Rock Killer (25 page)

“Roger.”

Chun looked at the display.

RADAR SOURCE: X:160.3, Y:172.7, D:???.? it read. The ship was almost directly behind. Alex had seen a man, Theresa Gold’s murderer, fall into the exhaust of a mass driver. He, his suit, and his weapon had been atomized.

“Thorne!”

“Yes, Alex?”

“Never mind. We’ll need the mass driver crew.”

After a slight pause Thorne said, “Okay.”

“Mass Driver, shut down and stand by. I want full thrust on my call.”

“This is Zalesky,” a man’s voice said. “Chief O’Rourke said that she understands.”

Oh, hell
, Alex thought. Diane O’Rourke and Diana Vuillard were in the drive section. The knot in his stomach grew worse at the possibility of losing friends. Then he forced it out of his mind. He had more people to worry about.

“Bente,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I want you to make that ‘X’ number one—”

The room moved and vibrations rattled Chun so hard he thought his insides would be mush. Again the floor took on a tilt, smaller than last time.

“Correct that spin,” Chun began again, “and make both ‘X’ and ‘Y’ equal one-eighty. That’s one eight zero. Let me know when you have it.”

“Yes, sir.” She bent over her thruster controls.

“Diane, still with us?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice taut with tension. “But that one hit close.”

***

“They’re turning,” Knecht reported anxiously. “Away from us.”

“Don’t worry, they can’t get away,” Griffin commented casually. “It looks like we’ve damaged the mass driver. Fire again, Cole.”

***

Naguchi worked her computer and turned to look at the slaved screen occasionally. She ignored the warning of a new launch. The rock agonizingly slowly changed pitch and the numbers changed digit by slow digit. Normally she’d have the computer calculate a combination of pitch, yaw, and roll, called the Euler Angle, to bring the asteroid to the attitude needed. But since she was trying to line it up with a moving target (which she assumed to be the stolen
Rock Skipper
), she had to do it manually. She was helped by the fact the
Rock Skipper
had yet to change heading. Another missile hit and again the control room vibrated and the floor tilted. A fine touch on the controls and she had the rock stabilized. She now had to change yaw. She gave the port yaw Masuka drive full power. Then, with a practiced hand, she used the starboard drive to start slowing the rock’s swing.

“Another launch,” she heard Manna say.

The ship’s yaw was slowing. She stopped it when the ‘X’ number was 179.7 and ‘Y’ read 180.1. Close enough.

“Got it, Alex.”

Chun smiled grimly. “Mass driver, full thrust now!”

***

“We’re directly behind them,” Knecht barked as a warning.

“Launch again,” Griffin ordered. “It should go right up their ass.”

The ship shuddered for the fourth time.

“Do you want to change heading?” Knecht asked urgently.

“What for?”

“The mass driver,” she said emphatically.

“What about it?”

“If they—” Knecht started, then noticed Griffin was enthralled by watching the missile and not listening. She turned to her controls. The ship pitched 90 degrees. She slammed on the drive.

“What the hell?” Griffin yelled as the asteroid swung from above his head to in front of him. He turned to Knecht but the full 1.5 gee acceleration of the ship grabbed at him.

Unprepared, he was slapped to the floor. He stood and looked at Knecht.

“What the hell?” he screamed at her.

“The mass driver,” she yelled back. Griffin turned to look out the window in time to see the mass driver start up. But, just behind the photons that brought that information, the dust-like reaction mass smote the ship with the powerful kinetic punch its incredible speed gave it.

***

The missile the
Rock Killer
had just launched was just outside the angle the mass driver threw its exhaust and therefore escaped its fury. It was locked on the center of the profile its radar eye saw. Gyros changed its heading so that it headed straight for the profile’s center. That happened to be where the base of the mass driver was connected to the asteroid.

***

“Control room, this is Manna. The acquisition radar is gone. There’s still guidance radar.”

“Damn,” Chun said. “We got the ship but the missile is still coming. It’s coming almost right up our tail pipe.”

“Why doesn’t the mass driver—”

The gravity momentarily grew greater. Then the air pressure and the gravity started dropping alarmingly fast.

“Mass driver,” Chun said. There was no answer. Chun felt himself start to float. “Diane?” he yelled at the intercom.

Again nothing. “Bente, give us some thrust.”

Naguchi worked her computer. “I’ve no response from the rear Masuka drive or the mass driver.”

“Chun, this is Thorne,” came over the intercom. His voice seemed subdued.

“Go ahead.”

“The missile took out the mass driver. We’re losing air. I don’t know how soon we can patch it up. It blew out the emergency door. If they hit us there again...” He didn’t need to finish the sentence.

Chun bowed his head. There were five people in the mass driver section, including his friends and Thorne’s lover.

“Alex?” Thorne’s voice came.

“I’m sorry,” Alex whispered.

“If they hit us again,” Thorne repeated.

“The ship is gone,” Chun said with voice void of any emotion.

“How do you know?”

“Its radar is gone.”

“They may have just turned it off, Alex.”

Alex shook his head berating himself. “Damn, you’re right.”
I must be getting stupid
, he thought. Again he was letting his personal feelings interfere with what his duty demanded. He noticed Thorne had remained professional. The asteroid didn’t have any rear-facing radar so there was no way to use machinery to check on the fate of the
Rock Skipper
. Alex could only think of one solution: “Send someone out to eyeball it and let me know.”

“Understood.”

“Director, this is Manna in communications.”

“Go ahead.”

“We just got a message from Security Head Mitchel.”

“Send it to my computer.”

“Roger.”

***

“Damn it!” Charlie swore. She’d grabbed the wrong ammunition. The KS-900 used nine millimeter caseless. In her haste she’d picked up a box of 9x19mm parabellum rounds used in older pistols and submachine guns. With no ammo, the weapon was about as useful as a rock.

