The Triple A's Check It Out

Prologue

The ice ship glided smoothly along in the blackness of space, hard to see unless you knew where to look for it and only then could it be dimly made out as it blocked the light of any stars behind it. It was not a pretty ship, not sleek and aerodynamic like some are, but then it didn’t need to be, it would never have to enter the atmosphere of a planet and fly through the air. Its mission in life was to push cargo from one part of the Solar System to another, remaining forever in space until the end of its days..., which were nearer than anyone thought.

It was an unmanned ship, pre-programmed for its mission but with a certain amount of computer intelligence built in, to cater for unforeseen events. Basically a large rocket, with a computer brain and lots of navigation and communication equipment. Most of the time the rocket engine was not even on. It was only needed for starting off, mid flight course corrections and slowing down at its destination. The rest of the time the ship just glided along its pre set course.

Its job this time was pushing a large cargo of the most valuable thing in space... water, or in this case ice. The ice had been mined from an asteroid in the asteroid belt. There was a lot of mining in the belt, metals mostly, but ice rich asteroids were few and far between.

Everybody in space wanted water, space stations, rockets, moon bases, the Mars colony... everybody. Not only for the water itself, but also because it could be broken down into Hydrogen for fuel and Oxygen for breathing. It could be lifted up in rockets from the Earth of course, they have tons of the stuff, but to lift all that weight against gravity would be incredibly expensive. Much better to get it from space itself.

So there it was, guiding its precious cargo of ice on its way to Mars, or rather Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, which acts as a kind of clearing station for space traffic in that part of the Solar System. It was just coming out of the asteroid belt, six months away from Mars, when disaster struck.

A large chunk of rock, about the size of a football, smashed into the side of the ship making a gaping hole in one of its fuel tanks. The fuel, which was stored under pressure, came spurting out into space pushing the ship at right angles to its course. This put too much pressure on the connection between the ship and its cargo, and the docking seals gave way. The crippled ship broke away from its cargo and went spinning off into the blackness, leaving the massive cargo module doing slow somersaults in space.

The two men in a small but powerful space tug, which had been following the ship, looked at each other and grinned.

“There, that ought to look like an accident,” said the first man. “If they ever find the ship that is.”

“Nice shooting Jack,” said the second. “If they do find it, it should look just like a small chunk of an asteroid hit it.”

“Right,” said Jack, “now for a bit of space walking to catch that ice. I hope that its docking hatch hasn’t been damaged too much.”

“Nothing we can’t fix. Come on, we should be due a tidy bonus on this one,” replied the other.

They looked at each other again and laughed.