The Rock Rats gt-11

by Ben Bova

“How’s that for martial arts?” Santorini shouted over his shoulder as the others revved up the minitractors and trundled into the warehouse, raising billows of black dust.

  Swaggering little snot, Harbin thought, looking at the woman Santorini had knocked down. Her lip was bloody, but the look in her eyes proclaimed pure malevolent fury. She struggled to her feet, then lurched toward the phone console.

  Harbin grabbed her by one shoulder. “Be careful, grandmother. You could get hurt.”

  The woman growled and swung her free fist into Harbin’s temple. The blow surprised more than hurt him, but it triggered his inner anger.

  “Stop it,” he snarled, shaking her.

  She aimed a kick at his groin. Harbin twisted sideways to catch it on his hip but it still hurt. Without thinking he slid the electro-dagger out of its sheath on his wrist and slit her throat.

  The old woman gurgled blood and collapsed to the floor like a sack of wet cement.

  Fuchs’s black mood of frustration and anger deepened into an even darker pit of raging fury as he and Nodon boarded the Astro Corporation ship Lubbock Lights bound for Ceres. They had said a lingering goodbye to George at the Pelican Bar the night before.

  “I’ll be back at the Belt as soon’s me arm grows back,” George had promised several times, over many beers.

  Pancho had bought all their rounds, drinking with them in gloomy comradeship.

  Now, with a thundering headache and a towering hatred boiling inside him, Fuchs faced the four-day journey back to Ceres with the exasperation of a caged jungle beast.

  When the message came in from Amanda he nearly went berserk.

  He was in his privacy compartment, a cubicle barely large enough to hold a narrow cot, trying to sleep. Each time he closed his eyes, though, he saw Martin Humphries sneering at him. And why not? Fuchs raged at himself. He has gotten away with murder. And piracy. No one can stop him; no one will even stand up to him except me, and I’m powerless: a pitiful, impotent, useless fool.

  For hours he tossed on the cot, clad only in a pair of shorts, sweating, his hair matted, his jaw stubbled with a two-day growth of beard. Stop this fruitless nonsense! he raged at himself. It’s useless to pound your head against a wall. Think! Prepare! If you want revenge on Humphries you must out-think him, you must make plans that are crystal clear, a strategy that will crush him once and for all. But each time he tried to think clearly, logically, his anger rose like a tide of red-hot lava, overwhelming him.

  The phone buzzed. Fuchs sat up on the cot and told the computer to open the incoming message.

  Amanda’s face filled the screen on the bulkhead at the foot of the cot. She looked tense, even though she tried to smile.

  “Hello, dear,” she said, brushing at a stray lock of hair that had fallen across her forehead. “I’m fine, but they’ve looted the warehouse.”

  “What? Looted?”

  She couldn’t hear or see him, of course. She had sent the message a good fifteen minutes earlier.

  “They killed Inga. Out of pure bloodthirsty spite, from what Oscar told me. You remember him, Oscar Jiminez. He’s the young boy I hired to help handle the stock.”

  She’s terrified, Fuchs realized, watching the lines of strain on her face, listening to her ramble on.

  “They came in during the night shift, when only Inga and Oscar were there, about nine or ten of them, according to Oscar. They beat him and slit Inga’s throat. The man who did it laughed about it. Then they emptied the warehouse. Every box, every carton, every bit of stock we had. It’s all gone. All of it.”

  Fuchs’s teeth were grinding together so furiously his jaw began to ache. Amanda was trying hard to keep from crying.

  “I’m perfectly fine,” she was saying. “This all happened late last night. The morning shift found Inga on the floor in a pool of blood and Oscar tied and gagged all the way in the rear of the warehouse. And—and that’s the whole story. I’m all right, no one’s bothered me at all. In fact, everyone seems to be very protective of me today.” She brushed at her hair again. “I suppose that’s all there is to say, just at this moment. Hurry home, darling. I love you.”

  The screen went blank. Fuchs pounded a fist against the unyielding bulkhead and roared a wordless howl of frustration and rage.

