Mother Lode

Mother Lode Page 2

by Zach Hughes

  looked at the viewers. Still lots of stars. Still closer to the core. And it took still longer for the computer to chuckle its way to a conclusion about location, for the stars around them were not included on the ship's charts and the computer had to backcheck behind them until it found a familiar correlation. Once again, and again, and a long wait for charging with a storm of solar winds eddying and seething around the ship, straining the capacity of the radiation shields built between the hulls. «One more time,» she told Mop. She pushed the button. Mother leapt. Mop sat down, his long hair hiding his rear legs, lifted his sharp little muzzle toward what the ship's gravity told him was the ceiling, and howled. Erin jumped, startled. «Don't do that,» she said. Mop lifted his nose and howled once more, then lay down with his nose between his front legs. Erin felt little sheets of shivers running up and down her spine. She punched in an all-direction scan, watched the screens closely. Stars and more stars. Then, toward the core, oddly enough, a big blackness. She punched in magnification, her heart pounding. She hadn't really expected to find an isolated binary so near the galaxy's heart. But there they were, two stars of equal brightness. She punched in orders. Optics whirred into position. The twin stars were separated by 9.5 astronomical units, had an orbital period of 44.5 years. The mass of the nearer sun was .96 of the sun of New Earth, the star by which man measured all others. The farther star was slightly larger in mass than the New Sun, which accounted for the fact that, even though it was more distant, it had the same apparent brightness as the nearer star. The nearer star was sterile, alone in its assigned volume of space. The other had whelped. She had to make a short Blink to get near enough for the ship's instruments to pick up the family of planets circling the more distant, larger star. So far everything on the chart was checking out. She put the Mother Lode on flux and, while she gathered data and recharged the generator, had a bath, gave Moppy one—much to his disgust—dried her hair and his with a blower, and then held Moppy up to the viewer to show him the sights. The ship flew past two uninhabitable planets, one a frozen ball of ice, the other a gas giant. «Well, my boy,» she told Mop, «it's just the way Dad's old buddy said it was.» She felt herself becoming just a bit excited as Mother neared her destination. She was quite close, astronomically speaking, before Mother's sensors could pick up the belt of asteroids located roughly in what would have been the star's life zone. Beyond the asteroid belt were two small bodies, one not much larger than a respectable moon, orbiting so close to the sun that they were nothing more than scorched rock. Not all life zone planets were number three planets, but most were. Once, apparently, this sun had had a third planet, a world positioned in that relatively narrow, highly critical area just close enough to a sun to condense water, not close enough for the water to boil away, and not far enough away for the water to freeze permanently. Now, in the orbit of the third planet, the ship's instruments picked up a band of rubble. The jumble of rocks extended far and away, curving in both directions, making a ring of space rubbish all around the sun. She let the ship fall closer, whistled when the optics showed that it was really crowded in there, that the chunks of rock, asteroids large and small, were so close together that maneuvering among them was going to be, at best, thrilling. She gave the ship directions. Gyros whined. The ship turned slowly, taking up an orbit parallel to and at a safe distance from the asteroid belt. She jumped when Mother's detectors pinged a warning, but before she could act a chunk of rock the size of an interplanetary freighter rolled past not over a half mile away. The tumbling asteroid didn't make a roar of threat, as debris sometimes did in the more amateurish space operas, but even without sound it was menacing enough to send Erin scampering to the controls to put more distance between her and the belt. She had a good sleep before approaching the asteroids again. Then, heart pounding, she turned the ship's detectors to maximum power and upped Mother's speed a bit. She zapped in close to the belt, holding her breath, matched velocity with the nearest large rock. The rock was tumbling slowly. It had ragged, sharp edges. No rain, no friction, no nothing in space to weather it. It was as big on one relatively flat surface as a city block, rounded on the other three sides. She edged the ship closer, turned on the detectors. Not much happened. She moved on to make another nerve-racking approach to a slowly tumbling rock mountain and used the detectors again. Nothing. It was four hours and several fruitless tries later that she pulled up alongside a smaller chunk of rock and turned on the detectors to hear them sing out loudly of heavy metals. She did some fine tuning and nodded. «Well, Mr. Mop,» she said, «There's gold in them thar hills, after all.» It was challenging as hell to bring the ship closer and closer to the slowly tumbling chunk of mass and inertia. One little misjudgment and it was one helluva long walk home. She edged up to a flat surface, teased Mother into followed the tumbling motion, hit the guidance jets, yelped as the landing gear contacted the rock. Mop said, «Yipe.» «Now you're worried?» she asked, as she adjusted the field to include the big rock and to effectively attach it to the ship. She let the computer measure the roll and tumble and fed impulses into the flux drive and guidance jets until the disturbing motions were stilled and the ship and rock, held together by the power of Mother's giant generator, sailed serenely along without so much as a wobble. «My boy,» she said, «things are looking up.» There was a huge vein of gold directly under the ship. She took up station in the second crew's cabin, which her father had turned into a control room for the raining equipment. Soon an extractor arm was using a laser to boil rock away from the vein of gold and, before the end of her first work day, she had not just some gold, but pounds of gold aboard ship. Gold so pure that it seemed to glow. When the vein of almost pure gold ran out she moved ship, using the extractor arm to pull Mother to a new position. There was gold, but it wasn't nearly as pure as the first vein. She lifted ship and spent several days trying to find another source as rich as that of the first day. After a week of it, she came to the conclusion that she was not going to get rich in a matter of days, that the first vein had been a fluke. Not that there weren't fortunes contained in the asteroid belt. There was enough gold and platinum metals and silver to make her one of the richest people in the U.P., but it wasn't going to be all that easy. The Mother Lode wasn't going to go home laden with nuggets of pure gold, but she would go back with very, very rich ore filling all available cargo spaces. Heck, it might even take two or three trips out there to make her as rich as she decided she wanted to be. She started loading gold-rich ore. It was picky work. First the areas containing gold had to be searched out by instrument, then Mother had to be positioned. The ship couldn't sit on a needle point of rock, so some very rich sounding areas had to be bypassed in order to find a fairly flat landing place. Moving in and out of the tumbling, crowded asteroid belt ceased to be so thrilling she could hardly stand it and came to be just spine-tinglingly terrifying. She'd been working for just under a month when she decided to scout around a bit before attaching the ship to another asteroid. She circled the sun in an orbit outside the belt. The density of the belt was about equal all the way around. She saw chunks that were large enough to make fairly respectable moons for a small planet. She had forgotten her loneliness. She had her work. She had very good company. Mop was not demanding. He fed and watered himself by pushing on his Mop buttons at his station. He had been trained to use an ingenious little pad in the exercise room that broke his body wastes down into recyclable liquids immediately and pulled the smells in behind them. He didn't talk a lot. In fact, except for that meaningful grunt which said, «Please, Erin, rub my belly,» he'd been silent since his disturbed howling had chilled Erin. On the opposite side of the orbital ring of debris she jockeyed Mother down onto a flat surface, stabilized the tumble, put out the extractor arm, and began to load ore that was the richest she'd seen since the first day. The detectors were humming merrily about gold and she was humming a little song that had been rewritten with some rather ribald lyrics by the junior officers aboard Rimfire. She was just about ready to knock
off for the day when there was a clear tone, a vibrant, piercing tone that jerked her to attention. She stopped the movement of the arm and focused a viewer on the biter at the end. The vibrant, piercing tone of alert continued to sing in her ears. She saw something a bit lighter in color than the gold bearing rock, reached back to kill the foreign object alert, turned on a powerful light, lowered the viewer until its nozzle almost touched the biter at the end of the extractor arm. «Woah,» she whispered. All around her was the vacuum of space, the coldness and emptiness, the uncaring, glaring stars. The nearest planet, a bit larger than New Earth, was a chemical swamp with surface temperatures hot enough to ignite paper, if there'd been any oxygen in the poisonous atmosphere. Nearer the sun were the two cinder planets, lifeless rock baked by the solar storms. Far away, out past the chemical swamp planet, was a frozen, airless ball of ice. And at the tip of the excavator arm, still half encased in the matrix rock, was a fossilized skull, a skull that looked up at her with dark, eyeless sockets, a skull that had to be incredibly ancient, and was very damned definitely humanoid. Man had been twice in space. A very few had soared upward from Old Earth on the fire of primitive chemical rockets. Centuries later man had broken the bounds of planetary gravity once more, this time with the help of old Billy Bob Blink's invention that made star travel less dangerous and much less time-consuming. Man had been in space for the second time for thousands of years and in all that time he had encountered intelligence only in the mutated forms of life that had survived the Destruction of Old Earth. He had found evidence of alien intelligence, but the aliens were all dead—the residents of the Dead Worlds and the two races who clung together in a clasp of death as galaxies collided in Cygnus. The decades of work on Old Earth since the reunion had taught man much about himself. From her classes at the Academy Erin knew that life on Old Earth had begun millions of years in the past, but that man, himself, was a relative newcomer. The humanoid skull staring up at her with its blank, dark eyes was as old or older than the anthropoid remains that had been discovered in fossil form on Old Earth since the reunion. Here, then, was evidence of another manlike race. Whether or not the skull represented intelligence she could not guess, but she knew that X&A scientists would consider it to be of more importance than the gold and gold ore she had stowed in Mother's bins. She moved the extractor arm slightly. The skull was still attached to the matrix rock. «Well, damn,» she said. Mop looked up questioningly. «I can't believe I'm going to do this,» she said. Mop followed her to the air lock and watched anxiously as she worked her way into a suit. «Sorry, fella, this trip isn't for you,» she said. She took the dog to the control room, closed the door behind her, felt panic for one moment not because she was scared, but because if anything happened to her out there, Mop would be left all alone to punch out his food and water until it was all gone and then— «Oh, damn,» she moaned, as she closed the helmet and sucked air. «Oh, shit,» she said, as the inner hatch closed and a pump whined as it evacuated air from the lock. «Balls,» she whispered, as the outer hatch opened and she stared out into the big empty. CHAPTER FOUR She felt stiff and heavy as she stepped out of the hatch onto the ship's ladder. She could never get enough oxygen into her lungs while she was imprisoned inside a flexsuit. The feeling of being slowly suffocated was psychological, for the air mixture in the suit was richer than that aboard ship. She halted for a moment before turning around to adjust the tool kit strapped to her back. The hatch started to close behind her. She did not hear it, of course, but she felt the slight vibration of its movement coming up through her boots. She turned and was