She’s too clever to use her own vessel, Harbin thought, as one by one the curving lines indicating individual ships’ courses winked out. She’ll hitch a ride aboard some prospector’s ship, or maybe an Astro logistics vessel.
The tracking information came straight from the IAA controllers in the Chrysalis habitat orbiting Ceres. Harbin wished that Humphries had enough spies aboard the habitat to watch Pancho Lane and see which vessel she entered, but that kind of information was not available to him. So he dispatched three armed ships out into the Belt, and kept three more in a very loose formation centered on his own vessel. To an untrained eye it looked like a few more prospectors’ ships heading outward. Harbin hoped that’s what Fuchs would see.
The welter of curving lines slowly diminished on the screen until only one ship’s planned trajectory was displayed. Harbin shook his head, muttering, “Stupid computer.” The ship’s manifest said it belonged to the government of Ceres and carried none other than their chief administrator, who was going out on an inspection tour of various mining operations in the Belt. The chief rock rat going to visit his little rock rat brethren, Harbin thought.
Then his eyes narrowed. Why is their chief administrator traipsing through the Belt? Has he ever done that before? he asked the computer. The answer returned almost before he finished uttering the question. Never. This was the first inspection tour on record.
Harbin smiled grimly. Maybe the computer isn’t so stupid, after all. He sent a message to Grigor, all the way back at Selene. “Do you have any way of finding out who’s on the torch ship Mathilda II with the rock rats’ chief administrator?”
Grigor replied in little more than an hour. “No passenger list is available. Apparently the vessel carries only its crew of three, and the man Ambrose.”
Harbin nodded and remembered that Pancho Lane had once been a professional astronaut. She could probably take the place of a crewman on Ambrose’s ship.
To his own navigator he commanded, “Set a course to follow the vessel shown on the computer display. Stay well behind it. I don’t want them to know we’re following them.”
Mathilda II was a great deal more comfortable than the original Waltzing Matilda. That old bucket had been a mining ship before it was shot to shreds in the first asteroid war. Mathilda II was a comfortably fitted torch ship capable of carrying important passengers while serving as a mobile office for the chief administrator of the Ceres settlement.
Sitting in a swivel chair in the galley, George was explaining, “I left the message for Lars and told him where we’ll be waitin’ for him. This way we don’t surprise him.”
Pancho was seated across the galley table from George. They were in the middle of dinner, Pancho picking at a salad while George wholeheartedly attacked a rack of ribs.
“And the spot you picked to rendezvous with him isn’t where one of the transceivers is stashed?” she asked.
“Naw,” said George, dabbing at his sauce-soaked beard with a napkin. “We’ll rendezvous in dead-empty space. I gave him the coordinates. If anybody’s followin’ us we’ll both be able to see ’em long before they can cause any trouble.”
Pancho nodded. “And you send all your messages to Lars over a tight laser link?”
“Yup. Just about impossible for anybody to intercept ’em or eavesdrop. If somebody does get into the beam we see it right away as a drop in received power.”
“Pretty cute.”
“Pretty necessary,” George said, picking up another sauce-dripping barbecued rib.
In the weeks since his encounter with the disguised logistics ship Roebuck, Lars Fuchs had added a new wrinkle to his Nautilus.
Ships operating in deep space required radiation shielding. When solar flares erupted and spewed planet-engulfing clouds of deadly ionizing particles through interplanetary space, a ship without shielding was little more than a coffin for its crew. The powerful protons in such clouds were particularly dangerous, capable of killing humans and frying electronics systems within minutes unless they were properly protected.
Most spacecraft shielded themselves by charging their outer skins to a very high positive electrical potential. This diverted the deadly high-energy protons of the radiation cloud. The cloud also contained electrons, however, which were less energetic but capable of discharging the ship’s positive electrical field. To keep the electrons at bay, the ships surrounded themselves with a magnetic field, generated by lightweight superconducting wires. Thus spacecraft operating beyond the Earth/Moon system were wrapped in an invisible but powerful magnetic field of their own, and charged their outer skins to high positive potential when a solar storm broke out.