by Chris Bunch
Nowotny drained his snifter, stood.
“I really think you … and your partners … should reconsider. Perhaps forthcoming events will change your mind, or perhaps Cerberus should approach them directly.”
Baldur nodded his head abruptly. Nowotny smiled again, and left the dining room, without looking back.
• • •
“I promise,” Jasmine said as they walked through the lobby of their hotel, “I’ll not tell the others you behaved in such a morally upright fashion when you told Nowotny to shove it.”
“It was not morality so much as simple professionalism,” Baldur said. “Not to mention I suspect Cerberus would find some way to avoid paying us the promised bonus.
“However, given Nowotny’s threat, there is a matter I should take care of.”
He bowed to her, went to the main desk.
“Yes, Colonel Baldur?” the smooth, unctuous clerk asked.
“I would like to go to our rooms without using the main entrance, but rather the service lift and entrance,” Baldur said.
“I’m sorry, sir, but that’s quite impossible for any guest — ”
A bill was passed across.
“Yes, Colonel,” the clerk said, inclining his head slightly. “I’m delighted to be of service. I’ll have someone from housekeeping bring a passkey.”
• • •
“Are you being paranoid?”
“After meeting that poisonous bastard, not at all,” Baldur said, sliding the slender bar of plas into the slot of the service door, around the corridor’s turning from their suite’s entrance.
“And what are you expecting?” Jasmine asked, as Baldur opened the door.
He didn’t have time to answer as an explosion rocked the room. Jasmine was knocked away, almost going down, and Baldur had her in his arms as the walls shook around them, things ricocheted back and forth, and dust billowed.
He pushed her down, went on top of her.
When no secondary explosion came, he sat up, and helped her up. Jasmine’s eyes were wide, shocked.
“A bit more sophisticated than I thought,” Baldur said. “Probably triggered by barometric pressure change, I would guess. Our opening that service door would be enough to trigger such a device. The center of the blast would, of course, have been at the normal entrance.”
There was a thunder of feet coming down the corridor toward them.
“Now it is time for us to act surprised and shocked, like all innocents caught in loud bangs should behave,” Baldur said.
• • •
“The worst thing about people trying to kill you in polite society is all the damned reports you have to fill out,” Baldur groaned.
He went to a window of their new suite, looked out at the sun coming up, and yawned.
“Police, secret police, the press, Grok,” he said. “Everyone wants to know just what happened.
“Not that we know anything. Hell, I am not even certain that bomb was intended to kill us.”
“It was,” Jasmine said, her voice still shaking a little, “rather an incredible warning.”
“True,” Baldur said. “Just what I would expect from Cerberus. Or, come to think of it, Mar Trac.”
He looked at Jasmine.
“Are you all right? They did miss us, you know. And I am sure staying here under a false name is safe for the night … sorry, morning. We shall be headed home by this evening.”
“No,” Jasmine said. “This is the first time Cerberus has tried to kill me. I’m not going to sit here and be calm and make little jokes about it. I want to hunt down that frigging Nowotny and finish up what that agent didn’t get right the first time, and shoot off the rest of his face.”
“Ah. Well, sleep knits up raveled sleeves and all that.”
“No,” King said. “I won’t sleep.”
“Perhaps I could offer other soothing measures?” Baldur said. “Even if our masquerade is now thoroughly shattered and I suppose we must now take responsibility for our actions?”
Jasmine went to the window, took several deep breaths, then turned back.
“Yes,” Jasmine said. “Yes. I think I need something like that.”
FORTY-EIGHT
“Might I ask you something?” Riss asked.
“You might,” Chas Goodnight said from where he slouched behind one of the mining ship’s two control boards.
“You’re sitting here running those frigging reports when you’re not back in the hold lifting rocks for exercise,” M’chel said, a touch heatedly. “So why me? This ship can run by itself, almost, and I could’ve been back on Sheol, looking for that damned cruiser of theirs.”
“I like your company at least because you’re easier on the eyes than any autopilot I know,” Goodnight said. “Plus, I might need somebody at my back.”
“Now there’s an admission of humility,” Riss said. “I didn’t know you besters ever admitted to needing anything or anybody.”
“Other than massive amounts of protein and spare batteries, we normally don’t. But I also might need someone to bounce ideas off of.
“That is, if I ever have any,” Goodnight said.
Their mining ship, cynically named the Busted, had been picked up on the cheap a system away from the Foley worlds. Mining ships went for a considerable amount new, not much used, since they were generally either dumped when a successful miner made an upgrade, or the financing entity repossessed one from an out-of-luck digger.
The ship was an ovoid, sitting on long, extendable legs. Its central hold had a huge airlock in the ship’s hull so equipment and ore could be lifted in and out on hydraulic platforms. Its control cabin and sleeping chambers sat in a secondary dome forward.
It was small, not more than seventy-five meters long, and was about averagely ugly.
It had also been armed after purchase, with a pair of missiles hidden in pods along the hull and a 40mm chaingun in the nose with a breakaway cover.
