Rock Killer (21 page)

Using the
Kyushu
’s tokomak’s copious energy, a laser beam as thick as an arm drilled a hole down the center of the rock. Then ropes were strung between the ship and asteroid. The miners, like stone carving pirates, swooped down on the captured rock and attacked the hole, widening it and preparing the asteroid for the installation of the mass driver, tokomak, MHD, Masuka Drives, and all the other sundry equipment that turned an artifact of the formation from the solar system into a ship.

***

Charlie waited until everyone was asleep. The couple in the corner had finished for the evening and one was snoring loudly. She guessed it was about one in the morning.

She got up and went to the kitchen; midnight snack if anyone saw her. She thought about throwing on a robe but the other women had displayed a definite lack of modesty and to fit in, Charlie had gotten used to tramping around in just her panties.

The false panel slid aside easily. She turned the doorknob. It was locked.

She replaced the panel and went to bed. There was nothing to do. Beatty would have the key. The problem was how to get it from him without his knowledge. That would have to wait until later.

Charlie kept an eye on Beatty the next few days. She hadn’t noticed before how he patrolled the house like a watchdog. He tried to sneak up on people, catch them doing something he didn’t approve of. If he ever went into the basement she didn’t see it.

As she cleaned she looked in every place she could think of to hide keys. She found nothing. She wondered how she could get that key. She wondered if he could be susceptible to her charms. She wondered if she dared try.

When he was alone once, Charlie walked up to Beatty.

“Yes, Shari?” he asked.

“I know I’m new around here,” she said. “But I’ve been pulling weeds and cleaning and pulling more weeds and cooking and pulling weeds some more for three weeks.”

“Yes?” Beatty prompted.

“I feel like you don’t trust me. I don’t know anything about what’s going on. Like when Whaltham was here—”

Beatty cut her off viciously. “Listen. You don’t know because it’s for your protection. The less you know the better off you are. We’ll decide what you need to know. Understand?”

Charlie nodded silently, acting subdued by Beatty’s rebuke.

She wanted to physically attack him, but she went back to the garden. She couldn’t believe how fast those damn weeds grew. They just got through with one end of the vegetable rows and the other end needed weeding again.

She needed a different tack. She decided to break in somehow.

***

Trudeau was bent over his radio computer. He scanned the spectrum up and down with the RF gain on maximum. He’d heard some Russian (Mars? he wondered), a lot of static, but nothing that sounded like SRI transmissions. He wasn’t too worried. He had a week, at least. It was just that Griffin was breathing down his neck to find the asteroid’s transmissions.

He scanned down the spectrum watching the signal analyzer’s display. There was a small peak, just barely distinguishable from the background noise. It disappeared and reappeared. Trudeau set the radio frequency to that of the peak.

“
Kyushu
, this is
Elara
,” he heard.

“Go ahead,
Elara
.”

“We have completed transfer of the water and oh-two to the rock. We will be unhooking the umbilical and maneuvering away.”

“Understood,
Elara
. Have a good trip back.”

“Roger that,
Kyushu
. Give our regards to Director Chun and his crew and our hopes for a safe trip home.”

“Will do.”

“
Elara
, out.”

Trudeau smiled and stored the frequency into the computer.

“Griffin,” he called.

“Yeah?” he replied, pushing over.

“I’ve got them.”

Griffin slapped him on the back so hard Griffin sailed halfway across the room. “Good job,” he said, laughing while he tried to stop his flight.

He collided with Knecht. He turned to apologize but she wrapped her arms around him in celebration.

“Now we’ll show SRI they can’t fuck with the sanctity of space,” she said.

“Damn right,” Griffin said. They held each other for a second then clumsily let go.

Cole watched and then pushed herself into the galley.

***

Alex pulled himself over to the asteroid by one of the many ropes between it and the
Kyushu
. Captain Takashara had maneuvered the combination so that the long axis of the ship and asteroid was pointed toward the sun and perpendicular to the vector of velocity of the asteroid’s orbit. Tidal forces were just enough to keep the ship and asteroid apart, bound by a network of taut cables. But the effect was too small to be noticed by Alex as he climbed toward the asteroid.

As he reached the stone surface, he turned back to look at the
Kyushu
. The roughly bullet-shaped vessel filled most of his vision but was dwarfed by the mass driver still attached to the ship’s exterior. The driver looked like a kilometer-long radio tower laid on its side. Attaching the base of the mass driver to the asteroid was the last operation that would be performed before the rock was a fully functioning ship.

He cycled through the huge temporary airlock in the opening for the mass driver’s mass feeder. Through this airlock the internal equipment was transferred.

Tsuji met him there, hanging onto a handle. Alex pulled off his helmet and grabbed his own handhold. She handed him a dust mask. Everyone wore them as the asteroid was being carved open to accept the equipment. Dust from the carving, with no gravity to settle it, floated freely throughout the interior of the rock. The air was passed through electrostatic precipitators but they couldn’t keep up with the volume of dust particles. Before the conversion was finished, every interior surface would have to be wiped down to eliminate the dust. Since water was more precious than gold, rags were treated with an electrostatic attractant.

Alex and Tsuji were in a large cavern carved from the asteroid. Once, a long time ago, Alex had joined Kirsten in an expedition to a cave in the Rocky Mountains. The damp smells and dripping water surprised Alex. He had expected it to be like the bone-dry interior of an asteroid. The man-made chamber’s walls were varying shades of gray and black. T
he monotony could drive one crazy
, Alex thought as he looked around.

In this room, the interior components of the mass driver would be installed. This was with equipment that ground the tailings to a powder so fine it almost moved like a liquid. The dust was ionized as the conduit passed between two massive, charged plates and then fed outside to the tower that would trail behind the asteroid. The tower accelerated the mass to just a little slower than the average photon. The grinding machines were already working on what the miners had dug out. T
his part is always so wasteful
, Alex thought. None of the valuable metals were separated at this stage; it would take too much time and the lost ore cost less than the time to separate it.

