Kurt Binder watched the featureless landscape fall away, as barren as a parking lot.
No irregularities to distract the eye. The asteroid's hills had been leveled years ago to provide reaction mass for the mass driver. His oval shadow lengthened as he approached the tiny world's night side. No enemies in sight. The hardest part was the wait.
   Strapped inside his tiny pod, Kurt checked the status boards. The fusion reactor, gravity detector and electromagnetic shield readouts gleamed steadily. Behind him a fan zoomed. The liquid CFC's he was breathing contained plenty of oxygen. His normal respiration had stopped. Kurt Binder, an example of the Terran Alliance under pressure, was as focused as a machine. His errand was so complex there was no room for reflection.
   "We know you're there," a voice said suddenly. A note of despair, Kurt thought.
   "We're ready for you," the voice went on. "We're not turning back." Kurt didn't move.
   He approached a field of containers filled with processed ore, covered with a film of dust. The steel boxes were stacked inside a chasm.
   From the corner of his eye Kurt saw a dark blur speeding over the container field toward his own shadow. A bright flash, and a shower of tumbling liquid fragments.
   Fortunately, the enemy had only hit the decoy, a balloon shaped like his pod. Kurt watched from inside the disk of dust fragments that orbited Rockall like solid fog.
   Dust particles hit his e-shield like hard rain. From a distance, the flattened cloud looked like Saturn's rings, reaching almost to the surface. Their orbits decayed fast, but the rings were constantly replenished by the mass driver, inefficient at full power. Turbulence in the weaker streams put much of the dirt into unstable orbits, where the particles collided and merged. The edge of the ring slowly faded as Rockall accelerated away. Now it was also being pulled apart by other forces.
   It was Kurt's turn to attack. He had no reputation because he left no survivors. The enemy might have learned something from his flattened nose and the deep cut on his forehead. His stubble covered many scars, not all from training. In a superficial era, he had no use for plastic surgery.
   With brief picosecond bursts, Kurt used the laser scatterometer to scan the horizon. No strange reflections. He had been forced to disable their thrusters.

   Below him the prize approached. Kurt's pod orbited at walking speed forty meters above the mountain-sized world of Rockall. Its barely perceptible surface gravity was reduced an additional third by its four-hour rotation, and by its hollowed interior. Anyone could jump off. It resembled an ordinary Amor-Apollo carbonaceous-chondrite, but Rockall's faint magnetic field, locked in when it had cooled long ago, identified it as something else. Just below the surface was a massive deposit of iron, aluminum, titanium, and more exotic elements. This hundred-billion ton nugget was a remnant of the planet Hephaestus, destroyed by a great collision at the birth of the solar system. In 2012, it had been learned that all the inner planets were fragments from that cataclysm.
   Rockall had originally been claimed by Ultexon enterprises to fuel the Earth-Mars run. Later a mass driver was installed, and ground-up pieces of its regolith were ejected into space. Slowly, the outpost crew began to alter Rockall's orbit. The ultimate destination was high Earth orbit. Its metals would be used to build space stations and luxury goods for the planet below, delighting Ultexon's shareholders.
   Last month everything had suddenly gone to hell. Contact with the small crew was lost, and the mass driver had switched to maximum output. Emergency orders were ignored, but the truth was obvious. Rockall had become an impregnable fortress heading straight for the Free Zone between Earth and Mars. It would provide the newborn democracy with a limitless supply of strategic metals.

