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by Jason K. Chapman
Science Fiction, 16 pages.
Originally Published in Cosmos Magazine, 2007
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Holden Burke watched the displays in front of him, but barely. The Holdin’ Aces was pulling two gees in a hard retro burn and his partner was doing the driving. Holden was just watching for warning lights and begging the universe for a lucky break. The universe was stingy with luck, though, especially for asteroid miners. Their last two trips had barely broken even. This was Holden’s last chance.
“Damn!” Asa Greene, Holden’s partner, flipped through displays on the navigation system. The screens flicked by too quickly for Holden to follow.
“What is it? Another ship? Out here? Asa, you swore no one would be working this rock.”
“Huh? No, no ships. Damn!”
“Not a bug.” Holden punched up a radar display on his own console. “Please tell me it’s not a bug.”
A bug on their jackpot-to-be would be bad. Game over. They’d just have to pack it in and go home broke.
No one really knew where the first bug had come from. The best guess was that it had originated somewhere near Lambda Scorpii — the scorpion’s tail. It had ridden into the solar system a little over a decade before on the end of a half-kilometer stream of high-speed ions and made its home on Ceres. From raw materials mined on the asteroid, it had built more bugs. Now there were hundreds of the bootstrap bots jetting around the belt. They chewed up asteroids and ferried the juicy bits back to Ceres to feed a massive construction project.
The scientists studying the Ceres Gate were convinced it was some kind of matter receiver, one large enough for ships to pass through. They haggled over terms like wormholes and hyperdimensional translation, but the gist of it was clear. Mankind’s first contact with an alien race was approaching.
The Regional Authority of Mars, with the full backing of both the U.N. and the Lunar Republic, had declared the bugs off limits. They couldn’t risk letting a careless act turn the arrival into a disaster.
Teams of researchers followed some of the bugs around. They snapped pictures and made guesses, but all from a distance. Interfering with the visitors was the only capital offense in the RAM legal code. Even joking about it could get a pilot’s ticket pulled and his ship impounded.
“No, it’s not a bug,” Asa said. “I’m off a couple of points on the orbit match. We need to burn some juice on a correction. I told you I thought the grapple let go too early on that last swing.”
Holden sighed. “A couple of points? You use ‘damn’ for a couple of points? That’s a ‘shoot,’ or a ‘rats,’ at most. You say ‘damn’ and I get a flipping heart attack!”
“Sorry.” Asa shut the drive down and they slammed forward against their restraints. “I think you’re wound a little tight.”
Holden felt the Aces roll and twist under Asa’s guidance. “You don’t have my bughh—.” The main drive kicked in again. “My bills. You know, a little warning might by nice.”
“Oopsy.” Asa grinned. “Come on. You got a two-bedroom spread on the half-gee ring with a Mars view. Of course you got bills. Me? I got a six-foot sleeper pod up near the hub. No worries.”
“I am not raising my daughter in a coffin!” In truth, he wasn’t sure that six-year-old Jasmine Burke could be contained in such a small space. She was too bright, too energetic, too full of life.
“I’m just saying. You know, a small place up on quarter-gee. Inside corridor. Plenty of room for the three of you. It’d save a lot.”
“Why not the welfare dome down on Mars? Huh? That’s cheap.”
“Nah. You’d spend all your money lifting back to orbit for the mining runs. Drive going off.”
Holden braced himself for the jolt and Asa shut down the drive. If it came to that, lifting back to orbit wouldn’t matter. Holden was three months behind on his payments on the Aces, and Sheila’s salary barely stayed ahead of food and air rights for the three of them. He had an inbox full of bills and he was running out of ways to juggle them.
“You don’t get it, do you? Asa, if this trip doesn’t pay out, I’m done. No more gambles. No more trips. Nothing.”
Asa busied himself with the controls. There was nothing in his expression. He didn’t smile. He barely even blinked. With Asa, that was usually a bad sign.
“Asa, look. It’s not personal.”
Asa twitched the attitude thrusters a few times. His face was still blank. They’d been partners a long time and friends even longer. Maybe it was hitting him harder than Holden thought.
“Asa?”
A smile grew on Asa’s face, then burst into his usual grin. He slapped the controls and all the screens lit up with the view from the forward cameras. “So maybe you should go hook this pe -- [End of Preview.]