mesmerized as the opening narrowed. When the crack closed and the hatch snugged itself into its seal, she felt panic. What if? What if the hatch lock didn't respond to her instructions when she was ready to go back into the ship? She had only a few hours of air. With the oxygen gone, she would never decay. She would be held on the surface of the asteroid by the field of the ship's generator until, perhaps years from now, the generator used up its full charge and cooled. Would she then drift away from the rock to tumble free in her own eternal orbit around an alien sun? She had performed extravehicular work before, but never alone. There had been times when teams of crewmen in suits had swarmed over the outside hide of Rimfire to check her condition, but each man had been teamed with another. Every spacer who had faced the void knew the devastating effect of looking at the big empty through an impossibly frail faceplate from the doubtful security of a flexsuit. It was S.O.P. to never, never, send a man outside the ship without a buddy. There near the core, with legions, hoards, multitudes of brilliant stars surrounding her, she felt more isolated than she had felt while space walking in the nothingness outside the galaxy when she had to look in one direction to see the misty mass of the Milky Way, when there was nothing but blankness on three sides. She was dwarfed. She felt as if she were being infinitely diminished. She turned and with a shaking hand punched the entry combination into the lock. The hatch began to open. She took a deep breath and let it out, canceled the open order, turned her face up toward the viewport in the control room. She saw the shaggy face of Mop. His sharp nose and alert eyes followed her movement as she climbed down the ladder. She waved and said, «Hold the fort, buddy. I'll be back before you know it.» The Mother Lode was in harsh sunlight. The surface of the asteroid was not level so that the ship seemed to be tilted. From the inside the lopsided stance had not mattered, since the reference for the senses was the ship's own gravity which made her deck down regardless of her position. Standing outside, the breath of the nuclear furnace that was the nearest star raising the temperature on the surface of her suit, Erin felt momentary dizziness as she looked up at Mother. She took a deep breath. The hiss of air was loud inside her helmet. On all sides around her the shattered remnants of a world kept pace, most of them tumbling slowly. She was in the middle of an eerie sea of motion made up of the glaring, brutal, unfiltered sunlight reflecting off sunward planes and angles and the absolute blackness of space that was echoed on the dark sides of the asteroids. And over and under and to all sides were the cold, many-faceted faces of the core star fields. In the shadow of the ship the suit's coolers changed tone as their function was reversed to heating. The light attached to her helmet came on automatically. She pointed it by moving her head, approached the extraction arm, stepped down into the trench. It was pleasing to her to see the light bouncing off flecks of pure gold, but that pleasure passed when she focused her attention on the thing that was partially exposed near the biting end of the arm. She placed the work kit on the barren stone, removed a hand-held, laser powered cutter, a tool developed especially for mining. A sensor guided her to a setting that would not harm the fossil bone. She applied the laser to the matrix rock around the skull experimentally, saw that the setting was perfect. The enclosing rock melted away. For a few minutes she forgot her appalling isolation, did not lift her eyes to see the harsh sunlight or the crowded stars, concentrated on the job at hand until she could lift the skull free. She placed it on the rock at the side of the trench and cleaned it with the laser beam. She had not been wildly interested in the subject matter covered in the one course in paleontology that had been required at the Academy. Following the fossil record of the evolution of the Tigian tiger was, at best, dull. Only a few days had been allocated to the discussion of the work being done by technicians in anti-radiation gear on Old Earth, where the hardened remains of the Old Ones, man himself, were being unearthed. Before going extravehicular, she had punched in orders for the scant material on the development of man. The skulls of the Old Ones, Earthmen, were identical to those of modern man. This had inspired various interpretations. One cynical school of thought had it that God had given up on man, that after the Destruction He had determined that man was His greatest failure and had abandoned any further development. Others, more upbeat, believed that, as the Bible said, man had been created in God's image, and was thus perfect, needing no evolution from the form that had been developed prior to the Destruction. The mutation of the Old On
es into Healers, Power Givers, Far Seers, and Keepers after the Destruction was, depending on one's viewpoint: 1. The power of God exemplified, since divine miracles were required to preserve life on earth. 2. The work of the evil one, perverting the perfection of God's finest creation into ugly and malignant forms. Fortunately, the first view, or more moderate adaptations of it, prevailed in U.P. society, allowing the mutants from Old Earth to be valued and welcome members of the race. But the fossil skull that grinned at her, all teeth intact, eye sockets black and empty, was not that of some mutated form or of some alien. Her knowledge was limited. She was not an expert in the field, but she'd looked at pictures just minutes before exiting the ship and the images were fresh in her mind. This fellow had been the guy next door. He was man. Modern man. And that was very damned interesting since, if she remembered correctly, it took a few million years to turn living bone into stone. She used the mining laser to check the area where the skull had spent an eon in sleep. She melted out a lightning bolt of pure gold and held it in her hand, but there was no sign of other fossilized bones. Mother spoke to her. The husky voice of the computer said, «You have been extravehicular for one hour and twenty-eight minutes.» No problem. She had four hours worth of air and a ten minute reserve. She melted out another small vein of gold, put it into her specimen pouch, examined the rock near the trench, said, «Well, to hell with it.» The suit's coolers sizzled into action as she stepped back into the light. She looked up and around. The skull in the pouch on the outside of the flexsuit pressed against her thigh as if reminding her that once it had housed the soft, mysterious things that made up an intelligent brain. The stars pushed down, dazzling her eyes. The tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt seemed to be moving toward her. She ran in pure panic, clambered up the steps, mispunched the combination to the lock, screamed out good, solid, spacer profanity that had originated in the less desirable areas of a score of planets. Her frantic eyes looked up, saw Mop sitting on the little ledge of the control room viewport, his mouth open, his tongue hanging out. «Hi,» she said, calming enough to punch the right combination into the lock. The outer hatch closed with an unheard but felt clang. Air hissed into the lock. The inner door opened and she peeled out of the suit, first removing the two samples of gold and the skull from the outside pouches. «Well, my friend,» she said, holding the skull in both hands, for it was, after all, heavy stone. «I can't say I care too much for the garden spot where you decided to spend eternity.» She was just a little bit ashamed of herself. Mop greeted her as if she'd been gone for ages, leaping, making mock attacks, hoisting his rear and lowering his head between his front paws in his «look-at-me-I'm-charming» pose. She ruffled his soft hair, picked him up. He threw himself over onto his back in the crook of her arm with a gusty sigh and allowed her to rub his chest and belly. When he had had enough he began to wiggle. She put him down, punched up a very stiff drink, sat in the control chair. Mop took his place on the console and lay down, his head held up alertly, ready for conversation. «Mr. Mop,» she said, «looks to me as if this belt of rock was once a planet of considerable size.» Mop said, «Wurf.» «Which makes you think, doesn't it?» She took a long sip of her drink. «The U.P.'s planet buster could have done this to a planet. Did, as a matter of fact, to a few Zede worlds during the Zede War, but that was just a thousand years ago, and our friend, there—» she shifted her eyes to the skull—» is very damned definitely more than a thousand years old.» Mop lifted his right paw, asking for a handshake. She complied, held the paw. «What we should do, I guess, is send a blinkstat back to X&A right now.» Mop cocked his head. «Yeah, you're right,» she said. «We've got everything we own tied up in this expedition. Dad's money, too. Everything wrapped up in this Mother. I don't know how much gold we've got aboard, but I do know this. We report our friend, here, to X&A and this whole belt will be off bounds until it's searched for other fossils. That means that you and I wouldn't live long enough to get back to digging gold.» She had released Mop's paw. He scratched her hand gently, demanding her touch. She held his paw again. «What I think is this,» she said. «I think we will wait to mine this particular rock. What I mean, sir, is this.» Mop cocked his head. «We haven't even seen this rock, have we?» Mop didn't say anything. «If you ever want me to take you go—» His right ear shot up. «—you'd better agree with me.» «Wurf,» he said. «Good,» she said, nodding. «And we won't see it until we're good and damned ready to see it, will we? If you ever want to go?» «Wurf,» Mop said. «Because our friend there has waited an eon or two already. I think he can wait until a nice, deserving young girl and a rather splendid pooch are so rich that the U.P. tax men can't take it all away from us.» She picked Mop up and ruffled the blond hair on his head. «So rich that waiters will bow and shop women will give us shit-eating grins. So rich that we'll buy you a diamond-studded collar. Would you like that?» «Ummmmm,» Mop said, meaning, «rub my belly, Erin.» She had to go back out again to place a coded beeper in the trench before she covered it over with debris. She did it quickly, without looking up and around at the silent, watchful stars or the slowly tumbling remnants of a world. When she was aboard once more she moved ship, found a nice pocket of gold, and went to work. Three weeks later the cargo space of the Mother Lode was heavy with ore. The generator was fully charged. Mother went flashing back down the blink routes toward civilization. The latest edition of the United Planets' Directory told her that the best place to sell her gold was a mining world on the coreward frontier of the U.P. sector. She punched a query into the computer and the old Century hummed and chuckled and came up with routes to the fourth planet of a class G sun a few thousand light-years away. She had let her hair grow during the months in space. She felt that she was a bit old, at thirty, to wear her ash blonde tresses shoulder length, but there didn't happen to be a hair care center nearby, so she blinked into communicator range of a rather cold looking planet called Aspiration and got landing instructions for the port in the principal city, Wiggston. She was told to stay aboard until customs checked the ship. Mop, able to see paved pads, snow, a few scraggly trees, buildings, and other items that might need irrigating, was going bananas, leaping and whining to go out. Erin tried to reason with him in vain. She called Wiggston Control. «Look, fellas,» she said, in her sexiest voice, «I've got a little dog over here who is about to burst something internally because he wants to go outside so badly. We've been in space for a few months. May I have permission to walk around outside on the pad?» «Let me speak to your captain,» the controller said. «You're speaking to the captain.» Silence. «Wiggston Control, this is the Mother Lode, « she said in irritation. «Permission to walk my dog, if you please.» «Your animal must go into quarantine,» the controller said. «The hell you say.» The controller's voice was harsh. «Do not open your hatch, Mother Lode . Do not allow your animal to exit the ship under any circumstances until our animal importation people are at your ship with a sealed transporter to take your animal to quarantine.» Silence on Erin's part. Then, «How long is your quarantine period?» «Six months.» «Permission to lift ship,» Erin said. Silence. «Wiggston Control, Mother Lode. I request immediate permission to lift ship.» «Permission refused,» the controller said. «You have broken the laws of Aspiration. Your animal must be put into quarantine.» «You and the horse you rode in on,» Erin said, as she pushed instructions into the computer. Mother quivered and lifted. An angry voice was on the communicator. Erin turned it off and juiced the flux drive. Mop whined as the g forces pushed him down onto the console forcefully. Just in case the good people of Aspiration were really assholes, Erin turned on the detectors. If anything looking like an armed ship came toward her she was ready to blink to hell out of there, although blinking while in a planet's gravitational well was against the rules. However, no ships appeared. She kept Mother's flux drive pumping full power until she was well clear and then punched in a blink. «What do you think?» she asked the Mop. Mop, freed of the g forces of the quick getaway, lifted his head and looked pitiful. «Sorry about tha
