FIVE

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The man eased open the door stenciled: TRANSKOOTENAY MINING.

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He propped the door open, and eased an antigravity ore carrier, about the size of a wheelbarrow, through.

The ore processing plant was almost wholly automated. The few people Transkootenay needed to run it worked only a "day" shift, since not enough ore was coming in to the asteroid outstation to warrant an around-the-clock crew.

There was no ore on the belt, but the machinery hummed in quiet readiness.

The man floated the carrier to the loading bay, and dumped the carrier's cargo, a single boulder, in.

He muttered at all the extra work he'd gone to, camouflaging the charges inside the boulder, acquiring a genuine mining ship to reach the plant looking innocent, disguising himself in a miner's suit, even providing himself with false ID.

None of which was necessary. Transkootenay's security was nonexistent.

He decided they were, in the old phrase, too dumb to live.

That made him grin.

The way things were going out here, they wouldn't for very much longer.

Tough for them.

The man took a small box from his belt, went into the small operating room.

He positioned the box over a large, red switch, and turned the timer on.

Being a careful sort, he took out a plas sheet, and, even though he'd memorized his instructions, went through the checklist as he brought the processing plant up to ready state.

Then he started the timer, went out of the room, and the plant.

There was a watchman at the entrance to the field, snoring in his booth.

But there were no fences around the prefab building, nor around the two barracks, one hundred meters distant.

The man threaded his way to his stolen ship, boarded, and lifted away on antigravs. One hundred meters clear of the rocky field, he went to secondary drive, watching the planetoid dwindle in his screen.

Forty-five minutes later, the timer clicked to zero, and the processor hummed into life.

The watchman woke with a jerk, feeling the vibration in his hut.

He sealed his suit, and cycled the hut's lock, awkwardly loading his blaster, as the processing plant fed the "boulder" into the crusher, which sized the rock, and hammers came down to break the boulder into chunks.

The first crash was buried under the slam of the explosives in the boulder, as they, fused with a pressure-sensitive device, went off.

The explosion could be seen fifty kilometers in space, as the processing plant fused, melted, tore itself apart.

The watchman, surprisingly, had been alert enough to go flat when the plant blew up, and survived, although he had nothing at all to report to Transkootenay system officials when they arrived from Sheol half a ship-day later.