Kill Station by Diane Duane & Peter Morwood

closely at the little crevasse, no more than a foot wide here. He kicked his helmet light on and looked at it more closely still.
    The patterns on the rock on one side of the crevasse did not match the patterns on the other.
    "Jesu Crist on a handbike!" he said.
    He reached down into the crevasse, set his legs wide, bent his knees, took hold of the stone on the transmitter side of the crevasse, and started exerting pull.
    Under his gauntlets, rock crumbled. He felt for another more solid handhold further down, but found none. He chipped through into the rock with his gauntlets to make a better place to brace his fingers, sank a bit more deeply into his kneebend, and heaved again.
    Nothing happened. He could hear the suit creaking and straining around him as the servos tried to cope with what he was trying to get it to do.
    He kept pulling.
    6O SPACE COPS
    Nothing happened. He wondered if he was going to ruin his negative-feedback circuitry. That happened, sqme-times, when you tried to move something too large, like a piece of a planet-Override requests and alarms began to flash in front of his eyes, or rather, on the surfaces of his retinas. Evan ignored them and kept pulling. Though nothing was happening.
    Wait a minute. Something was giving under his hands-No, it wasn't. The horizon was changing subtly.
    The claim transmitter was tilting away from him. A piece of the asteroid fifty feet across was tilting up out of the surface, near edge up, far edge down. A big, roughly semicircular chunk, now about a foot higher than the ground he was standing on—a foot and a half—
    "Enough already!" Joss said. Evan let go, but mass in motion doing what it does in zero gee, the plugged-in piece of stone kept tilting up and up for several seconds before inertia set in and stopped it.
    Then it began to settle again, and a brief cloud of dust puffed up as it did.
    "Pity you didn't have the suit on in the bar last night," Joss said. Evan saw Noel's head swivel toward Joss; it was a pity about the bad light, for he would have loved to see the look on Noel's face. "But how about that, then," Joss said smugly.
    Evan was feeling smug too, though he was not sure that his biceps and the muscles of his forearms weren't going to have something to say to him tomorrow. "Someone," he said, "cut the claim transmitter whole and entire out of another asteroid. And cut a matching hole in this one, and dropped one into the other."
    They both looked at Noel. He was flabbergasted. "Then the asteroid Hek claimed on is somewhere else entirely. With a big hole cut in it."
    "Let's go looking," Joss said, and headed back for the ship. "It can't be far. If I was pulling a stunt like this, I'd be betting on never getting caught. I wouldn't bother going more than a few minutes away to find the place where I
    SPACE COPS 61
    would dig the hole to stick this plug. Which means that Hek's real asteroid is nearby. Come on." They went after him, fast.
    IT TOOK THEM THREE HOURS TO FIND IT, FOR
    there were about eighteen asteroids in the immediate area, and looking over every one of them was a time-consuming business. Joss swore at the ship for not being maneuver-able enough (which it was) and at his scanning software for not being smart enough (which it was) as they sifted through the area, one rock after another.
    And there it was, the fifteenth one; a small asteroid, very elongated, almost cucumber-shaped. One end of it had a roughly spherical hole cut in it. Joss sat there working with his controls for a moment, then said, "The scan wasn't really built for this kind of thing, but I can tell that this ore pretty closely matches the ore around the claim core."
    Noel looked out at it and bit his lip. "I wish I had this kind of equipment," he said, "and time to use it."
    "No shame to you," Evan said. "You're not exactly underworked as it is." He looked over at Joss and said, "We ought to look this over pretty carefully."
    Joss nodded and started them in a slow spiral around