I’ll have a son with Amanda. The clones will come to term soon and I’ll pick the best of the litter, but I’ll have a natural son with Amanda, as well. The old-fashioned way. I’ll make her forget about Fuchs. I’ll drive him out of her memory completely, one way or the other.
Fuchs is finished. They may have let him loose, but he’s a dead man anyway. He can’t do anything to hurt me now. He’s an exile, alone and without friends to help him. I promised Amanda that I wouldn’t harm him and I won’t have to. He’s out of my way now and the rock rats are under control. Now the real battle against Astro can begin. I’ll take control of Astro Corporation, and the Belt, and the whole goddamned solar system.
At that moment the minister asked Humphries if he would take Amanda Cunningham as his lawful wedded wife.
His answer to that question, and to his own ambitions, was, “I will!”
EPILOGUE
Dorik Harbin writhed and groaned in his drugged sleep as he rode the fusion ship out to the Belt again. Humphries’s psychologists had done their best with him, but his dreams were still tortured by visions of Diane dying at his feet. Their drugs couldn’t erase the memory; sometimes they made it worse, distorted: sometimes it was Harbin’s mother drowning on her own blood while he stood helplessly watching.
When he awoke the visions of her death still haunted him. He heard her last gurgling moans, saw the utter terror in her eyes. She deserved to die, he told himself as he stared out the spacecraft’s thick quartz port at the star-flecked emptiness beyond the ship’s hull. She lied to me, she used me, laughed at me. She deserved to die.
Yes, said the voice in his mind that he could never silence. Everyone deserves to die. Including you.
He grimaced, and remembered Khayyam’s quatrain:
One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste, One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste —
The Stars are setting and the Caravan Starts for the Dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste!
Deep in the Asteroid Belt, Lars Fuchs sat uneasily in the command chair of Nautilus, staring into the bleak emptiness outside.
This ship is my whole world now, he told himself. This one ship and these six strangers who crew it. Amanda is gone; she is dead to me. All my friends, my whole life, the woman I love—all dead and gone.
He felt like Adam, driven out of the garden of Eden, kept from returning by an angel with a flaming sword. I can never return. Never. I’ll spend the rest of my days out here in this desert. What kind of a life do I have to look forward to?
The answer came to his mind immediately. Martin Humphries has everything I worked for. He possesses my wife. He’s driven me into exile. But I will get back at him. No matter how long it takes; no matter how powerful he is. I will have my revenge.
Not like Adam. Not like that sniveling weakling. No, he told himself. Like Samson. Betrayed, blinded, chained and enslaved. Eyeless in Gaza. Yet he prevailed. Even at the cost of his life he had his vengeance. And I will have mine.