“I suppose they expect me to pay for their transport back to Earth,” Humphries groused.
“There’s more.”
He turned and stacked his cue in its rack. “Well? What else?”
“Fuchs has stolen an Astro ship, the Lubbock Lights. He’s left—”
“How the hell could he steal a ship?” Humphries demanded angrily.
Verwoerd kept the pool table between them. “According to the captain—”
“The same limp spaghetti that allowed Fuchs to commandeer his ship on the way in to Ceres?”
“The same man,” Verwoerd replied. “He reported to the IAA that a half-dozen Asians boarded the ship under the pretense of loading ores. They were armed and took control of the ship. Then Fuchs came up from Ceres with another Oriental, apparently the man who was with him when he was here for the hearing. They packed the captain and regular crew into the shuttlecraft and sent them back down to Ceres.”
“Son of a bitch,” Humphries said fervently.
“By the time the Peacekeepers arrived, Fuchs was gone.”
“In one of Pancho’s ships.” He grinned. “Serves her right.”
Verwoerd pursed her lips, weighing the dangers of antagonizing him further against the pleasures of yanking his chain a little bit. “If possession is nine-tenths of the law,” she said slowly, “then it’s mostly his ship now, not Astro’s.”
He glared at her, fuming. She kept her expression noncommittal. A smile now could set off a tantrum, she knew.
He stood in angry silence for several long moments, face flushed, gray eyes blazing. Then, “So those pansies you hired to clean out Fuchs want to quit, do they?”
“Actually, Grigor hired them,” Verwoerd said. “And, yes, they want out. Fuchs made them watch while he hanged their leader.”
“And Amanda? She went with him?”
With a shake of her head, Verwoerd answered, “No, she’s still on Ceres. Apparently Fuchs’s people took back most of the items that were looted from their warehouse.”
“He left her on Ceres? Alone?”
“He hanged the man because he made some crack about her. Nobody’s going to go near her, believe me.”
“I don’t want anybody to go near her,” Humphries snapped. “I want her left strictly alone. I’ve given orders about that!”
“No one’s harmed her. No one’s threatened her.”
“Until this asshole opened his big mouth in front of Fuchs.”
“And he strung him up like a common criminal.”
Humphries leaned both hands on the rim of the pool table and hung his head. Whether he was overwhelmed with sorrow or anger or the burden of bad news, Verwoerd could not tell.
At last he lifted his head and said crisply, “We need someone to go after Fuchs. Someone who isn’t afraid of a fight.”
“But nobody knows where he’s gone,” Verwoerd said. “It’s an awfully big area, out there in the Belt. He’s not sending out a tracking beacon. He’s not even sending telemetry data. The IAA can’t find him.”
“He’ll run out of fuel sooner or later,” Humphries said. “He’ll have to come back to Ceres.”
“Maybe,” she said, uncertainly.
Pointing a finger at her as if he were pointing a pistol,
Humphries said, “I want somebody out there who can find him. And kill him. I want somebody who knows how to fight and isn’t afraid of being shot at.”
“A professional soldier,” Verwoerd said.
Humphries smiled thinly. “Yes. Like your boy-toy.”
She had known from the moment she’d heard about Fuchs’s actions that it would come down to this. “I agree,” she said, keeping her voice even, emotionless. “Harbin would be perfect for this task. But…” She let the word dangle in the air between them.
“But?” Humphries snapped. “But what?”
“He’ll want to be paid a lot more than he’s been getting.”
He stared at her for a moment. “Are you representing him now? Are you his goddamned agent?”
She made herself smile at him. “Let’s just say that I know him a lot better than I did a few weeks ago.”
CHAPTER 42
As they sped away from Ceres on Lubbock Lights, Fuchs familiarized himself with the crew that Nodon had recruited. Silent, blank-faced Asians, Mongols, descendents of Genghis Khan. They didn’t look particularly ferocious; they looked more like kids, students, fugitives from some high-tech training school. But they apparently knew their way around a fusion-powered spacecraft.