Rock Killer (20 page)

Whaltham had continued, “But we can stop them with blood. I’ll give you an example. A month ago we attacked Space Rape Incorporated’s base on the Moon. We killed five employees, including three security people. Since then, SRI has been unable to recruit people into their private little army they call ‘security’. They don’t want to get killed. So not only did we hurt SRI in the short term, we hurt it in the long run. And we’ll hurt it more soon. Very soon.”

“How?” the young girl who was afraid of the weapons asked innocently.

Charlie was glad someone else asked because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself. Also she was so angry she was afraid she’d reveal her feelings for this fat pig.

Whaltham glared at the poor girl. “If you needed to know, you would.”

The girl withered like a flower in her chair.

The dinner finished in silence and the dishes were washed. Then they sat around the living room of the house on the floor and Whaltham preached. Dissenting opinions were not encouraged so these “discussions” turned into confirmation sessions. Someone would say something like, “We’re fighting for the survival of mankind but more importantly, Mother Earth,” and everyone would agree. Charlie wondered why these people put mankind after nature in their priorities. She wondered just who had lied to them.

Eventually some of the Gaia Alliance members would wander off from listening to Whaltham. Most headed for the bedrooms. Charlie was genuinely tired. And tired of the tripe she was listening to and confirming and occasionally, just to fit in, parroting. So, she went to the room she shared with six others. They all slept on the dirty carpet in sleeping bags.

She was wakened in the night by someone unzipping her bag. She reached up, grabbed his head and twisted. The big man fell to the floor with an unceremonious plop and yelled in pain and anger.

“God damn it!” Whaltham spat. He slapped Charlie as she sat up. The force strained her neck as it tried to keep her head connected to her shoulders. “Don’t ever do that again,” he added.

Charlie heard someone rustle in their bag but stay uncannily quiet.

Charlie rubbed her cheek where his blow had connected. It felt hot. “Sorry, I grew up in a rough neighborhood. I didn’t know it was you.”

“Well, God damn it,” Whaltham repeated.

“What do you want?” Charlie asked, dreading the answer.

Whaltham looked at her by the illumination provided by a streetlight outside that came through the dirty window. Then he roughly grabbed her around the neck and pulled her to him. He kissed her harshly and that mustache brutalized her face. She could taste cigarette residue in his mouth. She almost gagged. She pushed him away and he slapped her again, harder, and again groped for her and pulled her against his rotund body. Without thinking, she kneed him in the crotch. He howled and rolled away, but remarkably, came back toward her. His eyes were bulging and his mouth was clenched like a fist ready for the blow. He seized her around the neck and, using strength Charlie wouldn’t have thought the fat man had, pulled her face to his.

“God damn,” he repeated, “I’ll kill you if you do that again.”

I’d like to see you try
, she thought.

“You don’t act like a kid from Maine. That’s where you said you were from, Shari?”

“Yes,” she mumbled softly. I
f I fight him, I’ll blow this whole deal
, she realized. All this effort would be for nothing and Frank’s killers will never see justice.

As he again attacked her mouth, Charlie pushed herself way down inside herself. She didn’t resist and passively let him have her.

At one point he said, “What’s this scar?” His lips were on her throat near the scar from her decompression.

“Nothing,” she said quickly, not wanting to come to the surface for long. “An accident.”

That seemed to satisfy his curiosity.

When he was otherwise satisfied, he left and Charlie went to the bathroom to clean up. She looked in the mirror. W
hat I’ll do for SRI
, she said to herself bitterly. I
should have killed him and raised humanity’s average IQ a few points
, she decided.

She wished Frank were there to comfort her. But Frank would never be there again.

If anyone noticed her crying they didn’t mention it.

The next morning Whaltham was gone.

***

Griffin awoke in a good mood. It was almost time. According to Knecht, the asteroid would be leaving the belt in a couple of days, depending on what problems they had getting it ready.

He left the captain’s quarters and pulled himself up the ladder to the bridge. Knecht was still working on the computer.

