“What do you mean?”
“Run silent, run deep.” With a deft finger, Sam turned off the ship’s tracking beacon and telemetry transmitter.
“Sam! The controllers at Ceres will think we’ve been destroyed!”
He grinned wickedly. “Let ’em. If they don’t know where we are, they can’t point Jill at us.”
“But Fuchs won’t know where we are.”
“Oh yes he will,” Sam insisted. “Somebody at Ceres has already given him our flight plan. Big George, probably.”
“Sam,” I said patiently, “you filed that flight plan with the IAA. They’ll tell Judge Meyers. She’ll come out looking for you.”
“Yeah, but she’ll be several days behind. By that time the IAA controllers’ll tell her we’ve disappeared. She’ll go home and weep for me.”
“Or start searching for your remains.”
He shot me an annoyed glance. “Anyway, we’ll meet with Fuchs before she gets here, most likely.”
“You hope.”
His grin wobbled a little.
I thought the most likely scenario was that Fuchs would ignore us and Judge Meyers would search for us, hoping that Sam’s disappearance didn’t mean he was dead. Once she found us, I figured, she’d kill Sam herself.
It was eerie out there in the Belt. Flatlanders back on Earth think that the Asteroid Belt is a dangerous region, a-chock with boulders, so crowded that you have to maneuver like a kid in a computer game to avoid getting smashed.
Actually, it’s empty. Dark and cold and four times farther from the Sun than the Earth is. Most of the asteroids are the size of dust flakes. The valuable ones, maybe a few meters to a kilometer or so across, are so few and far between that you have to hunt for them. You can cruise through the Belt blindfolded and your chances of getting hit even by a pebble-sized ’roid are pretty close to nil.
Of course, a pebble could shatter your ship if it hit you with enough velocity.
So we were running silent, but following the flight plan Sam had registered with the IAA. We got to the first rock Sam had scheduled and loitered around it for half a day. No sign of Fuchs. If he was anywhere nearby, he was running as silently as we were.
“He’s gotta be somewhere around here,” Sam said as we broke orbit and headed for the next asteroid on his list. “He’s gotta be.”
I could tell that Sam was feeling Judge Meyers’s eager breath on the back of his neck.
Me, I had a different problem. I wanted to get that message chip away from him long enough to send a copy of it to Martin Humphries. With a suitable request for compensation, of course. Fifty million would do nicely, I thought. A hundred mill would be even better.
But how to get the chip out of Sam’s pocket? He kept it on his person all the time; even slept with it.
So it floored me when, as we were eating breakfast in Achernar’s cramped little galley on our third day out, Sam fished the fingernail-sized chip out of his breast pocket and handed it to me.
“Gar,” he said solemnly, “I want you to hide this someplace where nobody can find it, not even me.”
I was staggered. “Why… ?”
“Just a precaution,” he said, his face more serious than I’d ever seen it before. “When Fuchs shows up things might get rough. I don’t want to know where the chip is.”
“But the whole point of this flight is to deliver it to him.”
He nodded warily. “Yeah, Humphries must know we’re looking for Fuchs. He’s got IAA people on his payroll. Hell, half the people in Ceres might be willing to rat on us. Money talks, pal. Humphries might not know why we’re looking for Fuchs, but he knows we’re trying to find him.”
“Humphries wants to find Fuchs, too,” I said. “And kill him, no matter what he promised his wife.”
“Damned right. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a ship tailing us.”
“I haven’t seen anything on the radar plot.”
“So what? A stealth ship could avoid radar. But not the hair on the back of my neck.”
“You think we’re being followed?”
“I’m sure of it.”
By the seven sinners of Cincinnati, I thought. This is starting to look like a class reunion! We’re jinking around in the Belt, looking for Fuchs. Judge Meyers is on her way, with a complete wedding party. And now Sam thinks there’s an HSS stealth ship lurking out there somewhere, waiting for us to find Fuchs so they can pounce on him.
But all that paled into insignificance for me as I stared down at the tiny chip Sam had placed in the palm of my hand.
I had it in my grasp! Now the trick was to contact Humphries without letting Sam know of it.
I couldn’t sleep that night. We were approaching the second asteroid on Sam’s itinerary on a dead-reckoning trajectory. No active signals going out from the ship except for the short-range collision avoidance radar. We’d take up a parking orbit around the unnamed rock mid-morning tomorrow.
I waited until my eyes were adapted to the darkness of the sleeping compartment, then peeked down over the edge of my bunk to see if Sam was really asleep. He was on his side, face to the bulkhead, his legs pulled up slightly in a sort of fetal position. Breathing deep and regular.
He’s asleep, I told myself. As quietly as a wraith I slipped out of my bunk and tiptoed in my bare feet to the cockpit, carefully shutting the hatches of the sleeping compartment and the galley, so there’d be no noise to waken Sam.
I’m pretty good at decrypting messages. It’s a useful talent for a con man, and I had spent long hours at computers during my one and only jail stretch to learn the tricks of the trade.
Of course, I could just offer the chip for sale to Humphries without knowing what was on it. He’d pay handsomely for a message that his wife wanted to give to Lars Fuchs.
But if I knew the contents of the message, I reasoned, I could most likely double or triple the price. So I started to work on decrypting it. How hard could it be? I asked myself as I slipped the chip into the ship’s main computer. She probably did the encoding herself, not trusting anybody around her. She’d been an astronaut in her earlier years, I knew, but not particularly a computer freak. Should be easy.
It wasn’t. It took all night and I still didn’t get all the way through the trapdoors and blind alleys she’d built into her message. Smart woman, I realized, my respect for Amanda Cunningham Humphries notching up with every bead of sweat I oozed.
At last the hash that had been filling the central screen on the cockpit control panel cleared away, replaced by an image of her face.
That face. I just stared at her. She was so beautiful, so sad and vulnerable. It brought a lump to my throat. I’ve seen beautiful women, plenty of them, and bedded more than my share. But gazing at Amanda’s face, there in the quiet hum of the dimmed cockpit, I felt something more than desire, more than animal hunger.
Could it be love? I shook my head like a man who’s just been knocked down by a punch. Don’t be an idiot! I snarled at myself. You’ve been hanging around Sam too long; you’re becoming a romantic jackass just like he is.
Love has nothing to do with this. That beautiful face is going to earn you millions, I told myself, as soon as you decrypt this message of hers.
And then I smelled the fragrance of coffee brewing. Sam was in the galley, right behind the closed hatch of the cockpit, clattering dishes and silverware. In a weird way I felt almost relieved. Quickly I popped the chip out of the computer and slipped it into the waistband of the under-shorts I was wearing.
Just in time. Sam pushed the hatch open and handed me a steaming mug of coffee.
“You’re up early,” he said, with a groggy smile.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I answered truthfully. That’s where the truth ended. “I’ve been trying to think of where I could stash the chip.”