The Stone Dogs (44 page)

"Weapons?" she thought aloud.

"What point? We've
already
got weapons mo' powerful than we dare use here on earth. Oh, yes, tactically useful in deep space. Even better as a propulsion system, iff'n it can be managed, the ultimate rocket, yes. Still, it's puzzlin'. This has to be a long-term project, an' expensive as hell. The maximum security approach makes it even
mo'
expensive an' slow. Fifteen years even to start on large-scale production. Probably mo'; it's doable but all sorts of problems. They'd put it in the Belt, certainly." The Alliance was encouraging "home-steading" there by every means possible. "We're goin' to deuterium-tritium fusion pellets fo' pulsedrives soon, then deuterium-boron 11.

That's almost as efficient, all charged particles. They can't be goin' to this much trouble just to build a better pulsedrive fo'

warships."

Snappdove snorted. "We have a pilot project, at the Mercury-Shield Platform." That was a research settlement, orbiting in the innermost planet's shadow. "Developing a plan to mass-produce solar power farms for near-sun use. Easily adaptable to powering antimatter production, perhaps early next century. We do the usual, wait for the Yankees to solve the tricky problems, steal their development, rejig it for our needs.

They get a little ahead but not much."

"So it
can't
be just what it seems," Eric said grimly. "Not just a power source for Belt settlement, not just a try fo' better drives.

There's a
big
secret here. The sort that I have nightmares about, knowin' some of our big secrets."

"Well… yes, Uncle Eric, but what's
my
part in it? I thought the High Command was sendin' me to grab a rock?"

"Aha," Eric said, with a mirthless laugh. "A rock
comin
from fairly close to where a lot of Alliance personnel have been
goin
.

And not comin' back, never. Now, we have information on a launch."

In a speech today to the north American Enterprise Institute, Commerce Secretary Ingrid Lindqvist called on the entrepreneurs of the Alliance to contribute to the humanization of space. Secretary Lindqvist noted that while pulsedrive ships will always be expensive, they are rapidly Increasing in number and efficiency, while solar-sail and plasma drives (given the falling price of superconductor accumulators) put the system as far out as the asteroids in reach with a modest investment given the tax credits and subsidies recently approved by the Alliance Grand Senate and the national governments, no more than the price of a merchant ship of moderate size. "Our entrepreneurs and companies are already present in strength in the orbital habitats and Lunar bases. Their diversity is our strength; we summon them to the contest for trans-Lunar space as well."

Under the new New Homestead Act (Alliance Grand Senate, Legislative Session 1976-77), private parties will now be able to claim any body within the interdicted Alliance zones provided they can develop it in a reasonable time. Survival equipment and surplus plasma-drive—equipped cargo shuttles suitable for conversion will be made available at Ceres Base. Facilities at the Alliance military outposts and scientific stations have now reached the point where full-time residence is possible, including centrifugal-gravity habitats for periodic exercise and child-bearing.

The larger asteroidal bodies will require intensive capital investment, but given cheap solar-powered vacuum refining methods, many smaller bodies will be accessible to partnerships or even individuals. Guaranteed markets exist, first with the Alliance government projects, then in Earth-Lunar space.

Secondary activities, from manufacturing and food to services of all types, are expected to grow exponentially. Secretary Lindqvist added: "We have a crucial advantage here. We can trust our people with small spaceships, and appeal to the profit motive.

What Draka Citizen will endure a prospector's life? And if they send out serfs, what is to prevent defection?"

Capital Monthly

Chicago Union Press

July 11. 1977

LOW EARTH ORBIT PLATFORM

FRONTIER FIVE

ALLIANCE SPACE FORCE

MAY 6, 1982

Earth turned beyond the dome like a giant blue shield, streaked with the white of clouds, glowing softly with an intense pale light. The western coast of North America was on the edge of vision, turning toward night, and the sunlight glittered on the ocean through a scattering of cirrus. There were scattered spots of light across the surface, above the last azure haze of atmosphere, moving or drifting in orbit. Spidery cages of aluminum beam extended in every direction in a latticework that linked powersails, broadcast rectennae, machinery of less obvious purpose. Further out were docking arms of tubing connected to the main pressure-modules behind them; two held passenger scramjets, long melted-looking delta aircraft, featureless save for the big squarish ramjet intakes under the rear of their lifting-body shapes.

