All three of them put their crates down on the pebbled, dusty ground.
Buchanan said, “I hear they call you the Ripper.”
“Sometimes,” Ripley said guardedly.
“Where’s your trumpet?”
With a little laugh, Ripley said, “Back in my quarters. I don’t carry it with me everywhere I go.”
“Too bad. I’d really like to jam it up your ass.”
Ripley kept smiling. “Aw, come on now. There’s no reason to—”
“That big ape of yours put Carl in the infirmary with three crushed vertebrae!”
“Hey, I didn’t start the fight. And I’m not looking for one now.” Ripley started to walk past them, toward the still-open airlock hatch.
They stopped him. They grabbed his arms. For a ridiculous instant Ripley almost felt like giggling. You can’t fight in spacesuits, for chrissakes! It’s like boxers wearing suits of armor.
“Hey, come on, now,” Ripley said, trying to pull his arms free.
Buchanan kicked his feet out from under him and Ripley fell over backward, slowly, softly, in the dreamy slow motion of micro-gee. It seemed to take ten minutes as he toppled over; numberless hordes of stars slid past his field of view, silently, solemnly. Then at last he hit the ground, his head banging painfully inside the helmet, a thick cloud of dust enveloping him.
“Okay, Ripper,” Buchanan said. “Rip this!”
He kicked Ripley in the side of his spacesuit. The others laughed and started kicking, too. Ripley bounced around inside the suit, unable to get up, unable to defend himself. It didn’t hurt that much, at first, but each kick got worse and he worried that they might tear his air line loose. He tasted blood in his mouth.
When they finally stopped kicking him, every part of Ripley’s body throbbed with pain. They were still standing over him. Buchanan stared down at him for a long, silent moment. Then he unhooked a tool from the belt at his waist.
“You know what this is?” he asked, holding it up in his gloved hand. It was a short, squat, smooth greenish rod with a helical glass flash-lamp coiled around its length and a pistol grip beneath. A heavy black cord ran from the heel of the grip to a battery pack clipped to Buchanan’s belt.
Before Ripley could say anything Buchanan explained.
“This is a Mark IV gigawatt-pulse neodymium laser. Puts out picosecond pulses. We use it to punch neat little holes in metal. What kind of a hole do you think it’ll punch through you?”
“Hey, Trace,” said Santorini. “Take it easy.”
Ripley tried to move, to crawl away. His legs wouldn’t carry him. He could see the laser’s guide beam walking up the front of his spacesuit, feel it come through his transparent helmet, inch over his face, past his eyes, onto his forehead.
“Trace, don’t!”
But Buchanan slowly lowered himself to one knee and bent over Ripley, peering into his eyes. This close, their helmets almost touching, Ripley could see a sort of wild glee in the man’s eyes, a manic joy. He moved one arm, tried to push his tormentor away; all he accomplished was to pull the name tag off Buchanan’s suit.
“They didn’t say to kill him,” Santorini insisted.
Buchanan laughed. “So long, noisemaker,” he said.
Ripley died instantly. The picosecond laser pulse pulped most of his brain into jelly.
CHAPTER 13
Lars Fuchs was sitting at his desk talking to the prospector to whom he’d leased Starpower. The woman flatly refused to give up the ship until the term of her lease expired, four months in the future.
“I’ve been snookered out of two good rocks by HSS people,” she said, her anger showing clearly in her image on Fuchs’s wallscreen. “I’m going out to the far side of the Belt and get me a good-sized metallic ‘roid. Anybody comes near me, I’ll zap ’em with the cutting laser!”
Fuchs stared at her face. She couldn’t be much more than thirty, a former graduate student like himself. Yet she looked far harder, more determined, than any graduate student he remembered. Not a trace of makeup; her hair shaved down to a dark fuzz; her cheek bones and jawline gaunt, hungry.
“I can arrange for you to transfer to another ship that’s available for lease,” Fuchs said reasonably.