I’ll have them flush my water tanks, too, and refill them, Harbin thought idly as he approached the vessel. After a couple of months recycled water begins to taste suspiciously like piss.
He linked with the supply vessel and stayed only long enough for the replenishment to be completed. He never left his own ship, except for one brief visit to the private cabin of the supply vessel’s captain. She handed him a sealed packet that Harbin immediately tucked into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit.
“Must you leave so soon?” the captain asked. She was in her thirties, Harbin judged, not really pretty but attractive in a feline, self-assured way. “We have all sorts of, um . . . amenities aboard my ship.”
Harbin shook his head. “No thank you.”
“The newest recreational drugs.”
“I must get back to my ship,” he said curtly.
“Not even a meal? Our cook—”
Harbin turned and reached for the cabin’s door latch.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” the captain said, smiling knowingly.
Harbin looked at her sharply. “Afraid? Of you?” He barked out a single, dismissive laugh. Then he left her cabin and went immediately back to his own ship.
Only after he had broken away from the supply vessel and was heading deeper into the Belt did he open the packet and remove the chip it contained. As he expected, it contained a list of ships to be attacked, together with their planned courses and complete details of their construction. Another death list, Harbin thought as he studied the images passing across his screen.
Abruptly, the specification charts ended and Grigor’s lean melancholy face appeared on the screen.
“This has been added at the last moment,” Grigor said, his dour image replaced by the blueprints of a ship. “The ship’s name is Starpower. We do not have a course for it yet, but that data will be sent to you via tight-beam laser as soon as it becomes available.”
Harbin’s eyes narrowed. That means I’ll have to get to the preplanned position to receive the laser beam and loiter there until they send the information. He did not like the idea of waiting.
“This is top priority,” Grigor’s voice droned over the image of Starpower’s construction details. “This must be done before you go after any other ships.”
Harbin wished he could talk back to Grigor, ask questions, demand more information.
Grigor’s face appeared on the screen again. “Destroy this one ship and you might not need to deal with any of the others. Eliminate Starpower and you might be able to return to Earth for good.”
WALTZING MATILDA
I have good news,” Nodon said as George pushed through the hatch into the bridge. “While you were EVA I wired the backup laser into the comm system.”
George squeezed into the right-hand seat. “The backup laser?”
“From our supply stocks. Back in the storage section.”
“And it works?”
Nodon beamed happily. “Yes. The laser can carry our communications signals. We can call for help now.”
Breaking into a guarded smile, George asked, “We’ll hafta point it at Ceres, then.”
“The pointing is the problem,” Nodon said, his happiness diminishing. “At the distance we are from Ceres, the beam disperses only a dozen kilometers or so.”
“So we hafta point it straight onto the optical receivers, then.”
“If we can.”
“And the fookin’ ‘roid rotates in about nine hours or so, right?”
“I believe so,” Nodon said. “I can look it up.”
“So that means we’d hafta hit their optical receivers bung on at just the right time when they’re pointin’ toward us.”
“Yes,” said Nodon.
“Like playin’ a fookin’ game o’ darts over a distance of thousands of kilometers.”
“Hundreds of thousands.”
“Fat chance.” Nodon bowed his head. For a moment George thought he might be praying. But then he looked up again and asked, “What of the engine? Can you repair the thruster?”
George grunted. “Oh, sure. Yeah.”
“You can?”
“If I had a repair shop available and a half-dozen welders, pipefitters and other crew.”
“Oh.”
Heaving a weary sigh, George said, “We’ll hafta depend on the laser, pal. The fookin’ engine’s a lost cause.”
CHAPTER 24
Lars Fuchs didn’t spend more than five minutes deciding what he was going to do. He called up the flight history data on Waltzing Matilda. Sure enough, Big George and his crewman had been working a fair-sized carbonaceous asteroid, according to the data they had telemetered back to the IAA. They had started mining it, then all communications from their ship had abruptly cut off. Efforts by the IAA controllers on Ceres to contact them had proved fruitless.