The Precipice Read online

  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.”

  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 nanotechnol-ogy 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, “Nan-otechnology. 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, “Wh
at’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 voice 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. “FU 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, jovial-looking man with thinning straw-colored hair that he wore down to his collar, Blyleven seemed to have a grandiatherly smile etched permanently on his face. It unnerved George to see the security director smiling as he explained about Dr. Cardenas’s disappearance.

  “This is way out of our league,” he said, without the slightest change in expression. “I mean, I only have half-a-dozen people in my group. We chase down industrial espionage and petty theft, for the lord’s sweet sake, not kidnappings.”

  George knew how well Astro’s security team chased down petty theft. The Lunar Underground lived on small “borrowings” from corporate storerooms.

  “Dan said we should go to Stavenger,” said George.

  Nodding cheerfully, Blyleven turned to his desktop phone and asked for Douglas Stavenger.

  When George and Blyleven were ushered into Stavenger’s office, up in the Grand Plaza, a fourth man was sitting in front of Stavenger’s broad, glistening desk. Stavenger introduced him as Ulrick Maas, director of security for Selene. Maas looked like a real cop to George: muscular build, dark, suspicious eyes, scalp shaved bald.

  “You realize that this may be nothing to get alarmed about,” Stavenger said once all four men were seated. “But Kris Cardenas isn’t the kind of woman who suddenly goes into hiding, so I think we ought to try to find her.”

  “She’s in Humphries’s place, down at the bottom level,” George said flatly.

  Stavenger leaned back in his desk chair. Maas stared at George through narrowed eyes; Blyleven looked as if he were thinking about much more pleasant things. Through the office windows George could see the broad expanse of the Grand Plaza. A couple of kids were flying above the greenspace like a pair of birds, flapping their brightly-colored rented plastic wings.

  Grimacing, Stavenger asked, “You’re certain of that?”

  “It’s Humphries she was scared of,” George replied. “Where else would he stash her?”

  “That area down there is the property of the Humphries Trust,” Maas pointed out. “Selene doesn’t have legal authority to go in and search it.”

  “Not even if her life’s on the line?” George asked.

  Stavenger said to Maas, “Rick, I think you’ll have to initiate a search.”

  “Of Humphries’s place?” George asked.

  “Of all of Selene proper,” Stavenger said. “Humphries’s place is a different matter.” He turned to the phone and asked it to connect him with Martin Humphries.

  * * *

  “Dr. Cardenas?” Martin Humphries said to Stavenger’s image on his patio wallscreen. “You mean the scientist?”

  “Yes,” said Stavenger, looking strained. “She’s missing.”

  Humphries got up from the chaise longue on which he’d been reclining while he reviewed his father’s holdings in Libya.

  “I don’t understand,” he said to Stavenger’s image, trying to look puzzled. “Why are you telling me about this?”

  “The security office has initiated a search for her throughout Selene. I’d appreciate it if you allowed them to search your premises, as well.”

  “My home?”

  “It’s just a formality, Mr. Humphries,” Stavenger said, with an obviously false smile. “You know security types: they want to dot every eye and cross every tee.”

  “Yes, I suppose they do,” Humphries replied, smiling back. “I suppose someone could hide out in the gardens, coul
dn’t they?”

  “Or inside the house. It’s rather large.”

  “H’mm, yes, I suppose it is—by Selene standards.” He took a breath, then said reluctantly, “Very well, let them send a team down here. I have no objections.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Humphries. He snapped his fingers to shut down the connection. Then he went into the house, walking swiftly to his office.

  He snapped his fingers as he entered the office. The phone screen lit up. “Get Blyleven down here on the double. I’ve got a job for him.”

  MARE NUBIUM

  The tractor plodded slowly along the bleak, empty expanse of Mare Nubium, heading away from the ring-wall mountains that marked Alphonsus and the site of Selene.

  Kris Cardenas fought to keep the terror from overcoming her. She could feel it, trembling deep inside her, crawling up into her throat, making her heart race so hard she could hear its pulse thundering in her ears.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked, her voice muffled by the helmet of the spacesuit they had put her into.

  No response from the driver. Of course, Cardenas thought. They’ve disabled my suit’s radio. A neat, high-tech way of gagging me.

  The two goons who had picked her up the night before had brought her down to Humphries’s extravagant place in Selene’s lowest level. Martin Humphries had not deigned to meet her, but she knew whose place it was. The servants had been very polite, offering her food and drink and showing her to a comfortable guest suite where she’d spent the night. The door to the corridor had been locked, of course. She was a prisoner and she knew it, no matter how sumptuous her cell.

  Strangely, she slept well. But thinking over the situation the next morning, after a maid had brought a breakfast tray into her sitting room, Cardenas reasoned that Humphries was going to murder her. He’ll have to, she thought. He can’t let me go and let me tell everyone that he’s killed Dan Randolph.