The Rock Rats

“I’ve seen those videos,” Stavenger said, grinning.

“Ah. I hope you enjoyed them.”

“Very much,” he said. Then, pulling his chair a bit closer to hers, he asked, “What can I do, personally, to make your visit more… productive?”

She glanced at the ceiling. “We are alone?”

“Yes,” Stavenger assured her. “No listening devices here. No bugs of any kind.”

She nodded, her smile gone. “Good. The message I carry is for your ears alone.”

“I understand,” said Stavenger, also fully serious.

Jatar Pahang was not only the world’s most popular video star; she was also the mistress of Xu Xianqing, chairman of the world government’s inner council, and his secret envoy to Stavenger and the government of Selene.

CHAPTER 45

The art of governing, thought Xu Xianqing, is much like the art of playing the piano: never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

It had been a long, treacherous road to the leadership of the world government. Xianqing had left many friends, even members of his own family, by the wayside as he climbed to the shaky pinnacle of political power. The precepts of K’ung Fu-Tzu had been his nominal moral guide; the writings of Machiavelli his actual handbook. During his years of struggle and upward striving, more than once he marveled inwardly that he—or anyone—bothered even to try. Why am I driven to climb higher and higher? he asked himself. Why do I take on such pains, such risks, such unending toil?

He never found a satisfactory answer. A religious man might have concluded that he had been chosen for this service, but Xianqing was not a man of faith. Instead, he considered himself a fatalist, and reasoned that the blind forces of history had somehow pushed him to his present pinnacle of authority and power.

And responsibility. Perhaps that was the true, ultimate answer. Xianqing understood that with the power and authority came responsibility. The planet Earth was suffering a cataclysm unmatched in all of human history. The climate was changing so severely that no one could cope with the sudden, disastrous floods and droughts. Earthquakes raged. Cities were drowned by rising waters. Farmlands were parched by shifting rainfall patterns, then washed away by savage storms. Millions had already died, and hundreds of millions more were starving and homeless.

In many lands the bewildered, desperate people turned to fundamentalist faiths for help and strength. They traded their individual liberties for order and safety. And food.

Yet, Xianqing knew, the human communities on the Moon and in the Asteroid Belt lived as if the travails of their brethren on Earth meant nothing to them. They controlled untold wealth: energy that Earth’s peoples desperately needed, and natural resources beyond all that Mother Earth could provide its wretched and despairing children.

The giant corporations sold fusion fuels and solar energy to the wealthy of Earth. They sold metals and minerals from the asteroids to those who could afford it. How can I convince them to be more generous, to be more helping? Xianqing asked himself every day, every hour.

There was only one way that he could see: Seize control of the riches of the Asteroid Belt. The fools who plied that dark and distant region, the prospectors and miners and their corporate masters, were fighting among themselves. The ancient crime of piracy had reappeared out there among the asteroids. Murder and violence were becoming commonplace.

The world government could send an expedition of Peacekeepers to Ceres to restore order, Xianqing thought. We could stop the mayhem and bring peace to the region. And thereby, we could gain control of those precious resources. The prospectors and miners would grumble, of course. The corporations would howl. But what could do they do in the face of a fait accompli? How could they protest against the establishment of law and peace along that murderous frontier?

One thing barred such a prospect: Selene.

The people of the lunar community had fought for their independence and won it. They would not sit back and allow the world government to seize the Asteroid Belt. Would they fight? Xianqing feared that they would. It would not be difficult for them to attack spacecraft that were launched from Earth. We live in the bottom of a gravity well, Xianqing knew. While our vessels fight their way into space, Selene could destroy them, one by one. Or worse yet, cut off all supplies of energy and raw materials from space. Earth would be reduced to darkness and impotence.

No, direct military intervention in the Belt would be counterproductive—unless Selene could be neutralized.

So, Xianqing decided, if I cannot be a conqueror, I will become a peacemaker. I will lead the effort to resolve the fighting in the Asteroid Belt and gain the gratitude of future generations.

His first step was to contact Douglas Stavenger, in secret, through his beautiful mistress.

CHAPTER 46

“This isn’t going to work, Lars,” said Boyd Nielson. Fuchs muttered, “That’s my worry, not yours.”

“But some of those people down there are just construction workers,” Nielson pleaded. “Some of them are friends of ours, for god’s sake!”

Fuchs turned away. “That can’t be helped,” he growled. “They shouldn’t be working for Humphries.”

Nielson was an employee of Humphries Space Systems, commander of the ore freighter William C. Durant, yet he had been a friend of Fuchs’s in the early days on Ceres, before all the troubles began. Fuchs had tracked the Durant as the ship picked its way from one asteroid to another, loading ores bound back to the Earth/Moon system. With a handful of his crew, Fuchs had boarded Nielsen’s ship and taken it over. Faced with a half-dozen fierce-looking armed men and women, there was no fight, no resistance from Nielson or his crew. With its tracking beacon and all other communications silenced, Fuchs abruptly changed Durant’s course toward the major asteroid Vesta.

“Vesta?” Nielson had asked, puzzled. “Why there?”

“Because your employer, the high-and-mighty Mister Martin Humphries, is building a military base there,” Fuchs told him.

Fuchs had heard the rumors in the brief flurries of communications he received from Amanda, back at Ceres. HSS people were building a new base on Vesta. More armed ships and mercenaries were going to use the asteroid as the base from which they would hunt down Lars Fuchs and kill him.

Fuchs decided to strike them first. He ordered the compliant Nielson to contact Vesta and tell them that Durant had been damaged in a fight with Fuchs’s ship and needed to put in for repairs.

But now, as the two men stood at the command console on Durant’s bridge and Nielson finally understood what Fuchs was going to do, he began to feel frightened. He was a lean, wiry redhead with a pointed chin and teeth that seemed a size too big for his jaw. Nielsen’s crew were all locked in their privacy cubicles. Nodon and the other Asians were at the ship’s controls. Nielson was not the nervous type, Fuchs knew, but as they approached Vesta he started to perspire visibly.

“For the love of mercy, Lars,” he protested.

“Mercy?” Fuchs snapped. “Did they show mercy to Niles Ripley? Did they show mercy to any of the people in the ships they destroyed? This is a war, Boyd, and in a war there is no mercy.”

The asteroid looked immense in the bridge’s main display screen, a massive dark sphere, pitted with numberless craters. Spreading across one of the biggest of the craters, Fuchs saw, was a tangle of buildings and construction equipment. Scorch marks showed where shuttlecraft had landed and taken off again.