The Rock Rats gt-11

by Ben Bova

  Big George hopped to his feet and waved the stump of his arm over his head. “Y’call this ludicrous? I di’n’t get this pickin’ daisies!”

  “Order!” Wilcox slapped the table with the flat of his hand. “Sit down, both of you. I will not have outbursts in this hearing. We will proceed along calm, reasoned lines.”

  Verwoerd and George resumed their seats.

  Pointing a bony finger at Fuchs, Wilcox said, “Now, sir, if you have evidence to sustain a charge of piracy, let us hear it. We’ll look into the responsibility for such acts after we ascertain that they have actually happened.”

  Fuchs slowly rose, feeling a trembling anger in his gut. “You have the transcription of the battle between my ship, Starpower, and the ship that attacked us. You have seen the damage inflicted on Starpower. Mr. Ambrose, here, lost his arm in that battle.”

  Wilcox glanced over his shoulder at the ruddy-faced IAA flunky, who nodded once. “Noted,” he said to Fuchs.

  “That same ship earlier attacked Mr. Ambrose’s ship, Waltzing Matilda, and left him and his crewman for dead.”

  “Do you have any evidence for this, other than your unsupported word?” Wilcox asked.

  “Waltzing Matilda is drifting in the Belt. We can provide approximate coordinates for a search, if you wish to undertake it.”

  Wilcox shook his head. “I doubt that such a search will be necessary.”

  “Earlier,” Fuchs resumed, “several others vessels were attacked: The Lady of the Lake, Aswan, The Star—”

  Verwoerd called from her chair, “There is no evidence that any of those ships were attacked.”

  “They disappeared without a trace,” Fuchs snapped. “Their signals cut off abruptly.”

  With a smile, Verwoerd said, “That is not evidence that they were attacked.”

  “Quite so,” said Wilcox.

  “In most of those cases, the asteroids that those ships claimed were later claimed by Humphries Space Systems,” Fuchs pointed out.

  “What of it?” Verwoerd retorted. “HSS ships have laid claim to many hundreds of asteroids. And if you examine the record carefully, you will see that four of the six asteroids in question have been claimed by entities other than HSS.”

  Wilcox turned toward the lean assistant on his left. The man nodded hastily and said, “Three of them were claimed by a corporation called Bandung Associates and the fourth by the Church of the Written Word. None of these entities are associated with HSS; I checked thoroughly.”

  “So what this hearing boils down to,” Wilcox said, turning back to Fuchs, “is your assertion that you were attacked.”

  “For that I have evidence, and you have seen it,” Fuchs said, boiling inside.

  “Yes, yes,” said Wilcox. “There’s no doubt that you were attacked. But attacked by whom? That’s the real question.”

  “By a ship working for HSS,” Fuchs said, feeling he was pointing out the obvious. “Under the orders of Martin Humphries.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “No employee of HSS would take such a step without the personal approval of Humphries himself,” Fuchs insisted. “He even had one of my people killed, murdered in cold blood!”

  “You are referring to the murder of a Niles Ripley, are you not?” asked Wilcox.

  “Yes. A deliberate murder to stop our construction of the habitat we’re building—”

  Verwoerd interrupted. “We concede that Mr. Ripley was killed by an employee of Humphries Space Systems. But it was a private matter; the killing was neither ordered nor condoned by HSS. And Mr. Fuchs personally dispatched the killer, in a violent act of vigilantism.”

  Wilcox fixed Fuchs with a stern gaze. “Frontier justice, eh? It’s too bad that you executed him. His testimony might have supported your case.”

  Feeling exasperated, Fuchs said, “Who else would benefit from all these criminal acts?”

  With a wry smile, Wilcox said, “I was hoping you could tell me, Mr. Fuchs. That’s why we’ve gone to the expense and trouble of holding this hearing. Who is responsible here?”

  Fuchs closed his eyes briefly. I don’t want to bring Amanda into this. I don’t want to make this seem like a personal feud between Humphries and me.

  “Do you have anything else to offer, Mr. Fuchs?”

