Rock Killer (32 page)

They wheeled her back to the helipad and another helicopter was waiting for her. The helicopter rose from the balcony and flew directly over the archology. The nurse looked down and said, “Reminds me of coronene.”

Charlie didn’t ask and leaned back in her seat. The aircraft took her and her nurse back to Narita. The spaceplane was ready to go again. She was flown to Esmeraldas where the SRI spaceport was located, and the shuttle to the Low Earth Orbit Facility was waiting for her. Charlie gave up adding up what this must be costing SRI. The delay of the shuttle meant it had to expend more fuel and spend more time maneuvering in space, at a cost of maybe millions of dollars, or billions of yen. Charlie tried practicing her Japanese with the nurse, but he wanted to practice his English.

At the LEOF they transferred to another shuttle. Some passengers looked at her with a mixture of curiosity and anger; apparently they knew she had been the cause of their delay.

The new shuttle used its Masuka Drives to accelerate toward the Moon.

“Damn,” Charlie said as she watched the LEOF grow smaller against the blue and white Earth.

“What?” the nurse asked.

“I forgot bubble bath.”

Her nurse shook his head and continued looking out the window.

***

In the hours since the attack, Bente Naguchi had felt pretty useless. Her main drives were gone and, after spinning the asteroid a quarter rad per second, she had no job. She had her two subordinates in their quarters or the galley and strapped down. Chun was rotating one of the control room crew on watch alone. There was really nothing to do. She monitored various systems, but the crews in charge of them were doing the same. Occasional messages passed through the control room from one section to another, but all she had to do was listen in to see if there was anything she needed to know. There wasn’t.

So, she had nothing to do; nothing to do but think and worry about her father. She’d used her message to assure her family she was well. She was hoping for a return message but wasn’t sure her family would try. They knew how critical communications were. She doubted they’d send a message even if her father died.

She’d left so much unsaid to her father, and now she had plenty of time for regrets.

Maybe I should have gone into research
, she thought. She missed the academic environment at the NESA University where she’d earned her B.S. in Astronomy. She could have gotten her master’s and doctorate tuition free since she was a resident.

She’d known she would study a science as long as she could remember. It was tacitly assumed in the Naguchi home that the children’s education would be science or, at worst, engineering. Bente remembered when she realized what she wanted to study. When she was about ten, her mother took her to the farside observatory during a school vacation. Astronomy had lost most of its romance since computers and automated electromagnetic radiation sensors did most of the work. Also, because the visible part of the spectrum held only a minuscule part of the information available throughout the entire EMR spectrum, astronomers rarely put their eye to a lens to view the heavens.

But at farside there was one small, 700 millimeter, Keplerian telescope. It was made of highly polished brass and rested on an oak tripod. Its lenses were Crysteel. Because the Moon rotates so slowly there was little need for a clock mechanism on the telescope.

Saturn was at opposition and Bente’s mother (while an automated telescope did her work) helped Bente find the ringed giant. Although she’d seen the rings in pictures taken from the numerous robotic craft that had visited Saturn, there was an almost mystical sensation in seeing the rings for herself: having the actual light reflected and refracted by the rings impinge on her retina. It was then she decided to study astronomy. She had no idea that she’d later decide to join SRI instead of continuing her education and going into research. But the exploration of space fascinated her. She’d studied its history from Sputnik to NESA. When she learned she could go into space (she didn’t consider the Moon “space”) by working for SRI, she took her knowledge of the heavens and sent a resume to Tokyo. When she was hired, her father, normally restrained almost to a fault, threw a fit. And since then the rift had grown so much that the hundreds of millions of kilometers between them now seemed the shorter of the two gulfs that separated father and daughter.

Bente stared at her computer’s monotonous display. I
wonder
, she thought,
why my father isn’t more like Director Chun
. Chun reminded her of what her father was like when she was a child. They were both about the same build and height and Chun was about the age now her father was then. The biggest difference was that Alex was half Korean, half Caucasian, and her father was Japanese. But Alex seemed to accept people for what they were. She’d never seen him become angry with anyone without good reason. She imagined he’d make a good father.

***

Griffin was dozing in the acceleration couch in the center of the
Rock Killer
’s bridge. He was barely aware of Knecht as she came and went from the engine compartment to the bridge and back again. He heard her say, “Goddamn fiber optics,” but wasn’t sure if it was a dream or not. He was almost positive that he dreamed she leaned over him and said, “I love you.”

A beeping awakened him. He opened his eyes and Cole was staring at Trudeau’s undamaged radar equipment.

“That just started beeping,” she said.

Griffin unstrapped himself and pushed himself over to it. The screen displayed:

RADAR SOURCE X:136.5, Y:026.3, D:???.?

CORRELATING FREQUENCY, MODULATION, AND POLARIZATION

WITH USES. PLEASE WAIT ONE MOMENT...

“What the hell is this,” Griffin wondered out loud.

AN/APN-453(A) U.S. AIRBORNE NAVIGATION RADAR, the display continued.

SRI/XPQ-34(V) SPACE RESOURCE INC NAVIGATION/DF RADAR

RUSSIAN FEDERATION TINCAN AIRBORNE NAVIGATION RADAR

“What’s going on?” Knecht asked, pulling off her helmet as she entered the bridge.

“This thing,” Cole said, “is displaying something.”

Knecht pushed over and looked at the growing list.

AN/DPS-002(X) DRONE RANGE BEARING RADAR, it added as she watched.

“Shit,” she yelled. “How could I be so stupid?” A
nd why
, she thought,
am I the only one who has to think of these things
?

“What?” Griffin demanded.

