Asimov's SF, Oct/Nov 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  For whatever reason, he'd decided at the end that he didn't want to share. Did he hate her by then? Or was he just greedy for the whole pot, not a half? It didn't really matter. After he fully understood what they'd found, he went back to the Queen of Spades, leaving her on the rock, and took off.

  Now, you have to know that a prospector ship doesn't take off fast. The ion drive is a slow push, not even a centimeter per second per second. Overall, that little bit of push builds up, but prospector ships don't have any kind of jackrabbit start. From Shania Montez's point of view it just hovered there in the sky, barely moving, lazy and arrogant.

  She called him, I am certain she did, on her tiny little suit radio, and he had ignored her, and sooner or later she realized it wasn't an oversight or an accident or a cruel cruel joke, and he wasn't planning on coming back for her.

  Even if her radio could reach out far enough to call someone else for help, who else could she call? She had, what, maybe five hours of oxy? Even if by wild chance there had been a directional high-gain pointed her direction to hear a distress call, it would take months for any ship to get there.

  She couldn't get rescue, but she could get revenge.

  She knew Queen of Spades inside and out, Shania Montez did, and she knew its weakness. She had with her the prospecting radar that they used to make depth profiles of the rock. John Goya must have taken the chance that she wouldn't be able to turn it into a communications link in the five hours she had left, and he'd been right about that. Instead, she focussed the microwave beam on the ship. Specifically, she targeted the return loop of the radiator heat pipe.

  Space is full of radiation. To keep the passengers in the ship safe, like any other ship that carried fragile humans, the Queen of Spades had a coil of superconducting wire that wrapped around it and generated a large magnetic field. The magnetic field curves the path of charged particles, just enough to keep the radiation from reaching the habitat bubble.

  Shania Montez knew just where to aim, and it didn't take much heating at all for her to overheat the superconductor. The moment the superconductor turned normal, the currents in it blew the coil, and the radiation protection was gone forever.

  Goya should have gotten a warning telltale from the system monitor, of course, but it was long since broken, and Shania knew it. That's the problem with a spaceship mortgaged from stem to stern; the money for safety repairs is the first thing to go. There wasn't really any way to repair the damage anyway, the remains of the coil was a rapidly-expanding mist of fine molten droplets.

  Queen of Spades was well out of the plane of the ecliptic—just how far, nobody knows, but it was a long trip back, over a year, with a couple of lateral delta-V maneuvers as Johnny did forced-flybys of convenient asteroids, grappling them with the ship's tether and exchanging a bit of momentum to alter his course. The radiation of space, along with the radiation from his own unshielded reactor, did its terrible slow work on John Jason Goya. By the time he realized how he'd been vulnerable, it was far, far too late. The Queen of Spades came back carrying a chunk of rock, a pilot dying of radiation poisoning—and a mystery.

  That answered some of my questions, but the big one remained a mystery. Corwin Teron hadn't been there.

  So why did he say he knew where the lode was?

  When Queen of Spades had returned to Freehold, prospector crews had gone over that ship with a fine-toothed comb, with microscopes, with every probe you or I could think of, and a bunch more we couldn't. Nobody found a thing. It had been wiped clean.

  "Sure thing they did, but nobody else knew that ship like I did,” Corwin Teron said. “I lived in their pockets, I did, and they lived in mine. I knew how they thought. I knew how they operated."

  "You say?” I said.

  "Johnny was hinkty about engine hours,” he said. “Always kept a meticulous record of every second that the engine was firing. Now, he wiped it, of course. I'm sure he thought he'd erased all the traces, but I got to thinking, what about scratchpad? The way he calculated engine hours, he logged when the engine was on, when it was off, and subtracted the two and logged the difference as engine hours. That was done in flash scratchpad, I thought, and I sort of got wondering if the scratchpad memory got wiped, too, or if he'd forgotten about that. I was right, he hadn't bothered wiping flash. So I know every engine firing, when and how long."

  "Shit,” I said. But then I thought about it. They'd taken that ship apart. For sure they hadn't neglected the computer, or anything that obvious. “You'd better give me a better lie than that. They had looked at scratchpad."

