Rock Killer (4 page)

***

His name was Alan Griffin. He was a tall, skinny man in his mid-thirties. Brown hair fell straight to his shoulders and he always seemed about three days late for a shave. He moved from the galley to the adjacent bridge of the
Rock Skipper
, renamed the
Rock Killer
by those who stole her.

Griffin saw, standing and looking over the navigation computer, a shapely female form. Brunette hair, floating in the small gravity the ship’s thrust provided, cascaded down a perfect back that tapered to a slim waist and an ass-leg combination that was rare in these days of leisure. Then the woman turned and, because he could see the hardness of her face, transformed into a fellow soldier whom he’d seen kill men with an almost erotic viciousness.

Griffin reminded himself that his thoughts were improper for guerrilla soldiers. The freedom fighters killed men and women guerrillas who had sex while fighting the oppressors of the people during the glorious years of the revolution in the middle of the twentieth century. That was before the Russians sold out to the capitalists, before even Cuba became a tourist resort for fat, American capitalists. Sometimes, Griffin thought he was born a hundred years too late. He dreamed of being in the field with an AK-47, and fighting alongside Kim Il Sung, Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung, the Mbundu, or Ho Chi Minh.

“Heard from Trent?” he asked between bites of a sandwich.

Trudeau was in his twenties and looked like he should be selling shoes at Penneys. He shook his head. “She must still be negotiating with the Syrians.”

“They’d better come through or this will all be for nothing,” Madalyn Cole growled. Cole was shaped like a pear with straight, stringy, greasy, graying hair. Griffin suspected she was gay by the way she reacted to Knecht. He didn’t care what her sexual orientation was but he didn’t want a sexual relationship, gay or otherwise, to interfere with the operation of the ship and the completion of the mission.

“Not for nothing,” Knecht remarked with near glee. “Because they smuggled our weapons onto the Moon, we were able to hurt SRI.” She smiled at the memory. “SRI is the most criminal of all criminal corporations. Only violence will stop them and their lust for profits.”

Griffin nodded. “And there’s more violence to come.”

“If the Syrians come through with the rest of their promises,” Trudeau reminded them.

***

Linda Trent was working late in the Sam Rayburn office building. She’d found something to go over and excused her staff for the evening. She did have to go over some bills for the Environment Committee. She was the only Green on the committee and she felt that was a great responsibility, though she thought the political process was a waste of time. The Greens were too conventional for her; but at least they could slow the damage until the revolution.

There was a knock on the outer door to the corridor. She’d left the door to her office open so she could hear anyone coming. She stood, walked to the door, and opened it. Two men in expensive business suits walked in.

Trent didn’t like Middle-Easterners; their condescending attitudes toward women grated her. But they were a necessary evil right now, as their money and resources were needed for the revolution. And after the revolution, their oil would be worthless and they would be swept aside. She closed the door behind them.

“Congresswoman Trent?” one of the men asked in heavily accented English.

She held up her hand and moved to the window. She turned on a small radio and pointed it at the glass. She did the same for every pane in the office using about ten of the Rwandan-made radios.

Finally she spoke. “Congress
person
,” Trent said emphatically. “Are you from Damascus?”

“Yes,” he replied. “We are authorized to negotiate on behalf of the Baath-Arab states.”

Trent smiled. “Good. We need to arrange a rendezvous. Do you have the missiles?”

“We have secured commitments for their delivery.”

“Good,” Trent said with a heartfelt smile.

***

Dr. Kirsten Hanna-Chun had quit the hospital she’d worked at for the first few years after school and started her own psychology practice in Denver. Although the hospital would always be special to her as the place she met Alex, with a private practice she could be free to see her husband for those brief times when he was on Earth. She was impatiently waiting for Alex, who was flying in from SRI headquarters. He was supposed to arrive two days ago but had been unexpectedly called to Tokyo.

Finally, he exited the airport’s secure area. She looked over her husband. He was in his late thirties but could easily pass for younger. He was obviously an Oriental-Occidental mix. When she had met him, 17 years ago, Kirsten had been struck by his presence despite his small stature. His face, then and now, was a striking combination of his heritage that Kirsten found magnetically attractive.

