Scavengers in Space Read online

  But there was no sign of anything that Roger Hunter might have found.

  Back in the control cabin Johnny was checking the ship’s log. The old entries were on microfilm, stored on their spools near the reader. More recent entries were still recorded on tape. From the jumbled order, there was no doubt that the marauders had examined them. Johnny ran through them nevertheless, but there was nothing of interest. Routine navigational data; a record of the time of contact with the asteroid; a log of preliminary observations on the rock, nothing more. The last tape recorded the call-schedule Roger Hunter had set up with the patrol, a routine precaution used by all miners, to bring help if for some reason they should fail to check in on schedule.

  There was no hint in the log of an extraordinary discovery.

  “Are any tapes missing?” Greg wanted to know.

  “Doesn’t look like it. There’s one here for each day period.”

  “I wonder,” Tom said. “Dad always kept a personal log. You know, a sort of a diary, on microfilm.” He peered into the film storage bin, checked through the spools. Then, from down beneath the last row of spools he pulled out a slightly smaller spool. “Here’s something our friends missed, I bet.”

  It was not really a diary, just a sequence of notes, calculations and ideas that Roger Hunter had jotted down and microfilmed from time to time. The entries on the one spool went back for several years. Tom fed the spool into the reader, and they stared eagerly at the last few entries.

  A series of calculations covering several pages, but with no notes to indicate what, exactly, Roger Hunter had been calculating. “Looks like he was plotting an orbit,” Greg said. “But what orbit? And why? Nothing here to tell.”

  “It must have been important, though, or Dad wouldn’t have filmed the pages,” Tom said. “Anything else?”

  Another sheet with more calculations. Then a short paragraph written in Roger Hunter’s hurried scrawl. “No doubt now what it is,” the words said. “Wish Johnny were here, show him a real bonanza, but hell know soon enough if. . . .”

  They stared at the scribbled, uncompleted sentence. Then Johnny Coombs let out a whoop. “I told you he found something! And he found it here, not somewhere else.”

  “Hold it,” Greg said, peering at the film reader. “There’s something more on the last page, but I can’t read it.”

  Tom blinked at the entry. “ ‘Inter Jovem et Martem plane- tarn interposui,’ ” he read. He scratched his head. “That’s Latin, and it’s famous, too. Kepler wrote it, back before the asteroids were discovered. ‘Between Jupiter and Mars I will put a planet.’ ”

  Greg and Johnny looked at each other. “I don’t get it,” Greg said.

  “Dad told me about that once,” Tom said. “Kepler couldn’t understand the long jump between Mars and Jupiter, when Venus and Earth and Mars were so close together. He figured there ought to be a planet out here—and he was right, in a way. There wasn’t any one planet, unless you’d call Ceres a planet, but it wasn’t just empty space between Mars and Jupiter, either. The asteroids were here.”

  “But why would Dad be writing that down?” Greg asked. “And what has it got to do with what he found?” He snapped off the reader switch angrily. “I don’t understand any of this, and I don’t like it. If Dad found something out here, where is it? And who tore this ship apart after the patrol ship left?”

  “Probably the same ones that caused the ‘accident’ in the first place,” Johnny said.

  “But why did they come back?” Greg protested. “If they killed Dad, they must have known what he’d found before they killed him.”

  “You’d think so,” Johnny conceded.

  “Then why take the risk of coming back here again?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know,” Tom said thoughtfully.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean maybe they killed him too soon. Maybe they thought they knew what he’d found and where it was, and then found out that they didn’t, after all. Maybe Dad hid it.”

  Johnny Coombs shook his head. “No way a man can hide an ore strike.”

  “But suppose Dad did, somehow, and whoever killed him couldn’t find it? It would be too late to make him tell then. They’d have to come back and look again, wouldn’t they? And from the way they went about it, it looks as though they weren’t having much luck.”

  “Then whatever Dad found would still be here, somewhere,” Greg said.

  “That’s right.”

  “But where? There’s nothing on this ship.”

