“The very same,” said Humphries.
“And the rock rats are sending a representative?” she prompted.
“Three people. That big Australian oaf and two assistants.”
“Who’ll represent Astro?”
“Probably Pancho,” he said lightly. “She’s the real power on the board these days.”
“It should be interesting,” said Verwoerd.
“It should be,” Humphries agreed. “It certainly should.”
Lars Fuchs scowled at his visitor. Yves St. Claire was one of his oldest and most trusted friends; Fuchs had known the Quebecois since their university days together in Switzerland. Yet now St. Claire was stubbornly refusing to help him.
“I need the fuel,” Fuchs said. “Without it, I’m dead.”
The two men stood in Nautilus’s cramped galley, away from the crew. Fuchs had given them orders to leave him alone with his old friend. St. Claire stood in front of the big freezer, his arms folded obstinately across his chest. When they had been students together he had been slim and handsome, with a trim little pencil moustache and a smooth line of patter for the women, despite his uncouth accent. In those days his clothes had always been in the latest fashion; his friends joked that he bankrupted his family with his wardrobe. During his years of prospecting in the Belt, however, he had allowed himself to get fat. Now he looked like a prosperous middle-aged bourgeois shopkeeper, yet his carefully draped tunic of sky blue was designed to minimize his expanding waistline.
“Lars,” said St. Claire, “it is impossible. Even for you, old friend, I can’t spare the fuel. I wouldn’t have enough left to get back to Ceres.”
Fuchs, dressed as usual in a black pullover and baggy slacks, took a long breath before answering.
“The difference is,” he said, “that you can send out a distress call and a tanker will come out for you. I can’t.”
“Yes, a tanker will come out for me. And do you know how much that will cost?”
“You’re talking about money. I’m talking about my life.”
St. Clair made a Gallic shrug.
Since the attack on Vesta Fuchs had survived by poaching fuel and other supplies from friendly prospectors and other ships plying the Belt. A few of them gave freely; most were reluctant and had to be convinced. Amanda regularly sent out schedules for the prospectors, miners, tankers and supply vessels that left Ceres. Fuchs planted remote transceivers on minor asteroids, squirted the asteroids’ identification numbers to Amanda in bursts of supercompressed messages, then picked up her information from the miniaturized transceivers the next time he swung past those rocks. It was an intricate chess game, moving the transceivers before Humphries’s snoops could locate them and use them to bait a trap for him.
Humphries’s ships went armed now, and seldom alone. It was becoming almost impossibly dangerous to try to hit them. Now and again Fuchs commandeered supplies from Astro tankers and freighters. Their captains always complained and always submitted to Fuchs’s demands under protest, but they were under orders from Pancho not to resist. The cost of these “thefts” was submicroscopic in Astro’s ledgers.
Despite everything, Fuchs was badly surprised that even his old friend was being stubborn.
Trying to hold on to his temper, he said placatingly, “Yves, this is literally a matter of life and death to me.”
“But it is not necessary,” St. Clair said, waving both hands in the air. “You don’t need to—”
“I’m fighting your fight,” Fuchs said. “I’m trying to keep Humphries from turning you into his vassals.”
St. Clair cocked an eyebrow. “Ah, Lars, mon vieux. In all this fighting you’ve killed friends of mine. Friends of ours, Lars.”
“That couldn’t be helped.”
“They were construction workers. They never did you any harm.”
“They were working for Humphries.”
“You didn’t give them a chance. You slaughtered them without mercy.”
“We’re in a war,” Fuchs snapped. “In war there are casualties. It can’t be helped.”
“They weren’t in a war!” said St. Clair, with some heat. “I’m not in a war! You’re the only one who is fighting this war of yours.”
Fuchs stared at him. “Don’t you understand that what I’m doing, I’m doing for you? For all the rock rats?”
“Pah! Soon it will be all over, anyway. There is no need to continue this…. this vendetta between you and Humphries.”