by Ben Bova
“A strategic alliance would be of great benefit to both of us,” he was saying, in his deeply resonant baritone. “After all, we are going to be neighbors here on the Moon, aren’t we?”
Physically, he was a hunk and a half, Pancho admitted to herself. If lie’s here as bait, at least they sent something worth biting on. Strong, broad cheekbones and a firm jawline. Deeply dark eyes that sparkled at her when he smiled, which he did a lot. Brilliant white teeth. Skin so black it almost looked purple. Conservative gray business cardigan, but under it peeped a colorfully patterned vest and a soft yellow shirt opened at the collar to reveal a single chain of heavy gold.
“Your base is going to be more’n four thousand kilometers from here, way down at Aitken Basin.”
“Yes, of course,” he said, with that dazzling smile. “But our base at Shackleton will be only about a hundred klicks from the Astro power facility down in the Malapert Range, you see.”
“The Mountains of Eternal Light,” Pancho murmured, nodding. The Japanese called them the Shining Mountains. Down near the lunar south pole there were several peaks so tall that they were perpetually in sunlight. Astro had established a solar power center there, close to the deposits of frozen water.
“The facility that we are building will be more than a mere base,” the Nairobi representative added. “We intend to make a real city at Shackleton Crater, much like Selene.”
“Really?” Pancho said, keeping her expression noncommittal. She had just been informed, a few minutes earlier, that another Astro freighter had disappeared out in the Belt: the second one in as many weeks. Humphries is at it again, she thought, nibbling away. And if this guy isn’t a stalking horse for Humphries, I’ll be dipped in deep dung.
The other major thing that Pancho had learned was to maintain herself as physically youthful as possible. Rejuvenation therapies that were once regarded as expensive extravagances for the vain and video personalities were now commonplace, especially among the viciously competitive power brokers of the giant corporations. So Pancho looked, physically, much as she had when she’d been thirty: tall, leggy and slim. She had even had the tattoo on her buttocks removed, because board room politics sometimes evolved into bedroom antics, and she didn’t want a teenaged misjudgment to become a whispered rumor. She hadn’t done anything about her face, though, which she considered to be forgettably ordinary except for its unfortunate stubborn, square jaw. Her only concession to the years was that she’d allowed her closely cropped hair to go totally white. The beauticians told her it made a stunning contrast to her light mocha skin.
Pancho made a point of going counter to the fashionable styles of the moment. This season the emphasis was on bulky pullovers and heavy-looking sweaters with strategic cutouts to make them interesting to the eye. Instead, Pancho wore a tailored pantsuit of pale ivory, which accented her long, lean figure, with highlights of asteroidal jewelry at her wrists and earlobes. Her office wasn’t particularly large, as corporate suites went, but it was sumptuously decorated with modern furniture, paintings that Pancho had personally commissioned, and holowindows that could display scenery from half a dozen worlds.
“Pardon me for asking a foolish question, I’ve never been to the Moon before. Is that real wood paneling?” her visitor asked, wide-eyed.
Aw, come on, Pancho groused silently. You can’t be that much of a rube.
“And your desk, too? Did you have it flown all the way here to the Moon?”
“In a sense,” Pancho answered evenly, wondering how much of this guy’s naivete was an act. “Our biotech division sent up a shipload of gengineered bacteria that produce cellulose. Same things tree do, at the cellular level.”
“I see,” he said, his voice still somewhat awed. “The bacteria produce bioengineered wood for you.”
Pancho nodded. “All we bring up from Earth is a small sample of bugs, and they reproduce themselves for us.”
“Marvelous. Nairobi Industries doesn’t have a biotechnology division. We are only a small corporation, compared to Astro or Humphries Space Systems.”
“Well, we all had to start at the beginning,” Pancho said, thinking that it sounded fatuous.
Her visitor didn’t seem to notice. “However, in exchange for help in building our base here on the Moon we offer a unique entry into the growing markets of Africa and the Indian subcontinent.”
The Indian subcontinent, Pancho thought grimly; between their nukes and their biowar there isn’t much left for those poor bastards. And Africa’s still a mess, pretty much.