t,» she said, «but I don't think you'd have liked an Aspiration prison for pooches.» The U.P. Director said that there were refineries on Haven, a planet just a few blinks down the routes. This time she was more careful, checking on Haven's attitude toward small dogs before going down. «Tell your captain,» the controller at Havenport said, «that your ship and crew and the little dog are welcome in our city.» «You're speaking to the captain,» Erin said. Silence. «Ah, good, Mother Lode, you have clearance to land on pad A-10. Make your approach vertical from 90 angles. What service do you require for your ship?» «Nothing more than offloading,» Erin said. Hardpad A-10 was near the eastern edge of Havenport, and it was lined with green lawns, shrubbery, and trees. Erin cracked the hatch as soon as Mother had settled, put a harness and leash on Mop just to be sure his enthusiasm could be controlled, and went out into air that smelled of the refineries smoking up the skies around the city. Mop was whining in his excitement. After a few satisfying, leg-lifting efforts, he looked up at her as if to say, «Why are you doing this to me when there are trees just over there?» «All right, buster,» she said, taking off his leash. «But you stay close.» Mop tore around in circles. He'd learned to run quite well on the moving belt in the exercise room, but there was no substitute for grass, open spaces, the occasional planting that needed hiked-leg attention, and trees. After a quarter hour of watching a busy little dog checking each object that rose above the level of the lawns for messages left by fellow canines and leaving volumes of meaning himself, she clapped her hands to bring Mop running and took him back aboard ship. There were two messages on her communicator, both from refinery representatives. She returned the calls. Yes, good yielding gold ore was very welcome on Haven. The price, U.P. standard, thirty-two credits per troy ounce of refined gold less ten percent for the cost of refining. Both reps offered the same price. She called one other refinery, pretended to be a reporter for a Xanthos-based holo-magazine, and was told that the going price for gold was thirty-two credits per troy ounce less ten percent for refining. She rewarded the first man who had called her by selling him her cargo. She supervised the offloading. Mop, on a leash, cringed at the noise. A cleaning crew went to work in the cargo hold as soon as the ore was offloaded. She and Mop followed the ore carriers to the refinery and visited the office. The man who had originally contacted her was six-four, weighed in at a solid-muscled two-hundred-ten, had a go-to-hell cowlick in his sandy hair and a lopsided grin that, he felt, was irresistible to all persons of the female persuasion. «What's a sweet little thing like you doing coming into Haven all alone with a cargo of gold ore worth a few hundred thousand credits?» he asked. «I'm not alone,» she said, rubbing Mop's blond head. «And I had hoped a million or so credits, not just a few hundred thousand.» His name was Murdoch Plough. He grinned. «Well, we'll see.» He reached out. «Cute little feller, ain't he?» Mop growled deep in his chest. «No, Mop, you can't eat the nice man,» Erin said. «Real killer, is he?» «His father was a Tigian weretiger,» she said. He laughed deep in his chest. «Well, we'll know in a few hours, little lady. I hope it is a million, but I sure can't figure out why a sweet little thing like you wants to go traipsing around out there in the big dark all by her sweet little self.» She stood up. «Oh, I find it rather restful,» she said. «You can call me aboard Mother Lode when you've completed the refining.» «Now you don't want to go running off,» he said, coming around his desk quickly to take her arm. Mop growled. «Easy, killer,» Murdoch said. To Erin he said, «Look, you've been in space a long time. It would be my pleasure to buy you a real steak and to show you the sights of Havenport.» «Thank you,» she said. «I have some housekeeping to do aboard ship, and I want to restock some food items.» «I can handle that for you,» Murdoch said, letting his hand travel up her arm. «I can handle it myself,» she said. «And I'd appreciate it if you'd quit handling my arm.» He laughed. «Now, little lady—» Mop lunged from his position in Erin's right hand and sank his sharp little teeth into Murdoch's index finger. Murduch yelped and leaped back. «Isn't it odd, Mr. Plough, that nobody will listen when I tell them what a mean little son-of-a-bitch my dog is?» Mop growled deep in his chest. «I'll be waiting for your call, Mr. Plough,» Erin said. Murdoch Plough called late the next day. He did not use her name. «We have your check ready for you, Captain,» he said. «Good,» Erin said. «How much?» «Well, I have some bad news for you,» he said. «When we put the ore through the refining process, we discovered that most of the gold content was of very low purity. Lots of contaminants, you know. It lowered the yield and increased refining costs. If you'll check your contract, you'll see that the standard ten percent charge is increased to twenty percent if there are certain impurities. However, the good news is that you have just over four-hundred-thousand credits worth, even if it wasn't pure stuff.» «Bullshit,» Erin said. She switched off. She dressed to go out. Mop was dancing, thinking that he was going to get to go. When she told him that he had to stay and guard the ship, he went into Erin's cabin and sulked, refusing to come out to say good-bye. She checked a town directory, hailed an aircab, gave the driver an address. It took a half hour for the assay office, licensed by the Haven government and the United Planets Department of Mining and Heavy Metals, to tell her that her gold samples were of very high purity, just a few points less than refinery pure. She had saved back the pretty little lightning bolt in gold that she had removed from its matrix rock and one nugget that she had selected at random. She went next to the Haven office of X&A and, after showing her discharge card, was immediately escorted into the office of an overweight X&A planetside commando wearing the leaves of a colonel. «Ah, Lieutenant Kenner,» he said, offering his hand, «you're a bit late, but I think we can waive the six month limit on separation from the service and get you your old rank and position back within one year.» «Thanks,» Erin said. «That's not why I'm here.» The colonel's face fell. «Well, have a seat,» he said. «What can I do for you?» «Colonel,» she said, «for years, ever since I entered the Academy, I've been told that the Service always looks after its own.» «That is very true,» he said. «I'm not sure, but I think I'm getting a royal screwing here on this wonderful little planet.» He raised his eyebrows, but not because of her language. Spacers were, he knew, an elitist bunch and they liked to show their toughness with shock talk. She told the colonel about her gold ore, showed him the assay figures from the government approved testing facility. He nodded and reached for a communicator. He winked at her and said, «Lieutenant, if you won't consider this a sexist suggestion, there's a pot of fresh coffee just outside the door. I'd love to have a cup, and you're more than welcome to join me. White and sweet for me, if you please.» She went out of the office and poured. She heard him ask for the Planetary Attorney General's office. She was back in the room, putting his coffee in front of him when he said, «Sam, how the hell are you?» It was good coffee and it was good talk she heard. He was only a groundbound colonel, but he was X&A, the voice of the most powerful agency in the civilized galaxy. He had the attention of Sam, the Attorney General. He grinned at Erin, winked as he listened. When he switched off he was still grinning. «Lieutenant,» he said, «I think that if you'll visit Mr. Murdoch Plough again in about two hours you might find that he has refigured the worth of your ore.» Erin rose, kissed the colonel on his cheek. He had the grace to blush. He laughed. «If you didn't leave any lipstick on my cheek, do it again. It's about time I made my wife a little jealous.» «It's true,» she said. «Yep,» he said, nodding. «We do take care of our own.» Murdoch Plough did not rise from his desk when she entered his office after being announced by his secretary. He looked up sullenly, stared at her for a long time before he spoke. «It seems, Lieutenant Kenner, that there was, ah, a bit of a mix-up in the assay of your ore.» The fact that he called her lieutenant told her that he had received some sort of a communication from on high. She nodded. He threw a gold-tone check across the desk toward her. She picked it up and read the figures—1,000,456.54 C. Over one million credits. On a certified check. «Thank you.
I do appreciate the fast work.» Plough had evidently thought about the situation. «Will you be selling again, Lieutenant?» «There is that possibility,» she admitted. «We here at Plough are always interested in doing business,» he said. «I'll remember that,» she said, «while also recalling that you did your best to give me the business.» She turned and was gone before he could reply. An hour later, having survived a wild greeting from a lonely little dog, she was lifting the Mother for space. Two blinks away from Haven the routes crossed. A right turn took her back toward the galactic core and the mining belt. A left turn and she was on the way to X&A Central and a serious conference with the Service scientists. It was decision time. The generator didn't need charging, but she put it on refill mode to buy time to think, went into the exercise room, stripped to her briefs and walked as she thought. If she went to X&A on Xanthos and showed them Old Smiley, the friendly fossil skull, the rocks would be fenced off by an X&A electronic cordon and there'd be no more gold for Erin Kenner. She had a million credits. With a million credits she could find a quiet little backwater on a frontier planet and live comfortably ever after. On Xanthos, however, where the bright lights were, a nice apartment would cost five thousand credits a month, sixty thousand a year. A sporty aircar went for over a hundred thousand. A million wouldn't last her a lifetime on Xanthos, or on any other metro planet. It was a tough decision. She was, after all, a loyal citizen of the U.P. She'd just been shown, on Haven, that the Service took care of its own. X&A had paid for her education and had given her the training that had enabled her to navigate to the gold belt and back in safety. Being ex-X&A, she had her share of the induced xenophobia that haunted a race face-to-face in three dimensions with the big, unexplored dark. She shared the knowledge that entire civilizations, multi-planet cultures, had passed into oblivion before man fought his way into space for the second time. She knew why the United Planets maintained a huge, heavily armed fleet of ships in service and in mothballs. Although the power that had devastated the Dead Worlds was unknown and, therefore, doubly awesome, mankind hoped that his weapons would be adequate to face an emergence from deep space of things like those beings who could kill a world from the inside out. It was her duty to report her findings, of course. Perhaps study of the fossil remains in the belt would give man more information on what had happened to at least three advanced races who were no more. Ah, but there was another possibility. The skull she'd found could have been seeded onto the planet which had been shattered into asteroids. Old Smiley might be the only humanoid fossil in the whole belt. «Mr. Mop,» she said, shaking hands at Mop's request, «Wouldn't it seem to you that our friend can wait a few months longer for his moment in the limelight?» Mop sighed. «After all, he's been in cold storage in the middle of a rock for maybe a million years.» Mop cocked his head. «It would be nice, though, if you and I had some help out there, wouldn't it? With a couple of men to help us we could do two