Murderers, he told himself. I’m dealing with men who would commit murder to get what they want. I’m taking Humphries’s money and running away from this place like a lackey being paid off by the lord of the manor.
“Lars, what wrong?” Amanda asked.
“Nothing.”
She looked truly worried. “But you were trembling. You looked—I’ve never seen such an expression on your face before.”
He tried to control the rage boiling inside him, tried to hide it, keep it bottled up where no one could see it, not even his wife.
“Come on,” he said gruffly. “You were right. There’s nothing we can do here until we can open the hatch and see how much damage has been done.”
When they got back to their apartment, he picked at the dinner Amanda set before him. He could not sleep. The next morning, when he and a pair of technicians went back to the warehouse, the airtight hatch was fused shut. They had to use one of Astro’s mining lasers to cut it open and then wait several minutes for the big, gutted chamber to fill with breathable air.
The warehouse was a blackened shambles. The technicians, both of them young men new to Ceres, stared at the wreckage with round eyes.
“Jeez,” muttered the one on Fuchs’s right as they played their hand lights around the still-hot ruins.
Fuchs couldn’t recognize the place. The shelving had collapsed, metal supports melted by the heat of the blaze. Tons of equipment were reduced to molten lumps of slag.
“What could’ve caused such a hot fire?” wondered the kid on Fuchs’s left.
“Not what,” Fuchs muttered. “Who.”
CHAPTER 12
It’s a good thing that it takes so long for communications to go back and forth, Amanda thought. Otherwise Lars would be screaming at the woman by now.
She had watched her husband, his face grimed from the ashes of the warehouse and his mood even darker, as he placed his call to their insurance carrier to inform them of the fire. Then he had called Diane Verwoerd, at Humphries Space Systems’ offices in Selene.
Even though messages moved at the speed of light, it took more than an hour for Ms. Verwoerd to respond. With the distance between them, there could be no real conversation between Ceres and the Moon. Communications were more like video mail that true two-way links.
“Mr. Fuchs,” Verwoerd began her message, “I appreciate your calling me to inform us about the fire in your warehouse. I certainly hope that no one was injured.”
Fuchs started to reply automatically, and only stopped himself when Verwoerd coolly went on, “We will need to know the extent of the damage before opening our negotiations on acquiring Helvetia Limited. As I understand it, a major part of your company’s assets consisted of the inventory in your warehouse. I understand that this inventory was insured, but I’m certain that your insurance won’t cover much more than half the value of the damaged property. Please inform me as soon as you can. In the meantime, I will contact your insurance carrier. Thank you.” Her image winked out, replaced by the stylized logo of Humphries Space Systems.
Fuchs’s face looked like a thundercloud, dark and ominous. He sat at the computer desk of their one-room apartment, staring silently at the wallscreen. Amanda, sitting on the bed, didn’t know what she could say to make him feel better.
“We won’t be getting ten million,” he muttered, turning to her. “Not half that, I imagine.”
“It’s all right, Lars. Three or four million is enough for us to—”
“To run away with our tails between our legs,” he snapped.
Amanda heard herself answer, “What else can we do?”
Fuchs’s head drooped defeatedly. “I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re wiped out. The warehouse is completely gutted. Whoever set the fire did a thorough job.”
Warily, she asked, “Do you still think it was deliberately set?”
“Of course!” her husband shouted angrily. “He never intended to pay us ten million! That was a lure, a ruse. He’s kicking us off Ceres, out of the Belt entirely.”
“But why would he make the offer…?” Amanda felt confused.
Almost sneering with contempt, Fuchs said, “To put us in the proper frame of mind. To get us accustomed to the idea of leaving the Belt. Now he’s waiting for us to come crawling to him and beg for as much of the ten million as he’s willing to give us.”
“We won’t do that,” Amanda said. “We won’t crawl and we won’t beg.”
“No,” he agreed. “But we will leave. We have no choice.”
“We still have the ship.”
His heavy brows rose. “Starpower? You’d be willing to go prospecting again?”
Amanda knew that she really didn’t want to take up the life of a rock rat again. But she nodded solemnly, “Yes. Why not?”
Fuchs stared at her, a tangle of emotions burning in his deep-set eyes.
Niles Ripley was dead tired as he shuffled slowly across the desolate dark ground, heading for the airlock. A four-hour shift of working on the habitat was like a week of hard labor anywhere else, he felt. And riding the shuttlecraft back down to the surface of Ceres was always nerve-racking; the ground controller ran the little hopper remotely from underground, but Ripley twitched nervously without a human pilot aboard. The shuttle had touched down without mishap, though, landing a few meters from a Humphries craft being loaded for a supply run to one of the miners’ ships hanging in orbit.
It’ll be good to get to the Pub and sip a brew or two, Ripley said to himself. By god, I’ll even spring for the imported stuff tonight.
The construction work was going well. Slower than Fuchs had expected, but Ripley was satisfied with the progress that the crew was making. Looking up through his fishbowl helmet, he could see the habitat glinting in the sunlight as it spun slowly, like a big pinwheel.
Okay, he thought, so maybe it does look like a clunky kludge. Bunch of spacecraft tacked together in a circle, no two of ’em exactly the same. But by god the kludge was pretty near finished; soon people could go up and live in that habitat and feel just about the same gravity as on the Moon.
Got to get the radiation shielding working first, he reminded himself. Sixteen different sets of superconducting magnets and more to come. Getting them to work together is gonna be a bitch and a half.
The work was so damned tedious. Flatlanders back on Earth thought that working in microgee was fun. And easy. You just float around like a kid in a swimming pool. Yeah. Right. The reality was that you had to consciously plan every move you made; inside the spacesuit you had to exert real strength just to hold your arms out straight or take a few steps. Sure, you could hop around like a jackrabbit on steroids if you wanted to. Hell, I could jump right off Ceres and go sailing around like Superman if I had a mind to—and I if didn’t worry about breaking every bone in my legs when I landed. Working in microgee is tough, especially in these damned suits.
Well, I’m finished for today, he said to himself as he watched the habitat slowly disappear beyond the sharp, rugged horizon. Ceres is so small, he thought. Just a glorified hunk of rock hanging in the middle of nothing. Ripley shook his head inside his bubble helmet, amazed all over again that he was working ’way out here, in this no-place of a place. He started back toward the airlock again, kicking up lingering clouds of gritty dust with each careful, sliding step. Looking down awkwardly from inside the helmet, he saw that the suit was grimy with dark gray dust all the way up the leggings, as usual. The arms and gloves were crummed up, too. It’ll take a good half-hour to vacuum all this crud off the suit, he told himself.
The airlock was set into a dome of local stone, its thick metal hatch the only sign of human presence on Ceres’s surface, outside of the two spindly-looking shuttlecraft sitting out there. Ripley was almost at the hatch when it swung open and three spacesuited figures stepped out slowly, warily, as if testing each step they made in this insubstantial gravity. Each of their spacesuits showed a HSS logo on the left breast, just above their name tags. Ripley wondered if they might be the guys Big George had shellacked in the Pub. They had all been Humphries employees, he recalled.