The Precipice (Asteroid Wars)

by Ben Bova

  So the New Morality has its tentacles into the IAA now, Dan thought. And the GEC too, I’ll bet. And Humphries is playing them all like a symphony orchestra, using them to stymie me long enough so he can grab Astro from me.

  Well, it’s not going to be that easy, partner.

  “What’s so funny?” Pancho asked, looking puzzled.

  “Funny?”

  “You say, ‘Here’s my plan,’ and then you start grinnin’ like a cat in a canary’s cage.”

  Dan took a sip of his brandy and dry, then said, “Pancho, I’ve always said that when the going gets tough, the tough get going—to where the going’s easier.”

  “I’ve heard that one before.”

  “So I’m going with you.”

  “You?”

  “Yep.”

  “To the Belt.”

  “You need a flight engineer. I know the ship’s systems as well as anybody.”

  “Lordy-lord,” Pancho muttered.

  “I’m still a qualified astronaut. I’m going with you.”

  “But not until we do the uncrewed test flight,” she said, reaching for her beer.

  Leaning across the table even closer to her, Dan said in a hoarse whisper, “Screw the test flight. We’re going to the Belt. You, Amanda, Fuchs and me.”

  Pancho nearly choked on her mouthful of beer. She sputtered, coughed, then finally asked, “What’re you drinkin’, boss?’

  Happy as a pirate on the open sea, Dan said, “We’ll let ‘em think we’re doing exactly what they’ve told us to do, except that the four of us will happen to be aboard the bird when she breaks orbit.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that We’ll calculate a new flight plan once we’re underway. Instead of accelerating at one-sixth g, as we’ve planned, we’ll goose her up to one-third g and cut the flight time by more than half.”

  Pancho looked unconvinced. “You better bring an as-trogator aboard.”

  “Nope.” Pointing a finger at her, Dan said, “You’re it, kid. You and Amanda. I’m not bringing anybody into this that we don’t absolutely need.”

  “I’m not so sure about this,” Pancho said warily.

  “Don’t go chicken on me, kid,” Dan said. “You two have been studying this point-and-shoot technique for a lot of weeks. If you can’t do it, I’ve been wasting money on you.”

  “I can do it,” Pancho said immediately.

  “Okay, then.”

  “I’d just feel better if you had a real expert on board.”

  “No experts. Nobody else except the four of us. I don’t want anybody tipped off about this. And that includes Humphries.”

  Pancho waved a hand nonchalantly. “He hasn’t said a word to me since we moved Sis.”

  “I don’t think he knows were we stashed her,” Dan said, reaching for his drink.

  “He knows about ever’thing.”

  “Not this flight,” Dan said firmly. “Nobody is going to know about this. Understand me? Don’t even tell Amanda or Fuchs. This is just between you and me, kid.”

  “And the flight controllers,” Pancho muttered.

  “What?”

  “How’re you goin’ to get the flight controllers to go along with this? You can’t just waltz aboard the Starpower and light her up without them knowin’ it Hell’s bells, Dan, you won’t even be able to hop up to the ship if they don’t let you have a jumper and give you clearance for takeoff.”

  Sipping at his brandy-laced ginger beer, Dan admitted, “That’s a problem I haven’t worked out yet.”

  “It’s a toughie.”

  “Yep, it is,” Dan said, unable to suppress a grin.

  Pancho shook her head disapprovingly. “You’re enjoying this.”

  “Why not?” Dan replied. “The world’s going to hell in a handbasket, the New Morality is taking over the government, Humphries is trying to screw me out of my own company—what could be more fun than hijacking my own spacecraft and riding it out to the Belt?”

  “That’s weird,” Pancho murmured.

  Dan saw that his glass was empty. He pressed the button set into the table’s edge to summon one of the squat little robots trundling through the crowd.

  “Don’t worry about the flight controllers,” he said casually. “We’ll figure out a way around them.”

  “We?”

  “You and me.”

  “Hey, boss, I’m a pilot, not a woman of intrigue.”

  “You made a pretty good spy.”

