The Precipice Read online

  “What the hell!”

  Elly bounced off the guy’s arm and fell to the floor. She reared up, hissing angrily.

  “Jesus Christ, what is it?”

  The buzz cut was tugging at something inside his jacket. Pancho chopped at the back of his neck and he sagged to the floor. Elly slithered toward him. The blond seemed frozen with fright, staring at the snake.

  Pancho gestured to Amanda, who stepped past the goggle-eyed blond and came to her side.

  The guy on the floor pushed himself up on one elbow and saw the snake rearing a bare ten centimeters in front of his face, its beady eyes staring at him.

  “Aaaggh,” he moaned.

  The blond pulled a small pistol from the holster beneath his jacket. Pancho saw that his hand was shaking badly.

  “Loud noises annoy her,” she said. “Just be quiet and don’t move.”

  The blond glanced at her, then returned his stare to the snake. The buzz cut was sweating as Elly stood before him, her tongue flicking in and out.

  “D-do something,” he whispered hoarsely.

  “Better drop your gun on the bed,” said Pancho to the blond. “If you shoot and miss her, she’ll bite him for sure.”

  The blond tossed the gun onto the bed. “Get it out of here,” he pleaded.

  Pancho started to lean forward, slowly, carefully, bending toward Elly. But the buzz cut’s nerve broke. He swung blindly at the snake and tried to scramble to his feet. Elly sank her fangs into the meaty side of his hand.

  He screamed and sagged back to the floor, unconscious. Pancho bent over and scooped Elly up, careful to hold her so the krait couldn’t twist and bite her.

  “He’ll be dead in an hour ‘less you get the antiserum into him,” Pancho said quickly.

  The blond stared at his partner helplessly.

  “Take him to the hospital!” Pancho shouted.

  She headed for her travel bag, still on her bed, next to the blond’s discarded gun. Still holding Elly, she rummaged in the bag until she found the vial of antiserum and tossed it to the blond.

  “Get him to the hospital! Now! Tell ‘em what happened and give ‘em this. It’s the antiserum.”

  Then she grabbed her still-open travel bag and headed for the door. Amanda came right behind her, then rushed back in to get her own bag. As they hurried down the corridor together, Pancho glanced back over her shoulder and saw the blond lugging his unconscious partner in the other direction, toward the hospital.

  “Good girl, Elly,” she said. The krait had wrapped itself contentedly around Pancho’s wrist.

  When they got to the spaceport tunnel Dan Randolph was pacing angrily.

  “Where the hell have you been? We’re running late.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it, boss,” Pancho said as they climbed aboard the cart

  “It’s Martin,” Amanda said, her voice low.

  “Humphries?” asked Dan.

  “He wants Mandy, and I think he knows we’re tryin’ to get out of here.”

  “What the hell happened?” Dan demanded.

  Pancho told him as the automated cart rode down the tunnel to the spaceport.

  Martin Humphries sat at his desk, staring coldly at the frightened, worried face of the blond security agent The man was sweating and nervously brushing at his moustache with a fingertip.

  “So you let her get away,” Humphries said, after the man had explained his failure for the third time.

  “My partner was dying!” the blond said, his voice ragged. “That motherfucking snake bit him!”

  “And you let Ms. Cunningham get away,” Humphries repeated, icily.

  “I had to take him to the hospital. He would’ve died otherwise.”

  “You didn’t phone me, or security, or anyone who might have prevented her leaving.”

  “I’m phoning you now,” the blond said, with some heat. “They’re just about making their rendezvous with the Star-power ship. You can call the control center and have them abort the mission,”

  “Can I?”

  “There’s still time.”

  Humphries clicked off the connection. Stupid clod, he thought. I send him to do one simple thing and he fucks it up completely.

  “Abort the mission,” he said aloud. Then he shook his head. I should call the control center and tell them that Dan Randolph is hijacking my vessel and taking the woman I love alone with him. That would be a lovely item for the scandal nets. Everyone would laugh themselves sick at me.

  He leaned back in his contoured chair, but its softly yielding padding failed to soothe him. Amanda’s running off with Randolph. He’s probably been hot for her all the time, just waiting to get her away from me. Well, now they can be together. She prefers him to me. So she can die with him.