He walked toward her with an ear-to-ear grin. She thought it seemed forced–she figured he’d heard the news about the Moon. After the compulsory airport embrace–with her a full head taller than he–Kirsten asked him why he was so happy.

“I’ve just been promoted to director,” he said happily.

Kirsten wrapped her arms around him in congratulations. If he didn’t want to talk about the attack, she wouldn’t push it. She knew from experience he would talk when he was ready, if ever, and not before.

“Shall we go out to celebrate?” Alex asked.

Kirsten took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she breathed softly.

“What?”

“We have a dinner engagement at Dr. and Mrs. McConnell’s in Englewood. I made the date before I knew you’d be late and this would be your first day here.”

“Can’t get out of it?”

Kirsten screwed up her face. “I could,” she said low.

“But,” Alex continued for her, “it wouldn’t be good. Isn’t he the head of the Denver Psychology Association or something?”

She nodded, bouncing her long, blonde hair.

Alex smiled. She was still as beautiful as she was when she first walked into his hospital room and they met. She towered above him at two hundred centimeters and still left her hair long down to her waist. “Well, I had to go to Tokyo. Mr. Nakata wanted to tell me of the promotion himself. Plus I saw Mitchel; oh, he says ‘hi.’ I’m sorry.”

“I suppose we could leave early,” Kirsten said coyly.

Dr. McConnell was about 65 and balding. His grizzled mustache moved in an undulating motion when he chewed. When he didn’t have food in his mouth he puffed on a cigarette, oblivious to how his guests felt about the noxious fumes. Mrs. McConnell was a dumpy woman who needed to do something, anything, with her short, gray hair.

The meal was a vegetarian delight. Alex had just spent almost six months in space where meat was rehydrated, tasteless, and expensive as hell. Then he was in Tokyo for the past two days, and there, buying meat meant taking out a short-term loan. Alex was dying for a steak, pork chops, pulgogi, hot dogs, any flesh.

“So, Alex,” McConnell said, bouncing his mustache around, “Kirsten says you work for Space Resources Incorporated.”

Alex nodded. “Yes.”

Kirsten, aware of McConnell’s political leanings, was afraid of the direction the conversation could take. She tried to deflect it. “Alex was just promoted to director.”

Dr. McConnell looked at Alex. “What does that mean?”

“I’ll be in charge of asteroids as they come in from the asteroid belt.”

Mrs. McConnell perked up. “Wouldn’t that be the ‘captain’?”

Alex shook his head. “No, traditionally it’s ‘director.’ When SRI first went to the belt to bring back asteroids, the rocks weren’t piloted; they were dropped. Chemical rockets were used to point the rock into the correct Hohmann orbit. Then the mass driver threw out ground up rock for about one thousandth of a gee—

“Excuse me,” Dr. McConnell interrupted, “a ‘gee’?”

Alex smiled. He was always surprised to find people who didn’t understand basic physics. “A gee is a unit of measure for acceleration, equal to the acceleration of gravity at the Earth’s surface. It’s about 9.8 meters per second per second or 32 feet per second per second.”

McConnell just looked at him and Alex knew he hadn’t understood; but he decided to just press on. “It took about six months to bring a rock in,” he continued. “And once it was moving there was little that could be done. Turn around and orbit insertion was accomplished using solid chemical rockets, and they were hard to control. Remember about ten years ago, something went wrong and a rock missed Earth? Rescuing the personnel and the loss of ore and equipment really cost SRI.”

Alex failed to notice the McConnells’ eyes were glazing over with incomprehension. Kirsten forgave him, knowing this was his life and first love.

“But now,” Alex continued, “we have a good, reliable constant acceleration drive, the Masuka drive, perfected. Masuka drives are placed to give yaw, pitch, and roll control—”

“Excuse me, what?” Mrs. McConnell asked.

“Yaw, pitch and roll.” Alex repeated. He held out his hand, palm down, fingers extended. He then moved his hand as if he were waving goodbye. “Pitch: movement of the nose of the craft up and down or the angle, ‘beta,’ of rotation around the
y
axis. And roll,” he twisted his hand at the elbow, “is rotation around the long axis, or
x
axis, measured by the angle ‘gamma.’ And yaw,” he set an empty glass on the table and spun it slowly on its side. “Yaw, which is rotation around the vertical, or
z
axis, measured by the angle ‘alpha.’”