  “I was lousy at it and we both know it.”

  “You hacked into Humphries’s files.”

  “And he found out about it in half a minute, just about.”

  “We’ll think of something,” Dan said.

  Pancho nodded, then realized that she had already thought of something.

  “I’ll fix the flight controllers,” she said.

  “Really?” Dan’s brows rose. “How?”

  “Better that you don’t know boss. Just let me do it my way.”

  Dan looked skeptical, but he shrugged and said nothing.

  MISSION CONTROL CENTER

  The timing had to be just right.

  Nervous despite being invisible, Pancho edged cautiously into the Armstrong spaceport’s mission control center. It was nearly two a.m. The center was quiet, only two controllers on. duty and both of them were relaxed, one leaning back in his chair while the other poured coffee at the little hotplate off by the door to the lav.

  Pancho hadn’t told anyone about this caper. She thought it best to borrow the stealth suit and get the job done without bringing anyone else into the picture, not even Dan Randolph. The fewer people who knew about the stealth suit, the better.

  No landings or takeoffs were scheduled at this hour; the skeleton crew was in the control center strictly because prudent regulations required that the center always be manned, in case an emergency cropped up.

  How could there be an emergency? Pancho asked herself as she slowly tiptoed to the console farthest from those being used by the pair of controllers. Spacecraft don’t just zoom in on the spur of the moment; even a max-thrust flight from one of the space stations orbiting Earth takes six hours to reach the Moon. Plenty time to rouse the whole crew of controllers if they were needed. The only possible emergency would be if one of the teams at a remote outpost on the lunar surface ran into a jam. Maybe if an astronomer at the Farside Observatory suddenly developed a case of appendicitis and their radio was out so they sent the poor boob on a ballistic lob to Selene without being able to alert anybody first. That was just about the only emergency Pancho could think of.

  Or if an invisible woman sneaked in and jiggered the flight schedule for tomorrow’s launches. No, Pancho thought, not tomorrow’s. It’s already past two in the morning. Today’s schedule.

  She sat at one of the unattended consoles, as far from the human controllers as possible, and waited for the woman at the coffee urn to return to her post. The overweight guy sitting at his console looked half asleep, feet up on the consoles, eyes closed, a pair of earphones clamped over his head. They weren’t the regulation earphones, either. The guy was listening to music; Pancho could see the rhythmic bobbing of his head.

  Hope it’s a lullaby, she said to herself.

  The woman controller took a sip of her coffee and made a sour face. Then she looked straight at Pancho. Inside the stealth suit, Pancho froze. The moment passed. The woman’s gaze shifted and she started back toward her console, her steaming coffee mug in one hand. Pancho began to breathe again.

  The woman came back to her console, next to the guy, gave him a disapproving frown, then sat down and clapped a regulation earphone and pin-mike set to her head.

  Good, thought Pancho. The big chamber was too quiet to suit her. Normally the rows of consoles would be filled with controllers talking to the traffic coming in and out of Selene. There would be plenty of background chatter to hide her pecking at a keyboard. But then there wouldn’t be any empty consoles to use; they
’d all be occupied during normal working hours.

  Pancho tentatively tapped on the keyboard before her, once to silence the voice system, then again to call up the status board. The woman at her console did not hear the faint clicks. Or if she did, she paid no notice. The guy was definitely asleep, Pancho thought, his head lolling on his shoulders now, his bulging belly rising and falling in deep, slow breathing.

  Only one craft on the schedule, Pancho saw from the status display. Due to land in five hours. Plenty of time for her to do what she had to and get out before more controllers began filing in for the morning shift.

  Slowly, cautiously, with one eye on the bored woman sitting on the other side of the room, Pancho tapped out a set of instructions for the morning’s schedule. Then she got up, quietly left the control center, and returned the stealth suit to Ike Walton’s locker up in the storage area near the catacombs. She wondered if she’d ever need it again. Maybe I ought to keep it, she thought. But then Ike would discover it was gone, sooner or later, and that would raise a stink. Better to let it stay here and just hope Ike doesn’t change the combination on the lock.

