In his haste he took a misstep and flew headlong a few feet above the
metal surface. Koa, gliding along behind him, turned him upright again.
He saw that the sergeant major was grinning. Rip grinned back. It was the
second time he had lost his footing.
They reached the peaks of thorium, and Rip looked them over. The tallest
was perhaps forty feet high. It was roughly pyramidal, with a base about
sixty feet thick. It would do.
"Kemp." The private hurried to his side. "Take the torch and make us a
cave. Make it big enough for the entire crew and the equipment."
Kemp was a good Planeteer. He didn't stop to ask questions. He said,
"I'll make a small entrance and open the cave out inside." He picked up
the torch and got busy.
Rip smiled. The Planeteer was right. He should have thought of it
himself, but it was good to see increasing proof that his men were smart
as well as tough and disciplined.
"Bring up all supplies," he told Koa. "Move the boat over here, too. We
won't be able to bury that, but we want it close by." He had an idea for
their boat. It was able to maneuver infinitely faster than the big
cruiser. They could put the supplies in the cave, then take to the boat,
depending on its ability to turn quickly and on Dowst's skill at piloting
to play hide and seek. Dowst certainly could keep the asteroid between
them and the cruiser.
The plan would fail when the cruiser sent a landing party. They would
certainly come in snapper-boats, and those deadly little fighting craft
could blast rings around the landing boat. The snapper-boats had gotten
their name because fast acceleration and quick changes of position could
snap a man right out of his seat if he forgot to buckle his harness
tightly.
The solution would be to keep the landing boat close to the asteroid. At
the first sign of a landing party, they would take to the cave, using the
rocket launcher as a defense.
The supplies began to arrive. The Planeteers towed them two crates at a
time in a steady line of hurrying men.
Kemp's torch sent an incandescent knife three feet into the metal at each
cut. He was rapidly slicing out a cave. He cut the metal out in great
triangular bars, angling the torch from first one side, then the other.
Koa came and stood beside Rip. "I haven't seen the Connie's exhaust for a
while, sir. They've probably stopped decelerating. We can't see them at
all."
"Meaning what?" Rip asked. He thought he knew, but he wanted Koa's
opinion.
"They're in free fall now, sir. That could mean they're just hunting in
the area. Or it could mean that they've stopped somewhere close by. They
could be looking us over right now, for all we know."
Rip surveyed the stars. "If that's so, they're not too close, Koa.
Otherwise they'd block out a patch of stars."
"Well, sir--" Koa hesitated. "I mean, if you were looking over this
asteroid, and you weren't sure whether the enemy had it or not, how close
would you get?"
"Probably about one AU," Rip said jokingly. That was one astronomical
unit, equal to about ninety-three million miles, the distance from Earth
to the sun.
"That's a safe distance, sir," Koa agreed with a grin.
"But let's suppose the Connie isn't as timid as I am," Rip went on. "He
might be only a few miles out. The question is, would he wait to get
closer before launching his snapper-boats?"
The tall officer answered frankly, "I've never been in a space grab like
this. I don't know the answer."
"We'll soon know," Rip replied grimly. A thought had just struck him. The
_Scorpius_ had trouble finding the asteroid because it was just one of
many sailing along through the belt. But now the asteroid was the only
one traveling _across_ the belt. It would make an outstanding blip on any
radarscope. It wasn't possible that the Connie cruiser had missed the
blip and its significance.
"The Connie may be looking us over," Rip added, "but I'll tell you one
thing. He knows we've taken the asteroid."
Koa looked wistfully at the atomic bomb which remained. "If we had a way
to throw that thing at them...."
"But we haven't. And the thing wouldn't explode, anyway. We don't have
the outside casing with an exploder mechanism, so it has to be turned on
electrically." Rip could see no way to use the atomic bomb against the
Connies. It was too big for use against a landing party. Besides, it
would put the Planeteers themselves in danger.
"Ever have trouble with the Connies before?" he asked Koa.
"More'n once, sir. Sometimes it seems like I'll never get a job where
I don't have to fight Connies."
Rip was trained in science and Planeteer techniques, and he didn't
pretend to know the ins and outs of interplanetary politics. Just the
same, he couldn't help wondering about the strange relationship between
the Consolidation of People's Governments and the Federation of Free
Nations.
Connies and Feds, mostly Planeteers but sometimes spacemen, were
constantly skirmishing. They fought over property, over control of
ports on distant planets and moons, and over space salvage. Often there
was bloodshed. Sometimes there were pitched battles between groups of
platoon size.
But at that point the struggle ended. The law of the Federation said that
no spaceship could fire on a Connie spaceship or on Connie land bases,
except with special permission of the Space Council. The theory was that
brief struggles between men, or even between small fighting craft like
the snapper-boats, was not war. But firing on a spaceship was considered
an act of war, and the first such act could mean the beginning of a war
throughout the entire solar system.
It made a sort of sense to Rip when he thought about it. Little fights
here and there were better than a full war among the planets.