Mother Lode

hard as he passed her so that the erupting, fiery havoc overtook her first and encased her as it had done once before. Her screams of agony quickly ceased to have a physical source as she knew the torment of immobility, of imprisonment inside a mass of cooling core material. «My God,» Ursy Wade said, as she watched a world explode into fragments. Julie Roberts gave quick orders. Rimfire blinked away from the exploding world, lest she be struck by the debris that was spreading into space. Ursy Wade took one quick look at Murdoch's Plough before the blink and, after Rimfire was back in normal space she activated a detector. To her amazement, the converted destroyer was still there. The instruments showed masses of rock and debris scattered all around her, but she was still there, apparently whole. Mop leapt into Ursy's lap, licked her hand. «My God,» Ursy said, «do you have any idea what you did?» «You bet your sweet ass,» Erin Kenner said, unheard. EPILOGUE Although the lights were low in the luxurious cabin aboard the sleek X&A destroyer converted into a private yacht and equipped with mining gear, Mop the dog's built-in alarm told him it was time to get up. He lay in his bed with his feet up in the air, his head hanging over the edge of the soft mattress, hairy ears brushing the thick carpet. He rolled to his feet, yawned and stretched, scratched behind his left ear with a quizzical expression on his face, and then walked to the big bed. He released a few experimental grunts and when there was no movement he crouched and leapt up onto the foot of the bed because when it was time for Mop the dog to get up it was time for everyone to get up. He crept softly upward, peered into the sleeping faces, made soft, grunting sounds in his throat. Still nothing. He went back to the foot of the bed, lay down with his head resting on a covered leg and waited patiently for about two minutes. By that time he was convinced that it was more than time for everybody to be up and about and giving some love and attention to a little dog. He began to scratch at the covers, found an opening, burrowed underneath and chewed gently on a set of shapely, bare toes. «Unnnnn,» Erin Kenner Gale groaned, moving her foot. Mop pursued, pushing his way under the covers, and began to get toes again. «You hairy little varmint,» Erin said, reaching down to pull Mop up beside her. «All right, all right. I'm awake, you animated alarm clock. Get Daddy.» Mop wriggled in excitement. His most pressing duty aboard ship was to see to it that everyone got out of bed in the morning to give a little dog a pat or two. He scampered across the bed and lapped a big, wet, doggie kiss right on Denton Gale's lips. Denton sat up, sputtering, wiping his mouth. He reached for the dog, who playfully leapt away and then came back to growl fiercely and gnaw gently on Dent's hand. «What would we do without you, Mr. Mop?» Dent asked. «Get a little extra sleep, I imagine,» Erin said. Dent leaned over to give her a good morning kiss. «Go brush the doggie slobber away,» Erin said. «He's your damned dog,» Dent said, seizing her and pushing her down onto the bed. She struggled to avoid his kiss. Mop got in on the fun and managed to lap one across her mouth as she twisted her head to avoid Dent's lips. «Well, what the hell,» she said, relaxing, putting her arms around Dent, accepting his kiss. The Yorkshire Terror, named in honor of a hairy little dog who had mastered the buttonology of the weapons' control system on an X&A explorer, was orbiting alongside a ring of debris that had been, not once but twice, a world. After breakfast, Erin and Dent went to mining control and began a search. Two days later they were about to give up when the detectors sang of gold, gold in plenty. They latched onto an extra large asteroid and soon Terror's mining equipment was digging out a vein so rich that in less than a week the number one cargo bay was laden with ore. The search went on. Another good ore bed was mined. Terror's instruments were for superior to those of the old Mother Lode. She could sit off from the asteroid belt and search hundreds of chunks of rock for gold and other things without moving. In less than three months she was laden to capacity with rich gold ore. Erin started the generator charging, wanting to be able to blink well past the Dead Worlds before having to halt for charge again. Dent was sleeping. She sat in the command chair, feet up on the console. Mop dozed, curled into a ball in an open space behind the computer keyboard. Erin closed her eyes, let a pleasant drowsiness take her. Somewhere aboard the converted destroyer a relay was activated and an air filtering system came on with a whoosh. The sound caused Erin's eyes to jerk open and cast around for the source of the sound. Moments like that came to her now and then—pure panic. It had been almost two years since she'd last been in the star-crowded area near the galactic core, but the memories were still vivid. Out there in a ring around the sun was their world. Somewhere among the masses of shattered rock and space-cooled masses of the planet's formerly molten core they were there. Mop, sensing Erin's momentary distress, moved close to her and offered his right paw. She shook it tenderly. «Yep,» she said, «Mr. Mop. Mr. Mop the hero.» Mop grinned, not because he was a hero—he didn't understand hero—but because he liked Erin to hold his paw. «They could not have survived that,» Ursy Wade had said, after the planet buster burrowed its way into