The prospector shook her head. “No deal. I’m working my way around the far side. By this time tomorrow it’ll take half an hour for messages to catch up with me. Sayonara, Lars.”
The screen went blank. Fuchs leaned back in his creaking desk chair, his thoughts churning slowly. There is no way I can force her to bring Starpower back. She’s on her way out and she won’t be back for at least four months. When she returns she’ll either have claim to a rich metallic asteroid or she’ll be so dead broke she won’t even be able to pay me the final installment on the lease.
No matter which way he looked at it, he could find no answer to his problem. If we’re going back to Earth it will have to be as passengers on someone else’s ship.
Amanda came through the door from the tunnel at the same moment that the phone chimed. Fuchs automatically said, “Answer,” to the phone, but then he saw the awful expression on his wife’s face.
“What is it?” he asked, rising from his chair. “What’s wrong?”
“Ripley,” she said in a voice that sounded frightened. “They found him by the airlock, outside. He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Fuchs felt shocked. “How? What happened?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” said Kris Cardenas, from the wallscreen.
Fuchs and Amanda both turned to her image.
Cardenas looked grim. “They brought Ripley’s body to me, here in the infirmary.”
“What happened to him?” Fuchs asked again.
Cardenas shook her head warily. “Nothing wrong with his suit. He didn’t die of asphyxiation or decompression. The suit’s scuffed up a lot, but there was no system failure.”
“Then what?” Amanda asked.
She frowned with uncertainty. “I’m going to do a multi-spectral scan and try to find out. The reason I called you was to find out if he has any next-of-kin here on Ceres.”
“No, no one closer than New Jersey, in the United States,” said Fuchs. “I’ll transfer his personnel file to you.”
“He was working on the habitat?” Cardenas asked, even though she knew the answer.
“Yes,” said Fuchs absently. “Now the project will have to stop until we find someone to replace him.”
Amanda said, “We’re coming to the infirmary, Kris. We’ll be there in five minutes.”
Cardenas said, “Hang on. Give me an hour or so to do this scan. I’ll know more about it by then.”
Amanda and Fuchs both nodded their agreement.
Despite her youthful appearance, Kris Cardenas looked grave, almost angry as she ushered Amanda and Fuchs into her tiny infirmary. It was the only medical facility on Ceres, the only medical facility between the Belt and the exploration bases on Mars. Cardenas could handle accident cases, if they weren’t too severe, and the usual run of infections and strains. Anything worse was sent to Selene, while Cardenas herself remained among the rock rats.
She was twice an exile. Because her body was teeming with nanomachines, no government on Earth would allow her to land on its territory. This had cost her, her husband and children; like most of Earth’s inhabitants, they were terrified by the threat of runaway nanotechnology causing pandemic plagues or devouring cities like unstoppable army ants chewing everything into a gray goo.
Her anger at Earth and its unreasoning fears led her to cause Dan Randolph’s death. It was inadvertent, true enough, but Selene banned her from her own nanotech laboratory as a punishment for her actions and a precaution against future use of nanomachines for personal motives. So she left Selene, exiled herself among the rock rats, used her knowledge of human physiology to establish the infirmary on Ceres.
“Have you found what killed Ripley?” Amanda asked her as she and Fuchs took the chairs in front of Cardenas’s desk.
“I wouldn’t have caught it, normally,” Cardenas said tightly. “I’m not a pathologist. It damned near slipped right past me.”
The office was small, crowded with the three of them in it. Cardenas tapped a keypad on her desktop and the wall opposite the doorway turned into a false-color display of Niles Ripley’s body.
“There was nothing obviously wrong,” she began. “No visible trauma, although there were a few small bruises on his chest and back.”