Zero Limit Read online

  “There she is!” a Texas-accented voice bellowed.

  Ross crossed the distance between himself and Caitlin with loud, heavy footfalls designed to announce his presence to anyone within earshot. His suit was immaculate and probably cost more than she could make in a year of moving rego, chits or no chits. Equally immaculate were his teeth, white, gleaming, and gigantic. Caitlin found herself wondering if, at the right angle, they might be visible from Earth. He finally reached her and shook her hand vigorously, smiling excitedly. During the brief but spirited handshake, Caitlin noticed rope bracelets on his wrist and a brief flash of tattoo. That, plus the shaggy blond hair that poked out beneath his rather large cowboy hat, told her that the suit was little more than a costume, just as the office was a stage. And the play that was about to begin was titled “Daddy’s Boy Tries to Make Good.” The only question she had now was what her role would be.

  “Man oh man, is it a pleasure to meet you, Captain,” Ross said. “My brother was at Samarra. He was a reporter for the Newsfeed. He saw what you and your platoon did there.”

  He pointed to the nearby wall on which hung a tattered American flag, no doubt recovered from the battlefield. Ross eyed the flag a moment. Caitlin wondered if he was about to salute.

  “A great day,” he said. “Great day.”

  “Only if you read about it on the Newsfeed.”

  At that remark, he didn’t flinch at all. He just pointed at Caitlin, smile still intact. “I heard that,” he said. “I heard it!”

  Ross moved around to the other side of the desk and produced a large bottle of amber liquid. He poured two drinks and handed a glass to Caitlin.

  “Bourbon?” he asked. “We’ve got the real stuff here. Not that cubed shit y’all drink back at the mining camp.”

  Caitlin took the drink, though a part of her felt just a little wrong for doing so. But with just one sip, regrets washed away. She hadn’t had a real drink in a year. The taste was sharp, smoky, and rich, and every dormant sense in her mouth was suddenly shaken awake. Ross immediately read her reaction, and instead of one pointed finger, Caitlin now got two, one from each hand. His smile grew to an almost impossible width, followed by a boisterous guffaw.

  “Ah?” Ross said as he nodded. “Ah? Do we have a winner? Yes, I think she likes it!”

  “It’s good, thank you,” Caitlin admitted, setting the drink down. “Now, can you tell me why I’m here?”

  Ross slapped the desk almost gleefully. “Right to the point!” he said. “I like it! I really, really like it! OK, Captain—”

  “You can just call me Caitlin.”

  “All right then, Caitlin,” he said. “I will tell you why you’re here. I’m about to make you absolutely filthy rich. Davey boy!”

  Richards scuttled over and pointed a remote at a holoprojector on the desk. There was a quick flash and a 3-D image of what looked to be an asteroid appeared, rotating slowly on its axis.

  “Asteroid 1222 Thresher,” said Ross. “It’s packed with more platinum than any other near-Earth asteroid we’ve tracked. To put a number to it, we’re looking at about five trillion dollars’ worth of platinum. We think it came out of the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Probably got knocked out by Jupiter’s gravity or something. Whatever the case may be, it’s presently on a flyby course with Earth. Once it passes by our geo-sats, it won’t come back for another hundred and fifty years.”

  He leaned forward on the desk. The 3-D image cast his face in an eerie blue glow.

  “What do you know about asteroid mining, Caitlin?”

  “That it’s dangerous,” she said, “which is why no one does it. It’s also not entirely legal yet.”

  “Right, right,” said Ross. “It is dangerous. You know what else people thought was dangerous? Building a machine that could fly. Or a rocket that went to the Moon. Hell, if we avoided something just because it was dangerous, we never would have left Earth at all.”

  “That would have been fine with me,” Caitlin said. She noticed that his answer had deftly skirted the issue of asteroid mining’s shaky legality.

  Ross’s eyes narrowed and his voice lowered to an almost conspiratorial whisper, but the smirk remained. “I know it would,” he said. “And that’s why we need to talk!”

