Rock Killer

by S. Evan Townsend

  “Did you have a brother or sister who did as your father wished?”

  “No,” Alex said. “I was an only child. That’s too bad because it might have been better if I had.”

  “Don’t count on that,” Bente grumbled. “My father is always holding up my younger brother, Akio, as the perfect child. Does your father do anything like that?”

  “No,” Alex said. “He died a few years ago.” His complexion darkened and his black eyes grew angry. “Some piece of garbage gang killed him in a robbery.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bente said softly not knowing what else to say.

  Alex shrugged. “It’s okay. I’m used to it now,” he said with a sadness that proved he was lying, if only to himself. “They never found them; never prosecuted. He was just one more Korean storeowner killed by the gangs. My mother didn’t live long after that.”

  Bente stared at him with empathetic eyes.

  “Bente,” Alex asked, “could you do something for me?”

  “Yes?”

  “First, don’t lose your father. It’s not worth it. If he’s alive when you get home, reconcile your differences.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  “And second,” Alex said, “would you hold me?”

  Bente smiled slightly. “Sure.” She pushed off the wall. They met in the middle of the room and held each other for a few long, friendly minutes. Despite differences in age and status Alex knew they were now friends.

  One cannot share hidden pain with another without some kind of bond forming.

  “I’ve got to get back to the control room; it’s my watch soon,” Bente said when they separated by mutual, albeit tacit, consent.

  “I should go up there myself,” Alex said. “I’ll go with you.”

  ***

  Knecht, still wearing the suit but with the bubble helmet removed, was standing over the navigation computer. “Here goes nothing,” she said more to herself. She punched a power button.

  Griffin was surprised. He expected to hear or feel something. Instead, the only indication was green lights on Knecht’s read-out.

  “Full power available,” Knecht crowed happily. “That’s it,” she continued, working the computer. She heaved a large sigh. “It’s a good thing the reactor wasn’t damaged. Prepare for acceleration...now!”

  The Rock Killer’s acceleration quickly built up to one and a half times the acceleration of Earth’s gravity.

  Griffin smiled–smiled despite the pain. The pseudo-gravity was killing his broken arm. “How long to rendezvous with the asteroid?”

  Knecht worked on her computer. “At full acceleration, 12 ½ hours, assuming the asteroid didn’t accelerate.”

  “How you gonna find it?” Griffin asked.

  “Look.” She typed on her computer. Her holographic display showed a nebulous trail.

  “What is that?” Griffin asked.

  “Helium, or more accurately, alpha particles. Their reactor releases minute amounts of it. It’s the ash of the fusion reaction.”

  “It’s not dangerous, is it?” Griffin asked.

  Knecht looked at him. His face showed his fear. She wondered why she never noticed before how stupid he was. “No, it’s just ionized helium. Harmless.”

  “Oh,” he said, trying to sound as if he understood.

  “It’s a lot hotter than the space around it and shows up in the infrared sensor,” she continued. “We’ll just follow it to them.”

  “Then we’ve got them,” Griffin said. He smiled and moved to put an arm around her.

  She shrugged it off her shoulder and glared silently at him.

  ***

  Alex was alone in the control room. It was his turn at lone watch. Alex checked the computer; twelve and a half hours, about, until the Kyushu rendezvous–and safety.

  Thorne entered the room. He pushed over to Alex’s chair and hung on to it.

  “How’s it going?” Alex asked.

  Thorne smiled weakly. “I’ve got an itch I can’t scratch in this suit. This is the longest I’ve ever worn it. It’s gonna stink when I get out of it.”

  “I know what you mean,” Alex said, unconsciously trying to scratch his leg. “Any problems?”

  “Well, some mining tunnels collapsed because they weren’t re-supported for spin.”

  “Who cares?” Alex mumbled tiredly, immediately regretting it.

  “We had one minor injury when a storage locker worked loose and ‘fell’ on someone’s leg.”

  Chun was immediately attentive. “Why wasn’t I told? How badly were they hurt?”