  His teeth hurt. With some surprise, Humphries realized that he’d clamped his jaw so tight it was making his whole head ache. His neck and shoulders were painfully stiff with tension. His fists were clenched so tightly he could feel his fingernails cutting into his palms.

  Amanda’s gone off with him. I’ll acquire Astro, but I’ve lost her forever. They’ll die together. It’s not my fault. I didn’t want to kill anybody. They’re doing it to themselves. She’s killing herself.

  He wished he could cry. Instead, he glanced at the list of major Astro stockholders that was displayed on his desktop screen. And he punched his right fist into the screen, exploding it in a shower of sparks and plastic shards.

  STARPOWER 1

  Fuchs met them at the spaceport, wondering why the four of them were going to the ship a bare hour before it was due to leave orbit and head out to the Belt.

  “There’s been a change in plans, Lars,” Dan told him. “We’re going along, too.

  The young man’s dark brows lifted halfway to his scalp. “The IAA has approved this?”

  “That doesn’t make any difference,” Dan said as Amanda and Pancho clambered into the tractor waiting to take them to the jumper out on the launch pad. “We’re going.”

  Fuchs hesitated, standing in the open airlock hatch of the tractor.

  “We’re going,” Dan repeated. “With you or without you.”

  A slow smile spread across Fuchs’s broad face. “With me,” he said, and hopped up into the tractor, clearing its six steps with ease.

  Dan grinned and resisted the urge to imitate the younger man’s athleticism. Amanda and Pancho had taken the two rear seats, Fuchs the one next to the hatch. Dan sat behind the driver’s seat as the driver herself closed the airtight hatch and then checked out the cab’s pressurization. She got behind the wheel and slipped on her headset.

  She’s waiting for authorization from the controller to go out, Dan knew. If they’re going to stop us, this’d be the easiest time for them to do it.

  But after a few moments’ wait, she put the tractor in gear and rolled to the garage’s airlock. A few minutes later they were at the jumper, connecting the flexible access tube from the tractor’s hatch to the airlock hatch on the jumper’s crew module. In their flight coveralls, the four of them stepped carefully along the springy plastic of the narrow tube, hands touching the walls, heads bent slightly to keep from brushing the low ceiling.

  Small as it was, the jumper’s hab module was better than the claustrophobic tube. It was little more than a few square meters of metal deck enclosed in a glassteel bubble. A control console stood up front on a waist-high pedestal. Pancho went to the control console and pulled on one of the headsets hanging there; Amanda took up her post on Pancho’s right.

  “Better use the foot loops,” Dan said to Fuchs. “We’ll be in zero-g for a few minutes.”

  Fuchs nodded. He looked tense, expectant, his thin lips tightly closed.

  They can stop us at any time, Dan told himself. But as each second ticked by, he felt better and better.

  “Five seconds and counting,” Pancho told them. She hadn’t bothered to turn on the speaker built into the console.

  Just as Dan reached out to cl
asp one of the handgrips along the curving inner surface of the bubble, the jumper leaped off the ground with a single short, sharp bang of its ascent rocket. Dan’s knees flexed, but Fuchs nearly buckled. Dan grabbed his arm to steady him.

  “I… I’m sorry,” Fuchs apologized. “I didn’t expect it.”

  “It’s okay,” said Dan, impressed by the hard muscle he felt. “This is only your second launch, isn’t it?”

  Fuchs looked pale. “My second from the Moon’s surface. I also rode the shuttle from the Zurich aerospace port.”

  Dan saw that zero-g was making Fuchs queasy. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked. Nothing worse than having the guy next to you upchucking all the way to rendezvous.

  With a weak smile, Fuchs pointed to his well-muscled biceps. “I took the precaution of wearing a medicinal patch.”

  “Good,” Dan said.

  “And also these.” He pulled a thick wad of retch bags from the thigh pocket of his coveralls.

  “Smart man,” Dan said, hoping that Fuchs wouldn’t have to use them.

