Kill Station by Diane Duane & Peter Morwood Page A

the surface of the asteroid. There was nothing much else to be seen, at least not by strictly visual means. What was plain from visual examination was that this asteroid had been slagged out as well, through several apertures, and with great skill. Joss shook his head ruefully as they came to the end of the spiraling, at the far end of the asteroid.
    "So," he said. "A claim jumper with a nasty turn of mind."
    "Or someone who wants us to think he's claim-jumping," Evan said.
    Joss nodded. "Yes," he said. "I didn't want to mention 62 SPACE COPS
    it. I hate to start being paranoid this early on. But we'll see whether there's any evidence to support it."
    He sat for a moment and thought, then began to work with his control panel again. "Let's see," he said,
    "what else we can dig up around here."
    A moment later he was done. Evan leaned over to look at the data readout screen. Joss had done something to its output; there was nothing on it but a sort of fuzzy glob of light off to one side. "You break that thing again?"
    "No," Joss said, sounding abstracted. "I've got it reading for diffuse proximity. You set the radar so it—oh, never mind. I'll tell you about it later. This may take a while-there's too damn much rock and ore around here to attenuate the signal." He leaned over the screen, peering at it while he made some delicate adjustment to the command console. "And what do you mean again? You broke it last time."
    "I never," Evan said. "You left it set up for radar, it wasn't my fault if the computer—"
    "Ssh!"
    Evan sshed, smiling slightly. There was a slight hiss of jets as Joss moved the ship, edging it away from the asteroid from which the claim core had been cut, and toward another one about twenty thousand meters away. Another burst of jets, and another, one every few seconds for awhile. Then, silence.
    Slowly they drifted close to it, the asteroid body swelling into visibility on the screen, a spark at first, then a bizarre shape like a batch of lumps welded together. "Mmf," Joss said, sounding annoyed. The fuzzy patch of light on the screen had become larger, and fuzzier around the edges: the light at its center was more concentrated.
    "No good?" Evan said softly.
    "Further along on this line," Joss said, more to himself than to Evan. "Another twenty kilometers or so.
    Let's see."
    More small hisses of jets, more time drifting in silence. They passed the lumpy asteroid and headed on.
    "It can't
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    be far," Joss muttered. "Even with drift, even with the usual traffic, I wouldn't have risked it being much farther than this. Hope that's not just some wreck."
    "We don't have wrecks drifting around out here," Noel said. "It's not like Earth orbit, where there are a lot of better ways to make money. Out here, salvage prices are too good to ignore, and worked metal is worth a lot more than raw.''
    "Good," Joss said, and would say nothing else for some minutes.
    They drifted on. Stars moved in the plex window, but nothing else came into view. Joss sat hunched over and wouldn't take his eyes off the screen. The concentration of light in the middle of the fuzzy glob got stronger and stronger.
    "Has to be," Joss said to himself. "Has to be." He hit the control console, and there was a short, heavy burst of jets, a two-second burn.
    They began to speed up a good deal. The white core of light on the readout got stronger and stronger. "Look at that!"
    Joss said, triumphant.
    "What is it?" said Evan.
    Joss sat back and breathed out. "That is metal under stone. Metal under disturbed stone. Side-looking radar sees half of it. The spectroscopy scanner sees the other half. A significant contrast in density between the surface and the substrate material. It's no good for mining, because the density differences are never this major, ninety percent of the time—the odds are too much against it being useful as a tool. Sorry, Noel. But that—" and he pointed at the screen
    "—that is something made of pure steel or other