The Rock Rats gt-11

by Ben Bova

  Nielsen’s left cheek ticked once. “Lars, you don’t have to do this. You can get away, go back to your own ship, and no harm done.”

  Fuchs glowered at him. “You don’t understand, do you? I want to do harm.”

  Standing on the rim of the unnamed crater in his dustcaked spacesuit, Nguyan Ngai Giap surveyed the construction work with some satisfaction. Half a dozen long, arched habitat modules were in place. Front loaders were covering them with dirt to protect them against radiation and micrometeor hits. They would be ready for occupation on time, and he had already reported back to HSS headquarters at Selene that the troops could be sent on their way. The repair facilities were almost finished, as well. All was proceeding as planned.

  “Sir, we have an emergency,” said a woman’s voice in his helmet earphones.

  “An emergency?”

  “An ore freighter, the Durant, is asking permission to take up orbit. It needs repairs.”

  “Durant? Is this an HSS vessel?” Giap demanded.

  “Yes, sir. An ore freighter. They say they were attacked by Fuchs’s ship.”

  “Give them permission to establish orbit. Alert the other ships up there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Only after he had turned his attention back to the construction work did Giap wonder how Durant knew of this facility. HSS vessel or not, this base on Vesta was supposed to be a secret.

  “Freighter approaching,” called the crewman on watch in Shanidar’s bridge.

  Dorik Harbin hardly paid any attention. After the fruitless attempt to decoy Fuchs with the fake ore freighter, he had returned to the repaired and refurbished Shanidar, waiting for him in a parking orbit around Vesta. As soon as refueling was completed, Harbin could resume his hunt for Lars Fuchs. Shanidar’s crew had been disappointed that they had put in at Vesta instead of Ceres, where they could have spent their waiting time at the asteroid’s pub or brothel. Let them grumble, Harbin said to himself. The sooner we get Fuchs the sooner all of us can leave the Belt for good.

  He thought of Diane Verwoerd. No woman had ever gained a hold on his emotions, but Diane was unlike anyone he had ever known before. He had had sex with many women, but Diane was far more than a bedmate. Intelligent, understanding, and as sharply driven to get ahead in this world as Harbin was himself. She knew more about the intrigues and intricacies of the corporate world than Harbin had ever guessed at. She would be a fine partner in life, a woman who could stand beside him, take her share of the burden and then some. And the sex was good, fantastic, better than any drug.

  Do I love her? Harbin asked himself. He did not understand what love truly was. Yet he knew that he wanted Diane for himself, she was his key to a better world, she could raise him above this endless circle of mercenary killing that was his life.

  He also knew that he would never have her until he found this elusive madman Fuchs and killed him.

  “She’s carrying a heavy load of ores,” the crewman noticed.

  Harbin turned his attention to the approaching ore freighter in the display screen on his bridge. Damaged in a fight with Fuchs, her captain had said. But he could see no signs of damage. Maybe they’re hidden by that pile of rocks she’s carrying, he thought. More likely the frightened rabbit raced away from the first sign of trouble and scurried here for protection.

  Harbin’s beard had grown thick again over the months he had been chasing Fuchs across the Belt. He scratched at it idly as a new thought crossed his mind. How did this ore freighter know that we are building a base here? It’s supposed to be a secret. If every passing tugboat knows about it, Fuchs will hear of it sooner or later.

  What difference? Harbin asked himself. Even if he knows about it, what can he do? One man in one ship, against a growing army. Sooner or later we’ll find him and destroy him. It’s only a matter of time. And then I can return to Diane.

  As he watched the display screen, he noticed that the approaching freighter didn’t seem to be braking into an orbit. Instead, it was accelerating. Rushing toward the asteroid.

  “It’s going to crash!” Harbin shouted.

  Maneuvering a spinning spacecraft with pinpoint accuracy was beyond the competence of any of Fuchs’s people. Or of Nielsen’s crew. But to the ship’s computer it was child’s play: simple Newtonian mechanics, premised on the first law of motion.

