The Precipice gt-8 Read online

  “Uh-huh,” said Pancho. “Still feels like we’re pushin’ freight.”

  Amanda said, “We are: all that deuterium and helium-three.” The fuel weighs a lot, Dan realized. Funny. You think of hydrogen and helium as being light, almost weightless. But we’ve got tons of the stuff in our tanks. Dozens of tons.

  There was nothing much to see through the port. No panoply of stars swinging past. No asteroids in sight. Nothing but emptiness.

  “Where’s the Sun?” Dan heard himself ask.

  Pancho chuckled. “It’s there, boss. Hasn’t gone away. We’re just angled up too much to see it through the windshield, that’s all.”

  As if in confirmation, a stream of light glowed through the port.

  “Sunrise in the swamp,” Pancho called out.

  Dan felt another sideways surge of thrust, pushing from the opposite direction.

  “Turnaround maneuver complete,” said Amanda.

  “Flow to main thrusters,” Pancho said, working the touchscreens.

  “Main thrusters, confirmed.”

  Weight returned to the bridge. Dan settled back onto the deck.

  Amanda smiled happily. “On course and on velocity vector.”

  “Hot spit!” Pancho exclaimed. “Now let’s see how that leak is doin’.” Kris Cardenas almost made it back to her own apartment before two young men in dark business suits caught up with her.

  “Dr. Cardenas?”

  She turned. The man who had called her name was taller than his partner, slim and lithe, sallow complexion, his dark hair cropped into a buzz cut. The other was huskier, blond, pink-cheeked.

  “Come with us, please,” said the dark one.

  “Where? Why? Who are you?”

  “Mr. Humphries wants to see you.”

  “Now? At this hour? It’s—”

  “Please,” said the blond, slipping a dead-black pistol from inside his jacket. “It fires tranquilizing darts,” said the dark one. “But you wake up with a bitching headache. Don’t make us use it on you.”

  Cardenas looked up and down the corridor. The only other person in sight was a mousy little woman who immediately turned away and started walking in the opposite direction.

  “Now,” said the blond, pointing his pistol at her.

  With a resigned droop of her shoulders, Cardenas nodded her surrender. The blond put his gun away and they started along the corridor toward the escalators. “At least this one doesn’t have a snake,” the blond whispered hoarsely to his partner.

  The other man did not laugh.

  EVA

  Pancho felt an old excitement bubbling up inside her as she wormed her arms through the spacesuit’s sleeves. After more than five days of being cooped up in the ship, she was going outside. It was like being a kid in school when the recess bell rang.

  Standing by the inner airlock hatch where the spacesuits were stored, she popped her head up through her suit torso’s neck ring, grinning happily to herself. This is gonna be fun, she thought.

  Dan looked uptight, though, as he held her helmet in his arms and watched her pull on the gloves and seal them to the suit’s cuffs. “Jealous?” she teased. “Worried,” he replied. “I don’t like the idea of you going out alone.”

  “Piece of cake, boss,” Pancho said. “I ought to go with you. Or Amanda, maybe.”

  With a shake of her head, Pancho countered, “Mandy’s gotta stay at the controls.

  Shouldn’t have both pilots out at the same time, if you can help it.”

  “Then I’ll suit up-”

  “Whoa! I’ve seen your medical record, boss. No outside work for you.”

  “The safety regs say EVAs should be performed by two astronauts—”

  “Whenever possible,” Pancho finished for him. “And since when did you start quotin’ IAA regulations?”

  “Safety is important,” Dan said.

  Inside the spacesuit, with its hard-shell torso and servomotor-amplified gloves, Pancho felt like some superhero out of a kids’ video confronting a mere mortal. “I’ll be fine,” she said as she took the helmet from Dan’s hands. “Nothin’ to worry about.”

  “But if you run into trouble…”

  “Tell you what, boss. You suit up and hang out here at the airlock. If I run into trouble you can come on out and save my butt. How’s that?” He brightened. “Okay. Good idea.”

