* * *

A hot, tropical sun beat down on brilliant, white sand. Salt spray swirled along the waterline as a warm, murmuring breeze drifted in from the vastness of the South Pacific Ocean. The sounds of children’s laughter drifted up from the water's edge, mixed with the raucous skirl of seagulls.

Joe Falcon half-opened his eyes. A young woman clad in a brief, suggestive, white bikini strolled across the beach towards him.

A glance in his direction.

A warm, friendly smile.

Helen, his beautiful wife of just a week, with her soft, gentle voice and the look of an angel.

A week? It seemed like a day.

He watched her approach. Life was satisfying, becoming better by the minute.

A split-second blink.

When his eyes opened again she was gone, the sand where she walked smooth and undisturbed. From somewhere nearby the rat-tat-tat, staccato rattle of an automatic weapon shattered the harmony, followed by the shrill, piercing whine of a siren.

Something smashed hard onto his head.

“What the f…?”

Joe’s forehead struck the solid, unforgiving bulkhead of the captain’s cabin. Weightless, he struggled to regain equilibrium, his eyes blind in the pitch dark, ears ringing to the noise of the ship's breach alarm. He reached out wildly in the darkness, one hand falling on the latch of the bathroom door.

Seconds earlier, he’d been reclining in the hot Australian sun, luxuriating in the soothing, caressing breeze of a time long gone but still cherished; a moment of bliss, a hard bang and a rude awakening.

The beach dimmed in memory as, with eyelids squeezed tight, Joe battled to silence the persistent gremlin breaking rocks behind his temples. Every few seconds a sharp, machinegun rattle echoed through the structure around him.

Something was not right.

The dim emergency lights flickered on and Joe's brain tumbled back to reality. The faint, ever-present vibration was absent, the accommodation wheel motionless. When rotation ceased Joe's body had continued, inertia launching him from his bunk. Deprived of the small but crucial centrifugal gravity he had drifted without waking across the tiny room and into the opposite wall.

With a gentle push against the bathroom door, he floated across to the crisis locker and his emergency suit, and then dragged the stiff fabric over his limbs as best possible in the zero-g.

Satisfied at last—he had not done this for a long time—he clipped the bubble helmet to his belt, planted his feet on the near wall and tapped the com-patch.

“Sarah? What in God's name…?”

“Meteor shower, Boss.” The voice belonged not to his first officer but to Terry Caldwell, the second engineer. “We bin hit! Micro-m’s”

“You're joking, right?”

“Wouldn’t do that, Boss.”

Joe whistled through his teeth. The source of gunfire in his dream now made sense; the irregular pings sounding through the toughened alloy structure of the ship were minute, sand-grain-sized meteoroids hitting the outside of the accommodation wheels.

Chances of being in the path of a meteoroid swarm were billions to one, a once in a lifetime event if at all. Unlikely, Joe thought, to happen again before he died.

“What's our status?”

“Not too bad, Boss. Sizes less than two millimeters, mostly. We got maybe three hundred hits overall but the old girl can handle it. Only a few bad ones: three on the reactor module, four on fusion-drive two, three more on the tanks, and six on the spine. No damage to the crew areas.”

“The accommodation wheels aren't turning. What happened to the power?”

“We lost the feed from the reactor,” Terry replied. “I got us on backup now.”

“Good man. Engines?”

“Unit two's got a few hits. It can be repaired, I reckon, but we might need a dock.”

“Anyone outside?”

“Yeah. The guys are out on the rock, 'round the back. They should be safe. External links are down, so Sarah's going out after them. She's in the lock now.”

Joe grunted acknowledgment. The vessel was tethered to the surface of an irregularly shaped asteroid approximately three hundred meters across, the latest target in their never-ending treasure hunt through the Asteroid Belt. The 'guys', Carl Geddes and Peter Stanley, had been out taking core samples and soundings for analysis in the lab.

A rock like this was not generally worth the effort but Carl had requested more time to check it over, muttering something about it being part of a planetary body, probably Mars, which somehow ended up here in the Belt. Unlike the typical metallic or carbonaceous asteroids in the area, this one was igneous rock.

Chunks of Mars thrown off by meteor impact often turned up on Earth, but how such a massive piece found its way out here Joe could not imagine—hardly surprising since it was not his field. He was Navy or had been once.

“Are you alright, Sarah?”

“Yes, Captain,” the voice of his first officer replied over the intercom. “Almost ready to go out now.”

“Sounds like the shower's over.”

“I wouldn't be going otherwise. Oh, hang on, I may not need to. The boys are coming around the rock now.”

Joe smiled—his first officer was younger than every one of the ‘boys’ on the ship by several years. “Good. Be careful. Terry, I'm on my way up. Are all the crew in suits?”