or three more loads in short order.» «Wurf,» Mop said. She thought about it. She considered going back to Haven and asking the X&A colonel to recommend a couple of good men, good workers. She quickly decided against that. One cabin on Mother had been converted into the mining control room. There was one bunk bed, high on the wall, in the mining room. Not enough space for two hired hands. And Mother was a small ship. To share a ship as small as a Mule two people had to be very good friends. Trouble was, all of her friends were still in Service. Except. «Hummm,» she said. «Uhhhh,» Mop said, looking for a belly rub as he rolled over. «You sort of liked Denton Gale, didn't you, Mr. Mop?» Mop grinned as she rubbed his chest and belly. «He acted civilized,» she said. Mop said nothing. «True, he was my father's friend, not mine.» «Uhhhh,» Mop moaned. «We could share the exercise room and the library with no problem, and he could sleep in the mining control room. What do you think?» Mop, having had enough rubbing, wiggled to be put down. She put him on the deck and he went to paw a chew bone from his personal dispenser. «You're a helluva lot of help,» she said. «Comes time for a heavy decision and you clam up.» Mop crawled under the control chair to eat his tidbit. She turned left, but not to go to Xanthos. Soon she was blinking rapidly down established routes. At beacons she encountered other ships lying on charge. Mother's sensors warned her of the presence of vessels in her blink line, but the Mule was not equipped with the highly advanced detection gear that had become standard issue for X&A ships after Pete Jaynes rediscovered how to tune a blink generator to frequencies other than standard. Such equipment would have told her as soon as she left Haven that she was being followed one blink behind by a sleek deep space miner equipped with a Unicloud computer and the latest detection equipment. The deep space miner was still with her ninety days later when she blinked past the administration planet and toward New Earth. CHAPTER FIVE Perhaps it was her proximity to civilization that brought out a feeling of guilt as Erin blinked the Mother Lode into orbit around New Earth. Before asking for landing instructions she sent a blink to X&A Central on Xanthos inquiring about the whereabouts of the Rimfire. Her intention was, at that moment, to settle for what she had, to go to her former commanding officer, Julie Roberts, and put Old Smiley into the captain's capable hands. However, Rimfire was on the opposite side of the galaxy, preparing to penetrate inward toward unknown areas. Going to X&A Central to turn over her discovery to strangers had little appeal and left room for cupidity to reassert itself. Mother settled gently onto her gear at the same hardpad assigned to her when John Kenner first brought her to Old Port. She told Control no, she did not want to renew the monthly lease on the hardpad, that she would be only a temporary visitor. Mop was in familiar territory. He scampered around the hardpad and greeted beloved bushes with a gaily hoisted leg before leading the way at a frantic run toward Denton Gale's workshop. He arrived at the door ahead of Erin, announced his presence with frantic barking, and leaped into Denton's arms, wiggling, whining, licking Denton's hands and face in delight when the door was opened. Mop was still demanding attention when Erin reached the office. «Hi,» she said. «Now if you were as glad to see me as this little rascal—» Denton said, grinning. «Well, I can't wriggle my rear as fast as he does,» she said, moving her hips. «Fine fellow that you are, Moppy,» Denton said, «on her it looks better.» He ruffled the dog's hair, pulled on his scrubby tail, put him down on the floor, said to Erin, «Come on in.» It was early autumn on New Earth. Erin, Mop, and the Mother Lode had been gone almost a year. She had scanned the areas surrounding the port on the way down, had seen little change except that the new owner of the Kenner home had built white fences around the entire property. Denton Gale had not changed. He still looked exuberantly youthful. The sun lines at the corner of his eyes gave them a permanent smile. His shop and office were as cluttered as ever. «You left in a hurry,» he said, as he walked to a table to pour coffee for two. «Yes,» she said. He handed her a steaming mug. Mop had jumped from a chair to the top of the service counter that separated the workshop from the office area. Erin sat down. Denton leaned against the counter, a tall man, his brown hair slightly mussed. «I hope that your trip was successful.» She nodded. «Dent, what are your plans for the future? What do you hope to accomplish in life?» He grinned. «You come back here to talk to me about my innermost dreams?» «Yes,» she said, «if you want to put it that way.» He looked at her intently, realizing that she was serious. «Would making inordinately large amounts of money interest you?» His grin broadened. She wondered if his genes were that good or if he'd spent a lot of time in a dentist's chair. «How large?» he asked. «Obscenely so.» «I'm told that the U.P. Penal Service is quite humane,» he said, «but I have no desire to spend any portion of my life in a work camp on some frontier planet.» «That's me,» she said, «the master criminal.» She stood up. Mop's right ear came to attention and he bailed out from the top of the counter to land with a thump at Erin's feet, ready to go. «Bring your coffee,» she said. «Yes, ma'am,» he said with mock humbleness. In the control room on the Mother Lode she handed him her bankbook. He looked at her inquiringly,
eyebrows raised, opened it. At the bottom of the page was a figure of a few thousand credits. «Well, you had this much when you left here, didn't you?» «Turn the page,» she said. He turned the page, did a classic double take, brought the little book closer to his face, whistled. His eyes showed his interest when he looked up. «By being more selective in gathering ores we can gross more than that on the next load,» she said. «We?» He handed her the bankbook, sat down in the captain's chair. «You have my attention.» She darkened the room, punched instructions into the computer. On the main viewer the harsh light of the asteroid belt made Denton blink. Mother sat alone in solitude. She had taken the holos on her last extravehicular excursion from a distance of about a hundred yards. Large and small chunks of space debris were visible, patches of glaring light and inky blackness. The scene changed, shot from a holo on the extraction arm. In artificial light the yellow gleam of gold made streaks on the rock sides of an excavated trench. Close up shots showed the dramatic lightning bolt of pure gold that Erin had extracted from the matrix rock, a pile of pure nuggets next to it. «So it was mining that your dad had in mind,» Denton said. «It took me four months to fill Mother's cargo space.» «Sounds simple. Why do you need me?» He laughed. «Or is it that you're overwhelmed by my masculine charm?» She said stiffly, «I'm offering a straight business deal. One third of the gross. Working partners. Twenty-four hour operations. You work, I sleep. I work, you sleep. And that's it, period.» «What's the rush?» He pushed buttons, returned the holo to its beginning, watched the tumble of the asteroids again. «Are you interested?» she asked. «I have a few things to clear up here.» «Time is important,» she said. «How important are those things when compared to one third of three payloads bringing in more than one million credits each?» «Not very, come to think of it,» he said. «A million for me, huh? But why just three trips?» «I'll tell you if you decide to come with me.» «Okay, but I want half. You've made a million. Three more trips at, say, a total of four or five million and you won't be hurting.» «A third or nothing.» «Okay.» He stood up. Mop made his begging sound, wanting to be noticed. Denton patted his head. «Too bad, Moppy, I thought maybe we'd be shipmates.» He was halfway out the open hatch before Erin said, «All right, damn it. Half.» He turned. «It's not that I'm greedy. It's just that I hate working twelve-on and twelve-off.» «Sure.» «How soon do you want to leave?» «Now.» «A couple of weeks. That's the best I can do.» «Two days, three at the most.» «I'll do my best, but even with the prospect of being quite rich I'm not going to just close down a business I've busted my—back to build.» «I won't be unreasonable, but I won't wait weeks.» «You were going to tell me why the rush.» «Sit,» she said, punching in the holo-tape that showed the first view of Old Smiley. The import of what he was seeing hit him with the holos of her cleaning the skull. He waited until a close-up filled the viewing area. «Old?» «I'm no expert. A million years, maybe.» «And you haven't reported it.» She shook her head. «So that's the rush.» «I figured another few months, a year, wouldn't matter. It isn't as if Smiley is a threat to the security of mankind.» «Ummm.» «My dad sunk everything he had into this mother of a ship. I had visions of coming home, caring for him in his declining years, living in genteel poverty on the old home place. I came home to find him dead and the house and lands mortgaged up to the hilt. I think I owe it to his memory not to throw away the opportunity he wanted for himself.» «With what you have already, you could buy a place like the Kenner house.» «Yes, I could.» «But you want more?» «Don't you?» There was a long silence. «Yes, I do.» He turned off the holo, brought up the lights. His eyes squinted. «What would X&A do if they found out you've delayed reporting an important find?» «The laws are very strict. Ten to fifteen years in a penal colony.» «What if you—we—simply do away with it? The skull.» «No. I couldn't do that.» «No, I guess not.» He sighed. «Well, then.» «We go to the belt. We work our asses off. We haul at least three, maybe four loads of the finest ore we can dig to Haven. We keep our eyes open for more fossilized bones. And then we call in X&A and show them where we found the objects—on our last trip to the belt. « Denton winked, picked up the dog, who grunted and threw himself onto his back in the crook of Denton's arm, indicating that he wanted his belly rubbed. «What about this hairy little scoundrel? Can we trust him to keep his mouth shut?» «Uhhhhh,» Mop groaned in pleasure. Erin found herself smiling. Dent was so good with the dog. Any man who liked dogs couldn't be all bad. She shook her head. «Nothing personal, Dent, but I want to reemphasize that this is strictly a working arrangement.» «I get the message. One question. Do we hot bed it, since the other cabin has been converted to mining control?» She smiled coldly, led him by the arm to the door of the mining cabin, pointed to the folded bunk bed on the bulkhead. He shrugged. «That makes it seventy-five twenty-five, my way.» «You and the horse you rode in on,» she said. «All right, Captain,» he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. «Although it will be a terrible struggle for me to resist your charms, I will control my animalistic impulses. I will sleep like a bat, hanging to the bulkhead. I will work twelve-on and twelve-off. Any other orders, ma'am?» Her face had gone stiff. «If that's your attitude, there's no need beginning it,» she said. He held up one hand, shook his head. «No, it's all right. I promise I'll be a good boy.» She clapped her palm to her forehead, looked up, rolled her eyes. «I shouldn't do this,» she said. «I know I shouldn't do this.» Mop came to put his forepaws up on Denton's leg, asking to be picked up. «You're outvoted, lady,» he said. «The hairy member of the crew likes me.» Denton sold his business to a large corporation that had been gobbling up small operations all over New Earth. His sporty aircar went into storage, along with a few personal items from his rented apartment. Erin, impatient to be off and away, told him that he'd have the money to buy a new and far more luxurious aircar, that it was silly to store things like music reproduction equipment. «Want me to throw away my baby pictures and stamp collection, too?» he asked. Actually, he was not quite ready to leave his entire life behind, and, in spite of her eagerness to be underway, Erin understood. He needed to know that he would have something to come back to. She had felt the same kind of wrench while gathering the personal things she had brought aboard Mother from her home. It took three days. Mother lifted off the hardpad into the nightside, orbited briefly as Erin punched in multiple blinks. By the time the generator was drained and ready for recharging, they were light-years from New Earth. During the charge period they settled into a routine that would become familiar. Twelve hours on duty, twelve off. Only one of them at a time in the small exercise gym. No meals taken together. With a fully charged generator Mother blinked again, and again, and just behind her, one blink back, the sleek, armed, deep space miner followed. CHAPTER SIX Dent watched nervously as Erin maneuvered Mother into the stream of asteroids, working her way toward the center where she had found the fragments containing the richest ore on her previous trip. The detectors spotted a promising site. Mop said «yipe» when the ship settled against the tumbling chunk of rock. Dent loosed a long sigh. Erin pretended total nonchalance, although each time she attached Mother to an asteroid it was pucker time. She balanced out forces with the flux drive and with steering jets until ship and rock flowed through space without tumbling. There were less than six hours left of her shift and Denton had been awake for eighteen hours. «You're going to need some sleep,» she said. «Now that the excitement's over?» «What excitement?» He laughed. «I'm familiar in theory with the extraction equipment, but it might be a good idea to have you go through the procedures with me.» She was thinking that at the end of his next twelve he would have gone thirty-six hours without sleep. A tired man was a careless man. X & A axiom. She, herself, would use the rest of her watch making minute measurements to be sure that their neighbors in the crowded asteroid belt were not being pushy and moving in on Mother as she sat on her rocky perch. «All right,» she said. She led the way into the mining control room. He had moved a locker from the gym to store his clothing and personal
