The Rock Rats gt-11

by Ben Bova

She found Humphries still awake and alone in the big mansion’s game room.

  “We have troubles,” she said as she entered the room. He was bent over the pool table, cue in hand. Humphries had spent many long hours learning how to shoot pool on the Moon. The one-sixth gravity only subtly affected the way the balls rolled or caromed. A visitor could play a few rounds and think nothing was different from Earth. That’s when Humphries would offer a friendly wager on the next game.

  “Troubles?” he said, intent on his shot. He made it; the balls clicked and one of the colored ones rolled to a corner pocket and dropped neatly in. Only then did Humphries straighten up and ask, “What troubles?”

  “Fuchs raided the warehouse and killed one of the men there. Hanged him.”

  Humphries’s eyes widened. “Hanged him? By the neck?”

  “The others have quit,” Verwoerd went on. “They want no part of this fight.”

  He snorted disdainfully. “Cowardly little shits.”

  “They were hired to bully people. They never thought that Fuchs would fight back. Not like this.”

  “I suppose they expect me to pay for their transport back to Earth,” Humphries groused.

  “There’s more.”

  He turned and stacked his cue in its rack. “Well? What else?”

  “Fuchs has stolen an Astro ship, the Lubbock Lights. He’s left—”

  “How the hell could he steal a ship?” Humphries demanded angrily.

  Verwoerd kept the pool table between them. “According to the captain—”

  “The same limp spaghetti that allowed Fuchs to commandeer his ship on the way in to Ceres?”

  “The same man,” Verwoerd replied. “He reported to the IAA that a half-dozen Asians boarded the ship under the pretense of loading ores. They were armed and took control of the ship. Then Fuchs came up from Ceres with another Oriental, apparently the man who was with him when he was here for the hearing. They packed the captain and regular crew into the shuttlecraft and sent them back down to Ceres.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Humphries said fervently.

  “By the time the Peacekeepers arrived, Fuchs was gone.”

  “In one of Pancho’s ships.” He grinned. “Serves her right.”

  Verwoerd pursed her lips, weighing the dangers of antagonizing him further against the pleasures of yanking his chain a little bit. “If possession is nine-tenths of the law,” she said slowly, “then it’s mostly his ship now, not Astro’s.”

  He glared at her, fuming. She kept her expression noncommittal. A smile now could set off a tantrum, she knew.

  He stood in angry silence for several long moments, face flushed, gray eyes blazing. Then, “So those pansies you hired to clean out Fuchs want to quit, do they?”

  “Actually, Grigor hired them,” Verwoerd said. “And, yes, they want out. Fuchs made them watch while he hanged their leader.”

  “And Amanda? She went with him?”

  With a shake of her head, Verwoerd answered, “No, she’s still on Ceres. Apparently Fuchs’s people took back most of the items that were looted from their warehouse.”

  “He left her on Ceres? Alone?”

  “He hanged the man because he made some crack about her. Nobody’s going to go near her, believe me.”

  “I don’t want anybody to go near her,” Humphries snapped. “I want her left strictly alone. I’ve given orders about that!”

  “No one’s harmed her. No one’s threatened her.”

  “Until this asshole opened his big mouth in front of Fuchs.”

  “And he strung him up like a common criminal.”

  Humphries leaned both hands on the rim of the pool table and hung his head. Whether he was overwhelmed with sorrow or anger or the burden of bad news, Verwoerd could not tell.

  At last he lifted his head and said crisply, “We need someone to go after Fuchs. Someone who isn’t afraid of a fight.”

  “But nobody knows where he’s gone,” Verwoerd said. “It’s an awfully big area, out there in the Belt. He’s not sending out a tracking beacon. He’s not even sending telemetry data. The IAA can’t find him.”

  “He’ll run out of fuel sooner or later,” Humphries said. “He’ll have to come back to Ceres.”

  “Maybe,” she said, uncertainly.

  Pointing a finger at her as if he were pointing a pistol.

  Humphries said, “I want somebody out there who can find him. And kill him. I want somebody who knows how to fight and isn’t afraid of being shot at.”

