Death was no stranger to Dorik Harbin. Orphaned from birth, he was barely as tall as the assault rifle the village elders gave him when Harbin had dutifully marched with the other preteens to the village down the road, where the evil people lived. They had killed his father before Harbin had been born and raped his pregnant mother repeatedly. The other boys sometimes sniggered that Dorik was conceived by one of the rapists, not the father that the rapists had hacked to death.
He and his ragamuffin battalion had marched down to that evil village and shot everyone there: all of them, men, women, children, babies. Harbin even shot the village dogs in a fury of vengeance. Then, under the pitiless eyes of the hard-faced elders, they had set fire to each and every house in that village. Dousing the bodies with petrol where they lay, they burned the dead, too. Some of them were only wounded, pretending to be dead to escape the vengeance they had reaped, until the flames ignited their clothing.
Harbin still heard their screams in his sleep.
When the blue-helmeted Peacekeeper troops had come into the region to pacify the ethnic fighting, Harbin had run away from his village and joined the national defense force. After many months of living in the hills and hiding from the Peacekeepers’ observation planes and satellites, he came to the bitter conclusion that the so-called national defense force was nothing more than a band of renegades, stealing from their own people, looting villages and raping their women.
He ran away again, this time to a refugee camp, where well-clad strangers distributed food while men from nearby villages sold the refugees hashish and heroin. Eventually Harbin joined those blue-helmeted soldiers; they were looking for recruits and offered steady pay for minimal discomfort. They trained him well, but more importantly they fed him and paid him and tried to instill some sense of discipline and honor in him. Time and again his temper tripped him; he was in the brig so often that his sergeant called him “jailbird.”
The sergeant tried to tame Harbin’s wild ferocity, tried to make a reliable soldier out of him. Harbin took their food and money and tried to understand their strange concepts of when it was proper to kill someone and when it was not. What he learned after a few years of service in the miserable, pathetic, deprived regions of Asia and Africa was that it was the same everywhere: kill or be killed.
He was picked for a hurry-up training course and sent with a handful of other Peacekeeper troops to the Moon, to enforce the law on the renegade colonists of Moonbase. They even allowed the specially-selected troopers dosages of designer drugs which, they claimed, would enhance their adaptation to low gravity. Harbin knew it was nothing more than a bribe, to keep the “volunteers” satisfied.
Trying to fight the tenacious defenders of Moonbase from inside a spacesuit was a revelation to Harbin. The Peacekeepers failed, even though the lunar colonists took great pains to avoid killing any of them. They returned to Earth, not merely defeated but humiliated. His next engagement, in the food riots in Delhi, finished him as a Peacekeeper. He saved his squad from being overrun by screaming hordes of rioters, but killed so many of the “unarmed” civilians that the International Peacekeeping Force cashiered him.
Orphaned again, Harbin took up with mercenary organizations that worked under contract to major multinational corporations. Always eager to better himself, he learned to operate spacecraft. And he quickly saw how fragile spacecraft were. A decent laser shot could disable a vessel in an eyeblink; you could kill its crew from a thousand kilometers away before they realized they were under attack.
Eventually he was summoned to the offices of Humphries Space Systems, the first time he had returned to the Moon since the Peacekeepers had been driven off. Their chief of security was a Russian named Grigor. He told Harbin he had a difficult but extremely rewarding assignment for a man of courage and determination.
Harbin asked only, “Who do I have to kill?”
Grigor told him that he was to drive the independent prospectors and miners out of the Belt. Those working under contract to HSS or Astro were to be left untouched. It was the independents who were to be “discouraged.” Harbin grimaced at the word. Men like Grigor and the others back at Selene could use delicate words, but what they meant was anything but refined. Kill the independents. Kill enough of them so that the rest either quit the Belt or signed up with HSS or Astro Corporation.
So this one had to die, like the others.
“This is Waltzing Matilda,” he heard his comm speaker announce. The face on his display screen was a young male Asian, head shaved, eyes big and nervous. His cheeks seemed to be tattooed. “Please identify yourself.”
Harbin chose not to. There was no need. The less he spoke with those he must kill, the less he knew about them, the better. It was a game, he told himself, like the computer games he had played during his training sessions with the Peacekeepers. Destroy the target and win points. In this game he played now, the points were international dollars. Wealth could buy almost anything: a fine home in a safe city, good wines, willing women, drugs that drove away the memories of the past.
“We are working this asteroid,” the young man said, his shaky voice a little higher-pitched than before. “The claim has already been registered with the International Astronautical Authority.”
Harbin took in a deep breath. The temptation to reply was powerful. It doesn’t matter what you have claimed or what you are doing, he answered silently. The moving finger has written your name in the book of death, nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line; nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
By the time he’d made his eighth ore-ferrying trip, George felt dead tired. And starving.
He turned off the laser and said into his helmet microphone, “I’m comin’ in.”
The Turk replied only, “Copy that.”
“I’m sloshin’ inside this suit,” George said. “The power pack needs rechargin’, too.”
“Understood,” said Nodon.
George unhooked the power pack and toted it in his arms back to Matilda’s airlock. It was twice his size, and even though it weighed virtually nothing he was careful handling it; a mass that big could squash a man no matter what the ambient gravity. The law of inertia had not been repealed.
“What’s our visitor doin’?” he asked as he sealed the lock’s outer hatch and started pumping air into it.
“Still approaching on the same course.”
“Any word from ’im?”
“Nothing.”
That worried George. By the time he had wormed his way out of the ripe-smelling suit and plugged the big power pack into the ship’s recharging unit, though, his first priority was food.
He half-floated up the passageway to the galley.
“Spin ’er up a bit, Nodon,” he hollered to the bridge. “Gimme some weight while I chow down.”
“One-sixth g?” the Turk’s voice came back down the passageway.
“Good enough.”
A comfortable feeling of weight returned as George pulled a meager prepackaged snack from the freezer. Should’ve loaded more food, he thought. Didn’t expect to be out here this long.
Then he heard a scream from the bridge. The air-pressure alarm started hooting and the emergency hatches slammed shut as the ship’s lights went out, plunging George into total darkness.
CHAPTER 18
Amanda was aghast. “You refused to sell at any price?”
Fuchs nodded grimly. Some of the blazing fury he had felt during his meeting with Humphries had burned off, but still the smoldering heat of anger burned deep in his guts. Only one thing was certain: he was going to fight. On the way from Humphries’s office to their hotel suite Fuchs had made up his mind once and for all. He was going to wipe the smug smile from Humphries’s face, no matter what it cost.