possessions. The bed was neatly made, although the movable partition that separated it from the rest of the room was pushed back. At least, she thought, he wasn't a slob. She ran him through the checklists, operating procedures, and buttonology for the biter and extractor. Within an hour he was handling the equipment well. It was a rich deposit and the weight of ore built quickly in Mother's hold. «Won't take long at this rate,» he said. «All the deposits are not this rich,» she said. She glanced at the clock and saw that they were two hours into Dent's watch. The tension of taking the ship into the belt, the stimulation of finding a good ore field, all drained away, leaving her exhausted. «I'm declaring a holiday,» she said. «In honor of what?» «You name it,» she said, rising, stretching. «In observation of the day they lopped off Mop's tail.» «A truly significant day.» «You've been up over twenty-four hours. I'm beat, too. I think we both need a good eight or ten hours' sleep, and then we can settle down to serious work.» «You talked me into it, Cap'n.» She was asleep moments after she pulled the light coverlet over her. At some time during the «night» she heard or felt the vibrations caused by the mining machines, thought about getting up to see why Dent had gone back to work, turned over and was fast asleep again. When she woke again, she'd been asleep for over nine hours. She had a solid breakfast before going to the cabin that was a combination of Dent's quarters and the mining control room. Mop greeted her at the door, leaping up joyfully, acting as if it had been months since he'd last seen her. Denton was seated in the control chair. The weight gauge showed that he'd loaded several tons of ore. «Looks as though this vein is about to play out,» he said. «Couldn't sleep?» she asked. «Slept for a couple of hours. I'll have twelve hours to catch up now.» «I'll take it, then.» «I think if we moved ship about a hundred feet toward that sharp extension—» «Readings are good in that direction?» «Yep.» «Well, if you've pretty well exhausted the vein—» «You're going to trust me with moving her?» «You'll have to do it sooner or later,» she said. «Okay. Just check behind me before I do anything,» he said. She watched closely. He used the remote control panel in the mining room to lift Mother with her flux drive and lower her without so much as a jar to a spot just over a hundred feet away. «Well done,» she said. He nodded, positioned the biter, and sampled the rock. A gleam of gold appeared in the viewer. Gold and something else. «Damn,» Erin said. «What? What?» he asked, startled by the tone of her voice. «On the surface,» she said, «just to the right of the trench.» It took him a while to see it. The telltale was a difference in texture more than shape. She pointed it out to him on the viewer. «Two separate pieces,» she said. «That jagged end there—» «Ah, yes,» he said. Mop protested loudly when both of them left him alone and disappeared into the air lock. Once again Erin had that feeling of disorientation as she stepped out of the lock onto the asteroid, but since Dent was directly behind her she did not have the sense of almost panicky loneliness that she'd experienced while going extravehicular on her first trip to the belt. She demonstrated the use of the laser cutter to Dent, adjusting it to flow away rock and leave the fossilized bones intact. One bone had a large knob extending just above the surface. As the matrix stone melted away it was apparent that the knob was part of a knee joint. The small bones of the feet of the two partial legs were scattered, but seemed to be complete. «When the crust of the planet was shattered,» Erin said, as Dent put the specimens into separate bags, «the break occurred just here.» Her voice was made slightly metallic by the radio. She indicated the jagged end of one leg bone. «The rest of him might be in one of the other asteroids,» Dent said. «I'm no expert,» she said, «but they look humanoid to me.» «Yep,» he said. «We'll have to watch very carefully.» «We could mark this one and move on.» «No. This is a rich ore field. Let's work it.» Once they were back inside the ship she had to insist that Dent go to bed. He took one last look at the fossils, grumbled a bit, went into the bath and stayed half an hour before closing off the partition around his bunk area. Mop leapt into Erin's lap and climbed up onto the console to take his place beside the main viewer. Erin scratched him behind the ears and whispered, «We have to keep quiet, Mr. Mop.» Mop curled up and closed his eyes. Erin began to hum softly. The hours passed. The weight of ore grew in Mother's storage areas. Denton emerged, pulling down his jumper, after only six hours. «Can't sleep?» she asked. «You're going to have to learn another tune.» «Oh?» She made a face. «If you're going to hum throughout your watch, you're going to have to learn a few more songs.» «Oh, hell,» she said. «I'm sorry. I didn't realize that I was doing it. It's habit, I guess.» «Not that I don't like music—» «All right,» she said. «You've made your point.» «Maybe I can insulate the partition.» «No, I'll be quiet.» «Maybe I could sleep in the other cabin.» «No,» she said quickly. Then, «Look, I'm sorry, Dent, but I have a thing about that. I think a bed is just about as personal as underwear.» «Your skivvies wouldn't fit me,» he said. «Much too small.» In the next week, Mother mined surface ore fields on three different asteroids. No more fossils were found. The relationship between Erin and Dent was unchanged. He had apparently adjusted to sleeping behind his partition while she was at work, and she remembered, most of the time, not to hum as she manipulated the biter and the extractor. It was Mop who brought about a change in the routine. The little dog's stub of a tail was the barometer of his feelings. Usually it was perky, a cocky little spike pointing stiffly upward and slightly forward. It was a sturdy stump of a tail, and it was lowered only when Mop was asleep. When he started carrying it tucked under, Erin was concerned. «Come to think of it, I haven't seen him punch out a nibble for himself lately,» Dent said. Erin pushed the button and offered Mop a tasty little artificial bone. He sniffed at it, lowered his head, lay down with his muzzle between his paws. «What's the matter, partner?» Erin asked, picking him up. He rolled onto his back in the crook of her arm, closed his eyes, sighed. Erin ran the tip of her finger over his nose. It was dry, sandpapery. «He's sick,» Erin said, looking at Dent with her eyes wide and full of concern. It took them a couple of days to figure out why the dog was under the weather. The first clue was that when Erin went to bed Mop was not content to lie down and keep her feet warm. Instead, he barked to be let out of the cabin. «Dr. Gale has the answer,» Denton announced one «morning» when Erin entered the mining room. «The problem is that Mr. Mop has no one to relieve him.» Erin was still feeling a bit sluggish from sleep. «Huh?» «You work twelve hours and rest twelve hours,» he said. «Ditto for me. Our little buddy here has to keep you company while you're on watch and then he goes to work immediately to keep me company.» He spread his hands. «Not even a superior pooch like Mr. Mop can be on duty twenty-four hours a day forever.» «Oh, pooh,» she said. «Now you think about it.» She thought. When she was alone on the ship, Mop had slept at her feet for the eight hours or more she was in bed. «I'll be damned,» she said. «Well, I'll just force him to stay in the cabin with me during your watch.» But Mop fretted, paced, leapt on and off the bed, begged politely to be let out the door. «He's a very conscientious canine,» Denton said. «You're keeping him from what he sees as his duty.» «One more night like last night,» Erin said, «and I'm going to pull his hairy ears off.» «The only solution,» Denton said, «is to work a normal day.» Actually, Erin had been thinking the same thing. Most of the time the work of extracting ore from the rock would go faster with two people at the controls in the mining room, one operating the biter and the laser, the other working with the extractor. «I'm thinking of myself, too,» Dent said. «I'll sleep a lot better with some peace and quiet.» Mop had a few fitful naps during the first watch under the new arrangement. With two people working, the ore poured into Mother's storage with pleasing swiftness. At the end of the watch Erin took Mop to bed with her. He showed the same pattern of behavior as he had exhibited previously, so she opened the door to her cabin and left him free to roam the ship, checking out the mining room and Denton's bed when he cared to do so. When he saw that the lights were off and that Dent was asleep, he return
ed to Erin's cabin, jumped up on the bed, rolled onto his back with his legs in the air and slept for ten hours without so much as moving. The stub of a tail was a flag of cheerfulness when he joined Erin and Dent for breakfast. Extracting ore was a repetitive job that had become a matter of routine. As they worked they made comments about the density and color of the rock, speculated on the method of destruction of the planet that had once followed the orbit that was now a huge ring of debris. Since Erin felt guilty for not reporting Old Smiley and The Legs to X&A, she never mentioned the fossils. Dent asked questions about her time in Service and she recounted the routine of life aboard the Rimfire. Like Erin, Denton had been born on New Earth. Unlike her, he was not widely traveled. Before shipping with her on the Mother Lode, he told her, he'd made one trip to Delos to take a course on how to recharge the Verbolt cloud chambers that were at the heart of most computers. His childhood had been a happy one, as had hers. His parents had died within the same year when he was twenty years old. He had never owned a dog. «My dad always used to give me dolls when I was a little girl,» she told him. «What I wanted was a bicycle, or a pellet gun. One Christmas he gave me a beautiful baby carriage lined in white silk. Charlie Frink and I were playing road construction and I filled it up with dirt, pretending it was an earth mover. It was very, very black dirt.» It was a comfortable, easy relationship. There were no demands made from either side. When the working watch ended, Erin went to her cabin or to the gym. Now and then they had a meal together or watched a holo-drama sitting in the comfortable control chairs on the bridge. Mop was more than happy with the new system. Once or twice a night he'd leave Erin's bed to check on Dent. The doors to both cabins were left open so that the dog could perform his duty of looking after both of them. It seemed logical, since production had actually increased, to continue the system of working together. It seemed safe. After all, during her first trip to the asteroid belt, she had been alone and had left Mother to look after herself during her sleep hours. Each «night» before retiring one of them would check the ship's detection system and set the audible alarms. While they slept, Mother's little electronic gadgets sent out beams to confirm that the neighboring asteroids were keeping their distance, chuckled their way through internal checks of the recycling plants, measured the sleeping power in the blink generator, probed the temperature in the food bins, and performed dozens of other tests, checks, and