  Sudden panic hit Pancho. Elly was not in the locker, where she had left her. Pancho had thought that the krait would snooze away in the chilly air of the storage area; she had fed Elly a mouse only a day earlier, and that usually left the snake in a pleasantly drowsy state of digestion. But moving her to Walton’s locker must have disturbed Elly’s torpor. The snake had slithered through one of the air slits in the bottom of the locker door.

  For several frantic minutes Pancho searched for the krait. She found her at last, curled on the floor in front of a heating vent. But when she tried to pick Elly up, the krait reared and hissed at her.

  Pancho got down on both knees and frowned at the snake. “Don’t you go hissy on me,” she said sternly. “I know I disturbed your nap, but that’s no reason to get sore.”

  The snake’s tongue flicked in and out, in and out.

  “That’s right, take a good sniff. It’s me, and if you’ll just calm yourself down, I’ll wrap you around my nice warm ankle and we can get back home. Okay?”

  Elly relaxed and sank back into a tight little coil of glittering blue. Pancho slowly extended her hand and when Elly didn’t react, she stroked the krait’s head gently with one finger.

  “Come on, girl,” she crooned, “we’re gonna take you home where you can sleep nice and comfy.”

  But not for long, Pancho added silently.

  HUMPHRIES TRUST RESEARCH CENTER

  Martin Humphries was awakened from a dream about Amanda by the insistent shrill of his personal phone.

  It wasn’t a sexual dream. Strangely, when he dreamed of Amanda it was never sexual. They were on a yacht this time, sailing across a calm azure sea, standing up by the prow and watching dolphins leaping across the ship’s bow wave. He felt nervous on the water, unable to shake the fear of drowning even in this idyllic setting.

  Amanda stood by the rail, wearing a lovely pale blue dress, the soft breeze tousling her hair. She gazed at him with sad eyes.

  “I’ll be leaving soon,” she said unhappily.

  “You can’t leave me,” Humphries said to her. “I won’t let you leave.”

  “I don’t want to, darling. But they’re forcing me to. I must go. I have no choice.”

  “Who?” Humphries demanded. “Who’s forcing you?”

  “You know who, dearest,” said Amanda. “You know. You’re even helping him.”

  “It’s Randolph! He’s taking you away from me!”

  “Yes,” Amanda said, her eyes pleading with him to help her. To save her.

  And then the damned phone woke him up.

  He sat up in his bed, blazingly angry. “Phone!” he called out. “On the art screen.”

  A reproduction of a Picasso cubist nude disappeared to reveal the somber face of his security chief.

  “Sorry to wake you, sir,” the man said, “but you said you wanted to be personally informed of Ms. Cunningham’s movements.”

  With a glance at the digital clock on the nightstand, Humphries demanded, “Where’s she going at four in the flicking morning?”

  “She’s apparently asleep in her room, sir, but—”

  “Then what are you bothering me for?” Humphries bellowed.

  The security man swallowed visibly. “Sir, her name has just appeared on a flight manifest.”

  “Flight manifest?”

  “Yessir. She and three other people are scheduled to go to the Starpower ship, up in orbit.”

  “Now? Today?”

  “Scheduled for eight this morning, sir.”

  Four hours from now, Humphries realized. “And this flight manifest just came up on the launch schedule?”

  “About an hour ago, sir.”

  “Why are they going to Starpower IT Humphries wondered aloud.

  “That vessel is scheduled for launch on a test flight at nine o’clock, sir.”

  “I know that,” Humphries snapped. “It’s an unnamed long-duration flight.”

  “Perhaps they’re going up for a last-minute checkout, before the ship is launched out of orbit.”

  “Three other people going with her, you say? Who are they?”

  The security chief read off the names. “P. Lane, command pilot; L. Fuchs, mission scientist; and C. N. Barnard, flight surgeon.”

  “I know Lane,” Humphries said. “Who are the other two?”

  “Fuchs is a graduate student from Zurich Polytechnical Institute. He just arrived in Selene a few days ago. Barnard is apparently a medic of sort.”