  "Sure thing,” he said. “But they wouldn't know what it meant. They didn't live with Johnny and Shania; I did. It was just random numbers to them."

  Could you reconstruct a trajectory from just engine firing times, I wondered? “Sounds pretty sketchy, I'd say."

  He shrugged. “Doesn't matter to me. I'm just telling you the story, believe me or don't, doesn't make a dirt speck of difference to me.” He was silent for a few moments, and then said, “Not just that. A lot of things, little stuff that wouldn't make any sense to anybody else. Pencil marks Shania made. She'd check the ship position, triangulating on asteroids, and taking notes in pencil on the rim of a porthole, little fragments of calculations. I knew which asteroids she always sighted on, and I've seen a hundred times just how she calculated the tether stretch. Nothing significant in itself, nothing anybody else would notice, but I could feel the way they thought. I could look at that ship and I was there, I knew how they flew, I knew which asteroids they'd triangulate on and which way they'd jump.

  "But the ship was in a junkyard in Freehold, and I was a down-and-outer in High-Hades, without a SAU to my name, scrambling for my day's oxy. It took me three damn years to work my way out of debt and get a mechanic's slot on a slow-orbit transport to Freehold. And by then the hulk had been sent out to a junkyard orbiting Mars, and it took me a few more years to track it down and find what I needed."

  Maybe it made sense, I thought. Just maybe.

  "So you're selling the asteroid,” I said. “You, and a hundred other down-and-out rock bums who are looking for a little scratch. I've heard that story before. Why the hell should I bite?"

  "Selling?” he said, and laughed. “Selling, to the likes of you? You're skewed. Don't kid yourself, Marcos, you got delusions of grandeur. That's a billion SAU rock you're talking about here, and you don't have the scratch. No, I don't need nothing from you. Thanks for the drink."

  Everybody needs something, I thought. But it was a pretty elaborate story, just to cadge an expensive drink. Still, I've paid more and gotten less other times. I nodded. “Great story,” I said. “Thanks for the company.” I got up and looked around to settle the tab.

  Corwin flagged a waitress first. She was wearing that skintight iridescent soap-bubble stuff, a recent fashion that reveals and conceals the figure in ripples of colors, and Corwin let his eyes linger. I could tell the waitress didn't exactly appreciate his gaze, but her costume was a good part of why the place could charge the pigs they charged, so she let him look. “You're drinking that frontier foam, Marcos?” he said, not taking his eyes off the waitress. “You know that's little more than colored water; tastes like recycled piss. You should try an Irish coffee, now that's a drink worth drinking."

  "Yeah, maybe I should. Great talking with you. Call me sometime,” I said.

  "Sit down, I'm buying,” Corwin said, and I sat. To the waitress, he said, “Two Irish, and don't skimp on the cream this time.” He laid out the SAUs, along with a tip for the waitress that was substantial enough to make me (and her) look twice. She gave him a second look, smiled at what she saw, and disappeared.

  To me, he said, “Me, sell Eureka? Sure thing. But not to the likes of you, no insult intended. I sold to somebody with real cash."

  "You sold,” I said. “Of course you sold."

  "Of course I sold. I sold the secret a month ago, to a consortium of investors with enough cash to put together an expedit
ion. They're on the way now.

  "In another month, they will be back with enough ore to sink Saturn itself.

  "So drinks are on me, buddy, drinks are on me. Keep your piggies to yourself, because I am about to be one filthy stinking rich rat."

  * * * *

  I should have invested, I suppose. I could have liquidated everything I had and used it all to short-sell scandium, gold, and copper, maybe earned a load of cash. But I would have had to have been fast, because I wasn't the only person he talked to, and within a week the options price dropped into the toilet, at least for the metals that had been assayed in the Eureka strike. A lot of piggies changed hands, and none of them landed into mine.

  But I wasn't investing. I trade in information, and I passed the chatter along to some friends of mine, and they passed along a couple of pigs and thanked me for the gossip.

