Read The Diamond Moon for Free Online

Everything made in this line in the last decade has built-in power supply.”
     
“You want it or not?”
     
“With power supply.”
     
“No problem. You pay five hundred IA credits extra.”
     
“Would that be new? Or ‘like new’?”
     
“Guaranteed like new.”
     
Blake translated the figure into dollars. “For that much I can buy new off the shelf in the Mainbelt.”
     
“You want to wait three months? Pay freight?”
     
Blake let the rhetorical question pass unanswered. “How do I know this thing isn’t going to break down as soon as we get it to Amalthea?”
     
“Like I say, guaranteed.”
     
“Meaning what?”
     
“We send someone to fix. Free labor.”
     
Blake seemed to consider that a moment. Then he said, “Let’s take it for a test drive.”
     
Lim looked pained. “Maybe too much to do this week.”
     
“Right now. We’ll add some space to your work area here.” “Not possible.”
    “Sure it is. I’ll borrow the power supply and commlink from that crawler”—he indicated the machine parts scattered on the floor—“since nobody’s going to need them for a while.” Blake picked his away among the scattered parts in the corner; he hefted one of the massive but lightweight units, jumped onto the trailer, lifted a cowl, and wrestled it into place.
    The women, who hadn’t really been concentrating on their work, now watched Blake openly— meanwhile trying to remain impassive, with cautious and uncertain glances at Lim. Reluctantly, as if he were playing without enthusiasm a role that required him to come up with some protest, however feeble, Lim said, “You can’t just do what you want with our . . . this equipment.”
    Blake ignored him. He took a pair of heavy rubber-insulated cables from a spring-loaded spool on the wall and shoved their flat, copper-sheathed heads into a receptacle in the rear of the mole; he locked them in place. Then he slipped into the mole’s cockpit and spent a moment fiddling with the controls. With a whine of heavy motors, the machine came to life, its red warning beacon whirling and flashing. The warning horn hooted repeatedly as it backed off the trailer on its clattering cleats. Blake pushed the levers ahead and the mole moved toward a blank spot in the wall of ice.
Lim watched all this as if stupefied, before shaking himself to action. “Hey! Wait a minute!”
    “Climb on, if you’re coming!” Blake shouted, slowing the machine’s wall-ward progress long enough for Lim to scramble up the side of the machine and sling himself into the open cockpit. The door sealed itself behind him; Blake checked the dashboard to see that the little compartment was sealed and pressurized. Then he shoved the potentiometers forward again, all the way to the stops.
    Transformers sang; the giant bits on the mole’s nose spun in a blur of counter-rotating blades. Blake drove the machine squarely into the ice, and there was a sudden screech and rumble; ice chips exploded in an opaque bliz-zard outside the cockpit’s cylindrical polyglas window.
    Inside the machine, the air was rank with ozone. False color displays on the dashboard showed a threedimensional map of the machine’s position, built from stored data and updated with feedback from the seismic vibrations gener-ated by the whirling bit. The void in the ice they were en-larging was at the edge of the settlement, only twenty meters below the mean surface, and adjacent to the space-port. The dashboard map displayed the region of ice beneath the port in bright red, with a legend in bold letters: RE-STRICTED AREA.
    The machine moved ahead, shuddering and plunging toward the red barrier at top speed—which for the old machine was a respectable three kilometers per hour. Unseen by the riders, a river of melted ice flowed out the rear of the machine and through the tunnel behind them, to pour down the drain.
“Watch where you go.” Lim’s accent showed signs of slipping. “Cross that barrier, the Space