The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 4

Kris Cardenas still looked little more than thirty. Even in a gritty, shabby one-room habitat carved out of one of Ceres’s countless natural crevices, she radiated the blonde, sapphire-blue-eyed, athletic-shouldered look of a California surfer. That was because her body was filled with therapeutic nanomachines, virus-sized contrivances that pulled apart molecules of fat and cholesterol in her bloodstream, repaired damaged cells, kept her skin smooth and her muscles taut, acted as a purposeful immune system to protect her body from invading microbes. Nanotechnology was forbidden on Earth; Dr. Kristine Cardenas, Nobel laureate and former director of Selene’s nanotechnology laboratory, was an exile on Ceres.

For an exile who had chosen to live on the ragged frontier of human settlement, she looked happy and cheerful as she greeted Amanda and Lars Fuchs.

“How are you two doing?” she asked as she ushered them into her quarters. The twisting tunnel outside her door was a natural lava tube, barely smoothed by human tools. The air out there was slightly hazy with fine dust; every time someone moved in Ceres they disturbed the rock dust, and the asteroid’s gravity was so slight that the dust hung in the air constantly.

Amanda and Fuchs shuffled their feet across Cardenas’s bare rock floor and made their way to the room’s sofa—actually a pair of reclining seats scavenged from a spacecraft that had limped to Ceres and never made it out again. The seats still had safety harnesses dangling limply from them. Fuchs coughed slightly as he sat down.

“I’ll turn up the air fans,” Cardenas said, gliding to the control panel set into the room’s far wall. “Settle the dust, make it easier to breathe.”

Amanda heard a fan whine from somewhere behind the walls. Despite being dressed in a long-sleeved, high-buttoned jumpsuit, she felt chilled. The bare rock always felt cold to her touch. At least it was dry. And Cardenas had tried to brighten up the underground chamber with holowindows that showed views of wooded hillsides and flower gardens on Earth. She had even scented the air slightly with something that reminded Amanda of her childhood baths in real tubs with scads of hot water and fragrant soap.

Cardenas pulled an old laboratory stool from her desk and perched on it before her visitors, locking her legs around its high rungs. “So, how are you?” she asked again.

Fuchs cocked an eye at her. “That’s what we come to you to find out.”

“Oh, your physical.” Cardenas laughed. “That’s tomorrow, at the clinic. How are you getting along? What’s the news?”

With a glance at Amanda, Fuchs answered, “I think we’ll be able to go ahead with the habitat project.”

“Really? Has Pancho agreed—”

“Not with Astro’s help,” he said. “We’re going to do it ourselves.”

Cardenas’s eyes narrowed slightly. Then she said, “Is that the wisest course of action, Lars?”

“We really don’t have that much of a choice. Pancho would help us if she could, but Humphries will hamstring her as soon as she brings it up to the Astro board of directors. He doesn’t want us to improve our living conditions here.”

“He’s going to establish a depot here,” Amanda said. “Humphries Space Systems will, that is.”

“So you and the other rock rats are going to pursue this habitat program on your own?”

“Yes,” said Fuchs, quite firmly.

Cardenas said nothing. She clasped her knees and rocked back slightly on the stool, looking thoughtful.

“We can do it,” Fuchs insisted.

“You’ll need a team of specialists,” Cardenas said. “This isn’t something that you and your fellow prospectors can cobble together.”

“Yes. I understand that.”

Amanda said slowly, “Lars, I’ve been thinking. While you’re working on this habitat project you’ll have to stay here at Ceres, won’t you?”

He nodded. “I’ve already given some thought to leasing Star-power to someone else and living here in the rock for the duration of the project.”

“And how will you earn an income?” Cardenas interjected.

He spread his hands. Before he could reply, though, Amanda said, “I think I know.”

Fuchs looked at his wife, clearly puzzled.

“We can become suppliers for the other prospectors,” Amanda said. “We can open our own warehouse.”

Cardenas nodded.

“We can deal through Astro,” Amanda went on, brightening with each word. “We’ll obtain our supplies from Pancho and sell them to the prospectors. We can sell supplies to the miners, too.”

“Most of the mining teams work for Humphries,” Fuchs replied darkly. “Or Astro.”

“But they still need supplies,” Amanda insisted. “Even if they get their equipment from the corporations, they’ll still need personal items: soap, entertainment videos, clothing…”

Fuchs’s face was set in a grimace. “I don’t think you would want to handle the kinds of entertainment videos these prospectors buy.”

Undaunted, Amanda said, “Lars, we could compete against Humphries Space Systems while you’re directing the habitat construction.”

“Compete against Humphries.” Fuchs rolled the idea on his tongue, testing it. Then he broke into a rare grin. It made his broad, normally dour face light up. “Compete against Humphries,” he repeated. “Yes. Yes, we can do that.”

Amanda saw the irony in it, although the others didn’t. The daughter of a small shopkeeper in Birmingham, she had grown up hating her middle-class background and the lower-class workers her father sold to. The boys were rowdy and lewd, at best, and they could just as easily become dangerously violent. The girls were viciously catty. Amanda discovered early that being stunningly beautiful was both an asset and a liability. She was noticed wherever she went; all she had to do was smile and breathe. The trick was, once noticed, to make people see beyond her physical presence, to recognize the highly intelligent person inside that tempting flesh.

While still a teenager she learned how to use her good looks to get boys to do what she wanted, while using her sharp intellect to keep one jump ahead of them. She escaped her father’s home and fled to London, took lessons to learn to speak with a polished accent, and—to her complete astonishment—found that she had the brains and skill to be a first-rate astronaut. She was hired by Astro Manufacturing Corporation to fly missions between Earth and the Moon. With her breathless looks and seeming naiveté, almost everyone assumed she had slept her way to the top of her profession. Yet the truth was just the opposite; Amanda had to work hard to fend off the men—and women—who wanted to bed her.

It was at Selene that she had met Martin Humphries. He had been her gravest danger: he wanted Amanda and he had the power to take what he wanted. Amanda had married Lars Fuchs in part to get away from Humphries, and Lars knew it.

Now, here out on the fringe of humankind’s expansion through the solar system, she was about to become a shopkeeper herself. How father would howl at that, she thought. The father’s revenge: the child becomes just like the parent, in the end.

“Humphries won’t like competition,” Cardenas pointed out.

“Good!” exclaimed Fuchs.

Shaken out of her reverie, Amanda said, “Competition will be good for the prospectors, though. And the miners, too. It will lower the prices they have to pay for everything.”

“I agree,” said Cardenas. “But Humphries won’t like it. Not one little bit.”

Fuchs laughed aloud. “Good,” he repeated.