  “Maybe not,” Tom said, “but I’d like to take a look at that asteroid before we give up.”

  They paused in the big ore-loading lock to reclamp their pressure suit helmets, and looked down at the jagged chunk of rock a hundred yards below them. In the lock they found scooters, the little one-man propulsion units so commonly used for short-distance work in space, but decided not to use them. “They’re clumsy,” Johnny said, “and the bumper units in your suits will do just as well for this distance.” He looked down at the rock. “I’ll take the center section. You each take an edge and work in. Look for any signs of work on the surface—chisel marks, Murexide charges, anythin’.”

  “What about the dark side?” Greg asked.

  “If we want to see anythin’ there, well either have to rig lights or turn the rock around,” Johnny said. “Let’s cover this side first and see what we come up with.”

  He turned and leaped from the airlock, moving gracefully down toward the surface, using the bumper unit to guide himself, with short bursts of compressed C02 from the nozzle. Greg followed, pushing off harder and passing Johnny halfway down. Tom hesitated. It looked easy enough, but he remembered the violent nausea of his first few hours of free fall.

  Finally he gritted his teeth and jumped off after Greg. Instantly he knew that he had jumped too hard. He shot away from the orbit ship like a bullet. The jagged asteroid surface leaped up at him. Frantically he grabbed for the bumper nozzle and pulled the trigger, trying to break his fall.

  He felt the nozzle jerk in his hand, and then, abruptly, he was spinning off at a wild tangent from the asteroid, head over heels. For a moment it seemed that asteroid, orbit ship and stars were all wheeling crazily around him. Then he realized what had happened. He fired the bumper again, and went spinning twice as fast. The third time he timed the blast, aiming the nozzle carefully, and the spinning almost stopped.

  He fought down nausea, trying to get his bearings. He was three hundred yards out from the asteroid, almost twice as far from the orbit ship. He stared down at the rock as he moved slowly away from it. Before, from the orbit ship, he had been able to see only the bright side of the huge rock; now he could see the sharp line of darkness across one side.

  But there was something else. . . .

  He fired the bumper again to steady himself, peering into the blackness beyond the light line on the rock. He snapped on his helmet lamp, aimed the spotlight beam down to the dark rock surface. Greg and Johnny were landing now on the bright side, with Greg almost out of sight over the ‘horizon’, but Tom’s attention was focused on something he could see only now as he moved away from the asteroid surface.

  His spotlight caught it—something bright and metallic, completely hidden on the dark side, lying in close to the surface but not quite on the surface. Suddenly Tom knew what it was—the braking jets of a Class I Ranger, crouching beyond the reach of sunlight in the shadow of the asteroid.

  Swiftly he fired the bumper again, turning back toward the orbit ship. His hand went to the speaker switch, but he caught himself in time. Any warning shouted to Greg and Johnny would certainly be picked up by the ship. But he had to give warning somehow.

  He tumbled into the airlock, searching for a flare in his web belt. It was a risk—the ranger ship might pick up the flash—but he had to take it. He was unscrewing the fuse cap from the flare when he saw Greg and Johnny leap up from the asteroid surface.

  Then he saw what had alarmed
them. Slowly, the ranger was moving out from its hiding place behind the rock. Tom reached out to catch Greg as he came plummeting into the lock. There was a flash from the ranger’s side, and Johnny Coombs’ voice boomed in his earphones: “Get inside! Get the lock closed, fast.”

  Johnny caught the lip of the lock, dragged himself inside frantically. They were spinning the airlock door closed when they heard the thundering explosion, felt the ship lurch under their feet, and all three of them went crashing to the deck.

  Chapter Five

  The Black Raider

  For a stunned moment they were helpless as they struggled to pick themselves up. The stable airlock deck was suddenly no longer stable. It was lurching back and forth like a row- boat on a heavy sea. They grabbed the shock bars along the bulkheads to steady themselves. “What happened?” Greg yelped. “I saw a ship—”

  As if in answer there was another crash below decks, and the lurching became worse. “They’re firin’ on us, that’s what happened,” Johnny Coombs growled.

