“He might not come here at all,” said one of the board members, an edgy-looking woman in a high-mode pullover that sported more cutouts than material. “He might just hijack a ship or two and steal the supplies he needs. He is a pirate, after all.”
“That’s why we exiled him in the first place,” said the bland-looking warehouse operator sitting next to her.
“That’s not entirely true,” George pointed out.
“But we did exile him,” the warehouseman retorted. “So we don’t have to allow him to dock here.”
“That all happened ten years ago,” said one of the older board members, a former miner who had started a new career as an armaments repairman.
“But he was exiled for life, wasn’t he?”
“Right,” George admitted.
“So there.”
The woman sitting directly across from George, a plumpish redhead with startling violet eyes, said, “Listen. Half the HSS ships in the Belt are going to be looking for Fuchs. If he puts in here they’ll grab him.”
“This is neutral territory,” George said. “Everybody knows that. We’ve established it with HSS and Astro. We service any ship that comes to us, and they don’t do any fighting within a thousand klicks of our habitat.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to service Fuchs. He’s an exile, remember.”
“There’s something else involved,” George added. “We have a news media star heading here. She’ll arrive tomorrow. Edith Elgin.”
“I’ve watched her shows from Selene!”
“Isn’t she married to Douglas Stavenger?”
“What’s she coming here for?”
“To do a documentary about the war,” George explained.
“Do we want to have a documentary about the war? I mean, won’t that be bad publicity for us?”
“She’ll want to interview Fuchs, I bet.”
“That’d be a great way to get everybody’s attention: an interview with the notorious pirate.”
“It’ll make us look like a den of thieves.”
“Can we stop her?”
All eight of them looked to George.
Surprised at this turn, George said, “We’d have a helluva time shooing her away. She’s got a right to report the news.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to help her. Let her interview Fuchs somewhere else.”
But George was thinking, Humphries’s people are smart enough to watch her and wait for Fuchs to show up. Wherever she interviews Fuchs, it’s going to be fookin’ dangerous for both of them.
ASTEROID VESTA
An individual nanomachine is like an individual ant: mindless but unceasingly active. Its blindly endless activity is of little consequence by itself; even the most tireless exertions of a device no bigger than a virus can be nothing but invisibly minuscule in the human scale of things.
But while an individual ant can achieve little and has not enough brain to accomplish more than instinctual actions, an ant colony of many millions of blindly scurrying units can strip a forest, build a city, act with a purposefulness that seems little short of human intelligence.
So it is with nanomachines. An individual unit can accomplish little. But strew millions of those virus-sized units over a restricted area and they can build or destroy on a scale that rivals human capacities.
The asteroid Vesta is a spheroid rich in nickel-iron, some 500 kilometers in diameter. The Humphries Space Systems base on Vesta was burrowed, for the most part, more than twenty meters below the asteroid’s pitted, airless, bare surface.
The nanomachines that were strewn across a small area of the asteroid’s surface operated in a far different regime of scale and environment. Their world was a universe of endlessly vibrating, quivering molecules where electromagnetic forces held atoms in tight clusters, and Brownian motion buffeted atoms, molecules and nanomachines alike. On that scale of size, the nanomachines were giant mechanical devices, like huge bulldozers or derricks, bulling their way through the constantly jostling, jiggling molecules.
Each nanomachine was built with a set of grippers that fit the shape of the molecule that made up high-grade steel. Each nanomachine had the strength to seize such molecules and pull them apart into their constituent atoms of iron, carbon, chromium, and nickel.
Drawing their energy from the unceasing Brownian vibrations of the molecules themselves, the nanomachines patiently, mindlessly, tirelessly chewed through every molecule of steel they could find, tearing them apart. On the molecular scale of the nanomachines this was a simple operation. It would end only when the quantum-dot timing devices built into each individual nanomachine told it to stop and disassemble itself.