  “A professional soldier,” Verwoerd said.

  Humphries smiled thinly. “Yes. Like your boy-toy.”

  She had known from the moment she’d heard about Fuchs’s actions that it would come down to this. “I agree,” she said, keeping her voice even, emotionless. “Harbin would be perfect for this task. But…” She let the word dangle in the air between them.

  “But?” Humphries snapped. “But what?”

  “He’ll want to be paid a lot more than he’s been getting.”

  He stared at her for a moment. “Are you representing him now? Are you his goddamned agent?”

  She made herself smile at him. “Let’s just say that I know him a lot better than I did a few weeks ago.”

  CHAPTER 42

  As they sped away from Ceres on Lubbock Lights, Fuchs familiarized himself with the crew that Nodon had recruited. Silent, blank-faced Asians, Mongols, descendents of Genghis Khan. They didn’t look particularly ferocious; they looked more like kids, students, fugitives from some high-tech training school. But they apparently knew their way around a fusion-powered spacecraft.

  All the fusion ships were built along two or three basic designs, Fuchs knew. Lubbock Lights was a freighter, but now he had armed the vessel with three mining lasers taken from his own warehouse.

  Once they were well under way, accelerating through the belt at a lunar one-sixth g, Fuchs called his crew into the galley. The seven of them crowded the little space, but they stood respectfully before him, their dark eyes showing no trace of emotion.

  “You realize that we are outlaws now,” he began, without preamble. “Pirates. There is no turning back.”

  Nodon spoke up. “We will follow you, sir. For us there is no other choice.”

  Fuchs looked from one face to another. Young, all of them. Some with facial tattoos, all of them pierced here and their with plain metal adornments. Already embittered by the way the world had treated them. Nodon had given him their backgrounds. They had all come from poor families who struggled to send their children to university where they could learn how to become rich. All six of them had studied technical subjects, from computer design to electrical engineering to environmental sciences. All six of them had been told, upon graduation, that there were no jobs for them. The world was crumbling, their home cities were being abandoned because of drought and disastrous storms that flooded the parched valleys and washed away the farmlands instead of nourishing them. All six of their families became part of the huge, miserable, starving army of the homeless, wandering the stark, bitter land, reduced to begging or stealing or giving up to die on the roadside.

  These are the statistics that I’ve read about, Fuchs realized. Ragged scarecrows who have lost their place in society, who have lost their families and their futures. The desperate ones.

  He cleared his throat and resumed, “One day, I hope, we will be able to return to Earth as wealthy men and women. But that day may never come. We must live as best as we can, and accept whatever comes our way.”

  Nodon said gravely, “That is what each of us has been doing, sir, for more than a year. Better to be here and fight for our lives than to be miserable beggars or prostitutes, kicked and beaten, dying slowly.”

  Fuchs nodded. “Very well, then. We will take what we need, what we want. We will not allow others to enslave us.”

  Brave words, he knew. As Nodon translated them to the crew, Fuchs wondered if he himself truly believed them. He wondered which of these blank-face
d strangers would turn him in for a reward. He decided that he would have to protect his back at all times.

  The Asians spoke among themselves in harsh whispers. Then Nodon said, “There is one problem, sir.”

  “A problem?” Fuchs snapped. “What?”

  “The name of this ship. It is not appropriate. It is not a fortunate name.”

  Fuchs thought, It’s a downright silly name. Lubbock Lights. He had no idea who had named the ship or why.

  “What do you propose?” he asked.

  Nodon glanced at the others, then said, “That is not for us to say, sir. You are the captain; you must make the decision.”

  Again, Fuchs looked from face to impassive face. Young as they were, they had learned to hide their feelings well. What’s going on behind their masks? he wondered. Is this a test? What do they expect from me? More than a name for this ship. They’re watching, judging, evaluating me. I’m supposed to be their leader; they want to see the quality of my leadership.

  A name for the ship. An appropriate, fortunate name.

  A single word escaped his lips. “Nautilus.”

