Martin Humphries strode into the board room, decked out in a sky-blue business suit. Pancho clenched her fists. If he’s in mourning for Dan he sure ain’t showing it, she thought. None of them are.
Humphries nodded here and there, saying hello and making small talk as he made his way past the sideboard toward Pancho. He glanced once out the long window above the sideboard and seemed almost to wince at the view of the sea out there. Then he turned and came toward Pancho. Stopping a meter or so in front of her, Humphries looked Pancho up and down, the expression on his face pretty close to a sneer.
“Do you honestly think we’re going to allow a roughneck grease monkey to have a seat on this board?”
Suppressing an urge to punch him out, Pancho said tightly, “We’ll see purty soon, won’t we?”
“We certainly will.”
He was wearing his lifts, Pancho saw; still, Humphries was several centimeters shorter than she.
“What puzzles me,” she said looking down into his ice-gray eyes, “is how they can allow a convicted murderer t’ stay on the board.”
“I wasn’t convicted of murder!” Humphries snapped, keeping his voice low.
Pancho made a small shrug. “They found you guilty of causin’ Dan Randolph’s death, didn’t they?”
“I pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. That was the deal my lawyers set up for me.”
“Selene’s court was way too easy on you. I would’ve hanged you. And not by the neck, either.”
“They made me divest my holdings in Starpower!” he snarled. “Made me turn over my one-third to them!”
“And Astro,” Pancho corrected. “You can still make money off Dan’s dead body outta the profits Astro’s gonna be pullin’ in.”
“And they exiled me! Threw me out of Selene. Forbade me from returning for twenty years.” He glanced over his shoulder at the view of the sea through the long sweeping window like a man looking back at something chasing him.
“You got off light,” said Pancho. “Dr. Cardenas got a life sentence. She’ll never be allowed to work in her own nanolab again.”
“She was just as responsible for his death as I was. And so are you, for that matter.”
“Me?”
“You were the captain of the vessel. You could have turned back once you realized the radiation shield was failing.”
“Thanks to you.”
Humphries smirked at her. “If Randolph had brought a proper medical man aboard, if he hadn’t taken the ship before the IAA approved the flight-”
“That’s right,” Pancho growled, “blame the victim for the crime.”
“You didn’t even freeze him once he died. You didn’t even try to.”
“Wouldn’t have done any good,” Pancho said. “We couldn’t’ve got his core temperature down quick enough.”
They had thought about it, she and Mandy and Fuchs. They had even considered putting Dan’s body into a spacesuit and dunking him into one of the fuel tanks. But a quick calculation showed the cryogenic fuel would be used up by the time they reached the Moon and Dan’s body would thaw before they could transfer him to a proper dewar.
Humphries smiled slyly. “Or maybe you wanted him dead, so you could inherit from him?”
Pancho had her right fist cocked before she realized it. Humphries threw his hands up and scuttled several steps back from her. Everything stopped. The board room went absolutely quiet. All faces turned toward them.
With a deep, deliberate breath, Pancho put her hand down. Humphries straightened up, looking sheepish. The other directors turned back to their own conversations, trying to pretend that nothing had happened.
Scowling angrily, Humphries walked away from her. Pancho saw that most of the directors moved out of his way as he approached the sideboard. As if they didn’t want to be close enough to touch him or even have him breathe on them.
“I think we’d better start the meeting,” said a petite red-haired woman in a forest-green skirted suit.
The directors went to the long polished table in the middle of the room and began to take their chairs. Pancho watched uncertainly for a moment, then saw that two chairs were unoccupied: one at the head of the table and another at its foot. Remembering her childhood bible classes, she took the lowest chair. The redhead sat to the right of the empty chair at the table’s head; Humphries sat opposite her, his back to the window.