They were making small cooing sounds as he dogged the hatch.
* * *
“Master—” The engineering slave sounded worried.
“Not now!” Dnivtopun said.
They were nearly in position to activate the Standing Wave and go faster than light; the Ruling Mind had built up the necessary .3 of lightspeed. It was an intricate job, piloting manually. He had disconnected the main computer; it was tnuctipun work, and he did not trust the innermost programs. The problem was that so much else was routed through it. Of course, the zengaborni should be at the board; they were expensive but had an instinctive feel for piloting. Now, begin the phase transition . . .
“Master, the density sensor indicates a mass concentration on our vector!”
Dnivtopun was just turning toward the slave when the collision alarm began to wail, and then—
-discontinuity-
Chapter I
“Right, give me a reading on the mass detector,” the prospector said; like many rockjacks, he spoke to his computer as if it were human. It wasn’t, of course; sentient computers tended to turn catatonic, usually at the most inopportune moments, so any illusion of sentience was just that; but most rockjacks talked to the machinery anyway.
He was a short man for a Belter, with the slightly seedy run-down air that was common in the Alpha Centauri system after the kzinti conquest of Wunderland and its Belt. There was hunger in the eyes that skipped across the patched and mismatched screens of the Lucky Strike; the little torchship had not been doing well of late, and the kzin-nominated purchasing combines on the asteroid base of Tiamat had been squeezing harder and harder. The life bubble of his singleship smelled, a stale odor of metal and old socks; the conditioner was not getting out all of the ketones.
Collaborationist ratcat-loving bastards, he thought, and began the laborious manual set-up for a preliminary analysis. In his mother’s time, there would have been automatic machinery to do that. And a decent life-support system, and medical care that would have made him merely middle-aged at seventy, not turning grey and beginning to creak at the joints.
Bleeping ratcats. The felinoid aliens who called themselves kzinti had arrived out of nowhere, erupting into the Alpha Centauri system with gravity-polarizer driven ships and weapons the human colonists could never match. Could not have matched even if they had a military tradition, and humans had not fought wars in three centuries. Wunderland had fallen in a scant month of combat, and the Serpent Swarm asteroid belt had followed after a spell of guerilla warfare.
He shook his head and returned his attention to the screens; unless he made a strike this trip he would have to sell the Lucky Strike, work as a sharecrop-prospector for one of the Tiamat consortia. The figures scrolled up.
“Sweet Finagle’s Ghost,” he whispered in awe. It was not a big rock, less than a thousand meters ’round. But the density . . . “It must be solid platinum!”
Fingers stabbed at the board; lasers vaporized a pit in the surface, and spectroscopes probed. A frown of puzzlement. The surface was just what you would expect in this part of the Swarm, carbonaceous compounds, silicates, traces of metal. A half-hour spent running the diagnostics made certain that the mass-detector was not malfunctioning either, which was crazy.
Temptation racked him suddenly, a feeling like a twisting in the sour pit of his belly. There was something very strange here; probably very valuable. Rich, he thought. I’m rich. He could go direct to the ratcat liaison on Tiamat; the kzinti were careful not to become too dependent on the collabo authorities. They rewarded service well. Rich. Rich enough to . . . Buy a seat on the Minerals Commission. Retire to Wunderland. Get decent medical care before I age too much.
He licked sweat off his upper lip and hung floating before the screens. “And become exactly the sort of bastard I’ve hated all my life,” he whispered.
I’ve always been too stubborn for my own good, he thought with a strange sensation of relief as he began to key in the code for the tightbeam message. It wasn’t even a matter of choice, really; if he’d been that sort, he wouldn’t have hung on to the Lucky Strike this long. He would have signed on with the Concession; you ate better even if you could never work off the debts.
And Markham rewarded good service, too. The Free Wunderland Navy had its resources, and its punishments were just as final as the kzinti. More certain, because they understood human nature better . . .
* * *
-discontinuity-
—and the collision alarm cut off.
Dnivtopun blinked in bewilderment at the controls. All the exterior sensors were dark. The engineering slave was going wild, all three arms dancing over the boards as it skipped from position to position between controls never meant for single-handing.
CALM, he ordered it mentally. Then verbally: “Report on what has happened.”
The slave immediately stopped, shrugged, and began punching up numbers from the distributor-nodes which were doing duty for the absent computer. “Master, we underwent a collision. The stasis field switched on automatically when the proximity alarm was tripped; it has its own subroutine.” The thrint felt its mind try to become agitated once more and then subside under the Power, a sensation like a sneeze that never quite materialized. “All exterior sensors are inoperative, Master.”
Dnivtopun pulled a dopestick from the pouch at his belt and sucked on it. He was hungry, of course; a thrint was always hungry.
“Activate the drive,” he said after a moment. “Extend the replacement sensor pods.” A stasis field was utterly impenetrable, but anything extending through it was still vulnerable. The slave obeyed; then screamed in syncopation with the alarms as the machinery overrode the commands.
REMAIN CALM, the thrint commanded again, and wished for a moment that the Power worked for self-control.