It was an old story to Frederick Lefarge. He twisted in the air to watch his wife's face instead.
How did
I ever luck out like
this?
he thought. The pale chill-blue light washed across the hazel-green of her eyes, the mahogany hair and olive-bronze skin.

Tears glistened at the corners of her eyes.

"Listen," she said softly. Her voice had an accent that was a blend of her mother's South Carolina drawl and her father's Spanish-Mayan; soft and lilting at the same time. "You can hear it."

"What?" he said.

"The music of the spheres," she answered, then scrubbed the back of her hand across her eyes.

A bell pinged. "
All passengers, flight Hermes-17A, forty
minutes to final call. Forty minutes to final
call"

"Damn, I wish you'd change your mind," he said fiercely.

"Honey," she replied, smiling. "How many times have we been over this? I wouldn't be anything but a burden for the next month; need-to-know, remember?"

She nodded to the scattering of people on the floor and sides of the domed lounge. Lefarge felt the familiar vertigo-inducing twist of perception, and now he was looking down, with the great curve of Earth above his head. A ground-ape's fear of falling passed through him unnoticed, and he studied the others.

Several dozen. You could tell the Space Forcers and old stationjacks, and not just by their clothing; to them a floor was just another wall, and they used the ripstick pads on feet and knees and elbows to negotiate their way with innocent disregard for orientation. You never saw them drifting free without a handhold, either, like that hapless woman wearing a
skirt
of all things, thrashing in midair until a crewman anchored a line from the reel at his belt and leaped out to her.

Most of the rest were those who would be leaving on the
Pathfinder
. Forty of the eighty, come for a last look at the home that none would see again for years, many never again. The majority were young, more than half men, technical workers of every type. He saw tears, laughter, raucous good humor, nervous excitement among the handful of children. There was a scattering of older folk, married couples solemn with the thought of what this meant. His own two daughters were already aboard the
Pathfinder,
sleeping in their cocoon-cribs in Cindy's cabin.

His stomach twisted at the thought.

"You'd be aboard a warship, if you waited," he said.

Cindy sighed. "Honey, it's important I get to know some of the project people without… well, without you around." There were a dozen recruits for the New America project aboard, the rest were leaving at Ceres.
But only one who has any inkling of the real
project,
he thought.
In time, in time. Patience.

His wife was continuing: "Free people don't like living under War Emergency Regulations, Fred. For things to work right, they've got to
want
them to work right, and for that they've got to see you as a human being, not some all-powerful bureaucrat.

What better way than to get to know your wife and children, on a three-month voyage? There's only a few thousand people in the whole
belt
, darling, and a few hundred on the Project. We're going to be a real small town for a long while." Quietly. "Let me do my part for this too, Fred."

Cindy was cleared for the third-level version of the Project, but he suspected she had guessed more.

"It isn't
safe
," he said.

"Darling, it's
safer
than coming out on the cruiser. It's been years since there was a clash in the Belt, isn't it? And the only incidents have been between warships."

He ran a hand through his hair, sighed. "Okay, okay, you convinced me before. The only thing the Snakes have scheduled is an expedition out to Jupiter, anyway." Pulsedrive warships were still not common, and mostly very fully occupied.

"And we
will
get to Ceres about the same time," she continued with gentle ruthlessness. His ship would be leaving much later, but the
Ethan Allen
was a new-launched pulsedrive cruiser, vastly more powerful. This would be her shakedown trip, in fact.

"All
right
, Cindy! I just hope Captain Hayakawa understands how important a cargo he's hauling."

They linked hands, and she pulled herself closer, putting an arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder. The hair that drifted up around his nose was short-cropped (nothing else was practical in zero-G), but it shone in the Earth-light, smelling faintly of Colorado Mist shampoo and flowers. Her gaze went back out to the curve of the planet above.

