“But how can you…”
He grabbed the door, slid it open, and marched out into the tunnel, leaving her standing there. Billows of dust followed his footsteps.
The Pub was crowded when Fuchs got there. He had to push his way to the bar.
The barkeep recognized him, but barely smiled. “Hello, Lars. Gonna call another town meeting?”
“Do you know a man named Buchanan?” Fuchs asked, without preamble.
The barkeep nodded warily.
“Do you know where I can find him?”
The man’s eyes shifted slightly, then came back to lock onto Fuchs’s. “What do you want him for?”
“I need to talk to him,” said Fuchs, struggling to keep his voice even, calm.
“He’s a badass, Lars.”
“I’m not here to start a fight,” Fuchs said. He even felt it was true.
“Well, that’s Buchanan right down there at the end of the bar.”
“Thank you.”
Fuchs accepted a frosted aluminum goblet of beer, then wormed his way through the crowd until he was next to Buchanan. The man was with two friends, talking to a trio of miniskirted young women, their drinks on the bar in front of them. Buchanan was tall, with wide sloping shoulders, and young enough to have a flat midsection. His blond hair was cut short, except for a tiny imitation matador’s twist at the back of his head. His face was lean, unlined, relaxed.
“You are Mr. Buchanan?” Fuchs asked, putting his aluminum goblet on the bar.
Buchanan turned to him, looked Fuchs over and saw a stocky older rock rat in a shapeless gray velour pullover and wrinkled slacks with the build of a weasel and a sour expression on his broad, heavy-featured face. The guy had a tool of some sort tucked in his waistband.
“I’m Buchanan,” he said. “Who the fuck are you?”
Fuchs replied, “I am a friend of the late Niles Ripley.”
He said it quietly, flatly, but it was as if he had shouted the words through a power megaphone. Everything in the Pub stopped. Conversation, laughter, even motion seemed to freeze in place.
Buchanan leaned his right elbow on the bar as he faced Fuchs. “Ripley won’t be blowing his horn around these parts anymore,” he said, grinning. One of the men behind him snickered nervously.
Fuchs said, “Your name tag was found in his dead hand.”
“Oh, so that’s where it got to. I was wondering where I’d lost it.”
“You killed him.”
Buchanan reached slowly behind him and pulled a hand laser from the pouch strapped to his waist. He laid it down carefully on the bar, next to his drink. Its power cord trailed back to his belt; its business end pointed at Fuchs.
“If I did kill him, what’re you going to do about it?”
Fuchs took a breath. The lava-hot rage he had felt only a few minutes earlier had turned to ice now. He felt cold, glacially calm, but not one nanobit less enraged than he had been before.
He replied softly, “I thought you and I could go back to Selene and let the authorities there investigate the murder.”
Buchanan’s jaw dropped open. He gawked at Fuchs, standing like a stubborn little bull in front of him. Then he lifted his head and brayed with laughter. His two friends laughed, also.
No one else did.
Fuchs slapped Buchanan’s laughing face, hard. Shocked, Buchanan touched his bleeding lip, then reached for the laser on the bar. Fuchs was prepared for that. He clamped Buchanan’s hand to the bar with a viselike grip and pulled the screwdriver from his waistband with his right hand.
The laser cracked once. Fuchs’s aluminum goblet went spinning, leaking beer through a tiny hole, while Fuchs thumbed the screwdriver on and jammed it into Buchanan’s chest. Blood geysered and Buchanan looked terribly surprised, then slumped to the floor, gurgling briefly before he went silent forever.
Splashed with Buchanan’s blood, still holding the buzzing screwdriver in his right hand, Fuchs picked up the hand laser. Buchanan’s fall had wrenched the power cord out of the base of its grip.
He glanced down at the dead body, then looked at Buchanan’s two friends. Their eyes were wide, their mouths agape. Unconsciously, they both backed away from Fuchs.
Without another word, Fuchs turned around and strode out of the silent Pub.
CHAPTER 15
They held a trial of sorts. Under Fuchs’s own prodding, the people of Ceres picked a judge by sorting through the computerized personnel files and coming up with a woman who worked for Humphries Space Systems as a contracts lawyer. A jury was selected by lot; no one picked was allowed to refuse the duty. For the defense, Fuchs represented himself. No less than the owner and barkeep of the Pub volunteered to prosecute the case.
The trial, held in the Pub itself, took all of forty-five minutes. Practically everyone in Ceres jammed into the rock-walled chamber. Chairs and two tables had been moved up to the bar to accommodate the accused and the counselors. The judge sat on a high laboratory stool behind the bar. Everyone else stood.
Six different witnesses told substantially the same story: Fuchs had asked Buchanan to go to Selene with him for a formal investigation of Ripley’s murder. Buchanan reached for the laser. Fuchs stabbed him with the power tool. Even Buchanan’s two companions admitted that that was the way it had happened.
Fuchs’s punctured beer goblet was presented as evidence that Buchanan had indeed fired his laser with intent to kill.
The only question arose when the prosecutor asked Fuchs why he had come into the Pub armed with the tool that eventually killed Buchanan.
Fuchs admitted openly, “I knew that he was a dangerous man. I knew that he had murdered Niles Ripley—”
The judge, sitting on a high stool behind the bar, snapped, “That’s inadmissible. This trial is about you, Mr. Fuchs, not about Ripley’s death.”
With only the slightest of frowns, Fuchs said, “I was afraid he would be dangerous. I had been told that he had come to the Pub before and started a fight. And that he had several friends with him.”
“So you armed yourself with a lethal weapon?” asked the prosecutor.
“I thought it might be useful as a club, if it came to a fight. I had no intention of using it to stab him.”
“Yet that’s exactly what you did.”
“Yes. When he tried to shoot me I suppose I reacted without thinking of the consequences. I defended myself.”
“Very thoroughly,” the judge grumbled.
The verdict was never in doubt. Fuchs was acquitted, the killing called justifiable self-defense. Then the prosecutor displaced the judge behind the bar and proclaimed that there would be a round of drinks on the house for everybody.
Amanda was delighted with the outcome, but Fuchs was morose for the next several days.
“This isn’t the end of it,” he told her one night as they lay in bed together.
“Lars darling,” said Amanda, “you mustn’t let this get you down so. You acted in self-defense.”
“I really would have gone with him to Selene,” Fuchs said. “But I knew he would never do that. Never.”
“It’s not your fault that you had to kill him. It was self-defense. Everyone knows that. You mustn’t feel bad about it.”
“But I don’t!” He turned to face her. In the darkened room, lit only by the glow of the digital clock numerals in one corner of the wallscreen, he could barely make out the puzzled expression on her lovely face.
“I don’t feel bad about killing that vermin,” Fuchs said, in a low, firm voice. “I knew I would have to. I knew he would never listen to reason.”
Amanda looked surprised, almost fearful. “But Lars—”
“No one would do a thing about it. I knew I was the only one who would bring him to justice.”