“Morning,” Griffin said.

Knecht turned to look at him. “Hi, Alan.”

“Cole and Trudeau sleeping?”

Knecht nodded. Griffin loved the way her hair moved.

“Let ‘em,” Griffin said. “The next few days are going to be busy. What’s our status?”

“The asteroid tender should rendezvous with the asteroid today. It’s a week to ten days to get the asteroid ready to go. That’s a three-day window in which they could go. Look,” she said, pointing to the computer, “I’ve been working on this. I’ve projected their routes for making Earth orbit depending on when they leave.” She pressed a key and the holographic display showed a curved area superimposed on a diagram of the solar system. It was wider near Earth. “Since the asteroid is orbiting the sun and so is the Earth, this is the area they must be in.”

“That’s not too bad,” Griffin said.

“You’re not taking into account the scale,” Knecht said. “That asteroid is traveling about seven kilometers a second. In three days that’s over two million kilometers for this arc segment. Earth travels about 300 kilometers a second so this end is an arc about 80 million kilometers. The total area is—”

“Never mind, I get the picture,” Griffin interjected. “What are our chances of finding them?”

“Slim unless we get more information.”

“You know where the asteroid is now. We got that information from their computer on the Moon.”

“Sure,” she acknowledged. “But I don’t know when it will start accelerating. I explained this to you and Whaltham back in L.A., but you were so hot to go kill some SRI personnel you didn’t listen.”

“So now what?”

“If Trudeau can intercept their transmissions,” Knecht explained, “they should give a good indication of their departure.”

“What about picking up the asteroid tender’s telemetry?”

She shook her head. “Again, I explained this on Earth. The beam is too narrow, for one thing. Also, they scramble it. Let’s hope Trudeau can pick up their transmissions.” Knecht looked up at him. “If he can’t, we’ll never be able to do this, unless we get unbelievably lucky.”

“He should,” Griffin said. “Maybe I’ll wake him up.”

Griffin turned in the air (he was getting better at zero gee maneuvers). Knecht grabbed his arm and pulled him around.

“Griffin,” she said softly.

“Yes?”

“Before you go, I want to talk to you.”

“Yes?”

“On the miner’s ship. You helped me.”

“I don’t know. I think you were doing okay.”

“Yes, but I appreciate the attempt.”

“No problem, Barb,” Griffin said.

She smiled at him and let him go.

***

Charlie found the door two days after Whaltham left. She happened upon it while cleaning in the kitchen. It was behind a false wall. She kept cleaning as if nothing happened.

On some days, the comrades had time to read the books and magazines in the house. After cleaning, Charlie sat on the floor next to Annie reading a book. It was about over population and predicted in ten years over population was going to doom humanity and the environment. It was written a hundred years ago.

“Annie,” she said. “I’m going outside for some fresh air.”

“Okay,” the girl replied. Charlie stood and stretched, then went to the back door. She walked out into the lawn were there was a small patch of brown grass. She sat cross-legged on the dying lawn and faced the sun. It was above the house and she studied the foundation of the structure while warming her face with the sun’s heat.

The cement rose about half a meter off the ground. Now that Charlie thought about it, that seemed awfully high. There were two spaces where the cement was a different shade from the rest of the foundation. They would just about be right if someone had covered up a window. The house had a basement!

***

The
Kyushu
matched orbits with the tumbling asteroid. The
Elara
was a few kilometers off, holding position relative to SRI-1961, as the crew of the SRI ship that had found it had dubbed the rock.

Tsuji, the head miner, looked out a port with Alex.

“This one will be difficult,” she said. “It’s tumbling a little faster than I like.”

Alex nodded. He’d seen this procedure a dozen times and it still made his stomach queasy. He looked out the port. The asteroid was roughly a kilometer long and half a kilometer in diameter at its widest. It was an unusually dark M-type nickel-iron asteroid. SRI preferred the M-types; they were rich in metals, and poor in less valuable silicates. It looked like a lumpy potato and was spinning on all three axes.