"Well," she said, "he
is
carryin' part of something precious."

At his glance, she added: "Hope, for our tired old mother there.

Up here, where there's room to breathe." She dimpled. "Even if there isn't much air…"

"You're a romantic," he laughed. Somberly: "And the Snakes are here, too."

She nodded. "Like our shadows," she said, sadly. "Or like an ancient set of armor with nothing inside but a corpse that's rotting and pitiful and thinks it's alive, walking and clanking and lolling and trying to eat…"

"For a nice person, you've got a way with images," he said, shivering slightly at the thought. It was appropriate, though. The Domination was something that should have died a century ago.

And it's my job
to bury it
, he thought as they turned and braced their feet against the cross wire.

"Gently does it, honey," he said.

They pushed off, floating down the ten meters to the deck; he kept his arm around Cindy's waist as they twisted end-for-end and landed. The ripstick on their slippers touched down on the catch-surface of the floor, with a
tack
sound as the miniature plastic hooks and loops engaged. The crew supervisors from the
Pathfinder
were shepherding their passengers into one of the radial exitways. As they passed the dogged-open pressure door, he had another flash of twisted perspective, and now they were at the bottom of a long well five meters broad, lit by strips, with handholds in regular receding rows. It was lined with close-cropped green vines, part of the air system, and a contribution to the eternal rabbit protein of the spacer's diet.

The joke was that you shouldn't leave gravity if you couldn't face rodent.

Or there was fish, of course. Frontier Five had a
big
watertank, like most industrial-transit stations with a population over a thousand; all you had to do was take a multitonne lump of Lunar silicon and point mirrors at it, inject some gas and continue to heat.
Voila
, as Maman would say. An aquarium, a convenient heatsink regulator and fuel store. You could rent a facegill and go swimming there, if you didn't mind sharing the water with trout and carp… the
other
inevitabilities of life in space…

Why am I thinking about this?
he asked himself as they passed a junction and caught a main-tube beltway. Cindy snuggled closer as they rode the strip of conveyor. Incoming traffic passed them on the left, and there was another set above.

They could see the heads of the passengers whipping by three meters beyond.
Because it's a distraction, that's why
, he thought.

The departure lounge was thronged. Most of the exit docking-tubes led to the thrice-daily Luna shuttles, off to the moon-settlements of Freetown and Britannia, and New Edo. One of the larger tubes had a rosette of four MPs in Space Force blues hanging around it; they snapped his colonel's bars a salute, and the three men eyed Cindy with respectful appreciation.

Washington
and
Simon Bolivar
were in, he remembered, downlined with skeletal crews for new thrustplates and repairs to their drive feed systems. The
Ethan Allen
was up at one of the L-5 battlestations, doing final calibrations on her drive and getting the auxiliary comps burned in; it was policy to keep as much of the deep-space fleet as possible away from Earth. Too many heavy lasers and beam-weapons between here and the moon, too many missiles and hardened launchers, too may sensors. A warship needed room to be effective…

Another exit, with the circular railing guard and a crew-woman in Trans-American silver. Briefly, his mouth quirked; the early skinsuits had been that color, for insulation.

Someone had wanted to call the Space Force the Silver Service, back then, until a tabloid came up with the inevitable "Teapots in Space" headline. The display beside her was flashing:
Flight
Hermes 17A—Trans-Am Ship Pathfinder—now boarding for
Ceres.

"This is it," he husked.

Cindy stood for a moment, then siezed him in a grip that nearly tore him loose from the deck. "I'll miss you, honey," she whispered, her forehead pressed into his chest. "
Vaya con dios,
mi corazon.
" Tears drifted loose and drifted like minor jewels; one landed on his lips, tasting of salt.

"I'll miss you and the tykes, too," he said, his own voice a little husky. Stepping back, he held her hands for a moment. "Go on then, have them all charmed silly by the time I get to Ceres!" he said.