Asteroid Wars - The Precipice Part 35

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 hoa.r.s.ely 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 s.p.a.cesuit's sleeves. After more than five days of being cooped up in the s.h.i.+p, 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 s.p.a.cesuits 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 s.p.a.cesuit, with its hard-sh.e.l.l 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 b.u.t.t. 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 s.p.a.cesuited 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 gla.s.steel 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.p.a.ceport's control center. This little cl.u.s.ter of desks was occupied by Astro employees, monitoring Starpower 1's Starpower 1's flight. They sat apart from the regular Selene controllers, who handled the traffic to and from Earth. 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.

Wis.h.i.+ng 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 d.a.m.ned 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 n.o.bel 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+p fails out there in the Belt and he and his crew are killed. n.o.body will know what happened and n.o.body 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 a.s.set. 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

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? G.o.d 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, "G.o.d help us all."