They were carrying bulky packing crates, probably filled with equipment. In Ceres’s low gravity, a man could carry loads that required a small truck elsewhere. All of them had tools of various sorts clipped to belts around their waists.
“Where you goin’, guys?” Ripley asked good-naturedly over the common suit-to-suit radio frequency.
“Loading up the shuttle,” came the answer in his earphones.
“Same old thing every day,” another of them complained. “More crap for the mining ships up in orbit.”
They got close enough to read Ripley’s name stenciled on the hard shell of his suit. Ripley realized that they were so new to Ceres they hadn’t gotten their own individual suits yet. They had apparently picked the suits they were wearing from HSS’s storage; their names were lettered on adhesive strips pasted onto the torsos.
“Buchanan, Santorini, and Giap,” Ripley read aloud. “Hi. I’m Niles Ripley.”
“We know who you are,” Buchanan said sourly.
“The horn player,” said Santorini.
Ripley put on his peacemaking smile, even though he figured they couldn’t see it in the dim lighting.
“Hey, I’m sorry about that brawl couple nights ago,” he said placatingly. “My friend got carried away, I guess.”
All three of them put their crates down on the pebbled, dusty ground.
Buchanan said, “I hear they call you the Ripper.”
“Sometimes,” Ripley said guardedly.
“Where’s your trumpet?”
With a little laugh, Ripley said, “Back in my quarters. I don’t carry it with me everywhere I go.”
“Too bad. I’d really like to jam it up your ass.”
Ripley kept smiling. “Aw, come on now. There’s no reason to—”
“That big ape of yours put Carl in the infirmary with three crushed vertebrae!”
“Hey, I didn’t start the fight. And I’m not looking for one now.” Ripley started to walk past them, toward the still-open airlock hatch.
They stopped him. They grabbed his arms. For a ridiculous instant Ripley almost felt like giggling. You can’t fight in spacesuits, for chrissakes! It’s like boxers wearing suits of armor.
“Hey, come on, now,” Ripley said, trying to pull his arms free.
Buchanan kicked his feet out from under him and Ripley fell over backward, slowly, softly, in the dreamy slow motion of micro-gee. It seemed to take ten minutes as he toppled over; numberless hordes of stars slid past his field of view, silently, solemnly. Then at last he hit the ground, his head banging painfully inside the helmet, a thick cloud of dust enveloping him.
“Okay, Ripper,” Buchanan said. “Rip this!”
He kicked Ripley in the side of his spacesuit. The others laughed and started kicking, too. Ripley bounced around inside the suit, unable to get up, unable to defend himself. It didn’t hurt that much, at first, but each kick got worse and he worried that they might tear his air line loose. He tasted blood in his mouth.
When they finally stopped kicking him, every part of Ripley’s body throbbed with pain. They were still standing over him. Buchanan stared down at him for a long, silent moment. Then he unhooked a tool from the belt at his waist.
“You know what this is?” he asked, holding it up in his gloved hand. It was a short, squat, smooth greenish rod with a helical glass flash-lamp coiled around its length and a pistol grip beneath. A heavy black cord ran from the heel of the grip to a battery pack clipped to Buchanan’s belt.
Before Ripley could say anything Buchanan explained.
“This is a Mark IV gigawatt-pulse neodymium laser. Puts out picosecond pulses. We use it to punch neat little holes in metal. What kind of a hole do you think it’ll punch through you?”
“Hey, Trace,” said Santorini. “Take it easy.”
Ripley tried to move, to crawl away. His legs wouldn’t carry him. He could see the laser’s guide beam walking up the front of his spacesuit, feel it come through his transparent helmet, inch over his face, past his eyes, onto his forehead.
“Trace, don’t!”
But Buchanan slowly lowered himself to one knee and bent over Ripley, peering into his eyes. This close, their helmets almost touching, Ripley could see a sort of wild glee in the man’s eyes, a manic joy. He moved one arm, tried to push his tormentor away; all he accomplished was to pull the name tag off Buchanan’s suit.
“They didn’t say to kill him,” Santorini insisted.
Buchanan laughed. “So long, noisemaker,” he said.
Ripley died instantly. The picosecond laser pulse pulped most of his brain into jelly.
CHAPTER 13
Lars Fuchs was sitting at his desk talking to the prospector to whom he’d leased Starpower. The woman flatly refused to give up the ship until the term of her lease expired, four months in the future.
“I’ve been snookered out of two good rocks by HSS people,” she said, her anger showing clearly in her image on Fuchs’s wallscreen. “I’m going out to the far side of the Belt and get me a good-sized metallic ’roid. Anybody comes near me, I’ll zap ’em with the cutting laser!”
Fuchs stared at her face. She couldn’t be much more than thirty, a former graduate student like himself. Yet she looked far harder, more determined, than any graduate student he remembered. Not a trace of makeup; her hair shaved down to a dark fuzz; her cheek bones and jawline gaunt, hungry.
“I can arrange for you to transfer to another ship that’s available for lease,” Fuchs said reasonably.
The prospector shook her head. “No deal. I’m working my way around the far side. By this time tomorrow it’ll take half an hour for messages to catch up with me. Sayonara, Lars.”
The screen went blank. Fuchs leaned back in his creaking desk chair, his thoughts churning slowly. There is no way I can force her to bring Starpower back. She’s on her way out and she won’t be back for at least four months. When she returns she’ll either have claim to a rich metallic asteroid or she’ll be so dead broke she won’t even be able to pay me the final installment on the lease.
No matter which way he looked at it, he could find no answer to his problem. If we’re going back to Earth it will have to be as passengers on someone else’s ship.
Amanda came through the door from the tunnel at the same moment that the phone chimed. Fuchs automatically said, “Answer,” to the phone, but then he saw the awful expression on his wife’s face.
“What is it?” he asked, rising from his chair. “What’s wrong?”
“Ripley,” she said in a voice that sounded frightened. “They found him by the airlock, outside. He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Fuchs felt shocked. “How? What happened?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” said Kris Cardenas, from the wallscreen.
Fuchs and Amanda both turned to her image.
Cardenas looked grim. “They brought Ripley’s body to me, here in the infirmary.”
“What happened to him?” Fuchs asked again.
Cardenas shook her head warily. “Nothing wrong with his suit. He didn’t die of asphyxiation or decompression. The suit’s scuffed up a lot, but there was no system failure.”
“Then what?” Amanda asked.
She frowned with uncertainty. “I’m going to do a multi-spectral scan and try to find out. The reason I called you was to find out if he has any next-of-kin here on Ceres.”