Not if Kurt could help it.
   He'd warned his bosses this would happen, not from empathy but from experience. Space mining was harsh. Astronauts were treated like equipment, exploited and discarded as needed. They couldn't quit, since they couldn't return to normal gravity. Years of zero-G had lowered their bone-densities to where they couldn't stand up by themselves. Ultexon wasn't looking particularly hard for a cure.
   Finally, space workers had other options. The Free Zone was a cluster of old space stations kept functioning by ex-astronauts. Only their Superbomb prevented the Alliance from attacking. With metals from Rockall, they could build a fleet of spaceships. The Free Zone would start colonizing the asteroid belt, hopping between small worlds like Polynesian settlers. In a few decades, they might become a serious rival of the Terran Alliance.
   Kurt Binder's job was to prevent that. Officially he worked for Imperial Insurance, which held the twelve-figure Rockall policy, but the Alliance was Kurt's real master.
   It was hard to hide in space. Fortunately the Alliance owned a stealth spacecraft. It wasn't truly invisible, (one invention they wouldn't want to risk) but Kurt's craft was almost perfectly black. Only star occultations revealed its presence, and even those could be masked to an extent. Waste heat was radiated by his laser. The drive was a neutral particle beam. Normally Kurt would have entered quietly, but when he had discovered Rockall's newly installed thrusters, he had no choice but to destroy them, losing the element of surprise.
   "We'll kill ourselves!" the voice shouted. "We'll take you with us."
   Up ahead was the target. Kurt emerged from the dust band and dived straight down, his pod spinning like mad. The last thing he saw was a surreal landscape of canyons and valleys crowding the horizon, not erosion but mining. Much of the planetoid was an abstract sculpture with smooth sandblasted shapes.

   With exquisite precision he vanished in a narrow shaft, the rock wall centimeters from the hull. He never flinched inside his cramped, blue-lighted aquarium, and barely felt the acceleration.
   The tunnel had been blasted minutes before by a smart bomb. With enough practice, anything could seem normal. There was a certain pleasure in seeing simulations become reality, if only because he wouldn't have to repeat them.
   The asteroid was riddled with man-made tunnels and caves, a three-dimensional labyrinth. Nothing attractive about the long, industrial corridors. Only a tiny percentage had been excavated, but it added up to a vast network of dark highways, constantly changing as old ones were filled in. Most were never traveled.
   He felt safe superiority in the darkness, though ambushes waited ahead. Their defenses had a major weakness.
The walls around him rumbled with occasional quakes. He had a 5% chance of perishing in an unanticipated tunnel contraction. Another rumble, and something behind him collapsed. Good, the dust would hide him.
   He couldn't see the ore excavator, but his radar imaged the huge machine. Using his laser, it took only seconds to cut the guide wires holding it in place. He entered the bulky device through the conveyor outlet in the back.
   The internal cavity was filled with crushed rocks of all sizes. When he bumped a titanium blade, the recoil caused another eruption of dust.
   He had no intention of waiting half an hour for the excavator to fall to the core, so he activated his thruster. The exhaust beam exited through the conveyer outlet, and his craft pushed against the blade. There were screeching sounds.
   Slowly the digging machine began to move. Boulders became unsettled, rolling in spooky silence between the grinders and out the back. A thud shook the excavator as it broke through a shield of steel netting.
   Within his cocoon, he felt the impact of particle beams, and saw the reflected neon glow of a laser burning through metal. They couldn't penetrate the thick armor of the excavator. Kurt had several minutes of peace. Everything was swell.
   With an impact that shook all of Rockall, the excavator hit the bottom of the shaft. Debris surged outward as Binder reversed course, and escaped into a side tunnel.
   He was weightless at the center of the world. His beam disturbed years of darkness. Around him Rockall was shaking, but all was quiet here. He couldn't use his main drive, but his electro-shield snared the faint magnetic field lines permeating the core, pulling his pod down a maze of corridors. Kurt never lost his sense of direction, rotating vectors in his head like a gyroscope.
   He saw odd geological patterns in the polished walls, metallic crystals like starfish and flowers. The burnished corridors looked almost organic.

