The Rock Rats

“Three ships in orbit,” Fuchs noted, eyes narrowing.

“Might be more on the other side, too,” said Nielson.

“They’ll all be armed.”

“I imagine so.” Nielson looked distinctly uncomfortable. “We could all get killed.”

Fuchs nodded, as if he had made a final calculation and was satisfied with the result.

To Nodon, sitting in the pilot’s chair, Fuchs said, “Proceed as planned.”

Turning to Nielson, “You should ask them for orbital parameters.”

Nielsen’s left cheek ticked once. “Lars, you don’t have to do this. You can get away, go back to your own ship, and no harm done.”

Fuchs glowered at him. “You don’t understand, do you? I want to do harm.”

Standing on the rim of the unnamed crater in his dustcaked spacesuit, Nguyan Ngai Giap surveyed the construction work with some satisfaction. Half a dozen long, arched habitat modules were in place. Front loaders were covering them with dirt to protect them against radiation and micrometeor hits. They would be ready for occupation on time, and he had already reported back to HSS headquarters at Selene that the troops could be sent on their way. The repair facilities were almost finished, as well. All was proceeding as planned.

“Sir, we have an emergency,” said a woman’s voice in his helmet earphones.

“An emergency?”

“An ore freighter, the Durant, is asking permission to take up orbit. It needs repairs.”

“Durant? Is this an HSS vessel?” Giap demanded.

“Yes, sir. An ore freighter. They say they were attacked by Fuchs’s ship.”

“Give them permission to establish orbit. Alert the other ships up there.”

“Yes, sir.”

Only after he had turned his attention back to the construction work did Giap wonder how Durant knew of this facility. HSS vessel or not, this base on Vesta was supposed to be a secret.

“Freighter approaching,” called the crewman on watch in Shanidar’s bridge.

Dorik Harbin hardly paid any attention. After the fruitless attempt to decoy Fuchs with the fake ore freighter, he had returned to the repaired and refurbished Shanidar, waiting for him in a parking orbit around Vesta. As soon as refueling was completed, Harbin could resume his hunt for Lars Fuchs. Shanidar’s crew had been disappointed that they had put in at Vesta instead of Ceres, where they could have spent their waiting time at the asteroid’s pub or brothel. Let them grumble, Harbin said to himself. The sooner we get Fuchs the sooner all of us can leave the Belt for good.

He thought of Diane Verwoerd. No woman had ever gained a hold on his emotions, but Diane was unlike anyone he had ever known before. He had had sex with many women, but Diane was far more than a bedmate. Intelligent, understanding, and as sharply driven to get ahead in this world as Harbin was himself. She knew more about the intrigues and intricacies of the corporate world than Harbin had ever guessed at. She would be a fine partner in life, a woman who could stand beside him, take her share of the burden and then some. And the sex was good, fantastic, better than any drug.

Do I love her? Harbin asked himself. He did not understand what love truly was. Yet he knew that he wanted Diane for himself, she was his key to a better world, she could raise him above this endless circle of mercenary killing that was his life.

He also knew that he would never have her until he found this elusive madman Fuchs and killed him.

“She’s carrying a heavy load of ores,” the crewman noticed.

Harbin turned his attention to the approaching ore freighter in the display screen on his bridge. Damaged in a fight with Fuchs, her captain had said. But he could see no signs of damage. Maybe they’re hidden by that pile of rocks she’s carrying, he thought. More likely the frightened rabbit raced away from the first sign of trouble and scurried here for protection.

Harbin’s beard had grown thick again over the months he had been chasing Fuchs across the Belt. He scratched at it idly as a new thought crossed his mind. How did this ore freighter know that we are building a base here? It’s supposed to be a secret. If every passing tugboat knows about it, Fuchs will hear of it sooner or later.

What difference? Harbin asked himself. Even if he knows about it, what can he do? One man in one ship, against a growing army. Sooner or later we’ll find him and destroy him. It’s only a matter of time. And then I can return to Diane.

As he watched the display screen, he noticed that the approaching freighter didn’t seem to be braking into an orbit. Instead, it was accelerating. Rushing toward the asteroid.

“It’s going to crash!” Harbin shouted.

Maneuvering a spinning spacecraft with pinpoint accuracy was beyond the competence of any of Fuchs’s people. Or of Nielsen’s crew. But to the ship’s computer it was child’s play: simple Newtonian mechanics, premised on the first law of motion.

Fuchs felt the ship’s slight acceleration as Durant followed the programmed course. Standing spread-legged on the bridge, he saw the rugged, pitted surface of the asteroid rushing closer and closer. He knew they were accelerating at a mere fraction of a g, but as he stared at the screen it seemed as if the asteroid was leaping up toward them. Will we crash? he asked himself. What of it? came his own mind’s answer. If we die that’s the end of it.

But as Durant accelerated silently toward the asteroid, its maneuvering jets fired briefly and the clamps holding nearly fifteen hundred thousand tons of asteroidal ores let go of their burden. The ship jinked slightly and slipped over the curve of the asteroid’s massive dark rim, accelerating toward escape velocity. The jettisoned ores spread into the vacuum of space like a ponderous rock slide, pouring down slowly toward the crater where the HSS base was being built.

In that vacuum, a body in motion stays in motion unless some outside force deflects it. In Vesta’s minuscule gravity, the rocks actually weighed next to nothing. But their mass was still nearly fifteen hundred thousand tons. They fell gently, leisurely, toward the asteroid’s surface, a torrent of death moving with the languid tumbling motion of a nightmare.

“Sir? Incoming call from Shanidar.” The woman’s voice in Giap’s earphones sounded strained, almost frightened.

Without waiting for him to tell her, she connected Harbin. “That ship is on a collision course with—no, wait. It’s released its cargo!”

It was difficult to look up from inside the spacesuit helmet, but when Giap twisted his head back and slightly sideways, all he could see was a sky full of immense dark blobs blotting out the stars.

He heard Harbin’s tense, strained voice, “Break us out of orbit!”

Then the ground jumped so hard he was blasted completely off his feet and went reeling, tumbling into an all-engulfing billow of black dust.

Aboard Shanidar, Harbin watched in horror as the rocks dropped ever-so-softly toward the construction site in the crater. The ore freighter was masked by them and heading over the curve of the asteroid’s bulk. The men and women down in that crater were doomed, condemned to inexorable death.

“Break us out of orbit!” he shouted to the woman in the pilot’s chair.

“Refueling isn’t completed!”

“Forget the mother-humping refueling!” he yelled. Pounding the intercom key on the console before him, he called to the crew, “Action stations! Arm the lasers! Move!”

But he knew it was already too late.

With nothing to impede their motion the landslide of rocks glided silently through empty space until they smashed into the surface of Vesta. The first one missed the buildings but blasted into the rim of the crater,