Ceres, Page 3

  Adam leaned back in his swivel chair, gazing up for a moment through the non-existent ceiling of his office, at the underside of the transparent dome, a thousand feet high, that served as base camp and headquarters for the Ceres Terraformation Project. A mile and a half in diameter, made of the same plastic that would someday cover the entire planetoid (except, of course, for the polar craters), the dome kept a habitable environment within, while protecting Adam and those working for him from solar radiation and a constant rain of micrometeorites.

  He could see a lot of tiny lights up there. Some were asteroids— this was the most densely populated portion of the Belt—but he didn’t have time or patience just now to watch long enough to tell which. He saw the Curringer Corporation’s factory vessel Giuseppi Piazzi, flagship of the fleet, affectionately known by everyone as Joe Pizza. Then he peered again at the big, flat, high resolution screen at the back of his desk.

  “This is in real time,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Hortense answered, “Real time.”

  The view was through a computer-assisted telescope aboard the Percy, looking into an otherwise undistinguished crater from which a missile had apparently been launched at the factory ship. Down inside the crater, the remains of a jumpbuggy were the easiest thing to see—little more than metallic confetti in the middle of a spoked rosette of blackened soil. Not far away, a small cluster of figures wearing brightly-colored envirosuits sat cross-legged, fingers interlaced submissively atop their helmets.

  On a nearby rock that had tumbled back into the crater sometime in the last couple of billion years, keeping his prisoners in that position, sat an individual wearing a white, professional-grade envirosuit more appropriate to long-term use on an asteroid’s surface. The manager of the Percy had assured Adam that the figure was his son, Wilson. Whoever it was—and there was no reason to believe that it wasn’t his son—he held a bulky laser rifle across his chest and looked up, every few minutes, toward the factory vessel in orbit above him.

  He made a decision. “Ingrid, call the motor pool and ask them to warm up a gamera for me, will you?”

  “Right away, Boss.” Ingrid went to her own desk and began pushing buttons.

  “Thank goodness we had the Morse Code in our database, Mr. Ngu,” Hortense was saying. They’d known each other and worked together for 15 years, and he’d never persuaded her to call him by his first name. Martians could be terribly formal, just as Pallatians tended to be rather informal. “And thank goodness your son guessed right, that at this distance, a laser rifle is safe to use as a signaling device.”

  Adam laughed. “If I know my own son, there wasn’t any guessing to it. That young man has the quickest mind for practical math I’ve seen since I met his mother. Did you attempt to signal back?”

  “Yes, sir. We’d seen the missile they fired at us—damn fools couldn’t shoot for sour owl-shit, pardon the expression, sir. Then we watched the gunfight and the explosion. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any way we could help. All of our tenders were out on rounds—still are, in fact—and we have no real weapons aboard except for personal sidearms. I think I’ll write a memo about that when this is over. When the boy sent us an SOS, using that laser, we switched off all of Percy’s running lights and switched them back on again, three times.

  “He acknowledged with his first initial and his last name.”

  Adam nodded, filled with fatherly pride. She could see him, even if he couldn’t see her. He was a man in his early 40s, sparely-built, tall, with thinning, sandy hair and an expression of vague sadness he didn’t know he wore. “Then he’ll know help is on the way—which it won’t be until I’m aboard the gamera. Talk to you again enroute.”

  “Okay, Mr. Ngu,” she answered, “Percival Lowell, signing off.”

  He got up, seizing his pistol belt where it hung from a shelf above the desk. It held a 10mm Magnum Ngu Departure Mark Five that the inventor—his own long-missing grandfather—had given him as a gift on his twelfth birthday. He was never more than an arm’s length away from it—that was the Pallatian Way—but the belt, holster, and spare magazine pouches didn’t work well with the arms of his swivel chair.

  “Ingrid, I’m outa here! Take the rest of the day off. I’m going to need you bright and early tomorrow morning.”

  “Good hunting, Boss.” She extinguished the lights and shut the door behind them.

  ***

  “Doctor Ngu!”

