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Visionary space industrialist Dan Randolph is dead-but his prot?g?, pilot Pancho Barnes, now sits on the board of his conglomerate. She has her work cut out for her. For Randolph's rival, Martin Humphries, still wants to control Astro and still wants to drive independent asteroid miners like Lars Fuchs out of business. Humphries wants revenge against Pancho-and, most of all, he wants his old flame, Amanda, who has become Lars Fuchs's wife. Brimming with memorable characters and human conflict, rugged high-tech prospectors and boardroom betrayals, The Rock Rats continues the tale of our near-future struggle over the incalculable wealth of the Asteroid Belt, the richest source of raw mineral wealth known to humankind. Before it ends, many will die-and many will achieve more than they ever dreamed was possible.
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THE ROCK RATS Book II of the Asteroid Wars
TOR®
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK
BEN BOVA This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. THE ROCK RATS: BOOK II OF THE ASTEROID WARS Copyright © 2002 by Ben Bova All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com Tor* is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bova, Ben, The rock rats / Ben Bova.-1st ed. p. cm. -(The asteroid wars; bk. 2) "A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-765-30227-6 (alk. paper) 1. Mines and mineral resources-Fiction. 2. Women air pilots-Fiction. 3. Space warfare-Fiction. 4. Asteroids-Fiction. I. Title. PS3552.O84R63 2002 813'.54-dc21 2001058464 First Edition: April 2002
Printed in the United States of America
0987654321
To Charles N. Brown and the Locus team
Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! Some kill their love when they are young. And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of Lust, Some with the hands of Gold: The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold. - Oscar Wilde The Ballad of Reading Gaol
THE ROCK RATS
PROLOGUE: SELENE Amanda clutched at her husband's arm when Martin Humphries strode into the wedding reception, unannounced and uninvited.
The Pelican Bar went totally silent. The crowd that had been noisily congratulating Amanda and Lars Fuchs with lewd jokes and lunar "rocket juice" froze as if somebody had doused the place with liquid nitrogen. Fuchs patted his wife's hand gently, protectively, as he scowled up at Humphries. Even Pancho Lane, never at a loss for a quip, simply stood by the bar, one hand holding her drink, the other balling into a fist. The Pelican wasn't Humphries's kind of place. It was the workers' bar, the one joint in Selene's underground warren of tunnels and cubicles where the people who lived and worked on the Moon could come for relaxation and the company of their fellow Lunatics. Suits like Humphries did their drinking in the fancy lounge up in the Grand Plaza, with the rest of the executives and the tourists. Humphries seemed oblivious to their enmity, totally at ease in this sea of hostile stares, even though he looked terribly out of place, a smallish manicured man wearing an impeccably tailored imperial blue business suit in the midst of the younger, boisterous miners and tractor operators in their shabby, faded coveralls and their earrings of asteroidal stones. Even the women looked stronger, more muscular than Humphries. But if Humphries's round, pink-cheek