  “Apparently?”

  Looking uncomfortable, the security chief replied, “He’s an Astro employee. We have no background data on Barnard, sir. No ID photo, either. All that we’ve been able to pull up from Astro’s files are his name, his position, and his fingerprints and retinal scan.”

  “Dan Randolph,” Humphries growled. “It’s an alias for Randolph!”

  “Sir?”

  “Check those prints and retinal scan against Dan Randolph’s file.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And send a couple of men to Amanda Cunningham’s quarters. Bring her here, to me.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  The wall screen went blank for an instant, then the Picasso image reappeared. Humphries paid no attention. He leaped out of bed, snarling aloud, “That fucking Randolph thinks he’s going to zip off to the Belt and take Amanda with him. Like hell he will!”

  Dan was already up and dressed in a white flight suit, the kind of coveralls worn by members of Selene’s medical staff. “C. N. Barnard” was one of the extra identities he had stored in Astro’s personnel files, a hangover from the days when he’d been up to his armpits in international skullduggery. He still had modest bank accounts scattered here and there on Earth under various aliases, just in case he ever needed to disappear for a while.

  He grinned to himself as he started for the tunnel that led to the spaceport. I’m going to disappear for a while, all right. Completely out of the Earth-Moon system. Past Mars. Out to the Asteroid Belt. The IAA will go apeshit when they find out we’re on board Starpower L Humphries’ll have a fit.

  And Astro’s stock ought to shoot up when we claim mining rights to a nice, rich asteroid or three. The lawyers may squabble over the details, but a few billion dollars worth of high-grade ores will start a feeding frenzy among the brokers. And the publicity will help, too.

  His grin disappeared as he reached the entrance to the tunnel. An electric cart sat waiting to take him to the spaceport, but neither Pancho nor Amanda was in sight. Dammitall to hell and back, Dan fumed. They were supposed to meet me here at five sharp. Women!

  “Come on, Mandy,” Pancho urged. “Dan’s prob’ly waitin’ for us already!”

  “One more minute,” Amanda said, from the lav. “I’ve just got to—”

  Somebody pounded impatiently on the door.

  “Oh, hell!” Pancho said.


  Amanda came out of the lavatory. “I’m ready, Pancho. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  Pancho opened the door. Instead of Dan Randolph, two strangers stood out in the corridor. Both were men, wearing identical dark gray business suits. One with long blond hair and a nice full moustache, the other a taller, darker man with a military crew cut. Both were big-shouldered and stone-faced. They looked like cops to Pancho.

  Shit! Pancho thought. They know I hacked into the flight schedule.

  But the blond said, “Amanda Cunningham? Come with us, please.”

  Pancho hiked a thumb over her shoulder. “That’s her. And she’s not goin’ anywhere with you. We’re late for work already.”

  They pushed past Pancho and entered the room. “You’ll have to come with us, Ms. Cunningham,” the blond said.

  “Why? On whose authority?”

  “Mr. Humphries wants to see you,” the buzz cut said. His partner frowned at him.

  Pancho said, “Now wait a minute—”

  “Don’t interfere,” the blond said sharply. “Our orders are to bring Ms. Cunningham to Mr. Humphries’s residence. That’s what we’re going to do.”

  “Call security, Mandy,” Pancho said. “These guys are workin’ for Humphries.”

  Amanda started around the bed to the phone on the night table between their two beds, but the blond moved faster and blocked her way.

  “We don’t want to get physical,” he said to Amanda, “but we’ve got a job to do and we’re going to do it.”

  “How rough we get depends on you,” said the darker man, grinning at Amanda.

  She stared at them, wide eyed, somewhere between confusion and terror.

  The blond took another step toward Amanda. “Come along now, honey. We don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  Mandy stumbled back, away from him. Pancho saw that both men were focused on her. She swiftly bent down and peeled Elly from her ankle.

  “Here, wiseass,” Pancho said as she hurled the bright blue snake at the blond.

  He turned just fast enough to see the krait sailing in limar slow motion toward his face. Instinctively he raised his arm to shield himself.