the mantle to burst the world open like a dropped melon. But they had survived just that once before. «I don't want to go out there again,» Denton told Erin, after they had answered X&A questions repeatedly for over ninety days. The questions had been asked behind closed doors because a curtain of secrecy had been thrown over the Rimfire incident by the president of the United Planets Council. «But how, Miss Kenner, did you, ah, reenter your, ah, body after the aliens, whom you claim could, ah, 'stash you away' as you say in the brain of a very small dog— « She had said, «I don't know.» The inert bodies, the bodies of Erin Kenner and Denton Gale, were removed from Murdoch's Plough to the sick bay aboard Rimfire. Denton Gale regained consciousness within hours of his arrival aboard the X&A ship. Erin Kenner didn't move, other than to breathe evenly and deeply, until a small, hairy dog sneaked in when a med-tech opened the door. He jumped up onto Erin's bed and licked her politely on the cheek and Erin sat up in bed and said, «Hi, Mr. Mop. What do you think?» Ursy Wade said it was like a movie where the dying heroine is revived by her lover's kiss. «Are you calling me a bitch, Ursy?» Erin asked jokingly. «Hey, you could do worse than Mr. Mop,» Ursy said. «I think we both did, once,» Erin said, winking at Ursy and nodding toward Jack Burnish. «Now that's a real dog, « Ursy said, grinning. All that joking was after Julie Roberts had thrown a fit on Erin for having used Mr. Mop to launch a planet buster. Julie was still a bit stiff toward Erin even when she heard it all from Erin and Dent. They had been, after all, the only living aliens ever to be encountered by man. Julie knew that there were people on Xanthos who would feel that she had lost a great opportunity to advance man's knowledge, people who would feel that she should have risked everything up to and including ship and crew to keep the aliens alive and to stay in contact with them. But she'd seen the exposed facial bones of the ship's chief med-officer. She saw a holo-tape from the library of Murdoch's Plough documenting how the aliens had built a planet from scraps. She had heard both Erin and Dent describe, while under the influence of a hypnotic drug that made them incapable of either falsehood or exaggeration, the thinking process of the aliens, their attitude toward human life. Julie had decided, by the time Rimfire blinked back to Xanthos with the converted destroyer locked in her generator field, that Erin had been right to put the aliens back into cold storage. She didn't know what they had been, although there were some fanciful speculations aboard Rimfire when the holo-tapes of the female's extended speech were shown. Some of the more scholarly and a few of the more religious ones had some interesting theories based on her statement that her name was «Legion.» «It must be pointed out specifically,» said Ursy, during one heated argument, «that they never created anything. They just moved atoms and molecules and stuff around. So if you say they were divine angels, you're as full of shit as a Christmas turkey and, furthermore, not just a little bit blasphemous, because these were evil mothers. Evil.» «There were angels who were once divine, but then were not,» said a sub-commander called Preacher, because his main form of relaxation was studying the Bible. «She said her name was Legion. That phrase was used once before, when Jesus cast out devils and put them into a herd of swine.» «Whether or not she was a devil, she was a devil,» Ursy said. Julie didn't want to waste her life in idle speculation. They were gone. She just wanted them to stay gone. In fact, she recommended that an X&A cordon be placed around the asteroid ring to keep anyone from stumbling onto their bones the way Erin and Dent had until a small fleet of X&A ships could reduce the asteroid belt to motes in space. She was overruled. Perhaps, she thought, they didn't believe what they heard back there on Xanthos far from the eerie star fields of the Dead Worlds and the asteroid belt that lay beyond in the glare of the old, malevolent core stars. «I want you two to go back out there,» Julie told Erin and Dent, after the courts had awarded the converted destroyer to Mr. and Mrs. Denton Gale in lieu of a salvage settlement from the defunct Haven Refining Company. «I don't want to go back out there,» Erin said. «I can't go,» Julie said. «I have orders. You can. And you must.» Erin shuddered. «You want us to go bone hunting again.» «That's the idea.» «And if we find anything?» «That ship you own has a laser cannon as powerful as those aboard most fleet ships of the line.» «I think I understand,» Denton said. «You're afraid that sometime in the future some unlucky prospector might find a few fossilized bones and take them aboard his vessel.» «I know someone who did just that,» Julie said. «It's a job for X&A,» Erin protested. «Honey, X&A is made up of people. And Headquarters is made up of that peculiar type of people who think that longevity guarantees wisdom. We're in a period of time when the Service is commanded by ground pounders. What can you expect?» «Oh, shit,» Erin said. The Yorkshire Terror was charged. Erin decided to make one last check. She put the ship on flux and used up several weeks in a spirited circumnavigation of the asteroid ring, the sensors set to the density of fossil bone. «We're spinning our wheels,» Dent said. «The bones we found were in the crust of the original planet. When they reassembled it, everything was