He looked around. Two men were unconscious at his feet, a third moaning facedown on the floor. The barkeep was bending over the yobbo on the floor behind the bar amid the shattered glassware, shouting, “Well, somebody’s got to pay for this damage!”
“Are you all right, George?” Ripley asked.
George saw that the Ripper had a packing-crate-chair in his hands. He laughed. “What’re you gonna do with that, post ’em back to Earth?”
Ripley broke into a relieved laugh, and the two men left the Pub. Half a minute later the Ripper ran back in and retrieved his trumpet. The bartender was on the phone, calling Kris Cardenas, the only qualified medical help on Ceres. He held a credit chip from one of the yobbos in his hand.
CHAPTER 10
Even after five years on Astro Corporation’s board of directors, Pancho Lane still thought of herself as a neophyte. You got a lot to learn, girl, she told herself almost daily.
Yet she had formed a few working habits, a small set of rules for herself. She spent as little time in Astro’s corporate offices as possible. Whether at La Guaira on Earth or in Selene, Pancho chose to be among the engineers and astronauts rather than closeting herself with the suits. She had come up through the ranks, a former astronaut herself, and she had no intention of reading reports and studying graphs when she could be out among the workers, getting her hands dirty; she preferred the smell of machine oil and honest sweat to the quiet tensions and power jockeying of the corporate offices.
One of her self-imposed rules was to make decisions as soon as she had the necessary information, and then to act on her decisions quickly. Another was to deliver bad news herself, instead of detailing some flunky to handle the chore.
Still, she hesitated to put in the call to Lars Fuchs. It won’t make him happy, she knew. Instead, she called his wife. Pancho and Amanda had worked together five years earlier; they had copiloted Starpower 1’s maiden mission to the Belt. They had watched helplessly as Dan Randolph died of radiation poisoning—murdered by remote control, by Martin Humphries.
And now the Humper was offering to buy out Lars and Mandy, get them off Ceres, establish his own Humphries Space Systems as the sole supplier for the rock rats out there. Pancho had tried to fight Humphries, tried to keep Astro in the competition through Fuchs’s little company. But she had been thoroughly outmaneuvered by Humphries, and she knew it.
Angry more at herself than anyone else, she marched herself to her office in La Guaira and made the call to Amanda. She paid no attention to the lovely tropical scenery outside her office window; the green, cloud-topped mountains and gently surging sea held no attraction for her. Planting her booted feet on her desktop, wishing there was some way to help Mandy and Lars, she commanded her phone to send a message to Amanda Cunningham Fuchs, on Ceres.
“Mandy,” she began unceremoniously, “‘fraid I got bad news for you and Lars. Astro won’t top Humphries’s buyout offer. The board wouldn’t vote to buy you out. Humphries has a nice little clique on the board and they voted the whole proposition down the toilet. Sorry, kid. Look me up when you get back to Selene, or wherever you’re goin’. Maybe we can spend some time together without worryin’ about business. See ya.”
Pancho was startled when she realized she’d been sitting at her desk for nearly half an hour without instructing the phone to transmit her message.
Finally she said, “Aw shit, send it.”
The headquarters of the International Astronautical Authority were still in Zurich, officially, but its main working offices were in St. Petersburg.
The global warming that had melted most of the glaciers in Switzerland and turned the snowpacks of the Alpine peaks into disastrous, murderous floods had forced the move. The administrators and lawyers who had been transferred to Russia complained, with some resentment, that they had been pushed off the greenhouse cliff.
To their surprise, St. Petersburg was a beautiful, cosmopolitan city, not at all the dour gray urban blight they had expected. The greenhouse warming had been kind to St. Petersburg: winters were nowhere near as long and bitter as they had once been. Snow did not start to fall until well into December and it was usually gone by April. Russian engineers had doggedly built a series of weirs and breakwaters across the Gulf of Finland and the Neva River to hold back the rising seas.