analyses. But the Mother Lode was not equipped with the latest detection gear which would have enabled her to warn Erin and Denton that stealthy search beams were playing on and through her metal hide, beams that told the man who operated the originating instruments that the routine had changed aboard the Mule, that now the Alpha patterns of the two-man crew showed that both slept at the same time. Nor could Mother see through the considerable mass of the asteroid on which she was currently perched. So it was that the sleek, fast, well equipped mining ship that had followed the Lode from the day that Erin first left Haven was able to wend her way through the belt and give an almost casual shove to a tumbling, roughly rectangular slab of stone that measured a hundred yards on its long axis. For a period of several hours the tombstone-shaped asteroid closed on Mother's blind side. When contact came, a small protrusion on the tumbling slab brushed across a distended node of stone on the asteroid contained in Mother's field. The two masses were traveling at the same speed in their orbital path around the sun. The differential in inertia was represented mainly by the slab's tumbling motion. As the slab came near, it was affected by the field being put out by Mother's generator. The brushing contact altered the vector of the large asteroid only slightly, and slowed the tumbling motion of the slab minutely. Now the slab was being drawn toward Mother's asteroid by the ship's field, and being impelled by its own motion. As it tumbled, it would have been apparent to an observer, had there been one, that the most massive end of the slab would impact solidly within a matter of minutes. Aboard Mother the first brushing contact sent a faint tremor through the ship. Sensors trembled, searched, sent signals to the computer. A quick search of near space showed the ship's systems nothing that was a cause for alarm. «Underneath» the ship the sensors found solid matter. All was well. But there happened to be a rather efficient biological sensor at work aboard the Mother Lode. Mop the dog had experienced every motion that was possible aboard a ship of Mother's size. When the very slight tremor of contact vibrated upward through the legs of Erin's bed, he rolled onto his feet and put all of his senses to work. When he was agitated, or doubtful about something, his neck seemed to get longer as he held his head high, perked up one ear. «Wurf,» he said softly. «Ummmf,» Erin said in her sleep. The hair on Mop's back rippled. He felt a difference in the ship's field, for it had strengthened itself to account for the additional bulk of the tumbling slab that was swinging slowly, so slowly, to smash its heaviest end directly into Mother's asteroid. Erin was galvanized into frenzied motion as Mop sounded off, «Yap-yap-yap-yap,» in a near-hysterical, high-pitched bark that brought her to her feet, standing up in bed, yelling, «What? What? What?» «What's going on?» Denton yelled, his voice carrying across the control bridge through Erin's open door. Erin leapt to the floor and dashed for the bridge. Since she'd been leaving her door open, she'd taken to sleeping in shortie gowns. The one she wore that night was blue and set off her ash blonde hair well. Lights came on automatically as she ran onto the bridge. She punched up the computer. There was something vaguely wrong. Mop was still yapping. Her hair seemed to want to stand on end. «The field,» Denton said, as he ran out of his cabin pulling on a pair of jeans. She noticed, although it didn't register at the moment, that he had a nice chest and that his arms were strong. He noticed, and it did register, that it was evident through the thin material of the gown that she was a natural ash blonde, and that her waist was even smaller than he'd thought. She punched instructions. The field was showing almost double the mass of the asteroid that they were mining. Mop was yapping warning. She had a feeling that the next few seconds were critical, but a quick search of near space showed no danger. She punched in an order and saw that the sensors had recorded a small tremor only four minutes ago. With a sudden chill running up her back she searched near space again, selected a vector, killed the ship's field and gave power to the flux drive. Mother jerked away from her rocky perch with a suddenness that sent Mop to his belly on the deck and caused both Dent and Erin to reach for support before the ship's gravity adjusted. Behind them, the tumbling slab smashed with all of the inertial mass of millions of tons into the asteroid just vacated by Mother. Rock shattered soundlessly in the vacuum of space. Erin found an opening in the belt and sent Mother soaring outward, racing away from chunks of rock that seemed to be pursuing her. At a safe distance, Erin stabilized the ship. «Keep an eye open,» she said, «in case some of the mothers come after us.» She motioned with one hand to indicate that she was talking about the shattered particles of the asteroids. «You wanta tell me what the hell happened?» Dent asked. «In a minute.» «What are you doing?» he asked. She was at the food dispensers. «I'm going to give Mr. Mop a full two ounces of our best and most tender steak.» Mop had a sensitive digestive system. He was, after all, a small dog. Giving him two ounces of steak was the equivalent of a man of Dent's size eating four pounds. Both Erin and Dent knew from experience that people food, as much as Mop loved it, upset his tummy, which cause him to have diarrhea, which tended to make him very messy and very smelly at the rear. «Two ounces?» Dent asked. «Yes.» «Well, he's your little dog.» «Yes, and if it upsets him I'll wash his rear end,» Erin said. «Because if it weren't for him, we'd be dead.» Denton adjusted a viewer, saw a growing cloud of rock particles behind him. «Think he'd want three ounces?» he asked. Erin bent over to give Mop his treat, felt a draft, realized that she was dressed only in her shortie gown, stood up quickly, saw Denton looking at her with a musing smile on his face. «Nice,» he said. «Son-of-a-bitch,» she said. «Give the dog his treat,» he said, as Mop danced around on his rear legs. Erin knelt and began feeding t
he dog the bits of savory meat. Denton's eyes on her seemed to generate warmth deep inside of her. CHAPTER SEVEN With her superior detection equipment the Murdoch Miner could keep track of the Mother Lode either from a distance or at close range if the Miner was hidden from Mother's sensors by intervening rock. For some time those aboard the rakishly designed ship were content to observe the actions of the converted Mule as she went about her work, although personal relations aboard the Murdoch Miner were not as congenial as aboard the Mule. Ordinarily the Miner operated with a four-man crew consisting of two married couples who got along very well together because the women were sisters who had an impartial regard for the cousins they had married. Over a period of several years the four had discovered that a certain amount of change and variety enlivened the dull routines of space mining. Into the smoothly working and cozy arrangement the boss, Murdoch Plough, had tossed a disruption that muddled things up as severely as if someone had dropped a piece of durasteel into the gears of a complicated machine. The disruption was named Gordon Plough, and since he was the little brother of the boss, thus making it necessary to put up a good front, the sisters had to keep to their own respective beds, wear more clothing than usual, and be careful of what they said. The situation was a pain in the hootchie, and it threatened to get worse before it got better, because little brother couldn't make up his mind what to do about the Mule that was keeping the Murdoch Miner from the richest gold deposits anyone aboard her had ever seen. In fairness to Gordon Plough it had never been simple being the younger brother to a self-made man. It hadn't even been easy when they were boys because Murdoch had always been big for his age and had taken great pleasure in making life as painful as possible for Gordon. Now that they were both men, Gordon thought that his older brother liked him well enough, but still looked upon him as a kid. He wasn't. He was twenty-nine years old and he'd always felt that if Murdoch would ever give him a real chance he could prove that he could do more for the Haven Refining Company and the mining interests than be some kind of errand boy. Gordon's chance had come when his brother put him in charge of following the Mother Lode to, it was clearly understood, if not stated openly, discover and take possession of one of the richest gold sources in the galaxy. Just how Gordon was to accomplish the job had been left up to him. In spite of the fact that the Miner had been functioning well under her captain of some five years, one of the male cousins, Gordon was now captain of the ship and, since it was his first real command, he was determined to make the most of it. The Miner had been in space for months. The cousins, Sam and Kim Maleska, were getting more and more fed up with Gordon Plough's constant orders and his indecision. Not the least of their frustrations was the fact that their customary shipboard social life had been put on hold by having a representative of the company aboard. It wasn't that Murdoch Plough was a prude, it was just that the cousins feared management might think that a crew that was having fun wouldn't get the work done. They hadn't been able to play musical beds since leaving Haven and they were discovering that you never miss a good thing until you have it within your reach but can't grab it for some reason or another. «Gordon,» said Sam Maleska one morning after weeks of sneaking around the belt spying on the Mother Lode, «I sure would like to get cracking on a few of them gold bearing rocks.» «Patience,» Gordon Plough said. «Why should we do the work when we can let them do it for us?» It took Sam a while to figure that one out. He told Kim and the sisters, «I think he's planning to let the Mother Lode fill her holds and then hijack her.» «Hell,» Kim said, «we could work twice as fast as they can. This ship was built for mining.» «I think he's scared,» said Caryl. On this trip Caryl was the blonde. It was sister Cherry's turn to be the brunette. «I think he's a pussy,» Cherry said. She tugged uncomfortably at her tunic. She was accustomed to wearing nothing more than a loose, transparent, hip length tee and briefs while aboard ship. «Why don't one us just let our finger slip and blast hell out of that Mule?» «Get it over with,» Caryl agreed. «Blasting her would leave teeny little scraps floating around,» Sam said. «The scraps might be found—» He lifted his eyebrows and spread his arms to indicate the vastness of space and the impossibility of the captain's fears. «Our captain doesn't want to risk having a piece of the Mother Lode identified at some—» At that moment Gordon Plough came into the lounge. «And here he is now,» Kim Maleska said. «I know that you've been wondering why we have delayed the completion of our mission,» Gordon said pompously. «I think you will be pleased to know that we are going to take action.» «When?» Caryl asked, with a flip of her blonde hair. «Soon,» Gordon said. «First we have to find some way to catch both of them out of the ship.» «Why?» Sam asked. «Let's just hole her with a laser and then toss her into the sun.» «There's always the chance that she might get off a distress signal if we do that,» Gordon said. «No. She's got to go into the sun on her own power and without any possibility of a message being sent.» «Can't see how some sombitch can send a stat while his lungs are blowing up in decompression,» Kim grumbled. «That's why my brother put me in charge of this operation,» Gordon said. «He wants things done right. « «If you don't want to put a hole in her with a laser.» Sam said, «how about if she gets busted open by accident?» Gordon made a face. He had to admit that an accident would be almost as good as what he had in mind. «An accident would be neat,» he said. «But it would have to be catastrophic and instantaneous.» It was Cherry who arranged the «accident» that would have smashed the Mother Lode in the collision of two asteroids. «You see,» Gordon said, his voice rising in anger, «I told you so. I said, 'Look, men, let's not be hasty.' « «You hear him say that?» Sam asked Kim. «I didn't. You hear him say that, Cherry?» «I didn't,» she said. «You hear him say that, Caryl?» «Well, maybe I didn't say it in words,» Gordon said, «but you know what I was thinking.» «Oh,» Kim said. «Well, sure.» He looked at Sam with his eyebrows raised. «We always know what you're thinking, Cap'n.» «Now what if she sent off a stat?» Gordon asked. «She was too busy saving her ass to think about sending off a stat,» Kim said. «What would she send? Help, help, a big rock