Edward M. Lerner by A New Order of Things

‘s autopilot.
    Best to take advantage before the tourists refueled and returned.
    He tugged his captain’s cap down over his eyes, relaxing for the first time in days. Corinne murmured sotto voce behind him, dry-running another broadcast. Her Nielsen-Sony ratings were astronomical. He drifted off to sleep to the soothing purr of her voice.
    He’d worn the battered hat more or less forever, since his first command. It was his only physical memento of those days. Never cleaned, the cap did not lack for odors—and smell is the most basic and evocative of senses, wired to very primitive parts of the brain. Including to memory centers….
    The bastards had sneaked up on the Lucky Strike , owned and captained by Willem Vanderkellen. Vanderkellen was his name then, a name he was proud of. Willem Vanderkellen IV, to be precise. Whether or not he ever had children, there would be no V.
    He had thought he had been oh, so clever. After the initial, hasty, solo exploration of a surprisingly ore-rich asteroid, he’d gone on for show and misdirection to prospect four more planetoids. He’d quietly taken out a second mortgage on the Lucky Strike by encrypted radio negotiation with the First Interplanetary Bank of Ceres, telling his long-time banker only that he planned to expand his operations. Then he had resupplied on Ganymede, splitting his purchases across a dozen stores but buying everything for a fully equipped, ore-assaying and claim-registering trip. The three rock hounds he brought aboard were old buddies whose loyalty he would have staked his life on.
    It turned out they had staked their lives on him , and it was a sucker bet.
    With its traffic-control transponder illegally silenced, the Lucky Strike should have been invisible. For good measure, much of that second mortgage had gone into the paranoid prospector’s favorite gadget: a radar nuller. Its mere possession was highly illegal except aboard military vessels. Its electronics estimated the reflections from detected incident RF pulses (from up to three concurrent sources, for his black-market model, although supposedly military-grade ones could fool a dozen or more sources), then emitted phase-reversed versions of the calculated echoes. Black-market nullers were never quite perfect—proper tuning for a specific ship required calibrating the entire hull’s reflectance within a huge, and hugely expensive, RF-anechoic chamber—but to anything other than a well-equipped naval vessel, the Lucky Strike was radar-stealthed. The nuller likewise suppressed any transmitters that might somehow have been smuggled aboard. Only signals from the ship’s antennae, properly integrated with the nuller, could get out.
    He still didn’t know how they learned of his plans. Probably he never would, and that still ate him up inside. His banker may have put two and two together. One of his friends might have had a fatal case of loose lips at a spacer bar. Maybe the fence who sold Willem the nuller also sold him out.
    Or perhaps simple credulity had done Willem in.
    How, he wondered years after the fact, by then with a new name, did common knowledge become common knowledge? It was holy writ among asteroid prospectors that the shipyards in the Belt were too small, too mom-and-pop, to afford any anonymity. When you had a big score, they whispered to one another, you prepped at one of the big outfitters in Jupiter system. Then came the second bit of revealed wisdom: the down-and-around Jupiter swoop.
    Could a reasonably well-financed group of claim-jumpers have planted those seeds in countless apparent drunken conversations? Enough great fortunes came from asteroid lodes to motivate such a conspiracy. Say you could lure to Jupiter a few Belters with particularly good prospects. A few radar-nulled satellites could continually monitor all Jupiter-region departures; any ship leaving Jupiter far off its announced flight plan would merit closer investigation.
    But how to detect a radar-stealthed