Read The Diamond Moon for Free Online Page A

Board impounds us.”
     
“I’ll turn here, take the long way back. Let’s see how it holds together after an hour or so.”
     
“Must go back now .”
    Blake pulled back on one of the potentiometer levers and the machine skewed, skittering and squirming like a hand drill with a dull bit. “Thing bucks like a wild horse—kind of hard to steer. Say, you smell something hot?”
“Don’t turn so hard,” Lim said in alarm. “Not good to abuse fine equipment.”
     
A panel light on the dashboard began to glow, dull yel-low at first, then bright orange.
     
“Looks like we’re overloading something,” Blake ob-served equably.
     
“Go slow, go slow!” Lim shouted. “We’ll be stranded!”
     
“Okay.” Blake straightened the machine and eased off the drilling rate. The overload warning light dimmed. “Tell me about that guarantee again.”
     
“You see yourself, if not abused, machine in very good condition. It breaks, you bring it in and we fix.”
    “No, I’ll tell you what, if it breaks out there on Amalthea we’ll come get your top mechanic. We’ll take that person and whatever parts we need back with us, right then. You pay for everything, including the fuel.” Fuel was gold in the Jupiter system; because of the depth of the giant planet’s gravitational well, the delta-vees between Ganymede and Amalthea were practically the same as between Earth and Venus.
Lim’s nervous expression vanished. He glared at the man beside him, no more than a few centimeters away. “You not stupid, so you must be crazy.”
     
Blake smiled. In fluent Cantonese he said, “Besides an intermittent rectifier, what else did your mechanics find wrong with this bucket?”
     
Lim snorted in surprise.
     
“Answer my questions, Mr. Lim, or you can look for somewhere else to unload this antique.”
    Caught out, Lim looked as if he might just throw a tem-per tantrum and let the deal go. Then, suddenly, his extrav-agant features stretched themselves into a gleeful grin. “Aieeee! You one foxy character, Ledfeared. I lose much face.”
“And you can drop the Number One Son accent. I don’t want to get the idea you’re making fun of me.”
    “Hey, I am my daddy’s number one son. But never mind, I take your point. My people will tell your people whatever you want to know. If anything needs fixing we’ll fix it.” Lim leaned back in his seat, obviously relieved. “But then you sign off. And we forget all this nonsense about guarantees. And rocket fuel.”
“Okay with me,” Blake said.
     
“Take me back to the office. You can write me a check and drive away.”
     
“Throw in the power supply?”
     
Lim sighed mightily. “The white devil is merciless.” But in fact he seemed to be taking pleasure in Blake’s hard-nosed attitude. “Okay, you win. Get us back in one piece, I’ll even take you to lunch.”
     
Late the same evening, Blake returned to the Forster ex-pedition’s secret camp under the ice.
    The rocket nozzles of the ship that would carry them to Amalthea loomed over them, beneath the frozen dome. For-ster had leased the heavy tug for the duration; he couldn’t legally change its registration, but he could call it anything he wanted. He had named it the Michael Ventris after his hero, the Englishman who’d been the co-decipherer of Mi-noan Linear B and who’d tragically been killed at the age of thirtyfour, not long after his philological triumph.
    The uneven icy floor of the exhaust-deflection chamber was less cluttered than it had been a few weeks earlier, when Professor Nagy had paid Professor Forster a visit. By now the cargo needed for the monthlong expedition had been loaded and the clip-on cargo hold secured to the frame of the big tug. The equipment bay still stood open and empty, however. There was room in it for the ice mole and more.
Blake knocked at the door of Forster’s foam hut. “It’s Blake.”
     
“Come in, please.” Forster looked up from the flatscreen he’d been