  He leaped off the cot and ripped open the flimsy sliding door of his cubicle. Still clad in nothing but his shorts he stormed up the ship’s passageway to the bridge.

  “We must get to Ceres as fast as possible!” he shouted to the lone crewwoman sitting in the command chair.

  Her eyes popped wide at the sight of him.

  “Now! Speed up! I have to get to Ceres before they murder my wife!”

  The woman looked at Fuchs as if he were a madman, but she summoned the captain, who came onto the bridge wrapped in a knee-length silk robe, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

  “My wife is in danger!” Fuchs bellowed at the captain. “We must get to Ceres as quickly as possible!”

  It was maddening. Fuchs babbled his fears to the captain, who finally understood enough to put in a call to IAA mission control for permission to increase the ship’s acceleration. It took nearly half an hour for a reply to come back from IAA headquarters on Earth. Half an hour while Fuchs paced up and down the bridge, muttering, swearing, wondering what was happening at Ceres. The captain suggested that they both put on some clothes, and went back to his quarters. Nodon appeared, then left without a word and returned minutes later carrying a pair of coveralls for Fuchs.

  Tugging them on and sealing the Velcro closures, Fuchs asked the crewwoman to open a communications channel to Ceres. She did so without hesitation.

  “Amanda,” he said, “I’m on the way. We are asking for permission to accelerate faster, so I might be able to reach you before our scheduled arrival time. I’ll let you know. Stay in your quarters. Ask some of the people who work for us to act as guards at your door. I’ll be there as soon as I can, darling. As soon as I can.”

  By the time the captain returned to the bridge, face washed, hair combed, and wearing a crisp jumpsuit with his insignia of rank on the cuffs, the answer arrived from IAA control.

  Permission denied. Lubbock Lights will remain at its current velocity vector and arrive at Ceres in three and a half more days, as scheduled.

  Trembling, Fuchs turned from the robotlike IAA controller’s image on the screen to the uniformed captain.

  “I’m sorry,” said the captain, with a sympathetic shrug of his shoulders. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  Fuchs stared at the man’s bland, scrubbed face for half a moment, then smashed a thundering right fist into the captain’s jaw. His head snapped back and blood flew from his mouth as he buckled to the deck. Turning on the gape-mouthed crew woman, Fuchs ordered, “Maximum acceleration. Now!”

  She glanced at the unconscious captain, then back at Fuchs. “But I can’t—”

  He ripped an emergency hand torch from its clips on the bulkhead and brandished it like a club. “Get away from the controls!”

  “But—”

  “Get out of that chair!” Fuchs bellowed.

  She jumped to her feet and stepped sideways, slipping along the curving control panel, away from him.

  “Nodon!” Fuchs called.

  The young Asian stepped through the open hatch. He glanced nervously at the captain lying on the deck, then at the frightened crewwoman.

  “See that no one enters the bridge,” Fuchs said, tossing the hand torch to him. “Use that on anyone who tries to get in here.”

  Nodon gestured the woman toward the hatch as Fuchs sat in the command chair and studied the control board. Not much different from Starpower or the other vessels he’d been on.

  “What about the captain?” the crewwoman asked. He was groaning softly, his legs starting to move a little.

  “Leave him here,” said Fuchs. “He’ll be all right.”

  She left and Nodon swung the hatch shut behind her.

  “Lock it,” Fuc
hs ordered.

  The captain sat up, rubbed at the back of his neck, then looked up blearily at Fuchs sitting at the controls.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the captain growled.

  “I’m trying to save my wife’s life,” Fuchs answered, pushing the ship’s acceleration to its maximum of one-half normal Earth gravity.

  “This is piracy!” the captain snapped.

  Fuchs swung around in the command chair. “Yes,” he said tightly. “Piracy. There’s a lot of it going around, these days.”

  CHAPTER 38

  “He’s what?” Hector Wilcox did not believe his ears.

  Zar looked stunned as he repeated, “He’s taken over the Lubbock Lights. He’s accelerating at top speed to Ceres. Our flight controllers have ordered him to cease and desist, but he’s paying no attention to them.”

  Wilcox sagged back in his desk chair. “By god, the man’s committed an act of piracy.”