  And Corwin Teron was suddenly in the middle of it. His story was a good one, and soon enough everybody knew it.

  Anderson/Newmoon, the venture that had bought his information, wasn't the biggest mining consortium in the belt, but they were a big enough player. They were a corporation headquartered in Paraguay. Now, the Earth “headquarters” of an asteroidal mining consortium is a bit more fiction than physical presence; I doubt that the purported headquarters would be more than a mail drop and a net relay node. The façade was a convenience to give the corporation standing to engage in contracts that would hold up as legal under Earth laws, nothing more.

  But, Earth headquarters notwithstanding, Anderson/Newmoon's microgee manufacturing operation was big enough, and they moved a lot of ore. They'd checked him out, and he scanned.

  Corwin was in quite a position. He was—exactly as he'd told me—filthy stinking rich, on paper, but he didn't actually have a single SAU to spend. Seventy-five million standard accounting units had been deposited into an account in his name, but there was a Stubborn Intelligence proctor on the account that wouldn't allow one SAU to be withdrawn until the expedition had returned, and the assays verified that the deposit was real. The money was there, it was his, but he couldn't actually spend it.

  Which made sense, of course. The suits at Anderson/Newmoon weren't stupid. His story checked out, as far as they could verify it, but there were a lot of weasels and liars out there, and they weren't going to let him float away with their money until they saw the glitter of scandium.

  The Stubborn Intelligence that proctored his money was chartered in Algeria, and the payment was technically in dinars, but of course it was guaranteed against Standard Accounting Units at a fixed exchange rate. That's common enough; the laws of the inner belt are a hodgepodge (and the outer belt even worse), since each of the entities doing business is incorporated under the laws of whichever nation had the most favorable legal system at the time, and for the most part, that meant the ones with the least legal system. That might have resulted in a lot of trade in the inner belt going on in currencies that weren't necessarily stable, but using Standard Accounting Units instead of pesos or ringgit or baht meant nobody ever had to actually deal with the inconvenience of Earth currency.

  So his money was proctored, but he had credit, a lot of it, and he used it. He played the rich miner, and High-Hades saw a lot of him, in every swank dive in the port. He'd spent fifteen years living on recycled oxygen, and now he was making up for it.

  The price of scandium fell, and gold and copper with it, but it didn't really matter. The scandium that had been estimated to be in Eureka was so rich that, even when it hit the lowest price in a century, everybody who'd invested in the venture would be rich, and the gold and copper would just be dessert.

  Hell, he even bought me drinks. I decided I could get to the point where I'd actually like Irish coffee, if I let myself.

  It was most of the month before it occurred to me how badly he'd been swindled. Seventy-five million, and a 5 percent share of profits? That was nothing, if the lode was a tenth as rich as it had been predicted. I mean, it's a fortune, but the prospector's cut should have made him a billionaire; he should have held out for forty percent, and settled for a third of the take. They'd taken advantage of him when he was down and out. He shouldn't be buying drinks in the fanciest bars in port—he should be owning the port.

  And I watched him closer, I did, and realized that he wasn't rich at all. He was acting. Underneath the smiling exterior, he had a hunted, nervous look. Corwin Teron had been taken—and he knew it.

  And it all came crashing down, the moment that the Newmoon ship got to the asteroid that Corwin had sworn to them was Eureka.

  The asteroid he had sold to Anderson/Newmoon for seventy-five million SAUs was inspected, scanned, drilled, radared, and x-rayed. It had gotten the full treatment; there was no way Corwin was going to be able to claim they just hadn't looked hard enough. It was an ordinary chondrite. Nothing to harvest. Not even enough nickel to pay for the voyage out.

  A day before the news, and you could find Corwin at any bar in High-Hades, buying drinks and making friends. A day after the news, and Corwin was hard to find indeed. It took me three days to hunt him down, but there are only so many places you can be on an asteroid port, and no real places to hide.

  Corwin had a bitter smile, and an ironic laugh.