  Ross stood up and began pacing the room excitedly. This was the pitch, Caitlin realized, what he had been building toward since he first got the idea to summon her here.

  “Asteroid mining is dangerous,” he said. “But it’s also the wave of the future. There are countless asteroids floating around out there between Mars and Jupiter, and thousands more between Earth and Mars. And nearly all of them are filled with materials we can use. Water, minerals, alloys. Come on, Caitlin, you read the papers. Tensions between Earth and the Moon are at an all-time high. People on both sides of the belt aren’t too happy with our commander in chief’s little cleanup proposal. Word has it that the lunar government is considering leaving the New Coalition. Becoming a sovereign state. This is a pressure cooker, and it’s just about ready to go bust. The time has come for bold choices. What I like to call a zero-limit option.”

  “Zero-limit option?”

  “Something my dad used to say,” said Ross. “It’s like the point where you’ve run out of choices. The zero limit.”

  “I think that’s zero sum.”

  “No,” said Richards, piping up from the back of the room, “that’s when the gains of the winner balance out with the losses of the loser.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” said Ross, his tone growing exasperated. “Jeez. It’s just a turn of phrase. The point is, it’s the Wild West up here right now. And you want to know what the crazy thing is?”

  “What’s the crazy thing?” Caitlin asked.

  “Everything they’re fighting about down on Earth, in fact, everything we’ve been starting wars over since we first crawled up out of the sea,” said Lyman, “water, minerals, fuel, all the silly little things we’ve been so busy killing each other for, it’s here in abundance in space. Hell, forget about getting rich. This is really about saving the world, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” said Caitlin, “but it’s also about getting rich.”

  Lyman shrugged. “If the fruits of my efforts turn out to be presented in gold, then who am I to complain?” he said. “And remember, you’re a partner in this, so some of that fruit can be yours.”

  Caitlin remained unsure. Something about Ross . . . well, everything actually, set off alarm bells in her brain. Ross seemed to sense her apprehension and tried a different tactic.

  “During the nineteenth century, do you know what the most valuable metal in the United States was?” he asked. “Aluminum. It was more precious than gold. Napoleon had even saved his aluminum cutlery for his best guests. And when they finished the Washington Monument in 1884, they made the capstone out of a six-pound pyramid of aluminum. But it didn’t take long for some enterprising souls to figure out how to separate aluminum from rock cheaply. Before too long, factories were producing fifty pounds of aluminum a day and that same stuff Napoleon saved for his best guests came in a seventy-five-foot sheet you could buy at your supermarket. And the company that capitalized on it, Alcoa? It’s worth more than thirty billion dollars today. It just takes one visionary mind to shift the balance of power or economics, Caitlin. And these asteroids? They represent the next gold rush. It’s all out there. Just waiting for some enterprising soul to reach out and take it.”

  “And I gather that enterprising soul is you?”

  “It’s going to be someone,” he said. “And why not me? Core One has the tools and the resources to become the premier asteroid mining company of the next decade. All we need to do is prove that it can work.”

  “That’s where I come in,” Caitlin said.

  “That’s where you come in,” Ross agreed.

  Richards hit another button on his remote and the asteroid image flickered out, replaced by a rotating image of a compact and rather ugly-loo
king spacecraft.

  “The Tamarisk,” Ross said with all the gusto of a proud papa. “She’s an older model cargo hauler, class 627, but we’ve given her a refit and a total overhaul. Now she’s a rock grabber.”

  “Rock grabber?”

  “An asteroid retrieval craft,” said Ross. “The first of her kind. It’s simple, really. You and your crew take her out to the Thresher and latch on to the rock itself. Then you deploy a series of robotic probes, each one equipped with its own electric propulsion system. Once the probes are on the surface, you and your crew detach and head home. Those little suckers will take over and steer that thing into lunar orbit. And that’s when the real work starts.”

  “So if your little droids are going to do the work,” Caitlin asked, “what do you need a crew for?”

