“We have to do a big asteroid anyway,” said Lem. “All we’re doing is jumping ahead. It’s unfortunate that we have to vacate the free miners, but that is the world we’re living in now. Chubs assures me that we can do this with minimal structural damage to their ship and without harming any of their crew.”
“It’s not right. We’re taking what’s theirs.”
“Technically, Doctor, it isn’t theirs. They have no deed. No right to ownership. That rock is ours as much as it is theirs. Just ask STASA.”
Lem wasn’t exactly sure he was right. The Space Trade and Security Authority, the international organization that provided oversight for the space-mining industry, might actually side with Benyawe on this one. But if Lem didn’t know the minutiae of such policies, he was fairly confident Benyawe wouldn’t, either. If he sounded sure of himself, she wouldn’t argue.
“But they got there first,” said Benyawe. “That has to account for something.”
“It has accounted for something. They’ve mined two quickships of metal. We’re not leaving them destitute, Doctor. Considering how much they’ve pulled out of their mineshaft, they’re probably at the end of their dig anyway. We’re just sending them off prematurely.”
She smiled reproachfully. “We don’t know if they’re at the end of their dig, Lem. That’s baseless speculation just to help us sleep at night.”
“You’re right,” said Lem. “But that doesn’t change our situation. Unless another large asteroid pops into existence in the next few hours, we’re going through with this.”
“Then I’d like it noted in the ship’s official records that I object to this action.”
That surprised Lem. “You feel that strongly?”
“I do. And I’m not the only one. A lot of the engineers are uneasy about this, not only because it feels like stealing but also because they fear for their lives. What if these free miners are better defended and better equipped than we think? We’re scientists, Lem, not soldiers.”
“I assure you, Doctor, bumping a bunch of pebble eaters is the safest thing in the world.”
“Please don’t use that term. I find it offensive. They’re human beings.”
“Pebble eaters. Rock suckers. Ash trash. Dig dogs. Mine mites. Scavengers. These words exist, Dr. Benyawe, because these kind of people live a less-than-civilized lifestyle. They marry their sisters. They’re completely uneducated. Their children never learn to walk. Their legs are just bone and sinew because they never develop them. It’s as if they’re becoming a different species altogether.”
“You’re talking about isolated incidents. Not all of them are like that. Most of them are quite innovative.”
“Have you watched the exposés, Doctor? Have you seen the documentaries on these people? It’s enough to turn your stomach.”
“Sensationalism, Lem. You know that. The vast majority of free miners are intelligent, hardworking families who love their children and obey space law. By bumping them we’re taking away a family’s livelihood.”
“And ensuring our own. This is the world we live in now, Doctor. We’re not in a lab on Luna anymore. This is the frontier. Out here it’s not all squeaky clean. Do we allow ourselves to fail so that a group of free miners can tap an asteroid for everything it’s got? No, we don’t. We take it. Do I like that option? No, but it’s nothing these free miners haven’t seen before. This is their world. In all likelihood, they bump ships too. Who’s to say they didn’t bump somebody off this rock to take it for themselves?”
“More baseless speculation.”
“I’m painting a picture here, Benyawe. I’m reminding you that the rules are different out here in the Deep. I don’t like it any more than you do. These free miners have an obligation to their family, yes, but we have an obligation as well.”
Benyawe frowned. “To the Board, you mean? To our stockholders? Seriously, Lem. You can’t compare that to family.”
“Just because these people are related to each other doesn’t make their cause any nobler than ours. They’ve got two quickships of metal from this rock. They’re going to be fine.”
Lem’s holodisplay chimed, and a message-acceptance request appeared. Lem waved his hand through the holospace, and Chubs’s head appeared.
“We’ve got an issue, Lem,” said Chubs. “Bumping this ship is going to be trickier than we thought. Can you come to the helm?”
