The Holdin' Aces was pulling two gees in a hard retro burn, and Asa Greene was doing the driving. Holden Burke just watched for warning lights and begged the universe for a lucky break. The universe was stingy with luck, though, especially for asteroid miners. Their last two trips had barely broken even. This was Holden's last chance.

"Damn!" Asa, Holden's business partner, flipped through displays on the navigation system. The screens flicked by too quickly for Holden to follow.

"What is it? Another ship? Out here? Asa, you swore no one would be working this rock."

"Huh? No, no ships. Damn!"

"Not a bug." Holden punched up a radar display on his own console. "Please tell me it's not a bug." A bug on their jackpot-to-be would be bad. Game over. They'd just have to pack it in and go home broke.

No one really knew where the first bug had come from. The best guess was that it had originated somewhere near Lambda Scorpii – the scorpion's tail. It had ridden into the Solar System a little over a decade before on the end of a half-kilometre-long stream of high-speed ions and made its home on Ceres. From raw materials mined on the asteroid, it had built more bugs. Now there were hundreds of the bootstrap bots jetting around the belt. They chewed up asteroids and ferried the juicy bits back to Ceres to feed a massive construction project.

The scientists studying the Ceres Gate were convinced it was some kind of matter receiver, large enough for ships to pass through. They haggled over terms like wormholes and hyperdimensional translation, but the gist of it was clear. Humanity's first contact with an alien race was imminent.

The Regional Authority of Mars (RAM), with the full backing of both the U.N. and the Lunar Republic, had declared the bugs off limits. They couldn't risk a careless act turning the arrival into a disaster.

Teams of researchers followed some of the bugs around. They snapped pictures and made guesses, but all from a distance. Interfering with the visitors was the only capital offence in the RAM legal code. Even joking about it could get a pilot's ticket pulled and the ship impounded.

"No, it's not a bug," Asa said. "I'm off a couple of points on the orbit match. We need to burn some juice on a correction. I told you I thought the grapple let go too early on that last swing."

Holden sighed. "A couple of points? You use 'damn' for a couple of points? That's a 'shoot,' or a 'rats,' at most. You say 'damn' and I get a flipping heart attack!"

"Sorry." Asa shut the drive down and they slammed forward against their restraints. "I think you're wound a little tight, personally."

Holden felt the Aces roll and twist under Asa's guidance. "You don't have my bughh–." The main drive kicked in again. "My bills. You know, a little warning might be nice."

"Oopsy." He grinned at Holden. "Come on. You got a two-bedroom spread on the half-gee ring with a Mars view. Of course you got bills. Me? I got a six-foot sleeper pod up near the hub. No worries."

"I am not raising my daughter in a coffin!" In truth, Holden wasn't sure that six-year-old Jasmine Burke could be contained in such a small space. She was too bright, too energetic, too full of life.

"I'm just saying. You know, a small place up on quarter-gee. Inside corridor. Plenty of room for the three of you. It'd save a lot."

"Why not the welfare dome down on Mars? Huh? That's cheap."

"Nah. You'd spend all your money lifting back to orbit for the mining runs. Drive going off." Holden braced himself for the jolt and Asa shut down the drive. If it came to that, lifting back to orbit wouldn't matter. Holden was three months behind on his payments on the Aces, and Sheila's salary barely stayed ahead of food and air rights for the three of them. He had an inbox full of bills and he was running out of ways to juggle them.

"You don't get it, do you? Asa, if this trip doesn't pay out, I'm done. No more gambles. No more trips. Nothing."

Asa busied himself with the controls. There was nothing in his expression. He didn't smile. He barely blinked. With Asa, that was usually a bad sign.

"Asa, look. It's not personal."

Asa twitched the attitude thrusters a few times. His face was still blank. They'd been partners a long time and friends even longer. Maybe it was hitting him harder than Holden thought.

"Asa?"

A smile grew on Asa's face, then burst into his usual grin. He slapped the controls and all the screens lit up with the view from the forward cameras. "So maybe you should go hook this pebble up and start cashing us in."

They were hanging, nose in, over the asteroid's surface. More than a kilometre long and nearly as wide, the slow-rolling rock had a pockmarked surface of dull, metallic grey. "Beautiful!" Holden tapped up the mineralogy controls and started scanning. He fired the magnetic grapple. It reported a solid grip, and Holden winched them in while Asa levelled the ship and kept up with the asteroid's roll.

"Didn't I tell you?" Asa held up his hands in victory when they were clamped to the surface. "Magnetometer. Spectrometer. Everything looks good."

"You called it, Ace."

"And we have it all to ourselves. Nobody else is stupid enough to hunt this far out."

