The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 10

Even after five years on Astro Corporation’s board of directors, Pancho Lane still thought of herself as a neophyte. You got a lot to learn, girl, she told herself almost daily.

Yet she had formed a few working habits, a small set of rules for herself. She spent as little time in Astro’s corporate offices as possible. Whether at La Guaira on Earth or in Selene, Pancho chose to be among the engineers and astronauts rather than closeting herself with the suits. She had come up through the ranks, a former astronaut herself, and she had no intention of reading reports and studying graphs when she could be out among the workers, getting her hands dirty; she preferred the smell of machine oil and honest sweat to the quiet tensions and power jockeying of the corporate offices.

One of her self-imposed rules was to make decisions as soon as she had the necessary information, and then to act on her decisions quickly. Another was to deliver bad news herself, instead of detailing some flunky to handle the chore.

Still, she hesitated to put in the call to Lars Fuchs. It won’t make him happy, she knew. Instead, she called his wife. Pancho and Amanda had worked together five years earlier; they had copiloted Starpower 1’s maiden mission to the Belt. They had watched helplessly as Dan Randolph died of radiation poisoning—murdered by remote control, by Martin Humphries.

And now the Humper was offering to buy out Lars and Mandy, get them off Ceres, establish his own Humphries Space Systems as the sole supplier for the rock rats out there. Pancho had tried to fight Humphries, tried to keep Astro in the competition through Fuchs’s little company. But she had been thoroughly outmaneuvered by Humphries, and she knew it.

Angry more at herself than anyone else, she marched herself to her office in La Guaira and made the call to Amanda. She paid no attention to the lovely tropical scenery outside her office window; the green, cloud-topped mountains and gently surging sea held no attraction for her. Planting her booted feet on her desktop, wishing there was some way to help Mandy and Lars, she commanded her phone to send a message to Amanda Cunningham Fuchs, on Ceres.

“Mandy,” she began unceremoniously, “ ’fraid I got bad news for you and Lars. Astro won’t top Humphries’s buyout offer. The board wouldn’t vote to buy you out. Humphries has a nice little clique on the board and they voted the whole proposition down the toilet. Sorry, kid. Look me up when you get back to Selene, or wherever you’re goin’. Maybe we can spend some time together without worryin’ about business. See ya.”

Pancho was startled when she realized she’d been sitting at her desk for nearly half an hour without instructing the phone to transmit her message.

Finally she said, “Aw shit, send it.”

The headquarters of the International Astronautical Authority were still in Zurich, officially, but its main working offices were in St. Petersburg.

The global warming that had melted most of the glaciers in Switzerland and turned the snowpacks of the Alpine peaks into disastrous, murderous floods had forced the move. The administrators and lawyers who had been transferred to Russia complained, with some resentment, that they had been pushed off the greenhouse cliff.

To their surprise, St. Petersburg was a beautiful, cosmopolitan city, not at all the dour gray urban blight they had expected. The greenhouse warming had been kind to St. Petersburg: winters were nowhere near as long and bitter as they had once been. Snow did not start to fall until well into December and it was usually gone by April. Russian engineers had doggedly built a series of weirs and breakwaters across the Gulf of Finland and the Neva River to hold back the rising seas.

Even though the late winter sunlight had to struggle through a slate-gray layer of clouds, Erek Zar could see from his office window that most of the snow had already melted from the rooftops. It promised to be a good day, and a good weekend. Zar leaned back in his desk chair, clasped his hands behind his head, looked out across the rooftops toward the shimmering harbor, and thought that, with luck, he could get away by lunchtime and spend the weekend with his family in Krakow.

He was not happy, therefore, when Francesco Tomasselli stepped through his office door with a troubled expression on his swarthy face. Strange, Zar said to himself: Italians are supposed to be sunny and cheerful people. Tomasselli always looked like the crack of doom. He was as lean as a strand of spaghetti, the nervous sort. Zar felt like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Let me have men about me that are fat; sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’ nights.

“What’s the matter, Franco?” Zar asked, hoping it wasn’t serious enough to interfere with his travel plans.

Tomasselli plopped into the upholstered chair in front of the desk and sighed heavily. “Another prospecting ship is missing.”

Zar sighed too. He spoke to his desktop screen and the computer swiftly showed the latest report from the Belt: a spacecraft named Star of the East had disappeared; its tracking beacon had winked off, all telemetry from the craft had ceased.

“That’s the third one this month,” Tomasselli said, his lean face furrowed with worry.

Spreading his hands placatingly, Zar said, “They’re out on the edge of nowhere, sailing alone through the Belt. Once a ship gets into trouble there’s no one near enough to help. What do you expect?”

Tomasselli shook his head. “When a spacecraft gets into trouble, as you put it, it shows up on the telemetry. They send out distress calls. They ask for help, or advice.”

Zar shrugged.

“We’ve had ships fail and crews die, god knows,” Tomasselli went on, the faint ring of vowels at the end of most of his words. “But these three are different. No calls for help, no telemetry showing failures or malfunctions. They just disappear—poof!”

Zar thought a moment, then asked, “Had they claimed any asteroids?”

“One of them had: Lady of the Lake. Two weeks after the ship disappeared and the claim was officially invalidated, the asteroid was claimed by a vessel owned by Humphries Space Systems: the Shanidar.”

“Nothing irregular there.”

“Two weeks? It’s as if the Humphries ship was waiting for Lady of the Lake to disappear so they could claim the asteroid.”

“You’re getting melodramatic, Franco,” said Zar. “You’re accusing them of piracy.”

“It should be investigated.”

“Investigated? How? By whom? Do you expect us to send search teams through the Asteroid Belt? There aren’t enough spacecraft in the solar system for that!”

Tomasselli did not reply, but his dark eyes looked brooding, accusing.

Zar frowned at his colleague. “Very well, Franco. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll talk to the Humphries people and see what they have to say about it.”

“They’ll deny everything, of course.”

“There’s nothing to deny! There’s no shred of evidence that they’ve done anything wrong!”

Tomasselli muttered, “I am going to examine all the claims made by HSS ships over the past month.”

“What for?”

“To see if there are any in the regions where those two other missing ships disappeared.”

Zar wanted to scream at the man. He’s nothing but a suspicious-minded young Italian, Zar thought, seeing nefarious plots and skullduggery wherever he looks. But he took a deep breath to calm himself and said in an even, measured tone:

“That’s fine, Franco. You check the claims. I’ll speak to the HSS people. Monday. I’ll do it first thing Monday morning, after I come back from the weekend.”