Riss decided to do what Goodnight had done, went back into the hold and exercised for a couple of hours, hoping her subconscious would give her another angle that might lead to Murgatroyd’s cruiser and then base, which would produce Murgatroyd, whoever she, he, it, or they was, on a platter. Hopefully.
She thought of meditating, but couldn’t stomach the idea of just sitting. She decided she’d suit up and go for a walk.
Actually, she would go for a bound on the near zero-gee surface of the asteroid the ship sat on. Goodnight had found a tiny world with a nice, convenient abandoned claim.
“I think that’s close enough to actually having to do the work ourselves, don’t you?”
M’chel had found a basic manual of mining in the ship’s cabin, studied it, then gone out and put some of the forsaken gear to work.
“You really expect to find something?” Goodnight had asked. “If you do, I get halfies.”
“Nope. On both counts.”
“Then why bother?”
“Why not?”
Riss could have answered honestly, and said she was always fascinated by a trade she knew nothing about, which is why, over the years, in times of Marine boredom, she’d taught herself the basics of photography, commercial art, accounting, historical research, Ping-Pong, and other seemingly useless, at least to her, trades.
But one ship-day of drilling, blasting, picking, and loading ore had made her decide she’d prefer a breadline to the back-destroying task of mining.
She went to the fresher, cleaned up, hating the ultrasound stall that substituted for real water, went back into the control room and announced her intentions.
“Hang on a shake,” Goodnight asked. “I think I’ve got something.”
“I thought you thought you had something three ship-days ago, when you were growling around about people trying to kill Freddie and Jasmine. Not to mention some four hundred-odd people murdered in Sheol by Murgatroyd’s strafing run.”
“I was wrong. Now, don’t disparage. Take a seat over there, and con
sider this screen here.”
He darkened the cabin lights, and a large-scale map of the asteroid system appeared on the screen.
“Consider this. The red dots are where the raiders have hit. Nice and scattered, so we wouldn’t have any idea where they might come from.
“Except for over here. Notice there’s a nice wedge that’s free of scabies?”
“Maybe there’s no miners around there,” Riss suggested.
“Considered that, checked around. I’m now adding, in green, the number of claims that I could pick up from whoever’s running Miner’s Rest these days.
“I didn’t go to Brother Reg because he told me they still haven’t gotten the earlier claims substantiated when the records building went kaflooie, and I somehow know it’d be pain in the ass to try to get the master files, which are supposedly somewhere on Glace. So I run with what I brung.
“Next I super on top of everything, in blue, a nice little miner’s hell here, which has the romantic name of Asteroid 47 Alpha, short for its full nomenclature, two ore stations, and one freighter port for transshipment, which means the sector’s at least got some workable ores.
“Doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“No,” Riss said. “Unless back of that is where that damned deepspace base of theirs is.”
“Thought of that, too,” Goodnight said. “But there’s nothing but nothing ‘back’ of that sector.”
“So what idea have you got out of that?”
“This is where a crafty criminal mind like mine comes in,” Goodnight said. “There are two things a criminal does for profit. One is being a criminal; the other is finding ways to make money without being that much of a criminal or, of course, actually working.”
“Brilliant, Professor. I’ll bet I could have figured that out myself.”
“One of the finest ways to sort of avoid getting in too much trouble with the law is the old protection racket,” Goodnight went on, ignoring M’chel. “Pay me money and I won’t kidnap your kid, blow up your store, steal your jewels, whatever. In extreme cases, protection also means a real defense against another, of course weaker, set of goons.
“But mainly it’s just a way to keep scared people scared, and you with pocket change.”
“You’re theorizing this particular sector’s not been hit because — ”
“Because just maybe somebody’s paying off,” Goodnight said. “Or more likely a bunch of somebodies.”
“Might be worthwhile paying the area a visit and stirring things up some,” Riss said.
“Might be,” Goodnight agreed. “It’s maybe a couple of ship-days away.”
“What about our claim here?”
“Since it was abandoned once, let’s hew to tradition.”
• • •
“I’ve been too long out of the service,” Goodnight said. “I forgot how deadly dull puttering around in-system can be, especially in a hogwallower like the Busted.”
“Poor ickle baby,” M’chel crooned. “Does oo want to be the big-time jewel thief, raffling his way between the stars with a smile on his lips, a song in his heart and a load in his pants?”
“Hah,” Goodnight said. “Now, how do we go about looking for a claim, so we’re real legit like you insist? Can’t we just grab an old chunk of rubble like we did before?
“They’ll never check.”
“They just might.”
“Awright. But this sounds like work. I say again my last. How do we go about finding a claim?”
“According to my handy-dandy Basic Handbook of Mining here onscreen,” Riss said, “the ores we should be interested in, that’ll power the machines of industry, can be discovered, and I quote, ‘When surrounded by a display of heavier metals, that will give a solidometer reading of 543 or higher. Visually, these ores may be distinguished by a gray to green shading, and striations in shades of gray to black.’ Endquote.”
“Wonderful,” Goodnight said. “I’m staring at this goddamned rock floating out there, and the whole thing is black, black, black.
“I’ll just fire up the old solidosolidthingie here, which I think is this little screen here … it works. Now, I guess it’ll range out on this beam here … umm.
