She’s gone to Selene, he kept repeating in his mind. To a conference. To Humphries. Without telling me. Without mentioning a word of it. He saw St. Claire’s face again as the man told him the news, almost smirking. Your wife didn’t tell you? he heard St. Claire ask, again and again. She never even mentioned it to you? It’s probably in the messages waiting for me, Fuchs told himself. Amanda must have put it into the latest batch of messages just before she left for Selene. For Humphries’s home. His guts knotted like fists every time he thought of it.
Why didn’t she tell me beforehand? he raged silently. Why didn’t she discuss this with me before she decided to go? The answer seemed terribly clear: Because she didn’t want me to know she was going, didn’t want me to know she would be seeing Humphries.
He wanted to bellow his rage and frustration, wanted to order his crew to race to Selene, wanted to take Amanda off the ship that was carrying her to the Moon and keep her safely with him. Too late, he knew. Far too late. She’s gone. She’s there by now. She’s left me.
Nautilus’s propellant tanks were full. Fuchs felt a slight pang of conscience about taking the hydrogen and helium fuels from his onetime friend St. Claire, but he had no choice. He had left St. Claire on less than friendly terms, but nevertheless the Quebecois waited six full hours before putting in an emergency call for a tanker, as Fuchs had ordered him to do.
Shaking his head as he sat in the command chair on Nautilus’s bridge, Fuchs wondered at how the human mind works. St. Claire knew I wouldn’t harm him. Yet he waited the full six hours before calling for help, giving me plenty of time to get safely away. Is he still my friend, despite everything? Or was he afraid I’d come back and fire on him? Pondering the question, Fuchs decided, most likely St. Claire was simply playing it safe. Our friendship is dead, a casualty of this war. I have no friends.
I have no wife, either. I’ve driven her away. Driven her into Humphries’s territory, perhaps into his arms.
The Asian navigator seated to one side of the bridge said to the woman who was piloting the ship, “The rock is in visual range.” He spoke in their native Mongol dialect, but Fuchs understood them. It’s not a rock, he corrected silently. It’s an aggregate.
Glad to have something else to occupy his mind, Fuchs commanded his computer to put the telescopic view of the asteroid on his console screen. It was tumbling slowly along its long axis, end over end. As they approached the ‘roid, Fuchs called up the computer image that showed where they had planted the transceiver.
He hunched forward in his chair, studying the screen, trying to drive thoughts of Amanda out of his mind. It showed the telescope’s real-time image of the asteroid with the computer’s grid map superimposed over it. Strange, he thought. The contour map doesn’t match the visual image any more. There’s a new lump on the asteroid, not more than fifty meters from where the transceiver should be sitting.
Fuchs froze the image and peered at it. The asteroids are dynamic, he knew. They’re constantly being dinged by smaller chunks of rock. An aggregate like this ‘roid wouldn’t show a crater, necessarily. It’s like punching your fist into a beanbag chair: it just gives and reforms itself.
But a lump? What would cause a lump?
He felt an old, old fervor stirring inside him. Once he had been a planetary geochemist; he had first come out to the Belt to study the asteroids, not to mine them. A curiosity that he hadn’t felt in many years filled his mind. What could raise a blister on a carbonaceous chondritic asteroid?
Dorik Harbin was half a day’s journey distant from the carbonaceous asteroid, even at the 0.5 g acceleration that was Shanidar’s best speed. He had dropped his ship into a grazing orbit around the jagged, striated body of nickel-iron where Fuchs had left one of his transceivers. His navigator was still sweating and wide-eyed with apprehension. His pale blond Scandinavian second-in-command had warned him several times that they were dangerously close to crashing into the rock.