tried to smush me?» Sam Maleska came to his feet. He was a big man, well over six feet, and he affected a huge, bushy, black beard that made him look quite uncivilized. «Cap'n,» he said, «with all respect, if you don't come to a decision pretty quick I'm gonna forget that you're the brother of the boss and take it on myself to kick a little ass.» «Are you threatening me?» Gordon blustered. «You hear me threaten the cap'n?» Sam asked, arms spread. «I didn't hear him threaten the cap'n,» Cherry said. «Did y'awl?» «Not me,» Kim said. «Me neither,» Caryl said, tossing her blonde locks. As it happened Caryl was on watch when the air lock of the Mother Lode opened and two flexsuited figures descended to the surface of the asteroid. She lost no time in waking the others. The captain assessed the situation and came up with a plan. It wasn't a good plan. Sam said to Kim, «This sucks.» But it was a plan. At last they were going to do something. Since there were five of them and only two members of the crew of the Mother Lode, it didn't really matter if the captain had come up with what was, really, a lousy plan. Five of them would handle two quickly and easily. «Listen and listen good,» Gordon said. Sam and Kim looked at each other and rolled their eyes. «We'll take them by surprise,» Gordon said. «Use a narrow beam on the saffers. We don't want to leave pieces of them scattered around. Just hole the suits and then we'll put them on board their ship and set the ship's generator to blink her into the sun. Everyone got that?» As it turned out it wasn't a bad plan after all, it was just that it didn't work for Gordon Plough and the crew of the Murdoch Miner. CHAPTER EIGHT There was nothing wrong with the Mother Lode's warning systems. For two days Erin and Dent checked and rechecked, working the old Century Series computer hard. When Erin was satisfied that Murphy's Law had been at work, that the tumbling slab of debris had, quite naturally, taken the very worst approach so that the bulk of the asteroid on which the ship sat blocked detection, she sighed, said, «Well, that's it,» and was ready to go back to wor
k. But it seemed that the incident with the straying asteroid had changed their luck. Time and time again Erin eased the ship close to a grim, barren, spinning mountain of rock only to find that there were no heavy metals or if there were they were buried deeply. Mother was equipped only for shallow, surface mining. She didn't have the tools to drill a thousand feet into stone to test the source of some very strong readings on the detectors. When, at last, the instruments buzzed happily, having located gold deposits near the exterior of an asteroid with convenient level areas, she attached Mother to the rock with the strength of her field and was pleased when rich flakes and nuggets were extracted immediately. Soon the comfortable work routine had been reestablished. She had forgotten that Dent had well developed arms and a muscular chest with just enough hair to make him look masculine. The sensors on the digging arm sounded the presence of fossilized bone late in a watch. «Oh, damn,» Erin said, stopping the biter from deepening a trench. «There,» Denton said, pointing to the viewer screen. The bones were lighter in color than the matrix rock. Three arching bands were visible. «Nothin' to it but to do it,» Dent said. Erin followed him to the air lock, suited up. Mop was voicing his protest. «Guard the ship,» Dent told him. «Hush,» Erin said, as the dog continued barking. Mop did not hush. He barked energetically long after the inner hatch closed. «You'd think,» Erin said, as she stepped down onto the bare surface, «that you'd get used to this after a few times.» Denton lifted his helmeted head, turned a full circle. Near them, sunward sides reflecting dazzling light, were a few asteroids. Over them, under them, and to all sides there was the harsh glare of the core stars. «I won't miss this part of it when it's over,» Dent said. He was carrying the laser cutter. He positioned himself over the curving bones and began to melt away the matrix. Slowly a rib cage emerged. «Small,» Erin said. » 'Bout like a six-year-old child,» Dent agreed. «There haven't been any fossils where the gold is in veins,» she said. «Only in this softer rock.» «This type of formation must have been near the surface of the planet's crust,» he said. «Notice how it's layered, as if it were formed by sedimentary action. And I'd guess that the gold is a placer deposit, washed down from some mother lode.» The fossilized skeleton was disjointed, but below the rib cage lay a large pelvic bone and long thighbones. Arms, neck, and skull were not to be found. It took over an hour to free the bones and bag them. Erin headed back toward the air lock, Dent directly behind her. She reached out her hand to punch the entry code into the lock, but her finger did not make contact. She felt a sudden sense of disorientation. With nightmare slowness the Mother Lode lifted and drifted away from her outstretched hand. «Hey,» she cried out. Dent jetted away from the surface of the asteroid as Mother accelerated, moving toward the black emptiness of space. For a few moments it seemed that he would catch the ship, but she was moving too fast for the jets of the suit. He and the ship became glowing little stars almost lost among the vastness. Erin watched in shocked silence. The small brightness that was Denton Gale grew until she could make out his suited arms and legs. And then he was landing beside her. «Erin? Hey?» His voice was soft inside her helmet. An image was burned into her mind, the lop-eared, hairy face of Mop at the viewport on the bridge, his head jerking with silent urgency as he barked his alarm at being alone on a ship moving off into space. «Erin?» «I don't know.» «She was not under her own power.» «No. We'd have felt the force of the flux drive.» «What?» She took a deep breath. She had just over three hours to live, plus ten minutes on the suit's reserve air, and she was thinking more about a frightened, lonely little dog than about her own predicament. She shook her head. «Let's take a walk,» she said. For Mother did not leave under her own power. «As it happens,» Dent said, «I have nothing else to do.» The chemically activated jets which gave some degree of maneuverability to a suited spacemen had limited capacity. Dent's vain attempt to catch Mother had almost exhausted his fuel. They crawled from point to point, aided somewhat by the small amount of artificial gravity generated by the tiny flux units that powered the suits. The asteroid was a large one, perhaps a quarter of a mile in diameter. A half hour's air was used up before they reached a point that allowed a view of the side of the asteroid away from Mother's former position. Erin leapt up onto a large protrusion, missed her footing, fell slowly, arms windmilling. The fall saved her life, for as she fell a slash of light passed over her head. «Take cover,» she ordered, her voice calm in spite of the fact that she'd just been narrowly missed by a lethal beam from a saffer. As she landed lightly on her feet and bounced, her own weapon was in her gloved hand. To her right, at a distance she estimated at about two hundred feet, although distances were deceiving on the sharply curved and uneven surface, she saw movement. Her reaction was the result of training. She brought the saffer beam down from above the head of the space-suited man who had fired on her and saw the sizzle of death as the figure was knocked backward by the force. «Behind you,» Denton yelped. She whirled. Rock disintegrated beside her as she slipped to her left, swinging the saffer in a horizontal arc to cut the legs out from under a second assailant. As the integrity of the attacker's suit was breached, she saw a fine mist of blood and fluids spew out to dissipate into the vacuum of space. «My God,» Dent said in disbelief, «they were trying to kill us.» «Bet your sweet ass,» Erin said, swiveling in the stiff suit, examining the shadowy, rocky landscape carefully. There was no further movement. She edged forward and there was a ship, anchored to the asteroid by her field at a point directly opposite Mother's former perch. Denton crawled to lie beside her. «Mining vessel,» he said. «Probably has laser cannon.» «But why?» «Gold,» she said. «But there's enough for everyone,» Dent said. «They didn't think so.» «They wanted to kill us so that they could have all of the gold?» Dent asked. «What else?» «I can't believe that,» he said. «No one ship can possibly mine the whole belt.» «Believe it.» «In real life men don't kill for gold. That happens only in holo-dramas.» «Bullshit,» she said. «How many in her crew?» he asked, nodding his head inside the helmet to indicate the sleek ship. «Four, usually. She's a fleet type scout. I don't know what was done to her during her conversion to a mining vessel. I doubt if they made more crew space. Four men could work the equipment around the clock.» «They used their generator to negate Mother's field?» «What else?» she asked. «A Mule's generator is powerful, but that was a military ship before her conversion. With Mother's generator on low, just enough to keep us on the rock, one quick surge of power with the mining ship's field in reverse would send Mother off into space.» «They had to know, then, that we were not aboard.» «They knew.» «Then they know we're here.» «Yes, but now we know they're here,» she said grimly. Denton swallowed. Two men were dead. «Next thing to do is get you a weapon,» she said, starting to crawl toward the crumpled form of the man whose legs had been cut away. Denton reached the body first, bent to take the saffer from a gloved hand, gasped. «It's a woman,» he said. «So it is,» Erin said, looking at the ruined face and wisps of blonde hair behind the clear mask. «A woman.» «Not a very well trained woman,» Erin said. «And you are,» he said bitterly. «Better thank God that I am.» He was silent. «All right, people,» Erin said, looking at the ship. «Where are you?» As if in answer, rock shattered in eerie silence so close to Demon's head that he rolled away in panic. Erin's eyes followed the lance of the saffer beam to a shadowed alcove between two rocky protrusions. She saw movement. «There are two of them,» she said. «Where?» She pointed. «What are we going to do?» Denton asked. «I think it might be a good idea if we kill them before they kill us.» «Maybe we can talk to them.» «Go ahead. Step forth in peace,» she said. He was silent. «In less than two hours we've got to be aboard that ship,» she said. «I think those two over there might have something to say about that.» «Probably.» She looked around, nodded to herself. The attackers had already shown themselves to be unskilled, even a bit stupid, but, as Denton had pointed out, not too many people went around murdering others these days. A certain lack of experience had been evidenced by the atta
ckers, which was fortunate for Erin Elizabeth Kenner and Denton Gale. «What I'm going to do,» she said, «is jet off behind that rise over there. I want you to keep up a fire on their position. Keep their attention on you.» «I've never fired at a person.» «I think now is the time to start.» «Let's try to contact them by radio.» «Listen, damn it,» she said, «I want you to lay down a covering fire on them now.» Denton's saffer sent a beam of concentrated energy that shattered rock and caused a stir of movement in the shadows. Erin pushed the jet controls and shot upward and outward at a shallow angle. Every muscle was tensed as she waited for fire to lance into her body, but then she was in the protection of the rocks and could relax her sphincters. Denton was firing at roughly five second intervals. She took a survey of the terrain and lifted off once more. From the rear, she soared over the concealed position of the unknown enemy. An overhanging ledge protected them. She fired as she moved forward, seeking a point where her beam could lance under the overhang. The two suited figures looked up, saw her. One of them leapt into the open and took a two-handed stance, his saffer aimed directly at her. She pushed a button to activate a jet to turn her so that she could fire at the man in the open, hit the wrong one, sent herself spinning. She was an easy target, spinning around suspended just above the two would-be killers. «Denton,» she cried out. Fire lanced out from Denton's position. The man who had been drawing a bead on her burned. She corrected her spin, aimed her weapon downward only to see Dent use the last of his jet fuel to put himself in firing position. The fourth man died while he was trying to get situated to shoot at Erin. «Hold your fire,» she sent to Dent. «They're dead.» Denton was standing quite still, saffer dangling from his gloved hand. One of the dead was a brown-haired woman and it was evident that he was greatly affected by the knowledge that he had killed her. Erin