With the semicircle of display screens curving around him, Fuchs saw the attacking spacecraft spurt down and away from them, a ghostly issue of gas glinting wanly in the light of the distant Sun. He could see a long thin slit slashed across one of the ship’s bulbous propellant tanks.
“You’ve hit him, George!” Fuchs said into his helmet microphone. “I can see it!”
George’s reply sounded testy. “So swing us around so’s I can hit ’im again!”
Fuchs tapped at the control keyboard, wishing he was more adept at maneuvering a spacecraft. Starpower was not built for graceful turns. Pancho was right, he remembered. We turn slow and ugly.
In the cargo bay, George stared out at emptiness.
“Where the fook is he?” he wailed.
“Still below your line of sight,” came Fuchs’s answer in his earphones.
“So turn us toward him!”
Nodon said, “The cooling system needs more time to recover. We have inadequate coolant flow.”
“Just need a few seconds, mate,” said George, “once we get ’im back in our sights.”
He stepped up to the lip of the cargo hatch and looked down in the direction he had last seen the attacking vessel.
“There he is!” George saw. “Comin’ our way again.”
The attacker was zooming up swiftly. George turned back toward the laser. “Fire her up!” he yelled to Nodon.
“Firing!” Nodon shouted back.
A blinding flash of light stunned George. He felt himself toppling head over heels and then something slammed into him so hard it spun him like an unbalanced gyroscope. Through blurry, tear-filled eyes he saw a spacesuited arm fly past, geysering blood where it had been severed, just above the elbow, rotating over and over as it dwindled out of his view. He heard someone bellowing in pain and rage and realized it was himself.
I’m a dead man, Harbin told himself.
Strangely, the knowledge did not seem to frighten him. He sat back in his spacesuit, relaxed now that the tension of battle had drained out of him.
They’ve killed me, he thought. I wonder if they know it.
His plan to silence the enemy’s laser had worked, after a fashion. He’d popped up into their field of view and fired off a full-energy burst as soon as he saw the red dot of their guide laser. They couldn’t have revved up their laser in time to hit him, he was certain of that.
Not unless they already had their laser cooking and he’d walked right into their beam. Which is exactly what had happened.
Harbin knew he had knocked out their laser with his one quick shot. But in doing so he had sailed Shanidar across the continuous beam of their mining laser. It had carved a long gash through two of the remaining propellant tanks and even sliced deeply into the habitation module itself.
I’ll have to stay inside this damned suit, he growled to himself. For how long? Until the air runs out. Hours, perhaps a day or so. No longer than that.
He pulled himself out of the command chair, thinking, Of course, I could tap into the ship’s air tanks. If the recycler hasn’t been damaged, the air could last for months, even a year or more. I’d starve before I asphyxiated.
But what would be the point? I’m drifting, too low on propellant to reach a tanker or any other help. Leaning forward slightly so he could check the control displays through his suit helmet, he saw that the ship’s power generator was unscathed. He would have enough electrical power to keep his systems going. He could even patch the hab module’s hull, bring the air pressure back to normal, and get out of the suit.
To what avail? To drift helplessly through the Belt until I starve.
You could call the nearest tanker and ask for a retrieval, he told himself. The computer has their positions in its memory and you could contact them with a tight-beam laser signal.
Would they come to my rescue? Not before they checked with HSS headquarters. Grigor will not be happy to learn that I failed to eliminate Starpower. By now Fuchs and his friends are probably screaming their heads off to the IAA. Would Grigor tell them to rescue me, or would he decide that it’s better if I just quietly die?
Quietly. Harbin smiled. That’s the key. Do not go gentle into that good night, he quoted silently. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
On a clear channel, he put through a call to Grigor.
CHAPTER 31
George awoke to see Fuchs and Nodon staring down at him, Fuchs looking grim, irritated. Nodon was wide-eyed with fright. Strange to see him with those fierce carvings in his face looking so scared, George thought.
“So I’m not in heaven, then,” he said, trying to grin. His voice sounded strained, terribly weak. “Not yet,” Fuchs growled.
George realized he was lying in one of Starpower’s privacy cubicles, his spacesuit removed. Either they’ve got me tied down or I’m so fookin’ feeble I can’t move. “What happened?” he asked.
Nodon glanced at Fuchs, then licked his lips and said, “The laser blast shattered our laser. The mirror assembly broke loose and… and took off your arm.”
He said the last words all in a rush, as if ashamed of them. George looked down, surprised at how much effort it took to twist his head, and saw his left arm ended just short of the elbow. The stump was swathed in plastic spray-bandage.
He felt more fuddled than shocked. Just the barest tendril of pain, now that he thought about it. Not scared. No worries. They must have me doped up pretty good.
“The rest of your arm is in the freezer,” Fuchs said. “We’re heading back to Ceres at high thrust. I will alert Kris Cardenas.” George closed his eyes and remembered seeing the spacesuited arm spiraling out the cargo hatch.
He looked at Nodon. “You shut off the bleedin’, huh?”
The younger man bobbed his head up and down.
“And closed off the suit arm,” George added.
Fuchs said, “He also went out EVA and recovered your arm. I thought for a few minutes that we would lose him altogether.”
“Did you now?” George said, feeling stupid, muffled. “Thanks, mate.”
Nodon looked embarrassed. He changed the subject. “You must have hit the other ship a damaging blow. It left at high speed.”
“That’s good.”
“We’ll be in Ceres in another fourteen hours,” said Fuchs.
“That’s good.” George couldn’t think of anything else to say. Somewhere, in a deep recess of his mind, he knew that he should be screaming. Prosthetics be damned, I’ve lost my fookin’ arm!
But the drugs muted his emotional pain as well as the physical. Nothing really seemed to matter. All George wanted was for them to leave him alone and let him sleep.
Fuchs seemed to understand, thank god. “You rest now,” he said, his tight slash of a mouth turned down bitterly. “I have a long report to send to the IAA as soon as we can repair one of the antennas.”
“Not this Fuchs person again,” complained Hector Wilcox.
Erek Zar and Francesco Tomasselli were sitting in front of Wilcox’s desk, Zar looking decidedly uncomfortable, Tomasselli almost quivering with righteous indignation.
Wilcox’s office was imposing, as befitted the Counsel General of the International Astronautical Authority. Slim, sleek, impeccably clothed in a somber charcoal business suit and dapper pearl-gray tie that nicely set off his silvery hair and trim moustache, Wilcox looked every centimeter the successful administrator, which he believed himself to be. He had arbitrated many a corporate wrangle, directed teams of bureaucrats to generate safety regulations and import duties on space manufactures, and climbed the slippery slope of the IAA’s legal department until he sat at its very top, unchallenged and hailed by his fellow bureaucrats as an example of patience, intelligence and—above all—endurance.