Asteroid Wars - The Precipice Part 20

Randolph gave her a sly grin. "I suppose," he said, running a finger across his chin, "that we'll award a few shares here and there, for exceptional performances."

"Like piloting a bird to the Belt and back."

Randolph nodded.

"Okay," Pancho said, with enthusiasm. "Meanwhile, you can poke into Humphries's files anytime you want to."

Randolph cleared the screen with a single, sharp, "Exit." To Pancho, he said, "You're wasting your time jockeying s.p.a.cecraft. You make a mighty fine spy, kid."

"I'd rather fly than spy," she said.

Randolph looked at her. He's got really neat eyes, she thought. Gray, but not cold. Deep. Flecked with gold. Nice eyes.

"I'm not sure that I want to poke into Humphries's files," he said.

"No?"

"A man named Stimson was the U. S. Secretary of State back a century or more ago," Randolph said. "When he found out that the State Department was routinely intercepting the mail from the foreign emba.s.sies in Washington he stopped the practice. He said, 'Gentlemen do not read each other's mail. ' Or something like that."

Pancho snorted. "Maybe you're a gentleman, but Humphries sure ain't."

"I think you're half right."

"Which half?"

Instead of answering, Randolph tapped a b.u.t.ton on the phone console. The big Australian came through the door from the outer office almost instantly.

"You two know each other?" Randolph asked. Without waiting for a reply from either of them, he said, "George Ambrose, Pancho Lane."

"Pleased," said Big George. Pancho made a quick smile.

"George, who do we have who can download a complete hard drive without letting the hard drive's owner know it?"

Big George glanced at Pancho, then asked, "You want this done as quiet as possible, right?"

"Absolutely right."

"Then I'll do it meself."

"You?"

"Don't look so surprised," George said. "I used to be an engineer, before I hooked up with you."

"You were a fugitive from justice before you hooked up with me," Randolph countered.

"Yeah, yeah, but before that. I came to the Moon to teleoperate tractors up on the surface. My b.l.o.o.d.y degree's in software architecture, for chrissakes."

"I didn't know that," Randolph said.

"Well now you do. So what needs doing here?"

"I'd like you to work with Pancho here. She'll explain the problem."

George looked at her. "Okay. When do we start?"

"Now," said Randolph. Then, to Pancho, he added, "You can tell George anything you'd tell me."

"Sure," Pancho agreed. But in her mind she added, Maybe.

FACTORY #4.

"This is more like it," said Dan.

He heard Kris Cardenas's nervous laughter in his helmet earphones.

There were five of them standing on the factory floor, encased in white s.p.a.cesuits like a team of astronauts or tourists out for a jaunt on the Moon's surface. Before them, on the broad, s.p.a.cious floor of the otherwise empty factory, stood a set of spherical fuel tanks, the smaller sphere of a fusion reaction chamber, and the unfinished channel of an MHD generator, all connected by st.u.r.dy-looking piping and surrounded by crates of various powdered metals and bins of soot: pure carbon dust. Dan, Cardenas and three of her nanotechnicians stood in a group, encased in their s.p.a.cesuits, watching the results of the nanomachines ceaseless work.

It was daylight outside, Dan knew. Through the open sides of the factory he saw the brilliant sunlight glaring harshly against the barren lunar landscape. But inside the factory, with its curved roof cutting off the glow from the Sun and Earth, the components of the fusion system looked dark and dull, like the unpolished diamond that they were.

"We start on the pumps next," Cardenas said, "as soon as the MHD channel is finished. And then the rocket nozzles."

Dan heard an edge in her voice. She did not like being out on the surface. Despite all her years of living on the Moon-or maybe because of them-being outside bothered her.

Selene's factories were built out on the Moon's surface, exposed to the vacuum of s.p.a.ce, almost completely automated or run remotely by operators safe in control centers underground. "You okay, Kris?" he asked. "I'd feel better downstairs," she answered frankly.

"Okay, then, let's go. I'm sorry I dragged you out here. I just wanted to see for myself how we're doing."

"It's all right," she said, but she turned and started toward the airlock hatch and the tractor that had carried them to the factory.

"I know that the vacuum out here is great for industrial processing," she said, apologizing. "It just scares the bejesus out of me."

"Even b.u.t.toned up nice and cozy in a s.p.a.cesuit?" Dan asked, walking across the factory floor alongside her.

"Maybe it's the suit," she said. "Maybe I'm a closet claustrophobe."

Contamination was something that flatlanders from Earth took for granted. Living on a planet teeming with life, from bacteria to whales, thick with pollution from human and natural sources, and deep within a turbulent atmosphere that transports spores, dust, pollen, smog, moisture and other contaminants everywhere, cleanliness for Earthsiders was a matter of degree. That was why Dan, with his immune system weakened by the radiation doses he'd been exposed to in s.p.a.ce, wore filter plugs and sanitary masks when he was on Earth.

In the hard vacuum of the lunar surface, a thousand times better than the vacuum of low Earth orbit, not only was the environment clean of external pollution sources, the contaminants inside most materials could be removed virtually for free. Microscopic gas bubbles trapped inside metals percolated out of the metal's crystal structure and boiled off into the void. Thus Selene's factories were out on the lunar surface, open to the purifying vacuum of the Moon.

"We don't need to go through the carwash again," Dan said, touching the arm of Cardenas's suit. "We can go straight to the tractor."