   "We see you," a voice said. "Game over!"
   He looked around. A red octopus crawled around a corner. From its alien head twin shafts of light glared through the suspended dust, illuminating his pod. It approached too fast, too smoothly to be alive. The robot had the most practical shape for its underground environment.
   Kurt activated his thruster and raced down a curving tunnel. The walls passed at increasing speed, but the red monster had no trouble keeping up. Despite the pressure from Binder's exhaust beam, it grew in his rear-view screen like a sinister mask. Its tentacles lashed the walls like whips. For an instant Kurt felt strangely remote, then his mental control reasserted itself. He chose anger.
   Radar showed no obstacles ahead, but he tensed as he passed a sealed hatch.
   Hopefully his passage had swept the corridor clean of all dust. Kurt's life depended on it. He fired an antimatter grain at the octopus robot, a sphere of anti-Neptunium barely visible to the naked eye.
   Apparently there had been some stray molecules after all. For an instant a jagged bolt of lightning marked the vaporized particle's trajectory. Then the octopus detonated with the force of an artillery shell.
   The tunnel became a bright kaleidoscope shaft. If the pod had windows, he would have been blinded. It was driven forward by the blast, bouncing against a wall. His reflexes steadied the pod as debris surged past, blown by a ghostly wind.
   After rounding a final corner, Kurt found himself between two vast walls receding into the darkness in all directions. His ship came to a gentle halt, and he listened.

   From within the rock came a musical thumping. The walls were designed to be pulled apart by mighty tidal forces, preserving the asteroid's general shape, but that wasn't all. Rockall's mass driver was on the other side, virtually impregnable. Bucket-loads of crushed debris were ejected from three different outlets.
Now he would use his secret weapon. Behind ten meters of solid, iron-rich stone was the ceramic superconductor ring.
   His quantum neural interface needed only milliseconds to aim the pod's neutrino gun. Traveling in a straight line at light speed, the neutrinos had no trouble penetrating the rock.
   The unstable particles decayed in nanoseconds. They would quickly heat the superconductor ring from within, and tear it apart, releasing the stored momentum of the superfluid helium circling inside. A fatal chain reaction would disable the asteroid. It was almost as clever as the crew's plan.

   When plotting their trajectory, Rockall's crew had discovered the perfect blackmail. At this very moment, the asteroid was making a close fly-by over the nightside of Mars, staying just outside the calculated Roche limit. The Alliance didn't dare interfere. The mass driver had to keep working at full power, or Rockall would hit the red planet. A collision would be unacceptable. It would freeze out the newly forming artificial atmosphere.
   The next step was even more daring. As they rounded the horizon, the asteroid would be on a direct collision course with Earth.
   Rockall's momentum made it hard to stop. Even blasted into dust, the fragments could do great damage. Earth was in no real danger, but the Alliance didn't want to spend a fortune to deflect Rockall, so they had to negotiate.
   Immediately after flyby, the crew would begin changing their trajectory again. Even at maximum power, the mass driver couldn't hope to balance the mighty attraction of the sun. The asteroid would plunge closer, speeding up.
Only the crew could steer it to safety. Their plan was to follow a strange orbit toward the Free Zone, designed to intersect Earth increasingly far in the future, until they had escaped. Soon enough, the impact point would shift suddenly from five months to two years away, but that didn't matter. The close encounter with Mars had weakened Rockall to such an extent it had developed billions of deep cracks, essentially becoming a loose collection of rubble. If the Alliance attacked, the crew would blow up their small world, and the rubble would follow its deadly path. Once inside the Free Zone, they could circularize their orbit in a few months. Only then could they relax.
   Destroying the superconductor ring would ruin their immediate plans. They also needed it to detonate their Superbomb. Their nuclear reactor was about to lose its cooling system, and experience a catastrophic meltdown. Since Kurt had disabled the attitude thrusters, they would be completely helpless. Hot gas would blast out of the three shafts, providing just enough thrust to miss Mars with an acceptable margin. Because of random course deviations it would also miss Earth. Deimos was the one thing that could stop Rockall, but a collision was impractical to arrange.