Holden smiled. "That's us. The dumbest guys in the business." He snapped his harness open and pushed off. Floating above his seat, he stretched the kinks out of his muscles. After the long burn, the return to freefall felt good.

"No more trips." Asa pulled himself over the back of his seat and sailed toward the crew cabin. "You keep talking like that and you'll be holed up with the Scorpion Cult in no time."

"It's got nothing to do with the bugmakers." Holden followed him through the hatch. "Anyway, piling up guns and preaching about an alien Armageddon really isn't my style."

Asa was already slipping into his pressure suit. "Mine either. I'm more of a 'Let me be the first to welcome our new robot bug-making Overlords' kind of guy. I get along with everybody."

"Except Jenkins."

"Now that's not fair. I get along with him fine." He sucked his teeth and shrugged. "I just don't like getting along with him. Not since he joined HUDFOR."

Holden checked the seals on Asa's suit. "He can be a little annoying."

"A little? The guy can't go two sentences without explaining how the Human Defence Force is the greatest thing to happen to people since the opposable thumb. You know where they've got their thumbs stuck, don't you? You ask me, they're gonna blow themselves up with those nukes long before anything comes through that gate thingy."

Holden took his suit from the cabinet. It was old and worn. Patches marked the places where the wear had become dangerous. Three trips back, Sheila made him promise to replace it, but suits were expensive. He'd used the money to buy himself a few more months with his ship, instead.

"It's just in case things go wrong, Asa." He stepped into his suit and adjusted the legs. "The future's a scary place."

"Always has been. You know, there's a reason we're born head first."

"I know." He'd heard it before.

"We're wired to look ahead."

"Yeah, I know. And we've only got two legs..."

"...so we don't get too comfortable standing in one place." Asa took his helmet off the rack. "So let's get moving." He dropped the helmet over his head and snapped it into place.

The surface held enough iron in the mix to give their magboots a decent grip. The asteroid was a chondrite with plenty of tasty oxides, better than they could have hoped for. Those were the key. That's where the platinum group metals were bound up. If the entire asteroid turned out to be as rich as the core samples, they could spend the next ten years just mining this one rock.

Holden set up the work lights and prepped the drill at a platinum-rich site. Asa was back on board the Aces, warming up the ore processor.

"I've got it," Asa's voice came over the radio. "We'll call it 'Asa Diamonds.' How's that?"

"Corny." Holden set the drill for an angle cut and draped electrostatic netting around the base. The tiny bit of gravity the asteroid provided wouldn't keep dust from flying off into space and Holden refused to waste even the tiniest scrap. "Besides, I was thinking of 'Jasmine's Hope.'"

"Oh, come on. There're a million rocks out here you can name for your kid. Heck, another ten years and she'll be out here staking her own."

"No way."

"Yeah, you're right. In ten years the bugmakers will probably be here and we'll all be slaves. Or dead. Or maybe dead slaves. It all seems kind of pointless when you think about it."

Holden backed the drill bit out and moved the drill for the next cut. "Jazz is not going to be a rock rat. Her math-ap tests were in high orbit. She'll be in engineering or something."

"What if she wants to be a rock rat?"

"Then I'll change her mind."

"Smooth. You know – damn!"

Holden shut the drill down and waited, but Asa stayed silent. "Asa? Ace?"

"One sec. Damn!"

"Is that a real 'damn' or one of your overblown 'rats' damns?"

"I think we've got company."

"You think."

"I mean someone's matching orbit with us, but I don't know who. You tell me. Is that a real 'damn' or what?"

There were stories. Every time a ship went dark the rumours flew. It didn't matter that there were a million stupid things you could do to get yourself killed out in the belt. People needed a bogey-man. The tales used to be about claim jumpers and pirates, but lately they were all about the bugs. The robots and their mysterious project on Ceres were like a shadow that darkened everything. Knowing that all human history was likely to change some time in the next few decades seemed to make everyone a little crazy.

Holden set the drill for the next cut. "How long?"

"Nav is guesstimating six hours."

"Then get your butt out here and help. We'll cut until whoever it is gets here. Then we'll see.

We were here first."

"Let's hope that matters to them."

"And I don't mind sharing. Plenty to go around."

"What if they don't feel the same way?"

"Then we play whatever hand we're dealt."

There was resignation in Asa's voice. "Ten million rocks out here and these idiots have to come for ours."

"And Ace?" Holden tried to sound casual, but wasn't sure he pulled it off.

"Maybe you should bring the plasma torch."

They cut as fast as they could without being reckless. Concentrating on high-yield clumps of oxides, they ignored spots that ordinarily they'd have milked for every last gram. They didn't even bother with the netting. Clouds of dust lingered around them. The refinery was running at the red line.

With an hour left, Holden pulled another platinum ingot out of the refinery and added it to the stack in the cargo hold. It looked to him like they were near break-even. Exhausted, he headed out for another cut.