Kirsten could tell he’d lost the McConnells again.

“Anyway,” Alex continued, “Masuka drives were added to supplement the mass driver. Now we can accelerate the whole trip at about one-sixth gee, cutting travel time down to about two weeks, depending on the orbit of the asteroid and where it is in relationship to Earth. We still have a few ships that can’t boost one sixth of a gee.

“Now the rock can be moved and navigated exactly as if it were a very large ship. That necessitated the addition of navigators, engineers, computers, gyros to maintain attitude, and everything a ship has. But they still call us directors.”

It took a moment for their hosts to wake up.

“How very interesting,” Mrs. McConnell finally said in a way that proved she was very uninterested.

Dr. McConnell took a long drag on his cigarette. “Do you support what SRI does, commercializing and polluting space?” he asked.

Alex frowned. “I don’t know how we’re polluting space. I’ll agree SRI is commercializing space, but I don’t see that as a problem.”

“Well, you are ruining the pristine nature of space. You’re taking asteroids for your own, greedy purposes.”

Alex smiled. “I guess,” he conceded. “But any asteroid we take, we discovered. We could take asteroids out of the belt for the next billion years at the rate we are now and there’d be no discernible effects.”

“You’re killing the only other life found in the universe,” he attacked. “For profit.”

“We’re killing a bacterium that gets energy from the heat of Europa’s rocky core. We have to in order to make the water we pump from that moon potable. The Denver water department does the same thing every day to make the water you drink safe. And we’re killing a minute fraction of the bacteria that is in Europa’s sea.”

McConnell seemed to consider that for a moment while he crushed out his cigarette. Alex hoped he wouldn’t light another but, in a practiced, almost unconscious series of moves, McConnell had another tube of tobacco in his mouth and it started glowing red at the tip as he sucked on it.

Then McConnell pounced: “How do you feel about the Los Angeles-New York tunnel project?”

Alex looked at Kirsten, who was embarrassedly studying her green meal. Then he turned to McConnell.

“I work for the Space Operations Division and before that the Security Division. The tunnel is being built by the Terrestrial Projects Division. I understand the basic technology and concepts, but other than that I don’t know much about it. I assume Terrestrial Projects’ engineers know what they are doing.”

McConnell wasn’t put off. “But it’s all SRI, whether you’re in space or in that private army they euphemistically call ‘Security Division.’ And don’t you think this idea of drilling a tunnel straight through the Earth under the U.S. is dangerous?”

“I’m sure our people know what they’re doing,” Alex repeated, realizing he was running out of arguments.

“But it could destabilize the entire ecology of the continent. Plus, it would put thousands of airline, trucking, and train employees out of work. It’s just another rape of nature by a criminal corporation. And is it any coincidence that they’re doing it under the U.S? A Japanese corporation: Why don’t they do it under Japan?”

Kirsten looked at Alex and saw his complexion grow darker.

She gave him a pleading look but it was too late.

Alex decided to ignore McConnell’s subtle racism. “Because Japan isn’t large enough to make it economically feasible,” he started. “Look, the tunnel, as I understand it, will provide quick, cheap, and pollution-free transportation between Los Angeles and New York.” Alex realized he was talking fast but anger was pushing his words out. “If it proves itself, SRI hopes to build tunnels between every major city in the world. Since gravity alone is used to move the trains, the only energy use will be parasitic. If the airlines are put out of business, that’s the price of progress. People who use that argument are no different from the Luddites who opposed the Industrial Revolution because steam engines would replace human jobs. It didn’t matter that those jobs were hellish, brute labor and the industrial revolution freed them to go do something better, like be psychologists, for example.”

Alex stopped, having said more than he planned.

McConnell looked at Alex while pulling smoke into his lungs. It seemed that great, bushy mustache was pointing straight out. “Those are the same kind of arguments they used for fusion,” he said softly. “That wasn’t all they promised.”