  They called Amanda down from the bridge as Dan struggled into the lower half of his suit and tugged on the boots. By the time he was completely suited up, backpack and all, except for the helmet, Pancho was feeling antsy. “Okay,” she said as she pulled the bubble-helmet over her head and sealed it to the neck ring. “I’m ready to go outside.”

  Amanda hurried back to the bridge while Dan stood there grinning lopsidedly at her, his head sticking out of the hard suit like some kid posing for a photograph from behind a cardboard cutout of an astronaut.

  Pancho opened the inner hatch of the airlock and stepped through. The airlock was roomier than most, big enough to take two spacesuited people at a time. Through her helmet she heard the pump start to clatter, and saw the telltale on the control panel switch from green to amber. The sound dwindled to nothing more than a slight vibration she felt through her boots as the air was pumped out of the chamber. The light flicked to red.

  “Ready to open outer hatch,” she said, unconsciously lapsing into the clipped argot of flight controllers and pilots.

  Amanda’s voice came through the tiny speaker set into her neck ring, “Open outer hatch.”

  The hatch slid up and Pancho stared out at an infinite black emptiness. The helmet’s glassteel was heavily tinted, but within a few seconds her eyes adjusted and she could see dozens of stars, then hundreds, thousands of them staring solemnly at her, spangling the heavens with their glory. Off to her left the bright haze of the zodiacal light stretched like a thin arm across the sky. She turned her back to the zodiacal light’s glow and attached her safety tether to one of the rungs just outside the hatch.

  “Goin’ out,” she said.

  “Proceed,” Amanda replied.

  “Gimme the location of the leak,” Pancho said as she clambered out and made her way up the handgrips set into the crew module’s side.

  “On your screen.”

  She peered at the tiny video screen strapped to her left wrist. It showed a schematic of the module’s superconducting network of wires, with a pulsating red circle where the leak was.

  “Got it.”

  Although she knew the ship was under acceleration and not in zero-g, Pancho still felt surprised that she actually had to climb along the handgrips, like climbing up a ladder, toward the spot marked on the schematic. Deep in her guts she had expected to float along weightlessly.

  “Okay, I’m there,” she said at last.

  “Tether yourself,” Dan’s voice commanded sternly.

  Pancho was still tethered to the rung next to the airlock hatch. Grinning at Dan’s fretfulness, she unreeled the auxiliary tether from her equipment belt and clipped it to the closest grip.

  “I’m all tucked in, Daddy,” she quipped.

  Now to find the leak, she thought. She bent close and played her helmet lamp on the module’s skin. The curving metal was threaded with thin wires running along the module’s long axis. There was no obvious sign of damage: no charred spot where a micrometeor might have hit, no mini-geyser of escaping nitrogen gas. It can’t be more than a pinhole leak, Pancho told herself.

  “Am I at the right spot?” she asked.

  No answer for a few moments. Then Amanda replied, “Put your beacon on the wire you’re looking at, please.”

  The radio beacon was strapped to Pancho’s right wrist. She laid her right forearm on the wire.

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re at the proper spot.”

  “Can’t see any damage.”

  “Replace that section and bring it in for inspection, then.”

  She nodded inside her helmet. “Will do.”r />
  But she felt silly, cutting out what looked to be a perfectly good length of wire.

  Something’s wonky here, Pancho thought. This ain’t what we think it is, I bet. Behind his unkempt beard, Big George was frowning with worry as he sat at one of the consoles in the spaceport’s control center. This little cluster of desks was occupied by Astro employees, monitoring Starpower 1’s flight. They sat apart from the regular Selene controllers, who handled the traffic to and from Earth. George wanted to send his message to Dan in complete privacy. The best the Astro controllers could do was to hand him a handset and tell him to keep his voice down.

  Wishing they had worked out a code before Dan had impetuously sailed off, George pulled the pin-mike to his lips and said hurriedly, “Dan, it’s George. Dr. Cardenas has disappeared. She told me last night she was worried that Humphries wants to kill you. When I called her this morning she wasn’t in her office or in her quarters. I can’t find her anywhere. I haven’t told Selene security about it yet. What do you want me to do?”

  He pulled off the headset and nudged the controller who had given it to him. The man had been studiously keeping his back to George.

