“My partner was dying!” the blond said, his voice ragged. “That motherfucking snake bit him!”
“And you let Ms. Cunningham get away,” Humphries repeated, icily.
“I had to take him to the hospital. He would’ve died otherwise.”
“You didn’t phone me, or security, or anyone who might have prevented her leaving.”
“I’m phoning you now,” the blond said, with some heat. “They’re just about making their rendezvous with the Starpower ship. You can call the control center and have them abort the mission.”
“Can I?”
“There’s still time.”
Humphries clicked off the connection. Stupid clod, he thought. I send him to do one simple thing and he fucks it up completely.
“Abort the mission,” he said aloud. Then he shook his head. I should call the control center and tell them that Dan Randolph is hijacking my vessel and taking the woman I love alone with him. That would be a lovely item for the scandal nets. Everyone would laugh themselves sick at me.
He leaned back in his contoured chair, but its softly yielding padding failed to soothe him. Amanda’s running off with Randolph. He’s probably been hot for her all the time, just waiting to get her away from me. Well, now they can be together. She prefers him to me. So she can die with him.
His teeth hurt. With some surprise, Humphries realized that he’d clamped his jaw so tight it was making his whole head ache. His neck and shoulders were painfully stiff with tension. His fists were clenched so tightly he could feel his fingernails cutting into his palms.
Amanda’s gone off with him. I’ll acquire Astro, but I’ve lost her forever. They’ll die together. It’s not my fault. I didn’t want to kill anybody. They’re doing it to themselves. She’s killing herself.
He wished he could cry. Instead, he glanced at the list of major Astro stockholders that was displayed on his desktop screen. And he punched his right fist into the screen, exploding it in a shower of sparks and plastic shards.
STARPOWER 1
Fuchs met them at the spaceport, wondering why the four of them were going to the ship a bare hour before it was due to leave orbit and head out to the Belt.
“There’s been a change in plans, Lars,” Dan told him. “We’re going along, too.”
The young man’s dark brows lifted halfway to his scalp. “The IAA has approved this?”
“That doesn’t make any difference,” Dan said as Amanda and Pancho clambered into the tractor waiting to take them to the jumper out on the launch pad. “We’re going.”
Fuchs hesitated, standing in the open airlock hatch of the tractor.
“We’re going,” Dan repeated. “With you or without you.”
A slow smile spread across Fuchs’s broad face. “With me,” he said, and hopped up into the tractor, clearing its six steps with ease.
Dan grinned and resisted the urge to imitate the younger man’s athleticism. Amanda and Pancho had taken the two rear seats, Fuchs the one next to the hatch. Dan sat behind the driver’s seat as the driver herself closed the airtight hatch and then checked out the cab’s pressurization. She got behind the wheel and slipped on her headset.
She’s waiting for authorization from the controller to go out, Dan knew. If they’re going to stop us, this’d be the easiest time for them to do it.
But after a few moments’ wait, she put the tractor in gear and rolled to the garage’s airlock. A few minutes later they were at the jumper, connecting the flexible access tube from the tractor’s hatch to the airlock hatch on the jumper’s crew module. In their flight coveralls, the four of them stepped carefully along the springy plastic of the narrow tube, hands touching the walls, heads bent slightly to keep from brushing the low ceiling.
Small as it was, the jumper’s lab module was better than the claustrophobic tube. It was little more than a few square meters of metal deck enclosed in a glassteel bubble. A control console stood up front on a waist-high pedestal. Pancho went to the control console and pulled on one of the headsets hanging there; Amanda took up her post on Pancho’s right.