Isa, and said, “You’re just not going to give up, are you?”
Isa looked at him in dismay. “I don’t … oh. That wasn’t a trick, Col. Jesus, do you think I’m that clumsy?” She smiled slightly, this time a genuine one. She always looked her best right after they had argued.
Collier grinned back. “No, I guess not.” He remembered that night ages ago when the two of them had, post-coitally, shared their best argument tactics. It had been a moment of pure vulnerability far more intimate than the sex act they had just completed. Even now, as he realized he would not be able to trick or browbeat her, he remembered the moment fondly. “All right, then. Let’s talk. But,” he added, taking the last squeeze from his yeastwine package and tossing it carelessly at her, “I’m talking to you, not to the Ad Astra Corporation. And we both do some talking.”
She caught the slow-moving package and nodded. “All right. I’ll start. We know you hit some kind of strike but ran into trouble with your vendor, Kein Go. He called the Authority on you, and they investigated. You didn’t use an extractor, and I personally know you don’t have one on board the Dulcinea. Furthermore, you settled up with Starcher for an unknown amount. All of that points to an unusual kind of strike. How am I doing so far?”
Collier nodded, impressed despite himself. “You’ve pretty much got it. How do you know all of this?”
“Oh,” Isa said, moving over to the bed and gently floating down to it, “some of it through simple investigation, some of it through inside people in the Authority.” At Collier’s raised eyebrows she added, “Oh, come on, Col. You knew we have people working for us in the Authority. We practically don’t even hide it anymore.”
“Oh, I know that — I just didn’t think you’d admit it so freely.”
“You said you wanted us both to talk, so I’m talking,” she grinned slightly. “Anyway, it was enough to get me curious, so I was on my way down to the Authority level to see where you had gone. That’s when I ran into you.”
“Why you?”
“What?”
“Why did the corporation send you to track me?”
Isa looked surprised. “I’d already been tracking you, and—”
“No, I don’t just mean now. I mean from the start. From since you … when we stopped seeing each other. Did they know you and I had been together?”
Isa looked away and smoothed out the already smooth bed sheet. “Once I told them, yes.”
“When did you tell them?”
“About a year ago.” She was still smoothing the sheet.
“And when,” Collier said with elaborate patience, “did you get your captain’s commission?”
“About ten months ago.”
Collier let the silence grow. When he spoke, it was with sad understanding. “So you promised them you’d be able to make big strikes, because you knew this old crazy Belter who would make them for you. Then you’d move in, take the strike, and cash in. And if there were any problems,” he floated toward her, face first, and said precisely, “you’d shut him up with a bit of fucking.”
This time, he caught her wrist as she raised it to slap him again. “No, no. I took one already. You only get one.” He shoved her arm back, releasing her wrist. “Tell me which part of my story was incorrect, Isa. Tell me all about how you didn’t track me down, didn’t steal my strike, didn’t use my success for your advancement. Tell me, Isa, how you didn’t break it off with me because you couldn’t live my lifestyle, but sure as shit could take in the success from it.”
Isa’s eyes didn’t flash with anger anymore. She looked at him as if suddenly very tired — her eyes sagged in her face and her shoulders drooped. “You’re right. Is that what you want to hear? You’re right. I used you to move up in the corporation. That’s what it’s like, Col. If you ever grew up and sat at the adults’ table, you’d know that. You do what you need to do to survive and thrive. It’s like that everywhere.” She sniffed. “So you can curse at me all night, but it won’t change the way things are. There are no miracles out there, except the ones you make for yourself. Sometimes that means using other people.”
“You didn’t used to be like this, Isa,” Collier said softly. “You were a good woman, even if we didn’t agree on a few things. And now…”
“Save it,” Isa said, her voice hard again. “I don’t need your pity. I’d rather you called me a whore again.”
Collier was silent for a while, and the two shifted their positions in the room, as if to mark an end to the ugliness of the conversation. Isa rose to select another drink from the automat, while Collier floated over to a wall niche and settled down on a bench seat.
“So, you have some kind of secret process for extracting ore, do you?” Isa said without prelude after she had taken a squeeze from her plastic flask.
“Yes. And I’m going to keep it a secret.”
“I don’t think I need to tell you that the corporation would pay handsomely for the process. It would make our operations much more efficient.”
“How handsomely?” Collier said. He wasn’t truly interested in selling the wand, but he wanted to know the level of the corporation’s interest.
“Well, that’s hard to say without the specifics of your discovery. What can you tell me about it?”
“I can tell you that it is a completely reliable method for producing pure metals from raw materials. There is no harmful by-product, and there is no complicated set up required. No significant energy output either.”
Isa scowled. “Sounds like magic.”
Collier shrugged. “Call it what you want. How much would that be worth to you?”
“Again, given what you’ve told me, that’s still hard to say.”
“Ballpark. Thousands? Millions? Billions?”
“I can’t say,” Isa said casually.
