The Rock Rats

frown, teeth clenched so hard it made his jaws ache, he banged out the keyboard commands that ejected the pod into a long, parabolic trajectory that would send it across the Belt. It took an effort of will, but he did not send a message back to his wife.

I’m alone now, Fuchs thought as he directed Starpower toward the asteroid where Big George had last been heard from.

Diane Verwoerd was reading her favorite Bible passage: the story of the crooked steward who cheated his boss and made himself a nice feather bed for his retirement.

Whenever she had qualms about what she was doing, she called up Luke 16:1-13. It reassured her. Very few people understood the real message of the story, she thought as she read the ancient words on the wallscreen of her apartment.

The steward was eventually fired when his boss found out about his cheating. But the key to the tale was that the steward’s thefts from his master’s accounts were not so huge that the master wanted vengeance. He just fired the guy. And all through the years that the steward had been working for this master, he had put away enough loot so he could live comfortably in retirement. A sort of golden parachute that the boss didn’t know about.

Verwoerd leaned back languidly in her recliner. It adjusted its shape to the curves of her body and massaged her gently, soothingly. It had originally belonged to Martin Humphries, but she had shown him an advertisement for a newer model, which he had immediately bought and then instructed her to get rid of this one. So she removed it from his office and installed it in her own quarters.

With a voice command she ordered the computer to show her personal investment account. The numbers instantly filled the wallscreen. Not bad for a girl from the slums of Amsterdam, she congratulated herself. Over the years you’ve avoided the usual pitfalls of prostitution and drug dependency and even steered clear of becoming some rich fart’s mistress. So far, so good.

She spoke to the computer again, and the list of asteroids that she personally owned the claims for appeared on the screen. Only a half dozen of the little rocks, but they were producing ores nicely and building up profits steeply. Taxes would take a sizeable chunk of the money, but Verwoerd reminded herself that no government can tax money that you don’t have. Pay the taxes and be glad you owe them, she told herself.

Of course, Martin thought that HSS owned the claims to those asteroids. But with so many others in his clutches, a mere half-dozen was down below his radar horizon. Besides, whenever he wanted to check on anything, he always asked his trusted assistant to do it. So he’ll never find out about this little pilfering until after I’ve left his employment.

She cleared the list from the screen, and the verses from Luke came up again.

I’ll be able to retire very comfortably in a couple of years, Verwoerd told herself. It will all work out fine, as long as I don’t get too greedy—and as long as I keep Martin at arm’s length. The moment I give in to him, my days as an HSS employee are numbered.

She looked at her reflection in the mirror across the room and smiled to herself. Maybe I’ll give him a little fling, once I’m ready to retire. Once he fires me, I’ll get severance pay. Or at least a nice little going-away present from Martin. He’s like that.

Turning from her own image back to the words from the Bible, she frowned slightly at the final verse:

No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.

Perhaps, thought Diane Verwoerd. But I’m not really serving Martin Humphries. I’m working for him. I’m getting rather wealthy off him. But I’m serving only myself, no one else.

Still, she cleared the wallscreen with a single sharp command to the computer. The Bible passage disappeared, replaced by a reproduction of a Mary Cassat painting of a mother and child.

DOSSIER: JOYCE TAKAMINE

You had to have an education to be considered for a job at Selene. The lunar nation was hiring engineers and technicians, not fruit pickers. Joyce’s passport to the Moon was a battered old palmcomp that her father had given her. Through it she could access virtually any class in any university on the net. She studied every night; even when she was so tired from picking that she could barely find the strength to open the palmcomp’s scuffed plastic lid.

The other pickers complained that the flickering light kept them from sleeping, so Joyce moved outside the barracks and kept doggedly at her studies out in the open, under the stars. When she looked up at the Moon and saw Selene’s beacon light, it seemed to her as if that laser’s bright beam was calling to her.

Once a guy she briefly slept with stole her palmcomp; just walked off with it, as if he owned it. In a panicked fury, Joyce tracked him down at the next camp and nearly took his head off with a two-by-four. The owner’s guards let her go, once she told them the whole story. They had no use for thieves; especially stupid ones who let a scrawny oriental girl cold cock them.

In three years, Joyce got her degree in computer systems analysis from California Coast University. She applied for an advertised job at Selene. She didn’t get it. Four hundred and twenty-seven other people, most of them just as desperate and needy as Joyce, had applied for the same position.

The same day that she was turned down by Selene she got the message that both her parents had died in a freeway pileup during the earthquake that destroyed the shantytowns up in the hills above the drowned ruins of San Francisco.

CHAPTER 25

Nothing.

Fuchs scowled at the display screens that curved around his command chair, then looked out through the bridge’s windows. No sign of Waltzing Matilda. Nothing here but the lumpy irregular shape of an asteroid tumbling slowly in the barren emptiness, dark and pitted and strewn with small boulders and rocks.

This was the last position that the IAA had for Big George’s ship. Matilda’s telemetering had cut off here, at this location. But the ship was nowhere in sight.

Almost without consciously thinking about it, he put Starpower into a tight orbit around the little asteroid. Was George really here? He wondered. If he was he probably didn’t linger very—

Then he saw an area on the ’roid where neat rectangular slabs had been cut out of the rock. George had been here! He had started to mine the asteroid. Turning up the magnification on his telescope to max, Fuchs saw that there was still some equipment standing on the surface. He left in a hurry, Fuchs realized, too much of a hurry to pick up all his gear.

It was a cutting laser, Fuchs saw, still standing silently at the edge of one of the cut-out rectangles. I must retrieve it, he said to himself. It could be evidence.

The easiest way to get it would be to suit up and go EVA. But with no one else in the ship, Fuchs decided against that. Instead, he maneuvered Starpower into an orbit that matched the asteroid’s own spin, the tip of his tongue apprehensively between his teeth, then slowly, carefully, brought the big ship to within a dozen meters of the rocky surface.

Using the manipulator arms on Starpower’s equipment module, Fuchs snatched the laser up off the asteroid and tucked it inside the cargo bay. He was soaked with perspiration by the time the job