  They looked puzzled. At least I’ve broken their shell a little, Fuchs thought.

  He explained, “The Nautilus was a submarine used by its captain and crew to destroy evil ships and wreak vengeance on wrongdoers.”

  Nodon frowned a little, then translated to the others. There was a little jabbering back and forth, but after a few moments they were all bobbing their heads in agreement. A couple of them even smiled.

  “Nautilus is a good name,” said Nodon.

  Fuchs nodded. “Nautilus it will be, then.” He had no intention of telling them that the vessel was fictional, or how it—and its captain—came to their end.

  Amanda woke up with a headache throbbing behind her eyes. She turned and saw that Lars was not in bed with her. And the wall-screen showed seven messages waiting. Strange that there was no sound from the phone. Lars must have muted it, she thought.

  Sitting up in the bed, she saw that he was not in the one-room apartment. Her heart sank.

  “Lars,” she called softly. There was no answer. He’s gone, she knew. He’s gone from me. For good, this time.

  The first message on the list was from him. Barely able to speak the command, her voice trembled so badly, she told the computer to put it on the screen.

  Lars was sitting at the desk in the warehouse, looking as grim as death. He wore an old turtleneck shirt, dead black, and shapeless baggy slacks. His eyes were unfathomable.

  “Amanda, my dearest,” he said, “I must leave you. By the time you get this message I will be gone. There is no other way, none that I can see. Go to Selene, where Pancho can protect you. And no matter what you hear about me, remember that I love you. No matter what I have done or will do, I do it because I love you and I know that as long as you are near me your life is in danger. Good-bye, darling. I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. Goodbye.”

  Without realizing it, she told the computer to rerun his message. Then again. But by then she couldn’t see the screen for the tears that filled her eyes.

  CHAPTER 43

  FOURTEEN MONTHS LATER

  She used her maiden name now: Amanda Cunningham. It wasn’t that she wanted to hide her marriage to Lars Fuchs; everybody on Ceres, every rock rat in the Belt knew she was his wife. But ever since Fuchs had taken off into the depths of space, she had worked on her own to establish herself and to achieve her goals. She sold off Helvetia, Ltd., to Astro Corporation for a pittance. Pancho, for once, outmaneuvered Humphries and convinced the Astro board of directors that this was a bargain they could not refuse.

  “Besides,” Pancho pointed out to the board, staring straight at Humphries across the table from her, “we should be competing out there in the Belt. It’s where the natural resources are, and that’s where the real wealth comes from.”

  Glad to be rid of Helvetia, Amanda watched Pancho begin to develop the warehouse into a profitable facility for supplying, repairing and maintaining the ships that plied the Belt. She lived off the income from the Astro stock that she had acquired from the sale, and concentrated her efforts on another objective, one that had originally been Lars’s goal: his idea of getting the rock rats to form some kind of government for themselves so they could begin to establish a modicum of law and order on Ceres. The independent-minded prospectors and miners had been dead-set against any form of government, at first. They saw laws as restrictions on their freedom; order as strangling their wild times when they put in at Ceres for R&R.

  But as more and more ships were attacked they began to understand how vulnerable they were. A war was blazing across the Belt, with HSS attacking the independents, trying to drive them out of the Belt, while Fuchs singlehandedly fought back against HSS ships, swooping out of nowhere to cripple or destroy them.

  In Selene, Martin Humphries howled with frustrated anger as his costs for operating in the Belt escalated over and again. It became increasingly expensive to hire crews to work HSS ships, and neither the IAA nor Harbin nor any of the other mercenaries that Humphries hired could find Fuchs and kill him.

  “They’re helping him!” Humphries roared time and again. “Those goddamned rock rats are harboring him, supplying him, helping him to knock off my ships.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Diane Verwoerd retorted. “The rock rats are arming their ships now. They’re shooting back—ineptly, for the most part. But it’s getting more dangerous out there.”

  Humphries hired still more mercenaries to protect his ships and seek out Lars Fuchs. To no avail.

