The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 25

Nothing.

Fuchs scowled at the display screens that curved around his command chair, then looked out through the bridge’s windows. No sign of Waltzing Matilda. Nothing here but the lumpy irregular shape of an asteroid tumbling slowly in the barren emptiness, dark and pitted and strewn with small boulders and rocks.

This was the last position that the IAA had for Big George’s ship. Matilda’s telemetering had cut off here, at this location. But the ship was nowhere in sight.

Almost without consciously thinking about it, he put Starpower into a tight orbit around the little asteroid. Was George really here? He wondered. If he was he probably didn’t linger very—

Then he saw an area on the ’roid where neat rectangular slabs had been cut out of the rock. George had been here! He had started to mine the asteroid. Turning up the magnification on his telescope to max, Fuchs saw that there was still some equipment standing on the surface. He left in a hurry, Fuchs realized, too much of a hurry to pick up all his gear.

It was a cutting laser, Fuchs saw, still standing silently at the edge of one of the cut-out rectangles. I must retrieve it, he said to himself. It could be evidence.

The easiest way to get it would be to suit up and go EVA. But with no one else in the ship, Fuchs decided against that. Instead, he maneuvered Starpower into an orbit that matched the asteroid’s own spin, the tip of his tongue apprehensively between his teeth, then slowly, carefully, brought the big ship to within a dozen meters of the rocky surface.

Using the manipulator arms on Starpower’s equipment module, Fuchs snatched the laser up off the asteroid and tucked it inside the cargo bay. He was soaked with perspiration by the time the job was done, but proud of his piloting.

Mopping his forehead, Fuchs resisted the temptation to call Ceres and ask if they had any fresh data on George’s ship. No! he scolded himself. You must remain silent.

Maybe that’s what George is doing, he thought. Gone silent, so no one can find him. Obviously he left in a big hurry. Most likely he was attacked, perhaps killed. But if he got away, now he’s staying silent to keep his attacker from finding him again.

But what do I do now? Fuchs wondered.

He left the bridge and went to the galley. The brain needs nourishment, he said to himself. I can’t think well on an empty stomach. He realized that his coverall shirt was sticky with perspiration. Honest work, he told himself. But it doesn’t smell good.

But by the time he washed up and ate a packaged meal, he still had no clear idea of what he should do next.

Find George, he thought. Yes, but how?

Back to the bridge he went and called up the search and rescue program from the computer files. “Aha!” he said aloud. Expanding spiral.

Standard operational procedure for a search mission was to fly an expanding spiral out from the last known position of the lost spacecraft. The one thing that worried Fuchs, though, was that George might have gone batting off at a high angle from the ecliptic. While the major planets orbited within a few degrees of the ecliptic path, plenty of asteroids roamed twenty or thirty degrees above or below that plane. Suppose George had gone angling away at high thrust? Fuchs knew he’d never find him then.

As it was, the Belt was so huge that even if George stuck close to the ecliptic, he could be halfway to hell by now. A few days at high thrust could push a ship all the way back to Earth. Or out past Jupiter.

Still, there was nothing more that Fuchs could do but fly his expanding spiral, and sweep with his radar at high angles above and below his position while he moved away from the asteroid.

He set the course, then got into his spacesuit to slither down the long buckyball cable that connected Starpower’s habitation unit with the equipment module. The hollow cable was big enough for a person to squeeze through, but it was not pressurized. You had to wear a suit, and that made crawling along the kilometer-long cable a long, arduous chore. Still, Fuchs had nothing else to do, and he wanted to see the laser that George had left behind.

Dorik Harbin was searching, too.

He had picked up Starpower’s telemetry signals within hours of Fuchs’s leaving Ceres and tracked the departing ship from a safe distance.

Before the day was out, however, the telemetry signal had abruptly cut off. Harbin debated moving close enough to the ship to sight it visually, but before he could make up his mind to do that, the telemetry came back on and showed that Starpower was moving again, cutting diagonally across the Belt at high thrust.

Where could he be going? Harbin asked himself. He must have a specific destination in mind, going at that velocity.

He matched Starpower’s course and speed, staying far enough behind the departing spacecraft that he wouldn’t be spotted. Even if Fuchs was cautious enough to probe behind him with radar, the beam would be so scattered by his own engine’s exhaust that he’d never see me, Harbin knew. He stayed within the shadow of Fuchs’s exhaust cloud and trailed Starpower—he thought. Actually he was following Fuchs’s escape pod.

Again he thought of Grigor’s comment: destroy Starpower and all this hunting and killing might be finished. I’ll get my money and a considerable bonus, Harbin thought. I can go back to Earth and find a safe area and live like an emir for the rest of my life.

Where would the best place be, on Earth? I want a warm climate, safe from the rising sea levels, no earthquakes, stable government. A wealthy country, not one where half the population is starving and the other half plotting revolution. Canada, perhaps. Or Australia. They have very tight restrictions of immigration, but with enough money a man can go wherever he wants. Maybe Spain, he thought. Barcelona is still livable, and Madrid hasn’t had a food riot in years.