  He swiveled his chair to face the Aussie. “Finished so soon?”

  “How long will it take to get an answer?”

  The controller tapped at his keyboard and squinted at the display on his console’s central screen. “Seventeen minutes and forty-two seconds for your message to reach them. Same amount of time for their answer to get back here, plus a couple additional seconds. They’re moving pretty damned fast.”

  “Thirty-five minutes,” George said.

  “Got to allow some time for them to hear what you’ve got to say and decide what to say back to you. Probably an hour, at least.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Martin Humphries unconsciously licked at the thin sheen of perspiration beading his upper lip. He hated talking with his crotchety sour-faced father, especially when he had to ask the old man for advice.

  “You kidnapped her?” W. Wilson Humphries’s wrinkled face looked absolutely astonished. “A Nobel Prize scientist? You kidnapped her?”

  “I’ve brought her here, to my home,” Humphries said, holding himself rigidly erect in his chair, exerting every gram of willpower he possessed to keep from squirming. “I couldn’t let her warn Randolph.”

  The conversation between father and son was being carried by a tight laser beam, directly from Humphries Space System’s communication center on the top of Alphonsus crater’s ringwall mountains to the roof of the senior Humphries’s estate in Connecticut. No one could eavesdrop unless they tapped into the laser beam itself, and if someone did, the drop in the beam’s output at the receiver would be detectable.

  “Killing Randolph isn’t bad enough,” grumbled the old man. “Now you’re going to have to kill her, too.”

  “I haven’t killed anybody,” Humphries said tightly. “If Randolph has any brains at all he’ll turn back.”

  It took nearly three seconds for his father’s reply to reach him. “Sloppy work. If you want to remove him, you should have done it right.” Humphries’s temper flared. “I’m not a homicidal maniac! Randolph is business, and anyway, if he dies it will look like an accident. His ship fails out there in the Belt and he and his crew are killed. Nobody will know what happened and nobody will be able to investigate, not for months, maybe years.” He tried to calm himself as he waited for his father’s response. “Gaining Astro Manufacturing is worth the risk,” the old man agreed. “Especially since no one can connect you with the… uh, accident.”

  “She can.”

  Humphries knew what his father was going to say.

  “Then you’ll have to get rid of her.”

  “But that doesn’t mean I have to kill her. I don’t want to do that. She’s a valuable asset. We can use her.”

  It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision, Humphries told himself. Dr. Cardenas and her knowledge of nanotechnology had been part of his long-range plan all along. It’s just that this crisis has forced me to move faster than I’d originally planned to, he told himself.

  “Use her?” his father snapped. “How?”

  Waving a hand in the air, Humphries said vaguely, “Nanotechnology. She’s the top expert. Without her it would’ve taken years to build that fusion rocket.” His father cackled. “You don’t have the guts to take her out.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Dad! She’s much more valuable to me alive than dead.”

  “You want her to be part of your team, then,” his father replied. “Yes, of course. But she’s having this goddamned attack of integrity. She’s got cold feet about Randolph, and if I don’t stop her, she’ll tell everyone about the sabotage, even though she’s a party to it.”

  The old man chuckled when he heard his son’s complaint. “An attack of integrity, eh? Well, there are ways to get around that.”

  “How?”

  It was maddening to have to wait nearly three seconds for his father’s response.

  “Make her an offer that she can’t accept.”

  “What?”

  Again the interminable wait. Then, “Offer her something that she really wants, but can’t agree to. Make her an offer that really tempts her, but she’ll have to reject. Then you’ve shown yourself to be reasonable, and she’s being the difficult one.

  Then she’ll be more willing to agree to your next offer.”

  Humphries was impressed. “That’s… Machiavellian.” When his father answered, his seamed, sagging face was strangely contorted, as if he were suppressing a guffaw. “Yes, it is, isn’t it? And it works.” Humphries could only sit there and admire the old bastard. More thoughtfully, his father asked, “What’s her weak point? What does Cardenas want that she can’t get unless you give it to her?”

  “Her grandchildren. They’ll be our hostages. Oh, I’ll do it in a nice, elegant manner. But I’ll let her know that either she works for me or her grandchildren suffer. She’ll do what I want.”

