“Which you started.”
“That doesn’t matter anymore. He’s the problem now.”
“You won’t rest until you’ve killed him.”
“Not—” He had to swallow hard before he could continue. “Not if you’ll marry me.”
He had expected her to be surprised. But her eyes did not flicker, the expression on her utterly beautiful face did not change one iota. She simply turned and headed up the corridor, away from him.
Humphries started to after her, but then he heard Stavenger and Dieterling coming up the hall behind him. Don’t make an ass of yourself in front of them, he told himself sternly. Let her go. For now. At least she didn’t say no.
CHAPTER 52
As Fuchs studied the image of asteroid 38-4002, Nodon ducked through the hatch and stepped into the bridge. Fuchs heard him ask the pilot if the long-range scan showed any other ships in the area. “None,” said the pilot.
What could raise a lump on a beanbag collection of pebbles? Fuchs asked himself for the dozenth time. Nautilus was approaching the asteroid at one-sixth g; they would have to start a braking maneuver soon if they were going to establish an orbit around it.
Wishing he had a full panoply of sensors to play across the asteroid’s surface, Fuchs noted again that there were several noticeable craters on its surface, but none of them had the raised rims that formed when a boulder crashed into a solid rock. No, this is a collection of nodules, he thought, and the only way to build a blister like that is for something to push the pellets up into a mound.
Something. Then it hit him. Or someone. He turned in his chair and looked up at Nodon. “Warm up laser number one,” he commanded.
Nodon’s big eyes flashed, but he nodded silently and left the bridge.
Turning back to the image of the approaching asteroid, Fuchs reasoned, If something natural pushed up that mound, then there should be a depression next to it, from where the pebbles were scooped up. But there isn’t. Why not? Because something is buried under that mound. Because someone dug a hole in that porous pile of rubble and buried something in it.
What?
“Cut our approach velocity in half,” he said to the pilot. The Asian complied wordlessly.
Several minutes later, Nodon called from the cargo bay, “Laser number two is ready.”
“Number two?” Fuchs replied sharply. “What happened to number one?”
“Its coolant lines are being flushed. Routine maintenance.”
“Get it on line,” Fuchs snapped. “Get number three on line, too.”
“Yes, sir.” Fuchs could hear Nodon speaking in rapid dialect to someone else down in the cargo bay.
“Slave number two to my console,” Fuchs ordered.
He began to reconfigure his console with fingertip touches on its main display screen. By the time he had finished, the laser was linked. He could run it from the bridge.
He put the asteroid on-screen and focused on that suspicious mound of rubble. He saw the red dot of the aiming laser sparkling on the dark, pebbly ground and walked it to the middle of the mound. Then, with a touch of a finger, he fired the high-power laser. Its infrared beam was invisible to his eyes, but Fuchs saw the ground cascade into a splash of heat, a miniature fountain of red-hot lava erupting, spraying high above the asteroid’s surface.
His face set in a harsh scowl, Fuchs held the cutting laser’s beam on the spewing geyser of molten rock. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Twenty. . . .
The mound erupted. Half a dozen spacesuited figures scurried in all directions like cockroaches startled out of their nest, stumbling across the rough surface of the asteroid.
“I knew it!” Fuchs shouted. The three Asians on the bridge turned toward him.
Nodon called from the cargo bay, “They were waiting for us to pick up the transceiver!”
Fuchs ignored them all. He swung the laser toward one of the figures. The man had tripped and sprawled clumsily in the minuscule gravity of the little asteroid, then when he tried to get up, he had pushed himself completely off the ground. Now he floated helplessly, arms and legs flailing.