  Fuchs felt the ship’s slight acceleration as Durant followed the programmed course. Standing spread-legged on the bridge, he saw the rugged, pitted surface of the asteroid rushing closer and closer. He knew they were accelerating at a mere fraction of a g, but as he stared at the screen it seemed as if the asteroid was leaping up toward them. Will we crash? he asked himself. What of it? came his own mind’s answer. If we die that’s the end of it.

  But as Durant accelerated silently toward the asteroid, its maneuvering jets fired briefly and the clamps holding nearly fifteen hundred thousand tons of asteroidal ores let go of their burden. The ship jinked slightly and slipped over the curve of the asteroid’s massive dark rim, accelerating toward escape velocity. The jettisoned ores spread into the vacuum of space like a ponderous rock slide, pouring down slowly toward the crater where the HSS base was being built.

  In that vacuum, a body in motion stays in motion unless some outside force deflects it. In Vesta’s minuscule gravity, the rocks actually weighed next to nothing. But their mass was still nearly fifteen hundred thousand tons. They fell gently, leisurely, toward the asteroid’s surface, a torrent of death moving with the languid tumbling motion of a nightmare.

  “Sir? Incoming call from Shanidar.” The woman’s voice in Giap’s earphones sounded strained, almost frightened.

  Without waiting for him to tell her, she connected Harbin. “That ship is on a collision course with—no, wait. It’s released its cargo!”

  It was difficult to look up from inside the spacesuit helmet, but when Giap twisted his head back and slightly sideways, all he could see was a sky full of immense dark blobs blotting out the stars.

  He heard Harbin’s tense, strained voice, “Break us out of orbit!”

  Then the ground jumped so hard he was blasted completely off his feet and went reeling, tumbling into an all-engulfing billow of black dust.

  Aboard Shanidar, Harbin watched in horror as the rocks dropped ever-so-softly toward the construction site in the crater. The ore freighter was masked by them and heading over the curve of the asteroid’s bulk. The men and women down in that crater were doomed, condemned to inexorable death.

  “Break us out of orbit!” he shouted to the woman in the pilot’s chair.

  “Refueling isn’t completed!”

  “Forget the mother-humping refueling!” he yelled. Pounding the intercom key on the console before him, he called to the crew, “Action stations! Arm the lasers! Move!”

  But he knew it was already too late.

  With nothing to impede their motion the landslide of rocks glided silently through empty space until they smashed into the surface of Vesta. The first one missed the buildings but blasted into the rim of the crater, throwing up a shower of rocky debris that spread leisurely across the barren landscape. The next one obliterated several of the metal huts dug halfway into the crater floor. Then more and more of them pounded in, raising so much dust and debris that Harbin could no longer see the crater at all. The dust cloud rose and drifted, a lingering shroud of destruction and death, slowly enveloping the entire asteroid, even reaching out toward his ship. Harbin unconsciously expected it to form a mushroom shape, as nuclear bombs did on Earth. Instead the cloud simply grew wider and darker, growing as if it fed on the asteroid’s inner core. Harbin realized it would hang over the asteroid for days, perhaps weeks, a dark pall of death.

  By the time Shanidar had broken out of orbit, the ore freighter was long gone. The damnable dust cloud even interfered with Harbin’s attempts to pick it up on a long-range radar sweep.

  CHAPTER 47

  “He what?” Martin Humphries screamed.

&nbs
p; “He wiped out the base on Vesta,” Diane Verwoerd repeated. “All fifty-two people on the surface were killed.” Humphries sank back in his desk chair. He had been on the phone negotiating a deal to sell high-grade asteroidal nickel-iron to the government of China when she had burst into his office, tight-lipped and pale with shock. Seeing the expression on her face, Humphries had fobbed the Chinese negotiator off onto one of his underlings in Beijing as politely as possible, then cut the phone link and asked her what was the matter.

