The Rock Rats gt-11

by Ben Bova

  Fuchs’s face looked like a thundercloud, dark and ominous. He sat at the computer desk of their one-room apartment, staring silently at the wallscreen. Amanda, sitting on the bed, didn’t know what she could say to make him feel better.

  “We won’t be getting ten million,” he muttered, turning to her. “Not half that, I imagine.”

  “It’s all right, Lars. Three or four million is enough for us to—”

  “To run away with our tails between our legs,” he snapped.

  Amanda heard herself answer, “What else can we do?”

  Fuchs’s head drooped defeatedly. “I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re wiped out. The warehouse is completely gutted. Whoever set the fire did a thorough job.”

  Warily, she asked, “Do you still think it was deliberately set?”

  “Of course!” her husband shouted angrily. “He never intended to pay us ten million! That was a lure, a ruse. He’s kicking us off Ceres, out of the Belt entirely.”

  “But why would he make the offer…?” Amanda felt confused.

  Almost sneering with contempt, Fuchs said, “To put us in the proper frame of mind. To get us accustomed to the idea of leaving the Belt. Now he’s waiting for us to come crawling to him and beg for as much of the ten million as he’s willing to give us.”

  “We won’t do that,” Amanda said. “We won’t crawl and we won’t beg.”

  “No,” he agreed. “But we will leave. We have no choice.”

  “We still have the ship.”

  His heavy brows rose. “Starpower? You’d be willing to go prospecting again?”

  Amanda knew that she really didn’t want to take up the life of a rock rat again. But she nodded solemnly, “Yes. Why not?”

  Fuchs stared at her, a tangle of emotions burning in his deep-set eyes.

  Niles Ripley was dead tired as he shuffled slowly across the desolate dark ground, heading for the airlock. A four-hour shift of working on the habitat was like a week of hard labor anywhere else, he felt. And riding the shuttlecraft back down to the surface of Ceres was always nerve-racking; the ground controller ran the little hopper remotely from underground, but Ripley twitched nervously without a human pilot aboard. The shuttle had touched down without mishap, though, landing a few meters from a Humphries craft being loaded for a supply run to one of the miners’ ships hanging in orbit.

  It’ll be good to get to the Pub and sip a brew or two, Ripley said to himself. By god, I’ll even spring for the imported stuff tonight.

  The construction work was going well. Slower than Fuchs had expected, but Ripley was satisfied with the progress that the crew was making. Looking up through his fishbowl helmet, he could see the habitat glinting in the sunlight as it spun slowly, like a big pinwheel.

  Okay, he thought, so maybe it does look like a clunky kludge. Bunch of spacecraft tacked together in a circle, no two of ’em exactly the same. But by god the kludge was pretty near finished; soon people could go up and live in that habitat and feel just about the same gravity as on the Moon.

  Got to get the radiation shielding working first, he reminded himself. Sixteen different sets of superconducting magnets and more to come. Getting them to work together is gonna be a bitch and a half.

  The work was so damned tedious. Flatlanders back on Earth thought that working in microgee was fun. And easy. You just float around like a kid in a swimming pool. Yeah. Right. The reality was that you had to consciously plan every move you made; inside the spacesuit you had to exert real strength just to hold your arms out straight or take a few steps. Sure, you could hop around like a jackrabbit on steroids if you wanted to. Hell, I could jump right off Ceres and go sailing around like Superman if I had a mind to—and I if didn’t worry about breaking every bone in my legs when I landed. Working in microgee is tough, especially in these damned suits.

  Well, I’m finished for today, he said to himself as he watched the habitat slowly disappear beyond the sharp, rugged horizon. Ceres is so small, he thought. Just a glorified hunk of rock hanging in the middle of nothing. Ripley shook his head inside his bubble helmet, amazed all over again that he was working ’way out here, in this no-place of a place. He started back toward the airlock again, kicking up lingering clouds of gritty dust with each careful, sliding step. Looking down awkwardly from inside the helmet, he saw that the suit was grimy with dark gray dust all the way up the leggings, as usual. The arms and gloves were crummed up, too. It’ll take a good half-hour to vacuum all this crud off the suit, he told himself.