Lem left his office immediately. He didn’t want Benyawe tagging along, but she either didn’t get the cues from his body language or she chose to ignore them completely. Either way, she followed him down the hall to the push tube. Before climbing inside, Lem faced her. “If you write up a formal objection,” he said, “I will sign it and put it on record in the ship’s computers. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have business on the helm.”
“I’d like to come along,” she said.
It was a bad idea. Engineers never came to the helm, and this wasn’t a good time to start, especially knowing how opposed she was to the bump. “This isn’t a matter for the engineers,” said Lem.
“I’m not just an engineer, Lem. I’m the director of Special Operations, an appointment you gave me. I’d say bumping a ship clearly qualifies as a special operation.”
Lem suddenly understood why Father would put a man like Dublin in charge of engineers. The Dublins of the world never questioned you. If they disagreed with superiors, they zipped their lips and towed the line. That didn’t make them better leaders, per se, but it certainly made Lem’s and Father’s jobs easier. Benyawe was another breed entirely. Staying silent was not in her DNA. But wasn’t that why he had promoted her in the first place? He wanted straight counsel.
“You can come,” said Lem. “But I can’t have you arguing with me at the helm.”
“I don’t argue,” said Benyawe.
“You’re arguing with me now.”
“I’m strongly disagreeing. There’s a difference.”
“Fine. Don’t strongly disagree with me then. My point is, on the helm I am the commanding officer. You can ask questions. You can make observations. But if you take issue with anything I say, keep it to yourself until we’re alone.”
“Fair enough.”
Chubs was waiting for them at the systems chart. The map had been replaced with a large holo of El Cavador. It was nothing like the original holo Lem had seen of the ship—that had been a 3-D rendering the computer had on file for the specific make and model of ship. This was the real thing. The Makarhu was now close enough to the asteroid to take high-res scans of the free-miner ship, and Lem couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“It looks like a tank,” he said.
“We’ve been running scans through the computers all morning,” said Chubs. “I’ve never seen anything like it, not on a free-miner ship, anyway. They’ve got armored plates welded all over the surface. Plus I’ve never seen this much proprietary tech on a single ship. See these protrusions here, here, and here. That’s tech.”
“What kind of tech?” asked Lem.
“We don’t know,” said Chubs. “These boxes here could be pebble-killers. Our computers can’t make heads or tails of it. Most of it looks like it’s built from scrap. The computers keep recognizing individual pieces from machines, but since the pieces are all used together in odd combinations, we have no idea what the tech is really for. Whoever these people are, they’re either certifiably insane or genius innovators.”
“I’d rather they be insane,” said Lem.
“Makes two of us,” said Chubs. “I don’t like them having machines we can’t understand. Makes me nervous. And that’s not the worst of it.” He glanced uneasily at Benyawe.
“It’s okay,” said Lem. “She’s here at my invitation.” Lem smiled to Benyawe, appearing nonchalant, though in truth he felt a little panicked. El Cavador looked tougher than he had anticipated. He shouldn’t have brought Benyawe.
Chubs turned to the systems chart and tapped a command. A dozen cables stretching from El Ca
vador down to the surface of the asteroid suddenly glowed yellow. “Here’s the bad news. They have twelve mooring lines anchoring them to the asteroid. That’s three times more lines than normal.”
“Meaning what?” asked Lem. “They’ve seen us? They’re adding more lines to hunker down?”
“No way,” said Chubs. “You don’t keep that much cable lying around. This has to be how they anchor all the time.”
“Maybe they’ve been bumped before,” said Benyawe. “And now they lay down more lines to discourage anyone from trying again.”
“My assumption as well,” said Chubs. “From the looks of their ship and the number of anchor lines, I’d say these people have seen their share of pirates and claim jumpers.”
“And corporates,” said Benyawe.
Lem shot her a look, but she was facing the holo and didn’t meet his eye.
“The other thing that bothers me is all the activity we’ve detected outside their ship,” said Chubs.
“What kind of activity?” asked Lem.