Collier grew angry. “Then what the hell are we doing here? I’m telling you what I’ve got, but you’re not giving me any idea what it’s worth. I’m sure as hell not going to show you or anyone else from the corporation how it works without some kind of deal.”
“And Ad Astra isn’t going to make any deal without knowing what you’ve got in greater detail, Col. You know that.”
“Well,” Collier said, leaning back on the bench, “it doesn’t matter, anyway. I won’t sell it to you or any other corporation. Not for any price.”
Isa frowned. “Don’t be like that. You and me … we’ve made a mess of us. Both of us are probably to blame for that. But you’ve got a chance here to set yourself up for life, Col.” She leaned forward toward him. “Listen, I am not making promises, but if you have what you say you have, you can sell it to Ad Astra for maybe a hundred million. That’ll keep you going for a long, long time, Col. It’s what you always said you wanted: to make a strike big enough to retire on.”
“I never dreamed that, Isa,” Collier said quietly. “You did.” He rose from the bench. “And I’m not refusing to sell because you and me didn’t work out. I … loved you, Isa. I really did. At least, I loved what I thought you were, and what I thought we could be.” He pushed off and floated toward the door. Once there, he turned back to Isa, who had not turned to look at him. “I’m sorry for what I said tonight. You needed me to be something I couldn’t be, just as I needed you to do the same. There’s no blame in what happened to us. Only tragedy. Goodbye, Isa.” He grabbed his vacc suit and left the room.
Chapter Five
Collier found hims
elf outside the Demeter, and although he knew he had to have walked out of the hotel, he had no distinct memory of it. He was numb from the meeting with Isa — neither triumphant nor sorrowful. Simply numb. He was still dragging his vacc suit behind him, in fact. He took a moment and slid himself inside, leaving the front ungasketed.
His feet carried him toward the quadrangle. He was on the top level — a simple drop down to the next would bring him to the Trojan Point. But he didn’t feel like getting drunk now. Only one thing could begin to bring him peace.
“Sancho, do you copy?”
“Urm?” Sancho said, his voice drowsy.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah. You jus’ woke me up, is all.”
Collier frowned. “You don’t sleep, Sancho.”
“I know,” his computer answered crisply, “I was just playing with a new personality wrinkle. What do you think of it?”
“Cute. As long as it doesn’t inhibit your functions, sure, add it in. Listen, how are we for propellant?”
“Kind of low, Skipper. Eleven percent in the mains. Ten more in the reserve tanks.”
“Okay. Go ahead and use what’s left of the funds to top her off.”
“Aye aye.”
“But no corporate fuel, you got that?” Collier said firmly.
“No corporate fuel. Copy that. Independents only.”
“And you’d better get some biosupplies,” Collier mused. “Shouldn’t need too much. And no corp on that, either.”
“Okay.”
“I’m coming aboard. Try to have her ready for me in about twenty minutes.”
“Not possible, Skipper. Refueling and resupply will take a lot longer from independents. I’ll do my best, but we’ll be here for a good few hours.”
“Damn it. Okay, do what you can.”
Collier was back aboard Dulcinea in half an hour. Sancho informed him that resupply had already happened — an independent had agreed to offload some supplies because half her crew had decided to join up with Horizon Corporation — but refueling was taking longer. It would be at least another hour before that was finished.
“Fine,” Collier said carelessly, shrugging out of his suit and tossing it toward the aft compartment.
“Everything all right, Skipper?” Sancho asked.
“Just let me know when the refueling is done,” he snapped.
*
Hours later, Sancho had completed the refueling procedure with the independent, and announced to Collier that they were ready for untethering and departure.
Collier, who had dozed off into an unsettled sleep, woke in a foul mood. “Good. Lose the tether and orient us to the nearest unclaimed rock.”
“Aye aye. Nearest unclaimed asteroid is C-114. Well within the Ceres Group. At fifty percent thrust for two hours, it’ll take us two days, one hour, approximately seventeen minutes to reach it, assuming standard flipbraking at halfway point.”
“Sounds good. No need to tax the thrust tubes. As soon as we’re untethered, file the flight plan and get us there.”
“Copy that. .075g thrust in ten minutes.”
Collier settled into his acceleration couch, though when the thrust came, the gentle push against the cushion almost went by him unnoticed. He truly didn’t know what he wanted from Isa, but he knew enough about his desires to know she wasn’t going to fulfill them ever again. She had once been adventurous and independent. He had seen in her a kindred spirit — a seeker. Like one of his asteroid hunches, he had tried to mine her depths, only to find he had been wrong.
During the outbound trip, Collier explained to Sancho his plan. The computer hadn’t asked him, but Collier felt he knew his electronic partner well enough to detect his unspoken curiosity. The two would head for the nearby asteroid and take on worthless rock. They’d hover there for a while, converting the rock to whatever element they thought best, then head back to Ceres to sell it again.
“That sounds fine, Skipper, but I wonder if you’ve really thought this through?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking while you were down on Ceres.”
“Have you.” Collier scooped another forkful of vat-grown chicken cacciatore into his mouth.