“I’ll go first,” Tsuji said.

“Right,” Alex concurred. “I’ll keep everybody out of your way.”

“Thanks, Director,” she said perfunctorily and pushed herself toward the equipment storage area.

A few hours later, Tsuji, in a maneuvering pressure suit, stood in the airlock. On her back were ropes, hammers and pitons, and a hefty device that looked like a very large caliber shotgun. Over that was a Masuka drive package that gave her the same maneuvering abilities of a ship: yaw and roll and a good deal of thrust. There was a large, powerful battery to provide energy for the drive. Her four best miners were with her. Every member of the team carried ten chemical rockets, each about the size of a baseball bat.

The
Kyushu
had maneuvered within a few hundred meters of the asteroid. Tsuji used the small drive to accelerate into space. She then was simply another object orbiting the sun.

She used the yaw drive to twist her body so she was facing the opposite direction to the one she, the asteroid, and the two ships were traveling. She did an old-fashioned retro burn with her Masuka drive, putting her into an orbit closer to the asteroid but also moving faster.

Tsuji was a two meter-long spaceship. She used orbital mechanics to get within 50 meters. The face of the asteroid was moving so fast below her she didn’t dare look. Her brain would assume she was moving and panic would set in despite her knowledge of her true situation.

She pulled the “shotgun” off her back. It had a roll of monofilament line above the stock. Not much more than a spider web strand in thickness, the fiber, made at the Low Earth Orbit Facility one atom at a time, had more strength than a steel cable as thick as the wrist.

She used a snap link to connect her suit to two O-rings on the butt of the instrument. Satisfied she was secured, she aimed at the limb of the asteroid that was spinning toward her and fired. Missing would mean taking time to retract the line but, more importantly, would ruin her record. She was six for six.

A diamond tipped projectile jabbed into the rock. The light coating of dust on the asteroid near the impact fled the site in a growing cone. Line began playing out of the roll but automatically was slowing. As it slowed Tsuji was drawn toward the asteroid. Now it was the stars she couldn’t look at as they spun crazily around her. She kept her eyes on the surface of the asteroid that was moving slower and slower relative to her.

Soon she was stationary relative to the surface. Alex watched from a
Kyushu
port as his miner chief was swung around at the end of the line like a rock in a slingshot.

Tsuji hit a switch on the gun and was reeled in to the surface. The fishing analogy always struck Alex although it was like a mosquito trying to land a whale.

Tsuji hit the asteroid slowly as the last of monofilament line was reeled in. She immediately brushed aside the thin layer of dust and drove in a piton, then another and then a third. She roped herself to the surface. If she was flung off, she might hit the ship like some large projectile or, much more likely, be flung into space making for an expensive and time-consuming rescue.

Now the hard part: she turned on her helmet light, so the other miners could see her, and waited while the other miners took their shot at the asteroid. Another line of monofilament connected to the rock and a miner descended to the surface and secured him or herself with pitons and rope. Eventually, all four were on the exterior of the rock with her. Each had lashed himself to their quarry as soon as they had touched the surface.

The data link to the
Kyushu
’s computer was busy as the miners consulted it for the locations to place the rockets. Each headed across the asteroid’s skin, making sure he or she was always firmly tied to at least two pitons driven securely into the rock. They planted their rockets in the proper places and correct orientations as called for by the computer.

The rockets were connected by ignition wires. The process took six long, nervous hours from the time Tsuji was swinging around the asteroid at the end of her filament until they were ready to fire the rockets. The five miners were again tied down and the rockets fired.

The asteroid’s tumble slowed considerably and the dust coating swirled as each grain continued tangentially as the asteroid’s spin was retarded beneath it. Another miner came over from the tender with more rockets and the process was repeated. Once the asteroid was stable and all the miners had returned to the
Kyushu
, the ship was maneuvered behind the asteroid. Alex admired the skill of the navigator under Takashara’s command as he worked with his computer to use the complexities of orbital mechanics to put the asteroid right where it needed to be.