“We have two flight controllers at Ceres.”
“Bah!” Wilcox shook his head. “What do they call themselves out there? Rock rats? They pride themselves on their independence. They resisted the one attempt we made to establish a full-fledged office on Ceres. So now they’re crying to us about piracy, are they?”
“It’s only one person making the accusation: this man Fuchs.”
“A maniac, no doubt,” said Wilcox.
“Or a sore loser,” Zar agreed.
WLTZING MATILDA
Big George’s stomach rumbled in complaint.
He straightened up—no easy task in the spacesuit—and looked around. Waltzing Matilda hung in the star-strewn sky over his head like a big dumbbell, its habitat and logistics modules on opposite ends of a kilometer-long buckyball tether, slowly rotating around the propulsion module at the hub.
Been too many hours since you’ve had a feed, eh? he said to his stomach. Well, it’s gonna be a few hours more before we get any tucker, and even then it’ll be mighty lean.
The asteroid on which George stood was a dirty little chunk of rock, a dark carbonaceous ’roid, rich in hydrates and organic minerals. Worth a bloody fortune back at Selene. But it didn’t look like much: just a bleak lump of dirt, pitted all over like it had the pox, rocks and pebbles and outright boulders scattered across it. Not enough gravity to hold down a feather. Ugly chunk of rock, that’s all you are, George said silently to the asteroid. And you’re gonna get uglier before we’re finished with ya.
Millions of kilometers from anyplace, George realized, alone in this cold and dark except for the Turk sittin’ inside Matilda monitoring the controls, squattin’ on this ugly chunk of rock, sweatin’ like a teen on his first date inside this suit and me stomach growlin’ ’cause we’re low on rations.
And yet he felt happy. Free as a bloomin’ bird. He had to make a conscious effort not to sing out loud. That’d startle the Turk, he knew. The kid’s not used to any of this.
Shaking his head inside the fishbowl helmet, George returned to his work. He was setting up the cutting laser, connecting its power pack and control module, carefully cleaning its copper mirrors of clinging dust and making certain they were precisely placed in their mounts, no wobbles. It was all hard physical work, even though none of the equipment weighed anything in the asteroid’s minuscule gravity. But just raising your arms in the stiff, ungainly suit, bending your body or turning, took a conscious effort of will and more muscular exertion than any flatlander could ever appreciate. Finally George had everything set, the laser’s aiming mirrors pointing to the precise spot where he wanted to start cutting, the power pack’s superconducting coil charged and ready.
George was going to slice out chunks of the asteroid that Matilda could carry back to Selene. The prospector who’d claimed the rock wouldn’t make a penny from it until George started shipping the ores, and George was far behind schedule because the wonky laser kept malfunctioning time and again. No ores, no money: that was the way the corporations worked. And no food, George knew. It was a race now to see if he could get a decent shipment of ores off toward Selene before Matilda’s food locker went empty.
As he worked, a memory from his childhood school days back in Adelaide returned unbidden to his mind; a poem by some Yank who’d been in on the Yukon gold rush nearly two centuries ago:
George nodded solemnly as he checked out the laser’s focus. Hunger and night and the stars, all right. We’ve got plenty of that. And a stark, dead world, too, aren’t you? he said to the impassive asteroid. Come to think of it, you’ve prob’ly got some gold tucked away inside you, huh? Strange kinda situation when water’s worth more’n gold. Price of gold’s dropped down to its value as an industrial metal. Jewelers must be going bonkers back Earthside.
“George?” the Turk’s voice in his helmet speaker startled him.
“Huh? What’sit?”
The kid’s name was Nodon. “Something is moving out at the edge of our radar’s resolution range.”
“Moving?” George immediately thought that maybe this asteroid had a smaller companion, a moonlet. But at the extreme range of their search radar? Not bloody likely.
“It has a considerable velocity. It is approaching very fast.”
That was the longest utterance the kid had made through the whole flight. He sounded worried.
“It can’t be on a collision course,” George said.
“No, but it is heading our way. Fast.”
George tried to shrug inside the spacesuit, failed. “Well, keep an eye on it. Might be another ship.”
“I think it is.”
“Any message from ’im?”
“No. Nothing.”
“All right,” said George, puzzled. “Say hullo to him and ask his identification. I’m gonna start workin’ the ores here.”
“Yes, sir.” The kid was very respectful.
Wondering what—or who—was out there, George thumbed the activator switch and the laser began to slash deeply into the asteroid’s rocky body. In the airless dark there was no sound; George couldn’t even feel a vibration from the big ungainly machine. The dead rock began to sizzle noiselessly along a pencil-slim line. The cutting laser emitted in the infrared, but even the guide beam of the auxiliary laser was invisible until the cutting raised enough dust to reflect its thin red pointing finger.
Be a lot easier if we could get nanomachines to do this, George thought. I’ve got to twist Kris Cardenas’s arm when we get back to Ceres, make her see how much we need her help. Little buggers could separate the different elements in a rock, atom by atom. All we’d hafta do is scoop up the piles and load ’em on the ship.
Instead, George worked like a common laborer, prying up thick, house-sized slabs of asteroidal rock as the laser’s hot beam cut them loose, clamping them together with buckyball tethers, and ferrying them to Matilda’s bulky propulsion module, which was fitted with attachment points for the cargo. By the time he had carried three such loads, using the jetpack of his suit to move the big slabs, feeling a little like Superman manhandling the massive yet weightless tonnages of ores, he was soaked with perspiration.
“Feels like a bloody swamp in this suit,” he complained aloud as he started back toward the asteroid. “Smells like one, too.”
“It is a ship,” said Nodon.
“You’re sure?”
“I can see its image on the display screen.”
“Give ’em another hail, then. See who they are.” George didn’t like the idea of another ship in the vicinity. It can’t be coincidence, he told himself.
He landed deftly on the asteroid about fifty meters from where the laser was still slicing up the rock. Why would a ship be heading toward us? Who are they?
Dorik Harbin sat at the controls of Shanidar, his dark bearded face impassive, his darker eyes riveted on the CCD display from the ship’s optical sensors. He could see the flashes of laser-heated rock spurting up from the asteroid and the glints of light they cast on the Waltzing Matilda, parked in orbit around the asteroid. The information from Grigor had been accurate, as usual. There was the ship, precisely where Grigor had said it would be.