The Rock Rats

With a cheerful wave, Pancho signed off. Amanda felt like crawling back into bed and staying there until Lars returned.

If he returned at all.

How long should I search? Fuchs asked himself. It’s been three days now, and no sign of George. No sign of anything.

He had known, intellectually, that the Belt was almost entirely empty space. Even in his freshman astronomy course he remembered it being compared to a big, empty theater that contained only a few specks of dust floating in its vast volume. Now he felt the reality of it. Staring out the windows in the bridge of Starpower, studying the screens that displayed the radar scans and telescopic views, he saw that there was nothing out there, nothing but empty space, darkness and eternal silence.

He thought of how Columbus’s crew must have felt, alone out in the middle of the Atlantic without even a bird in sight; nothing but empty sea and emptier sky.

Then the comm unit chirped.

Fuchs was startled by the unexpected noise. He turned in the command chair and saw that the communications display showed an incoming message had been received on the optical comm system.

An optical signal? Puzzled, he commanded the comm computer to display the message.

The screen flashed into a harsh jumble of colors while the speakers rasped with hisses and squeaks. Only random noise, Fuchs thought. Probably a solar flare or a gamma burster.

But the other sensors showed no evidence of a solar flare and, once he though about it, Fuchs wondered if a gamma-ray burst would not have registered on the optical receiver.

He ordered the navigation program to move Starpower back to the area where the optical signal had been detected. Turning a ship of Starpower’s mass was no simple matter. It took time and energy. But at last the nav computer reported it was done.

Nothing. The comm system remained silent.

It was a fluke, Fuchs told himself. An anomaly. Still, something must have caused it, and he felt certain that it wasn’t an internal glitch in the communications equipment. Nonsense, snapped the reasoning part of his brain. You’re convinced because you want it to be a signal. You’re letting your hopes overbalance your good sense.

Yes, that’s true, Fuchs admitted to himself. But he ordered the nav system to move Starpower along the vector that the spurious signal had come from.

Hoping that his gut feeling was closer to the mark than his rational mind, Fuchs followed that course for an hour, then two, then—

The comm screen lit up with a weak, grainy picture of what looked to Fuchs like a bald, emaciated Asian.

“This is the Waltzing Matilda. We are disabled and unable to control our course. We need help urgently.”

Fuchs stared at the streaky, weak image for several slack-jawed moments, then flew into a flurry of activity, trying to pin down Matilda’s location and move his own ship to her as quickly as possible while getting off a signal to her on every channel his comm system could transmit on.

Dorik Harbin was furious.

It’s a decoy! he raged. A stupid, sneaking decoy! And you fell for it. You followed it like an obedient puppy halfway to hell!

He had maneuvered Shanidar slightly away from the exhaust wake of what he’d thought was Starpower more out of boredom than any intelligent reason. He’d been following the ship’s telemetry signals for several days, intent on finding where it was heading. His standing orders from Grigor were to wait until a ship takes up orbit around a particular asteroid, then destroy it. Harbin knew without Grigor telling him that HSS then claimed the asteroid for itself.

But after several days his quarry showed no indication of searching for an asteroid. It simply puttered along at low thrust, like a tourist boat showing off the local sights. Except there were no tourists out here and no sights to show; the Belt was cold and empty.

Now Harbin could see clearly in his screens that what he’d been following was not Starpower at all but a crew emergency vehicle, a miserable escape pod.

This was no accident. Fuchs had deliberately set him up while he went off in some other direction. Where? Grigor would not be happy to learn that he’d failed. Harbin swore to himself that he would find Fuchs and destroy the cunning dog.

If he reversed his course it would cost so much of his propellant that he’d need another topping off within a few days. And the nearest HSS ship was at least three days off. Harbin searched his sensor screens. What he needed was a fair-sized rock close enough…

He found one, an asteroid that had enough mass for the maneuver he had in mind. Too small for a slingshot move, but Harbin eased close to the twelve-kilometer-long rock and put Shanidar into a tight orbit around it. He checked his nav computer twice before setting up the program. At precisely the proper instant he fired his thrusters, and Shanidar shot away from the unnamed asteroid in the direction Harbin wanted, at a fraction of the propellant loss that a powered turnaround would have cost.

Now he sped back toward the region where Starpower had fired off its decoy. That was easy to calculate: it had to be where Starpower’s telemetry signals went off for a few hours. That’s when the clever dog transferred his transmitter to the escape pod. He’s been running silent ever since.

Or maybe not, Harbin reasoned. He might be communicating with Ceres on another channel. Or perhaps signaling some other ship.

So Harbin kept all his communications receivers open as he raced back to the area where Fuchs had fooled him into following the decoy.

Chance favors the prepared mind. After two days of running at full thrust, Harbin picked up the distant, weak signal of Fuchs answering Waltzing Matilda’s distress call.

So that’s where he’s going. Harbin nodded to himself, satisfied that now he could destroy Starpower and finish the job on Waltzing Matilda.

WALTZING MATILDA

George had drifted to sleep in the copilot’s chair, leaving Nodon to monitor the control console. There wasn’t much to monitor. They were still drifting helplessly, alone, slowly starving.

“I have a signal!” Nodon exulted. His shout roused George from a dream about dining with a beautiful woman in the Earthview restaurant back in Selene. Groggy with sleep, George knuckled his eyes, wondering which was more important in his dream, the woman or the tucker. “What signal?” he mumbled.

Nodon was quivering with excitement. “Look!” He pointed a bony, shaking finger at the comm screen. “Look!”

George blinked several times. By crikes, there was Lars Fuchs’s dour, dead-serious face on the screen. George had never seen anyone more beautiful.

“I have received your distress call and am proceeding at full thrust to your position. Please home on my beacon and keep repeating your signal so my nav system can maintain an accurate track on you.”

Nodon’s fingers were already dancing across the keyboard on the control console.

“Ask ’im how long it’ll take him to reach us,” George said. “I have already fed the data into the computer.” Nodon tapped a few more keystrokes. “Ah. Here is the answer. Fifty-two hours.”

“A little more’n two days.” George broke into a shaggy smile. “We can hold up for two more days, can’t we mate?”

“Yes! Certainly!”