  The airlock was set into a dome of local stone, its thick metal hatch the only sign of human presence on Ceres’s surface, outside of the two spindly-looking shuttlecraft sitting out there. Ripley was almost at the hatch when it swung open and three spacesuited figures stepped out slowly, warily, as if testing each step they made in this insubstantial gravity. Each of their spacesuits showed a HSS logo on the left breast, just above their name tags. Ripley wondered if they might be the guys Big George had shellacked in the Pub. They had all been Humphries employees, he recalled.

  They were carrying bulky packing crates, probably filled with equipment. In Ceres’s low gravity, a man could carry loads that required a small truck elsewhere. All of them had tools of various sorts clipped to belts around their waists.

  “Where you goin’, guys?” Ripley asked good-naturedly over the common suit-to-suit radio frequency.

  “Loading up the shuttle,” came the answer in his earphones.

  “Same old thing every day,” another of them complained. “More crap for the mining ships up in orbit.”

  They got close enough to read Ripley’s name stenciled on the hard shell of his suit. Ripley realized that they were so new to Ceres they hadn’t gotten their own individual suits yet. They had apparently picked the suits they were wearing from HSS’s storage; their names were lettered on adhesive strips pasted onto the torsos.

  “Buchanan, Santorini, and Giap,” Ripley read aloud. “Hi. I’m Niles Ripley.”

  “We know who you are,” Buchanan said sourly.

  “The horn player,” said Santorini.

  Ripley put on his peacemaking smile, even though he figured they couldn’t see it in the dim lighting.

  “Hey, I’m sorry about that brawl couple nights ago,” he said placatingly. “My friend got carried away, I guess.”

  All three of them put their crates down on the pebbled, dusty ground.

  Buchanan said, “I hear they call you the Ripper.”

  “Sometimes,” Ripley said guardedly.

  “Where’s your trumpet?”

  With a little laugh, Ripley said, “Back in my quarters. I don’t carry it with me everywhere I go.”

  “Too bad. I’d really like to jam it up your ass.”

  Ripley kept smiling. “Aw, come on now. There’s no reason to—”

  “That big ape of yours put Carl in the infirmary with three crushed vertebrae!”

  “Hey, I didn’t start the fight. And I’m not looking for one now.” Ripley started to walk past them, toward the still-open airlock hatch.

  They stopped him. They grabbed his arms. For a ridiculous instant Ripley almost felt like giggling. You can’t fight in spacesuits, for chrissakes! It’s like boxers wearing suits of armor.

  “Hey, come on, now,” Ripley said, trying to pull his arms free.

  Buchanan kicked his feet out from under him and Ripley fell over backward, slowly, softly, in the dreamy slow motion of micro-gee. It seemed to take ten minutes as he toppled over; numberless hordes of stars slid past his field of view, silently, solemnly. Then at last he hit the ground, his head banging painfully inside the helmet, a thick cloud of dust enveloping him.

  “Okay, Ripper,” Buchanan said. “Rip this!”

  He kicked Ripley in the side of his spacesuit. The others laughed and started kicking, too. Ripley bounced around inside the suit, unable to get up, unable to defend himself. It didn’t hurt that much, at first, but each kick got worse and he worried that they might te
ar his air line loose. He tasted blood in his mouth.

  When they finally stopped kicking him, every part of Ripley’s body throbbed with pain. They were still standing over him. Buchanan stared down at him for a long, silent moment. Then he unhooked a tool from the belt at his waist.

  “You know what this is?” he asked, holding it up in his gloved hand. It was a short, squat, smooth greenish rod with a helical glass flash-lamp coiled around its length and a pistol grip beneath. A heavy black cord ran from the heel of the grip to a battery pack clipped to Buchanan’s belt.

  Before Ripley could say anything Buchanan explained.

  “This is a Mark IV gigawatt-pulse neodymium laser. Puts out picosecond pulses. We use it to punch neat little holes in metal. What kind of a hole do you think it’ll punch through you?”

