She found Humphries still awake and alone in the big mansion’s game room.
“We have troubles,” she said as she entered the room. He was bent over the pool table, cue in hand. Humphries had spent many long hours learning how to shoot pool on the Moon. The one-sixth gravity only subtly affected the way the balls rolled or caromed. A visitor could play a few rounds and think nothing was different from Earth. That’s when Humphries would offer a friendly wager on the next game.
“Troubles?” he said, intent on his shot. He made it; the balls clicked and one of the colored ones rolled to a corner pocket and dropped neatly in. Only then did Humphries straighten up and ask, “What troubles?”
“Fuchs raided the warehouse and killed one of the men there. Hanged him.”
Humphries’s eyes widened. “Hanged him? By the neck?”
“The others have quit,” Verwoerd went on. “They want no part of this fight.”
He snorted disdainfully. “Cowardly little shits.”
“They were hired to bully people. They never thought that Fuchs would fight back. Not like this.”
“I suppose they expect me to pay for their transport back to Earth,” Humphries groused.
“There’s more.”
He turned and stacked his cue in its rack. “Well? What else?”
“Fuchs has stolen an Astro ship, the Lubbock Lights. He’s left—”
“How the hell could he steal a ship?” Humphries demanded angrily.
Verwoerd kept the pool table between them. “According to the captain—”
“The same limp spaghetti that allowed Fuchs to commandeer his ship on the way in to Ceres?”
“The same man,” Verwoerd replied. “He reported to the IAA that a half-dozen Asians boarded the ship under the pretense of loading ores. They were armed and took control of the ship. Then Fuchs came up from Ceres with another Oriental, apparently the man who was with him when he was here for the hearing. They packed the captain and regular crew into the shuttlecraft and sent them back down to Ceres.”
“Son of a bitch,” Humphries said fervently.
“By the time the Peacekeepers arrived, Fuchs was gone.”
“In one of Pancho’s ships.” He grinned. “Serves her right.”
Verwoerd pursed her lips, weighing the dangers of antagonizing him further against the pleasures of yanking his chain a little bit. “If possession is nine-tenths of the law,” she said slowly, “then it’s mostly his ship now, not Astro’s.”
He glared at her, fuming. She kept her expression noncommittal. A smile now could set off a tantrum, she knew.
He stood in angry silence for several long moments, face flushed, gray eyes blazing. Then, “So those pansies you hired to clean out Fuchs want to quit, do they?”
“Actually, Grigor hired them,” Verwoerd said. “And, yes, they want out. Fuchs made them watch while he hanged their leader.”
“And Amanda? She went with him?”
With a shake of her head, Verwoerd answered, “No, she’s still on Ceres. Apparently Fuchs’s people took back most of the items that were looted from their warehouse.”
“He left her on Ceres? Alone?”
“He hanged the man because he made some crack about her. Nobody’s going to go near her, believe me.”
“I don’t want anybody to go near her,” Humphries snapped. “I want her left strictly alone. I’ve given orders about that!”
“No one’s harmed her. No one’s threatened her.”
“Until this asshole opened his big mouth in front of Fuchs.”
“And he strung him up like a common criminal.”
Humphries leaned both hands on the rim of the pool table and hung his head. Whether he was overwhelmed with sorrow or anger or the burden of bad news, Verwoerd could not tell.
At last he lifted his head and said crisply, “We need someone to go after Fuchs. Someone who isn’t afraid of a fight.”
“But nobody knows where he’s gone,” Verwoerd said. “It’s an awfully big area, out there in the Belt. He’s not sending out a tracking beacon. He’s not even sending telemetry data. The IAA can’t find him.”
“He’ll run out of fuel sooner or later,” Humphries said. “He’ll have to come back to Ceres.”
“Maybe,” she said, uncertainly.
Pointing a finger at her as if he were pointing a pistol.
Humphries said, “I want somebody out there who can find him. And kill him. I want somebody who knows how to fight and isn’t afraid of being shot at.”
“A professional soldier,” Verwoerd said.
Humphries smiled thinly. “Yes. Like your boy-toy.”
She had known from the moment she’d heard about Fuchs’s actions that it would come down to this. “I agree,” she said, keeping her voice even, emotionless. “Harbin would be perfect for this task. But…” She let the word dangle in the air between them.
“But?” Humphries snapped. “But what?”
“He’ll want to be paid a lot more than he’s been getting.”
He stared at her for a moment. “Are you representing him now? Are you his goddamned agent?”
She made herself smile at him. “Let’s just say that I know him a lot better than I did a few weeks ago.”
CHAPTER 42
As they sped away from Ceres on Lubbock Lights, Fuchs familiarized himself with the crew that Nodon had recruited. Silent, blank-faced Asians, Mongols, descendents of Genghis Khan. They didn’t look particularly ferocious; they looked more like kids, students, fugitives from some high-tech training school. But they apparently knew their way around a fusion-powered spacecraft.
All the fusion ships were built along two or three basic designs, Fuchs knew. Lubbock Lights was a freighter, but now he had armed the vessel with three mining lasers taken from his own warehouse.
Once they were well under way, accelerating through the belt at a lunar one-sixth g, Fuchs called his crew into the galley. The seven of them crowded the little space, but they stood respectfully before him, their dark eyes showing no trace of emotion.
“You realize that we are outlaws now,” he began, without preamble. “Pirates. There is no turning back.”
Nodon spoke up. “We will follow you, sir. For us there is no other choice.”
Fuchs looked from one face to another. Young, all of them. Some with facial tattoos, all of them pierced here and their with plain metal adornments. Already embittered by the way the world had treated them. Nodon had given him their backgrounds. They had all come from poor families who struggled to send their children to university where they could learn how to become rich. All six of them had studied technical subjects, from computer design to electrical engineering to environmental sciences. All six of them had been told, upon graduation, that there were no jobs for them. The world was crumbling, their home cities were being abandoned because of drought and disastrous storms that flooded the parched valleys and washed away the farmlands instead of nourishing them. All six of their families became part of the huge, miserable, starving army of the homeless, wandering the stark, bitter land, reduced to begging or stealing or giving up to die on the roadside.
These are the statistics that I’ve read about, Fuchs realized. Ragged scarecrows who have lost their place in society, who have lost their families and their futures. The desperate ones.
He cleared his throat and resumed, “One day, I hope, we will be able to return to Earth as wealthy men and women. But that day may never come. We must live as best as we can, and accept whatever comes our way.”
Nodon said gravely, “That is what each of us has been doing, sir, for more than a year. Better to be here and fight for our lives than to be miserable beggars or prostitutes, kicked and beaten, dying slowly.”