The Rock Rats gt-11

by Ben Bova

  “You’re right,” he snapped. “Absolutely right. If I could kill Humphries like that, I’d do it. In a hot second.”

  She reached up and stroked his cheek as gently, soothingly as she could. “Lars, darling, please—all you’re going to accomplish is getting yourself killed.”

  He pushed her hand away. “Don’t you think I’m already marked for murder? He told me he would have me killed. You’re a dead man, Fuchs. Those were his exact words.”

  Amanda closed her eyes. There was nothing she could do. She knew that her husband was going to fight, and there was nothing she could do to stop him. She knew he would get himself killed. Worse, she saw that he was turning into a killer himself. He was becoming a stranger, a man she didn’t know, didn’t recognize. That frightened her.

  “And to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” asked Carlos Vertientes.

  He’s a handsome devil, Pancho thought. Aristocratic Castilian features. Good cheekbones. Neat little salt-and-pepper beard. He really looks like a professor oughtta, not like the slobs and creeps back in Texas.

  She was strolling along the Ramblas in Barcelona with the head of the university’s plasma dynamics department, the tall, distinguished physicist who had helped Lyall Duncan build the fusion propulsion system that now powered most of the spacecraft operating beyond the Moon’s orbit. Vertientes looked truly elegant in a dove-gray three-piece suit. Pancho was wearing the olive green coveralls she had traveled in.

  Barcelona was still a vibrant city, despite the rising sea level and greenhouse warming and displacement of so many millions of refugees. The Ramblas was still the crowded, bustling, noisy boulevard where everyone went for a stroll, a sampling of tapas and good Rioja wine, a chance to see and be seen. Pancho liked it far better than sitting in an office, even though the crowd was so thick that at times they had to elbow their way past clusters of people who were walking too slowly. Pancho preferred the chatting, strolling crowd to an office that might be bugged.

  “Your university’s a shareholder in Astro Corporation,” Pancho said, in answer to his question.

  Vertientes’s finely-arched brows rose slightly. “We are part of a global consortium of universities that invests in many major corporations.”

  He was slightly taller than Pancho, and slim as a Toledo blade. She felt good walking alongside him. With a nod, she replied, “Yup. That’s what I found out when I started lookin’ up Astro’s stockholders.”

  He smiled dazzlingly. “Have you come to Barcelona to sell more stock?”

  “No, no,” Pancho said, laughing with him. “But I do have a proposition for you—and your consortium.”

  “And what might that be?” he asked, taking her arm to steer her past a knot of Asian tourists posing for a street photographer.

  “How’d you like to set up a research station in orbit around Jupiter? Astro would foot three-quarters of the cost, maybe more if we can jiggle the books a little.”

  Vertientes’s brows rose even higher. “A research station at Jupiter? You mean a manned station?”

  “Crewed,” Pancho corrected.

  He stopped and let the crowd flow around them. “You are suggesting that the consortium could establish a manned—and womanned—station in Jupiter orbit at one-quarter of the actual cost?”

  “Maybe less,” Pancho said.

  He pursed his lips. Then, “Let’s find a cantina where we can sit down and discuss this.”

  “Suits me,” said Pancho, with a happy grin. Waltzing Matilda.

  George looked sourly at the screen’s display.

  “Four hundred and eighty-three days?” he asked. He was sitting in the command pilot’s chair, on the bridge; Nodon sat beside him.

  Nodon seemed apologetic. “That is what the navigation program shows. We are on a long elliptical trajectory that will swing back to the vicinity of Ceres in four hundred and eighty-three days.”

  “How close to Ceres?”

  Nodon tapped at the keyboard. “Seventy thousand kilometers, plus or minus three thousand.”

  George scratched at his beard. “Close enough to contact ’em with our suit radios, just about.”

  “Perhaps,” said Nodon. “If we were still alive by then.”

  “We’d be pretty skinny.”

  “We would be dead.”