  “They were bruised, that’s all, Alex.”

  Chun relaxed visibly. He’d already lost too many people on this trip. “Any other problems?”

  “No. Everyone is being cooperative.”

  “Good,” Alex said. Not surprising, he thought. They know the risks and the fact they’re in space in the first place indicates their level of intelligence was higher than the average.

  “How are you?” Alex asked.

  “Okay,” Thorne replied casually.

  Liar, Alex thought. “I heard they recovered Diana’s body,” he prodded.

  Thorne’s face hardened. “Yes,” he said simply.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said sympathetically.

  Thorne simply acknowledged with a small nod.

  “Sometimes I think about Diane,” Alex continued, “and I get so angry I...” He stopped, knowing clichés weren’t adequate for the composite of anger and sadness he was experiencing. Alex had first felt the concoction of rage and grief when Joey Hernandez was killed. He experienced the amalgamation of emotion again when Theresa Gold died. Every time Alex lost a friend, he would wonder if it would hurt less the next time. So far it hadn’t. He was glad Kirsten refused to leave the Earth, but there were dangers there, also. Alex’s father was on Earth when he was killed. “It’s just like Theresa,” he said softly.

  Thorne looked at him. “What about Theresa? I know you were there. That Chinese spy killed her.”

  Alex shrugged. “When we caught Woo trying to steal trade secrets, he killed her.” Alex’s voice became unsteady. “Used his shotgun. She died, while I held her, a few minutes later. I was never so angry. I chased him onto the surface of the asteroid and down by the mass driver. That was back when they only had about a twentieth of a gee acceleration and you could still climb on the outside.”

  “I know,” Thorne remarked.

  “We were making long traverses over the surface. I don’t know where he was trying to go. I kept telling him over the radio there was no escape. Right after he’d planted a piton he fired at me, missed, but it propelled him up. When his rope went taut he started swinging back toward the surface of the rock.”

  Alex stopped.

  Thorne waited while Alex regained his composure.

  “I undid his snap link,” Alex said.

  “What?”

  “I reached down and undid his snap link. He continued on a tangential trajectory. He went into the mass driver exhaust. I told everyone his piton came loose.”

  “Why, Alex?”

  “I wanted to kill him.”

  “Why? Theresa was a friend, but—”

  “We were having an affair,” Alex said softly.

  Thorne just looked ahead.

  “Yeah, it was after that that I decided you were okay. After all, I’d made the same mistake you did. It started on Europa. We were there for three years while the facility was being built and she and I just got along really well. We fell in love and let that cloud our judgment.”

  “What about Kirsten? Does she know?”

  “She figured it out,” Alex said. “And we don’t talk about it anymore. Old baggage, she calls it. It’s been seven years.”

  Alex paused. “But you know, Bill, it’s funny. I loved Theresa and still loved Kirsten just as much, just differently.”

  “But why did you kill Woo?”

  “I guess I was angry—wanted revenge.”

  “I�
��m angry, too,” Thorne said, his voice tense. “God damn it, Alex. I think we were in love. Those damned...I just hope they died in great pain trying to breath vacuum.”

  Alex nodded in agreement and was angry with the terrorists for making him feel good about human suffering.

  ***

  “How long will you be staying at the Nippon/European Space Agency Facility, Mr. Oaks?” the customs inspector asked.

  “A few weeks,” McConnell said.

  “You realize it’s very expensive to stay here on the Moon.”

  “Oh, yes,” McConnell said. But he had access to a network of bank and SRI accounts full of GA money that even Beatty didn’t know about and therefore weren’t in that damned computer.

  “Fine,” the inspector said, putting McConnell’s visa in the computer slot.

  Here goes, McConnell thought. We’ll find out if that was worth what we paid for it.

  Apparently it worked. The inspector read the screen and then handed the visa back. “Thank you, Mr. Oaks.”

  McConnell had visited the Moon once before using his own name and money. He knew the way to the opulent Selene Hotel.

