“There are no spares remaining, sir. You’ll have to use your suit’s fuel cell to power Robot Six until its battery cools to an acceptable temperature.”
I hated it when Forty-niner told me what I should do. Especially since I knew it as well as he did. Even more especially because he was always right, dammit.
“Give me an estimate on the time remaining to finish the meteor shield replacement.”
“Fourteen minutes, eleven seconds, at optimal efficiency, sir. Add three minutes for recircuiting Robot Six’s power pack, please.”
“Seventeen, eighteen minutes, then.”
“Seventeen minutes, eleven seconds, sir. That time is well within the available capacity of your suit’s fuel cell, sir.”
I nodded inside my helmet. Damned Forty-niner was always telling me things I already knew, or at least could figure out for myself. It irritated the hell out of me, but the blasted pile of chips seemed to enjoy reminding me of the obvious.
Don’t lose your temper, I told myself. It’s not his fault; he’s programmed that way.
Yeah, I grumbled inwardly. Maybe I ought to change its programming. But that would mean going down to the heart of the vessel and opening up its CPU. The bigbrains back at corporate headquarters put the computer in the safest place they could, not the cramped little pod I had to live in. And they didn’t want us foot soldiers tampering with the computers’ basic programs, either.
I finished the bumper replacement and came back into the ship through the pod’s airlock. My spacesuit smelled pretty damned ripe when I took it off. It might be a couple hundred degrees below zero out there, but inside the suit you got soaking wet with perspiration.
I ducked into the coffin-sized lav and took a nice, long, lingering shower. The water was recycled, of course, and heated from our fusion reactor. JRK49N had solar panels, sure, but out in the belt, you need really enormous wings to get a worthwhile amount of electricity from the sun, and both of the solar arrays had frozen up only two weeks out of Vesta. One of the maintenance jobs that the robots screwed up. It was on my list of things to do. I had to command Forty-niner to stop nagging me about it. The fusion-powered generator worked fine. And we had fuel cells as a backup. The solar panels could get fixed when we got back to Vesta—if the corporation didn’t decide to junk JRK49N altogether.
I had just stepped out of the shower when Forty-niner’s voice came through the overhead speaker:
“A vessel is in the vicinity, sir.”
That surprised me. Out here you didn’t expect company.
“Another ship? Where?” Somebody to talk to, I thought. Another human being. Somebody to swap jokes with and share gripes.
“A very weak radar reflection, sir. The vessel is not emitting a beacon nor telemetry data. Radar puts its distance at fourteen million kilometers.”
“Track?” I asked as I toweled myself.
“Drifting along the ecliptic, sir, in the same direction as the main belt asteroids.”
“No thrust?”
“No discernable exhaust plume, sir.”
“You’re sure it a ship? Not an uncharted ’roid?”
“Radar reflection shows it is definitely a vessel, not an asteroid, sir.”
I padded to my compartment and pulled on a fresh set of coveralls. No beacon. Drifting. Maybe it’s a ship in trouble. Damaged.
“No tracking beacon from her?” I called to Forty-niner.
“No telemetry signals, either, sir. No emissions of any kind.”
As I ducked through the hatch into the bridge, Forty-niner called out, “It has emitted a plasma plume, sir. It is maneuvering.”
Damned if his voice didn’t sound excited. I know it was just my own excitement: Forty-niner didn’t have any emotions. Still . . .
I slid into the command chair and called up a magnified view of the radar image. And the screen immediately broke into hash.
“Aw, rats!” I yelled. “What a time for the radar to conk out!”
“Radar is functioning normally, sir,” Forty-niner said calmly.
“You call this normal?” I rapped my knuckles on the static-streaked display screen.
“Radar is functioning normally, sir. A jamming signal is causing the problem.”
“Jamming?” My voice must have jumped two octaves.
“Communications, radar, telemetry, and tracking beacon are all being interfered with, sir, by a powerful jamming signal.”
Jamming. And the vessel out there was running silent, no tracking beacon or telemetry emissions.
A freebooter! All of a sudden, I wished I’d studied that tactical manual.
Almost automatically, I called up the comm system. “This is Humphrey Space Systems waterbot JRK49N,” I said, trying to keep my voice firm. Maybe it was a corporate vessel, or one of the mercenaries. “I repeat, waterbot JRK49N.”
No response.
“Their jamming blocks your message, sir.”
I sat there in the command chair staring at the display screens. Broken, jagged lines scrolled down all the comm screens, hissing at me like snakes. Our internal systems were still functional, though. For what is was worth, propulsion, structures, electrical power all seemed to be in the green. Life support too.
But not for long, I figured.
“Compute our best course for Vesta,” I commanded.
“Our present course—”
“Is for 78-13, I know. Compute high-thrust course for Vesta, dammit!”
“Done, sir.”
“Engage the main drive.”
“Sir, I must point out that a course toward Vesta will bring us closer to the unidentified vessel.”
“What?”
“The vessel that is jamming our communications, sir, is positioned between us and Vesta.”
Rats! They were pretty smart. I thought about climbing to a higher declination, out of the ecliptic.
“We could maneuver to a higher declination, sir,” Forty-niner said, calm as ever, “and leave the plane of the ecliptic.”
“Right.”
“But propellant consumption would be prohibitive, sir. We would be unable to reach Vesta, even if we avoided the attacking vessel.”
“Who says it’s an attacking vessel?” I snapped. “It hasn’t attacked us yet.”
At that instant the ship shuddered. A cluster of red lights blazed up on the display panel, and the emergency alarm started wailing.
“Our main deuterium tank has been punctured, sir.”
“I can see that!”
“Attitude jets are compensating for unexpected thrust, sir.”
Yeah, and in another couple minutes the attitude jets would be out of nitrogen. No deuterium for the fusion drive and no propellant for the attitude jets.
