The Rock Rats

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.

Death was no stranger to Dorik Harbin. Orphaned from birth, he was barely as tall as the assault rifle the village elders gave him when Harbin had dutifully marched with the other preteens to the village down the road, where the evil people lived. They had killed his father before Harbin had been born and raped his pregnant mother repeatedly. The other boys sometimes sniggered that Dorik was conceived by one of the rapists, not the father that the rapists had hacked to death.

He and his ragamuffin battalion had marched down to that evil village and shot everyone there: all of them, men, women, children, babies. Harbin even shot the village dogs in a fury of vengeance. Then, under the pitiless eyes of the hard-faced elders, they had set fire to each and every house in that village. Dousing the bodies with petrol where they lay, they burned the dead, too. Some of them were only wounded, pretending to be dead to escape the vengeance they had reaped, until the flames ignited their clothing.

Harbin still heard their screams in his sleep.

When the blue-helmeted Peacekeeper troops had come into the region to pacify the ethnic fighting, Harbin had run away from his village and joined the national defense force. After many months of living in the hills and hiding from the Peacekeepers’ observation planes and satellites, he came to the bitter conclusion that the so-called national defense force was nothing more than a band of renegades, stealing from their own people, looting villages and raping their women.

He ran away again, this time to a refugee camp, where well-clad strangers distributed food while men from nearby villages sold the refugees hashish and heroin. Eventually Harbin joined those blue-helmeted soldiers; they were looking for recruits and offered steady pay for minimal discomfort. They trained him well, but more importantly they fed him and paid him and tried to instill some sense of discipline and honor in him. Time and again his temper tripped him; he was in the brig so often that his sergeant called him “jailbird.”

The sergeant tried to tame Harbin’s wild ferocity, tried to make a reliable soldier out of him. Harbin took their food and money and tried to understand their strange concepts of when it was proper to kill someone and when it was not. What he learned after a few years of service in the miserable, pathetic, deprived regions of Asia and Africa was that it was the same everywhere: kill or be killed.

He was picked for a hurry-up training course and sent with a handful of other Peacekeeper troops to the Moon, to enforce the law on the renegade colonists of Moonbase. They even allowed the specially-selected troopers dosages of designer drugs which, they claimed, would enhance their adaptation to low gravity. Harbin knew it was nothing more than a bribe, to keep the “volunteers” satisfied.

Trying to fight the tenacious defenders of Moonbase from inside a spacesuit was a revelation to Harbin. The Peacekeepers failed, even though the lunar colonists took great pains to avoid killing any of them. They returned to Earth, not merely defeated but humiliated. His next engagement, in the food riots in Delhi, finished him as a Peacekeeper. He saved his squad from being overrun by screaming hordes of rioters, but killed so many of the “unarmed” civilians that the International Peacekeeping Force cashiered him.

Orphaned again, Harbin took up with mercenary organizations that worked under contract to major multinational corporations. Always eager to better himself, he learned to operate spacecraft. And he quickly saw how fragile spacecraft were. A decent laser shot could disable a vessel in an eyeblink; you could kill its crew from a thousand kilometers away before they realized they were under attack.

Eventually he was summoned to the offices of Humphries Space Systems, the first time he had returned to the Moon since the Peacekeepers had been driven off. Their chief of security was a Russian named Grigor. He told Harbin he had a difficult but extremely rewarding assignment for a man of courage and determination.

Harbin asked only, “Who do I have to kill?”

Grigor told him that he was to drive the independent prospectors and miners out of the Belt. Those working under contract to HSS or Astro were to be left untouched. It was the independents who were to be “discouraged.” Harbin grimaced at the word. Men like Grigor and the others back at Selene could use delicate words, but what they meant was anything but refined. Kill the independents. Kill enough of them so that the rest either quit the Belt or signed up with HSS or Astro Corporation.

So this one had to die, like the others.

“This is Waltzing Matilda,” he heard his comm speaker announce. The face on his display screen was a young male Asian, head shaved, eyes big and nervous. His cheeks seemed to be tattooed. “Please identify yourself.”

Harbin chose not to. There was no need. The less he spoke with those he must kill, the less he knew about them, the better. It was a game, he told himself, like the computer games he had played during his training sessions with the Peacekeepers. Destroy the target and win points. In this game he played now, the points were international dollars. Wealth could buy almost anything: a fine home in a safe city, good wines, willing women, drugs that drove away the memories of the past.

“We are working this asteroid,” the young man said, his shaky voice a little higher-pitched than before. “The claim has already been registered with the International Astronautical Authority.”

Harbin took in a deep breath. The temptation to reply was powerful. It doesn’t matter what you have claimed or what you are doing, he answered silently. The moving finger has written your name in the book of death, nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line; nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

By the time he’d made his eighth ore-ferrying trip, George felt dead tired. And starving.

He turned off the laser and said into his helmet microphone, “I’m comin’ in.”

The Turk replied only, “Copy that.”

“I’m sloshin’ inside this suit,” George said. “The power pack needs rechargin’, too.”

“Understood,” said Nodon.

George unhooked the power pack and toted it in his arms back to Matilda’s airlock. It was twice his size, and even though it weighed virtually nothing he was careful handling it; a mass that big could squash a man no matter what the ambient gravity. The law of inertia had not been repealed.

“What’s our visitor doin’?” he asked as he sealed the lock’s outer hatch and started pumping air into it.

“Still approaching on the same course.”

“Any word from ’im?”

“Nothing.”

That worried George. By the time he had wormed his way out of the ripe-smelling suit and plugged the big power pack into the ship’s recharging unit, though, his first priority was food.

He half-floated up the passageway to the galley.

“Spin ’er up a bit, Nodon,” he hollered to the bridge. “Gimme some weight while I chow down.”

“One-sixth g?” the Turk’s voice came back down the passageway.

“Good enough.”

A comfortable feeling of weight returned as George pulled a meager prepackaged snack from the freezer. Should’ve loaded more food, he thought. Didn’t expect to be out here this long.

Then he heard a scream from the bridge. The air-pressure alarm started hooting and the emergency hatches slammed shut as the ship’s lights went out, plunging George into total darkness.