Even though the late winter sunlight had to struggle through a slate-gray layer of clouds, Erek Zar could see from his office window that most of the snow had already melted from the rooftops. It promised to be a good day, and a good weekend. Zar leaned back in his desk chair, clasped his hands behind his head, looked out across the rooftops toward the shimmering harbor, and thought that, with luck, he could get away by lunchtime and spend the weekend with his family in Krakow.
He was not happy, therefore, when Francesco Tomasselli stepped through his office door with a troubled expression on his swarthy face. Strange, Zar said to himself: Italians are supposed to be sunny and cheerful people. Tomasselli always looked like the crack of doom. He was as lean as a strand of spaghetti, the nervous sort. Zar felt like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Let me have men about me that are fat; sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’ nights.
“What’s the matter, Franco?” Zar asked, hoping it wasn’t serious enough to interfere with his travel plans.
Tomasselli plopped into the upholstered chair in front of the desk and sighed heavily. “Another prospecting ship is missing.”
Zar sighed too. He spoke to his desktop screen and the computer swiftly showed the latest report from the Belt: a spacecraft named Star of the East had disappeared; its tracking beacon had winked off, all telemetry from the craft had ceased.
“That’s the third one this month,” Tomasselli said, his lean face furrowed with worry.
Spreading his hands placatingly, Zar said, “They’re out on the edge of nowhere, sailing alone through the Belt. Once a ship gets into trouble there’s no one near enough to help. What do you expect?”
Tomasselli shook his head. “When a spacecraft gets into trouble, as you put it, it shows up on the telemetry. They send out distress calls. They ask for help, or advice.”
Zar shrugged.
“We’ve had ships fail and crews die, god knows,” Tomasselli went on, the faint ring of vowels at the end of most of his words. “But these three are different. No calls for help, no telemetry showing failures or malfunctions. They just disappear—poof!”
Zar thought a moment, then asked, “Had they claimed any asteroids?”
“One of them had: Lady of the Lake. Two weeks after the ship disappeared and the claim was officially invalidated, the asteroid was claimed by a vessel owned by Humphries Space Systems: the Shanidar.”
“Nothing irregular there.”
“Two weeks? It’s as if the Humphries ship was waiting for Lady of the Lake to disappear so they could claim the asteroid.”
“You’re getting melodramatic, Franco,” said Zar. “You’re accusing them of piracy.”
“It should be investigated.”
“Investigated? How? By whom? Do you expect us to send search teams through the Asteroid Belt? There aren’t enough spacecraft in the solar system for that!”
Tomasselli did not reply, but his dark eyes looked brooding, accusing.
Zar frowned at his colleague. “Very well, Franco. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll talk to the Humphries people and see what they have to say about it.”
“They’ll deny everything, of course.”
“There’s nothing to deny! There’s no shred of evidence that they’ve done anything wrong!”
Tomasselli muttered, “I am going to examine all the claims made by HSS ships over the past month.”
“What for?”
“To see if there are any in the regions where those two other missing ships disappeared.”
Zar wanted to scream at the man. He’s nothing but a suspicious-minded young Italian, Zar thought, seeing nefarious plots and skullduggery wherever he looks. But he took a deep breath to calm himself and said in an even, measured tone:
“That’s fine, Franco. You check the claims. I’ll speak to the HSS people. Monday. I’ll do it first thing Monday morning, after I come back from the weekend.”
CHAPTER 11
There was no meeting hall in Ceres, no single place designated for public assemblies. That was mainly because there had never been a need for one; Ceres’s ragtag collection of miners and prospectors, repair people and technicians, merchants and clerks had never come together in a public assembly until now. The closest thing to a government on Ceres was a pair of IAA flight controllers who monitored the take-offs and landings of the ships that were constantly arriving for supplies and maintenance, then departing into the dark emptiness of the Belt.