The Sam Gunn Omnibus (70 page)

Bo
can look menacing in his sleep, with that burly build of his and the shaved
scalp. He’s really a gentle guy, a frustrated poet who makes his living writing
documentaries. But he looks like a Turkish assassin.

“I
don’t have to prove anything,” Darling answered, edging back toward the hatch. “A
man’s innocent until proven guilty. That’s the law.”

What
little patience I have snapped right then and there. “I’m the law

aboard
this vessel,” I said. “And I order you to open up your suite for inspection.
Now.”

He hemmed and hawed. He blubbered
and spluttered. But with Bo and me pushing him, he backed all the way down the
corridor to his suite. Sure enough, there was enough food cached away in there
to cater a party.

Which is exactly what we had. I called
Grace, Sheena, and Lowell Hubble. Even invited the crew while I went up to the
command center and kept an eye on the automated equipment. They ate and drank
everything Darling had squirreled away. He just sat on his own bed and cried
until there was nothing left but crumbs and empty bottles.

Served him right. But I couldn’t
help feeling sort of sorry for the poor jerk when they all left him in his own
suite, surrounded by the mess.

I
KIND
OF
hate to leave Pittsburgh.
This asteroid has made me filthy rich. We can’t stay long enough to mine
everything she’s got to give us; even if we did the
Argo
would be toting so much mass that our thrusters
would never be able to get us back to Earth.

No, we’ll leave Pittsburgh with our
smelting equipment and a beacon on her, to verify our claim. If the IAA works
the way they should, nobody else will be able to touch her. In a few years the
lawyers ought to have wrangled out this moratorium business, and I’ll be able
to send out a fleet of ships to finish carving her up and carting the refined metals
back Earthward.

I’ll be a billionaire!

Those bastards at Rockledge have
shown their hand at last. They’re going to kill me and my partners and steal my
claim to Pittsburgh and the metals we’ve mined. As well as the water and
volatiles we got from Aphrodite.

I’m beyond anger. A kind of a cold
freeze has gripped me. I can’t even work up the satisfaction of screaming and
swearing. They’ve marooned us on the asteroid; me and all my partners. We’ll
die on Pittsburgh. I’m talking into the recording system built into my space
suit. Maybe someday after we’re all dead somebody will find us and listen to
this chip. If you do, take our bodies—and this chip—straight to the IAA’s law enforcement
people. Murder, piracy, grand larceny, conspiracy, kidnapping—and it all goes
right to the top of Rockledge. And God knows who else.

I
don’t even feel scared. I’m just kind of numb.
Dumbstruck. Like being paralyzed.

Erik
is the one. Smiling, blond, slow-witted Erik is the mastermind that Rockledge
planted on the
Argo.
It’s like one of those
damned mystery novels where the murderer turns out to be the stupid butler. Who
would have suspected Erik? Not me, that’s for sure.

Lonz,
Will and I had put in a long, tough day finishing up our operations on
Pittsburgh. All the mining and smelting equipment we had put onto the asteroid
was finally shut down. That cluster of steel grapes bulked very nicely on one
side of the ship. The sheets of platinum and the ingots of gold and silver were
all neatly tucked into our cargo bays. Our identification beacon was on the
asteroid, beeping satisfactorily.

I
scrolled through the checklist on the main console’s
screen one final time. We had done everything we had to do. The partners were
all asleep—at least they were all in their beds. Or somebody’s beds.

“Okay,”
I said to Lonz. “That’s it. Let’s see the nav program and set up the trajectory
for home.”

“Um,
there’s been a change in the mission plan, Sam,” Erik said.

I
turned around from the console to look at him. I hadn’t
even realized he’d entered the control center. His usual station was down by
the galley, next to the lounge. He stood in the middle of the floor, smiling
that slow, genial smile of his, like always.

“Whattaya
mean?” I asked.

“We
can’t start the homeward trip just yet,” he said.

“Why
not?”

His
smile didn’t change one iota as he explained, “We’ve got to put you and your
partners off the ship first.”

“Put
me
and ... ?”

“You’re
staying on Pittsburgh, Sam,” Erik told me. “You’re not coming back.” And he
pulled a slim little automatic pistol from his belt. It looked big enough to me,
probably because he pointed it straight at my eyes.

“What
the hell are you talking about?” But the sinking sensation in the pit of my
stomach told me that I knew the answer to my own question.

I
spun around toward Lonz and Will. They both looked
unhappy, but neither one of them made a move to help me.

“You
guys, too?” All of a sudden I felt like Julius Caesar.

“You
wouldn’t believe how much money we’ll be getting,” Will muttered.

“For chrissakes, didn’t I treat you
guys fair and square?” I yelped.

“You didn’t make us partners, Sam,”
said Lonz.

“Holy shit. Why didn’t you
tell
me
you were unhappy? I could’ve ...”

“Never mind,” Erik said, suddenly
forceful, in charge. “Sam, you’ll have to stay in your quarters until we get
everything arranged. Don’t try anything. I don’t want to make this messy.”

Three against one would have made a
mess all right, and the mess would be me. So I huffed and puffed and slinked to
my quarters like a good, obedient prisoner. My mind was spinning, looking for
an out, but I didn’t know what they planned to do. That made it tough to figure
out my next move. I heard them attach some kind of a lock to the outside of the
door as soon as I closed it after me. And then all my lights went off; not even
the emergency lamps lit. They had cut off all electrical power to my quarters.
No lights, no computer access, no communications with anybody, nothing but
darkness.