saw that his eyes were wide, that his lips were trembling. «You did well,» she said. «You saved my life.» «I never killed anyone before.» «Do you think I make a habit of it?» «You were so cool, so unconcerned.» «You couldn't have driven a nail up my anus with a sledge hammer,» she said. «You are so damned dainty.» «Thank you, love.» She moved away, turned back. «If you're ready to quit bleeding over those bastards who tried to kill both of us—» They approached the ship from her stern, moving with great caution. The last hundred yards was in the open. She bled half of her jet propellant into Dent's suit. Side by side, they soared to the cover of the ship's flux mount. «What if there's someone inside?» Denton asked, as they moved slowly and carefully toward the outer lock. Erin didn't answer. She examined the lock. «No way we'll figure the combination,» she said. The suit's air timer showed that she had thirty-seven minutes before going on reserve. She lifted her saffer. «If the inner hatch is open you'll get explosive decompression,» Denton warned. «Yep,» she said, narrowing the beam to a pinpoint cutting frequency. Metal gave off gases that quickly disappeared into the merciless vacuum of space. A rush of air through the hole that she'd cut in the hatch scattered the residue left from the cutting operation. «The inner hatch was closed,» she said. In the air lock she turned as the outer hatch slid shut, stuffed the hole where the lock had been with a cloth used to wipe dust off the glass of her helmet. «Here goes,» she said, putting her hand on the air control. Denton lifted his gloved hand and tried unsuccessfully to cross his fingers. Air hissed into the lock. The makeshift patch held, although, as the lock filled, escaping air made a whistling noise. The inner hatch opened. Erin, weapon at the ready, stepped into the suit closet. It was empty. She opened a door cautiously and moved into a corridor. «Well, you're back,» Gordon Plough said. Erin whirled. A uniformed man was standing in a doorway, a saffer dangling from his right hand. Erin's arm moved only slightly. Gordon Plough died before he had time to understand that his plan had not worked, at least not for him. He had one nanosecond of puzzlement as to why one of his own crew was lifting a saffer at him. «Damn, Erin,» Dent protested. «Look in his right hand,» Erin said harshly. Denton walked to the dead man, saw the weapon in his hand, swallowed, looked away quickly. Erin made a quick check of the rest of the ship. There were permanent quarters for four crew members and a temporary setup for another. Five in all. All of them accounted for with four dead outside on the surface of the asteroid and one in the corridor. Erin approached the computer, a first generation Unicloud, not state of the art but years newer than Mother's old Century Series. There were files for the usual star charts. The ship's papers gave her the name, the Murdoch Miner, and told her that the ship was registered on Haven in the name of the Haven Refining Company, the firm that had bought her first cargo of ore. She got a mental picture of Murdoch Plough, tall, self-centered. So, she thought, he hadn't taken it so lightly after all when X&A put the strong arm on him and forced him to pay a fair price for her gold. «Well, I guess that's it,» Denton said. «I guess it's back to the nearest civilized planet to call—» He shook his head. «Who do you call? You can't call the nearest policeman.» «X&A,» she said. «The Service handles any crime in space.» She was pushing buttons. «Time enough for that later. Right now we've got to find Mother. « «Oh, hell, poor Mop,» he said. «I'll bet he thinks we've deserted him for sure.» She lifted ship. The Miner was much more agile than the old Mule. She circled past the asteroid and headed out into the big empty roughly on the vector followed by Mother. The Miner's state of the art detectors had the Mule on screen within seconds. After that it was a matter of closing with Mother, of sending Denton out into the void again. «Put Mother down where she was when it all started,» she told Dent. «And you?» His voice was slightly distorted by space as it came from Mother by radio. «Beside you,» she said. She refilled her suit's tanks, left the outer hatch of the Miner open when she left her. «How's Mr. Mop?» she asked, as she stood on the bare rock. «I think he was happy to see me.» «I need your help out here, Dent.» «All right. Let me get suited up.» «I wouldn't ask, but I can't do it all alone.» He emerged from Mother into full sun that glared off his suit. She was already moving one of the bodies toward the Miner. «Bring the woman,» she told him. An hour and a half later they had put all four bodies, two men and two women, aboard the Miner to join the body of the man Erin had killed aboard ship. «What are you going to do?» Denton asked. «Lock onto her and take her back to the nearest U.P. planet?» They were standing near the mining ship with the crowded core star fields gleaming harshly over them. Starlight reflected off the treated glass of their helmets. Erin took a deep breath. «Why did we come out here, Dent?» «Am I supposed to answer?» «I wish you would.» «For gold.» «For how much gold?» «For enough so that neither one of us would ever have to worry about money again.» «Have we gathered that much gold?» «Nope,» he said. «But listen, Erin—» «Why did they—» she moved her gloved hand in the direction of the Miner— «come out here?» «For gold.» «And they were perfectly willing to kill us to get it. All of it.» «Where are you going with this, Erin?» «Do you have any idea what sort of red tape we'd have to go through if we show up on Haven or some other U.P. planet with five dead people?» He shook his head. «I'll tell you this. You'd be old and gray before you finished filling in forms, being tested to see if you were telling the truth, and answering questions. I don't have time for that. I didn't ask these people to follow us out here and try to kill us.» «I don't think I'm going to like this,» Dent said. «I'm ex-X&A, and I'd still be put through the wringer,» she said. «I've paid my dues. I spent six years on Rimfire. I don't want to spend two years explaining to a board of inquiry how we got lucky enough to kill five people who were trying to kill us.» «What do you have in mind?» he asked doubtfully. «I'm going to go aboard and program a timed blink into that computer,» she said, and her eyes turned toward the nearest sun, an atomic furnace that would swallow the Murdoch Miner and her dead easily and with finality. «I don't know, Erin. We're walking the line by not reporting Old Smiley and the other bones. I'm not sure I want to go that far across the line.» «Then just go on back to Mother and tell Mop I'll be along shortly and I'll take care of it.
Your conscience will be clear.» He grunted once, twice, shook his head. «No,» he said, «you've done enough. You took charge. You saved our lives. You wait here.» He disappeared into the bowels of the ship. A few minutes later Erin's hair tried to stand on end as the blink generator was activated. Denton came hurrying out of the air lock as if he were being pursued by the ghosts of the Miner's dead. «Thirty minutes,» he said. «Plenty of time for us to get back to Mother and get the hell out of here.» They bounced and jetted their way back to the ship in silence. When the inner air lock hatch opened, Mr. Mop went wild with joy on seeing them both, walking on his rear legs, gnawing on them playfully. Erin picked him up and scratched his belly. Dent went on through to the bridge and soon Mother lifted away. «It just occurred to me,» she said, «that they might have left some trace of their presence on the asteroid.» «Not to worry,» he said, positioning Mother so that they could see the Miner on her rocky perch. He checked his watch. «About—now,» he said. The Miner and the asteroid winked out of existence. Mother's sensors followed the blink. The mass of ship and rock continued to exist for one brief moment in the corona of the nearest star before being broken down into basic subatomic building blocks. Neither of them felt like working. Erin checked Mother's orbit, made sure that she was clear of any strays from the belt, said, «I'm going to bed.» «Drink first?» She shook her head in negation, went to her quarters, showered, put on a lacy nightgown and threw herself down onto the bed. The elation of victory over dangerous odds was gone. The stimulation of facing deadly danger had left her drained. A storm of melancholy submerged her in guilt. She slept. She awoke with Mop pawing at her hand and making begging noises. «What? What?» she asked. Mop leapt to the floor and ran to the door, which she'd left ajar so that he could perform his duty of keeping an eye on both her and Denton. He whined and ran back to the bed, jumped up, pawed at her leg, ran to the door. Fear came to her. «Something wrong, partner?» she asked, as she ran out onto the bridge. Dent was sprawled in the control chair, head thrown back, mouth open. He was snoring. Mop leaped up into his lap and whined. «He's just asleep,» Erin whispered. Mop pawed at Denton's lax hand. There was a strong smell of brandy. «And a little drunk,» she said. Denton said, «You're wrong, lady.» «It talks,» she said. «I'm more'n a little bit drunk.» «Good for you.» He opened his eyes. They were red, as if he'd been weeping. «Come on,» she said, «I'll help you get into your bed.» «Let's go fin' some more people to kill,» he mumbled. «Denton—» » 'Cause you seemed to enjoy it.» «You and the horse you rode in on,» she said, turning to go back to her cabin. «I killed me a woman and I killed me a man,» he said, «an' 'en I scooped 'em up and put 'em in their little ole spaceship and zapped 'em into a sun.» She turned. Huge tears were running down his cheeks. She went back to him, put her hands on his face. «Would you rather it had been you and me?» «Me? Maybe. You?» He looked at her with eyes that wouldn't quite focus. «Never you, Erin. Never you. Beautiful Erin.» She took his arm. «Come on, buddy. You're going beddy-bye.» «Pretty Erin,» he mumbled, leaning on her shoulder. She knew that she could never hoist him onto his elevated bunk. She guided him to her bed. He fell onto his back and dragged her with him so that she landed atop him. «Had to do it,» he said. «Had to kill 'em. They woulda killed my Erin.» «Hush,» she said. «Go to sleep.» His eyes opened wide. «I never killed anyone before.» «Hush. I know.» «It hurts.» «I know.» «I didn't want to kill them.» She kissed him lightly on the lips. He tasted of brandy. «I know.» «Did you want to kill them?» «No,» she said. «Do 'at again.» «What?» «This,» he said, pulling her face to him. He did not kiss like a drunk. His arms were strong. She did not resist as he rolled her onto her back and let his hands discover that her nightgown fell away with a simple tug at a tie around her neck. She helped him undress, for she, too, had faced death and had delivered death, had seen the color of blood and had smelled the odor as it gave an entirely new dimension to the recycled air aboard the Murdoch Miner. But there was more involved than the age-old desire of a man and a woman to affirm that, after being near death, they were alive. After the first cooling of mutual passion she lay with her head on his shoulder and watched him sleep. When he moved in the middle of the night she, too, awakened quickly. When he whispered his love to her, she could almost form the words to answer him. Dent was awake and about the next morning before Mr. Mop decided that it was high time for Erin to get out of bed. Mop licked her nose and made urging noises in his throat. Erin groaned, sat up, reached for the cover, for she was nude. Then she remembered and made a disgusted face. She went directly to the shower. Demon was eating breakfast when she went onto the bridge. He didn't speak, but his eyes were questioning. For a moment her face was grim, and then she remembered the taste of him, the feel of him, the goodness of being in his arms. No, she could not regret what had happened. «Hi,» she said. «Hi, yourself.» She went to him, kissed him. «You're not angry,» he said. «Should I be?» «I wasn't sure. Your bed. I remember you said that you thought a bed was as personal as underwear.» «I'm very careful about lending my underwear,» she said. «I'm even more picky about sharing my body.» His face turned red. She laughed. «Erin, I—» «If you apologize, I'll slug you,» she said. «But—» «Hush,» she said, closing his mouth with hers. Mop, wanting to get into the play, leapt onto Denton's lap, stood on his rear legs, and tried to lick them both in the face. «Now look, you hairy little monster,» Denton said, «you can sleep on my bed and sit in my lap, but when it comes to sharing my girl with you—» CHAPTER NINE Once again they had made love. Mop, who had been banished to a spot

 

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