The Rock Rats

poem by some Yank who’d been in on the Yukon gold rush nearly two centuries ago:

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red the North Lights swept in bars?—
Then you’ve a hunch what the music meant… hunger and night and the stars.

George nodded solemnly as he checked out the laser’s focus. Hunger and night and the stars, all right. We’ve got plenty of that. And a stark, dead world, too, aren’t you? he said to the impassive asteroid. Come to think of it, you’ve prob’ly got some gold tucked away inside you, huh? Strange kinda situation when water’s worth more’n gold. Price of gold’s dropped down to its value as an industrial metal. Jewelers must be going bonkers back Earthside.

“George?” the Turk’s voice in his helmet speaker startled him.

“Huh? What’sit?”

The kid’s name was Nodon. “Something is moving out at the edge of our radar’s resolution range.”

“Moving?” George immediately thought that maybe this asteroid had a smaller companion, a moonlet. But at the extreme range of their search radar? Not bloody likely.

“It has a considerable velocity. It is approaching very fast.”

That was the longest utterance the kid had made through the whole flight. He sounded worried.

“It can’t be on a collision course,” George said.

“No, but it is heading our way. Fast.”

George tried to shrug inside the spacesuit, failed. “Well, keep an eye on it. Might be another ship.”

“I think it is.”

“Any message from ’im?”

“No. Nothing.”

“All right,” said George, puzzled. “Say hullo to him and ask his identification. I’m gonna start workin’ the ores here.”

“Yes, sir.” The kid was very respectful.

Wondering what—or who—was out there, George thumbed the activator switch and the laser began to slash deeply into the asteroid’s rocky body. In the airless dark there was no sound; George couldn’t even feel a vibration from the big ungainly machine. The dead rock began to sizzle noiselessly along a pencil-slim line. The cutting laser emitted in the infrared, but even the guide beam of the auxiliary laser was invisible until the cutting raised enough dust to reflect its thin red pointing finger.

Be a lot easier if we could get nanomachines to do this, George thought. I’ve got to twist Kris Cardenas’s arm when we get back to Ceres, make her see how much we need her help. Little buggers could separate the different elements in a rock, atom by atom. All we’d hafta do is scoop up the piles and load ’em on the ship.

Instead, George worked like a common laborer, prying up thick, house-sized slabs of asteroidal rock as the laser’s hot beam cut them loose, clamping them together with buckyball tethers, and ferrying them to Matilda’s bulky propulsion module, which was fitted with attachment points for the cargo. By the time he had carried three such loads, using the jetpack of his suit to move the big slabs, feeling a little like Superman manhandling the massive yet weightless tonnages of ores, he was soaked with perspiration.

“Feels like a bloody swamp in this suit,” he complained aloud as he started back toward the asteroid. “Smells like one, too.”

“It is a ship,” said Nodon.

“You’re sure?”

“I can see its image on the display screen.”

“Give ’em another hail, then. See who they are.” George didn’t like the idea of another ship in the vicinity. It can’t be coincidence, he told himself.

He landed deftly on the asteroid about fifty meters from where the laser was still slicing up the rock. Why would a ship be heading toward us? Who are they?

Dorik Harbin sat at the controls of Shanidar, his dark bearded face impassive, his darker eyes riveted on the CCD display from the ship’s optical sensors. He could see the flashes of laser-heated rock spurting up from the asteroid and the glints of light they cast on the Waltzing Matilda, parked in orbit around the asteroid. The information from Grigor had been accurate, as usual. There was the ship, precisely where Grigor had said it would be.

Death was no stranger to Dorik Harbin. Orphaned from birth, he was barely as tall as the assault rifle the village elders gave him when Harbin had dutifully marched with the other preteens to the village down the road, where the evil people lived. They had killed his father before Harbin had been born and raped his pregnant mother repeatedly. The other boys sometimes sniggered that Dorik was conceived by one of the rapists, not the father that the rapists had hacked to death.

He and his ragamuffin battalion had marched down to that evil village and shot everyone there: all of them, men, women, children, babies. Harbin even shot the village dogs in a fury of vengeance. Then, under the pitiless eyes of the hard-faced elders, they had set fire to each and every house in that village. Dousing the bodies with petrol where they lay, they burned the dead, too. Some of them were only wounded, pretending to be dead to escape the vengeance they had reaped, until the flames ignited their clothing.

Harbin still heard their screams in his sleep.

When the blue-helmeted Peacekeeper troops had come into the region to pacify the ethnic fighting, Harbin had run away from his village and joined the national defense force. After many months of living in the hills and hiding from the Peacekeepers’ observation planes and satellites, he came to the bitter conclusion that the so-called national defense force was nothing more than a band of renegades, stealing from their own people, looting villages and raping their women.

He ran away again, this time to a refugee camp, where well-clad strangers distributed food while men from nearby villages sold the refugees hashish and heroin. Eventually Harbin joined those blue-helmeted soldiers; they were looking for recruits and offered steady pay for minimal discomfort. They trained him well, but more importantly they fed him and paid him and tried to instill some sense of discipline and honor in him. Time and again his temper tripped him; he was in the brig so often that his sergeant called him “jailbird.”

The sergeant tried to tame Harbin’s wild ferocity, tried to make a reliable soldier out of him. Harbin took their food and money and tried to understand their strange concepts of when it was proper to kill someone and when it was not. What he learned after a few years of service in the miserable, pathetic, deprived regions of Asia and Africa was that it was the same everywhere: kill or be killed.

He was picked for a hurry-up training course and sent with a handful of other Peacekeeper troops to the Moon, to enforce the law on the renegade colonists of Moonbase. They even allowed the specially-selected troopers dosages of designer drugs which, they claimed, would enhance their adaptation to low gravity. Harbin knew it was nothing more than a bribe, to keep the “volunteers” satisfied.

Trying to fight the tenacious defenders of Moonbase from inside a spacesuit was a revelation to Harbin. The Peacekeepers failed, even though the lunar colonists took great pains to avoid killing any of them. They returned to Earth, not merely defeated but humiliated. His next engagement, in the food riots in Delhi, finished him as a Peacekeeper. He saved his squad from being overrun by screaming hordes of rioters, but killed so many of the “unarmed” civilians that the International Peacekeeping Force cashiered him.

Orphaned again, Harbin took up with mercenary organizations that worked under contract to major multinational corporations. Always eager to better himself, he learned to operate spacecraft. And he quickly saw how fragile spacecraft were. A decent laser shot could disable a vessel in an eyeblink; you could kill its crew from a thousand kilometers away before they realized they were under attack.

Eventually he was summoned to the offices of Humphries Space Systems, the first time he had returned to