  Striding across the dome at ground level—his office was at one edge, the motor pool airlock almost at the other—Adam recalled that he hadn’t known why transports used here and on other large asteroids were called gamera, until his daughter had told him.

  “Doctor Ngu!”

  In his mind’s eye he could see Llyra now, tall, slender like nearly all Pallatians, blonde and fair, with a light scattering of freckles across her cute little turned-up nose—but looking back at him with her lost and legendary great-grandfather’s Asian eyes. She’d been exasperated with her daddy because “everybody” knew that the vehicles were named for their shape—everybody her age and enthusiastic about the latest media revival—a giant, mythical, rocket-powered turtle in silly Japanese monster movies of a previous century.

  Sometimes he wondered where a 13-year-old learned about things like that. It certainly wasn’t what he and his wife imported tutors to teach her. On the other hand, it had been a long time since he’d been 13 himself, and the years between full enough to make remembering what it was like a trifle difficult.

  If only Ardith—

  “Phone!” Adam spoke to the air more emphatically than he’d meant to. The thought of his wife usually had that effect on him. A welding crew preparing their midday meal at the worksite looked up at him. They were using an acetylene torch to heat the underside of a cast iron skillet, its handle clamped in a vise. It smelled like they were frying rabbit. It reminded him that he hadn’t had any lunch yet today.

  He grinned and waved as he passed them.

  “Doctor Ngu!”

  “Ready” came the electronic answer from his shirt pocket.

  The dome was full of buildings, relatively skeletal in appearance to any observer born and raised in more than a tenth of a standard gravity. Here were the administrative offices, drafting facilities, workshops, and living quarters for the Curringer Corporation’s Ceres Terraformation Project which he served as Executive Director and Chief Engineer. He walked rapidly through the makeshift streets between the so-far only half-constructed buildings, unconsciously inspecting them as he talked.

  “Get me Lindsay and Arleigh, right away, in conference.”

  “I just learned about Wilson,” said a voice most people heard as identical to his own. His middle brother Lindsay was one of his two “right arms” on the Project. “I’m on my way back now. You under way, yet, Ad?”

  “Not quite,” Adam told him. “I’m afoot, just arriving at the tunnel airlock. I’ll be aboard Number 23 in three minutes. Where are you now?”

  Lindsay laughed. “Look out through the dome. That’s me approaching in the crawler. Some idiot excavator thought he’d found a Drake-Tealy Object. What he found was one of the original survey landing sites. I’ll reach the gamera first. Want some coffee? Where’s Arleigh?”

  “What I want is lunch.” Adam couldn’t see him through the dome. He’d just sealed himself into the first of three airlocks between the edge of it and the motor pool. All the chambers between were kept filled with air, so the only wait was for the doors to open and close.

  “I’m in the lockspace right behind, you Ad,” came a third voice, tenor, rather different from those of his brothers. “If you’ll wait. There’s a very insistent young woman with me who’s been following you from your office, screaming your name.”

  Adam waited as requested, until the lock cycled, and was joined by his youngest brother. Arleigh was already wearing most of a company issue envirosuit and held his helmet under his arm, with his gloves tucked into it. Adam’s envirosui
t—one of them, anyway—would be waiting for him in the gamera.

  “Doctor Ngu…” There was a woman with Arleigh, mid-30s, Adam guessed, and from Earth to judge by her clothing. She wore a fairly plain business suit with a short skirt that didn’t work at one tenth of a gee—or worked splendidly, depending on one’s viewpoint. It kept creeping up over her hips and she had to hike it down. What most impressed Adam about her was that she wore a pair of Sony QDH-616G SuperMedia spectacles with cameras at their outer corners no bigger than a pinhead—and far too much perfume for a closed environment.

  Without thinking about it consciously, he dismissed her.

  Unlike Adam and Lindsay, and most Pallatians, Arleigh was almost as broad as he was tall. Their father Bill joked that he’d been born over a mascon and was built for heavy gravity. Arleigh had powerful arms and big, thick-fingered hands. His bushy hair and massive beard were black and curly. People had the impression he was short until they stood beside him. From the first moment she’d spoken, and for seven or eight years thereafter, Llyra had called her uncle Arleigh “Hagrid”.

