“It missed the Earth completely. Mars, as well.”
“But it’s going to swamp us.”
“Actually,” Amanda said, “we’ll merely be brushed by it. A few hours, that’s all.”
“That’s good.”
“Our own velocity is helping a lot, you know. An ordinary spacecraft, coasting along the way they do, would be in the cloud for days on end.”
Dan had no desire to be in the cloud for even ten minutes. He changed the subject, as much to get away from the fear building up inside him as any other reason. “How friendly are you and Fuchs?”
Amanda’s brows shot up. “Lars? He’s very earnest—about his work. Nothing more.”
“That’s all there is to it?”
“Yes.”
Dan thought it over. Two healthy young people locked in this sardine can for a couple of weeks. Of course, there’s Pancho and me to chaperon them. Dan grinned to himself. Damn, it’s like being a teenager’s father.
Pancho returned to the bridge. “Hey boss, get outta my chair.”
“Yes’m,” said Dan.
The plasma cloud hit them less than an hour later. There was no buffeting, no clanging of alarms, nothing to tell them that they were being engulfed in the cloud of killing radiation except the rising curves of fire-engine red on the radiation monitoring screens.
Pancho did not consider the storm so dangerous that someone had to be on the bridge at all times. She came into the wardroom and joined the others for dinner. Dan ate mechanically, not really tasting his food, not really hearing the conversation. Double-damned radiation, he kept thinking. I hate this. Despite two steaming mugs of coffee, he felt cold inside. But the others seemed completely unfazed by the storm. After the meal Dan said good-night to them all and went to his compartment. He dreamed of floating helplessly in space, slowly freezing as the Sun glowered at him.
NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY
Long past midnight, Kris Cardenas sat alone in her office in Selene’s nanotechnology lab. The rest of the lab was empty, darkened to its nighttime lighting level.
She had agreed to have dinner with Martin Humphries because she wanted to get the man to warn Dan Randolph about the nanomachines that she had planted in his vessel, virus-sized disassemblers that once were known as “gobblers.”
They were the reason that nanotechnology was banned on Earth — and under careful supervision at Selene.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? she asked herself. Who will watch the watchmen? Some Roman asked that question more than two thousand years ago, Cardenas knew.
All nanotech work was under very strict control in Selene. No one was allowed to work with gobblers: they had killed people. They had even been used to commit murder. If they ever got loose they could destroy all Selene. The medical work had to be supervised down to the nanometer because the therapeutic nanobugs that took apart plaque in a person’s arteries or destroyed tumors atom by atom were forms of gobblers, nothing less. If they ever got loose, if their programming was ever-so-subtly altered…
That was why Kris Cardenas’s primary duty as head of all nanotech work at Selene was to protect against such a catastrophe. She watched over every aspect of the work done in the nanotech lab.
But who will watch the watchmen? She had produced a microscopic batch of gobblers for Humphries, specifically tailored to damage Starpower 1 enough so Dan would have to turn the ship around and limp back to Selene. Humphries had promised that he would obtain permission for her to visit Earth again, to see her daughters and her grandchildren.
Now he was offering to bring them up here. Even better. But the price! Dan Randolph and the other people on that ship could get killed.
Is that what Humphries really wants? She asked herself. If I warned Dan now he’d have to return to Selene. Flat and simple. But Humphries wants to wait another day or so, let Dan get to the inner fringes of the Belt and then tell him that his ship’s going to fail.
Or maybe he won’t warn Dan at all!
Cardenas sat up straight in her desk chair. That’s it, she told herself. He wants to kill Dan and the rest of the crew. She knew it with the certainty of revealed truth.