Fuchs nodded. “Very well, then. We will take what we need, what we want. We will not allow others to enslave us.”
Brave words, he knew. As Nodon translated them to the crew, Fuchs wondered if he himself truly believed them. He wondered which of these blank-faced strangers would turn him in for a reward. He decided that he would have to protect his back at all times.
The Asians spoke among themselves in harsh whispers. Then Nodon said, “There is one problem, sir.”
“A problem?” Fuchs snapped. “What?”
“The name of this ship. It is not appropriate. It is not a fortunate name.”
Fuchs thought, It’s a downright silly name. Lubbock Lights. He had no idea who had named the ship or why.
“What do you propose?” he asked.
Nodon glanced at the others, then said, “That is not for us to say, sir. You are the captain; you must make the decision.”
Again, Fuchs looked from face to impassive face. Young as they were, they had learned to hide their feelings well. What’s going on behind their masks? he wondered. Is this a test? What do they expect from me? More than a name for this ship. They’re watching, judging, evaluating me. I’m supposed to be their leader; they want to see the quality of my leadership.
A name for the ship. An appropriate, fortunate name.
A single word escaped his lips. “Nautilus.”
They looked puzzled. At least I’ve broken their shell a little, Fuchs thought.
He explained, “The Nautilus was a submarine used by its captain and crew to destroy evil ships and wreak vengeance on wrongdoers.”
Nodon frowned a little, then translated to the others. There was a little jabbering back and forth, but after a few moments they were all bobbing their heads in agreement. A couple of them even smiled.
“Nautilus is a good name,” said Nodon.
Fuchs nodded. “Nautilus it will be, then.” He had no intention of telling them that the vessel was fictional, or how it—and its captain—came to their end.
Amanda woke up with a headache throbbing behind her eyes. She turned and saw that Lars was not in bed with her. And the wall-screen showed seven messages waiting. Strange that there was no sound from the phone. Lars must have muted it, she thought.
Sitting up in the bed, she saw that he was not in the one-room apartment. Her heart sank.
“Lars,” she called softly. There was no answer. He’s gone, she knew. He’s gone from me. For good, this time.
The first message on the list was from him. Barely able to speak the command, her voice trembled so badly, she told the computer to put it on the screen.
Lars was sitting at the desk in the warehouse, looking as grim as death. He wore an old turtleneck shirt, dead black, and shapeless baggy slacks. His eyes were unfathomable.
“Amanda, my dearest,” he said, “I must leave you. By the time you get this message I will be gone. There is no other way, none that I can see. Go to Selene, where Pancho can protect you. And no matter what you hear about me, remember that I love you. No matter what I have done or will do, I do it because I love you and I know that as long as you are near me your life is in danger. Good-bye, darling. I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. Goodbye.”
Without realizing it, she told the computer to rerun his message. Then again. But by then she couldn’t see the screen for the tears that filled her eyes.
CHAPTER 43
She used her maiden name now: Amanda Cunningham. It wasn’t that she wanted to hide her marriage to Lars Fuchs; everybody on Ceres, every rock rat in the Belt knew she was his wife. But ever since Fuchs had taken off into the depths of space, she had worked on her own to establish herself and to achieve her goals. She sold off Helvetia, Ltd., to Astro Corporation for a pittance. Pancho, for once, outmaneuvered Humphries and convinced the Astro board of directors that this was a bargain they could not refuse.
“Besides,” Pancho pointed out to the board, staring straight at Humphries across the table from her, “we should be competing out there in the Belt. It’s where the natural resources are, and that’s where the real wealth comes from.”
Glad to be rid of Helvetia, Amanda watched Pancho begin to develop the warehouse into a profitable facility for supplying, repairing and maintaining the ships that plied the Belt. She lived off the income from the Astro stock that she had acquired from the sale, and concentrated her efforts on another objective, one that had originally been Lars’s goaclass="underline" his idea of getting the rock rats to form some kind of government for themselves so they could begin to establish a modicum of law and order on Ceres. The independent-minded prospectors and miners had been dead-set against any form of government, at first. They saw laws as restrictions on their freedom; order as strangling their wild times when they put in at Ceres for R&R.
But as more and more ships were attacked they began to understand how vulnerable they were. A war was blazing across the Belt, with HSS attacking the independents, trying to drive them out of the Belt, while Fuchs singlehandedly fought back against HSS ships, swooping out of nowhere to cripple or destroy them.
In Selene, Martin Humphries howled with frustrated anger as his costs for operating in the Belt escalated over and again. It became increasingly expensive to hire crews to work HSS ships, and neither the IAA nor Harbin nor any of the other mercenaries that Humphries hired could find Fuchs and kill him.
“They’re helping him!” Humphries roared time and again. “Those goddamned rock rats are harboring him, supplying him, helping him to knock off my ships.”
“It’s worse than that,” Diane Verwoerd retorted. “The rock rats are arming their ships now. They’re shooting back—ineptly, for the most part. But it’s getting more dangerous out there.”
Humphries hired still more mercenaries to protect his ships and seek out Lars Fuchs. To no avail.
The people who, like Amanda, actually lived on Ceres—the maintenance technicians and warehouse operators and shopkeepers, bartenders, even the prostitutes—they gradually began to see that they badly needed some kind of law and order. Ceres was becoming a dangerous place. Mercenary soldiers and outright thugs swaggered through the dusty tunnels, making life dangerous for anyone who got in their way. Both HSS and Astro hired “security” people to protect their growing assets of facilities and ships. Often enough the security people fought each other in the tunnels, the Pub, or the warehouses and repair shops.
Big George Ambrose returned to Ceres, his arm regrown, with a contract to work as a technical supervisor for Astro.
“No more mining for me,” he told his friends at the Pub. “I’m a fookin’ executive now.”
But he brawled with the roughest of them. Men and women alike began to carry hand lasers as sidearms.
At last, Amanda got most of Ceres’s population to agree to a “town meeting” of every adult who lived on the asteroid. Not even the Pub was big enough to hold all of them, so the meeting was held electronically, each individual in their own quarters, all linked through the interactive phone system.
Amanda wore the turquoise dress she had bought at Selene as she sat at the desk in her quarters and looked up at the wallscreen. Down in the comm center, Big George was serving as the meeting’s moderator, deciding who would talk to the group, and in which order. He had promised, at Amanda’s insistence, that everyone who wanted to speak would get his or her turn. “But it’s goin’ t’be a bloody long night,” he predicted.
It was. Everyone had something to say, even though many of them repeated ideas and positions already discussed several times over. Through the long, long meeting—sometimes strident, often boring—Amanda sat and carefully listened to each and every one of them.