Rock Killer (5 page)

“That’s because the paranoid, uneducated masses got it legislated to death with regulations. And they did the same thing to fission before that in the last century. We use fusion reactors on the asteroids and, while I’m deathly afraid of cosmic rays and solar radiation, I’ll sleep on top of a tokamak. These environmentalists, like the damned GA, are unrealistic paranoiacs who want to return us all to the vile days before the nineteenth century.”

McConnell noticed Alex’s bitterness. “Is that how you feel about the Gaia Alliance? You don’t think they do a lot of good?”

Alex snorted. “The GA is nothing more than punk terrorists, and the people who support them are as irresponsible and criminal as they are.”

McConnell continued to drill Alex. “You said you were in SRI Security. Have you ever killed for SRI?”

Alex hesitated long enough to look away. An expression of pain and anger crossed his features before he faced McConnell again. “I have killed while on duty,” he said flatly.

“Then what makes you different from the GA, other than you killed for profits and the GA kills to save the environment?”

Alex’s face grew redder at he calmly spoke. “I killed in self-defense or in defense of another person.”

“If you work for SRI, even if you’ve never killed anyone directly, you’ve killed for profit.”

“If anything,” Alex said barely containing his rage, “I killed for progress and technology that has made human existence better than could have been imagined just a few hundred years ago. That’s what profits are: wealth to make everyone better off. The GA kills because they want the rest of the world to follow their beliefs and doctrines. They are no different from the Nazis or Communists that caused so much misery in the twentieth century.”

McConnell stood slowly and dramatically removed his cigarette from between his lips. “I financially support the GA. If that’s how you feel I think you should leave.”

Alex stood to his full 172-centimeter height. “Gladly. Did you know two friends of mine were killed on the attack GA did on our lunar facility today? If you support the GA, you’re culpable in their deaths.” He turned to his wife. “Kirsten, we’re leaving.”

Kirsten looked up at him from her seat.

“Now,” he barked.

Kirsten usually refused to react to Alex’s occasional macho spells. But this time she decided it was better to accede to his demands and work it out later in private. She stood and looked apologetically at their hosts. Then she followed Alex out of the house and to her car.

McConnell watched them leave. “Fascist,” he said.

His wife nodded.

In the car, Alex apologized.

“It’s okay,” Kirsten said with a sigh. “They’re self-righteous snobs.” She waited a few heartbeats. “Who was killed on the Moon?”

“Frank DeWite and someone you never met named Prince.”

“I’m sorry.”

Chapter Three

“…that damn rope slipping through my fingers.”

Bente Naguchi gazed out the window at the Earth. In the SRI Low Earth Orbit Facility at an altitude of about 400 kilometers, this was as close as she ever planned to get. Born on the Moon 25 years ago, she was sure she could live in one gee. She’d felt that and more on some ships she’d traveled in. But she knew she wouldn’t like it one bit. Sometimes she wished she could visit the blue and green world of her parents.

She’d seen pictures, of course, but they couldn’t convey the entire sensation of being outdoors with no pressure suit confining you. She’d heard there were places, in Europe mostly, where it was legal to go naked. She wondered what that would be like: to have nothing between you and everything. Maybe someday she’d visit; someday, for a very short period.

Bente was over 225 centimeters tall but massed about the same as a “normal” woman. She had long, black-brown hair and large, brown eyes with an exotic hint of an epicanthic fold. Her mother, a German, had given her skin a paler complexion than her Japanese father’s. She knew that some considered her attractive. That was attested to by the number of men, and sometimes women, who approached her in this bar while she waited for transportation to the Moon. But she also told herself that “Moon Maidens” were considered a novelty, and relative attractiveness had little to do with the number of propositions she received.

“Shuttle to Lunar Facility One departing in ten minutes,” a voice said over the public address. Bente put her SRI card in the slot, pressed her thumb to the plate, and pushed herself out of the bar. She didn’t notice the numerous pairs of eyes following her.