  “It would seem so,” Zar agreed cautiously. “According to our people on Ceres, someone broke into Fuchs’s warehouse and cleaned out everything. They murdered one of the people working there. A woman.”

  “His wife?”

  “No, an employee. But you can understand why Fuchs wants to reach Ceres as quickly as he can.”

  “That doesn’t justify piracy,” Wilcox said sternly. “As soon as he arrives at Ceres, I want our people there to arrest him.”

  Zar blinked at his boss. “They’re only flight controllers, not policemen.”

  “I don’t care,” Wilcox said sternly. “I won’t have people flouting IAA regulations. This is a matter of principle!”

  Diane Verwoerd had spent most of the morning combing her apartment for bugs. She found none, which worried her. She felt certain that Humphries had bugged her place; how else would he know what she was doing? Yet she could find no hidden microphones, no microcameras tucked in the ventilator grills or anywhere else.

  Could Martin have been guessing about Bandung Associates? She had thought she’d covered her trail quite cleverly, but perhaps naming her dummy corporation after the city in which her mother had been born wasn’t so clever, after all.

  Whatever, she decided. Martin knows that I’ve winkled him out of several choice asteroids and he’s willing to let that pass—if I carry his cloned baby for him.

  She shuddered at the thought of having a foreign creature inserted into her womb. It’s like the horror vids about alien invaders we watched when we were kids, she thought. And she had heard dark, scary stories about women who carried cloned fetuses. It wasn’t like carrying a normal baby. The afterbirth bloated up so hugely that it could kill the woman during childbirth, they said.

  But the rational part of her mind saw some possible advantages. Beyond the monetary rewards, this could put me in a position of some power with Martin Humphries, she told herself. The mother of his clone. That puts me in a rather special position. A very special position, actually. I might even gain a seat on his board of directors, if I play my cards well.

  If I live through it, she thought, shuddering again.

  Then she thought of Harbin. Beneath all that steely self-control was a boiling hot volcano, she had discovered. If I play him correctly, he’ll sit up and roll over and do any other tricks I ask him to perform. A good man to have at my side, especially if I have to deal with Martin after the baby is born.

  The baby. She frowned at the thought, wondering, Should I tell Dorik about it? Eventually, I’ll have to. But not now. Not yet. He’s too possessive, too macho to accept the fact that I’ll be carrying someone else’s baby while I’m letting him make love to me. I’ll have to be very careful about the way I handle that little bit of news.

  She walked idly through her apartment, thinking, planning, staring at the walls and ceilings as if she could make the electronic bugs appear just by sheer willpower. Martin’s snooping on me. She felt certain of it. He certainly got his jollies watching me do it with Dorik.

  With a reluctant sigh she decided she would have to call in some expert help to sweep the apartment. The trouble is, she told herself, all the experts I know are HSS employees. Can I get them to do the job right?

  Then she thought of an alternative. Doug Stavenger must know some experts among Selene’s permanent population. I’ll ask Stavenger to help me.

  Both of the IAA flight controllers were waiting at the cave that served as a reception area at Ceres’s spaceport when Fuchs returned. He had left Lubbock Lights in orbit around the asteroid, turned the ship back to its captain, and ridden a shuttlecraft down to the surface. The two controllers left their posts in the cramped IAA control center and went to the reception area to meet him.

  As Fuchs stepped out of the pressurized tunnel that connected the shuttlecraft to the bare rock cave, the senior controller, a thirtyish woman of red hair and considerable reputation among the men who frequented the Pub, cleared her throat nervously and said:

  “Mr. Fuchs, the IAA wants you to turn yourself in to the authorities to face a charge of piracy.”

  Fuchs ignored her and started for the tunnel that led to the underground living quarters. She glanced at her partner, a portly young man with a round face, high forehead, and long ponytail hanging halfway down his back. They both started after Fuchs.

  He said, “Mr. Fuchs, please don’t make this difficult for us.”

  Kicking up clouds of dark gray dust as he shuffled into the tunnel, Fuchs said, “I will make it very easy for you. Go away and leave me alone.”