"Damn!"

Holden stopped in the hatchway. "Will you stop already with the 'damns'?"

"This one's for real, Holden. Like damn-plus."

"What is it?"

"I've got an optical on our guest. It's a bug."

Holden rolled his eyes starward and wondered why the universe hated him.
He stifled a sob and pushed himself back out to the asteroid's surface.

"Did you hear me? We gotta go, buddy."

Holden trudged back to the dig site, feeling the resistance from his magboots. "It's not here yet." He angled the drill under a ledge left from his last cut.

"We should be packing."

He fired up the drill. "I'm not folding until I have to." Holden kept cutting. He chewed out two more chunks of oxide-bearing iron. Asa came and went, gathering lights and tools and hauling them back to the Aces. Somewhere along the line he'd given up talking. Holden noticed that the ore disappeared, though. Asa wasn't leaving money on the table.

"It's time." Asa waved a hand in front of Holden's faceplate and pointed.

Holden turned around just as the bug settled to the surface less than fifty metres away.

"Why?"

Asa lifted his hands, palms up. It was a shrug, pressure suit style. "Luck of the draw."

"No, I mean why here?" He stepped toward the bug. "It's a big rock. It could have set down a kilometre away. Or on the other side. Why here?"

Asa grabbed Holden's arm, pulling gently. "The better to eat us. How the hell should I know? I just know we need to leave. According to the law, we should already be gone. If anyone finds out, we're toast."

"Do you see anyone else? Was there anything on radar?" He turned to face his partner. Their helmets were nearly touching. "Ace, if I leave now, it's my last trip. I lose the Aces. I lose my home. I'll end up shuffling through Mars dust and popping rivets for a living. Sheila and Jazz … "

"They love you, buddy. They'd love you even if you ate slime and crapped frogs."

"I can't lose this, Asa. I can't lose Jazz's future."

"Holden, you can't – oh, damn!"

He didn't have to ask. Asa's eyes and the tone of his voice said it all. This was a real 'damn.' Holden turned to find the bug standing just a few metres away.

He'd seen the images published by the science teams, but they were flat little representations that flashed on a datapad, no more threatening than an image of a lion or a supernova. Seeing nearly three metres of multi-jointed legs and squat metal body towering in front of him, he wondered if a lion or a supernova might not be preferable.

The bugs actually came in two pieces. One was the forty-metre drum that held the thing's thrusters and cargo hold. That part still rested in the distance. The other part, the part that had earned them their nickname, the part that had snuck up on Holden and Asa, had a dozen legs mounted around a thick, diamond-shaped torso. The legs had manipulator fingers on the ends and each carried a variety of cutting, boring, and grinding gadgets.

On the front of the torso was a ball on a short stalk. It was ringed with what seemed to be a random scattering of antennae, optics, and – things.

Holden realised the bug wasn't watching them at all. It was examining the scar on the surface where he'd cut out a couple of chunks of ore. One front leg extended to the hole and a grinding wheel rotated into place. Holden watched, fascinated, as the manipulator dug at the asteroid. It swept through the dust and lifted it up to the machine's head. It looked like it was tasting it. The taste must have been right, because the leg came back down and the bright flare of a plasma torch bit into the rock.

That was just too much for Holden. Not only was this thing going to take his rock, it was going to waste half of it by vaporising it with a torch! "Stop it!" He took two strides forward, dangerously close to the torch.

The bug finally seemed to notice him. The torch went dark. Its head tilted up and spun from sensor to sensor, apparently imaging him in a variety of modes. Finally, it looked down and went back to its torch work.

"What the hell are you doing?" Asa sounded frightened.

"I'm going all in." Holden took another step and slapped the side of the leg that carried the torch. He yelled, trying to pummel the bug with all twelve of his suit radio's milliwatts. "Stop that right now!"

The torch shut off again and the bug reared back slightly. Its head tilted up and spun, stopping with a triangle of lenses trained on Holden.

"This is insane," Asa whispered.

"That's all I have left." Holden squatted down. He slapped his palm against the asteroid. "This rock is mine!" He tapped himself on the chest.

"Holden."

"Shut up, Asa."

"Holden!"

"I'm not leaving!"

The torch didn't move, but the other front leg swept forward. It tapped the ground at Holden's feet then its own body, between where the two front legs were mounted.

Asa's voice was barely a whisper. "Oh. My. God."

"No!" Holden said. "Mine!" He tapped his chest again. The robot's leg moved again. Holden gasped as it came straight at him this time. The manipulator fingers folded into a point. Just centimetres away, it stopped, then gently tapped his chest twice. He wanted to run or scream or beg, anything, but he felt paralysed. The manipulator moved up, hovering in front of his face. It tapped on the faceplate of his helmet. The tiny 'tick tick' was lost in the thunder of his own heartbeat.

