The Rock Rats

Spreading his hands placatingly, Zar said, “They’re out on the edge of nowhere, sailing alone through the Belt. Once a ship gets into trouble there’s no one near enough to help. What do you expect?”

Tomasselli shook his head. “When a spacecraft gets into trouble, as you put it, it shows up on the telemetry. They send out distress calls. They ask for help, or advice.”

Zar shrugged.

“We’ve had ships fail and crews die, god knows,” Tomasselli went on, the faint ring of vowels at the end of most of his words. “But these three are different. No calls for help, no telemetry showing failures or malfunctions. They just disappear—poof!”

Zar thought a moment, then asked, “Had they claimed any asteroids?”

“One of them had: Lady of the Lake. Two weeks after the ship disappeared and the claim was officially invalidated, the asteroid was claimed by a vessel owned by Humphries Space Systems: the Shanidar.”

“Nothing irregular there.”

“Two weeks? It’s as if the Humphries ship was waiting for Lady of the Lake to disappear so they could claim the asteroid.”

“You’re getting melodramatic, Franco,” said Zar. “You’re accusing them of piracy.”

“It should be investigated.”

“Investigated? How? By whom? Do you expect us to send search teams through the Asteroid Belt? There aren’t enough spacecraft in the solar system for that!”

Tomasselli did not reply, but his dark eyes looked brooding, accusing.

Zar frowned at his colleague. “Very well, Franco. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll talk to the Humphries people and see what they have to say about it.”

“They’ll deny everything, of course.”

“There’s nothing to deny! There’s no shred of evidence that they’ve done anything wrong!”

Tomasselli muttered, “I am going to examine all the claims made by HSS ships over the past month.”

“What for?”

“To see if there are any in the regions where those two other missing ships disappeared.”

Zar wanted to scream at the man. He’s nothing but a suspicious-minded young Italian, Zar thought, seeing nefarious plots and skullduggery wherever he looks. But he took a deep breath to calm himself and said in an even, measured tone:

“That’s fine, Franco. You check the claims. I’ll speak to the HSS people. Monday. I’ll do it first thing Monday morning, after I come back from the weekend.”

CHAPTER 11

There was no meeting hall in Ceres, no single place designated for public assemblies. That was mainly because there had never been a need for one; Ceres’s ragtag collection of miners and prospectors, repair people and technicians, merchants and clerks had never come together in a public assembly until now. The closest thing to a government on Ceres was a pair of IAA flight controllers who monitored the take-offs and landings of the ships that were constantly arriving for supplies and maintenance, then departing into the dark emptiness of the Belt.

So when Fuchs called for a public meeting, it took some doing for him to convince the other rock rats that a gathering was necessary and beneficial. As it was, hardly forty men and women out of the several hundred in the asteroid showed up at the Pub, which Fuchs had commandeered for his meeting. A few dozen others attended electronically, from their ships in transit through the Belt. Big George was among those latter; he had left Ceres in his Waltzing Matilda several days before Fuchs’s meeting convened.

It was a good-natured crowd that came together in the Pub at 1700 hours that afternoon. Like most spacecraft and off-Earth facilities, Ceres kept Universal Time. The Pub’s owner/barkeep had allowed his place to be used for the meeting upon Fuchs’s promise that it would take no longer than an hour. The “six o’clock swill” could proceed as usual.

“I’m no public speaker,” Fuchs said, standing atop the bar so everyone in the milling, chattering crowd could see him. Three big flatscreens had been wheeled into the back of the room; they showed nearly a score of individuals attending the meeting remotely. Many of the prospectors refused to do even that, claiming that they didn’t want anyone to know where they were, outside of the usual IAA trackers, whom they tolerated only because of the IAA’s tradition of confidentiality and non-interference in spacecraft operations, except for safety conditions.

“I’m no public speaker,” Fuchs repeated, louder.

“Then what’re you doing up there?” came an irreverent voice from the crowd. Everyone laughed.

Grinning back at the heckler, Fuchs rejoined, “It’s a dirty job…”

“…but somebody’s got to do it,” the whole crowd finished with him.

Fuchs laughed, a little sheepishly, and looked at Amanda, standing off by the wall toward his right. She smiled encouragement at him. The twins stood beside her, fully clothed in glittering metallic outfits. Even in plain coveralls Amanda still looked far more beautiful than they, in Fuchs’s eyes.

“Seriously,” he said, once the crowd settled down, “it’s time we talked about something that most of us find distasteful—”

“What’samatter Lars, the toilets backing up again?”

“The recycler breaking down?”

“No,” he said. “Worse than that. It’s time to start thinking about forming some kind of a government here.”

“Aw, shit!” somebody yowled.

“I don’t like the idea of rules and regulations any more than you do,” Fuchs said quickly. “But this community is growing and we don’t have any laws or law enforcement.”

“We don’t need ’em,” a woman shouted.

“We’ve been getting along okay without any.”

Fuchs shook his head. “There have been two brawls right here in the Pub in the past month. Someone deliberately damaged Yuri Kubasov’s ship last week. Deliberate sabotage.”

“That’s a private matter,” came a voice from the back of the chamber. “Yuri was chasing the wrong woman.”

A few people snickered knowingly.

“Then there was the break-in in my warehouse,” Fuchs added. “That was no minor affair; we lost more than a hundred thousand dollars worth of inventory.”

“Come on, Lars,” a woman challenged. “Everybody knows that you’re competing against HSS. So they’re playing a little rough; that’s your problem, not ours.”

“Yeah, if you and Humphries are battling it out, why try to drag us into your fight?”

Glancing again toward Amanda, Fuchs answered, “It’s not my fight. It’s yours.”

“The hell it is!” said one of the men, heatedly. “This is between you and Humphries. It’s personal and it’s got nothing to do with us.”

“That’s not true, as you’ll soon find out.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Reluctantly, surprised at how hard it was to bring out the words, he told them, “It means that Amanda and I will be leaving Ceres shortly. We’ll be returning to Earth.”

“Leaving?”

Feeling real pain, Fuchs went on, “Humphries has made an offer that’s much too generous for us to us to ignore. HSS will be taking over Helvetia’s warehouse and all its services.”

For several heartbeats there was absolute silence through the Pub.

Then, from one of the flatscreens, Big George said, “That means HSS will be our only supplier.”

“They’ll have a monopoly here!” someone else wailed.

With a grave nod, Fuchs said, “That’s why it’s important for you to form some kind of government, some