  “Come on, Caitlin,” Ross said. “You know better than anyone that certain ops call for a human touch. You can’t trust a machine to get all the details right. From where I sit, the whole thing should be as easy as sliding off a barn. You ever work one of them prize-snatching machines at a diner? Same idea.”

  “I never got the prize once,” Caitlin said.

  “Oh, you will this time,” said Ross. “I guarantee it. Word has it you and your crew are the best miners on the surface.”

  “Mining rego’s a little different than slowing an asteroid down in the middle of space,” Caitlin told him. “There’re a lot more factors to consider and a lot more that can go wrong. And all of that’s before we even set down on the surface. But the bigger question—why us? Why not use a crew from your own company? Surely you have to have people trained for this kind of thing.”

  “Well,” said Ross, settling back into his chair and putting his feet up on his desk. As he did this, Caitlin took note of his rather loud—and presumably expensive—boots. “Now there’s the bitch of it. You see, all the legalities about mining an asteroid haven’t really been sorted out yet. As you probably know, there were a number of asteroid mining companies starting up in the early twenty-first century. However, most of ’em stalled out because of lack of funding or drowned in a sea of corporate red tape about who really owned the rights to mine space. Things haven’t changed much over the last fifty years or so. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. Most of the He-3 mining companies, yours included, have been working in secret on asteroid mining procedures. Sooner or later, the floodgates are going to open, and every rock out there’s going to be up for grabs. The thing is, no one can make a move until the Interstellar Commerce Commission rules that asteroids are officially cleared to be mined. But, if say a group of privateers went out and snagged themselves a rock, proved it was viable, and acquired our services to mine it further? Well now, that’s just capitalism at work.”

  “And if those privateers were to have an accident while snagging this rock, Core One would have no responsibility, correct?”

  There was no answer to this query, simply another shrug and that omnipresent grin. Caitlin sipped her drink and pressed on.

  “What about my job?”

  Ross waved a dismissive hand. “Taken care of,” he said. “Mr. Chen at Guanghang is a good friend of the family. He’s quite interested in the proposal.”

  “And what does he stand to gain from it?” asked Caitlin.

  “With five trillion dollars, there’s plenty to go around,” he said.

  “Tell me again why I’d ever consider this?”

  Ross swept his feet off the desk and sat up, hands folded on the desk surface. “You know who my father is, yes? Well, he’s one of the stockholders of Core One. And, between you, me, and the lamppost, he stands to gain quite a bit from this little endeavor. To that end, he’s prepared to compensate those responsible in whatever way they wish. I know you’ve been applying for a travel pass to get back on planet, using your veteran’s status to help your case. And I also know it’s been getting stuck in the wheels of bureaucracy. Now I ask you, Caitlin, who better to grease those wheels than a United States senator?”

  “And if we fail?”

  Ross leaned back again, placing his hands behind his head. “This is the free market, Caitlin. We don’t reward failure. Only success.”

  Caitlin turned Ross’s entire proposal over in her head before standing up. “I can’t do it,” she said.

  Ross’s expression remained, but something in his eyes changed slightly. “You’re joking,” he said.

  “I don’t have time to joke,” she told him. “You’re right. I have been applying for a visa, and if I play my cards right, it might go through in a year. Maybe eighteen months. If I take the shortcut you’re offering, I could be home sooner, sure. But I could also get myself killed. Worse yet, without the protection of your company, I could also get caught by the ICC. Which means that not only would I lose my job, but the only way I’d be seeing my daughter is on the other side of a plate-glass window.”

  “ICC won’t be a problem,” said Ross. “They’ve got far bigger fires to put out these days, believe you me.”

  “Are you willing to bail me out if you’re wrong?”

  His silence was answer enough for Caitlin. She reached over to shake his hand.

  “Thank you for the drink, Mr. Ross,” she said, “but I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time.”

  Before Caitlin made for the door, Ross quickly handed her a small card made from clear plastic.

  “Now that’s my private line,” he said. “The Tamarisk leaves Ponca City docks in three days with your crew or someone else’s. You have a change of heart, that’s how you can tell me.”

