He had spent the high-g flight from Selene studying the plan and background information Diane had given him, but he had expected reliable men to work under him, not a gaggle of hooligans. Steeling himself to his task, Harbin silently repeated the mantra that the workman does not blame his tools, and the warrior must fight with what he has at hand. The first task is to instill these morons with some purpose other than cracking skulls and making money.
Harbin assumed that none of the louts assigned to him gave a damn about what had happened to the hotheaded Tracy Buchanan, but the doctrine that his old sergeant had drilled into him asserted that it was beneficial to a unit’s cohesion and teamwork to build group solidarity in any way possible.
So he said to them, “You remember what that man Fuchs did to Trace Buchanan?” It was purely a rhetorical question.
They nodded unenthusiastically. Buchanan had been a bully and a fool; he did not have friends, only associates who were afraid to make him angry. None of them mourned the late Mr. Buchanan.
But Harbin felt he had to whip up some enthusiasm among his eight underlings. He had brought them together in the cramped little office at the HSS warehouse: eight men who had been flown to Ceres specifically because they could follow orders and weren’t strangers to mayhem.
“Okay,” Harbin told them. “Tonight we even the score. Tonight we hit Fuchs’s warehouse and clean it out once and for all.”
“I got a better idea,” said Santorini.
Harbin felt the old anger simmering inside him. Santorini had the intelligence of a baboon. “What is it?”
“You wanna get even with Fuchs, why don’t we do his wife?”
The others all grinned at the thought.
Are these the best that Diane could hire? Harbin asked himself. Or did somebody in her office merely scrape a few barroom floors and send these specimens here to Ceres?
“Our orders are to leave her strictly alone,” he said sharply. “Those orders come from the top. Don’t even go near her. Understand? Anybody who even looks in her direction will be in deep shit. Is that clear?”
“Somebody up there likes her,” one of the lunks said.
“Somebody up there’s got the hots for her,” agreed the goon next to him.
Harbin snarled, “That somebody will fry your testicles and then feed them to you in slices if you don’t follow orders. Our job is to hit the warehouse. We go in, we do the job, and then we leave. If we do it right you can all go back to Earth with a big fat bonus in our accounts.”
“Plenty of slash back home.”
“Yeah, ‘specially if you got money.”
Harbin let them think about how they were going to enjoy their bonuses. Get them away from thinking about Fuchs’s wife. Diane had been very specific about that. She is not to be harmed or even threatened. Not in any way, shape, or form.
The warehouse was something else.
“Where the hell have you been?” Humphries snapped.
Verwoerd allowed herself a small smile. “I took a long lunch. A victory celebration.”
“The whole damned afternoon?”
Humphries was sitting in the mansion’s dining room, alone at one end of the long rosewood table, the remains of his dinner before him. He did not invite his assistant to sit down with him.
“I expected you here as soon as the hearing ended.”
“You got the news without me,” she said coolly. “In fact, you knew how the hearing would turn out before it ever started, didn’t you?”
His frown deepened. “You’re pretty damned sassy this evening.”
“Fuchs is on his way back to Ceres,” she said. “By the time he gets there he won’t have a warehouse. His company will be broke, he’ll be ruined, and you’ll be king of the Asteroid Belt. What more do you want?”
She knew what he wanted. He wanted Amanda Cunningham Fuchs. For that, though, it won’t be enough to ruin Fuchs, she thought. We’ll have to kill the man.
Humphries’s frown dissolved slowly, replaced by a sly smile. “So,” he asked, “what are you doing for sex now that you’ve sent your soldier boy off to Ceres?”