John Maddox Roberts - Space Angel (6 page)

"All right, then; everybody lay in a substantial meal, we
've
got work ahead of us. Tor, break out some respirators. Oxygen's a bit thin down there. Michelle, any medical precautions we should take?"

the Admiralty manual says there's nothing down there a human can catch unless it was left there by the Navy. The primary's a low-radiation type, so the mutation rate is low. No plant life more highly evolved than a giant fern and the highest animal forms are multilegged insect equivalents—none venomous to humans. Gravity's about 10 percent lower than Earth,just don't go for more than a couple of minutes without a respirator and there should be no problems."

The crew ate with cautious gusto as their stomachs

were still suffering residual twinges from transition.

After lunch, Kelly went to the navigator's bubble to

have a look at Alpha Tau Pi Rho/4. Even from space

it was a drab planet, somewhat smaller than Earth,

but much older—her seas had shrunk to lakes, clouds

lew and thin, vegetation just anemic patches of dingy

green against the general grayness. Torwald joined him in the bubble.

"The kind of place where Navy men dread being stationed. Oh, well, we didn't come here for recreation, after all. If this deal pays off as we expect,-we can spend all the time we care "to on a resort world. Kelly, you'll come with me to scout out the crystal formation in the atmosphere craft, so as soon as we land, meet me at the dock. While we're on the ground, the grav field won't be operating abaft the forward hold bulkhead. That makes loading the holds and

launching the AC easier, but watch your step when you cross the line. It's a long drop through the hold if you don't catch the ladder." The landing horn honked. "There is it," said Torwald. "Go strap yourself in."

The planet was no more attractive close up than it had been from a distance. Kelly's first good look at an alien world was from the atmosphere craft dock while Torwald and Achmed readied the craft itself.

"Somehow, I expected something more exotic." His voice sounded tinny over the respirator that covered his nose and mouth.

"As habitable planets go," said Torwald, "this one's pretty near the bottom of the barrel."

The surface resembled the dreariest of Earth's desert—rock, sand, and thin, undernourished vegetation. The mountain ranges were worn to nubbins, not an elevation higher than a thousand meters on the whole planet. From the amount of coal the Admiralty survey had found, vegetation had once been abundant on Alpha Tau, but the planet's water vapor and oxygen had slowly leaked into space until only the hardiest life forms could survive. As usual in such cases, the survivors were the most primitive organisms, the ones that had been the least demanding of their environment in the first place. Alpha Tau was a world far gone in senility.

"Not much to look at, is it, Raffen?" Kelly turned to find Popov standing behind him. The Russian was dressed in a geologist's field gear, a tightly rolled chart under his arm.

"No argument there. I can see right now that you're going to have to offer big bonuses to tempt miners to come to this place. I worked better spots as a POW."

"Pile in!" Ham called. Torwald, Kelly, and Popov climbed aboard the AC. The mate spoke briefly with Popov while Torwald and Kelly removed the AC's all-weather top and locked a low, rounded windshield

into place around the pilot's area, then he turned to Torwald.

"Torwald, you're our most experienced pilot, so vou take the controls."

Kelly sat directly behind the pilot, from where he could study the operation of the AC. When all were belted in, Torwald eased the craft from the bay and look it up slowly for a hundred meters, to get a good look at the landing field. All the prefabs had been removed, except for the small shed housing the beacon. Only rectangular foundations remained to indicate the buildings had ever existed. The outpost was a forlorn sight.

"Where away?" asked Torwald.

"Taking the beacon for a homing point," said Popov, "set course 85 degrees, magnetic, for ninety-seven kilometers." Torwald punched the bearing into the craft's computer, then accelerated. He could have relinquished manual control but preferred to use the opportunity to get the feel of the AC. The dismal landscape sped by below them as they climbed from the shallow basin where the old base had been and headed into the hills.

