Mother Lode

t-years away from where she was supposed to have followed Kenner's ship, with Gordon wondering how the hell to find his way home. As the Mother Lode used her big generator to make multiple blinks before recharging, Plough was happy that he had a converted military ship with a generator to match the capacity of the Mule. He had a good crew, six of them, four women and two men. They had been with him for a long time, and he had taken care of them as he built his business from one antiquated mining ship to a fleet and then to bigger and better things. More than once the crew had obeyed his orders without question when there was gain to be had in seizing a rich mining location that had been discovered by others, but Plough had not jumped a claim or disappeared isolated miners in the far outback of space for a long time. It had taken the unbelievably rich deposits being mined by Erin Kenner to arouse his instinct for avarice enough to lure him away from the comfort he had built on Haven. He knew he had goofed in sending his younger brother to do whatever it took to gain access to Kenner's mines; but now he had left the comfort of his office and the charms of no less than three mistresses to make up for his mistake. He wasn't too unhappy about it because in that last load of ore there'd been an almost incredible richness of pure nuggets mixed in with the veined rock. With a source like Kenner's mine, he'd be able to buy Haven, if he wanted to, but most likely he'd accumulate so much money that he could have power on any planet in the system. With the proper amounts of money it wouldn't be difficult to find a more pleasant spot than Haven. For a while it looked as if Kenner's mine was in the Dead World sac, but the Mother Lode had merely paused for charging and when her generator was ready she blinked onward. Plough brought his yacht back into normal space at a safe distance and saw the Mother Lode lying near an asteroid belt that formed a ring around a good G-class sun at approximately one astronomical unit of distance, the usual position for a life zone planet. To be sure he was at the right place, he put his sensors to work. He had the latest equipment, state of the art, and from outside the ring he was able to locate a dozen asteroids showing pleasingly large gold and platinum deposits. This was the place. He told his crew to get ready for some work. The converted light destroyer had huge cargo spaces. The load of ore he'd take back to Haven would make him a very rich man. First, however, there was a little chore to be done. Plough himself took the controls and maneuvered the yacht among the tumbling asteroids until he was within laser range of the Mother Lode. He considered using a computer guided torpedo, but that would have been overkill. It would simply blow the Mule into bits, and would leave enough scrap metal floating around in space so that if someone—like an X&A explorer—stumbled onto it the particles could be identified as having come from a Mule. Simple logic led him to arrive at the same solution for getting rid of a spaceship completely as both his brother and Erin Kenner had. He would hole the hull of the Mother Lode with a laser. Explosive decompression would take care of Kenner and Gale, leaving the ship intact. Then he'd use his generator to boost the Mother Lode into the sun and no one would ever be able to say what had become of her. He positioned the yacht to bring a laser cannon to bear, sighted in on the viewport on the control bridge, ordered the laser's power to be turned on. There was a sinister sizzling sound as the weapon built toward destruction force. Plough was calm. Getting rid of Kenner and Gale and their ship was going to be almost too easy. CHAPTER THIRTEEN Haven was a lightly populated planet composed mostly of scrublands and deserts. Her two principal land masses were of similar size and were on opposing sides of the globe in the northern hemisphere. So alike were the continents that their weather patterns were similar. Alpine ranges on the western edges lifted the moisture-laden ocean air to cooling heights so that a narrow band of rain forest faced the sea. On the eastern side of the mountains, on both continents, arid conditions prevailed, scrub giving way to the sand wastes and barren rock of the deserts that extended two thousand miles to the semi-arid west coast. Throughout the cruel deserts, where, in summer, the daytime temperatures reached one hundred and twenty degrees, were the camps and digs of miners and prospectors. Haven, having little agricultural land to offer, compensated for that lack by being rich in utile ores such as iron, manganese, copper, bauxite, and a good representation of trace minerals, in short, most of the metallic raw materials that were necessary to build and expand a civilization that had spread from one very old and rather small planet, New Earth, to encompass a degree of arc that, on charts, seemed impressive. A new feature appeared in Haven's skies, for Rimfire was that large, her surfaces that reflective. When she went into orbit she became, to those on the surface, a fast moving star, and the scattered seekers of metallic riches turned their faces upward. In Haven's two large cities word spread rapidly that the biggest and most complex spacecraft ever constructed was orbiting over Haven. The territorial governors of both continents were on hand when Rimfire requested landing instructions at East Havenport for the Captain's Gig. The launch was directed to the governor's own pad where Lieutenant Ursy Wade landed her after a spectacularly swift forty-five degree approach that flattened dramatically at the last possible second to allow the gig to contact the pad without so much as a jar. Ursy ran out the gig's boarding stairs before the dignitaries could approach the ship. A grimy worker standing on the edge of the pad behind the baffles said, «Welcome to Haven, babe.» «Thank you,» Ursy said. «After you get through messin' 'round with the H.M.F.I.C, I'll be glad to show you the sights.» «I appreciate that,» Ursy said, holding back a smile. «What did he say?» Julie Roberts asked from behind Ursy. «He tried to hit on me,» Ursy said. «I am aware of that,» Julie said icily. «What were those initials? H.M.F.