  “But, Mr. Fuchs—”

  “I have no intention of turning myself in to you or anyone else. Leave me alone before you get hurt.”

  They both stopped so short that swirling clouds of dust enveloped them to their knees. Fuchs continued shambling down the tunnel, heading for his quarters and his wife.

  He was no longer the raging, bellowing puppet yanked this way and that by strings that Martin Humphries controlled. His fury was still there, but now it was glacially cold, calm, calculating. He had spent the hours in transit to Ceres calculating, planning, preparing. Now he knew exactly what he had to do.

  There was no guard at his door. Hands trembling, Fuchs slid it open. And there was Amanda sitting at the work desk, her eyes wide with surprise.

  “Lars! No one told me you had arrived!” She jumped out of her chair and threw her arms around his neck.

  “You’re all right?” he asked, after kissing her. “No one has tried to harm you?”

  “I’m fine, Lars,” she said. “And you?”

  “I’ve been charged with piracy by the IAA. They probably want me to turn around and return to Selene for a trial.”

  She nodded gravely. “Yes, they sent me a message about it. Lars, you didn’t need to take over the ship. I’m quite all right.”

  Despite everything, he grinned at her. Feeling her in his arms, most of his fears dissolved. “Yes,” he breathed, “you’re more than all right.”

  Amanda smiled back at him. “The door’s still open,” she pointed out.

  He stepped away from her, but instead of closing the door, went to the desk. The wallscreen showed a form letter from their insurance carrier. Fuchs scanned it as far as the line telling them that their policy had been terminated, then blanked the screen.

  “I’ve got to go to the warehouse,” he said. “Nodon will be waiting there for me.”

  “Nodon?” Amanda asked. “George’s crewman?”

  “Yes,” said Fuchs as he called up Helvetia’s personnel file. “He was with us at the farce of a hearing in Selene.”

  “I know.”

  Looking up at her, he asked, “Which of these people witnessed Inga’s murder?”

  “Oscar Jiminez,” Amanda said, pulling up the room’s other chair to sit beside him.

  “I must speak to him,” Fuchs said. He got up from his chair and went to the door, leaving Amanda sitting there alone.

  Nodon was waiting for him at the warehouse. Feeling uneasy, irritable, Fuchs c
alled Jiminez and two other Helvetia employees, both men, both young. When they all arrived at the warehouse’s little office area, the place felt crowded and suddenly warm from the press of their bodies. Jiminez, skinny and big-eyed, stood between the two other men.

  “In a day or two,” Fuchs told them, “we’re going to the HSS warehouse and take back the material they stole from us.”

  The men looked nervously at one another. “And we’re going to administer justice to the men who murdered Inga,” he added.

  “They’ve gone,” Jiminez said, in a voice pitched high with tension.

  “Gone?”

  “The day after the raid on our warehouse,” said one of the older men. “Nine HSS employees left on one of their ships.”

  “Where is it bound?” Fuchs demanded. “Selene?”

  “We don’t know. Maybe it’s going to Earth.”

  “We’ll never get them once they reach Earth,” Fuchs muttered.

  “They brought in another bunch on the ship that took them away,” said the other man, a trim-looking welterweight with a military buzz cut and jewelry piercing his nose, both eyebrows and earlobes.

  “I suppose they are guarding the HSS warehouse,” Fuchs said, glancing at Nodon, who remained silent, taking it all in.

  The young man nodded.

  “Very well, then,” Fuchs said. He took a deep breath. “This is what we’re going to do.”

  DOSSIER: JOYCE TAKAMINE

  “It’s not what you know,” he told her, time and again. “It’s who you know.”

  Joyce “graduated” from picking to helping run one of the big farm management companies. Armed with her degree in computer analysis, she had worked up the courage to ask the young man running the company’s local office for a job. He offered to discuss the possibilities over dinner, in his mobile home. They ended the evening in his bed. She got the job and lived for the next two years with the young man, who constantly reminded her about “the great American know-who.”

  When Joyce took his advice and left him for an older man who happened to be an executive with Humphries Space Systems, the young man was shocked and disillusioned.