“Jeez,” muttered the one on Fuchs’s right as they played their hand lights around the still-hot ruins.
Fuchs couldn’t recognize the place. The shelving had collapsed, metal supports melted by the heat of the blaze. Tons of equipment were reduced to molten lumps of slag.
“What could’ve caused such a hot fire?” wondered the kid on Fuchs’s left.
“Not what,” Fuchs muttered. “Who.”
CHAPTER 12
It’s a good thing that it takes so long for communications to go back and forth, Amanda thought. Otherwise Lars would be screaming at the woman by now.
She had watched her husband, his face grimed from the ashes of the warehouse and his mood even darker, as he placed his call to their insurance carrier to inform them of the fire. Then he had called Diane Verwoerd, at Humphries Space Systems’ offices in Selene.
Even though messages moved at the speed of light, it took more than an hour for Ms. Verwoerd to respond. With the distance between them, there could be no real conversation between Ceres and the Moon. Communications were more like video mail that true two-way links.
“Mr. Fuchs,” Verwoerd began her message, “I appreciate your calling me to inform us about the fire in your warehouse. I certainly hope that no one was injured.”
Fuchs started to reply automatically, and only stopped himself when Verwoerd coolly went on, “We will need to know the extent of the damage before opening our negotiations on acquiring Helvetia Limited. As I understand it, a major part of your company’s assets consisted of the inventory in your warehouse. I understand that this inventory was insured, but I’m certain that your insurance won’t cover much more than half the value of the damaged property. Please inform me as soon as you can. In the meantime, I will contact your insurance carrier. Thank you.” Her image winked out, replaced by the stylized logo of Humphries Space Systems.
Fuchs’s face looked like a thundercloud, dark and ominous. He sat at the computer desk of their one-room apartment, staring silently at the wallscreen. Amanda, sitting on the bed, didn’t know what she could say to make him feel better.
“We won’t be getting ten million,” he muttered, turning to her. “Not half that, I imagine.”
“It’s all right, Lars. Three or four million is enough for us to—”
“To run away with our tails between our legs,” he snapped.
Amanda heard herself answer, “What else can we do?”
Fuchs’s head drooped defeatedly. “I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re wiped out. The warehouse is completely gutted. Whoever set the fire did a thorough job.”
Warily, she asked, “Do you still think it was deliberately set?”
“Of course!” her husband shouted angrily. “He never intended to pay us ten million! That was a lure, a ruse. He’s kicking us off Ceres, out of the Belt entirely.”
“But why would he make the offer…?” Amanda felt confused.
Almost sneering with contempt, Fuchs said, “To put us in the proper frame of mind. To get us accustomed to the idea of leaving the Belt. Now he’s waiting for us to come crawling to him and beg for as much of the ten million as he’s willing to give us.”
“We won’t do that,” Amanda said. “We won’t crawl and we won’t beg.”
“No,” he agreed. “But we will leave. We have no choice.”
“We still have the ship.”
His heavy brows rose. “Starpower? You’d be willing to go prospecting again?”
Amanda knew that she really didn’t want to take up the life of a rock rat again. But she nodded solemnly, “Yes. Why not?”
Fuchs stared at her, a tangle of emotions burning in his deep-set eyes.
Niles Ripley was dead tired as he shuffled slowly across the desolate dark ground, heading for the airlock. A four-hour shift of working on the habitat was like a week of hard labor anywhere else, he felt. And riding the shuttlecraft back down to the surface of Ceres was always nerve-racking; the ground controller ran the little hopper remotely from underground, but Ripley twitched nervously without a human pilot aboard. The shuttle had touched down without mishap, though, landing a few meters from a Humphries craft being loaded for a supply run to one of the miners’ ships hanging in orbit.