“Just get out of here, before there’s trouble,” the other one said. His accent sounded Latino.
Fuchs stopped and looked them up and down. “Trouble?” he asked. “The only trouble that happens here will be trouble that you start.”
The taller one shrugged. “Doesn’t matter who starts it. What matters is, who’s still standing when it’s over.”
“Thank you,” said Fuchs. “Your words will be useful evidence.”
“Evidence?” They both looked startled.
“Do you think I’m a fool?” Fuchs said sharply. “I know what you’re up to. I’m wearing a transmitter that is sending every word you say to IAA headquarters in Geneva. If anything happens to me, you two have already been voiceprinted.”
With that, Fuchs turned on his heel and strode away from the two toughs, leaving them dumbfounded and uncertain. Fuchs walked carefully, deliberately, stirring up as little dust as possible. He didn’t want them to think he was running away from them; he also didn’t want them to see how his legs were shaking. Above all, he didn’t want them to figure out that his transmitter was a total bluff, invented on the spot to allow him to get away from them.
By the time he got home, he was still trembling, but now it was with anger. Amanda flashed a welcoming smile at him from the computer desk. Fuchs could see from the wallscreen that she was ordering inventory to stock the warehouse. Most of the machinery and electronic gear she ordered came from Astro Corporation. Now, he saw, she was dealing with foodstuffs and clothing, which came from other companies. He went to wash up as she stared wistfully at the latest Earthside fashions.
By the time he came back into the room, she was finished with the computer. She slid her arms around his neck and kissed him warmly.
“What would you like for dinner?” she asked. “I just ordered a shipment of seafood from Selene and I’m famished.”
“Anything will do,” he temporized as he disengaged from her and sat at the computer desk.
Amanda went to the freezer as she asked, “Will you be ready by the time the supplies start arriving?”
Working the computer, his eyes on the wallscreen display, Fuchs barely nodded. “I’ll be ready,” he muttered.
Amanda saw that he was studying the specifications for handheld lasers.
Frowning slightly, she said, “That looks like the laser that that Buchanan fellow killed Ripley with.”
“It is,” Fuchs said. “And he tried to kill me with it, too.”
“I’ve already ordered six of them, with an option for another half-dozen when they’re sold.”
“I’m thinking of ordering one for myself,” said Fuchs.
“For Starpower?”
He looked up at her. His face was grim. “For myself,” he said. “As a sidearm.”
CHAPTER 23
Starpower swung lazily in the dark star-choked sky above Ceres. Strange, Fuchs noted as he climbed aboard the shuttlecraft, that the sky still seems so black despite all those stars. Other suns, he thought, billions of them blazing out their light for eons. Yet here on the rubble-heap surface of Ceres the world seemed dark, shadowy with menace.
Shaking his head inside the fishbowl helmet, Fuchs clambered up the ladder and ducked through the shuttlecraft’s hatch. No sense taking off the suit until I’m inside Starpower, he told himself. The shuttle flight would take mere minutes to lift him from the asteroid’s surface to his waiting ship.
The shuttle’s hab module was a bubble of glassteel. Two other prospectors were already aboard, waiting to be transferred to their spacecraft. Fuchs said a perfunctory hello to them through his suit radio.
“Hey, Lars,” one of them asked, “what are you gonna do about the habitat?”
“Yeah,” chimed in the other one. “We put up good money to build it. When’s it going to be finished so we can move in?”
Fuchs could see their faces through their helmets. They weren’t being accusative or even impatient. They looked more curious than anything else.
He forced a weak smile for them. “I haven’t had a chance to recruit a new project engineer, someone to replace Ripley.”
“Oh. Yeah. Too bad about the Ripper.”
“You did a good thing, Lars. That sonofabitch murdered the Ripper in cold blood.”
Fuchs nodded his acknowledgment of their praise. The voice of the IAA controller told them the shuttlecraft would lift off in ten seconds. The computer counted off the time. The three spacesuited men stood in the hab module; there were no seats, nothing except a tee-shaped podium that held the ship’s controls, which weren’t needed for this simple flight, and foot loops in the deck to hold them down in microgravity.
Liftoff was little more than a gentle nudge, but the craft leaped away from Ceres’s pitted, rock-strewn surface fast enough to make Fuchs’s stomach lurch. Before he could swallow down the bile in his throat, they were in zero-g. Fuchs had never enjoyed weightlessness, but he put up with it as the IAA controller remotely steered the shuttle to the orbiting ship of the other two men before swinging almost completely around the asteroid to catch up with Starpower.
Fuchs thought about hiring a replacement for Ripley. The funding for the habitat was adequate, barely. He had put the task on Amanda’s list of action items. She’ll have to do it, Fuchs said to himself. She’ll have to use her judgment; I’ll be busy doing other things.
Other things. He cringed inwardly when he thought of the angry words he had flung at Humphries: I’ve studied military history… I know how to fight. How pathetic! So what are you going to do, go out and shoot up Humphries spacecraft? Kill his employees? What will that accomplish, except getting you arrested eventually, or killed? You think too much, Lars Fuchs. You are quick to anger, but then your conscience frustrates you.
He had thought long and hard about searching out HSS vessels and destroying them. Hurt Humphries the way he’s hurt me. But he knew he couldn’t do it.
After all his bold words, all his blazing fury, the best he could think of was to find an asteroid, put in a claim for it, and then wait for Humphries’s hired killers to come after him. Then he’d have the evidence he needed to make the IAA take official action against Humphries.
If he lived through the ordeal.
Once the shuttle made rendezvous with Starpower and docked at the spacecraft’s main airlock, Fuchs entered his ship and began squirming out of the spacesuit, grateful for the feeling of gravity that the ship’s spin imparted. The bold avenger, he sneered at himself. Going out to offer yourself as a sacrificial victim in an effort to bring Humphries down. A lamb trying to trap a tiger.
As he entered the bridge, still grumbling to himself, the yellow message waiting signal was blinking on the communications screen.
Amanda, he knew. Sure enough, the instant he called up the comm message, her lovely face filled the screen.
But she looked troubled, distraught.
“Lars, it’s George Ambrose. His ship’s gone missing. All communications abruptly shut off several days ago. The IAA isn’t even getting telemetry. They’re afraid he’s dead.”
“George?” Fuchs gaped at his wife’s image. “They’ve killed George?”
“It looks that way,” said Amanda.
Amanda stared at her husband’s face on the wallscreen in their quarters. Grim as death, he looked.
“They killed George,” he repeated.
She wanted to say, No, it must have been an accident. But the words would not leave her lips.
“He had George killed,” Fuchs muttered. “Murdered.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Amanda heard herself say. It sounded more like a plea than a statement, even to her own ears.