  “Hey, Trace,” said Santorini. “Take it easy.”

  Ripley tried to move, to crawl away. His legs wouldn’t carry him. He could see the laser’s guide beam walking up the front of his spacesuit, feel it come through his transparent helmet, inch over his face, past his eyes, onto his forehead.

  “Trace, don’t!”

  But Buchanan slowly lowered himself to one knee and bent over Ripley, peering into his eyes. This close, their helmets almost touching, Ripley could see a sort of wild glee in the man’s eyes, a manic joy. He moved one arm, tried to push his tormentor away; all he accomplished was to pull the name tag off Buchanan’s suit.

  “They didn’t say to kill him,” Santorini insisted.

  Buchanan laughed. “So long, noisemaker,” he said.

  Ripley died instantly. The picosecond laser pulse pulped most of his brain into jelly.

  CHAPTER 13

  Lars Fuchs was sitting at his desk talking to the prospector to whom he’d leased Starpower. The woman flatly refused to give up the ship until the term of her lease expired, four months in the future.

  “I’ve been snookered out of two good rocks by HSS people,” she said, her anger showing clearly in her image on Fuchs’s wallscreen. “I’m going out to the far side of the Belt and get me a good-sized metallic ’roid. Anybody comes near me, I’ll zap ’em with the cutting laser!”

  Fuchs stared at her face. She couldn’t be much more than thirty, a former graduate student like himself. Yet she looked far harder, more determined, than any graduate student he remembered. Not a trace of makeup; her hair shaved down to a dark fuzz; her cheek bones and jawline gaunt, hungry.

  “I can arrange for you to transfer to another ship that’s available for lease,” Fuchs said reasonably.

  The prospector shook her head. “No deal. I’m working my way around the far side. By this time tomorrow it’ll take half an hour for messages to catch up with me. Sayonara, Lars.”

  The screen went blank. Fuchs leaned back in his creaking desk chair, his thoughts churning slowly. There is no way I can force her to bring Starpower back. She’s on her way out and she won’t be back for at least four months. When she returns she’ll either have claim to a rich metallic asteroid or she’ll be so dead broke she won’t even be able to pay me the final installment on the lease.

  No matter which way he looked at it, he could find no answer to his problem. If we’re going back to Earth it will have to be as passengers on someone else’s ship.

  Amanda came through the door from the tunnel at the same moment that the phone chimed. Fuchs automatically said, “Answer,” to the phone, but then he saw the awful expression on his wife’s face.

  “What is it?” he asked, rising from his chair. “What’s wrong?”

  “Ripley,” she said in a voice that sounded frightened. “They found him by the airlock, outside. He’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Fuchs felt shocked. “How? What happened?”

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about,” said Kris Cardenas, from the wallscreen.

  Fuchs and Amanda both turned to her image.

  Cardenas looked grim. “They brought Ripley’s body to me, here in the infirmary.”

  “What happened to him?” Fuchs asked again.

  Cardenas shook her head warily. “Nothing wrong with his suit. He didn’t die of asphyxiation or decompression. The suit’s scuffed up a lot, but there was no system failure.”

  “Then what?” Amanda asked.

  She frowned with uncertainty. “I’m going to do a multi-spectral scan and try to find out. The reason I called you was to find out if he has any next-of-kin here on Ceres.”

  “No, no one closer than New Jersey, in the United States,” said Fuchs. “I’ll transfer his personnel file to you.”

  “He was working on the habitat?” Cardenas asked, even though she knew the answer.

  “Yes,” said Fuchs absently. “Now the project will have to stop until we find someone to replace him.”

  Amanda said, “We’re coming to the infirmary, Kris. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

  Cardenas said, “Hang on. Give me an hour or so to do this scan. I’ll know more about it by then.”

  Amanda and Fuchs both nodded their agreement.

  Despite her youthful appearance, Kris Cardenas looked grave, almost angry as she ushered Amanda and Fuchs into her tiny infirmary. It was the only medical facility on Ceres, the only medical facility between the Belt and the exploration bases on Mars. Cardenas could handle accident cases, if they weren’t too severe, and the usual run of infections and strains. Anything worse was sent to Selene, while Cardenas herself remained among the rock rats.

