The comm system pinged again and suddenly the screen split. The other half showed Judge Meyers, all smiles, obviously in a compartment aboard a spacecraft.
“Sam, we’re here!” she said brightly. “At The Rememberer. It was so brilliant of you to pick the sculpture for our wedding ceremony!”
“Who the hell is that?” Fuchs roared.
For once in his life, Sam actually looked embarrassed. “Um … my, uh, fiancée,” he stumbled. “I’m supposed to be getting married in two days.”
The expression on Fuchs’s face was almost comical. Here he’s threatening to blow us into a cloud of ionized gas and all of a sudden he’s got an impatient bride-to-be on the same communications frequency.
“Married?” he bellowed.
“It’s a long story,” said Sam, red-cheeked.
Fuchs glared and glowered while Judge Meyers’s round freckled face looked puzzled. “Sam? Why don’t you answer? I know where you are. If you don’t come out to The Rememberer I’m going to bring the whole wedding party to you, minister and boys’ choir and all.”
“I’m busy, Jill,” Sam said.
“Boys’ choir?” Fuchs ranted. “Minister?”
Not even Sam could carry on two conversations at the same time, I thought. But I was wrong.
“Jill, I’m in the middle of something,” he said, then immediately switched to Fuchs: “I can’t hang around here; I’ve got to get to my wedding.”
“Who are you talking to?” Judge Meyers asked.
“What wedding?” Fuchs demanded. “Do you mean to tell me you’re getting married out here in the Belt?”
“That’s exactly what I mean to tell you,” Sam replied to him.
“Tell who?” Judge Meyers asked. “What’s going on, Sam?”
“Bah!” Fuchs snapped. “You’re crazy! All of you!”
I saw a flash of light out of the corner of my eye. Through the cockpit’s forward window I watched a small, stiletto-slim spacecraft slowly emerge from the cloud of pebbles surrounding the asteroid, plasma exhaust pulsing-from its thruster and a blood-red pencil-beam of laser light probing out ahead of it.
Fuchs bellowed, “I knew it!” and let loose a string of curses that would make an angel vomit.
Sam was swearing too. “Those sonsofbitches! They knew we’d be here and they were just laying in wait in case Fuchs showed up.”
“I’ll get you for this, Gunn!” Fuchs howled.
“I didn’t know!” Sam yelled back.
Judge Meyers looked somewhere between puzzled and alarmed. “Sam, what’s happening? What’s going on?”
The ambush craft was rising out of the rubble cloud that surrounded the asteroid. I could see Fuchs’s ship through the window now because he was shooting back at the ambusher, his own red pencil-beam from a spotting laser lighting up the cloud of pebbles like a Christmas ornament.
“We’d better get out of here, Sam,” I suggested at the top of my lungs.
“How?” he snapped. “Fuchs took out the thruster.”
“You mean we’re stuck here?”
“Smack in the middle of their battle,” he answered, nodding. “And our orbit’s taking us between the two of them.”
“Do something!” I screamed. “They’re both shooting at us!”
Sam dove for the hatch. “Get into your suit, Gar. Quick.”
I never suited up quicker. But it seemed to take hours. With our main thruster shot away, dear old Achernar was locked into its orbit around the asteroid. Fuchs and the ambusher were slugging it out, maneuvering and firing at each other with us in the middle. I don’t think they were deliberately trying to hit us, but they weren’t going out of their way to avoid us, either. While I wriggled into my spacesuit and fumbled through the checkout procedure Achernar lurched and quivered again and again.
“They’re slicing us to ribbons,” I said, trying to keep from babbling.
Sam was fully suited up; just the visor of his helmet was open. “You got the chip on you?”
For an instant I thought I’d left it in the cockpit. I nearly panicked. Then I remembered it was still in the waistband, of my shorts. At least I hoped it was still there.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got it.”
Sam snapped his visor closed, then reached over to me and slammed mine shut. With a gloved hand he motioned for me to follow him to the airlock.
“We’re going outside?” I squeaked. I was really scared. A guy could get killed!
“You want to stay here while they take potshots at us?” Sam’s voice crackled in my helmet earphones.
“But why are they shooting at us?” I asked. Actually, I was talking, babbling really, because if I didn’t I probably would’ve started screeching like a demented baboon.
“Fuchs thinks we led him into a trap,” Sam said, pushing me into the airlock, “and the bastard who’s trying to bushwhack him doesn’t want any living witnesses.”
He squeezed into the airlock with me, cycled it, and pushed me through the outer hatch when it opened.
All of a sudden I was hanging in emptiness. My stomach heaved, my eyes blurred. I mean there was nothing out there except a zillion stars but they were so far away and I was falling, I could feel it, falling all the way to infinity. I think I screamed. Or at least gasped like a drowning man.
“It’s okay, Gar,” Sam said, “I’ve got you.”
He grasped me by the wrist and, using the jetpack on his suit’s back, towed me away from the riddled hulk of Achernar. We glided into the cloud of pebbles surrounding the asteroid. I could feel them pinging off my suit’s hard shell; one of them banged into my visor, but it was a fairly gentle collision, no damage—except to the back of my head: I flinched so sharply that I whacked my head against the helmet hard enough to give me a concussion, almost, despite the helmet’s padded interior.
Sam hunkered us down into the loose pile of rubble that was the main body of the asteroid. “Safer here than in the ship,” he told me.
I burrowed into that beanbag as deeply as I could, scooping out pebbles with both hands, digging like a terrified gopher on speed. I would’ve dug all the way back to Earth if I could have.
Fuchs and the ambusher were still duking it out, with a spare laser blast now and then hitting Achernar as it swung slowly around the ’roid. The ship looked like a shambles, big gouges torn through its hull, chunks torn off and spinning lazily alongside its main structure.
They hadn’t destroyed the radio, though. In my helmet earphones I could hear Judge Meyers’s voice, harsh with static:
“Sam, if this is another scheme of yours …”
Sam tried to explain to her what was happening, but I don’t think he got through. She kept asking what was going on and then, after a while, her voice cut off altogether.
Sam said to me, “Either she’s sore at me and she’s leaving the Belt, or she’s worried about me and she’s coming here to see what’s happening.”
I hoped for the latter, of course. Our suits had air regenerators, I knew, but they weren’t reliable for more than twenty-four hours, at best. From the looks of poor old Achernar, we were going to need rescuing and damned soon, too.
We still couldn’t really see Fuchs’s ship; it was either too far away in that dark emptiness or he was jinking around too much for us to get a visual fix on him. I saw flashes of light that might have been puffs from maneuvering thrusters, or they might have been hits from the other guy’s laser. The ambusher’s craft was close enough for us to make out, most of the time. He was viffing and slewing this way and that, bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter trying to avoid his opponent’s punches.
But then the stiletto flared into sudden brilliance, a flash so bright it hurt my eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut and saw the afterimage burning against my closed lids.