“What is happening?” the woman asked handing her a housecoat.

“Long story,” Charlie answered putting on the paisley thing. It was too short yet too big, but it covered the essentials.

Sirens cut off the woman before she could ask another question. Soon there was a pounding on the door. Charlie opened it with the chain on. Two LAPD officers, one male, one female, stood on the porch in their flack uniforms. Charlie let them in.

“What’s the problem?” the woman asked. The male spotted the weapon and bullets Charlie had left on the woman’s couch.

“What the hell’s that?” he said pointing and his hand went to his pistol.

“Listen,” Charlie said, keeping her hands in sight, “my name is Charlene Jones. If you’ll contact special agent Gordon Freeman of the FBI in Washington he’ll explain everything. That weapon and this chip,” she held it up, “are evidence in the murder of Space Resources personnel on the Moon.”

The two cops looked at each other. The female looked at the old woman and asked her a question in Spanish. This brought forth a rapid stream of the lady’s native language. The police officer occasionally asked short questions. Eventually she turned to her partner. “The lady, Mrs. Cortez, says that this woman came to her door almost naked and carrying that weapon. She said a man from the house next door tried to come into the house after her. She said she thinks the house next door is a smash house or something.”

“Maybe we’d better check it out,” the male said.

Charlie shook her head. “That house is national headquarters of the Gaia Alliance, the terrorist group. You’d better get some help.”

The cops looked at her in disbelief. “Damn,” the female whispered. “Okay,” she said. “You’re coming with us.”

“With pleasure,” Charlie said. She turned to the lady.

“Thank you,
Gracias
.”

Mrs. Cortez smiled and nodded. Charlie made a mental note to see that SRI thanked her more substantially.

The male cop talked into the radio attached to his cheek. “This is delta five-three, requesting back-up and a sergeant at—”

The explosion blew the front door apart in a shower of splinters. The male cop’s fractured body careened into his partner.

The spitting sound of automatic weapons fire crackled through the night. The doorframe was burning and through the smoke and flames Charlie saw the muzzle flash from a weapon being held at hip level. She pulled the old lady to the floor.

The female cop pushed the gory mess off of her and returned fire with her service pistol while yelling into her radio, “Officer needs assistance, officer down.”

Charlie crawled over to the dead cop and took his pistol from its holster. The female stopped firing to see what Charlie was doing and a burst of fire made mincemeat of her face.

Charlie fired twice at the door. She saw the profile of a man falling.

The carpet was on fire and the flames were rolling against the dead bodies of the cops. Charlie took the female cop’s weapon and emptied its magazine toward the door and yelled at Mrs. Cortez. “Out the back door, now!”

***

“We’re losing a hell of a lot of air, sir,” Security Man Perez said, pushing himself up the corridor from the remains of the emergency door that led to the mass driver. The door had been blown off its hinges.

Thorne nodded, then, remembering they were both in pressure suits, said, “I know.”

“The DC foam,” Perez continued, “is being sucked out the cracks before it hardens. If we don’t get a new door in here we’re all going to be trying to suck down vacuum.” Damage control foam was designed for little breaches cause by micro-meteors or accidents, not battle damage.

“The miners are working on it,” Thorne said turning to see where, behind him, miners were installing a new emergency door. It was a race to see who would finish first. Thorne didn’t care, but Perez was right. Their life was being sucked out the hole where the door had been.

“I’m going in,” Thorne said.

“By yourself?” Perez queried.

“Yes, I don’t want to risk more than one man.”

“Yes, sir.”

And
, thought Thorne,
if I cry, no one will see me
.

***

Mitchel sat in his office overlooking Tokyo. As the evening progressed the lights became more garish and glaring, even from this height.

Mitchel knew that in sections of Tokyo and Yokohama there were places one could purchase almost whatever one wanted. Right now he wanted a message from Alexander Chun worse than anything else. The broadcast from the
Rock Killer
had made the news a while ago and still not one bit had been broadcast from SRI-1961.

The computer beeped.

“Yes?” Mitchel yelled at the machine.

“Incoming message” the computer said in its soothing voice.

Mitchel smiled broadly. “Display.”

Two icons appeared on the screen indicating the message was encoded and high priority.

Elisa Morgan’s face appeared. She looked worried.

Mitchel felt his emotions sag like a sapling under a heavy snow.

“Yes, Elisa?” Mitchel asked.

“Mitch,” she said, apparently not noticing Mitchel’s disappointment. “I’m with Mr. Zvi Patai of the Mossad. He has come to me with a concern.” The view widened to show a middle-aged man. Mitchel could tell he was a disciplined, serious person just from the determination in his tanned face.

“Mr. Mitchel,” Patai said, “we have a concern.”

“Yes?” Mitchel asked. He knew this would lead to something important. Elisa wouldn’t waste his time during a crisis. “We have reports out of the Baathist States that there is the possibility of a
coup d’etat
soon. One man, an advisor to the president of Syria that we know only as ‘Faruq,’ has support from the Party and elements of the military.”

“This is very interesting but what,” Mitchel said, “does it have to do with SRI?”

“Mitch,” Elisa said, “Mr. Patai came to me just after the announcement of the attack on the asteroid. We shared information. We knew of the Syrian support for the Gaia Alliance, the Mossad knew of the planned coup. It seems the usurper Mr. Patai is concerned about is the same Faruq we’ve been investigating; the one that authorized the purchase of the Pumas for the GA.”

“It seems,” Patai continued, “that this man plans to use this attack to his political advantage.”

“Are you saying this Faruq acted without authorization?”

“No,” Patai replied. “He may have over-stepped his bounds, though. But what’s important is that this man must not reach power.”