  “Wiped out the entire base?” he asked, his voice gone hollow. “One of our ships in orbit around Vesta got caught in the dust cloud and—”

  “What dust cloud?” Humphries demanded irritably. Verwoerd sank into one of the chairs in front of his desk and explained as much as she knew of Fuchs’s attack. Humphries had never seen her look so stunned, so upset. It intrigued him.

  “Fifty-two people killed,” she murmured, almost as if talking to herself. “And the crew of the ship that was damaged by the dust cloud…four of them died when their life support system broke down.”

  Humphries calmed himself, then asked, “And Fuchs got away?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Harbin tried to give chase, but he was too low on fuel. He had to turn back.”

  “So he’s still out there, hatching more mischief.”

  “Mischief?” She looked squarely at him. “This is more than mischief, Martin. This is a massacre.”

  He nodded, almost smiled. “That’s right. That’s exactly what it was. A deliberate massacre.”

  “You look as if you’re pleased about it.”

  “We can make it work in our favor,” Humphries said.

  “I don’t see—”

  “Those rock rats have been helping Fuchs, giving him fuel and food, giving him information about our ships’ schedules and destinations.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Obviously.”

  “Somebody told him about the base on Vesta.”

  “Obviously,” Verwoerd repeated.

  “And now he’s killed a couple of dozen of his own people. Rock rats. Construction workers. Right?”

  She took a deep breath, straightened up in the chair. “I see. You think they’ll turn against him.”

  “Damned right.”

  “What if they turn against you?” Verwoerd asked. “What if they decide that working for HSS is too dangerous, no matter how good the pay?”

  “That’s where we play our trump card,” Humphries said. “Stavenger’s been putting out feelers about arranging a peace conference. Apparently the world government’s sticking its nose into the situation and Stavenger wants to head them off.”

  “A peace conference?”

  “Humphries Space Systems, Astro, Selene… even the world government will send a representative. Slice up the Asteroid Belt neat and clean, so there’s no more fighting.”

  “Who’ll represent the rock rats?”

  He laughed. “What do we need them for? This is strictly among the major players. The big boys.”

  “But it’s about them,” Verwoerd countered. “You can’t divide up the Asteroid Belt between HSS and Astro without including them.”

  With a shake of his head, Humphries said, “You don’t understand history, Diane. Back in the twentieth century there was a big flap in Europe over some country called Czechoslovakia. It doesn’t even exist anymore. But at that time, Germany wanted to take it over. England and France met with the Germans in Munich. They decided what to do with Czechoslovakia. The Czechs weren’t included in the conference. No need for them; the big boys parceled it all out.”

  Verwoerd shot back, “And a year later all Europe was at war. I know more history than you think. You can’t have a conference about parceling out the Belt without having the rock rats in on it.”

  “Can’t we?”

  “You’ll be throwing them into Fuchs’s arms!”

  Humphries frowned at that. “You think so?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “H’mm. I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe you’re right.”

  Verwoerd leaned toward him slightly. “But if you included the rock rats, got them to send a representative to the conference—”

  “We’d be making them a party to the crime,” Humphries finished for her.

  “And the only outsider, the only one who doesn’t agree to the settlement, would be Fuchs.”

  “Right!”

  “He’d be isolated,” Verwoerd said. “Really alone. He’d have to give up. Nobody would help him and he’d be forced to quit.”

  Humphries clasped his hands behind his head and leaned far back in his big, comfortable chair. “And he’d also have to face trial for killing all those people on Vesta. I love it!”

  CHAPTER 48

  Much to his surprise, George Ambrose was elected “mayor” of Ceres.

  His official title was Chief Administrator. The election came about once the inhabitants of Ceres reluctantly admitted that they needed some form of government, if only to represent them against the growing mayhem that was turning the Belt into a war zone. Fuchs’s destruction of the Vesta base was the last straw; more than two dozen residents of Ceres had been killed in the attack.