“We are also developing strong ties with Australia and New Zealand,” he went on. “They still hesitate to deal with Africans, but we are overcoming their prejudices with sound business opportunities for them.”
Pancho nodded. This guy’s a stalking horse, all right. Whoever he’s really working for thinks he’s damned smart sending a black man to make this offer. Thinks I’ll get all gooey and not see past the trap they’re setting up.
Humphries. It’s gotta be Martin Humphries, she reasoned. The old Humper’s been after Astro for years. This is just his latest maneuver. And he’s started knocking off our freighters again.
As if he could read her thoughts, the Nairobi representative added, in a confidential near-whisper, “Besides, an alliance between your corporation and mine will outflank Humphries Space Systems, so to speak. Together, we could take a considerable amount of market share away from HSS.”
Pancho felt her eyebrows hike up. “You mean the asteroidal metals and minerals that Earthside corporations buy.”
“Yes. Of course. But Selene imports a good deal from Humphries’s mining operations in the Belt, too.”
The big struggle, Pancho knew, was to control the resources of the Asteroid Belt. The metals and minerals mined from the asteroids were feeding Earthside industries crippled by the environmental disasters stemming from the greenhouse cliff.
“Well,” said the Nairobi executive, with his gleaming smile, “that’s just about the whole of it. Does it strike any interest in you?”
Pancho smiled back at him. “ ’Course it does,” she said, thinking about how the kids she grew up with in west Texas would cross their fingers when they fibbed. “I’ll give it a lot of thought, you can believe me.”
“Then you’ll recommend a strategic alliance to your board?”
She could see the eagerness on his handsome young face.
Keeping her smile in place, Pancho replied, “Let me think it over, get my staff to run the numbers. Then, if everything checks out, I’ll certainly bring it up before the board.”
He fairly glowed with pleasure. Pancho thought, Whoever sent this hunk of beefcake didn’t pick him because he’s got a poker face.
She got to her feet and he shot up so quickly that Pancho thought he’d bounce off the ceiling. As it was, he stumbled slightly, unaccustomed to the low lunar gravity, and had to grab a corner of her desk to steady himself.
“Easy there,” she said, grinning. “You only weigh one-sixth of Earth normal here.”
He made a shamefaced smile. “I forgot. The weighted boots aren’t all that much help. Please forgive me.”
“Nothing to it. Everybody needs a little time to get accustomed to lunar gee. How long will you be staying at Selene?”
“I leave tomorrow.”
“You won’t be talking to anybody from HSS?”
“No. Mr. Humphries has a reputation for swallowing up smaller corporations rather than helping them.”
Maybe he’s not from Humphries after all, Pancho thought.
She asked, “So you came up here just to see me?”
He nodded. “This alliance is very important to us. I wanted to speak to you about it face-to-face, not by videophone.”
“Good thinking,” Pancho said, coming around her desk and gesturing toward her office door. “That three-second lag in phone communication is enough to drive me loco.”
He blinked. “Loco? Is that lunar slang?”
Wi
th a laugh, Pancho answered, “West Texas, for crazy.”
“You are from Texas?”
“Long time ago.”
Pancho played it cool, watching how he tried to maneuver their conversation into a dinner invitation before she could shoo him out of her office. He smelled good, she noticed. Some sort of cologne that reminded her of cinnamon and tangy spices.
Finally he got to it. “I suppose a person of your importance has a very full calendar.”
“Yep. Pretty much.”
“I was hoping we might have dinner together. Actually, I don’t know anyone else in Selene City.”
She made a show of pulling up her schedule on the wallscreen. “Dinner engagement with my PR director.”
He looked genuinely crestfallen. “Oh. I see.”
Pancho couldn’t help smiling at him. “Hell, I can talk to her some other time. Let’s have dinner together.”
His smile grew even wider than before.
And he was good in bed, too, Pancho discovered. Great, in fact. But the next morning, once he was on his way back Earthside and Pancho had fed herself a breakfast of vitamin E and orange juice, she called her security director from her kitchen and told him to check the guy out thoroughly. If he’s not from Humphries, maybe somebody else wants to move into the territory.
