The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 43

She used her maiden name now: Amanda Cunningham. It wasn’t that she wanted to hide her marriage to Lars Fuchs; everybody on Ceres, every rock rat in the Belt knew she was his wife. But ever since Fuchs had taken off into the depths of space, she had worked on her own to establish herself and to achieve her goals. She sold off Helvetia, Ltd., to Astro Corporation for a pittance. Pancho, for once, outmaneuvered Humphries and convinced the Astro board of directors that this was a bargain they could not refuse.

“Besides,” Pancho pointed out to the board, staring straight at Humphries across the table from her, “we should be competing out there in the Belt. It’s where the natural resources are, and that’s where the real wealth comes from.”

Glad to be rid of Helvetia, Amanda watched Pancho begin to develop the warehouse into a profitable facility for supplying, repairing and maintaining the ships that plied the Belt. She lived off the income from the Astro stock that she had acquired from the sale, and concentrated her efforts on another objective, one that had originally been Lars’s goal: his idea of getting the rock rats to form some kind of government for themselves so they could begin to establish a modicum of law and order on Ceres. The independent-minded prospectors and miners had been dead-set against any form of government, at first. They saw laws as restrictions on their freedom; order as strangling their wild times when they put in at Ceres for R&R.

But as more and more ships were attacked they began to understand how vulnerable they were. A war was blazing across the Belt, with HSS attacking the independents, trying to drive them out of the Belt, while Fuchs singlehandedly fought back against HSS ships, swooping out of nowhere to cripple or destroy them.

In Selene, Martin Humphries howled with frustrated anger as his costs for operating in the Belt escalated over and again. It became increasingly expensive to hire crews to work HSS ships, and neither the IAA nor Harbin nor any of the other mercenaries that Humphries hired could find Fuchs and kill him.

“They’re helping him!” Humphries roared time and again. “Those goddamned rock rats are harboring him, supplying him, helping him to knock off my ships.”

“It’s worse than that,” Diane Verwoerd retorted. “The rock rats are arming their ships now. They’re shooting back—ineptly, for the most part. But it’s getting more dangerous out there.”

Humphries hired still more mercenaries to protect his ships and seek out Lars Fuchs. To no avail.

The people who, like Amanda, actually lived on Ceres—the maintenance technicians and warehouse operators and shopkeepers, bartenders, even the prostitutes—they gradually began to see that they badly needed some kind of law and order. Ceres was becoming a dangerous place. Mercenary soldiers and outright thugs swaggered through the dusty tunnels, making life dangerous for anyone who got in their way. Both HSS and Astro hired “security” people to protect their growing assets of facilities and ships. Often enough the security people fought each other in the tunnels, the Pub, or the warehouses and repair shops.

Big George Ambrose returned to Ceres, his arm regrown, with a contract to work as a technical supervisor for Astro.

“No more mining for me,” he told his friends at the Pub. “I’m a fookin’ executive now.”

But he brawled with the roughest of them. Men and women alike began to carry hand lasers as sidearms.

At last, Amanda got most of Ceres’s population to agree to a “town meeting” of every adult who lived on the asteroid. Not even the Pub was big enough to hold all of them, so the meeting was held electronically, each individual in their own quarters, all linked through the interactive phone system.

Amanda wore the turquoise dress she had bought at Selene as she sat at the desk in her quarters and looked up at the wallscreen. Down in the comm center, Big George was serving as the meeting’s moderator, deciding who would talk to the group, and in which order. He had promised, at Amanda’s insistence, that everyone who wanted to speak would get his or her turn. “But it’s goin’ t’be a bloody long night,” he predicted.

It was. Everyone had something to say, even though many of them repeated ideas and positions already discussed several times over. Through the long, long meeting—sometimes strident, often boring—Amanda sat and carefully listened to each and every one of them.

Her theme was simple: “We need some form of government here on Ceres, a set of laws that we can all live by. Otherwise we’ll simply have more and more violence until the IAA or the Peacekeepers or some other outside group comes in and takes us over.”

“More likely it’d be HSS,” said a disgruntled-looking prospector, stuck on Ceres temporarily while his damaged ship was being repaired. “They’ve been trying to take us over for years now.”

“Or Astro,” an HSS technician fired back.

George cut them both off before an argument swallowed up the meeting. “Private debates can be held on another channel,” he announced cheerfully, turning the screen over to the lean-faced, sharp-eyed Joyce Takamine, who demanded to know when the habitat was going to be finished so they could move up to it and get out of this dust-filled rathole.

Amanda nodded sympathetically. “The habitat is in what was once called a Catch-22 situation,” she replied. “Those of us who want it finished so we can occupy it, haven’t the funds to get the work done. Those who have the funds—such as Astro and HSS—have no interest in spending them on completing the habitat.”

“Well, somebody ought to do something,” Takamine said firmly.

“I agree,” said Amanda. “That’s something that we could do if we had some form of government to organize things.”

Nearly an hour later, the owner of the Pub brought up the key question. “But how’re we gonna pay for a government and a police force? Not to mention finishing the habitat. That’ll mean we all hafta pay taxes, won’t it?”

Amanda was ready for that one. In fact, she was glad the man had brought it up.

Noting that the message board strung across the bottom of her wallscreen immediately lit up from one end to the other, she said sweetly, “We will not have to pay taxes. The corporations can pay instead.”

George himself interjected the question everybody wanted to ask. “Huh?”

Amanda explained, “If we had a government in place, we could finance it with a very small tax on the sales that HSS and Astro and any other corporation makes here on Ceres.”

It took a few seconds for George to sort out all the incoming calls and flash the image of a scowling prospector onto her wall-screen.

“You put an excise tax on the corporations and they’ll just pass it on to us by raising their prices.”

Nodding, Amanda admitted, “Yes, that’s true. But it will be a very small rise. A tax of one percent would bring in ten thousand international dollars for every million dollars in sales.”

Without waiting for the next questioner, Amanda continued, “HSS alone cleared forty-seven million dollars in sales last week. That’s nearly two and a half a billion dollars per year, which means a tax of one percent would bring us more than twenty-four million in tax revenue from HSS sales alone.”

“Could we finish the habitat on that kind of income?” asked the next caller.

Amanda replied, “Yes. With that kind of assured income, we could get loans from the banks back on Earth to finish the habitat, just the same as any government secures loans to finance its programs.”

The meeting dragged on until well past one A.M., but when it was finished, Amanda thought tiredly that she had accomplished her objective. The people of Ceres were ready to vote to form some kind of a government.

As long as Martin Humphries doesn’t move to stop us, she reminded herself.