  Richards showed Caitlin out. Ross’s smile trailed her as the door closed.

  The maglev train ride back to the Hive from Aldrin City passed in a blur. Caitlin’s thoughts were spinning and turning wildly, like leaves in a fall storm. Part of her wondered if she was crazy to turn Ross down. She had more than enough confidence in her crew. In the year she’d spent working with them, she’d seen the team rise to multiple challenges, conquering each one and effortlessly moving on. She believed that together they might be able to pull off the job without losing a drop of sweat and that, with a little luck, she’d be home in time for Christmas with Emily. But the question that ate at her was whether she was confident enough in her crew, in Ross, and in herself to risk her entire future with her daughter, not to mention her life?

  She leaned back against her seat and exhaled. In war it was so much easier, she thought. You didn’t have time to weigh the options. You just reacted and trusted in your training and instincts. “Move from your hara,” her drill sergeant used to say back in basic. The Chinese called it the dantian, but in Japan it was the hara, your lower abdomen and a center of tremendous energy and qi. The idea was that all movement, whether physical or emotional, should be focused on that area. If you focused your energy on your hara, it was almost impossible to be knocked down. The same was true when it came to making decisions. “Listen to the energy coming from the hara,” he would say. “Whatever it is telling you is always correct.” The idea existed in many cultures, from China to Japan to the kath of the Sufi. But in the end, it all came down to the same thing: gut instinct. In the Last Campaign, Caitlin had always trusted her instincts to see her through. But now she didn’t know.

  When Caitlin got back home, she was shocked when Ava informed her that she had fifteen missed transmissions, all from Ben.

  Emily.

  She raced across the room, her legs watery and unresponsive, and told Ava to contact Ben. After what felt like hours, his bleary, panicked face finally filled the screen.

  “Ben?” Caitlin asked. “What is it? What—”

  “He finally did it,” Ben said. “He finally screwed everything up.”

  “Who?” she asked, wanting to choke him for being so cryptic. “Who screwed what up?”

  “Eric,” he said. “He’s been arrested.”

  Caitlin’s stomach felt like it had just collided with an angry fist. “How?”

  “Apparently he was tryin
g to move trank across the border,” he said. “Drug deal gone bad. Patrol nailed him near Los Ebanos.”

  Goddammit, Eric. Caitlin felt the anger surge.

  “Which side of the fence?” she asked, trying to figure out the best-case scenario. He was screwed either way, but if he was still in Mexico, chances are he’d never come back.

  Ben shook his head. “They’ve got him in Tamaulipas, for processing,” he said. “Who knows when—”

  “Emily?” Caitlin asked. She really didn’t give a shit what they did with Eric.

  “I’ve got her,” Ben said. “Thank God she called me when she did. Eric left sometime last evening and never came back. She was all alone in that apartment, Cait.”

  Caitlin closed her eyes. That son of a bitch. Ben looked at her through the screen, his expression serious.

  “Cait,” he said, “I’ve got her for now. But you and I both know I can’t keep her for long. Not the way things work these days. Both your parents and Eric’s parents are gone. That means she’s going to be systemized.”

  Caitlin’s heart began to pound and the room swam as she processed the word. Systemized. As painful as it was to process, she knew Ben was right. With no next of kin, Emily would go into the system, which meant that, unless Caitlin got to her first, she would be subjected to standardized housing in the foster block until she was eighteen and then jettisoned out into the world without a second glance. There was a time when kids could go through the system and come out healthy, well-adjusted members of society. Now, however, with exponential population growth straining an already-overcrowded Earth, the system was little more than a conveyor belt, with lost and confused kids going in on one end and ghosts coming out on the other.

  “What if I transmit authorization to name you her temporary legal guardian?”

  “Yeah, we can do that,” said Ben. “She’ll have to stay on Earth until this is sorted out, which means her trip to see you is off. But, more importantly, it’ll still only buy you thirty days. With my vet status, I can maybe stretch that to forty-five.”