The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 12

It’s a good thing that it takes so long for communications to go back and forth, Amanda thought. Otherwise Lars would be screaming at the woman by now.

She had watched her husband, his face grimed from the ashes of the warehouse and his mood even darker, as he placed his call to their insurance carrier to inform them of the fire. Then he had called Diane Verwoerd, at Humphries Space Systems’ offices in Selene.

Even though messages moved at the speed of light, it took more than an hour for Ms. Verwoerd to respond. With the distance between them, there could be no real conversation between Ceres and the Moon. Communications were more like video mail that true two-way links.

“Mr. Fuchs,” Verwoerd began her message, “I appreciate your calling me to inform us about the fire in your warehouse. I certainly hope that no one was injured.”

Fuchs started to reply automatically, and only stopped himself when Verwoerd coolly went on, “We will need to know the extent of the damage before opening our negotiations on acquiring Helvetia Limited. As I understand it, a major part of your company’s assets consisted of the inventory in your warehouse. I understand that this inventory was insured, but I’m certain that your insurance won’t cover much more than half the value of the damaged property. Please inform me as soon as you can. In the meantime, I will contact your insurance carrier. Thank you.” Her image winked out, replaced by the stylized logo of Humphries Space Systems.

Fuchs’s face looked like a thundercloud, dark and ominous. He sat at the computer desk of their one-room apartment, staring silently at the wallscreen. Amanda, sitting on the bed, didn’t know what she could say to make him feel better.

“We won’t be getting ten million,” he muttered, turning to her. “Not half that, I imagine.”

“It’s all right, Lars. Three or four million is enough for us to—”

“To run away with our tails between our legs,” he snapped.

Amanda heard herself answer, “What else can we do?”

Fuchs’s head drooped defeatedly. “I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re wiped out. The warehouse is completely gutted. Whoever set the fire did a thorough job.”

Warily, she asked, “Do you still think it was deliberately set?”

“Of course!” her husband shouted angrily. “He never intended to pay us ten million! That was a lure, a ruse. He’s kicking us off Ceres, out of the Belt entirely.”

“But why would he make the offer…?” Amanda felt confused.

Almost sneering with contempt, Fuchs said, “To put us in the proper frame of mind. To get us accustomed to the idea of leaving the Belt. Now he’s waiting for us to come crawling to him and beg for as much of the ten million as he’s willing to give us.”

“We won’t do that,” Amanda said. “We won’t crawl and we won’t beg.”

“No,” he agreed. “But we will leave. We have no choice.”

“We still have the ship.”

His heavy brows rose. “Starpower? You’d be willing to go prospecting again?”

Amanda knew that she really didn’t want to take up the life of a rock rat again. But she nodded solemnly, “Yes. Why not?”

Fuchs stared at her, a tangle of emotions burning in his deep-set eyes.

Niles Ripley was dead tired as he shuffled slowly across the desolate dark ground, heading for the airlock. A four-hour shift of working on the habitat was like a week of hard labor anywhere else, he felt. And riding the shuttlecraft back down to the surface of Ceres was always nerve-racking; the ground controller ran the little hopper remotely from underground, but Ripley twitched nervously without a human pilot aboard. The shuttle had touched down without mishap, though, landing a few meters from a Humphries craft being loaded for a supply run to one of the miners’ ships hanging in orbit.

It’ll be good to get to the Pub and sip a brew or two, Ripley said to himself. By god, I’ll even spring for the imported stuff tonight.

The construction work was going well. Slower than Fuchs had expected, but Ripley was satisfied with the progress that the crew was making. Looking up through his fishbowl helmet, he could see the habitat glinting in the sunlight as it spun slowly, like a big pinwheel.

Okay, he thought, so maybe it does look like a clunky kludge. Bunch of spacecraft tacked together in a circle, no two of ’em exactly the same. But by god the kludge was pretty near finished; soon people could go up and live in that habitat and feel just about the same gravity as on the Moon.

Got to get the radiation shielding working first, he reminded himself. Sixteen different sets of superconducting magnets and more to come. Getting them to work together is gonna be a bitch and a half.

The work was so damned tedious. Flatlanders back on Earth thought that working in microgee was fun. And easy. You just float around like a kid in a swimming pool. Yeah. Right. The reality was that you had to consciously plan every move you made; inside the spacesuit you had to exert real strength just to hold your arms out straight or take a few steps. Sure, you could hop around like a jackrabbit on steroids if you wanted to. Hell, I could jump right off Ceres and go sailing around like Superman if I had a mind to—and I if didn’t worry about breaking every bone in my legs when I landed. Working in microgee is tough, especially in these damned suits.

Well, I’m finished for today, he said to himself as he watched the habitat slowly disappear beyond the sharp, rugged horizon. Ceres is so small, he thought. Just a glorified hunk of rock hanging in the middle of nothing. Ripley shook his head inside his bubble helmet, amazed all over again that he was working ’way out here, in this no-place of a place. He started back toward the airlock again, kicking up lingering clouds of gritty dust with each careful, sliding step. Looking down awkwardly from inside the helmet, he saw that the suit was grimy with dark gray dust all the way up the leggings, as usual. The arms and gloves were crummed up, too. It’ll take a good half-hour to vacuum all this crud off the suit, he told himself.

The airlock was set into a dome of local stone, its thick metal hatch the only sign of human presence on Ceres’s surface, outside of the two spindly-looking shuttlecraft sitting out there. Ripley was almost at the hatch when it swung open and three spacesuited figures stepped out slowly, warily, as if testing each step they made in this insubstantial gravity. Each of their spacesuits showed a HSS logo on the left breast, just above their name tags. Ripley wondered if they might be the guys Big George had shellacked in the Pub. They had all been Humphries employees, he recalled.

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.