“Spacewalks. And lots of them. Some to lay down more hull armor. Some to work on their collision-avoidance system. They’ve been very, very active. We haven’t seen more than three or four guys out at a time. But it’s like they know a war is coming.”
“They’ve obviously detected us,” said Lem. “They’re building defenses for our attack.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Chubs. “It’s only three or four guys out there. If they were in prebattle panic mode, they’d have a whole crew out. They’d put every available man behind an effort like that.”
“Maybe that is every available man,” said Benyawe. “Maybe only three or four people are left. Maybe they had an outbreak or something. It’s happened with free miners before.”
“But they do have other people,” said Chubs. “We’ve seen them. While these three guys are strengthening the ship, they’ve got thirty guys working the mine. It’s basically life as usual.”
Lem shrugged. “It’s not that strange if you think about it. They’ve seen us coming, and they’re trying to mine as much as they can before we get there. That’s what I would do.”
“The other possibility,” said Benyawe, “is that they don’t know we’re coming, and strengthening the ship is simply what these three or four guys do. That’s their job. They’re simply going about their business. You could argue that the state of the ship substantiates that idea. It’s well defended. It doesn’t get that way overnight. You can see scorch marks and dents all along their armor, which would suggest that the armor has been there a long time.”
“Maybe,” said Chubs. “It could also mean the armor plates were scorched when they applied them.”
“Not likely,” said Benyawe. “Some of these dents and marks stretch across multiple plates. This is a ship that’s seen action, which brings up another possibility. Maybe they’re not preparing for war with us. Maybe they’ve got a feud with another family, or there’s a ship of thieves in the area.”
“There’s no one else in the area,” said Chubs.
Benyawe shrugged. “So maybe they’re prepping to set out on a six-month journey at the end of which is their enemy. Who knows?”
“I’ve had enough guesswork for one day,” said Lem. “I want answers. How does this affect the bump? Are we a go or not?”
“The mooring cables are the biggest problem,” said Chubs. “That’s a lot of lines. We can’t bump the ship unless every one of those lines is severed. We could cut them with the lasers, but it would be tedious work. It would take way too long. Bumps need to happen fast. Two minutes at the most. Gives them less of a chance to retaliate. I suggest cutting the cables a different way.”
“How?” Lem asked.
Chubs tapped more commands into the system chart, and the holo of El Cavador winked out. A holo of the asteroid took its place, with El Cavador now a small ship moored to the surface. “We’ll land over here,” said Chubs. “On the blind side.”
Lem watched the holo as the Makarhu approached the opposite side of the asteroid and landed at a spot just below what would be El Cavador’s horizon line, hiding the Makarhu from view yet keeping it within striking distance.
“They still haven’t seen us at this point,” said Chubs. “We wait here until four hours into their sleep schedule, when everyone is good and gone to dreamland. Then we send in twelve breakers.”
The breaker bots were small, disc-shaped explosive drones. Corporates used them for mining, sending them down narrow mineshafts to break up large chunks of rock for extraction.
“There’s a ridgeline here,” said Chubs, highlighting the feature on the asteroid. “It runs from our landing site to within a hundred yards of El Cavador. We can take a shuttle out along the ridgeline without them seeing us. The shuttle stops here at the edge of open ground. We throw the breakers from there. Our pilot steers each one to a different mooring line. The bots attach to the lines, then we detonate them all at once. That’s when the attack begins. Once the lines are cut, we come forward with the ship and take out their pebble-killers and their power with our lasers. It’s over at that point. We can brush them aside easy as anything. Ninety seconds tops.”
Lem stared at the holo a moment. “Throwing the breakers? You can send them that far with that much accuracy?”
“The breakers have mini cams. We have a very good pilot. He can steer them pretty much wherever you want them.”
“Won’t El Cavador detect the movement?” asked Lem. “Won’t they see the breakers coming?”
“Their collision-avoidance system doesn’t monitor the surface of the asteroid. It can’t. They’ve got miners walking around the surface all day. Believe me, it’s the last place they would look for an attack.”
