So he temporized. “Amanda, dearest… it wouldn’t be fair for me to ask you to live that way again. I’ve made a mess of things, it’s up to me to—”
“Lars, he’ll kill you!”
She was truly frightened, he saw.
“If you go back to the Belt by yourself,” Amanda said urgently, “he’ll have someone track you down and murder you.”
Fuchs remembered Humphries’s words: You’re a dead man, Fuchs.
“I can take care of myself,” he said grimly.
Amanda thought, I’ve got to go with him. Martin won’t strike at Lars if there’s a possibility of hurting me.
Aloud, she said to her husband, gently, soothingly, “I know you can take care of yourself, darling, but who’s going to take care of me?” And she reached up to stroke his cheek.
“You’d go with me?”
“Of course.”
“You want to go with me?” He was filled with joyful wonder at the idea.
“I want to be with you, Lars,” Amanda said softly, “wherever you go.”
To herself, though, she said, It’s me that Martin wants. I’m the cause of all this. I’m the reason my husband is in such danger.
And Fuchs was saying to himself, She wants to be away from Humphries. She’s afraid of him. She’s afraid that if I’m not near enough to protect her, he’ll steal her away from me.
And the embers of his anger burst into flaming rage again.
WALTZING MATILDA
The emergency lights came on, dim but better than utter darkness. George groped through the shadows along the narrow passageway from the galley to the closed hatch of the bridge. He tapped the code on the bulkhead keypad and the hatch popped open slightly.
At least there’s proper air pressure in the bridge, George thought as he pushed the hatch all the way open. Hatch wouldn’t have opened otherwise.
Nodon was sitting in the command pilot’s chair, eyes wide with shock or fright, hands racing along the console keyboard. The regular lights came back on, but they seemed weaker than usual.
“What th’ fook happened, mate?” George asked, sliding into the copilot’s chair.
“I got an electric shock,” said Nodon. “A spark jumped from the panel and the lights went out.”
George could see the kid was checking out all the ship’s systems. The control panel’s displays flickered almost too quickly for the eye to register as Nodon raced through one system diagnostic after another.
The kid’s good, George thought. I made the right decision when I hired him.
Nodon was a skinny youngster who’d claimed to be twenty-five, but George figured the kid was barely out of his teens. No real experience, outside of working on computers back on Ceres, but he had an intensity, a bright eager desire to succeed, that made George pick him as his crewman for this mining job. George called him “Turk” but Nodon was actually a Mongol, with the decorative spiral tattoos on both his cheeks to prove it. He claimed he’d been born on the Moon, of miners who’d fled Earth when the Gobi Desert engulfed the grasslands of their ancestral homeland. He was all bone and sinew, skin the color of old parchment, head shaved bald, big expressive deep brown eyes. He’d look damned handsome if it weren’t for those bloody scars, George thought. He was trying to grow a moustache; so far it was nothing more than a few wisps that made his upper lip look dirty.
Sitting tensely in the command chair, flicking through diagnostics almost faster than George could follow, Nodon wore only a comfortable sleeveless mesh shirt over a pair of ragged shorts.
“The power generator is off-line,” he said. “That’s why the lights went out.”
“We’re on batteries now?” George asked.
“Yes, and—”
The alarms hooted again and George felt his ears pop. The airtight hatch slammed shut once more.
“Jeezus God!” George shouted. “The bugger’s shootin’ at us!”
Dorik Harbin scowled at his display screens. His first shot should have taken out the ship’s habitat module, but they’d increased their spin just a split second before he’d fired. He’d hit something, he was certain of that, but it wasn’t a fatal hit.
It had taken a few minutes for the big laser to recharge; this had given Harbin enough time to choose his target carefully. He had the full schematics of Waltzing Matilda on one of the screens, courtesy of Humphries Space Systems. Their intelligence data was well-nigh perfect. Harbin knew where to find the ships he went after, and what each ship’s layout was.