Rick lifted his hand away from Deedee’s, closed his eyes, and relaxed. After a few moments he felt her hand leave his thigh.
“Luban. That your name?”
“Yeah?” He opened his eyes and glanced across at her. Deedee Mao’s smooth face was still pale but now it bore its old belligerent expression.
“Don’t get no funny ideas, Luban.”
“Like what?”
“I mean, about what I might have said back there at liftoff.”
“I won’t.”
“I mean, I was just making conversation.”
Rick couldn’t let that pass. “Like hell! You were scared white. You should change your name from Deedee to pee-pee. You were ready to pee in your pants.”
“Making love to you appeals less than screwing a swamp toad.”
“I guess you’ve tried that. Tough on the toad.”
She reached over and grabbed his arm. “Listen, if you want to have this out when we get to the station that’s fine by me. I’ve eaten smart-ass jerks like you—”
She paused. The steady roar beneath them had ended. Suddenly they were in freefall, gliding upward in dead silence. Rick once more felt his stomach start to move up his throat.
“—eaten them for breakf—” Deedee couldn’t complete the word. Her brown eyes bulged and her mouth clamped shut. She turned away from Rick, reaching forward and trying to hold off long enough to get her suction mask into position.
Rick clenched his own teeth and closed his eyes again. He wished he could close his ears, too. Any smart-ass jerks that Deedee had eaten for breakfast were coming up again, along with everything else; and from the sound of it Deedee was just getting into her stride. Rick didn’t want to watch.
Sex in freefall—or, fighting, or anything else with the possible exception of dying—didn’t seem to be in Rick and Deedee Mao’s immediate future.
Rick had been told quite a few things about Vanguard Mining’s operations, but he lacked the glue to put the pieces together. For instance, he knew from the short briefings at the medical facility and at White Sands that franchises for commercial mining of the Belt had bogged down in endless debate within the Council of Nations. That deadlock had continued until the Council’s own international (and multilingual) mining effort had ended in disaster, with the loss of all equipment and personnel.
At that point, business interests were suddenly permitted to mine the asteroid belt—and welcome to it. The Council had decided that there was no profit to be made there, although they were more than ready to accept franchise fees. They were astonished when Vanguard Mining’s prototype mine and refinery turned out to be profitable. In the subsequent sixteen years the company had established commercial mining and refining operations on thirty-eight different asteroids out in the Belt.
Rick knew all that. He had also been told, at the time of his first tests by Vanguard, that the woman speaking to him was located on some place called CM-2, in translunar orbit. But in school, astronomy had been of no interest. He didn’t know the difference between LEO and GEO, or cislunar and translunar. He was more interested in chastity belts than asteroid belts.
It never occurred to Rick to connect the things he had been told until the translunar transfer vehicle carrying him and thirty-one other trainees up from the holding station in low earth orbit was close enough for Rick to actually see CM-2.
He had been expecting some sleek, clean-lined structure. Instead he found their vehicle was closing on a vast irregular lump of dark rock.
“That thing?” Rick spoke to Deedee, who was standing between him and Jigger Tait, a Vanguard miner who was hitching a ride back from Earth with the trainees. “That can’t be the training center.”
In the two days since first lift-off, Rick and Deedee had been observing a sort of armed truce. Their ship, station, and dining-area seat assignments had forced them to be together most of the time, but neither one was sure enough of either knowledge or stomach stability to risk an assertion of superiority. So it was Jigger, big-boned, iron-stomached, unaffected by freefall, and apparently totally self-confident in every way, who raised his pale eyebrows, sniffed disdainfully, and said, “Don’t you guys know anything? That’s CM-2 out there—commercial mine number two.”
“But I thought the mines were all out in the Belt.”
“They are. But this one has been worked out commercially. When the iron and siderophiles—that’s nickel and platinum and iridium—were all gone they attached low-thrust engines and moved it to translunar, so now it’s the headquarters for the Vanguard training school.”
“I don’t remember that from any briefings.” Rick looked questioningly at Deedee, who shook her head.
“Me neither.”
“Then you didn’t use the browse feature on your reader.”
“We weren’t told we had to.”
Jigger sniffed again. “I’m sure you weren’t. But I’ll give you some free advice that I had to learn the hard way when I was a trainee: If you only do what you’re told to do, you’ll soon be in trouble at Vanguard Mining.” Jigger lifted from his seat, moving effortlessly in the zero-gee environment. “Okay kids. Better get your act together and strap in. We’ll be docking in a few more minutes. But before you sit down, take a quick look at that.”
He pointed outside, away from CM-2. At first Rick saw nothing but bright unwinking stars. He stared hard, and finally noticed something like a tiny feather of sparkling blue-white where Jigger Tait had pointed.
“What is it?” asked Deedee. “A comet?”
“No such luck. That, friends, is the competition. Take a good look, and hope you won’t be seeing a lot like it.”
“That’s a ship,” Rick exclaimed. “Isn’t it?”
“It is. But it’s not one of ours, you can tell that from the drive. They use pulsed fusion, we use continuous fusion. So their ships don’t show a continuous exhaust. If you want to travel rough, ride one of those babies—an acceleration that varies between zero and two gees and back, every ten seconds.”
“What do you mean, not one of ours?” asked Deedee.
“What I said. That’s part of the fleet of Avant Mining and Refining.”
“Who?”
“God! Don’t they tell you guys anything?” Jigger glared at them. “Avant Mining and Refining. Founded seven years after Vanguard. They’re aggressive, expanding fast. That one’s on its way back from the Belt. Did you think we had a damned monopoly out here?”
“Nobody ever mentioned Avant Mining,” said Deedee defensively, and looked at Rick for confirmation. He nodded.
“Well, they will,” Tait said. “Maybe you shouldn’t hear this from me, but you’re going to find it out sooner or later. Avant make our management real nervous. They’ve had a couple of big successes in the Belt, places where they got to a rich asteroid and staked their claim on it before we did—even though we thought our prospectors had found it first, and we had the inside track. Believe me, Avant is tough. Pacific Rim financing, and they play real hardball. You’ll see.”
He floated away toward the rear of the ship. Rick and Deedee lingered at the screen for a few seconds longer, staring at the insignificant mote of Vanguard’s competition. But then their attention turned again to their destination. CM-2 seemed much more important to their immediate future than Avant Mining.
Now that they were closer they could see the true size of the training asteroid. Each of the wart-like bubbles that covered the surface of the planetoid was actually the exit point for a mine shaft, three to ten meters across. The whole object must be riddled with tunnels. CM-2 seemed more like a whole world than a training facility.