  She was twice an exile. Because her body was teeming with nanomachines, no government on Earth would allow her to land on its territory. This had cost her, her husband and children; like most of Earth’s inhabitants, they were terrified by the threat of runaway nanotechnology causing pandemic plagues or devouring cities like unstoppable army ants chewing everything into a gray goo.

  Her anger at Earth and its unreasoning fears led her to cause Dan Randolph’s death. It was inadvertent, true enough, but Selene banned her from her own nanotech laboratory as a punishment for her actions and a precaution against future use of nanomachines for personal motives. So she left Selene, exiled herself among the rock rats, used her knowledge of human physiology to establish the infirmary on Ceres.

  “Have you found what killed Ripley?” Amanda asked her as she and Fuchs took the chairs in front of Cardenas’s desk.

  “I wouldn’t have caught it, normally,” Cardenas said tightly. “I’m not a pathologist. It damned near slipped right past me.”

  The office was small, crowded with the three of them in it. Cardenas tapped a keypad on her desktop and the wall opposite the doorway turned into a false-color display of Niles Ripley’s body.

  “There was nothing obviously wrong,” she began. “No visible trauma, although there were a few small bruises on his chest and back.”

  “What caused them?” Fuchs asked.

  “Maybe when he fell down, inside his suit”

  Fuchs scowled at her. “I’ve fallen down in a spacesuit. That doesn’t cause bruising.”

  Cardenas nodded. “I know. I thought maybe he died of a cardiac infarction, a heart attack. That’s when I went for the scan,” she explained. “But the coronary arteries look clean and there’s no visible damage to the heart itself.”

  Fuchs squinted at the image. A human body, he thought. One instant it’s alive, the next it’s dead. What happened to you, Ripley?

  Amanda echoed his thoughts. “So what happened to him?”

  Cardenas’s expression grew even tighter. “The next thing I looked for was a stroke. That’s still the number one killer, even back on Earth.”

  “And?”

  “Look at his brain.”

  Fuchs peered at the wallscreen, but he didn’t know what was normal in these false-color images and what was not. He could make out the white outline of the skull and, within it, the pinkish mass of the man’s brain. Tangles of what he took to be blood vessels wrapped around the brain and into it, like a mass of tiny snakes writhing inside the
skull.

  “Do you see it?” Cardenas asked, her voice as sharp as a bayonet.

  “No, I don’t see… wait a minute!” Fuchs noticed that while most of the brain was a light pink color, there was an area of deeper hue, almost a burnt orange, that ran straight through the brain mass, from front to back.

  “That orange color?” he said, not certain of himself.

  “That orange color,” Cardenas repeated, hard as ice.

  “What is it?” Amanda asked.

  “It’s what killed him,” said Cardenas. “Ruptured neurons and glial cells from the front of his skull to the back. It did as much damage as a bullet would, but it didn’t break the skin.”

  “A micrometeor?” Fuchs blurted, knowing it was stupid even as his mouth said it.

  Amanda objected, “But his suit wasn’t ruptured.”

  “Whatever it was,” said Cardenas, “it went through the transparent plastic of his helmet, through his skin without damaging it, through the cranial bone, and pulped his brain cells.”

  “Mein gott,” Fuchs muttered.

  “I have two more bits of evidence,” Cardenas said, sounding more and more like a police investigator.

  The wallscreen image changed to show Ripley’s dead face. Fuchs felt Amanda shudder beside him and reached out to hold her hand. Ripley’s eyes were open, his mouth agape, his milk-chocolate skin somehow paler than Fuchs remembered it. This is the face of death, he said silently. He almost shuddered himself.

  Cardenas tapped her keyboard again and the image zoomed in on the area just above the bridge of Ripley’s nose.

  “See that faint discoloration?” Cardenas asked.

  Fuchs saw nothing unusual, but Amanda said, “Yes, just a tiny little circle. It looks… almost as if it had been charred a little.”