  Checking in was not a problem; his visa opened his room and he went in. There were two rooms, one a bathroom. A large bed dominated the main chamber. Most of the furniture was wood and cloth and the floor was covered in carpet. A window, about half a meter wide by one meter tall, looked out over the gray moonscape and the black, starry sky.

  McConnell also knew the computer in his room could connect him to almost any service imaginable. Last time he couldn’t afford to sample those services. But on GA money it was no problem. After all, he deserved a little extra service at the GA’s expense considering what he’d sacrificed for the alliance.

  About an hour later the door buzzer rang. He pulled it open. The two girls smiled and walked in. And he’d only started on the first page of the “Personal Services” menu.

  ***

  Mitchel turned off the communications program on his computer after talking to Freeman. His friend was at a loss.

  “I can’t see any way to find McConnell,” Freeman had said.

  But, Mitchel had resources not available to the FBI. He spent a good hour writing a search program. It took less than five minutes to run. SRI had access to most banks’ credit card databases through a long standing but expensive contract.

  Mitchel’s program sifted through the billions of credit card transactions for the past two days for those at Denver’s two airports within four hours either side of McConnell’s ticket purchase.

  Next it eliminated all seats bought in pairs and all tickets that were reserved in advance (this required correlating airline data also), leaving a large amount to filter through. Anyone who bought a ticket for the places Mitchel thought McConnell would run to or bought a second ticket at their destination for one of those places was selected. This left a few less.

  Finally, the credit reports of all those people were checked for activity. Any with very little activity before the ticket purchases were chosen. These were displayed on Mitchel's computer. There were about a hundred but he noticed two in particular. He had the computer display only them. One was a female going to Damascus via London. The other was a “Oaks, Rodger J.” who was going to New York and then Cayenne. That one had zero credit card activity before that ticket was purchased. While McConnell might run to Damascus, Mitchel didn’t think he would be traveling in drag from what Charlie told him about McConnell.

  Cayenne is in French Guiana, Mitchel thought, and NESA’s spaceport is there. SRI and NESA shared information in an agreement that went back to the original privatization of Space Resources. Mitchel wondered if NESA knew how much SRI held back and wondered how much NESA kept from SRI.

  NESA’s database included information on travelers to the Moon. Roger J. Oaks had bought one ticket to the Moon. The price of the ticket was determined by the mass of the person and their luggage. Charlie said McConnell was more than a little pudgy.

  Roger Oaks massed 120 kilograms. His single bag, less than ten. Oaks arrived on the Moon and checked into the Selene Hotel. Very expensive, but Oaks had the credit rating. Which, come to think of it, was very unusual for someone with no activity on their credit account–unless it was a bogus account and a bogus credit rating.

  Mitchel switched to the communications program and got a visual link to the Moon.

  After talking to Rodriguez, Mitchel got a secure line to Mr. Kijoto’s office. Mitchel briefed the CEO on the situation on the Moon and in Syria. Kijoto approved Mitchel’s plan. Mitchel then contacted Yamauchi, the intra-lunar tug fleet commander at the LEOF, by secure signal.

  ***

  Knecht was rubbing her eyes. She had to manually follow the spoor of hot helium left by the asteroid. Except for a short catnap while repairing the Rock Killer, she hadn’t slept since hours before the attack almost 50 hours ago.

  The asteroid hadn’t changed direction and a second trail of alpha particles was paralleling the first. The speed at which the helium in the second trail moved, which indicated the speed of the source as the atoms left it, was slowing by 44.3 meters per second per kilometer. That corresponded to a negative acceleration of the source of one tenth of a gee. That would be the asteroid tender, she decided. It must be trying to reach the asteroid. From the speed of the rock and the speed and acceleration of the asteroid tender, she was able to predict when they would rendezvous. It was so close to the time the Rock Killer would reach the asteroid that she couldn’t predict which would catch up first.