—» «Don't ask, ma'am,» Ursy said. «I just did.» «Ask him,» Ursy said, pointing to the governor as the dignitaries reached the pad. «I'll give you a hint. H.M.F.I.C. Head mother in charge. Supply the middle initial from your knowledge of old English ma'am.» «I see,» Julie said, even more icily. «Thank you, Lieutenant.» Julie stepped forward, stood in the hatch at stiff attention, saluted, said, «Captain Julie Roberts, X&A Expo ship Rimfire, sir. I thank you for the hospitality of your world.» Ursy took advantage of the movement to slip away, descending to the pad via a cargo chute and walking away with the bulk of the ship hiding her from the crowd. Captain Roberts descended and stood in the chill wind while the H.M.F.I.C. of East Haven took turns with his West Haven counterpart in praising X&A, Captain Julie Roberts, the Rimfire, and the United Planets in general. Each of them managed to get in lengthy commercials for Haven which, Julie heard with some skepticism, was a garden planet waiting to be cultivated, lacking only a few billion credits from X&A's terraforming fund. Julie politely turned down an offer of a guided tour of the scenic deserts from both H.M.F.I.C.s, stating that Rimfire was at Haven on Service business, and that her stay would be quite brief. «I'm sure,» said his Honor, the governor of East Haven, «that you'll want to give your crew liberty. You'll find the accommodations in East Haven City to be quite—» «Gentlemen,» Julie interrupted, «I wish I could. My crew deserves it.» She mentally crossed her fingers for she had a good crew who deserved more than East Haven City. «However, there is a possibility that Rimfire will be passing Haven on her return trip and if time allows I will most certainly consider your kind invitation.» His Honor tried to smile, but the thought of losing the opportunity to have several hundred members of Rimfire's crew turned loose with good U.P. credits in his town turned the attempt into a rather sickly smirk. Ursy Wade entered East Haven Control, saluted the guard on duty, requested to see the officer in charge, stated her business, and very quickly had a copy of the port's log showing that the Mother Lode, Erin Kenner's ship, had paid two visits to Haven, one that had been terminated quickly after a brief stay only weeks previously. East Havenport wasn't the busiest place in the U.P. sector by any means. Two full years of recorded comings and goings were recorded on one Compuleaf so that when Ursy fed the data into the ship's Unicloud it took only three or four «page turnings» to check every ship that had been in Haven's sector in that length of time. Julie Roberts joined Ursy in the computer room and nodded as Ursy pointed out the two visits of Erin's Mule to Haven. «You'll note, Cap'n, that she did not file a flight plan in either instance,» Ursy said. «Not all that unusual,» Julie said. It was prudent for a ship's captain to file a complete plan of his intended blink routes with the control tower at his point of departure, but since it was, after all, a free galaxy, such practical wisdom could not be mandated by law. «She wasn't the only one who didn't file a flight plan,» Ursy said. «This private yacht that left right behind her the last time didn't register her destination, either.» Julie took note of the name of the yacht, Murdoch's Plough. «It seems, ma'am, that she would have waited,» Ursy ventured. «Yes, it does.» «Unless she expected us to make for the blink beacon from which she sent the message,» Ursy said. «That's way to hell and gone toward the core,» Julie said. «A few blinks.» «Start making them, Lieutenant,» Julie said. «And her reasons for this had better be good. If she's jacking us around on a wild goose chase, I'll boot her ass right up between her shoulder blades.» Ursy smiled to herself. It was seldom that Captain Roberts resorted to spacehand vulgarity. That she had done so indicated that she was more than a little bit: 1. Angry. 2. Concerned. 3. Tired. Maybe just a little bit of all three, Ursy thought, as she went to the control bridge and gave orders to the navigation team. CHAPTER FOURTEEN The history of man was in the process of being rewritten. New and often humbling discoveries were being made on the planet where the race had originated. Some called Old Earth Man's Graveyard, for billions of the Old Ones had perished there in a cataclysm of nuclear fire. With the Old Ones had died their cities and a way of life—one hesitated to call it a civilization or a culture in view of its end—that had covered a world which had once had more habitable land area than any planet in the U.P. sector. There were acrimonious debates among scientists and historians about the length of time that had passed following the holocaust before an Old Earth Healer named Rack used the substance and life of a Power Giver to travel to Earth's moon in search