Nodon was waiting for him at the warehouse. Feeling uneasy, irritable, Fuchs called Jiminez and two other Helvetia employees, both men, both young. When they all arrived at the warehouse’s little office area, the place felt crowded and suddenly warm from the press of their bodies. Jiminez, skinny and big-eyed, stood between the two other men.
“In a day or two,” Fuchs told them, “we’re going to the HSS warehouse and take back the material they stole from us.”
The men looked nervously at one another. “And we’re going to administer justice to the men who murdered Inga,” he added.
“They’ve gone,” Jiminez said, in a voice pitched high with tension.
“Gone?”
“The day after the raid on our warehouse,” said one of the older men. “Nine HSS employees left on one of their ships.”
“Where is it bound?” Fuchs demanded. “Selene?”
“We don’t know. Maybe it’s going to Earth.”
“We’ll never get them once they reach Earth,” Fuchs muttered.
“They brought in another bunch on the ship that took them away,” said the other man, a trim-looking welterweight with a military buzz cut and jewelry piercing his nose, both eyebrows and earlobes.
“I suppose they are guarding the HSS warehouse,” Fuchs said, glancing at Nodon, who remained silent, taking it all in.
The young man nodded.
“Very well, then,” Fuchs said. He took a deep breath. “This is what we’re going to do.”
DOSSIER: JOYCE TAKAMINE
“It’s not what you know,” he told her, time and again. “It’s who you know.”
Joyce “graduated” from picking to helping run one of the big farm management companies. Armed with her degree in computer analysis, she had worked up the courage to ask the young man running the company’s local office for a job. He offered to discuss the possibilities over dinner, in his mobile home. They ended the evening in his bed. She got the job and lived for the next two years with the young man, who constantly reminded her about “the great American know-who.”
When Joyce took his advice and left him for an older man who happened to be an executive with Humphries Space Systems, the young man was shocked and disillusioned.
“But it’s what you’ve been telling me to do all along,” Joyce reminded him.
“Yeah,” he admitted, crestfallen. “I just didn’t think you’d take my advice so literally.”
Joyce stayed with the executive only long enough to win a position at HSS’s corporate offices in Selene. She left the tired old Earth at last, and moved to the Moon.
CHAPTER 39
Two days passed.
Amanda spent the time trying to find out what her husband was up to, to no avail. It was clear to her that Lars was planning something; he was putting together some scheme to fight back against Humphries. But he would not tell her a word of it.
Lars is a different man, she knew. I hardly recognize him. He’s like a caged animal, pacing, waiting, planning, looking for a way to break free. He’s dead set on wreaking vengeance on the people who looted his warehouse and killed Inga, but he won’t reveal his thinking to me.
In bed he relaxed a little, but still he kept his own counsel. “The only law out here is the law we enforce for ourselves,” he said in the darkness as he lay next to her. “If we don’t fight back he’ll turn us all into his slaves.”
“Lars, he’s hired trained mercenaries. Professional killers,” Amanda pleaded.
“Scum,” her husband answered. “I know how to deal with scum.”
“They’ll kill you!”
He turned to her, and she could feel the heat radiating from his body. “Amanda, my darling, they are going to kill me anyway. That’s what he wants. Humphries wants me dead and he won’t be satisfied until I’m killed and you’re at his mercy.”
“But if you’d only—”
“Better for me to strike at him when and where he doesn’t expect it,” Fuchs said, reaching for her. “Otherwise, we just wait here like sheep ready to be slaughtered.”
“But what are you going to do? What do you—”
He silenced her with a finger on her lips. “Better that you don’t know, my darling. You can’t be any part of this.”