  He was dead out of credit now—the first thing that the consortium had done was tickle the Stubborn Intelligence that proctored Corwin's finder's-fee money, and there was no way he would ever pry that loose. I'd heard on the street that he'd borrowed a lot of SAUs, using the finder's-fee money as collateral, and with the finder's fee about to evaporate, he was looking at a lot of debt suddenly coming due.

  That had been his game all along, I realized. He'd been nothing, a down and outer, a prospector with no prospects, nothing to his name but a single good story. So he traded that story for a month's worth of living rich, floating around with piggies in his pockets and impressing everyone with outrageous tips.

  Yeah, now it had caught up with him.

  His debts hadn't tracked him down yet, not quite, when I saw him. He wasn't drinking in the swank bars any more, but the rock rats all knew where he was. They were buying him drinks now, and why shouldn't they? He had a hell of a story these days, and a lot of prospectors weren't terribly sorry to see a big venture get played for fools, even if it only lasted a month. Corwin was going down in flames—it was unlikely he'd ever be able to pay his next oxygen bill—but the down-and-outers and rock rates all were cheering him as he fell.

  He was smiling.

  "I admire your attitude,” I told him. “You're out, but you certainly did run them like a player."

  "They insulted me,” he said, as if he hadn't a care in the world. “Did I mention that? I gave them the secret of the greatest strike in the asteroids, and they wouldn't even let me join in on the expedition. I've been prospecting since before any of them were born. No way they could tell me I didn't have the skill-set they needed. Idiots."

  "Yeah, buddy,” I said. “Indeed. But I guess they had the last laugh."

  "Laugh?” he said, and I suddenly realized he was seriously snockered. He didn't need microgravity for the way he was floating. “Sure thing. I'm laughing. Say, I'm putting together an expedition. You got contacts? Want to invest?"

  "Expedition? Yeah, sure. The only expedition you're putting together, if you have any sense, is a one-way trip to Earth.” If he could drop down to where oxygen was free, it wouldn't kill him if he went bankrupt; down below, the planet itself keeps deadbeats alive. If he couldn't get a drop—well, his next oxygen bill was likely to be his last. You can get oxygen on credit—sometimes—but not with a record of burning through piggies like he had.

  How much had he gone through, anyway? I was curious, and he was just drunk enough he might answer.

  "So how much did you borrow, anyway?"

  "'Bout ninety."

  "Ninety thousand?” I whistled.

  "Million."

  Ninety million SAUs? But that didn't make any sense. “You borro
wed ninety million oinking SAUs? On seventy-five million collateral? How the hell did you do that?"

  He smiled. “Well, it started at ninety. You got to keep it moving, so nobody can see how much you don't have. Borrow a little, then home it in a blind account, then use that for collateral to buy more. It's a shell game. I used the money I borrowed to borrow a little more, and then used that to borrow more. Leveraged it out to a total of more like one-eighty."

  I whistled. “When's it come due?"

  He looked at his watch, a tattoo on the inside of his wrist. “’ Bout an hour."

  No wonder he was snockered. But I had to give him credit, he was going down in a far more flamboyant style than I'd ever imagined. “What the hell did you want with a hundred and eighty million oinkers? What in the hell could you buy?"

  "Well, a lot of things, I guess. I bought some drinks for my friends. I bought a little oxygen, here and there. And a bit of—private entertainment."

  "For that many piggies,” I said, shaking my head, “You must have bought a hell of a lot of entertainment."

  "...but mostly,” he said, “I bought scandium."

  "Scandium?"

  He smiled, a big bright smile. “Sure. It was cheap, see."

  I had that curious feeling, the one where you think you're right-side up, and then suddenly you reorient, and everything in the universe turns over and you suddenly realize you're hanging upside down and falling. “How much scandium did you buy?"

  "How much? Well, how much is there? It's a pretty rare item, you know. Useful, the stuff is, but hard to find. And it was such a bargain, dropping so fast. Of course, I encouraged that a little, I guess."

  "Encouraged, it? Yeah, I'd say you did. How much?"

  "Well—all of it."

  "All of it."

  "Yep. I think I cornered the market. Anybody who went short on scandium—well, they're going to cover their position.