He walked around the bulky airlock and hopped off the concrete slab that formed the factory floor, dropping in lunar slow-motion three meters to the regolith. His boots puffed up a little cloud of dust that floated lazily up halfway to his knees.

Cardenas came to the lip of the slab, hesitated, then jumped down to where Dan waited for her.

Like all the lunar factories, this one was built on a thick concrete platform to keep the factory floor above the dusty ground. With no winds, there was little danger of contaminants blowing in from the outside. A curving dome of honeycomb lunar aluminum protected the factory from the constant infall of micrometeoroids and the hard radiation from the Sun and deep s.p.a.ce.

The most worrisome source of pollution came from the humans who occasionally entered the factories, even though they had to wear s.p.a.cesuits. Before they were allowed onto the factory floor, Dan and the others had to go through the "carwash," a special airlock equipped with electrostatic scrubbers and special powdered detergents that removed the traces of oil, perspiration and other microscopic contaminants that clung to the s.p.a.cesuits' outer surfaces.

As the tractor slowly trundled back to Selene's main airlock, Dan thought about what he had just seen. Before his eyes, the MHD channel was growing: slowly, he admitted, but it was visibly getting longer as the virus-sized nanomachines took carbon and other atoms from the supply bins and locked them into place like kids building a Tinkertoy city.

"How much longer?" he asked into the microphone built into his helmet.

Cardenas, sitting beside him, understood his question. "Three weeks, if they go as programmed."

"Three weeks?" Dan blurted. "Looks like they're almost finished now."

"They've still got to finish the MHD channel, which is a pretty tricky piece of work. High-current-density electrodes, superconducting magnets and all. Then comes the pumps, which is no bed of roses, and finally the rocket nozzles, which are also complex: buckyball microtubes carrying cryogenic hydrogen running a few centimeters away from a ten-thousand-degree plasma flow. Then there's-"

"Okay, okay," Dan said, throwing up his gloved hands. "Three weeks."

"That's the schedule."

Dan knew the schedule. He had been hoping for better news from Cardenas. Over the past six weeks his lawyers had hammered out the details of the new Starpower, Ltd. partnership. Humphries's lawyers had niggled over every detail, while Selene's legal staff had breezed through the negotiation with little more than a cursory examination of the agreement, thanks largely to Doug Stavenger's prodding.

So now it was all in place. Dan had the funding to make the fusion rocket a reality, and he still had control of Astro Manufacturing. Astro was staggering financially, but Dan calculated that the company could hold together until the profits from the fusion system started rolling in.

Still, he constantly pushed Cardenas to go faster. It was going to be a tight race: Astro had already started construction of its final solar power satellite. When that one's finished, Dan knew, we go sailing over the disaster curve. No new s.p.a.ce construction contracts in sight.

"Can't this buggy go any faster?" Cardenas asked, testily.

"Full throttle, ma'am," said the imperturbable technician at the controls.

To take her mind off her fears of being out in the open, Dan asked her, "Did you see this morning's news from Earthside?"

"The food riots in Delhi? Yeah, I saw it."

"They're starving, Kris. If the monsoon fails again this year there's going to be a monster famine, and it'll spread a long way."

"Not much we can do about," Cardenas said.

"Not yet," Dan muttered.

"They got themselves into this mess," she said tightly, "breeding like hamsters."

She's really bitter, Dan thought. I wonder how she'd feel if her husband and kids had decided to stay on the Moon with her. With a sigh, he admitted, she's got plenty to be bitter about.

Big George was waiting for Dan in his private office, sitting on the sofa, a sheaf of printouts scattered across the coffee table.

"What's all this?" Dan asked, sitting in the chair at the end of the coffee table. When George sat on the couch there really wasn't much room for anyone else.

"Stuff I lifted from Humphries's files," George said, his red-bearded face wrinkled with worry. "He's out for your b.a.l.l.s, y'know."

"I know."

Tapping a blunt finger on the pile of printouts, George said, "He's buyin' every share of Astro stock he can get his hands on. Quietly. No greenmail, no big fuss, but he's pushin' his brokers to buy at any price."

"Great," Dan grunted. "Maybe the d.a.m.ned stock will go up a little."

George grinned. "That'd be good. Been in free fall long enough."

"You're not thinking of selling, are you?"

With a laugh, George replied, "The amount I've got? Wouldn't make any difference, one way or the other."

Dan was not amused. "If you ever do want to sell, you come to me first, understand? I'll buy at the market price."

"Humphries is buyin' at two points above the f.o.o.kin' market price."

"Is he?"

"In some cases, where big blocks of stock are involved."

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Dan said fervently, p.r.o.nouncing each word distinctly. "He knows I don't have the cash to buy out the minor stockholders."

"It's not all that bad," George said. "I did a calculation. At the rate he's acquiring Astro shares, it'll take him two years to buy up a majority position."

Dan stared off into s.p.a.ce, thinking hard. "Two years. We could be making profits from the Asteroid Belt by then. Should be, if everything goes right."

"And if it doesn't go right?"

Dan shrugged. "Then Humphries will take control of Astro and throw me out on my b.u.t.t."

"I'll take his head off his f.o.o.kin' shoulders first," George growled.

"A lovely sentiment, pal, but then we'd have to deal with his lawyers."

George rolled his eyes toward heaven.

GRAND PLAZA.

This is getting silly, Pancho thought. Humphries doesn't trust phones or electronic links, too easy to tap, he says. So we have to meet face-to-face, in person, but in places where we won't be noticed together. And he's running out of places.