  Before he could reply, George got to his feet again and said, very calmly, “Everybody on Ceres knows that Humphries is tryin’ to squeeze Fuchs out of the Belt. Ask anybody.”

  “Mr…” Wilcox glanced down at his computer screen. “Ambrose, is it? Mr. Ambrose, what ‘everybody knows’ is not evidence in a court of law. Nor in this hearing.”

  George sat down, mumbling to himself.

  “The fact is,” Fuchs said, struggling to keep from screaming, “that someone is killing people, someone is attacking prospectors’ ships, someone is committing terrible crimes in the Asteroid Belt. The IAA must take action, must protect us…” He stopped. He realized he was begging, almost whining.

  Wilcox leaned back in his chair. “Mr. Fuchs, I quite agree that your frontier is a violent, lawless place. But the International Astronautical Authority has neither the power nor the legal authority to serve as a police force across the Asteroid Belt. It is up to the citizens of the Belt themselves to provide their own protection, to police themselves.”

  “We are being systematically attacked by Humphries Space Systems personnel!” Fuchs insisted.

  “You are being attacked, I grant you,” Wilcox responded, with a sad, condescending smile. “Most likely by renegades from among your own rough and ready population. I see no evidence linking Humphries Space Systems to your problems in any way, shape or manner.”

  “You don’t want to see!” Fuchs raged.

  Wilcox stared at him coldly. “This hearing is concluded,” he said.

  “But you haven’t—”

  “It’s finished,” Wilcox snapped. He stood up, grabbed his computer, clicked its lid shut and tucked it into his jacket pocket. Then he turned and strode out of the room, leaving Fuchs standing there, frustrated and furious.

  CHAPTER 36

  Straining to keep a satisfied smile off her face, Diane Verwoerd led the squad of Humphries employees out of the hearing room, leaving Fuchs and his two friends standing there in helpless, confused frustration.

  Out in the corridor she made polite small talk with Douglas Stavenger and Pancho Lane as they left, looking disappointed at the outcome of the hearing. Verwoerd knew that Pancho was Humphries’s chief opponent on the board of Astro Corporation, and that Humphries would not be satisfied until he had full control of Astro. Which means, she told herself, that once we’ve finally gotten rid of Fuchs, Pancho is next.

  She hurried to the power stairs that led down to her office. Once there, alone, she put through a tight-beam laser call to Dorik Harbin. He should be arriving at Ceres in another hour or so, she knew.

  It took nearly twenty minutes before his face appeared on her wallscreen: smolderingly handsome without the beard, his chin firm and hard, his eyes icy blue, intent.

  “I know you can’t reply to this before you land,” she said to Harbin’s image. “But I wanted to wish you good luck and tell you that… well, I’m counting the minutes until you get back here to me.”

  She took a deliberate breath, then added, “I’ve made arrangements with the HSS people at Ceres. The drugs you need will be there, waiting for you.”

  Verwoerd cut the connection. The screen went dark. Only then did she smile. Keep him personally bound to you, she told herself. Use his weaknesses; use his strengths. He’s going to be very valuable, especially if you ever have to protect yourself from Martin.

  She turned and studied her reflection in the mirror on the far wall of her office. Delilah, she said to herself, and laughed.

  “So whattawe do now?” George asked as he, Fuchs and Nodon made their way down the power stairs.

  Fuchs shook his head miserably. “I don’t know. This hearing was a farce. The IAA has given Hum
phries a free hand to do whatever he wants.”

  “Looks that way,” George agreed, scratching at his beard.

  Nodon said nothing.

  “Amanda,” Fuchs said. “I must tell her what’s happened. I must tell her that I’ve failed.”

  Harbin looked over the eight men that had been assigned to his command. A ragtag bunch, at best. Roughnecks, hoodlums, petty thugs. Not one of them had a scrap of combat training or true military discipline. But then, he remembered, this isn’t really a military operation. It’s a simple theft, nothing more.

