What worried her was Lars’s reaction. He would be dead-set against her going to Selene, to Humphries’s home territory. So, after two days of inner turmoil, Amanda decided to go. Without telling Lars.
A total of twenty-two ships made rendezvous above the ruined base on Vesta. The dust cloud from Fuchs’s attack had finally settled, but Harbin could see nothing of the base, not even the crater in which it had been situated. It was all obliterated by a new set of overlapping craters, fresh, sharp, raw-looking circular scars on the asteroid’s dark surface. They reminded Harbin of the scars left on sperm whales by the suckers of giant squids’ tentacles.
With no little bit of irony, Dorik Harbin considered his position as he stood on the bridge of Shanidar. A man who treasured his solitude, who had never wanted to be dependent on anyone else, now he was the commander of an entire fleet of spacecraft: attack ships, tankers, even surveillance drones that were spreading across the Belt seeking one infinitesimal speck in all that dark emptiness: Lars Fuchs.
Although he far preferred to work alone, Harbin had been forced to admit that he could not find Fuchs by himself. The Belt was too big, the quarry too elusive. And, of course, Fuchs was aided covertly by other rock rats who gave him fuel and food and information while they secretly applauded his one-man war against Humphries Space Systems. Probably Astro Corporation was also helping Fuchs. There was no evidence of it, Harbin knew; no outright proof that Astro was supplying the renegade with anything more than gleeful congratulations on his continuing attacks.
But Humphries himself was certain that Astro was behind Fuchs’s success. Diane had told Harbin that Humphries was wild with rage, willing now to spend every penny he had to track down Fuchs and eliminate him, once and for all. This armada was the result: its cost to Humphries was out of all proportion to the damage that Fuchs had done, but Humphries wanted Fuchs destroyed, no matter what the cost, Diane said.
Diane. Harbin reflected soberly that she had become a part of his life. I’ve become dependent on her, he realized. Even with the distance between them, she protected him against Humphries’s frustrated anger. She was the one who had convinced Humphries to give Harbin command of this all-out campaign against Fuchs. She was the one who would be waiting for him when he returned with Fuchs’s dead body.
Well, he thought as he surveyed the display screens showing a scattering of his other ships, now I have the tools I need to finish the job. It’s only a matter of time.
The surveillance probes were already on their way to quarter the Belt with their sensors. Harbin gave the orders to his fleet to move out and start the hunt.
Satisfaction showed clearly on Martin Humphries’s face as he sat down at the head of the long dining table in his mansion. Diane Verwoerd was the only other person at the table, already seated at his right.
“Sorry I’m late for lunch,” Humphries said, nodding to the servant waiting to pour the wine. “I was on the phone with Doug Stavenger.”
Verwoerd knew her boss expected her to ask what the call was about, but she said nothing.
“Well, he’s done it,” Humphries said at last, just a little bit nettled. “Stavenger’s pulled it off. We’re going to have a peace conference right here at Selene. The world government’s agreed to send their number-two man, Willi Dieterling.”
Diane Verwoerd made herself look impressed. “The man who negotiated the Middle East settlement?”
“The very same,” said Humphries.
“And the rock rats are sending a representative?” she prompted.
“Three people. That big Australian oaf and two assistants.”
“Who’ll represent Astro?”
“Probably Pancho,” he said lightly. “She’s the real power on the board these days.”
“It should be interesting,” said Verwoerd.
“It should be,” Humphries agreed. “It certainly should.”
Lars Fuchs scowled at his visitor. Yves St. Claire was one of his oldest and most trusted friends; Fuchs had known the Quebecois since their university days together in Switzerland. Yet now St. Claire was stubbornly refusing to help him.
“I need the fuel,” Fuchs said. “Without it, I’m dead.”
The two men stood in Nautilus’s cramped galley, away from the crew. Fuchs had given them orders to leave him alone with his old friend. St. Claire stood in front of the big freezer, his arms folded obstinately across his chest. When they had been students together he had been slim and handsome, with a trim little pencil moustache and a smooth line of patter for the women, despite his uncouth accent. In those days his clothes had always been in the latest fashion; his friends joked that he bankrupted his family with his wardrobe. During his years of prospecting in the Belt, however, he had allowed himself to get fat. Now he looked like a prosperous middle-aged bourgeois shopkeeper, yet his carefully draped tunic of sky blue was designed to minimize his expanding waistline.
“Lars,” said St. Claire, “it is impossible. Even for you, old friend, I can’t spare the fuel. I wouldn’t have enough left to get back to Ceres.”
Fuchs, dressed as usual in a black pullover and baggy slacks, took a long breath before answering.
“The difference is,” he said, “that you can send out a distress call and a tanker will come out for you. I can’t.”
“Yes, a tanker will come out for me. And do you know how much that will cost?”
“You’re talking about money. I’m talking about my life.”
St. Clair made a Gallic shrug.
Since the attack on Vesta Fuchs had survived by poaching fuel and other supplies from friendly prospectors and other ships plying the Belt. A few of them gave freely; most were reluctant and had to be convinced. Amanda regularly sent out schedules for the prospectors, miners, tankers and supply vessels that left Ceres. Fuchs planted remote transceivers on minor asteroids, squirted the asteroids’ identification numbers to Amanda in bursts of supercompressed messages, then picked up her information from the miniaturized transceivers the next time he swung past those rocks. It was an intricate chess game, moving the transceivers before Humphries’s snoops could locate them and use them to bait a trap for him.
Humphries’s ships went armed now, and seldom alone. It was becoming almost impossibly dangerous to try to hit them. Now and again Fuchs commandeered supplies from Astro tankers and freighters. Their captains always complained and always submitted to Fuchs’s demands under protest, but they were under orders from Pancho not to resist. The cost of these “thefts” was submicroscopic in Astro’s ledgers.
Despite everything, Fuchs was badly surprised that even his old friend was being stubborn.
Trying to hold on to his temper, he said placatingly, “Yves, this is literally a matter of life and death to me.”
“But it is not necessary,” St. Clair said, waving both hands in the air. “You don’t need to—”
“I’m fighting your fight,” Fuchs said. “I’m trying to keep Humphries from turning you into his vassals.”
St. Clair cocked an eyebrow. “Ah, Lars, mon vieux. In all this fighting you’ve killed friends of mine. Friends of ours, Lars.”
“That couldn’t be helped.”
“They were construction workers. They never did you any harm.”
“They were working for Humphries.”
“You didn’t give them a chance. You slaughtered them without mercy.”
“We’re in a war,” Fuchs snapped. “In war there are casualties. It can’t be helped.”