"Human." Holden grasped the light mounted on the side of his helmet. He gave it a twist and detached it. Nearly blinding himself, he shone it into his helmet. "See? Organic. Creature. Human." He made faces, silly, stupid faces; as if it would somehow prove he was organic. What machine would be designed to act like an idiot?

"Mewwwwwmawwww."

"It's okay, Asa. I don't think it's going to hurt me."

"That wasn't me."

"Mewwwwmawwww."

Holden backed up a step. He shook his head. The rest of him was already shaking. "It's trying to use the radio."

"It talks? No one ever said they talk."

"No one's tried."

"That's because they'll space you for even joking about it!"

Holden pulled his datapad off his belt. He punched up his personal photos
and settled on one of him with Sheila and Jazz. It showed them in a freefall hug, tangled and laughing. It had been taken at the Bounce Park at Ares Station's hub.

He held the pad up in front of the bug, trying to get it in front of the lenses. "See? That's me and my wife, Sheila, and our daughter Jasmine. See?"

"Holden, they may not even have sexes."

"See? Jasmine. Really, we call her Jazz, because ... well, she's like jazz, really. She's barely-controlled chaos, all counterpoint and surprise. She makes you think something's coming and then it does, but it's not what you expect. It's something better, sharper, you know? And afterwards you think 'Well, of course.'"

"Holden."

"You see it's Jazz's rock, really. I need it for her."

"Holden, come on. You're losing it."

"I need this rock!"

Asa was beside him, pulling his arm. "Come on, buddy. We've got to go."

"Jjjjjaaaazhzhzhzhz begawwwwwwz."

Asa turned and both men stared at the bug. Again, the front leg tapped the surface of the asteroid and then its own body. "Jjjjjaaaazhzhzhzh begawwwwwz."

Holden's brief hope dimmed when the bug's torch flared.

"That's it," Asa said. "The wildcard wins. We go."

They turned away. Defeated, Holden started breaking down the drill while Asa grabbed the few loose tools that were still scattered around the site.

"We'll find a way, Holden. Maybe I can twitch our orbit, hit another rock on the way home."

"We don't have the fuel. You know we don't."

"Well, look. You said it yourself, it's a big rock. Let's just put some distance between us. Move to the other side. Anyone catches us, we just act like we didn't know it was here. I mean, it's not like the thing comes by and introduces itself, right?"

Holden lifted the drill's motor housing. "Thanks, but I can't ask that. I've put you at enough risk as it is."

"Hey. You're the first human being to talk to an alien. How could I miss that?"

"Yeah." Holden tried to force a laugh. "Well, it's not really an alien, you know. It's just a robotic appliance."

"So you're the first person to talk to an alien's refrigerator. That's still pretty strong."

This time his laugh bubbled out on its own. "I'll put that on my resume. Human Ambassador to Kitchen Gadgets."

"There you go."

"Jjjjaaazhzhzhzh begawwwwwwz."

"What now?" Holden looked back at the bug. Twice, it repeated the motion of tapping the asteroid and then its body. It scuttled backward, turned, and walked back to its drive unit. It lifted itself to its full height and attached itself to the front of the stubby cylinder. The legs folded up and flattened themselves against the bug's sides.

The two men watched as the whole assembly lifted on tiny thrusters. It spent ten minutes drifting clear of the asteroid before the bright, blue-white spear of its main drive lit up.

"What the hell?" Asa walked over to the spot where they'd left the bug.

Holden set the drill down. He felt drained, too exhausted to enjoy the hope he was beginning to feel.

"Hey, Holden?"

"Yeah."

"You need to see this, buddy."

"What is it?"

"What'd I just say? You need to see it."

Holden trudged over to find a metre-wide rectangle cut into the surface. Inside it, intricate lines and swirls were etched into the flat surface.

"What's this, some kind of warning?"

Asa laughed. "Stand on this side."

Holden stepped across it. From Asa's side it became clear. It was a perfect reproduction of the family photo he'd shown the bug.

"'Jasmine's Hope' it is," Asa said. "Who am I to argue with a bug? That's apparently your job."

Holden got down on his hands and knees. He traced the lines with his finger. "We're OK."

"We're more than OK. We're profitable."

"No, I mean all of us."

"Oh, come on." Asa squatted down next to him. "You don't really think it understood, do you? It was just mimicking."

"It could have killed me. Worse, it could have ignored me. Wouldn't mimicking be the first step toward communication?"

"Maybe. But it's still nothing more than an automated bulldozer."

"I know." Holden looked up to where the bug was just beginning to show motion against the curtain of stars. "But they designed it to drive around the anthills, didn't they?"

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