Liftoff was little more than a gentle nudge, but the craft leaped away from Ceres’s pitted, rock-strewn surface fast enough to make Fuchs’s stomach lurch. Before he could swallow down the bile in his throat, they were in zero-g. Fuchs had never enjoyed weightlessness, but he put up with it as the IAA controller remotely steered the shuttle to the orbiting ship of the other two men before swinging almost completely around the asteroid to catch up with Starpower.
Fuchs thought about hiring a replacement for Ripley. The funding for the habitat was adequate, barely. He had put the task on Amanda’s list of action items. She’ll have to do it, Fuchs said to himself. She’ll have to use her judgment; I’ll be busy doing other things.
Other things. He cringed inwardly when he thought of the angry words he had flung at Humphries: I’ve studied military history…. I know how to fight. How pathetic! So what are you going to do, go out and shoot up Humphries spacecraft? Kill his employees? What will that accomplish, except getting you arrested eventually, or killed? You think too much, Lars Fuchs. You are quick to anger, but then your conscience frustrates you.
He had thought long and hard about searching out HSS vessels and destroying them. Hurt Humphries the way he’s hurt me. But he knew he couldn’t do it.
After all his bold words, all his blazing fury, the best he could think of was to find an asteroid, put in a claim for it, and then wait for Humphries’s hired killers to come after him. Then he’d have the evidence he needed to make the IAA take official action against Humphries.
If he lived through the ordeal.
Once the shuttle made rendezvous with Starpower and docked at the spacecraft’s main airlock, Fuchs entered his ship and began squirming out of the spacesuit, grateful for the feeling of gravity that the ship’s spin imparted. The bold avenger, he sneered at himself. Going out to offer yourself as a sacrificial victim in an effort to bring Humphries down. A lamb trying to trap a tiger.
As he entered the bridge, still grumbling to himself, the yellow message waiting signal was blinking on the communications screen.
Amanda, he knew. Sure enough, the instant he called up the comm message, her lovely face filled the screen.
But she looked troubled, distraught.
“Lars, it’s George Ambrose. His ship’s gone missing. All communications abruptly shut off several days ago. The IAA isn’t even getting telemetry. They’re afraid he’s dead.”
“George?” Fuchs gaped at his wife’s image. “They’ve killed George?”
“It looks that way,” said Amanda.
Amanda stared at her husband’s face on the wallscreen in their quarters. Grim as death, he looked.
“They killed George,” he repeated.
She wanted to say, No, it must have been an accident. But the words would not leave her lips.
“He had George killed,” Fuchs muttered. “Murdered.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Amanda heard herself say. It sounded more like a plea than a statement, even to her own ears.
“Isn’t there?” he growled.
“Lars, please . . . don’t do anything . . . dangerous,” she begged.
He slowly shook his head. “Just being alive is dangerous,” he said.
Dorik Harbin studied the navigation screen as he sat alone on the bridge of Shanidar. The blinking orange cursor that showed his ship’s position was exactly on the thin blue curve representing his programmed approach to the supply vessel.
Harbin had been cruising through the Belt for more than two months, totally alone except for the narcotics and virtual reality chips that provided his only entertainment. A good combination, he thought. The drugs enhanced the electronic illusion, allowed him to fall asleep without dreaming of the faces of the dead, without hearing their screams.
His ship ran in silence; no tracking beacon or telemetry signals betrayed his presence in space. His orders had been to find certain prospectors and miners and eliminate them. This he had done with considerable efficiency. Now, his supplies low, he was making rendezvous with a Humphries supply vessel. He would get new orders, he knew, while Shanidar was being restocked with food and propellant.