  The people who, like Amanda, actually lived on Ceres—the maintenance technicians and warehouse operators and shopkeepers, bartenders, even the prostitutes—they gradually began to see that they badly needed some kind of law and order. Ceres was becoming a dangerous place. Mercenary soldiers and outright thugs swaggered through the dusty tunnels, making life dangerous for anyone who got in their way. Both HSS and Astro hired “security” people to protect their growing assets of facilities and ships. Often enough the security people fought each other in the tunnels, the Pub, or the warehouses and repair shops.

  Big George Ambrose returned to Ceres, his arm regrown, with a contract to work as a technical supervisor for Astro.

  “No more mining for me,” he told his friends at the Pub. “I’m a fookin’ executive now.”

  But he brawled with the roughest of them. Men and women alike began to carry hand lasers as sidearms.

  At last, Amanda got most of Ceres’s population to agree to a “town meeting” of every adult who lived on the asteroid. Not even the Pub was big enough to hold all of them, so the meeting was held electronically, each individual in their own quarters, all linked through the interactive phone system.

  Amanda wore the turquoise dress she had bought at Selene as she sat at the desk in her quarters and looked up at the wallscreen. Down in the comm center, Big George was serving as the meeting’s moderator, deciding who would talk to the group, and in which order. He had promised, at Amanda’s insistence, that everyone who wanted to speak would get his or her turn. “But it’s goin’ t’be a bloody long night,” he predicted.

  It was. Everyone had something to say, even though many of them repeated ideas and positions already discussed several times over. Through the long, long meeting—sometimes strident, often boring—Amanda sat and carefully listened to each and every one of them.

  Her theme was simple: “We need some form of government here on Ceres, a set of laws that we can all live by. Otherwise we’ll simply have more and more violence until the IAA or the Peacekeepers or some other outside group comes in and takes us over.”

  “More likely it’d be HSS,” said a disgruntled-looking prospector, stuck on Ceres temporarily while his damaged ship was being repaired. “They’ve been trying to take us over for years now.”

  “Or Astro,” an HSS technician fired back.

  George cut them both off before an argum
ent swallowed up the meeting. “Private debates can be held on another channel,” he announced cheerfully, turning the screen over to the lean-faced, sharp-eyed Joyce Takamine, who demanded to know when the habitat was going to be finished so they could move up to it and get out of this dust-filled rathole.

  Amanda nodded sympathetically. “The habitat is in what was once called a Catch-22 situation,” she replied. “Those of us who want it finished so we can occupy it, haven’t the funds to get the work done. Those who have the funds—such as Astro and HSS—have no interest in spending them on completing the habitat.”

  “Well, somebody ought to do something,” Takamine said firmly.

  “I agree,” said Amanda. “That’s something that we could do if we had some form of government to organize things.”

  Nearly an hour later, the owner of the Pub brought up the key question. “But how’re we gonna pay for a government and a police force? Not to mention finishing the habitat. That’ll mean we all hafta pay taxes, won’t it?”

  Amanda was ready for that one. In fact, she was glad the man had brought it up.

  Noting that the message board strung across the bottom of her wallscreen immediately lit up from one end to the other, she said sweetly, “We will not have to pay taxes. The corporations can pay instead.”

  George himself interjected the question everybody wanted to ask. “Huh?”

  Amanda explained, “If we had a government in place, we could finance it with a very small tax on the sales that HSS and Astro and any other corporation makes here on Ceres.”

  It took a few seconds for George to sort out all the incoming calls and flash the image of a scowling prospector onto her wall-screen.

  “You put an excise tax on the corporations and they’ll just pass it on to us by raising their prices.”

  Nodding, Amanda admitted, “Yes, that’s true. But it will be a very small rise. A tax of one percent would bring in ten thousand international dollars for every million dollars in sales.”

  Without waiting for the next questioner, Amanda continued, “HSS alone cleared forty-seven million dollars in sales last week. That’s nearly two and a half a billion dollars per year, which means a tax of one percent would bring us more than twenty-four million in tax revenue from HSS sales alone.”