“We’ve got a good reading flickering between 200 and 215.
“Now what? Pootle over to another rock and check that?”
“That’s what the book says.”
“Under drive,” Goodnight announced automatically. “Closing. Braking. Checking. Meter reading 185. Jesus. This mining has all the fascination of watching rocks turn into sand.”
“As soon as we find something that reads right,” Riss said, “that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing.”
“I don’t care what miners get paid,” Goodnight said. “It ain’t enough.”
• • •
Eventually they found a chunk of tumbling rock that read right. But there were no visual confirmations that matched the handbook.
Riss chanced taking a few core samples with a drill, which told her she’d been wasting her time.
They moved on.
• • •
“I can’t believe it,” Goodnight said. “This one actually reads and looks right on the gauge. Sumbeech: 784. I’m enthralled. So what next?”
The bit of exploded world wasn’t more than half a dozen times bigger than their ship.
“We suit up, go on out, and start taking samples. You punch some holes over here, and I’ll go around the far side.”
“That sounds uncomfortably like work,” Goodnight said, but started climbing into his suit. Riss followed, and, burdened with tools, left the ship, plugged into an external power source, and floated over to their rock, anchoring it firmly to the ship when they arrived.
Goodnight set to work, drilling out core samples, and taking them back to the ship. He extruded loading claws to the asteroid, then went back to the rock and, by eye, began chopping out big chunks of mineral. Even he could distinguish the desirable ore from just plain rock.
He was thinking about the pure monotony of this job, and how the drone of the drill came through his gauntlets, up his arms, and into his brain.
It reminded him, but not enough, of some of the electronic music he used to dance to.
He tumbled another chunk of ore into the ship’s waiting claws, watched them retract into the hold, started for another, when his com opened.
“Holy shit,” Riss said in a weak voice.
“What’s the matter?”
“I think … you’d better come over here.”
Goodnight, mind running up wonderful thoughts of Riss having drilled a hole in herself, or some other thrilling accident that happened when people actually started wearing tin cans and going places where there weren’t essentials like air and water.
He clipped the drill to the claw as it returned, then kicked free of the asteroid, and, using the suit’s low-power jet, went around the rock, wanting to put on full power, knowing he’d kick himself out into orbit, the asteroid’s escape velocity being about a meter a year.
Riss was floating just off the rock, motionless. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” She giggled. “I think I’m more than fine.”
Goodnight, a little irritated, closed on her. “So what’s the problem?”
“Look.” He looked.
“Rock,” he identified.
“Yeah,” Riss said, almost religiously. “Greasy, dark rock.”
“More ore?”
“Not frigging likely,” she said. “That’s diamond.”
“That? Where’s the glitter? Where’s the sparkle?”
“Waiting at the jeweler’s, you oaf. You think diamonds come out all nice and shaped and cut and refracting?”
“Hell if I know,” Goodnight said. “I never had any interest in the goddamned things until they were in a nice setting, or even just cut, in some nice, available box somewhere.”
“This is diamond,” Riss said. “A pipe. It goes … I don�
��t know how deep. Normally a diamond pipe, which happens in the heart of a planet, with heat and pressure, is rock with a bunch of diamonds in it. This … at least this what we can see … is one great big frigging rock.”
“Come on,” Goodnight said. He reached out, ran his fingers around the cropping. “You mean from here to here?”
“And who knows how deep,” Riss said, her voice dreamy.
“You mean we’re rich?”
“I mean somebody’s rich. Note that somebody, singular. And in the female gender.”
“How rich?” Goodnight asked.
“I don’t know. Let’s cut this rock out, and go on back to the ship. I think I need a drink.”
• • •
“I still don’t believe it,” Chas Goodnight said. The chunk of crystal sat between them on the Busted’s chart table. There was a bit of a gleam to it now that it’d been run through an ultrasonic cleaner, but Goodnight wouldn’t have bothered to pick it up if he’d tripped over it. It weighed a bit more than half a kilogram.
“So what do we have?” he asked.
Riss hit sensors on a pad, shook her head, tried again.
“According to what I keep coming up with, that makes this rock, uncut, about three thousand carats. Not the biggest diamond that’s ever been found, but sure as hell one of the top ten.”
“Yow,” Goodnight said reverently. “So we don’t need Transkootenay’s credits. We can tell my brother to sit on his job, and go back to Trimalchio and be rich, rich, rich.”
“What, might I inquire,” Riss asked in a silky voice, “is this we shit? I’m the one who found it.”
“But we’re partners?”
“You got anything in writing?” she asked. “Ah, yes. To be rich, rich, rich.
“I remember, back when I was starving on Trimalchio, somebody left a holo on in one of the canalside restaurants, and I flipped through it. It was set on some for-sale service, and there was this island, complete with palace and servants.
“Just right for my declining years.”
“Boy,” Goodnight said. “Talk about loyalty.”
“And who was going to run out on us back on Puchert if we hadn’t booby-trapped his fallback ID?”
“That was different,” Goodnight said. “Plus you aren’t supposed to know about that.”