Harbin’s beard had grown thick again over the months he had been chasing Fuchs across the Belt. He scratched at it idly as a new thought crossed his mind. How did this ore freighter know that we are building a base here? It’s supposed to be a secret. If every passing tugboat knows about it, Fuchs will hear of it sooner or later.
What difference? Harbin asked himself. Even if he knows about it, what can he do? One man in one ship, against a growing army. Sooner or later we’ll find him and destroy him. It’s only a matter of time. And then I can return to Diane.
As he watched the display screen, he noticed that the approaching freighter didn’t seem to be braking into an orbit. Instead, it was accelerating. Rushing toward the asteroid.
“It’s going to crash!” Harbin shouted.
Maneuvering a spinning spacecraft with pinpoint accuracy was beyond the competence of any of Fuchs’s people. Or of Nielsen’s crew. But to the ship’s computer it was child’s play: simple Newtonian mechanics, premised on the first law of motion.
Fuchs felt the ship’s slight acceleration as Durant followed the programmed course. Standing spread-legged on the bridge, he saw the rugged, pitted surface of the asteroid rushing closer and closer. He knew they were accelerating at a mere fraction of a g, but as he stared at the screen it seemed as if the asteroid was leaping up toward them. Will we crash? he asked himself. What of it? came his own mind’s answer. If we die that’s the end of it.
But as Durant accelerated silently toward the asteroid, its maneuvering jets fired briefly and the clamps holding nearly fifteen hundred thousand tons of asteroidal ores let go of their burden. The ship jinked slightly and slipped over the curve of the asteroid’s massive dark rim, accelerating toward escape velocity. The jettisoned ores spread into the vacuum of space like a ponderous rock slide, pouring down slowly toward the crater where the HSS base was being built.
In that vacuum, a body in motion stays in motion unless some outside force deflects it. In Vesta’s minuscule gravity, the rocks actually weighed next to nothing. But their mass was still nearly fifteen hundred thousand tons. They fell gently, leisurely, toward the asteroid’s surface, a torrent of death moving with the languid tumbling motion of a nightmare.
“Sir? Incoming call from Shanidar.” The woman’s voice in Giap’s earphones sounded strained, almost frightened.
Without waiting for him to tell her, she connected Harbin. “That ship is on a collision course with—no, wait. It’s released its cargo!”
It was difficult to look up from inside the spacesuit helmet, but when Giap twisted his head back and slightly sideways, all he could see was a sky full of immense dark blobs blotting out the stars.
He heard Harbin’s tense, strained voice, “Break us out of orbit!”
Then the ground jumped so hard he was blasted completely off his feet and went reeling, tumbling into an all-engulfing billow of black dust.
Aboard Shanidar, Harbin watched in horror as the rocks dropped ever-so-softly toward the construction site in the crater. The ore freighter was masked by them and heading over the curve of the asteroid’s bulk. The men and women down in that crater were doomed, condemned to inexorable death.
“Break us out of orbit!” he shouted to the woman in the pilot’s chair.
“Refueling isn’t completed!”
“Forget the mother-humping refueling!” he yelled. Pounding the intercom key on the console before him, he called to the crew, “Action stations! Arm the lasers! Move!”
But he knew it was already too late.
With nothing to impede their motion the landslide of rocks glided silently through empty space until they smashed into the surface of Vesta. The first one missed the buildings but blasted into the rim of the crater, throwing up a shower of rocky debris that spread leisurely across the barren landscape. The next one obliterated several of the metal huts dug halfway into the crater floor. Then more and more of them pounded in, raising so much dust and debris that Harbin could no longer see the crater at all. The dust cloud rose and drifted, a lingering shroud of destruction and death, slowly enveloping the entire asteroid, even reaching out toward his ship. Harbin unconsciously expected it to form a mushroom shape, as nuclear bombs did on Earth. Instead the cloud simply grew wider and darker, growing as if it fed on the asteroid’s inner core. Harbin realized it would hang over the asteroid for days, perhaps weeks, a dark pall of death.