“Pay attention!” she screamed at herself.
“Say again?” came the voice of the flight controller at Malapert.
“Nothin’,” Pancho replied, apologetically. They’ve still got me on their radar, she thought. Good. They’ll know where the body’s buried.
There! Coming up on the right. A fairly flat area with only a few dinky little rocks. It’s sloping, though. On a hillside. Not so bad. If I can reach it.
Pancho nudged the tee-shaped control yoke and the hopper’s maneuvering thrusters squirted out a few puffs of cold gas, enough to jink the ungainly little craft toward the open area she had spotted.
Shit! More rocks than I thought. Well, beggars can’t be choosers. Only enough juice for one landing.
She tapped the keyboard for the automatic landing sequence, not trusting herself to do the job manually. The hopper shuddered as its main engine fired, killed its velocity, and the little craft dropped like a child’s toy onto the stony, sloping ground. All in total silence.
Pancho remembered enough from her old astronaut training to flex her knees and brace her arms against the control podium. The hopper thumped into the ground, one flat landing foot banging into a rock big enough to tip the whole craft dangerously. For a wild moment Pancho thought the hopper was going to tumble over onto its side. It didn’t, but the crash landing was violent enough to tear away the loop that held her right foot to the platform grillwork. Her leg flew up, knocking her so badly off balance that her left leg, still firmly anchored in its foot loop, snapped at the ankle.
Pancho gritted her teeth in the sudden pain of the broken bone as she thudded in lunar slow motion to the grillwork platform.
Feeling cold sweat breaking out of every pore of her body, she thought, Well, I ain’t dead yet.
Then she added, Won’t be long before I am, though.
ASTRO CORPORATION COMMAND CENTER
I might as well move a cot in here, thought Jake Wanamaker as he paced along the row of consoles. A technician sat at each of them, monitoring display screens that linked the command center with Astro ships and bases from the Moon to the Belt. Lit only by the ghostly glow of the screens, the room felt hot and stuffy, taut with the hum of electrical equipment and the nervous tension of apprehensive men and women.
There were only two displays that Wanamaker was interested in: Malapert base, near the lunar south pole, and Cromwell, about to start its runup to the asteroid Vesta.
Wanamaker hunched over the technician monitoring the link with Cromwell. Deep inside the cloud of high-energy particles, radio contact was impossible. But the ship’s captain had sent a tight-beam laser message more than half an hour earlier. It was just arriving at the Astro receiving telescope up on the surface of the Moon.
The screen showed nothing but a jumbled hash of colors.
“Decoding, sir,” the seated technician murmured, feeling the admiral’s breath on the back of her neck.
The streaks dissolved to reveal the apprehensive-looking face of Cromwell’s skipper. The man’s eyes looked wary, evasive.
“We have started the final run to target,” he stated tersely. “The radiation cloud is dissipating faster than predicted, so we will release our payload at the point halfway between the start of the run and the planned release point.”
The screen went blank.
Turning her face toward Wanamaker, the technician said, “That’s the entire message, sir.”
His immediate reaction was to fire a message back to Cromwell ordering the captain to stick to the plan and carry the nanomachines all the way to the predecided release point. But he realized that it would take the better part of an hour for a message to reach the ship. Nothing I can do, he told himself, straightening up. He stretched his arms over his head, thinking, The captain’s on the scene. If he feels he needs to let the package go early it’s for a good reason. But Wanamaker couldn’t convince himself. The captain’s taking the easiest course for himself, he realized. He’s not pressing his attack home.
Turning slowly, he scanned the shadowy room for Tashkajian. She was at her desk on the other side of the quietly intense command center. This is her plan, Wanamaker thought. She worked it out with the captain. If there’s anything wrong with his releasing the package early, she’ll be the one to tell me.