A short distance away a snapper-boat
was lashed to the landing boat. O'Brine had left it, with a word of
warning.
"These Connies are plenty smart. I don't like leaving you unprotected,
even within reach of Mercury and Terra, but orders are orders. Keep the
snapper-boat, and you'll at least be able to put up a fight if you bump
into trouble."
The asteroid sped on its lonely way for two days, and then a cruiser came
out of space, its nuclear drive glowing. The Planeteers manned the rocket
launcher, and Rip and Santos stood by the snapper-boat, just in case, but
the cruiser was the _Sagittarius_, out of Mercury.
Capt. Go Sian-tek, a Chinese Planeteer officer, arrived in one of the
cruiser's boats with three enlisted men.
Captain Go greeted Rip and his men, then handed over a plastic stylus
plate ordering Rip to deliver six cubic meters of thorium for use on
Mercury. While Koa supervised the cutting of the block, Rip and the
captain chatted.
The Mercurian Planeteer base was in the twilight zone, but the Planeteers
always worked on the sun side, wearing special alloy suits to mine the
precious nuclite that only the hot planet provided.
At some time during its first years, Mercury had been so close to the
sun that its temperature was driven high enough to permit a subatomic
thermonuclear reaction.
Pages:
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165