Lem didn’t like it. This was supposed to be a clean operation. They would swoop in, zap a few devices on the hull, push the ship aside, and be done with it. Simple. Nothing with breakers. No explosions. No creeping up in a shuttle. This was far more variables than Lem had intended.
One of the crewmen launched from his workstation and landed near Lem.
“They’re rotating away, sir,” said the crewman. “We can accelerate as soon as you’re ready.”
This would be the last push forward. They were close now. They would land on the rock within a few hours. Lem turned to Benyawe. Her face was a mask. She seemed poised, but he knew she was angry. She’d hate this new development more than he did.
“What’s the word, Lem?” said Chubs. “We can cut bait now and scoot away if you’d like. Otherwise we need to punch it. We have a brief window here.”
Nine days, thought Lem. They had come nine days. The rock was right there in front of them. What would you do, Father? Go off and shoot some more pebbles? Fly eight months to a different asteroid? Or knock these gravel suckers off the rock? Lem could almost feel Father here beside him, looking over his shoulder, shaking his head in disgust, oozing disappointment. “Why do you even have to think this one through, Lem?” Father would say. “Are you a Jukes or are you a child?”
Lem turned to Chubs. “Put us on the rock.”
CHAPTER 6
Marco
Victor was on a spacewalk, outside El Cavador, bolting one of the pebble-killers into place with his hand drill. Mono was beside him, his feet anchored to the hull, holding the PK steady with bracing cables. They had removed the laser a few days ago and taken it into the cargo bay to make modifications. Now, with those completed, they were reinstalling it on the side of the ship.
Victor wasn’t sure if their efforts would make much difference. If the alien starship proved to be aggressive, Victor probably couldn’t do much to stop it. The starship moved at near-lightspeed, which required an almost inconceivable amount of energy and huge leaps in technology, far beyond anything human tech had ever achieved. And if the starship’s builders could do that, there was no telling what their weapons could do.
Victor inserted a bolt into his drill and moved to the next hole, noticing that
the hole was slightly off its mark. He looked up and saw that Mono had fallen asleep. The bracing cable drifted lazily away from Mono’s open hands, and his arms floated limply beside him. If not for Mono’s boot magnets, he probably would have drifted away from the ship.
“Mono,” Victor said sharply.
Mono jerked awake, suddenly alert, eyes wide. He grabbed the bracing cable and pulled it taut. “Sorry. I’m awake.”
“No you’re not. You’re exhausted. And I don’t blame you. I’ve pushed you way too hard today.”
“No, no. I’m fine. Really. I’m good now.” Mono blinked his eyes in an exaggerated manner and shook his head to force himself to stay awake.
“Three more bolts,” said Victor. “Then we’ll go inside. It’s already an hour into sleep-shift. You should be zipped up in your hammock.”
“I’m fine,” Mono said, though Victor could tell from the look on his face that if given five more seconds of silence, the boy would be asleep again.
A message from Mother appeared on Victor’s visor. “It’s late, Vico. Bring Mono inside. His mother’s worried.”
Victor and Mono finished the install, collected their things, and hurried to the airlock. Mother greeted them inside with containers of chili and two hot arepas wrapped in a cloth. Victor wiggled out of his pressure suit and sucked the first taste of chili up through the straw. It was hot and spicy with finely minced peppers the way he liked it.
“Perfect as always,” he said.
Mother scowled. “You’re not winning me over with compliments, Vico. You’re in trouble. Mono should have been in a bed an hour ago.”
“I’m not tired,” said Mono, though he was barely keeping his eyes open.
Mother smiled. “No, you’re as perky as a jackrabbit.” She frowned at Victor. “You’re not resting and eating like I told you to, Vico. You need eight hours of sleep a night. As does Mono. He’s nine years old.”
“Nine and three quarters,” said Mono. “My birthday’s coming up.”
“You’re right, Patita,” said Victor. “I’m sorry.
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