  “Well, they’re shaking us loose at the seams,” Greg said. “We’ve got to get this crate out of here.” He reached for his helmet and began unsnapping his pressure suit.

  “Leave it on,” Johnny snapped.

  “But we can’t move fast enough in these things.”

  “Leave it on all the same. If they split the hull open, you’ll be dead in ten seconds without a suit.”

  Somewhere below they heard the steady clang-clang-clang of the emergency stations bell. Already one of the compartments somewhere had been breached and was pouring its air out into the vacuum of space. “But what can we do?” Greg cried. “They could tear us apart!”

  “First, we see what they’ve already done,” Johnny said, spinning the wheel on the inner lock. “If they plan to tear us apart, we’re done for, but they may want to try to board us.”

  The lock came open, and they started down the corridor, lurching helplessly with the ship, crashing back and forth into the bulkheads as they ran. The alarm bell continued its urgent clanging. Somewhere above they heard the wrenching grate of tortured metal as a seam gave way.

  Like all orbit ships, this one had been built in space, in the form of a sphere that was never intended to enter the powerful gravitational field or the thick atmosphere of any planet Orbit ships were the work horses of space; their engines were built for friction-free maneuverability, and their spherical design provided the most storage space for the least surface area. Once placed in a desired orbit, such a ship would travel like any planetoid in its own ellipse around the sun.

  For passenger and freight traffic between the planets, orbit ships were reliable and cheap. As headquarters bases for asteroid mining, they were perfect. But an orbit ship was never designed for combat. Its hull was a thin layer of aluminum alloy, held in shape by the great pressure of the artificial atmosphere inside it. It had maneuverability, but no speed. And its size—huge in comparison to the scout ships that used it for a base—made it a perfect target.

  An orbit ship under fire was completely vulnerable. One well-placed shell could rip it open like a balloon.

  Tom and Greg followed Johnny up the corridor between the storage holds of the outer layer, and lurched down a ladder to the middle layer where the control cabin was located. In control they found alarm lights flashing in three places on the instrument panel. Another muffled crash roared through the ship, and a new row of lights sprang on along the panel.

  “How are the engines?” Greg asked, staring at the flickering lights.

  “Can’t tell. Looks like they’re firing at the main jets, but they’ve ripped open three storage holds, too. They’re trying to disable us.”

  “What about the Scavenger?”

  Johnny checked a gauge. “The airlock compartment is all right, so the scout ships haven’t been touched. They couldn’t fire on them without splittin’ the whole ship down the middle.” He leaned forward, flipped on the view screen, and an image came into focus.

  It was a Class I Ranger, and there was no doubt of its origin. Like the one they had seen berthing at the Sun Lake City racks, this ship had a glossy black hull, with the golden triangle-and-J insignia standing out in sharp relief in the dim sunlight.

  “It’s our friends, all right,” Johnny said.

  “But what are they trying to do?” Tom said.

  Even as they watched, a pair of scooters broke from the side of the Ranger and slid down toward the sun side of the asteroid. “I don’t know,” Johnny said. “I think they intended to stay hidden, until Tom lost control of his bumper and got far enough around there to spot them.” He frowned as the first scooter touched down on the asteroid surface.

  “Can’t we fire on them?” Greg said angrily.

  “Not the way this tub is lurching around. They’ve got our main gyros, and the auxiliaries aren’t powerful enough to steady us. Another blast or two could send us spinnin’ like a top, and we’d have nothing to stabilize us.”

  There was another flash from the Ranger’s hull, and the ship jerked under their feet. “Well, we’re a sitting duck here,” Greg said. “Maybe those engines will still work.” He slid into the control seat, flipped the drive switches to fire the side jets in opposite pairs. They fired, steadying the lurching of the ship somewhat, but there was no response from the main engines. “No good. We couldn’t begin to run from them.”

  “They could outrun us anyway,” Tom said, watching the view screen. “And they’re moving in closer now.”