On the shuttle, Bente didn’t need a window seat–she gave hers up to a tourist. At turn-around, during the few minutes of free-fall, Bente made sure she was far, far away from the tourists and others on their first space excursion. Frankly, watching others with space sickness made her sick. She watched the descent to the Moon on a monitor. She could see the original NESA site: a metal dome less than 100 meters in diameter. From this, like a spreading plant, the facility grew. It was a hodgepodge of domes, tunnels, and corridors.

Occasional windowed boxes that were a few stories tall marked NESA hotels and resorts made to resemble their terrestrial counterparts. The farther the facilities were from the original dome, the newer the construction. A lot of the facility was under the surface, and the parts that weren’t were partially covered with black slag from SRI asteroids. The slag provided extra protection from radiation but still, during solar flares, everyone huddled in shelters under meters of lunar rock.

NESA Facility Two was a framework about a kilometer away. Occasionally she’d see the sharp sparkle of a welder. Bente caught a glimpse of the SRI area and the shipyard, and saw workers crawling over the carcasses of the destroyed ships. She had a passing acquaintance with some of the dead people. M
urdered people
, she reminded herself.

The shuttle landed and the enclosed ramp extended and mated to the ship. Bente let the tourists, giddy with excitement–the space sickness only an acrid memory–de-shuttle first. Then Bente threw her bag over her shoulder and entered the shuttleport. As a resident she skipped lightly through customs and went to the subway. A few minutes later she was in the residential area. She found her parents’ new apartment with little trouble. Since both she and her brother had moved out, they had moved into a smaller domicile.

When Bente entered her parent’s home, Mozart’s Requiem was playing on the stereo system. H
ow fitting
, she thought as the mournful basses droned out the dirge that only the son of Leopold could make that beautiful. This might be her swan song with her family if she and her father couldn’t work out their differences.

Bente’s mother loved Mozart, Beethoven, Bach. Once someone asked her how she felt about Rimsky-Korsakov–her mother almost spat. “Russians,” she said. “The Russians have been conquered by everybody including the Communists. Conquered people can’t write powerful music.” That the listener was a scientist from the University of Moscow didn’t make her any more reticent in expressing her low opinion of Russian composers. Bente had been raised on a combination of classical music and the stuff kids listened to all over the world and even in space. Now, if she happened to hear popular music, she had to wonder if it had gotten worse or her tastes had gotten better.

She suspected the former.

“Mother,” she called out, closing the door behind her.

Bente’s mother came into the foyer of their apartment. Her mother seemed to have gained a few kilos in the months Bente had been gone, and her hair’s blonde color seemed to have faded to a dull shade bordering on gray. Her round face, though, probably would never develop wrinkles.

“Bente, welcome home!” her mother exclaimed, wrapping her arms around her daughter. Bente could literally look down on her head.

Releasing Bente, her mother asked, “How are you?”

“Fine, Mother. Is Father home?”

Mrs. Naguchi shook her head. “Not yet. He’s still at the lab working late. He didn’t know you’d be coming.”

“I should have called from the Low Earth Orbit Facility.”

“SRI pays you enough to afford trans-lunar connections?”

Yes
, she thought. She shrugged. “You’re right.”

“I’ve got good news,” her mother beamed. “Akio’s home.”

Bente didn’t groan like she wanted to. She didn’t even roll her eyes.

Dinner at the Naguchi residence was always an unusual combination of Japanese and German tainted by the lack of meat and by the abundance of vegetables available from the NESA farms. Akio deftly put the sauerkraut into his mouth with chopsticks. Mr. Naguchi had developed a taste for the putrid vegetable, but it seemed to him his wife thought it was a staple.

“Is the development of the lunar-equatorial accelerator going well?” he asked Akio.

“Yes,” Bente’s younger brother replied. “We hope to start digging the tunnel by next year. I hope I’m alive to see its completion.”

“Are you still having financial problems?” Mr. Naguchi asked.