   Soon, Kurt's mission would be over. Time for the final report, a solemn occasion. He spoke in code, and the signal went through a chain of microscopic relays left in the tunnels.
   "This is Kurt Binder," he said. "The Death Star is about to blow."
   Then he heard a voice in his earphone, their medical officer. The woman sounded calm. Let's see if this criminal could distract him while he waited for the end.
   "I'm listening," he said, sensors in his vocal chords compensating for the fluid.
   "Think about what you're doing," the medic said. "This is a turning point in history. The Free Zone desperately needs this asteroid. If you take it away, a billion people will never be born!"
   "I'm glad to hear it," Binder responded as he recollimated the neutrino beam. "They would consume resources."
   "Consider the implications," the medic went on, "All your systems, including that neutrino gun, are quantum-controlled by your brain. And your brain has been changed to make it more efficient."
   "That's why I won," Kurt said.
   The medic went on. "You believe nothing I say could change your mind, but only a few of your brain cells need to be changed. Maybe only one! That would take a tiny amount of energy."
   "So what?" Binder asked. This traitor amused him.
   "Quantum phenomena are infinitely strange," the medical officer said. "Sometimes the potential future influences the present. Right now, the choice between two possible futures is being decided inside your brain! The quantum fate of the universe depends on your thoughts, which have been fine-tuned to detect such processes. It's too much for one man to bear. Can you sense all the conflicting possibilities?"
   Kurt Binder tried to reply but stopped. He had a strange insight. He was at the center of the asteroid, and could sense the surrounding matter like a giant lens, with him at the focus. The crew knew the mass of the asteroid to the last gram. They should be able to detect the gravitational distortion he caused.
   He had already forgotten about the proximity of Mars, as his thoughts became less rational.
   Binder felt he was no longer alone. A rising chorus, a maelstrom of voices approached from all directions, or inside him. Millions of potential voices screaming to be born filled his quantum interface like mad feedback. He began screaming. Caught in the grip of panic, only escape mattered.
Under the circumstances, it wasn't surprising he forgot he wasn't wearing a spacesuit until after he'd left his pod.

   Seven space-suited figures emerged from the darkness like a formation of statues. Carrying every weapon they had, they watched their defeated enemy from a safe distance. Of different races and ages, they all had the same expression.
   Frozen drops of blood hovered in startling 3D. The neutrino beam had strayed off course the moment Binder panicked, and it was now aimed harmlessly into the other wall. His pod was so black it was hard to find among the shadows.
   "What happened?" the engineer asked. "He could have won. Was he affected by radiation from the antimatter explosion?"
   "No," the medical officer said. She was as exhausted as everyone in the crew. The past weeks had been excessive. Cut loose from everything, they were a wild tribe. They really looked like pioneers now.
   "Even gamma rays take longer to affect vital systems," she said. "Alliance agents are strange. This man didn't mind dying in the superconductor explosion, but it made him willing to hear me out during the final countdown."
   The medic studied Kurt's corpse amid the still-liquid drops of oxygenated fluid. Tiny bubbles boiled off their surfaces.
   "The Alliance doesn't want its agents to show initiative," she said. "Their control implants generate irresistible compulsions and taboos, like hearing voices. Everything I said about quantum ghosts was nonsense, of course. His weakness was that he believed in forces higher than himself. A classic submissive personality type, ready to accept what I said."
   "Sounds like mind games to me," the engineer said, looking at his wrist. "But this is a crucial moment in time. Closest approach to Mars is . . . Now!"
   The medic glanced at her crew, wondering if it was worth it. They were pale and emaciated, with lines around their eyes, scars and radiation burns. Their bold plan had become a monstrous chore, even with regulator drugs. After several weeks they were used to fear, but their exhausted, vacant expressions never went away. The human body resisted confinement in a spacesuit.
   She continued. "Very likely, he amplified some random fluctuations from his quantum interface, and imagined they were whatever frightened him the most. Something worse than death chased him from his pod. He found our weak spot, but forgot about his own."
   "He still made history," the commander said. He felt unexpected, giddy relief. All options remained open for his flying circus.
   Floating between two vast walls, the medic realized how tiny their margin of error had been, and wondered: could the future really influence the present?
For a moment she understood how Binder had felt.

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Arguably the best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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