  Arleigh had named himself. He’d hated his first name, Randolph. He’d hated being called Randy even worse. Going by his middle name for a while, he’d found that people assumed that “Leigh Ngu” was Asian. Not that it mattered. The brothers’ paternal grandfather was half Cambodian and half Vietnamese. That was how things were in the Belt. People came for a new beginning. They met and married others—or the daughters and sons of others—who had come for exactly the same reason.

  By then, nobody cared about anything about you, except the kind of person you were inside. You had to be smart and tough to survive. You had to have a decent regard for the rights of others. That was what really counted. The boys’ great grandmother’s maiden name had been Singh, but her father had been born and raised in Montana, part of West America.

  “Doctor Ngu,” the woman insisted. “Please let me introduce myself. I’m Honey Graham, of the Interplanetary Interactive Information Service. I understand there’s something of a crisis going on right now, and that it involves Null Delta Em—and your son, Wilson.”

  Without pausing more than an instant, Adam turned away from the woman and shook his brother’s hand. Ignoring her, they both hurried down the long tunnel designed to protect the dome from an explosion or fire in the motor pool. (The mechanics always said it was to protect them from an accident in the dome.)

  On the phone, Lindsay spoke. “I’ve downloaded nav data, Ad. Are you about here?”

  Adam said, “Just beneath you, cycling the elevator lock.”

  “See here, Doctor Ngu, you can’t just ignore me like that!” Honey Graham had caught up and was out of breath. “I represent the people’s press, and the people have a right—”

  Adam turned to her. “This is the asteroid Ceres, Miss… what did you say your name was? Every square inch of it is private property, and ‘the people’ have exactly the same rights here that they have in your bedroom. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

  He pushed buttons beside what looked like an ordinary elevator door. It opened into a cylindrical chamber. He and Arleigh entered, looking forward to the door closing behind them.

  “Please wait, Doctor Ngu! I’ve been on this goddamned rock for three weeks and haven’t found a single story worth transmitting home! I’m in danger of losing my job—and even worse, of dying of boredom! Can’t I come along? I’ll behave myself, I promise.”

  She twisted her torso slightly to expose a bit of cleavage and even more thigh. Adam sighed to himself. After only two minutes’ acquaintance, he detested this woman and everything she represented. But as Director of the Ceres Terraformation Project, he couldn’t afford trouble with the press right now, especially if Null Delta Em—and their sponsors, the Mass Movement—was involved.

  “What’s the matter, Miss…” he asked. “If nothing bleeds, then nothing leads?”

  “I’m Honey Graham, Doctor Ngu, and I’m afraid you’re right. I’m hearing that your son is a hero, though, and I’d like to cover the story.”

  “All right,” he told her. “Step into the elevator. I don’t suppose you have an envirosuit with you.”

  Arleigh laughed. “We’ll fix her up, Ad, don’t worry about it.”

  Adam pressed a button. The door shut and they felt a slight change in pressure in their ears. By the time they’d worked their jaws to clear them, the elevator had risen 20 feet and was now inside the belly of the gamera. The door opened. The two men and the woman stepped out.

  The door closed and another door, part of the gamera, closed over it. The elevator lowered itself back into the ground and circular doors on both the gamera and the tunnel below sealed themselves. The chamber that remained in the gamera could now be used as an ordinary airlock.

  “What’s our ETA?” Adam strode forward to the controls, while Arleigh stayed behind with the reporter, ostensibly to inspect some part of the machinery. Lindsay sat in the lefthand seat, working his way through the checklist. Like his brother, he was tall and slender, although his hair was dark and had receded to form a distinctive widow’s peak.

  “Point-to-point, about 36 minutes.” Lindsay flipped a last switch, closed the aluminum-covered book, and dropped it into its slot beside his left knee. He shouted at Arleigh, “Grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup in the kitchen unit! Better buckle up back there!”