  “You really want to be emperor of the world, don’t you, Martin?” Humphries blanched. “Your world? God forbid. Earth is a shambles and it isn’t going to get any better. You can have it. You’re welcome to it. If I make myself emperor, it’ll be up here: Selene, the Moon, the asteroids. That’s where the power is. That’s where the future lies. I’ll be emperor of these worlds, all right. Gladly!” For long moments his father said nothing. At last the old man muttered, “God help us all.”

  STARPOWER 1

  Lars Fuchs was scowling as he peered at the display screen. “Well?” Dan prompted.

  The two men stood in the cramped sensor bay, where Fuchs had rigged a makeshift laboratory by yanking one of the ship’s mass spectrometers from its mounting and putting it on the repair bench where he was using it to examine the sample of dull gray wire that Pancho had brought in. A thin sky-blue coolant tube lay alongside the wire. Dan knew the wire had originally run through the tube, like an arm in a sleeve.

  “There is no leak in the coolant line,” Fuchs said. “I drove pressurized nitrogen through it and it didn’t leak.”

  Dan felt puzzled. “Then what’s causing the hot spot?” Pointing to the tangle of curves displayed on the screen, Fuchs said, “The composition of the wire seems to match the specifications quite closely: yttrium, barium, copper, oxygen — all the elements are in their proper proportions.”

  “That doesn’t tell us diddley-squat,” Dan groused.

  Fuchs’s frown deepened as he studied the display. “The copper level seems slightly low.”

  “Low?”

  “That might be a manufacturing defect. Perhaps that’s the reason for the problem.”

  “But there’s no leak?”

  Fuchs rubbed his broad, square chin. “None that I can detect with this equipment. Really, we don’t have the proper equipment for diagnosing this. We would need a much more powerful microscope and—”

  “Dan, we’re receiving a call for you,” Amanda’s v
oice came through the speaker in the sensor bay’s overhead. “It’s from George Ambrose, marked urgent and confidential.”

  “I’d better get back up to the bridge,” Dan said. “Do the best you can, Lars, with what you’ve got.”

  Fuchs nodded unhappily. How can a man accomplish anything without the proper tools? he asked himself. With a heavy sigh, he turned back to the display screen while Randolph ducked through the hatch and headed forward. What other sensors can I take from the set we have to examine this bit of wire? Everything we have here has been designed to measure gross chemical composition of asteroids, not fine details of a snippet of superconducting wire. With nothing better that he could think of, Fuchs fired up the mass spectrometer again and took another sampling of the wire’s composition. When the curves took shape on the display screen his eyes went wide with surprised disbelief. George held one meaty hand over the earphone clamped to the side of his head, listening intently to Dan Randolph’s tense, urgent voice. There was no video transmission; Dan had sent audio only.

  “… you go with Blyleven to Stavenger himself and tell him what’s happened. Stavenger can bypass a lot of red tape and get Selene’s security people to turn the place upside down. You can’t hide much in a closed community like Selene. A really thorough search will find Dr. Cardenas… or her body.” George nodded unconsciously as he listened. Once, ten years earlier, he had lived as a fugitive on the fringes of Selene, an outcast among other outcasts who called themselves the Lunar Underground. But they had survived principally on the sufferance of Selene’s “straight” community. They could exist on the fringes because nobody cared about them, as long as they didn’t make nuisances of themselves.

  George agreed with Dan, up to a point. If Selene’s security cops wanted to find a person, there wasn’t much chance of hiding. But a dead body could be toted outside, concealed in a tractor, and dumped in the barren wilderness of the Moon’s airless surface.

  “Okay, Dan,” he half-whispered into the pin-mike at his lips. “I’ll get to Stavenger and we’ll find Dr. Cardenas, unless she’s already dead.” Frank Blyleven was head of Astro corporate security. A round, florid-faced, joviallooking man with thinning straw-colored hair that he wore down to his collar, Blyleven seemed to have a grandfatherly smile etched permanently on his face. It unnerved George to see the security director smiling as he explained about Dr. Cardenas’s disappearance.