“Yes. I’m not against us using the wand to turn a profit. After all, that’s what we’re out here for, isn’t it?”
“Go on.”
“But it’s not going to work indefinitely, you know.”
Collier stopped mid-bite. “What? What did you find out about the wand? Is its power source fading?”
“No, no, that’s not what I mean at all. As far as I can tell, the wand has to get its power from the conversion process itself. It has to be a nuclear-powered device in the purest sense. That’s not what I mean.”
Collier relaxed and swallowed. Sancho’s theory raised as many questions as it answered: for instance, even if the wand used the energy released in the transmutation process to power the process itself, it still begged the question as to how it started the process at all. Or was the device so advanced that it was the perpetual motion machine dreamed of by cranks for centuries?
At Collier’s silence, Sancho continued. “I mean that if the Authority questioned you about the sale to Go, don’t you think they will do it again, or more, if we try to repeat the process?”
Collier nodded thoughtfully as he chewed. “I have been worried about that. That’s partly why we’re going out to mine instead of just using local junk and converting it. Will be more convincing to anyone tracking our movements. If we still get investigated, a few well-placed bribes will keep the Authority off our backs.”
“Oh. I never thought of that.”
“No, I bet you wouldn’t. Not really something that you can think of, is it, Sancho?”
Sancho sounded defensive. “Well, I—”
“I didn’t mean it as an insult. It’s a credit to you that you think humans are incorruptible.”
“I don’t think that, Skipper. What, do you think I rolled off the assembly line yesterday? Hell, I know people can be bought. You taught me that yourself. No, it’s just that I didn’t think of it because, in the long run, it won’t work.”
Collier’s grin faded. “Why not?”
“Because bribes grow, never shrink. And people who are corrupt enough to be bought in the first place don’t have enough integrity to stay bought. There will come a time when the bribes you have to pay out will get bigger and bigger, and involve more and more people, and it’ll reach a tipping point where you’ll decide it isn’t worth it. Bribes will only buy us some time.”
“Maybe enough time, Sancho,” Collier said quietly. He thought for a moment, then grinned again. “You’re turning into a regular Machiavelli, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know about that, Skipper. I think I am just programmed for Realpolitik.”
“Well, whatever you want to call it, thanks for the analysis. There’s also a problem in your analysis that I foresee. The Authority provost, Fletcher, doesn’t strike me as a woman who can be bought.”
“Really? That could be a problem, Skipper.”
“Maybe,” Collier mused. He opened his mouth to start to tell Sancho about Isa, but he caught himself. If Sancho was, as he said, a believer in Realpolitik, he could never understand the conflicting feelings that existed between his master and Isa. Collier didn’t even understand them himself.
Six hours later, Sancho interrupted the silence that had evolved during the cruising phase of the trip. “Skipper, something odd here.”
“What is it?”
“Picking up a vessel with the same heading as us. Out of Ceres. Matching our velocity. They’re about four hours behind us.”
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit!” Collier floated to the control suite and strapped into the command chair. “Show me.”
The holodisplay lit up. “I’ve been tracking them for several minutes now to confirm: they are indeed heading for asteroid C-114. Telescopic image plus extrapolated enhancement on the display for you.”
It was Isa. The huge Ad Astra vessel was unmistakable, and although he could not identify the markings, he knew it had to be her.
“You say they’re matching our speed?”
“Yes. Only a slight insignificant variance.”
“How long until we get to C-114?”
“At our current speed, assuming standard flipbraking, forty-two hours, fifty-one minutes.”
Collier looked at the image for a few moments, then wiped it from midair with a swipe of his hand. “Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter,” he repeated, “because what are they going to do? There’s nothing on C-114 to steal. They’re going to watch us gather up a whole lot of rock and head back to Ceres. Let them follow us.”
“Should we try to signal them?”
“And say what?” Collier chuckled once. “No, I’ve got nothing to say to them.”
“Then I assume you don’t want to answer if they try to reach us?”
“You assume rightly.”
*
The rest of the trip was uneventful — at least, Collier assumed it was. He didn’t ask Sancho if the pursuing corporate vessel had sent a transmission, and Sancho didn’t volunteer any data to that effect, so the two of them spent the day continuing their research on the wand. They had come to the conclusion that the wand could transmute anything placed inside of it into an equal amount of a single element — and by “amount,” the transmuter read mass. The wand even changed the air trapped inside of it into whatever had been selected, so when the wand was opened, it made a popping sound as pressure inside the wand equalized. The two still hadn’t tried to convert anything into the more volatile or dangerous elements, and they both assumed the wand would change a substance into any of the superheavy elements, even ununoctium and perhaps even beyond.
“Frankly, I can’t even begin to speculate what would happen if we programmed the wand for that,” Sancho had said. “According to the wand’s operating pattern, I know how to do it, but I don’t know what would happen. Unbibium is completely unstable — half life of less than a millisecond — so I don’t know if the wand would make a stable version or not.”
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