  He had spent the high-g flight from Selene studying the plan and background information Diane had given him, but he had expected reliable men to work under him, not a gaggle of hooligans. Steeling himself to his task, Harbin silently repeated the mantra that the workman does not blame his tools, and the warrior must fight with what he has at hand. The first task is to instill these morons with some purpose other than cracking skulls and making money.

  Harbin assumed that none of the louts assigned to him gave a damn about what had happened to the hotheaded Tracy Buchanan, but the doctrine that his old sergeant had drilled into him asserted that it was beneficial to a unit’s cohesion and teamwork to build group solidarity in any way possible.

  So he said to them, “You remember what that man Fuchs did to Trace Buchanan?” It was purely a rhetorical question.

  They nodded unenthusiastically. Buchanan had been a bully and a fool; he did not have friends, only associates who were afraid to make him angry. None of them mourned the late Mr. Buchanan.

  But Harbin felt he had to whip up some enthusiasm among his eight underlings. He had brought them together in the cramped little office at the HSS warehouse: eight men who had been flown to Ceres specifically because they could follow orders and weren’t strangers to mayhem.

  “Okay,” Harbin told them. “Tonight we even the score. Tonight we hit Fuchs’s warehouse and clean it out once and for all.”

  “I got a better idea,” said Santorini.

  Harbin felt the old anger simmering inside him. Santorini had the intelligence of a baboon. “What is it?”

  “You wanna get even with Fuchs, why don’t we do his wife?”

  The others all grinned at the thought.

  Are these the best that Diane could hire? Harbin asked himself. Or did somebody in her office merely scrape a few barroom floors and send these specimens here to Ceres?

  “Our orders are to leave her strictly alone,” he said sharply. “Those orders come from the top. Don’t even go near her. Understand? Anybody who even looks in her direction will be in deep shit. Is that clear?”

  “Somebody up there likes her,” one of the lunks said.

  “Somebody up there’s got the hots for her,” agreed the goon next to him.

  Harbin snarled, “That somebody will fry your testicles and then feed them to you in slices if you don’t follow orders. Our job is to hit the warehouse. We go in, we do the job, and then we leave. If we do it right you can all go back to Earth with a big fat bonus in our accounts.”

  “Plenty of slash back home.”

  “Yeah, ’specially if you got money.”

  Harbin let them think about how they were going to enjoy their bonuses. Get them away from thinking about Fuchs’s wife. Diane had been very specific about that. She is not to be harmed or even threatened. Not in any way, shape, or form.

  The warehouse was something else.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Humphries snapped.

  Verwoerd allowed herself a small smile. “I took a long lunch. A victory celebration.”

  “The whole damned afternoon?”

  Humphries was sitting in the mansion’s dining room, alone at one end of the long rosewood table, the remains of his dinner before him. He did not invite his assistant to sit down with him.

  “I expected you here as soon as the hearing ended.”

  “You got the news without me,” she said coolly. “In fact, you knew how the hearing would turn out before it ever started, didn’t you?”

  His frown deepened. “You’re pretty damned sassy this evening.”

  “Fuchs is on his way back to Ceres,” she said. “By the time he gets there he won’t have a warehouse. His company will be broke, he’ll be ruined, and you’ll be king of the Asteroid Belt. What more do you want?”

  She knew what he wanted. He wanted Amanda Cunningham Fuchs. For that, though, it won’t be enough to ruin Fuchs, she thought. We’ll have to kill the man.

  Humphries’s frown dissolved slowly, replaced by a sly smile. “So,” he asked, “what are you doing for sex now that you’ve sent your soldier boy off to Ceres?”

  Verwoerd tried to keep the surprise off her face. The sneaking bastard has been keeping me under surveillance!

  “You bugged his quarters,” she said coldly.

  Grinning, Humphries said, “Would you like to see a replay?”

  It took her a moment to get her emotions under control.

  Finally she managed to say, “He’s an interesting man. He quotes Persian poetry.”

  “In bed.”

  Still standing, Verwoerd stared down at him for a long moment, then conceded the point with a curt nod, thinking, He probably has my apartment bugged, too! Does he know about Bandung Associates?

  But Humphries seemed more amused than annoyed. “I have a proposition for you.”

