Fuchs stopped and looked them up and down. “Trouble?” he asked. “The only trouble that happens here will be trouble that you start.”
The taller one shrugged. “Doesn’t matter who starts it. What matters is, who’s still standing when it’s over.”
“Thank you,” said Fuchs. “Your words will be useful evidence.”
“Evidence?” They both looked startled.
“Do you think I’m a fool?” Fuchs said sharply. “I know what you’re up to. I’m wearing a transmitter that is sending every word you say to IAA headquarters in Geneva. If anything happens to me, you two have already been voiceprinted.”
With that, Fuchs turned on his heel and strode away from the two toughs, leaving them dumbfounded and uncertain. Fuchs walked carefully, deliberately, stirring up as little dust as possible. He didn’t want them to think he was running away from them; he also didn’t want them to see how his legs were shaking. Above all, he didn’t want them to figure out that his transmitter was a total bluff, invented on the spot to allow him to get away from them.
By the time he got home, he was still trembling, but now it was with anger. Amanda flashed a welcoming smile at him from the computer desk. Fuchs could see from the wallscreen that she was ordering inventory to stock the warehouse. Most of the machinery and electronic gear she ordered came from Astro Corporation. Now, he saw, she was dealing with foodstuffs and clothing, which came from other companies. He went to wash up as she stared wistfully at the latest Earthside fashions.
By the time he came back into the room, she was finished with the computer. She slid her arms around his neck and kissed him warmly.
“What would you like for dinner?” she asked. “I just ordered a shipment of seafood from Selene and I’m famished.”
“Anything will do,” he temporized as he disengaged from her and sat at the computer desk.
Amanda went to the freezer as she asked, “Will you be ready by the time the supplies start arriving?”
Working the computer, his eyes on the wallscreen display, Fuchs barely nodded. “I’ll be ready,” he muttered.
Amanda saw that he was studying the specifications for handheld lasers.
Frowning slightly, she said, “That looks like the laser that that Buchanan fellow killed Ripley with.”
“It is,” Fuchs said. “And he tried to kill me with it, too.”
“I’ve already ordered six of them, with an option for another half-dozen when they’re sold.”
“I’m thinking of ordering one for myself,” said Fuchs.
“For Starpower?”
He looked up at her. His face was grim. “For myself,” he said. “As a sidearm.”
CHAPTER 23
Starpower swung lazily in the dark star-choked sky above Ceres. Strange, Fuchs noted as he climbed aboard the shuttlecraft, that the sky still seems so black despite all those stars. Other suns, he thought, billions of them blazing out their light for eons. Yet here on the rubble-heap surface of Ceres the world seemed dark, shadowy with menace.
Shaking his head inside the fishbowl helmet, Fuchs clambered up the ladder and ducked through the shuttlecraft’s hatch. No sense taking off the suit until I’m inside Starpower, he told himself. The shuttle flight would take mere minutes to lift him from the asteroid’s surface to his waiting ship.
The shuttle’s hab module was a bubble of glassteel. Two other prospectors were already aboard, waiting to be transferred to their spacecraft. Fuchs said a perfunctory hello to them through his suit radio.
“Hey, Lars,” one of them asked, “what are you gonna do about the habitat?”
“Yeah,” chimed in the other one. “We put up good money to build it. When’s it going to be finished so we can move in?”
Fuchs could see their faces through their helmets. They weren’t being accusative or even impatient. They looked more curious than anything else.
He forced a weak smile for them. “I haven’t had a chance to recruit a new project engineer, someone to replace Ripley.”
“Oh. Yeah. Too bad about the Ripper.”
“You did a good thing, Lars. That sonofabitch murdered the Ripper in cold blood.”
Fuchs nodded his acknowledgment of their praise. The voice of the IAA controller told them the shuttlecraft would lift off in ten seconds. The computer counted off the time. The three spacesuited men stood in the hab module; there were no seats, nothing except a tee-shaped podium that held the ship’s controls, which weren’t needed for this simple flight, and foot loops in the deck to hold them down in microgravity.