“You bet, Boss.”

Joe berated himself for leaving his com-patch off, stared at it for a moment, tapped it off again and then pulled himself through the doorway into the corridor.

Dim emergency lights illuminated the interior of accommodation wheel number one, throwing dark, surrealistic shadows on the curved walls. Near-silence haunted the motionless structure, the constant drone of the ventilation replaced by an almost indiscernible shush from the backup system.

Joe's nose wrinkled at the faint, ‘canned’ odor of the air. It felt cold. He shivered and then decided it was his imagination. The temperature was normal but the cool, bluish, secondary lights cast an unnatural pall that fooled the senses.

Opposite the door, a window looked toward the bridge and forward docking module. All was motionless beyond the polycarbonate pane, confirming the lack of wheel rotation. Joe launched himself at the exit ladder and floated up to the central spine, ignoring the rungs. Without gravity, they were superfluous.

An open hatch in the hub led up to the corridor within the spine of the ship. Joe glanced aft; a few meters away another rotating sleeve, also motionless, marked the ship's secondary wheel. The cargo-zone access hatch beyond was shut. Joe guessed Sarah had secured it on her way to the service bays.

Nothing else appeared compromised other than the lights, suggesting damage was limited to the electrics, tanks and engine. A lucky escape; the situation could have been far worse.

As Joe entered the bridge Terry turned, his battered, scar-covered face showing obvious concern. That face always intrigued Joe. At some point in the past, it had undergone considerable involuntary re-arrangement. Joe did not ask; it was not his business. That’s how it was in the Belt.

“Any hull breaches?”

“The engine module, tanks and upper work bays,” Terry replied. “The shower hit mostly aft of the wheels. Bit of luck, hey Boss?”

“Engineering?”

“We lost … oh, hang on … got a faint pressure drop in wheel two.” Terry peered briefly at a read-out above his head. “A pinhole breach—easy fixed.”

“Fine. Engineering?”

“Oh, right. One engine out. Reactor’s okay. One of the bigger buggers tore straight through the casing on the primary power loom forward of the radiation shield. A broken piece of the case must’ve taken out the power cables. Mari and Sam are getting ready to go now.”

Joe nodded. Marius Pine and Sam Bright, the ship's chief and electrical engineers, would sort the mess soon enough. Joe took a great deal of pride in Butterball's crew. They did their jobs expertly, neither needing nor expecting orders. Joe pulled himself into the command chair.

The mineral prospecting ship Butterball began life as a long-haul supply freighter built for the Earth to Mars cargo run before the Resources War. Little more than a long, spinal gantry connecting the bridge and docking module to the aft engineering units, she resembled a giant stick insect in space. The backbone contained an access corridor and formed the conduit through which ran high-voltage lines delivering electricity from the reactor to all other parts of the ship. Those cables now lay in shreds.

The view on the command screen currently looked aft towards the radiation shadow shield. Behind the bridge module, two counter-rotating habitat wheels contained the living and working quarters for the crew. With the loss of power, the vessel now functioned on batteries alone, and the rotation of both wheels had stopped.

Further aft, removable work and cargo flats sat around the spine. From there, the business of mineral surveying and prospecting took place. In the bottom, forward work bay Marius and Sam were getting ready to begin emergency repairs.

Long streamers of liquid spewed into space from two of the many tanks lining either side of the gantry between the upper and lower flats, diffusing into rainbow clouds of crystallized, frozen vapor. Butterball's lifeblood boiled away in a cloud of glittering diamonds.

“Xenon numbers three and seven,” Terry confirmed. “There's still enough to get home once we carry out repairs, but only just. We still got one fusion engine, so we should be solid, Boss.”

Joe's heart sank. The ship's main engine was a xenon-ion drive that provided low but constant thrust and used little fuel. This allowed her to accelerate at a slow, steady rate, ideal for her original intended purpose of freighting between Earth and Mars but useless for working the asteroids.

Above and below the primary engine were twin deuterium-tritium fusion boosters, fitted during the refit for faster maneuvering near targets in the Belt. One was now out of action, so Butterball would have to rely more on the ion drive, making close-quarters work more difficult.

Joe cringed as the proximity alarm let out a loud, chilling wail.

Something unseen slammed into the still functional number-one booster. At enormous velocity, the baseball-sized meteoroid punched through the unit, reducing it to a twisted mass of scrap metal as the impact wrenched it from its mountings. Alarms screeched as the ship automatically cut the wrecked unit off from the reactor.

Joe slumped back into his seat, took a deep breath and waited for his heart to stop pounding. If the rock had struck a meter or two lower, it would have hit the ion drive. A few meters further forward and it would have taken out the reactor and killed them all.

It was a frighteningly close call.

“Shit,” he murmured. “Trip's over.”