  Guardedly, she asked, “What kind of a proposition?”

  “I want you to bear my child.”

  She could feel her eyes go round. “What?”

  Laughing, Humphries leaned back in the cushioned dining room chair and said, “You won’t go to bed with me, the least you can do is carry my child for me.”

  She pulled out the chair closest to her and sank slowly into it.

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  Almost offhandedly, Humphries said, “I’ve decided to have a child. A son. My medical experts are picking the best possible egg cells for me to inseminate. We’re going to clone me. My son will be as close to me as modern biological science can make him.”

  “Human cloning is outlawed,” Verwoerd murmured.

  “In most nations on Earth,” Humphries conceded. “But even on Earth there are places where a man of means can have himself cloned. And here in Selene, well—why not?”

  Another little Martin Humphries, Verwoerd thought. But she said nothing.

  “The cloning procedure is still a bit dicey,” he went on, as casually as a man discussing the stock market, “but my people should be able to produce some viable fertilized eggs and get a few women to carry them.”

  “Then why do you want me?”

  He waved a hand. “You’re a very good physical specimen; you ought to make a good home for my clone. Besides, it’s rather poetic, don’t you think? You won’t have sex with me, but you’ll bear my son. That boy-toy of yours isn’t the only one with a poetic soul.”

  “I see,” Verwoerd said, feeling slightly numbed by his cheerful arrogance.

  “What I need is several wombs to carry the zygotes to term. I’ve decided you’d be perfect for the job. Young, healthy, and all that.”

  “Me.”

  “I’ve gone through your medical records and your family history,” Humphries said. “You might say that I know you inside out.”

  She was not amused.

  “You carry my son to term,” he said, his smile fading, his tone more commanding. “You’ll get a very sizable bonus. I’ll even transfer a couple more of my asteroids to your Bandung Associates.”

  The pit of her stomach went hollow.

  “Did you think you could embezzle three very profitable asteroids from me without my finding out about it?” Humphries asked, grinning with satisfaction.

  Verwoerd knew it was hopeless. She felt glad that she had Dorik on her side.

  CHAPTER 37

  As they pulled up their convoy of four minitractors to the entrance of the Helvetia warehouse, Harbin saw that there
were only two people on duty there, and one of them was a woman, gray-haired and grandmotherly, but with a hard, scowling face. She was stocky, stumpy, built like a weight-lifter.

  “What do you guys want?” she demanded as Harbin got down from the lead tractor.

  “Don’t give us a hard time, grandmother,” he said gently. “Just relax and do what you’re told.”

  A face-to-face job like this was far different from shooting up spacecraft in the dark emptiness of the Belt. That was like a game; this was blood. Be still, he commanded silently. Don’t make me kill you. But he felt the old rage building up inside him: the manic fury that led to death.

  “What are you doing here?” the woman repeated truculently. “Who the hell are you assholes?”

  Working hard to keep his inner rage under control, Harbin waved his undisciplined team into the Helvetia warehouse. They all wore breathing masks, nothing unusual in the dusty tunnels of Ceres. They also wore formfitting shower caps that had been ferried in all the way from Earth; with the caps on, no one could see a man’s hair color or style. Harbin also made certain none of his crew had any name tags or other identification on themselves. If Tracy Buchanan had taken that simple precaution he would undoubtedly still be alive now, Harbin thought.

  “What’s this goddam parade of tractors for?” the woman demanded.

  She was wearing a breathing mask, too. So was the skinny kid standing a few paces down the shadowy aisle of tall shelves.

  “We’re here to empty out your warehouse,” Santorini said, strutting up to her.

  “What the hell do you mean?” the woman asked angrily, reaching for the phone console.

  Santorini swatted her to the floor with a backhand smack. The kid back in the stacks threw up his hands in the universal sign of surrender.

  “Come on,” Santorini said, waving to the rest of them.

  Harbin nodded his approval. They started to move in. The kid stood absolutely still, frozen in terror from the look on his ashen face. Santorini kicked him in the stomach so hard he bounced off the shelving and collapsed groaning to the floor.