She chuckled to herself as she headed for her office that morning. She had forgotten the man’s name.
TORCH SHIP NAUTILUS
The ship had once been a freighter with the unlikely name of Lubbock Lights, plying the Asteroid Belt, picking up ores mined by the rock rats and carrying them back to the factories in Earth orbit and on the Moon. Lars Fuchs and his ragtag crew of exiles had seized it and renamed it Nautilus, after the fictional submersible of the vengeance-seeking Captain Nemo.
Over the years, Fuchs had changed the spacecraft. It was still a dumbbell shape, rotating on a buckyball tether to provide a feeling of gravity for the crew. It still could carry thousands of tons of ores in its external grapples. But now it also bore five powerful lasers, which Fuchs used as weapons. And it was armored with thin layers of asteroidal copper fixed a few centimeters outside the ship’s true hull, enough to absorb an infrared laser beam for a second or more. Nautilus’s fusion propulsion system was among the most powerful in the Belt. Speed and maneuverability were important for a pirate vessel.
In the ship’s cramped bridge Fuchs leaned over the back of the pilot’s chair and scowled at the scanner display.
“It is a freighter, nothing more,” said Amarjagal, his pilot. She was a stocky, stoic woman of Mongol ancestry who had been with Fuchs since he’d fled from the mining center at Ceres to take up this life of exile and piracy.
“With a crew pod?” Fuchs sneered.
Nodon, the ship’s engineer, had also been part of Fuchs’s renegade team since the earliest days. He was rail-thin, all bone and sinew, his head shaved bald, spiral scars of ceremonial tattoos swirling across both cheeks. A menacing black moustache drooped down to his jawline, yet his dark brown eyes were big and expressive, soulful.
“A crew pod means that the ship carries food,” he pointed out as he studied the image on the display screen.
“And medical supplies,” added Amarjagal.
“Both of which we could use,” said Nodon.
Fuchs shook his head ponderously. “It could be a trap.”
Neither of his crew replied. They glanced at each other but remained silent.
Fuchs wore a black pullover and shapeless black slacks, as usual. He was a short-limbed, barrel-chested little bear of a man, scowling with anger and implacable in his wrath. His broad, jowly face was etched with hatred, thin slash of a mouth set in a permanent glower, deepset eyes looking far beyond what the others saw. He looked like a badger, a wolverine, small but explosively dangerous.
For nearly a decade Lars Fuchs had been a pirate, an outcast, a renegade who cruised through the vast, silent emptiness of the Belt and preyed on ships owned by Humphries Space Systems.
Once he had considered himself the luckiest man in the solar system. A love-struck student riding the first crewed exploratory ship into the Asteroid Belt, he had actually married the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, Amanda Cunningham. But then he became ensnarled in the battle over the riches of the Belt, one man pitted against Martin Humphries, the wealthiest person off-Earth, and his Humphries Space Systems’ hired thugs. When the HSS mercenaries finally cornered him, Amanda begged Humphries to spare his life.
Humphries was merciful, in the cruelest manner imaginable. Fuchs was banished from Ceres, the only permanent settlement in the Belt, while Amanda divorced him and married Humphries. She was the price for Fuchs’s life. From that time on, Fuchs wandered through the vast dark emptiness of the Belt like a Flying Dutchman, never touching down at a human habitation, living as a rock rat, sometimes prospecting among the asteroids in the farthest reaches of the Belt and digging metal ores and minerals to sell to refinery ships.
More often he swooped down on HSS freighters like a hawk attacking a pigeon, taking the supplies he needed from them, even stealing the ores they carried and selling them clandestinely to other rock rats plying the Belt. It was a pitiful way to maintain his self-respect, telling himself that he was still a thorn in Humphries’s flesh. Merely a small thorn, to be sure, but it was the only thing he could do to keep his sanity. While he almost always attacked automated drone freighters toting their ores back toward the Earth/Moon system, often enough he hit ships that were crewed. Fuchs did not consider himself a killer, but there were times when blood was spilled.
As when he wiped out the HSS mercenaries’ base on Vesta.