“The XPQ-34 victor is the primary navigation radar for SRI. That must be the asteroid tender.”

“So?” Griffin asked.

She rolled her eyes. “So, they can find us. This is a radar receiver. I just hope we’re not reflecting enough yet for them to pick us up. Strap down, now!”

She jumped to her navigation controls. “Everyone down?” she asked, and before anyone could answer yawed the
Rock Killer
violently.

Griffin wasn’t buckled in and was thrown from his chair. He hung onto the seat belt with the hand on his good arm and was swinging around the air on its end.

Knecht started the ship rolling and then pitched the ship. She heard Griffin slap against the floor and mutter a few obscenities. She watched while he painfully pulled himself into the chair and buckled the seat belt. Pain contorted his face as he was forced to use his broken arm in the process.

“I’m turning the lights off,” Knecht said.

The bridge became unearthly dark. Out the windows, the stars spun as if God was shaking the universe in a dice cup. Occasionally the Sun passed before a window and burned a streak on the retina.

“How long have we got to stay like this?” Griffin asked angrily.

“Until they pass us.”

Chapter Sixteen

“Warm up those missiles.”

Griffin carefully pulled on an emergency pressure suit just enough to get the helmet over his head without it cutting into his shoulders. He was worried about his arm. The pain was slowly and inexorably growing. Bagalos, who died on the lunar plain, was the medical expert. The splints helped, but the arm was turning shades no human skin should be.

Knecht had been in and out of the engine compartment. After the asteroid tender passed, as evidenced by the radar receiver’s silence, she gave the ship a stable attitude. Then, she’d slept a few hours before returning to her task. She had completely ignored him for the past day since the attack. He was tired of it and decided to do something about it.

Griffin took a minute or two to figure out the radio in the suit helmet and the controls on the arm. “Barbara?” he asked over the radio.

“What?” she snapped. She sounded breathless.

“What’s wrong?”

“There are some damaged connectors I need to fix. I just hope I can do it,” she said accusingly.

“No,” Griffin pleaded, uselessly shaking his head. “Are you mad at me?”

There was a long pause. Griffin was about to ask if she’d heard when the radio crackled. “Listen,” Knecht said. “I’m a little too busy now to deal with your adolescent, hormonal problems. Get off the damn radio.”

“Okay,” Griffin said flatly. He turned off the radio and pulled off the suit.

Cole looked at him. She was smiling enigmatically.

***

Alex was, for the first time in his life, thankful for the relative free fall he experienced in his quarters. As a mental exercise, he had calculated that the 2.4 rpm spin of the asteroid resulted in about five one-hundredths of a gee acceleration here; just enough that if he let go of anything, it eventually ended up on the outside wall.

His chronic space sickness had dulled to being merely excruciatingly uncomfortable. But, if he’d been in any greater acceleration, he knew his body would be killing him. He’d been strapped down on the bed in his quarters for 25 hours. Almost half the time was gone until the
Kyushu
would rendezvous and take them off.

The intercom system gave him regular reports. Communications Chief Manna relayed a report from the
Kyushu
that it had found the
Rock Skipper
. It was tumbling and apparently lifeless. Alex wondered if there would be an attempt to salvage it.

The mass driver was being repaired but they were having trouble with the superconductors. They didn’t work in vacuum so some miners were building conduits they could pressurize around the vital, ceramic fibers. They said they’d be finished soon. He hoped so. Even the mass driver’s small acceleration of a tenth of a gee would speed rendezvous if Naguchi turned the rock and used the mass driver to accelerate opposite to the
Kyushu
’s acceleration vector.

As if she’d heard him think of her, the navigator descended into his quarters.

“Bente,” Chun said, “you shouldn’t be moving.”

“I wanted to see you,” she replied sheepishly. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, you’re here. What can I do for you?” He looked at her. Her long body floated in front of him. She was a stunning beauty because of her mixed heritage alone. But she was raised on the Moon where her body grew long and svelte, exotically enhancing her loveliness. Again he wondered why she seemed so lonely.

“Do you think we’ll make it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Taylor in life support says there’s a good chance.”

“What if we don’t?”

Chun unstrapped himself and sat up, except he wasn’t actually sitting because he was hanging onto the bed to keep from floating off the mattress. “I try not to think about it,” he said with a smile.

“Could you,” she asked haltingly, “hold me?”

Alex considered a moment. Then he pushed off the bed gently and bumped into her. He clumsily put his arms around her. Their combined masses slowly bumped into the wall pressing them together for an instant before they bounced back into the middle of the room.

She snaked her long arms around his back. Alex had to admit it felt good to hold her despite the layers of their two pressure suits separating them. He tried not think about the fact his feet reached to about her knees. He was also ignoring the signals he was getting from other parts of his body.

She moved to kiss him. He let go of her with a small push and they separated.

“No,” he said simply.

“I’m scared,” she whispered.

“So am I,” Alex replied. “But we need to limit movement.”

He cringed at his excuse. She looked hurt at the brush off.

“I’m married,” he added.

“We could die,” she said, almost whining.

Alex looked over her. “I know. But we could, probably will, come out of this alive. And even if we didn’t, I don’t believe that makes it all right.”

She looked at him. Tears were building on her eyes. She shook her head and the tears floated free as blobs. “I’m sorry,” she finally said, emotion hanging in the air like her tears.

Alex shook his head. “Don’t be. A hug feels good sometimes.”

She nodded and turned to push out of his office.

“Bente,” he called after her.

She used the metal doorframe to turn around. “Yes?”

“Is everything okay? I mean, other than the obvious.”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said. Her voice quivered slightly.

Alex smiled at her. “Really? You got an emergency message on the
Kyushu
.”