Her message ended.
Humphries leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the wall screen that displayed a hologram of Jupiter’s colorful swirling clouds.
Completely destroyed the ship and killed everybody aboard, he repeated to himself. What a weapon those little bugs could make!
ORE CARRIER STARLIGHT
Starlight was an independent freighter. For years it had plied between Ceres and Selene, taking on cargoes of ore in the Belt and carrying them on a slow, curving ellipse to the waiting factories on the Moon and in Earth orbit. Its owners, a married couple from Murmansk, had kept strictly aloof from the big corporations, preferring to make a modest living out of carrying ores and avoiding entanglements. Their crew consisted of their two sons and daughters-in-law. On their last trip to Selene they had tarried a week longer than usual so that their first grandchild—a girl—could be born in the lunar city’s hospital. Now, after a trip with the squalling new baby to the Belt, they were returning to Selene, happy to be away from the fighting that had claimed so many Astro and HSS ships.
The Astro drone had no proper name, only a number designation: D-6. The D stood for “destroyer.” It was an automated vessel, remotely controlled from Astro’s offices in Selene. The controllers’ assignment was to attack any HSS vessels approaching the Moon. The particular controller on duty that morning had a list of HSS ships in her computer, complete with their names, performance ratings, and construction specifications. She suspected that Starlight was a disguised version of a Humphries freighter and spent most of the morning scanning the vessel with radar and laser probes.
Astro’s command center was kept secret from Humphries’s people, of course; it was also kept secret from the government of Selene, which insisted that no hostilities should take place in its jurisdiction. So the controller watched Starlight passively, without trying to open up a communications link with the freighter or even asking the International Astronautical Authority offices about the ship’s registration and identity.
To her credit, the Astro controller instructed D-6 to obtain close-up imagery of the approaching freighter. Unfortunately, the destroyer’s programming was new and untried; the drone had been rushed into use too soon. The onboard computer misinterpreted the controller’s order. Instead of a low-power laser scan, the destroyer hit Starlight with a full-intensity laser beam that sawed the vessel’s habitation module neatly in half, killing everyone aboard.
Pancho was heading for the Moon’s south pole when the news of the Starlight fiasco reached her.
She was flying in a rocket on a ballistic trajectory to the Astro power station set on the summit of the highest peak in the Malapert Mountains. Taller than Everest, Mt. Dickson’s broad, saddle-shaped summit was always in sunlight, as were its neighboring peaks. Astro workers had covered its crest with power towers topped by photovoltaic cells. The electricity they generated was carried back to Selene by cryogenically cooled cables of lunar aluminum that ran across the rugged, crater-pocked highlands for nearly five thousand kilometers.
For the few brief minutes of the rocket’s arcing flight southward, the handful of passengers hung weightlessly against their seat restraint straps. To her surprise, Pancho actually felt a little queasy. You’ve been flying a desk too long, girl. She thought about how the future growth of the Moon would almost certainly be in the polar regions. Water deposits were there, she knew, and you could build power towers that were always in sunlight, so you got uninterrupted electricity, except for Earth eclipses, but that was only a few minutes out of the year. It was a mistake to build Selene near the equator, she thought.
Back in those days, though, it started as a government operation. Moonbase. Some bean-counting sumbitch of a bureaucrat figured it’d be a couple of pennies cheaper in propellant costs to build near the equator than at either polar region. They picked Alphonsus because there were vents in the crater floor that outgassed methane now and then. Big lollapalooza deal! Water’s what you need, and the ice deposits at the poles are where the water is. Even so, it isn’t enough. We have to import water from the rock rats.