  “So,” George asked, “what alternatives do we have?” Nodon said, “I have gone through all the possibilities. We have enough propellant remaining for only a short burst, nowhere nearly long enough to cut our transit time back to Ceres to anything useful.”

  “But the thruster’s bunged up, useless.”

  “Perhaps we could repair it.”

  “Besides, if we use the propellant for thrust we won’t have anything left for the power generator. No power for life support. lights out.”

  “No,” Nodon corrected. “I have reserved enough of the remaining propellant to keep the power generator running. We are okay there. We won’t run short of electrical power.”

  “That’s something,” George huffed. “When our corpses arrive back in Ceres space the fookin’ ship’ll be well lit.”

  “Perhaps we can repair the rocket thruster,” Nodon repeated.

  George scratched at his beard again. It itched as if some uninvited guests had made their home in it. “I’m too fookin’ tired to go out again and look at the thruster. Gotta get some shut-eye first.”

  Nodding his agreement, Nodon added, “And a meal.”

  Surveying the depleted list on the galley inventory screen, George muttered, “Such as it is.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Amanda looked up from her screen and smiled as Fuchs entered their one-room apartment. He did not smile back at her. He had spent the morning inspecting the ruins of Helvetia’s warehouse. The fire had turned the rock-walled chamber into an oven, melting what it did not burn outright. Before it consumed all the oxygen in the cave and died out, it reduced all of Fuchs’s stock, all that he had worked for, all that he had planned and hoped for, to nothing but ashes and twisted stumps of melted metal. If the airtight hatches hadn’t held, the fire would easily have spread down the tunnels and killed everyone in Ceres.

  Fuchs trembled with rage at the thought. The murdering vermin didn’t worry about that. They didn’t care. So everyone in Ceres dies, what is that to Humphries? What does it matter to him, so long as he gets his way and removes the thorn in his side?

  I am that thorn, Fuchs told himself. I am only a little inconvenience, a minor nuisance in his grandiose plans for conquest.

  Thinking of the blackened, ruined warehouse, Fuchs said to himself, This thorn in your side will go deeper into your flesh, Humphries. I will infect you, I will inflame you until you feel the same kind of pain that you’ve inflicted on so many others. I swear it!

  Yet by the time he trod back to his home, coughing in the dust stirred up by his strides, he felt more weary than angry, wondering how he had come to travel down this path, why this weight of vengeance had fallen onto his shoulders. It’s not vengeance, he snarled inwardly. It’s justice. Someone has to stand for justice; Humphries can’t be allowed to take everything he wants without being accountable to anyone.

  Then he slid back the door to his quarters and saw Amanda’s beautiful, radiant smile. And the anger surged back in full fury. Humphries wants her, too, Fuchs reminded himself. The only way he’ll get Amanda is over my dead body.

  Amanda got up from her desk and came to him. He took her in his arms, but instead of kissing him, she rubbed her fingers against his cheek.

  “You have a smudge on your face,” she said, still smiling. “Like a little boy who’s been out playing in the streets.”

  “Soot from the warehouse,” he said bleakly.

  She pecked him on the lips, then said, “I have some good news.”

  “Yes?”

  “The insurance money was deposited in Helvetia’s account this morning. We can get started again without borrowing from Pancho.”

  “Ho
w much?”

  Amanda’s smile faded a fraction. “Just a tad less than half of what we applied for. About forty-eight percent of our actual loss.”

  “Forty-eight percent,” he muttered, heading for the lav.

  “It’s more hard cash than we had when we started Helvetia, darling.”

  He knew she was trying to cheer him. “Yes, that’s true, isn’t it?” he said as he washed his face. His hands were grimy with soot, too, he saw.

  He let the dryer blow over his face, noisy and rattling, remembering the luxury of having actual cloth towels at the hotel in Selene. We could do that here, Fuchs told himself. Vacuum clean them on the surface just as they do at Selene. It would save us electrical power, if we could keep the dust from up on the surface out of the laundry.

  “Any word from Starpower?” he asked as he stepped back into the main room.

  “She’s on the way in,” Amanda said. “She’ll be here when the lease is up, at the end of the month.”