Eventually Popov gave the word to stop and hover, though the terrain below looked just like all the rest they had passed over. He directed them up a small canyon at low speed, occasionally consulting his chart. Soon, Torwald spotted what they were looking for and pointed toward it.

A jagged slab of glittering crystal protruded from the wall at the end of the canyon like a cantilevered balcony. Below it lay silver .fragments that had somehow broken from the main mass. There were few of these, since there isn't much in nature that can break diamond crystal. Torwald brought the AC down as near to the formation as he could maneuver.

They clambered from the AC and trudged up the hillside to the crystal, where they found themselves gazing at the biggest fortune any of them had laid eyes on.

"Utterly unique." Popov seemed somewhat awed.

"How's it unique?" Kelly asked. "I've heard of diamond slab being mined on other worlds."

"Because it shouldn't be here—not on a world this small. Ordinarily, the pressures required to produce such a prodigy are generated only on worlds much more massive. As a geologist, I would have said that such a thing was impossible, but, as our friends have already told you, such words should not be used by spacers. Still, this phenomenon makes as much sense as bananas growing from a saguaro cactus."

"What do you think broke off those pieces?" Ham asked.

"Maybe quakes, maybe a meteorite." Popov shrugged. "It's probably lain exposed like this for a billion years, so it would come as no surprise if it had been hit once or twice. Erosion has been very slow here in recent eras."

"Well," said Ham, "we can speculate to our hearts' content on the way back to Earth. Right now, I'm calling the skipper and telling her to bring the ship in. There's space to land her here, and the canyon floor's sufficiently solid according to the AC seismometer."

After the
Space Angel
arrived, Torwald and Kelly off-loaded the cutters and their mounts, and soon all the equipment had been carted up the hillside by powerbarrow. Bert had supplied templates to guide the cuts, thin plastic patterns that the quarriers would use to shape their slabs precisely. The
Angel's
hold was nearly cylindrical, and Bert did not want to waste a single cubic centimeter of space. When the gear was set up, the skipper ventured out to examine everything. After she was satisfied about the condition of the shortbeam cutters, she turned to Torwald. "How you going to organize your teams?"

"First off, we cut away the impure stuff on the outside of the outcropping. Ham, Finn, and I have the muscle for that. We'll manhandle the cutters and the others can dispose of it. When the pure stuff is exposed, ill put the cutters on mounts for the fine work. Serge will have to indicate where the cuts are to be made, and Achmed, Kelly, and Lafayette will cart the slabs back to the ship. Bert will direct storage in the hold, and Nancy can spell us on cutters after they're mounted, if she likes." He did not suggest that Michelle be assigned a ground job. The med officer was never risked if it was avoidable.

"Go to it, then."

Torwald picked up one of the cutters and, for a moment, held it while indulging in a private reverie. Only Michelle, standing by the AC, had an inkling of what was going through his mind. She had seen his psych profile, knew something of his history. She guessed that the feel of the tool was taking him back to Signet and the smell of blood and sweat and dead men in the quarries, the starvation and exhaustion and the never-ending fear.

After a minute, Torwald shook off the mood and made a test cut. A sheet of impure crystal streaked with rocky matrix fell away cleanly. One by one, he tested the other cutters. All worked perfectly. Under Popov's supervision, they were soon cutting away at the outcropping while Achmed, Kelly and Lafayette were disposing of the dross. The debris was worth a fortune as gem and industrial diamond, but it would have to be recovered by the next team when Minsk Mineral established a permanent installation.

Once the worst was cleared away, Torwald set the cutters on mounts while Popov scribed lines on the now fiat-surfaced outcropping, using Bert's templates. The slabs were to be cut ten centimeters thick and fifty on a side, rectangular, except for those that were to fit the circular walls of the hold. Each slab weighed nearly twenty kilos, and wrestling them onto the pow-erbarrows for the ride to the hold was rough work. Ham and Achmed tried to rig up a suction crane to make the loading easier, but the unstable surface of the hillside made it impracticable. Muscle labor was the only answer.