  Under control from the ground, the jumper made rendezvous with Starpower 1 and docked with the fusion ship’s main airlock hatch. Dan felt the slightest of thumps as the jumper’s adapter section locked onto the ship’s hatch.

  “Confirm docking,” Pancho said into her pin-mike. “You guys did a good job. I didn’t have to touch the controls once.”

  Whatever the controller said back to her made Pancho laugh. “Yeah, I know; that’s why you drag down the big bucks. Okay, we’re goin’ aboard now.”

  Turning to Dan, Pancho said, “I’ll set her up for automatic separation and return to Selene.”

  “Right,” said Dan, lifting free of his foot restraints and floating to the hatch. As far as the controllers back at Armstrong spaceport were concerned, the four of them were to be aboard Starpower 1 only for a final checkout before the ship was launched out of orbit. They were expected to return to Selene on the jumper.

  “They’re gonna be kinda surprised when this li’l buggy lands and nobody’s in it,” Pancho said with a mischievous grin.

  Dan went through the jumper’s hatch and into the coffinsized adapter section. He tapped out the entry code to open the fusion ship’s airlock hatch.

  “Okay,” he said, once the hatch had swung open. “Let’s get aboard the Beltline express.”

  “You first, boss,” said Pancho. “You’re the owner.”

  He grunted. “One-third owner. I imagine at least one of the other two is going to be mighty slammed once he figures out what we’re doing,”

  “But lie must have figured that out already,” Amanda said.

  “Right,” Pancho agreed. “Why else would he send those goons after Mandy?”

  Dan felt his brow furrow. “Then why isn’t he raising a howl? Why isn’t he trying to stop us?”

  Fuchs looked back and forth from Amanda to Pancho to Dan, clearly baffled by their conversation.

  “Well, let’s get aboard before he does start hollerin’,” Poncho said, making a shooing motion toward Dan with both her hands.

  Feeling suddenly uneasy, Dan sailed through the hatch and entered Starpower 1. He hovered at the airlock’s inner hatch as Pancho came through and pushed off straight toward the bridge. Amanda started through the hatch, but stumbled slightly. Fuchs grasped her by the shoulders, steadying her.

  “Thank you, Lars,” Amanda said.

  Dan thought the kid’s face turned red for a moment He let her go and Amanda sailed through both hatches without needing to use her hands or feet. Fuchs, still a newcomer to zero-g, gripped the edges of the hatch with both his meaty hands and cannonballed through. He thumped painfully against the far bulkhead. Dan said nothing, suppressing his laughter at the young man’s attempted display of athletic prowess.

  But as he sealed the hatches Dan’s mood darkened. I warned Amanda about coming on to a guy. He realized that she was wearing ordinary coveralls, but still—I’ll have to play chaperon between her and Fuchs, Dan told himself.

  He headed up to the bridge, “swimming” in zero gravity by flicking his fingertips against the passageway bulkheads to propel himself weightlessly forward.

  Pancho had strapped herself into the command pilot’s chair, busily working both hands across the control board. Through the wide glassteel ports above the board, Dan could see the dead gray curve of the Moon’s limb and, beyond it, the beckoning bright crescent of the glowing Earth.

  “I just disconnected ground control,” she said. “They oughtta start squawkin’ about it just about… now.”

  “Put them on the speaker,” said Dan.

  Amanda glided into the co-pilot’s chair and buckled the safety harness. Fuchs came up behind her and slid his feet into the restraint loops on the floor.

  “We have a disconnect signal, S-l,” came a man’s voice from the speaker. He sounded more bored than annoyed.

  Pancho looked over her shoulder toward Dan, who placed a finger before his lips. “Run silent, run deep,” he whispered.

  Cupping her pin-mike with one hand, Pancho said, “I’m ready to separate the jumper.”

  “Do it,” Dan replied.

  “Jumper separation sequence initiated,” Pancho said into her mike.

  “Are you aboard the jumper?” asked the controller. “We can’t launch S-l as long as that disconnect is in effect. We’ve lost command of the vehicle.”

  A red light flashed on the control panel, then winked off.

  “Jumper separated,” Pancho said.

  “Repeat, are you aboard that jumper?” the controller asked, his voice rising with irritation.