  “I’m buckled! So is Miss Graham—may I call you Honey?”

  Grinning, Lindsay checked radar, then checked the old-fashioned way, through what were once called windshields, for any traffic around them. He took the yoke in his left hand, put his feet on the pedals, and pulled back on a lever. The gamera lifted itself from the ground on a column of ionized gases, surged forward as it continued to rise, and they were off.

  CHAPTER FOUR: BRODY MEMORIAL

  In retrospect, it makes perfect sense, as all unintended consequences do. The parts were all there: the low gravity, the availability of temperatures only a handful of degrees above Absolute Zero, confined spaces that won’t permit wider- reaching pastimes like baseball. But who could have guessed that the asteroids’ favorite sport, to watch or play, would turn out to be hockey? —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  “I see you have again been pond skating,” Jasmeen Khalidov said. “And over mascon.”

  Somehow looking like a ballerina at rest, the young woman sat cross-ankled on a long, low, slatted plastic bench running down the center for most of the length of the women’s hockey locker room at the Aloysius Brody Memorial Ice Skating Rink in Curringer, principal city on Pallas, second largest body in the Asteroid Belt. She was holding, in both of her long, slender-fingered hands, her only student’s left boot, upturned just now to expose the gleaming double edges of the blade.

  The boots were perfectly conventional, handmade for their owner of stiff, multilayered leather and various synthetics, nominally white on the outside, but covered with scuffs and cuts from long, hard use. It was the blades that were different, especially designed for the lower gravity of Pallas. They were half again as thick as ordinary figure skating blades, but lighter because they were made from an alloy of titanium. Their undersurfaces were grooved, like those of ordinary skates, but the radius was much smaller than normal—only three sixteenths of an inch—to provide extraordinarily sharp, deep edges, necessary for control at only one twentieth of the “standard” Earth gravity.

  The toepicks at the fronts of the blades were different, too, longer and sharper. Ordinary toepicks, meant for use on Earth, would only skid in the light gravity of Pallas, without biting into the ice properly.

  The other boot lay at Jasmeen’s feet.

  There wasn’t a surface in the room that wasn’t marked where a black rubber hockey puck had bounced off it at one time or another. There were a dozen signs in the locker rooms, in the lobby, in the bleachers, in the alleyway around the rink itself, warning in big red letters against puck and stick play anywhere at Frazier Memorial but on the
ice. Nobody had ever paid the slightest attention to them or ever would.

  Similar warnings not to hang on the overhead netting, forty feet above the ice—it was an easy jump for most Pallatian skaters— were similarly ignored.

  Three broken hockey sticks stood, stacked together like rifles, in a corner of the room near the showers, and odd remnants of gear, armor made of fiberglass—knee guards, shin guards, elbow guards, shoulder pads, even a helmet—were strewn about the rubberized floor like bits of molted dinosaur skin.

  The heavy odor of athletic sweat, suffused with adrenaline, and allowed to stand in lockers full of dirty clothing until it fermented, permeated the room, but Jasmeen and her student were as accustomed to it as anyone could get. After twenty minutes or so of adjustment, they hardly noticed it. If it were her rink, the young coach had often said nobody would be allowed to enter the rink with unwashed pads and other equipment.

  Jasmeen could see herself in the polished nickel-steel mirror at one end of the locker room. (Glass wouldn’t have survived in here for a minute.) What she saw was an extraordinarily slender, rather fragile looking young woman who was not quite yet 20, and, at five foot four inches, fully a head shorter than most of the Pallatian children Llyra’s age.

  Appearances can be deceiving. There was nothing fragile about Jasmeen, nothing fragile at all. She was a pretty blonde—at the moment, her shoulder-blade-length hair was bound up in a couple of big pigtails—with rather strong features: enormous gray-green eyes with very long, dark lashes, and lids that were a natural lavender color and needed no makeup. Her eyebrows didn’t arch, but soared up and outward above her eyes. She had a small dimple in her chin, and her lips, especially the lower one, were full. Her nose, gracefully turned up, was proportionate with the rest of her face.