After ten hours of continuous work, everyone was bone-tired, but still stimulated by the prospect of the wealth this voyage would bring.

"Quitting time," Torwald announced suddenly. "Everybody back to the ship—everybody, that is, except you two." He pointed at Kelly and Lafayette. "You get to clean up the site and make sure everything is ready for us to start work in the morning." Both groaned.

When the others had left, Kelly and Lafayette got up from where they had been leaning against a rock and brushed the seats of their coveralls. They began sweeping up and loading the dross into the power-barrow to be hauled away and dumped.

"Hurry it up, kid," said Lafayette. "I'm getting hungry."

Kelly stopped what he was doing. "We're not on the ship now."

"So?"

"I have to take that kind of treatment from you on the ship, but down here I'm not taking it. -Back in the State homes, I had to put up with a lot from the dorm chiefs because they had authority backing them up. But they didn't try to pull any of that stuff on me out on the street. They knew better. You'd better learn better, too."

"Oh? What do you propose to do about it?" He placed his palm on Kelly's chest and began to shove, but he had barely touched Kelly when he caught a roundhouse punch to his jaw. The redhead went down and skidded away downslope.

"You've been riding me long enough, Lafayette."

"I'm disappointed in you, kid." Lafayette wiped his mouth, then glanced briefly at the smear of blood left on the back of his hand. "I thought you were coming along pretty well. Now it looks like you've got to be put in your place again." He got up, dusted himself off and charged. Kelly sidestepped and tripped him, then jumped on his back and tried for a stranglehold. He missed his grip, felt Lafayette's hands get him behind the neck, and found himself tumbling through the in until he landed on his back with the redhead on top. Kelly saw stars as he caught what he presumed to be two swift punches to the face, then he got a hand under Lafayette's chin, forcing his head back and thrusting the stiff fingers of the other hand into his throat.

Lafayette fell away, gagging, and Kelly took the opportunity to push him over on his back and drop a handful of sand into his open mouth. He found, however, that Lafayette wasn't as helpless as he seemed. I he older boy threw a double kick into his stomach with both space boots. Kelly flew back, coming up short against the crystal outcrop, his head banging into the unyielding surface. He slid downward until he was in a sitting position. When he caught his breath, he saw that Lafayette was sitting up, spitting the last of the sand-and-blood mixture from ids mouth. Kelly derived a qualified satisfaction from the sight. Qualified, because he wasn't feeling much better.

"Had enough, Kelly?"

"What do you mean? You look worse than me."

"I guess I do," Lafayette admitted with a rueful smile. The smile hurt, so he stopped. "Shall we call a truce for a while, kid?"

"No truce. You stop riding me, on
or
off the ship, or we do this every time we're off-ship together. If you can't live with those conditions, we can have at it again, right now."

"All right," Lafayette said after a pause, "it's a deal. Now, let's finish up here."

On board, the others raised some eyebrows as the unkempt duo entered the mess. "What happened to you two?" the skipper asked.

"We fell down the stairs," Lafayette replied. There was no further comment.

After three weeks of labor, the hold was nearly full. The crew were all bent over from the strenuous labor, and those who were not dark to begin with had been heavily tanned by the ultraviolet light of Alpha Tau's sun, which easily penetrated the thin, cloudless atmosphere. The last few days, the quarriers actually worked within the hillside since almost all of the outcrop had been removed. On the final shift, Kelly and Torwald were slicing the crystal face when Achmed arrived with the powerbarrow.

"Bert says there's room for fifteen more slabs," the Arab announced.

"Great!" Torwald said. "We'll finish up and lift for home this afternoon."

"Hey, what's this?" Kelly asked, sounding mystified. He was lifting the slab Torwald had just cut free. Beneath it, glinting in the light of the lamps they had rigged, was the upper surface of something spherical and metallic.

Calmly, after a moment's hesitation Torwald turned to Kelly. "Run to the ship and bring everybody back on the double. There's something weird here."