Once a guy she briefly slept with stole her palmcomp; just walked off with it, as if he owned it. In a panicked fury, Joyce tracked him down at the next camp and nearly took his head off with a two-by-four. The owner’s guards let her go, once she told them the whole story. They had no use for thieves; especially stupid ones who let a scrawny oriental girl cold cock them.
In three years, Joyce got her degree in computer systems analysis from California Coast University. She applied for an advertised job at Selene. She didn’t get it. Four hundred and twenty-seven other people, most of them just as desperate and needy as Joyce, had applied for the same position.
The same day that she was turned down by Selene she got the message that both her parents had died in a freeway pileup during the earthquake that destroyed the shantytowns up in the hills above the drowned ruins of San Francisco.
CHAPTER 25
Nothing.
Fuchs scowled at the display screens that curved around his command chair, then looked out through the bridge’s windows. No sign of Waltzing Matilda. Nothing here but the lumpy irregular shape of an asteroid tumbling slowly in the barren emptiness, dark and pitted and strewn with small boulders and rocks.
This was the last position that the IAA had for Big George’s ship. Matilda’s telemetering had cut off here, at this location. But the ship was nowhere in sight.
Almost without consciously thinking about it, he put Starpower into a tight orbit around the little asteroid. Was George really here? He wondered. If he was he probably didn’t linger very—
Then he saw an area on the ‘roid where neat rectangular slabs had been cut out of the rock. George had been here! He had started to mine the asteroid. Turning up the magnification on his telescope to max, Fuchs saw that there was still some equipment standing on the surface. He left in a hurry, Fuchs realized, too much of a hurry to pick up all his gear.
It was a cutting laser, Fuchs saw, still standing silently at the edge of one of the cut-out rectangles. I must retrieve it, he said to himself. It could be evidence.
The easiest way to get it would be to suit up and go EVA. But with no one else in the ship, Fuchs decided against that. Instead, he maneuvered Starpower into an orbit that matched the asteroid’s own spin, the tip of his tongue apprehensively between his teeth, then slowly, carefully, brought the big ship to within a dozen meters of the rocky surface.
Using the manipulator arms on Starpower’s equipment module, Fuchs snatched the laser up off the asteroid and tucked it inside the cargo bay. He was soaked with perspiration by the time the job was done, but proud of his piloting.
Mopping his forehead, Fuchs resisted the temptation to call Ceres and ask if they had any fresh data on George’s ship. No! he scolded himself. You must remain silent.
Maybe that’s what George is doing, he thought. Gone silent, so no one can find him. Obviously he left in a big hurry. Most likely he was attacked, perhaps killed. But if he got away, now he’s staying silent to keep his attacker from finding him again.
But what do I do now? Fuchs wondered.
He left the bridge and went to the galley. The brain needs nourishment, he said to himself. I can’t think well on an empty stomach. He realized that his coverall shirt was sticky with perspiration. Honest work, he told himself. But it doesn’t smell good.
But by the time he washed up and ate a packaged meal, he still had no clear idea of what he should do next.
Find George, he thought. Yes, but how?
Back to the bridge he went and called up the search and rescue program from the computer files. “Aha!” he said aloud. Expanding spiral.
Standard operational procedure for a search mission was to fly an expanding spiral out from the last known position of the lost spacecraft. The one thing that worried Fuchs, though, was that George might have gone batting off at a high angle from the ecliptic. While the major planets orbited within a few degrees of the ecliptic path, plenty of asteroids roamed twenty or thirty degrees above or below that plane. Suppose George had gone angling away at high thrust? Fuchs knew he’d never find him then.