“By killing Randolph?”
“Dan’s trying to help them,” she said, looking up at him at last, her face streaked with tears. “I don’t want them helped! They made this mess. They shut me out of their lives. Let them stew in their own juices! They deserve whatever they get.”
Stavenger shook his head, bewildered. He handed Cardenas a tissue and she dabbed at her reddened eyes.
“I’m going to recommend that you be placed under house arrest, Kris. You’ll be able to go anywhere in Selene except the nanotech lab.”
She nodded wordlessly.
“And Humphries?” George asked, still standing by the door.
“Same thing, I suppose. But he’s right, the smug slimebag. We don’t have capital punishment; we don’t even have a jail here in Selene.”
“House arrest for him would be a lark,” George said.
Stavenger looked disgusted. But then his chin came up and his eyes brightened. “Unless we take it out on his wallet.”
“Huh?”
With a slow smile spreading across his youthful face, Stavenger said, “If he’s found guilty of murder, or even attempted murder, maybe the court can divest him of his share of Starpower and keep him from taking over Astro Corporation.”
George huffed. “I’d rather punch his ribs in.”
“So would I,” Stavenger admitted. “But I think he’d rather have his ribs punched in than to have to give up Astro and Starpower.”
HAVEN
“There it is,” Pancho sang out. “How’s that for navigation?”
Dan crouched slightly behind the command chair and peered through the window. The asteroid was visible to their naked eyes now against the distant glow of the Sun’s zodiacal light, a dumbbell-shaped dark mass tumbling slowly end over end.
Fuchs stood beside Dan, his hands on the back of Amanda’s chair.
“It’s two bodies in contact,” he said. “Like Castallia and several others.”
“Looks like a peanut,” said Dan.
“A peanut made of rock,” Pancho said.
“No, no,” Fuchs corrected, “a peanut made up of thousands of little stones, chondrules, that are barely holding together in their very weak mutual gravitational attraction.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Look, you can see craters on the surface.”
Dan strained his eyes. How in hell can he see craters on that black slug in this dim lighting?
“They have no rims,” Fuchs went on, talking fast in his excitement. “Smaller objects have collided with the asteroid but they don’t make impact craters as they would on a solid body. They simply burrow into the loose rubble.”
“Same as we’re gonna do,” Pancho said. “Our storm cellar,” Amanda added, glancing up at Fuchs. It’s our storm cellar only if he’s right, Dan added silently. If that chunk out there really is a beanbag and we can dig into it until the storm’s over. Aloud, he asked, “How long before the radiation starts to build up?”
“Four hours, plus a few minutes,” Pancho said. “Plenty of time.” You hope, Dan said to himself.
She established Starpower 1 in a close orbit around the tumbling asteroid, and then the four of them floated weightlessly down to the airlock, where Dan and Fuchs had already assembled six emergency tanks of air. As they wriggled into their spacesuits Fuchs begged to go out the airlock first, but Dan overruled him.
“Pancho goes first, Lars. You’re still a tenderfoot out there.”
Through his fishbowl helmet, Fuchs’s broad face frowned in puzzlement. “But my feet are fine,” he said. “Why are you worried about my feet?”
Dan and Pancho both laughed, but Amanda shot an annoyed glance at Dan and said, “It’s an American expression, Lars. From their western frontier, long ago.”
“Yep,” Dan conceded. “I learned it from Wild Bill Hickok.”
Getting serious, Pancho said, “We can go together, Lars and me— whenever you guys are ready to stop horsin’ around.”
“Aye-aye cap’n,” said Dan, touching his helmet with a gloved hand in a sloppy salute.
Pancho and Fuchs went through the airlock and, once it cycled, Dan and Amanda. While he stood in the cramped metal chamber, listening to the air-pump’s clatter dwindling to silence, he heard Fuchs’s excited voice through his helmet speaker:
“It’s like a sandpile!”
Dan offered a swift thanks to whatever gods there be. Maybe we’ll all live through this, after all.