Now he frowned at the image of the approaching freighter, with its crew pod attached.
“Our supplies are very low,” Nodon said in a soft voice, almost a whisper.
“They won’t have much aboard,” Fuchs muttered back.
“Enough for us and the rest of the crew for a few weeks, perhaps.”
“Perhaps. We could grab more supplies from a logistics ship.”
Nodon bowed his head slightly. “Yes, that is so.”
Despite its name, the Asteroid Belt is a wide swath of emptiness between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, populated by millions of tiny, cold, dark lumps of metal and rock tumbling around the Sun, leftover bits from the creation of the solar system. The largest, Ceres, is barely a thousand kilometers across. Most of the asteroids are the size of boulders, pebbles, dust motes. Trash, Fuchs thought. Chunks of matter that never became part of a true planet. Leftovers. God’s garbage.
But the “garbage” was a treasure trove for desperate, needy humankind. Earth had been hit hard by climate change, a greenhouse cliff that struck suddenly, viciously, over a few decades. Glaciers melted down, ocean levels rose, coastal cities worldwide were flooded out, the global electrical power net collapsed, hundreds of millions lost their homes, their livelihoods, even their lives. Farmlands dried to dust in perpetual droughts; deserts were swamped with rain; monster storms lashed the frightened, starving refugees everywhere.
In the distant stretches of the Asteroid Belt there were metals and minerals beyond reckoning, raw materials to replace the lost mines of Earth. Factories built in orbit and on the Moon depended on those raw materials. The salvation of the battered, weary Earth lay in the resources and energy of space.
Fuchs gave all this hardly a thought. He concentrated on that freighter plying its way through the Belt, heading at a leisurely pace inward, toward Earth.
“If there’s a crew aboard, why are they coasting on a Hohmann ellipse? Why not light their fusion drive and accelerate toward Earth?”
“Perhaps their engines malfunctioned,” Amarjagal said, without looking up from her control board.
“She’s not beaming out a distress call.”
The pilot lapsed into silence.
“We could hail her,” Nodon proposed.
“And let her know we’re on her tail?” Fuchs snarled. “If we can s
ee her, she can see us.”
“Then let her hail us.”
“She isn’t transmitting anything except a normal tracking beacon and telemetry data,” said Amarjagal.
“What’s her name and registration?”
The pilot touched a key on the board before her, and the information superimposed itself on the ship’s image: John C. Fremont, owned and operated by Humphries Space Systems.
Fuchs sucked in a deep breath. “Get us out of here,” he said, gripping the pilot’s shoulder in his broad, thick-fingered hand. “That ship’s a trap.”
Amarjagal glanced at the engineer, sitting in the right-hand seat beside her, then obediently tapped in a course change. The ship’s fusion engines powered up; Nautilus swung deeper into the Belt.
Aboard the John C. Fremont, Dorik Harbin watched the radar screen on his control panel, his ice-blue eyes intent on the image of Fuchs’s ship dwindling into the vast emptiness of the Asteroid Belt.
His face was like a warrior of old: high cheekbones, narrow eyes, a bristling dark beard that matched the thick black thatch that tumbled over his forehead. His gray coveralls bore the HSS logo over the left breast pocket, and symbols of rank and service on the sleeves and cuffs; he wore them like a military uniform, immaculately clean and sharply pressed. Yet those glacier cold eyes were haunted, tortured. He only slept when he could no longer force himself to stay awake, and even then he needed sedatives to drive away the nightmares that screamed at him.
Now, though, he smiled—almost. He had tangled with Fuchs several times in the past, and the wily outlaw always escaped his grasp. Except once, and that had required a small army of mercenaries. Even then, Humphries had allowed Fuchs to get away alive. It was Fuchs’s wife that Humphries was after, Harbin had learned.
But now Humphries had ordered Harbin to find Fuchs and kill him. Quietly. Out in the cold darkness of the Belt, where no one would know for many months, perhaps years, that the man was dead. So Harbin hunted his elusive quarry alone. He preferred being alone. Other people brought complications, memories, desires he would rather do without.