  She’d also found a parallel cloud of diatomic hydrogen molecules. It was much cooler than the helium from the fusion reactors. It had the speed of the asteroid, so she knew the rock was its source. She calculated from its heat that when it left the asteroid it was about room temperature. She wondered what the hell that meant.

  Griffin came up behind her as she bent over her navigation computer. She stiffened at his approach.

  “You need to get some sleep,” he said. “How long?”

  “About three hours,” she said simply.

  “You could take a nap,” he suggested. “Cole is.”

  “I’m okay,” she snapped.

  He hesitated a moment. “I’m just worried about you.”

  She turned to look at him. He didn’t look well; it was obvious he was in a lot of pain. She’d watched him try to sleep but the pain was too much and his sleep was restless. He refused the pain medicine available.

  “I’m okay,” she restated.

  He reached his good arm out to her.

  “Don’t,” she ordered, shying away.

  He pulled back. “What’s wrong?” he asked with the hurt evident in his voice.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked incredulously. “You’re just like all the rest.”

  “The rest of what?”

  “You treated me like a thing just like all the rest.”

  “What do you mean, Barb?”

  “I mean you said you loved me but you just used me and then you didn’t care.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I let you have me,” she said, her voice getting shrill. “But then you didn’t consider me worthy of normal consideration. You wouldn’t listen to me and Trudeau is dead and we almost all got killed and almost ended our mission.”

  “You mean the mass driver? I didn’t understand the danger. You saved us, Barb. I appreciate that.”

  She looked at him for a moment. He thought he might have dented her shield of anger.

  “No,” she barked. “You still thought of me as a thing. Otherwise you would have taken my word for it. Leave me alone,” she said with a finality that indicated the conversation was over.

  Griffin walked away not without pain to his arm in the high gravity. And that wasn’t the only pain he felt. He turned to look at Knecht. Already she was absorbed in her work. He couldn’t see the tears on her face.

  ***

  The intra-lunar tug fleet commander, M
asatoshi Yamauchi, contacted Director Nakajima of SRI-1960 on a secure communication. Nakajima agreed to arrange to provide what Yamauchi required.

  Trusting no one else to complete the job, Yamauchi personally piloted the tug. This also reduced the number of employees that knew about the strange mission Mitchel had given him. He left the LEOF and moved toward the Lagrange point where SRI-1960 was being dismantled. The tailings were about all that was left. That would be sold cheap to NESA for radiation shielding. But one hunk of rock, about the size of car, was separated from the rest. Yamauchi picked up the boulder with the tug’s mechanical and magnetic grapples. Yamauchi then dropped the tug’s Earth orbit to about 950 kilometers.

  ***

  The time was soon, Faruq knew. Timing was everything. General Zuabi was in Damascus on official business and could control the army; the Baath party was so angry about the inaction of the president against the Zionist state that it could soon explode; the leaders of the other United Baath Arab States were distancing themselves from him. There was hardly a member of the Party who did not know that Faruq had been instrumental in the brilliant attack on Space Resources Inc. Faruq could almost feel the party’s support swinging toward him. The time was ripe to move.

  Two of the nine rotating presidential bodyguards would be on duty at the same time tomorrow. Those two had sworn loyalty to Faruq.

  In less than 24 hours Faruq would rule Syria. In less than 48 hours the Zionist state would no longer exist.

  ***

  Charlie watched out the window as the shuttle descended to the Moon. She was on the wrong side to see the SRI observation lounge. She was thankful for that. The tube extended and they walked in the shuttleport; except Charlie, she rolled.

  Rodriguez met her and her escort.

  “We think Whaltham, a.k.a. McConnell, a.k.a. Roger Oaks is here.”

  Charlie’s eyes grew wide. “Here? Where? I want him.”

  “He arrived on the last NESA shuttle.”

  “Let me at him.”

  “That’s a problem. He’s staying in a hotel and as far as anyone can tell he hasn’t left his room. He’s been sending out for food, entertainment, clothes.”

  “Entertainment?”