And waiting.

After a few hours they bundled us
all into space suits and—one by one—had each of us jet from the
Argos
main
airlock to the surface of Pittsburgh, where we had left the mining and smelting
equipment. I was the last one to be pushed out.

“We’ve set up an inflated dome for
the eight of you,” Erik said, with that maddening slow grin of his, “and
stocked with enough food to last a few months.”

“Thanks a bunch!” I snapped.

“We could have killed you all
outright,” he said. “I thought I was going to have to after I made that slip
about Liechtenstein in the lounge one of the first nights out.”

I
felt like a
complete idiot. It never occurred to me that one of the guys I hired might be
the Rockwell plant.

The sonofabitch knew what he was
doing; I have to hand him that. If he had tried anything violent all eight of
us would have fought for our lives. As far as I could tell the only weapon they
had was Erik’s one pistol. He might have killed several of us, but we might
have swarmed him under. Lonz and Will, too. Eight against three. We might have
carried it off.

But Erik worked it like an expert.
He isolated us into individuals and, instead of killing us outright, merely
forced us to go from the ship to the asteroid. Merely. It was a slow way of
killing us. Food and shelter notwithstanding, nobody will return to Pittsburgh
in less than a couple of years. Nobody can, even if Erik would leave us a radio
and we screamed our lungs out for help.

“This is piracy,” I said as the
three of them nudged me toward the airlock. “To say nothing of murder.”

“It’s business, Sam,” Erik said. “Nothing
personal.”

I
turned to Lonz. “Do
you think he’s going to let you live?” Then to Will. “Or you? Neither one of
you is going to make it back to Earth.”

Lonz looked grim. “They’re giving
us enough money to set us up for life. There’s no reason for us to talk, and no
reason for Erik to worry about us.”

I
huffed at him
from inside my helmet. “Dead men tell no tales, pals.” Then I snapped the visor
shut and stepped into the airlock.

“I’m sorry, Sam.” I heard Will’s
voice say, muffled by my helmet.

“Sorry don’t get the job done,” I answered
in my bravest John Wayne imitation.

Then the hatch closed and the pumps
started sucking the air out of the lock.

The outer hatch slid open. There
was Pittsburgh, hanging big and black and ugly against the even blacker
background of space. Through the heavy tinting of my visor I could only see a
few of the brighter stars. They looked awfully cold, awfully far away.

“Get going Sam,” Erik’s voice
sounded genially in my earphones, “or we’ll have to open your suit with a laser
torch.”

Like walking the goddamned plank. I
jetted over to the asteroid. Sure enough, there was an inflated dome next to
the equipment we had left. And seven space-suited figures standing outside it.
Even in the bulky suits they looked scared shitless, huddled together, clinging
to one another.

I
planted my feet
on the asteroid and turned back toward the
Argo,
spinning lazily against the backdrop of stars.

Raising one clenched fist over my
head I yelled into my suit radio’s microphone, “I’ll see you—all of you—hanging
from the highest yardarm in the British fleet!”

It was the only damned thing I could
think of. About five minutes later a blazing flare of light bellowed from the
Argo’s
rocket nozzles and the ship—
my
ship—suddenly leaped
away and dwindled in the dark sky until I couldn’t see it any more.

TO SAY THAT
my partners are upset is putting
it so mildly that it’s like saying that Custer’s Seventh Cavalry was not
terribly friendly with the Sioux Nation.

They’re terrified. They’re weeping.
They’re cursing and swearing and calling down the wrath of the gods. Who (as
usual) remain totally aloof and unconcerned about our plight. It took me nearly
half an hour to get them to stop babbling, and by that time I finally got it
through my thick skull that they’re mad at
me!

“This is all your fault!” Rick
Darling screamed at me. “I
begged
them to let me stay on
the ship. I promised them I’d never inform on them. I even told them that I was
glad
they wanted to get rid of you! But they wouldn’t listen! Now I’m going to die
and it’s all your fault!”

Funny thing is, each and every one
of them is yelling some variation of the same story. Each one of them begged
Erik to let them stay aboard, promised to go along with killing me—and all the
others—providing they were allowed to get home safely.

Erik didn’t take any of them up on
their offers. Not even Sheena, who had a helluva lot to offer. The sonofabitch
must be made of very strong stuff. Either that or he’s gay, which I doubt,
because Darling would’ve probably bent over backwards for him if that’s what he
wanted.

They’re being so goddamned rotten
that they’ve almost made me forget who our real enemy is. I let them babble and
gabble and just clumped across the rough, pitted surface of Pittsburgh and went
inside the dome Erik had so thoughtfully left for us. I ought to mention that
the asteroid’s too small to have any noticeable gravity. We’re all outfitted
with small magnets on our boots, which work very nicely on a body made
predominantly of iron. But even though walking is as easy as stepping across a
newly painted floor that’s still slightly tacky, my body’s feeling all the old
sensations of nearly zero gravity.

I’m smiling to myself. As soon as my
partners calm down enough to take stock of their situation, they’re going to
get good and sick. I’m certain that Erik hasn’t included space-sickness medications
in the pile of supplies he’s left us.