  Amanda tried to distance herself from her estranged husband’s offense by throwing herself into the drive to bring some form of law and order to Ceres. She worked tirelessly to craft a government, searching databases for months to find governmental organizations that might fit the needs of the rock rats. Once she had put together a proposed constitution, the rock rats grumbled and fussed and ripped it to shreds. But she picked up the pieces and presented a new document that addressed most of their complaints. With great reluctance, they voted to accept the new government—as long as it imposed no direct taxes on them.

  Staffing the government was simple enough: there were enough clerks and technical supervisors on Ceres to handle the jobs. Many of them were delighted with the prospect of getting an assured salary, although Amanda made certain that each bureaucrat had to satisfy a strict performance review annually to hold onto the job.

  Then came the selection of a governing board. Seven people were chosen at random by computer from the permanent residents of Ceres. No one was allowed to refuse the “honor.” Or the responsibility. Amanda was not selected by the computerized lottery, which disappointed her. George was, which disappointed him even more.

  At their first meeting, the board elected George their chief, over his grudging protests.

  “I won’t fookin’ shave,” he warned them.

  “That’s all right, George,” said one of the young women on the board. “But could you just tone down your language a little?”

  Thus it was that Big George Ambrose, now the reluctant “mayor” of the rock rats, became their representative in the conference that took place at Selene, where he had once lived as a fugitive and petty thief.

  “I’m not goin’ by meself,” George insisted. “I’ll need some backup.”

  The governing board decided they could afford to send two assistants with George. His first real decision as the newly-elected Chief Administrator of Ceres was to pick the two people who would go with him. His first choice was easy: Dr. Kris Cardenas.

  As he tussled in his mind over who the other appointee should be, Amanda surprised him by volunteering for the post.

  She popped into his “office”—actually nothing more than his everyday living quarters—and told him that she wanted to be part of the delegation to Selene.

  “You?” George blurted. “How come?”

  Amanda looked away from his eyes. “I’ve done as much work to create this government as anyone. More, in fact. I deserve to go.”

  George said warily, “This won’t be a fookin’ vacation, y’know.”

  “I understand that.”

  He offered her his best chair, but she shook her head and remained standing in the middle of his one-room residence. She seemed calm, and very determined. The place is pretty messy, George though
t: bed’s not made, plates in the sink. But Amanda simply stood there staring off into infinity, seeing—what? George wondered.

  “Humphries is there, in Selene,” he said.

  Amanda nodded, her face expressionless, frozen, as if she were afraid to show any emotion at all.

  “Lars won’t like you goin’.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “I’ve thought it all out, George. I must go with you. But I don’t want Lars to know. Please don’t tell him.”

  Scratching his beard, trying to sort out what she was saying, George asked, “How can I tell ’im? The only way I get any word to him is through you.”

  “I’ve got to go with you, George,” Amanda said, almost pleading now. “Don’t you see? I’ve got to do whatever I can to put an end to this fighting. To save Lars before they find him and kill him!”

  George nodded, finally understanding. At least, he thought he did.

  “All right, Amanda. You can come with us. I’ll be glad to have you.”

  “Thank you, George,” she said, smiling for the first time. But there was no happiness in it.

  Amanda had wrestled with her conscience for two days before asking George to let her go with him to Selene. She knew that Lars would not want her to be so near to Humphries, especially without him there to protect her. She herself did not fear Humphries any longer; she felt that she could handle him. Martin wouldn’t hurt me, she told herself. Besides, George and Kris will be there to chaperone me.

  What worried her was Lars’s reaction. He would be dead-set against her going to Selene, to Humphries’s home territory. So, after two days of inner turmoil, Amanda decided to go. Without telling Lars.

  A total of twenty-two ships made rendezvous above the ruined base on Vesta. The dust cloud from Fuchs’s attack had finally settled, but Harbin could see nothing of the base, not even the crater in which it had been situated. It was all obliterated by a new set of overlapping craters, fresh, sharp, raw-looking circular scars on the asteroid’s dark surface. They reminded Harbin of the scars left on sperm whales by the suckers of giant squids’ tentacles.