“Greetings Director,” Tsuji said, her voice muffled by her dust mask.

“Hello, Chief,” Alex replied. “How’s it going over here?”

“Great. We’ve had no problems.”

Alex pulled along a rope heading deeper into the rock. “How long before equipment can start coming in?”

“Tomorrow we’ll start bringing in the big items for the far end and work our way back,” Tsuji said, following on another rope.

“So about three days until the mass driver’s installed?” Alex asked from experience.

“Yes, barring unforeseen circumstances,” Tsuji said as they reached the far end of the chamber and started climbing up the two-meter wide tunnel the miners had dug from the pilot hole drilled by the laser. A small tube ran the length of the pipe-like passage carrying rock to the grinders.

They passed a room with three miners cutting rock and shoving it into a branch of the tube.

“The tokamak room?” Alex asked.

“Yes,” Tsuji said. “It’ll be finished in time.”

Alex looked at Tsuji. He realized that she thought this was an inspection. “I’m sure it will, Chief. You’re doing a good job. I just want a look around.”

Tsuji seemed to relax, Alex thought. “Fine,” she said. “Do you need me?”

“No,” Alex said. “Go do what you need to do.”

“Okay, Director. If you need me—”

“I won’t. I’ll just look around.”

“Okay,” she said and pulled herself up the rope.

Alex watched the miners work. It was hard, dusty work, not without its element of danger. One saw Alex but acted as if he hadn’t. Miners were a clique and few, not even the director, were worthy of their notice.

Alex moved on. In a large room he assumed would be life support in a few days, miners were installing bracing for when the rock would be accelerating.

He found a side passage and followed it. There was a small room and outside the opening where the door would go was a passage just wide enough for a man. A ladder would be installed so he could climb the tube when the rock was under acceleration.

Alex knew the small room would be his quarters and office. He moved up the tube to the control room. On a ship it would be called the bridge, but control room was another misnomer left over from the days when the asteroids couldn’t maneuver without chemical rockets.

Already conduits were protruding from the rock surfaces and some had fiber optics and wires spilling out. Alex marveled at the work being done. His, or rather Chief Tsuji’s miners, and technicians from the
Kyushu
were working around the clock to turn asteroid SRI-1961 into ship SRI-1961. When finished, the center of the asteroid would be a three dimensional maze of corridors and rooms. The chambers would have walls of virgin rock. Conduits would bring power for lights and equipment would snake along the rock surfaces. It looked primitive but it worked. The luxury of metal walls was too expensive for the asteroid’s temporary status as a ship. Once the asteroid reached Earth orbit, it would be stripped of all useful material and then merely be an oversized ore ingot.

The work to convert the asteroid had to be done quickly; keeping the
Kyushu
in space cost SRI one to two million dollars a day. And having the billions of dollars worth of equipment that comprised the mass drive, Masuka drives, tokomak and MHD–and all the other equipment for the asteroid–idle probably cost another couple million a day. Then the billions of dollars of ore in the asteroid weren’t making any money out here. The demand for the iron, nickel, gold and platinum on Earth was growing almost as fast as the population. And SRI, NESA, and the Russian Federation’s ambitious space programs required huge amounts of the metals. Mining asteroids meant less mining on Earth was necessary and less damage was done to the environment. And the demand was still met for the raw materials that supported the standard of living almost everyone but those in the poorest nations enjoyed. Manufacture in orbit, also made economically feasible by asteroid mining, threw pollution to space on the solar wind. To Alex, SRI and NESA were the real environmentalists while the GA simply used the environment as an excuse to grab power for themselves.

And that reminded him of the
Rock Skipper
. He felt his stomach knot and bile seeped into his mouth. Was he nervous, or space sick? he wondered.

***

The
Rock Killer
accelerated to a stop.

“Okay,” Knecht reported, “We’re about a hundred kilometers closer to the asteroid.”

“Good,” Trudeau said. He called up the frequency on the computer that controlled the radio.

The spike on the signals analyzer was larger.

“
Kyushu
, this is 1961.”

“Go ahead, sixty-one.”

Trudeau transferred the broadcast to the ship’s intercom so all could hear.

“We are powered up and self-sufficient. We will commence acceleration within 15 minutes.”

“Roger, 61. We’re heading home. Safe trip, sixty-one.”

“Safe trip,
Kyushu
.”

Trudeau looked at Griffin, who was smiling.

“We’ve got them,” Griffin cried happily. “Knecht, it’s your show.”

She replied, “Okay,” and bent over her computer. “Trudeau, stay on them. They’ll announce to the asteroid tender when they start acceleration. Then I can plot an intercept course.”

“And then,” Griffin said, “we’ll kill a rock.”

Chapter Eleven

“Tell the miners it’s time to earn their pay.”

To the rest of the solar system it was SRI-1961. But to Director Alexander Chun it, or she, was the USS
Enterprise
, the
Long Shot
, the
Skylark
, and “Gay Deceiver” all rolled into one.

And although those ships had capabilities that were still, and may always be, science fiction, Chun wouldn’t trade SRI-1961, his rock, his command, for the lot of them. W
ell
, he thought, strapped down in his chair in the control room,
I wouldn’t mind the “Star Trek” artificial gravity
.

“Reactor on line,” the voice of the reactor chief came over the intercom.

“Roger,” Chun barked. He tasted acid in the back of his throat. Fifteen years making a living in space and he still got sick in free fall as his guts desperately searched for “up.”

“Mass driver powered up,” Diane reported over the intercom.

“Roger,” Chun repeated. S
oon
, he thought. “Masuka drives?”