Gregory Benford: A Worm in the Well

Here goes. One foot over the lip, turn to her right, snatch the stunner out of its grip mount, turn and aim—and she couldn’t fire.

“Damn!” she spat out.

He blinked and backed off, hands up, palms out, as if to block the shot. “What? You’d do a knockover for a crummy ore-hauler?”

“It’s my ship. Not Isataku’s.”

“Lady, I got no angle here. You knock me, you get maybe a day before the heavies come after you.”

“Not if I freeze you.”

His mouth opened and started to form the f of a disbelieving freeze? —then he got angry. “Stiff me till you shipped out? I’d sue you to your eyeballs and have ’em for hock.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Claire said wearily This guy was all cliches. “But I’d be orbiting Luna by the time you got out, and with the right deal—”

“You’d maybe clear enough on the ore to pay me damages.”

“And square with Isataku.” She clipped the stunner back to the wall wearily.

“You’d never get that much.”

“OK, it was a long shot idea.”

“Lady, I was just delivering, right? Peaceable and friendly, right? And you pull—”

“Get out.” She hated it when men went from afraid to angry to insulted, all in less than a split minute.

He got. She sighed and zipped the portal closed.

Time for a drink, for sure. Because what really bothered her was not the Isataku foreclosure, but her own gutlessness.

She couldn’t bring herself to pong that guy, put him away for ten mega-seconds or so. That would freeze him out of his ongoing life, slice into relationships, cut away days that could never be replaced.

Hers was an abstract sort of inhibition, but earned. Her uncle had been ponged for over a year and never did get his life back together. Claire had seen the wreckage up close, as a little girl.

Self-revelation was usually bad news. What a great time to discover that she had more principles than she needed.

And how was she going to get out from under Isataku?

The arch loomed over the Sun’s horizon now, a shimmering curve of blue-white, two thousand kilometers tall.

Beautiful, seen in the shimmering x-ray—snaky strands purling, twinkling with scarlet hotspots. Utterly lovely, utterly deadly. No place for an ore hauler to be.

“Time to get a divorce,” Claire said.

YOU ARE SURPRISINGLY ACCURATE. SEPARATION FROM THE SLAG SHIELD IS 338 SECONDS AWAY.

“Don’t patronize me, Erma.”

I AM USING MY PERSONALITY SIMULATION PROGRAMS AS EXPERTLY AS MY COMPUTATION SPACE ALLOWS.

“Don’t waste your running time; it’s not convincing. Pay attention to the survey, then the separation.”

THE ALL-SPECTRUM SURVEY IS COMPLETELY AUTOMATIC, AS DESIGNED BY SOLWATCH.

“Double-check it.”

I SHALL NO DOUBT BENEFIT FROM THIS ADVICE.

Deadpan sarcasm, she supposed. Erma’s tinkling voice was inside her mind, impossible to shut out. Erma herself was an interactive intelligence, partly inboard and partly shipwired. Running the Silver Metal Lugger would be impossible without her and the bots.

Skimming over the Sun’s seethe might be impossible even with them, too, Claire thought, watching burnt oranges and scalded yellows flower ahead.

She turned the ship to keep it dead center in the shield’s shadow. That jagged mound of slag was starting to spin. Fused knobs came marching over the nearby horizon of it.

“Where’d that spin come from?” She had started their parabolic plunge sunward with absolutely zero angular momentum in the shield.

TIDAL TORQUES ACTING ON THE ASYMMETRIC BODY OF THE SHIELD.

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

The idea was to keep the heated side of the slag shield Sunward. Now that heat was coming around to radiate at her. The knobby crust she had stuck together from waste in Mercury orbit now smoldered in the infrared. The shield’s far side was melting.

“Can that warm us up much?”

A SMALL PERTURBATION. WE WILL BE SAFELY GONE BEFORE IT MATTERS.

“How’re the cameras?” She watched a bot tightening a mount on one of the exterior imaging arrays. She had talked the SolWatch Institute out of those instruments, part of her commission. If a bot broke one, it came straight out of profits.

ALL ARE CALIBRATED AND ZONED. WE SHALL HAVE ONLY 33.8 SECONDS OF VIEWING TIME OVER THE TARGET. CROSSING THE ENTIRE LOOP WILL TAKE 4.7 SECONDS.

“Hope the scientists like what they’ll see.”

I CALCULATE THAT THE PROBABILITY OF SUCCESS, TIMES THE EXPECTED PROFIT, EXCEEDS SIXTY-TWO MILLION DOLLARS.

“I negotiated a seventy-five million commission for this run,” So Erma thought her chances of nailing the worm were—

EIGHTY-THREE PERCENT CHANCE OF SUCCESSFUL RESOLUTION IN ALL IMPORTANT FREQUENCY BANDS.

She should give up calculating in her head; Erma was always faster. “Just be ready to shed the shield. Then I pour on the positrons. Up and out. It’s getting warm in here.”

I DETECT NO CHANGE IN YOUR AMBIENT 22.3 CENTIGRADE.

Claire watched a blister the size of Europe rise among wispy plumes of white-hot incandescence. Constant boiling fury. “So maybe my imagination’s working too hard. Just let’s grab the data and run, OK?”

The scientific officer of SolWatch had been suspicious, though he did hide it fairly well.

She couldn’t read the expression on his long face, all planes and trimmed bone, skin stretched tight as a drumhead. That had been the style among the asteroid pioneers half a century back. Tubular body suited to narrow corridors, double-jointed in several interesting places, big hands. He had a certain beanpole grace as he wrapped legs around a stool and regarded her, head cocked, smiling enough not to be rude. Exactly enough, no more.

“ You will do the preliminary survey?”

“For a price.”

A disdainful sniff. “No doubt. We have a specially designed vessel nearly ready for departure from Lunar orbit. I’m afraid—”

“I can do it now. ”

“You no doubt know that we are behind schedule in our reconnaissance—”

“Everybody on Mercury knows. You lost the first probe.”

The beanpole threaded his thick, long fingers, taking great interest in how they fit together. Maybe he was uncomfortable dealing with a woman, she thought. Maybe he didn’t even like women.

Still, she found his stringy look oddly unsettling, a blend of delicacy with a masculine, muscular effect. Since he was studying his fingers, she might as well look, too. Idly she speculated on whether the long proportions applied to all his extremities. Old wives’ tale. It might be interesting to find out. But, yes, business first.

“The autopilot approached it too close, apparently,” he conceded. “There is something unexpected about its refractive properties, making navigation difficult. We are unsure precisely what the difficulty was.”

He was vexed by the failure and trying not to show it, she guessed. People got that way when they had to dance on strings pulled all the way from Earthside. You got to like the salary more than you liked yourself.

“I have plenty of bulk,” she said mildly. “I can shelter the diagnostic instruments, keep them cool.”

“I doubt your ore carrier has the right specifications.”

“How tricky can it be? I swoop in, your gear runs its survey snaps, I boost out.”

He sniffed. “Your craft is not rated for Sun skimming. Only research craft have ever—”

“I’m coated with Fresnel.” A pricey plating that bounced photons of all races, creeds, and colors.

“That’s not enough.”

“I’ll use a slag shield. More, I’ve got plenty of muscle. Flying with empty holds, I can get away pronto.”

“Ours was very carefully designed—”