  “Where else would we be?” Pancho asked innocently. And she disconnected the radio link with Selene.

  Amanda worked on the launch sequence program, her manicured fingers tapping dexterously on the touchscreen.

  “Three minutes to launch,” she said calmly.

  “Gotcha,” said Pancho.

  Despite himself, Dan felt his palms go sweaty. Standing there behind the two pilots, ready to ride a man-made star out farther than any sane man had ever gone before, he said to himself, Everything I’ve got is riding on this bird. If we don’t make it; I’ve got nothing to come back to. Not a double-damned thing.

  He looked at Fuchs. The kid was smiling fiercely, like an old-time warrior watching the approach of an enemy army, waiting for the battle to begin, eager to get into it He’s got guts, Dan thought admiringly. We picked the right guy.

  “Two minutes,” Amanda called out.

  “They must be goin’ apeshit down there by now,” Pancho said, grinning.

  “Nothing they can do about it,” said Dan. “They can’t shoot us down.”

  “Couldn’t they send a Peacekeeper vessel after us?” Fuchs asked.

  “Once we light the fusion rocket,” Dan answered, “nothing in the solar system will be able to catch us.”

  “Till we come back,” said Pancho.

  Dan frowned at the back of her head. Then he relaxed. “When we come back, we’ll be rich.”

  “You’ll be rich, boss,” Pancho said. “The rest of us’ll still be employees.”

  Dan laughed. “You’ll be rich, too. I’ll see to that. You’ll be rich.”

  “Or dead,” Pancho countered.

  “One minute,” Amanda said. “I really think we should pay attention to the countdown.”

  “You’re right,” said Pancho.

  Dan watched it all on the displays of the control board. The fusion reactor lit up as programmed. Star-hot plasma began generating eneigy. Through the MHD channel it roared, where a minor fraction of that heat energy was turned into electrical power. The ship’s internal batteries shut off and began recharging. Cryonically-cold liquid hydrogen and helium started pumping through the rocket nozzles’ cooling walls. The hot plasma streamed through the nozzles’ throats.

  “Ignition,” Amanda said, using the traditional word even though it was now without physical meaning.

  �
�Thrust building up,” Pancho said, Dan watched the curves rising on the thrust displays, but he didn’t need to; he could feel weight returning, feel the deck gaining solidity beneath his feet.

  “We’re off and running,” Pancho announced. “Next stop, the Asteroid Belt!”

  SPACEPORT ARMSTRONG

  Flanked by his chief of security and the head of his legal department, Martin Humphries arrived at the spaceport just in time to see Starpower 1 light up and break orbit.

  He stood at the rear of the control center, arms folded across his chest, and watched the telescopic view of the fusion ship displayed on the main wallscreen. It was not a spectacular sight: Starpower 7’s four rocket nozzles glowed slightly, and the ship drifted away so slowly that Humphries had to check the numbers running along the right edge of the screen to be certain that it was moving at all.

  A smaller screen on the side wall showed a lunar jumper approaching the spaceport.

  Four rows of consoles took up most of the control center, only three of the consoles were occupied, but Humphries could sense the consternation and confusion among the controllers.

  “Jumper Six, answer!” the controller on the left was practically shouting into his headset mike.

  The ponytailed, bearded man sitting in the middle of the trio was whispering heatedly with the woman on his other side. Then he whipped around in his swivel chair and grabbed his own headset from the console.

  “Pancho!” he yelled in a rumbling basso voice. “Where the hell are you people? What’s going on?”

  Humphries knew perfectly well what was going on.

  The woman controller looked up and saw Humphries standing there. She must have recognized him. Her face went white and she jabbed the chief controller’s shoulder, then pointed in Humphries’s direction.

  The chief literally jumped out of his chair, sailing high enough almost to clear the console behind his station. But not quite. He banged his shins painfully on the top edge of the console and went sprawling in lunar slow motion into the unoccupied chair behind it, ponytail flying. He was enough of a lunik to reflexively put out his hands and grab the chair’s arms to break his fall. But the chair rolled backward into the last row of consoles, and the chief controller crashed ungracefully to the floor with a loud thud and an audible, “Ooof !”