“How close to Ceres?”
Nodon tapped at the keyboard. “Seventy thousand kilometers, plus or minus three thousand.”
George scratched at his beard. “Close enough to contact ’em with our suit radios, just about.”
“Perhaps,” said Nodon. “If we were still alive by then.”
“We’d be pretty skinny.”
“We would be dead.”
“So,” George asked, “what alternatives do we have?” Nodon said, “I have gone through all the possibilities. We have enough propellant remaining for only a short burst, nowhere nearly long enough to cut our transit time back to Ceres to anything useful.”
“But the thruster’s bunged up, useless.”
“Perhaps we could repair it.”
“Besides, if we use the propellant for thrust we won’t have anything left for the power generator. No power for life support. lights out.”
“No,” Nodon corrected. “I have reserved enough of the remaining propellant to keep the power generator running. We are okay there. We won’t run short of electrical power.”
“That’s something,” George huffed. “When our corpses arrive back in Ceres space the fookin’ ship’ll be well lit.”
“Perhaps we can repair the rocket thruster,” Nodon repeated.
George scratched at his beard again. It itched as if some uninvited guests had made their home in it. “I’m too fookin’ tired to go out again and look at the thruster. Gotta get some shut-eye first.”
Nodding his agreement, Nodon added, “And a meal.”
Surveying the depleted list on the galley inventory screen, George muttered, “Such as it is.”
CHAPTER 22
Amanda looked up from her screen and smiled as Fuchs entered their one-room apartment. He did not smile back at her. He had spent the morning inspecting the ruins of Helvetia’s warehouse. The fire had turned the rock-walled chamber into an oven, melting what it did not burn outright. Before it consumed all the oxygen in the cave and died out, it reduced all of Fuchs’s stock, all that he had worked for, all that he had planned and hoped for, to nothing but ashes and twisted stumps of melted metal. If the airtight hatches hadn’t held, the fire would easily have spread down the tunnels and killed everyone in Ceres.
Fuchs trembled with rage at the thought. The murdering vermin didn’t worry about that. They didn’t care. So everyone in Ceres dies, what is that to Humphries? What does it matter to him, so long as he gets his way and removes the thorn in his side?
I am that thorn, Fuchs told himself. I am only a little inconvenience, a minor nuisance in his grandiose plans for conquest.
Thinking of the blackened, ruined warehouse, Fuchs said to himself, This thorn in your side will go deeper into your flesh, Humphries. I will infect you, I will inflame you until you feel the same kind of pain that you’ve inflicted on so many others. I swear it!
Yet by the time he trod back to his home, coughing in the dust stirred up by his strides, he felt more weary than angry, wondering how he had come to travel down this path, why this weight of vengeance had fallen onto his shoulders. It’s not vengeance, he snarled inwardly. It’s justice. Someone has to stand for justice; Humphries can’t be allowed to take everything he wants without being accountable to anyone.
Then he slid back the door to his quarters and saw Amanda’s beautiful, radiant smile. And the anger surged back in full fury. Humphries wants her, too, Fuchs reminded himself. The only way he’ll get Amanda is over my dead body.
Amanda got up from her desk and came to him. He took her in his arms, but instead of kissing him, she rubbed her fingers against his cheek.
“You have a smudge on your face,” she said, still smiling. “Like a little boy who’s been out playing in the streets.”
“Soot from the warehouse,” he said bleakly.
She pecked him on the lips, then said, “I have some good news.”
“Yes?”
“The insurance money was deposited in Helvetia’s account this morning. We can get started again without borrowing from Pancho.”
“How much?”
Amanda’s smile faded a fraction. “Just a tad less than half of what we applied for. About forty-eight percent of our actual loss.”