  “Good.”

  Amanda’s expression turned grave. “Lars, do you think it’s a good idea for you to take Starpower out? Can’t you hire a crew and stay here?”

  “Crews cost money,” he said. “And we’d have to share whatever we find with the crew. I can handle the ship by myself.”

  “But you’ll be alone…”

  He knew what she meant. Ships had disappeared out in the Belt. And he was marked for murder by Humphries.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said. “They won’t know where I’m going.”

  Amanda shook her head. “Lars, all they have to do is tap into the IAA’s net and they’ll see your tracking beacon. They’ll know exactly where you are.”

  He almost smiled. “Not if the tracking beacon is coming from a drone that I release a day or so after I’ve left Ceres.”

  She looked totally surprised. “But that would be a violation of IAA regulations!”

  “Yes, it would. It would also make my life much safer.”

  The work of cleaning up the charred mess of his warehouse took several days. It was hard to find men or women to do the menial labor; they demanded the same level of pay they could get working someone’s computer systems or crewing one of the prospecting ships. So Fuchs hired all four of the teenagers on Ceres. They were eager to have something to do outside of their school hours, happy to be away from their lesson screens, happier still to be earning spendable money. Still, Fuchs did most of the labor himself, since the kids could only work a couple of hours each day.

  After several days, though, the four youngsters failed to show up for work. Fuchs phoned each of them and got a variety of lame excuses.

  “My parents don’t want me working.”

  “I got too much studying to do.”

  Only one of them hinted at the truth. “My father got an e-message that said he could lose his job if he let me work for you.”

  Fuchs didn’t have to ask who the father worked for. He knew: Humphries Space Systems.

  So he labored alone in the warehouse cave, finally clearing out the last of the charred debris. Then he started putting together new shelving out of discarded scraps of metal from the maintenance bays.

  One evening, as he scuffed wearily along the dusty tunnel after a long day of putting up his new shelving, Fuchs was accosted by two men wearing HSS coveralls.

  “You’re Lars Fuchs, aren’t you?” said the taller of the pair. He was young, not much more than a teenager himself: his dirty-blond hair was cropped close to his skull, and his coverall sleeves were rolled up past his elbows. Fuchs saw tattoos on both his forearms.

  “I am,” Fuchs answered, without slowing down.

  They fell in step with him, one on either side. The shorter of the two was still a couple of centimeters taller than Fuchs, with the chunky build of a weightlifter. His hair was long and dark, his face swarthy.

  “I’ve got a piece of friendly advice for you,” said the taller one. “Take your insurance money and leave Ceres.”

  Still shuffling along the tunnel, Fuchs said, “You seem to know something about my business.”

  “Just get out of here, before there’s trouble,” the other one said. His accent sounded Latino.

  Fuchs stopped and looked them up and down. “Trouble?” he asked. “The only trouble that happens here will be trouble that you start.”

  The taller one shrugged. “Doesn’t matter who starts it. What matters is, who’s still standing when it’s over.”

  “Thank you,” said Fuchs. “Your words will be useful evidence.”

  “Evidence?” They both looked startled.

  “Do you think I’m a fool?” Fuchs said sharply. “I know what you’re up to. I’m wearing a transmitter that is sending every word you say to IAA headquarters in Geneva. If anything happens to me, you two have already been voiceprinted.”

  With that, Fuchs turned on his heel and strode away from the two toughs, leaving them dumbfounded and uncertain. Fuchs walked carefully, deliberately, stirring up as little dust as possible. He didn’t want them to think he was running away from them; he also didn’t want them to see how his legs were shaking. Above all, he didn’t want them to figure out that his transmitter was a total bluff, invented on the spot to allow him to get away from them.

  By the time he got home, he was still trembling, but now it was with anger. Amanda flashed a welcoming smile at him from the computer desk. Fuchs could see from the wallscreen that she was ordering inventory to stock the warehouse. Most of the machinery and electronic gear she ordered came from Astro Corporation. Now, he saw, she was dealing with foodstuffs and clothing, which came from other companies. He went to wash up as she stared wistfully at the latest Earthside fashions.

