The Rock Rats

weeks.” He spoke in her own Mongol dialect now; haltingly, but he was learning his crew’s language. He did not want them to be able to keep secrets from him.

One of the auxiliary screens lit up with thin, looping curves of yellow set against a sprinkling of green dots.

Fuchs studied the display. If it was to be believed, that yellow line represented the course that the Humphries ship had followed over the past six weeks, picking up loads of ore at five separate asteroids. Fuchs did not believe it.

“It’s a fake,” he said aloud. “If she’d really followed that plot she’d be out of propellant by now and heading for a rendezvous with a tanker.”

Nodon said, “According to their flight plan, they will increase acceleration in two hours and head inward to the Earth/Moon system.”

“Not unless they’ve refueled in the past few days,” Fuchs said.

“There is no record of that. No tankers in the vicinity. No other ships at all.”

Fuchs received brief snippets of intelligence information from the friendly ships he occasionally visited. Through those independent prospectors he arranged a precarious line of communications back to Ceres by asking them to tell Amanda what frequency he would use to make his next call to her. His calls were months apart, quick spurts of ultracompressed data that told her little more than the fact that he was alive and missed her. She sent similar messages back by tight laser beam to predesignated asteroids. Fuchs was never there to receive them; he left a receiving set on each asteroid ahead of time that relayed the message to him later. He had no intention of letting Humphries’s people trap him.

But now he felt uneasy about this supposed fat, dumb freighter. It’s a trap, he heard a voice in his mind warning him. And he remembered that Amanda’s latest abbreviated message had included a piece of information from Big George to the effect that Humphries’s people were setting up decoy ships, “Trojan horses,”

George called them, armed with laser weapons and carrying trained mercenary troops whose mission was to lure Fuchs into a fatal trap.

“George says it’s only a rumor,” Amanda had said hastily, “but it’s a rumor that you should pay attention to.”

Fuchs nodded to himself as he stared at the image of the ship on the display screen. Some rumors can save your life, he thought.

To the woman piloting the ship he commanded, “Change course. Head back deeper into the Belt.”

She wordlessly followed his order.

“We leave the ship alone?” Nodon asked.

Fuchs allowed the corners of his mouth to inch upward slightly into a sour smile, almost a sneer. “For the time being. Let’s see if the ship leaves us alone once we’ve turned away from it.”

Sitting in the command chair on the bridge of W. Wilson Humphries, Dorik Harbin was also watching the display screens. He clenched his teeth in exasperation as he saw the ship that had been following them for several hours suddenly veer away and head back into the depths of the Belt.

“He suspects something,” said his second-in-command, a whipcord-lean Scandinavian with hair so light she seemed almost to have no eyebrows. She had a knack for stating the obvious.

Wishing he were alone, instead of saddled with this useless crew of mercenaries, Harbin muttered, “Apparently.”

The crew wasn’t useless, exactly. Merely superfluous. Harbin preferred to work alone. With automated systems he had run his old ship, Shanidar, by himself perfectly well. He could go for months alone, deep in solitude, killing when the time came, finding solace in his drugged dreaming.

But now he had a dozen men and women under his command, his responsibility, night and day. Diane had told him that Humphries insisted on placing troops in his decoy ships; he wanted trained mercenaries who would be able to board Fuchs’s ship and carry back his dead body.

“I tried to talk him out of it,” Diane whispered during their last night together, “but he won’t have it any other way. He wants to see Fuchs’s dead body. I think he might have it stuffed and mounted as a trophy.”

Harbin shook his head in wonder that a man with such obsessions could direct a deadly, silent war out here among the asteroids. Well, he thought, perhaps only a man who is obsessed can direct a war. Yes, he answered himself, but what about the men who do the fighting? And the women? Are we obsessed, too?

What difference? What difference does any of it make? How did Kayyam put it?

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon, Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty face Lighting a little Hour or two—is gone.

What difference do our own obsessions make? They turn to ashes or prosper. Then they melt like snow upon the desert. What difference? What difference?

He heard his second-in-command asking, “So what are we going to do? He’s getting away.”

He said calmly, “Obviously, he doesn’t believe that we’re carrying ores back to Earth. If we turn around and chase him we’ll simply be proving the point.”

“Then what do we do?” the Scandinavian asked. The expression on her bony, pale face plainly showed that she wanted to go after the other ship.

“We continue to behave as if we are an ore-carrier. No change in course.”

“But he’ll get away!”

“Or come after us, once we’ve convinced him that we’re what we pretend to be.”

She was clearly suspicious of his logic, but murmured, “We play cat and mouse, then?”

“Yes,” said Harbin, glad to have satisfied her. It didn’t seem to matter to her which one of the two ships was the cat and which the mouse.

In Selene, Douglas Stavenger stood by his office window, watching the kids out in the Grand Plaza soaring past on their plastic wings. It was one of the thrills that could only be had on the Moon, and only in an enclosed space as large as the Grand Plaza that was filled with breathable air at normal Earthly pressure. Thanks to the light gravity, a person could strap wings onto her arms and take off to fly like a bird on nothing more than her own muscle power. How long has it been since I’ve done that? Stavenger asked himself. The answer came to him immediately: too blasted long. He chided himself, For a retired man, you don’t seem to have much fun.

Someone was prodding the council to allow him to build a golf course out on the floor of Alphonsus. Stavenger laughed at the idea, playing golf in space suits, but several council members seemed to be considering it quite seriously.

His desk phone chimed, and the synthesized voice announced, “Ms. Pahang is here.”

Stavenger turned to his desk and touched the button that opened his door. Jatar Pahang stepped through, smiling radiantly.

She was the world’s most popular video star, “The Flower of Malaya,” a tiny, delicate, exotic woman with lustrous dark eyes and long, flowing, midnight-black hair that cascaded over her bare shoulders. Her dress shimmered in the glareless overhead lights of Stavenger’s office as she walked delicately toward him.

Stavenger came around his desk and extended his hand to her. “Ms. Pahang, welcome to Selene.”

“Thank you,” she said in a voice that sounded like tiny silver bells.

“You’re even more beautiful than your images on-screen,” Stavenger said as he led her to one of the armchairs grouped around a small circular table in the corner of his office.

“You are very gracious, Mr. Stavenger,” she said as she sat in the chair. Her graceful frame made the chair seem far too large for her.

“My friends call me Doug.”

“Very well. And you must call me Jatar.”

“Thank you,” he said, sitting beside her. “All of Selene is at your feet. Our people are very excited to have you visit us.”

“This is my first time off Earth,” she said. “Except for two vids we made in the New China space station.”