“You been at it all night?” I asked him.
He nodded wearily. “Whoever did the job on the freezers was pretty fuckin’ smart.”
Will pulled three tiny chips from the chest pocket of his smelly, stained coveralls. They were so small I couldn’t make out what they were.
“Timers,” he explained before I could ask. “Somebody spliced ’em into the control unit of each freezer. Really neat job; took me all fuckin’ night to find ’em. Interrupted the current flow and shut the freezers down, while at the same time sending an okay reading to the monitors up here on the bridge. Pretty fuckin’ ingenious.”
“Can you fix the freezers before all the food thaws out?” I asked.
Will gave me a sad shake of his head. “Whoever did this job knew what he was doing. I’d have to rebuild the whole control unit in each freezer. Take two-three weeks, maybe more.”
“We don’t have spares?”
“We were supposed to. They’re listed in the logistics computer but the bin where they ought to be stored is dead-empty.”
I felt my blood seething. Sabotage.
“Were they put into the control units before we launched, or during the flight?” I asked.
Will gave me a shrug. “Can’t tell.”
“There aren’t any locks on the freezer doors,” I muttered.
“Never saw anybody goin’ in there,” he muttered back. “Except that Darling guy, once. He said he was looking for a key lime pie.”
Darling. The art critic. The guy who’d been stuffing himself ever since we had left Earth orbit.
The file I had on Darling claimed that he had inherited a modest fortune from his mother, a real estate broker in Florida. It would’ve been a larger fortune if his father hadn’t kept frittering money away on half-baked schemes like opening a fundamentalist Christian theme park in Beirut. The old man died, eventually: gunned down by a crazed ecologist on the Ross Ice Shelf where he was trying to build a hotel and penguin-hunting lodge.
Darling claimed his ten million investment in the Argo expedition came from his inheritance. Said it was all the money he had in the world.
I called a lady in Anaheim that I knew, Kay Taranto. She specialized in tracking down deadbeats for the Disney financial empire. I asked her to find out if any money from Rockledge had suddenly appeared in Darling’s chubby hands. Told her to check Liechtenstein. Kay was as persistent and dogged as a heat-seeking missile. If there was anything to find out about Darling, she was the one to do it.
Meanwhile, I told Will to go through the entire ship millimeter by millimeter to see if there were any other nasty little surprises planted here or there.
“Don’t sleep, don’t eat, don’t even waste time breathing,” I told him. “From now on you’re my bug inspector. Look everywhere.”
He gave me a sly grin. “Even under the beds?”
“And in them, if you have to,” I said. “For every bug you find I’ll give you a bonus—say, a week’s salary?”
“How about a month’s?”
I nodded an okay. It’d be worth it, easy.
I don’t know whose idea it was to have a continuous banquet until all the food that was about to spoil was eaten up. Probably Darling’s. Kind of thing his perverted brain would think up.
For the past three days and nights the seven of them have been stuffing themselves like ancient Romans during Saturnalia. Ship of Bulemics. They must know that everything they upchuck is going into the reprocessor, but it looks like they just don’t care. Not right now.
Of course, they’re drinking all the wine on board, too. My only joy is that they’re going to be so sick when they get to the end of the food that they’ll just lay in their sacks for a long time and let me get on with the real job of this mission.
I’m staying up here at the command center for the duration of their orgy. I’ve got some old synthesized Dixieland playing on the intercom so I can’t hear their laughing and shouting from down in the dining room. Or their puking. I’ve ordered the crew to stay out of the passengers’ area.
“Let ’em bust their guts,” I told my men. “We’ve got work to do.”
When you read that there’s millions of asteroids out in the Belt you get the mental picture of a kind of forest of chunks of rock and metal, you know, clustered so thick that you can’t sail a ship through without getting dinged.
No such luck.
Sure, there’s millions of asteroids in the Belt. Some as big as mountains; a few of ’em are a couple of hundred kilometers wide. But most of ’em are the size of pebbles, even grains of sand. And they’ve got a tremendously wide volume of space to wander around in, out there between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. You could put all the planets and moons of the solar system in that region and it’d still be almost entirely empty space.
The first thing I’m looking for is a nice little nickel-iron asteroid, maybe a couple hundred meters across. Nothing spectacular; a piece as small as a Little League baseball field will do fine. She’ll contain more high-grade iron ore than the whole Earth’s steel industry uses in ten years. Maybe fifty to seventy-five tons of platinum, an impurity that’d set a man up for life. To say nothing of the gold and silver that’s sprinkled around in her.
Such an asteroid is worth trillions of dollars. Maybe hundreds of trillions.
Then there’s the carbonaceous-type rocky asteroids. They contain something more valuable than gold, a lot more valuable. They contain water.
There’s a new frontier being built in cislunar space, the region between low Earth orbit and the Moon’s surface. We’ve got zero-gee factories in orbit and mining operations on the Moon. We’ve got big condominium habitats being built in the L-4 and L-5 libration points. More than fifty thousand people live and work in space now.
They get most of their raw materials from the Moon. Lunar ores give our frontier workers aluminum and titanium, even some iron, although it’s lowgrade stuff and expensive as hell to mine and smelt. There’s plenty of silicon on the Moon; they’ve got a thriving electronics industry growing there.
But the people on the space frontier have got to import their heavy metals from Earth. And their water. They buy high-grade steels from outfits like Rockledge International, and pay enormous prices for lifting the tonnage up from Earth. Same thing for water, except the corporate bastards charge even more for that than they do for steel or even platinum.
Which is why Rockledge and the other corporate giants don’t want to see me succeed on this venture. If I come coasting back to the Earth-Moon system with several thousand tons of high-grade steel and enough water to start building swimming pools in Moonbase—and undercutting the corporations’ Earth-based prices—I’ll have broken the stranglehold those fat-cat bastards have on the space settlements.
They don’t like that. Which is why they’re out to stop me. I’ve got to be on the lookout for their next attempt. They can’t launch anything to intercept us or attack us outright; the IAA would know that they’d done it and there’d be criminal charges filed against them.
No, Rockledge and any partners-in-crime they may have are working from within. They’ve got an agent on board my ship and they’ve got a plan for wrecking this expedition. This sabotage of the food freezers is just their first shot. Will hasn’t found any more time bombs yet, but that doesn’t mean the ship’s clean. Not by a long shot. They could hide a ton of surprises aboard the Argo; I just hope Will digs ’em up before they go off.
I know it sounds paranoid, but even paranoids have enemies.
Kay Taranto finally answered me today. We’re so far beyond the orbit of Mars by now that messages take nearly an hour to travel from Earth, even at the speed of light. So two-way conversations are out of the question.