  By the time he came back into the room, she was finished with the computer. She slid her arms around his neck and kissed him warmly.

  “What would you like for dinner?” she asked. “I just ordered a shipment of seafood from Selene and I’m famished.”

  “Anything will do,” he temporized as he disengaged from her and sat at the computer desk.

  Amanda went to the freezer as she asked, “Will you be ready by the time the supplies start arriving?”

  Working the computer, his eyes on the wallscreen display, Fuchs barely nodded. “I’ll be ready,” he muttered.

  Amanda saw that he was studying the specifications for handheld lasers.

  Frowning slightly, she said, “That looks like the laser that that Buchanan fellow killed Ripley with.”

  “It is,” Fuchs said. “And he tried to kill me with it, too.”

  “I’ve already ordered six of them, with an option for another half-dozen when they’re sold.”

  “I’m thinking of ordering one for myself,” said Fuchs.

  “For Starpower?”

  He looked up at her. His face was grim. “For myself,” he said. “As a sidearm.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Starpower swung lazily in the dark star-choked sky above Ceres. Strange, Fuchs noted as he climbed aboard the shuttlecraft, that the sky still seems so black despite all those stars. Other suns, he thought, billions of them blazing out their light for eons. Yet here on the rubble-heap surface of Ceres the world seemed dark, shadowy with menace.

  Shaking his head inside the fishbowl helmet, Fuchs clambered up the ladder and ducked through the shuttlecraft’s hatch. No sense taking off the suit until I’m inside Starpower, he told himself. The shuttle flight would take mere minutes to lift him from the asteroid’s surface to his waiting ship.

  The shuttle’s hab module was a bubble of glassteel. Two other prospectors were already aboard, waiting to be transferred to their spacecraft. Fuchs said a perfunctory hello to them through his suit radio.

  “Hey, Lars,” one of them asked, “what are you gonna do about the habitat?”

  “Yeah,” chimed in the other one. “We put up good money to build it. When’s it going to be finished so we can move in?”

  Fuchs could see their faces through their he
lmets. They weren’t being accusative or even impatient. They looked more curious than anything else.

  He forced a weak smile for them. “I haven’t had a chance to recruit a new project engineer, someone to replace Ripley.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Too bad about the Ripper.”

  “You did a good thing, Lars. That sonofabitch murdered the Ripper in cold blood.”

  Fuchs nodded his acknowledgment of their praise. The voice of the IAA controller told them the shuttlecraft would lift off in ten seconds. The computer counted off the time. The three spacesuited men stood in the hab module; there were no seats, nothing except a tee-shaped podium that held the ship’s controls, which weren’t needed for this simple flight, and foot loops in the deck to hold them down in microgravity.

  Liftoff was little more than a gentle nudge, but the craft leaped away from Ceres’s pitted, rock-strewn surface fast enough to make Fuchs’s stomach lurch. Before he could swallow down the bile in his throat, they were in zero-g. Fuchs had never enjoyed weightlessness, but he put up with it as the IAA controller remotely steered the shuttle to the orbiting ship of the other two men before swinging almost completely around the asteroid to catch up with Starpower.

  Fuchs thought about hiring a replacement for Ripley. The funding for the habitat was adequate, barely. He had put the task on Amanda’s list of action items. She’ll have to do it, Fuchs said to himself. She’ll have to use her judgment; I’ll be busy doing other things.

  Other things. He cringed inwardly when he thought of the angry words he had flung at Humphries: I’ve studied military history… I know how to fight. How pathetic! So what are you going to do, go out and shoot up Humphries spacecraft? Kill his employees? What will that accomplish, except getting you arrested eventually, or killed? You think too much, Lars Fuchs. You are quick to anger, but then your conscience frustrates you.

  He had thought long and hard about searching out HSS vessels and destroying them. Hurt Humphries the way he’s hurt me. But he knew he couldn’t do it.