  It was true. The black ship, which had been lying out several miles from them, was now looming larger. As they watched, the Ranger maneuvered toward the #3 landing rack, just above the rack that held the Scavenger.

  “They’re going to board us,” Tom cried.

  Johnny nodded, his eyes suddenly bright. “I think you’re right. And if they do, we may have a chance. But we’ve got to split up. Greg, you take the control cabin here; try to keep them out if you can. Tom, you cover the main corridor to the storage holds. I’ll take the engine-room section. That will sew up the entrances to control, here, and give us a chance to stop them.”

  “They may have a dozen men,” Tom said. “They could just shoot us down.”

  “I don’t think so,” Johnny said. “They want us, not the ship, or they wouldn’t bother to board us. We may not be able to hold them off, but we can try.”

  “What about making a run for it in the Scavenger?” Greg said.

  Johnny chuckled grimly. “It’d be a mighty short run. That Ranger’s got homing shells that could blow the Scavenger to splinters if we tried it. Our best bet is to put up such a brawl that they’ll think twice about takin’ us.”

  The Ranger had come in very close now. Magnetic grappling cables shot out from the dark hull, clanging on the steel plates above and below #3 rack. Slowly the ship began pull-itself in to the orbit ship’s side.

  And then the two scooters shot up from the asteroid surface, heading for the loading lock. Johnny looked at Tom. “Let’s go, and don’t be afraid to hit them.”

  They parted in the corridor outside control, Johnny heading down for the engine-room corridor, while Tom ran up toward the main outer-shell corridor, Markheim stunner in his hand. The entire outer shell of the ship was storage space, each compartment separately sealed and connected with the two main corridors that circled the ship. On each side these corridors came together to join the short entry corridors from the scout ship’s airlocks.

  Tom knew that the only way the ship could be boarded was through those locks. A man stationed at the place where the main corridors joined could block any entry from the locks, as long as he could hold his position. He reached the junction of the corridors, and crouched close to the wall. By peering around the comer, he had a good view of the airlock corridor. He waited until his heart stopped pounding in his ears. Then he heard the clanging sound of boots on metal and the sucking noise of the airlock in operation.

  They were aboard.

  Tom
gripped the Markheim tightly and dialed it down to a narrow beam. Nobody had ever been killed by a stunner, but a direct hit with a narrow beam could paralyze a man for three days. He would have to hit his target with no help from the sub-sonic reflections, but he knew that whoever he hit wouldn’t go any. farther.

  There was movement at the far end of the airlock corridor. A helmeted head peered around the turn in the corridor; then two men in pressure suits moved into view, walking cautiously, weapons in hand. Tom shrank back against the wall, certain they had not seen him. He waited until they were almost to the junction with the main corridor; then he took aim and pressed the trigger stud on his Markheim. There was an ugly ripping sound as the gun jerked in his hand. The two men dropped as though they had been poleaxed.

  A shout, a scrape of metal against metal, and a shot ripped back at him from the end of the corridor. Tom jerked back fast, but not quite fast enough. He felt a sledge-hammer blow on his shoulder, felt his arm jerk in a cramping spasm while the corridor echoed the low rumble of sub-sonics. He flexed his arm to work out the spasm. They were using a wide beam, hardly strong enough to stun a man. His heart pounded. They were being careful, very careful.

  Two more men rounded the bend in the corridor. Tom fired, but they hit the deck fast, and the beam missed. The first one jerked to his feet, charged up the corridor toward him, dodging and sliding. Tom followed him in his sights, fired three times as the Markheim heated up in his hand. The beam hit the man’s leg, dumping him to the deck, and bounced off to catch the second-one.

  But now there was another sound coming from the corridor behind him. Voices, shouts, clanging of boots. He pressed against the wall, listening. The sounds were from below—probably the men on the scooters. They must have gotten past Johnny. Tom looked around helplessly. If they came up behind him, he was trapped in a crossfire. But if he left his position, more men could come in through the airlock. Even now two more came around the bend, starting up the corridor for him.