of clean, breathable air. There were those who said the mutations that produced the New Ones in their several varieties, Healer, Power Giver, Far Seer, and Keeper, would have required millions of years. In opposition to this view were those who practiced the prevalent religion of the United Planets sector, a creed based on the one piece of Old Earth literature that had survived the Exodus. The mutants, said these later scholars, had developed as a result of divine intervention within no more than four generations. As proof they cited Old Earth's poisoned ecosphere. Only mutants could have survived the radiation that enveloped the Earth following the war; so God, they said, preserved that which He had created in His own image by making rapid changes in the race. By the time that Rack the Healer made his epic biopowered voyage from Earth to the Moon, Earth's atmosphere had become so toxic and, with the death of the microorganisms in the seas, so depleted of oxygen, that not even the mutated New Ones could have survived had they not been removed to more suitable planets after an X&A ship found Rack the Healer dying on the Moon, holding his love in his scaly arms. The Post-Holocaust history of Old Earth resided in the fleshy data banks of the idiot savant Keepers, accessible only to the Far Seer who had cared for his Keeper since her birth. The Pre-Holocaust record of mankind was a poisoned layer of crust on a devastated planet with the evidence consisting of scraps of stone, metal, and the artifacts of an advanced technological culture. The history of Modern Man, man of the United Planets, began on Terra II, called New Earth. There were men and women who specialized in each area of man's history, and a few who tried to assimilate the three separate branches into a logical whole. The most favored overall view was that man had evolved very slowly on Old Earth, sharing ancestors with a variety of other life-forms known to U.P. science from the scanty fossil records that had been accumulated since the reunion of the two racial branches. U.P. man, in his copious numbers, traced his ancestry to a very few men and women, perhaps less than a hundred, who survived a decades-long space voyage in a primitive sub-light, rocket-propelled spaceship to make a disastrous crash landing on New Earth. The colonists, most historians agreed, escaped Old Earth just before the final fury of war left billions dead. There was also agreement that the Exodus had been poorly planned, for, apparently, the accumulated wisdom of mankind had been contained in the bowels of a computer aboard the spaceship, to be lost completely when the crash destroyed all means of providing electrical power. There had been only one book aboard, an ornate presentation copy of The King James Bible, the Old and New Testaments. Fortunately for the future of the race, scientists aboard the ship were able to use the ship's laboratory to produce test-tube specimens of the domestic animals upon which mankind depended so heavily, for man was to find that while Old Earth had been a teeming stew of life, with life-forms filling all available niches in the ecosphere, animal life on even the most fertile of planets other than Old Earth was severely limited. The Tigian planets had their grass eaters and one carnivore, the Tigian tiger. Other than the Tigian varieties of life, man had encountered a few reptiles and some birds. Thus, from the beginning of U.P. history, it had been up to man, himself, to seed his newly discovered planets with life. On New Earth and—when the race struggled back into space on the spoils of yet another fruitful planet—throughout the inhabited worlds, one found food animals, cattle, and domestic fowl. Man the practical had provided the frozen seeds of milk cows and herd bulls which produced beef animals, for egg laying chickens and for ducks to be roasted. He had brought with him from Old Earth hundreds of varieties of plant seeds, fruits, vegetables, trees for lumber, shade, and shelter, crops of the fields, and the rose and other flowering things whose only purpose was to add beauty. Space-going man could have his wheaten cereal with milk and sugar, could sear a steak over charcoal briquettes made from an Old Earth oak, could start his day with a ham and egg breakfast. Man had his bread and his beer, and he marveled at how little things had changed during the thousands of years since the Few had left Old Earth on a roaring column of fire. For scientists wearing hot suits and breathing bottled air dug from the ruins of a vast museum on Old Earth ancient clay tablets that spoke of bread and beer; and on a scorched desert where once a mighty river had run they found, near one of Old Earth's greatest enigmas—a series of vast pyramids constructed of huge stones—drawings preserved in underground rooms that showed oddly dressed men hunting ducks with hand weapons, men harvesting grain, men herding long-horned cattle. Yes, practical man had sent the colony ship into space with her storage bins filled with the fruits of the Earth and the frozen seed of Earth's useful animals. But then man had always been efficient and ingenious. That he was not a creature of cold logic only, however, was illustrated by the fact that from New Earth there spread throughout the growing U.P. sector dozens of breeds of dogs and cats, for man had ceased being practical when faced with living without his pets. He had brought with him poodles and St. Bernards, greyhounds and terriers, sheep dogs and hounds, working breeds and miniature breeds in all their amusi