“It’s getting better. Even the American government is putting in money–almost as much as the Russian Federation.”

“What energies do you hope to obtain?” Mr. Naguchi asked as if reading from a script.

“Near primordial energies: About ten to the minus one hundred seconds after the big-bang,” he said proudly.

“And, Bente,” Mr. Naguchi chided. “What do you do? You go off to make money. You mine asteroids.”

“I’m a navigator, Father,” Bente said patiently. “And I don’t do it for money.”

“Then why would you throw your education away on SRI? You could be working with your brother on the accelerator, or on some other research project.”

“Father, research is fine,” Bente replied. “But it takes money. Akio? How much was SRI’s contribution to the accelerator?”

“About five billion euro,” Akio admitted reluctantly.

“You see,” Bente said. “The reason I joined SRI is that they’re doing something other than sitting around theorizing. They have a manned outpost on Europa, for heaven’s sake. They’ve gone farther into space than any government. They’re moving man into the frontier. Sure it’s for profit, but in history that’s why all the new lands were explored. It was only in the twentieth century that ‘profit’ became a dirty word.”

“Yes,” Mr. Naguchi retorted. “But SRI was started by NESA; a multi-government research agency.”

“And then NESA sold SRI to the stockholders and made enough to afford to bring more research scientists to the Moon. Like you and Mother.”

Mr. Naguchi looked at his daughter. “Do they teach you disrespect at SRI?” he asked quietly.

“No, Father.”

“Then where did you learn it?”

“I’m sorry, Father. I meant no disrespect.”

The rest of the meal was unusually quiet.

***

Griffin woke from a light sleep and exited the closet-sized captain’s quarters. He climbed the ladder that put him on the deck with the galley and bridge. Knecht was sitting in front of her computer. The ship was small and most of it was devoted to equipment, not living space.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

Knecht literally jumped a foot off the chair in the low gravity. She turned and a short yet lethal-looking knife was in her hand. She didn’t relax until she saw Griffin, and that he was a good, long ways away.

“What do you want?” she asked, more than just a little suspicious.

Griffin spread his hands in supplication. “I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d check on how things are going.”

“You need to sleep,” Knecht stated flatly. “As shorthanded as we are.”

Griffin nodded. He hadn’t anticipated losing three on the Moon; that damn security man. But Knecht took care of him.

“I know,” he said. “How’s the navigation?”

Knecht started to relax. She enjoyed computers and the challenges of navigation. O
ne
uses computers, they don’t use you
, she thought. And they didn’t hurt you, at least not maliciously. Everything a computer did was logical, even if their programmers were not.

“Fine,” she said. “If the Syrians get here soon and if the information we got out of the computer on the Moon is correct, we should reach the belt way ahead of time; even with this delay. Matching orbits shouldn’t be a problem. We can accelerate nine times as much as they can.” She smiled at that thought.

Griffin also smiled. G
od
, he thought,
she is beautiful when she’s not trying to prove what a cold bitch she is
. “That’s good,” he said. Silence hung thick in the room.

“You should get some sleep,” Knecht stated. She almost sounded caring. Griffin moved closer; he could reach out and touch her. His hand hesitated, then moved for her shoulder. But she caught the action and flinched away. The knife was less relaxed in her hand.

“Go to sleep, Griffin,” she ordered.

He nodded and turned to the opening in the floor. As he descended the ladder he watched her watch him leave.

***

Security Chief Mitchel looked at the faces on the screen that covered one wall of his office in the SRI Headquarters building.

“NESA is very embarrassed,” Rodriguez said on the Moon. “They are willing to help any way they can in the investigation within the confines of their privacy laws. But they don’t think we’ll ever know how the weapons got on the Moon.”

“Did you,” Mitchel asked, “tell them about the Syrians?”

Two seconds later Rodriguez nodded. “Yes. But they can’t really investigate in the UBS area any more than they can investigate in our area.”