Pancho shook her head. Once Selene had been virtually self-sufficient, mining water from the deposits of ice at the lunar poles, and using the raw materials scraped from the Moon’s surface layers of regolith. Selene even exported fusion fuels to Earth and supplied the aluminum and silicon for building solar power satellites in Earth orbit.
But once Selene’s government decided to allow limited immigration from the devastated Earth, the lunar nation’s self-sufficiency ended. Selene became dependent on the metals and minerals, even the water, imported from the asteroids. And the trickle of immigration from Earth had become an ever-increasing stream, Pancho knew.
“What’re you going to do?” Pancho repeated.
Looking decidedly unhappy, Stavenger said, “I’ll have a talk with Humphries. Not that it’ll do much good, I expect.”
Pancho heard his unspoken words. It’s up to me to stop Humphries, she realized. I’ve got to fight him. Nobody else can.
“Okay,” she said to Stavenger. “You talk. I’ll act.”
“No fighting here,” Stavenger snapped. “Not here.”
“Not here, Doug,” Pancho promised. Already in her head she was starting to figure how much it would cost to go to war against Humphries Space Systems out in the Asteroid Belt.
Flying in the rattling, roaring helicopter from SeaTac Aerospaceport, the Asian-American who had been assigned to make certain that Pancho Lane survived the sabotage of the cable car looked forward to returning to his home in the mountains of Washington State’s Olympic peninsula. His family would be waiting for him, he knew. So would the fat stipend from Yamagata Corporation.
The helicopter touched down on the cleared gravel area at the foot of the path that led up to his cabin. Strangely, no one was there to greet him. Surely his wife and children heard the copter’s throbbing engines. He walked to the edge of the helipad, clutching his travel bag in one hand, squinting in the miniature sandstorm of gravel and grit from the helicopter’s swirling rotors.
From the gravel pad he could see downslope to the drowned city of Port Townsend and the cluster of scuba-diving camps huddled around it. On a clear day, he could gaze through binoculars at the shattered remains of Seattle’s high-rise towers poking up above the waters of Puget Sound.
It had been a curious assignment, he thought. Fly to the Moon as a tourist—at a cost that would have emptied his life savings—and ride in a certain cable car at a certain time, carrying emergency survival equipment to make certain that Ms. Lane would not be killed by the “accident.”
He shrugged his heavy shoulders as he watched the helicopter dwindle into the cloudy sky, then turned and headed up the winding path toward his home.
He never saw his wife and children, who lay in their bloody beds, each of them shot through the head. Two men grabbed him as he stepped through the front door of his cabin and put a gun to his temple. By the time the local police arrived on the scene, several days later, it seemed obvious to them that the man had slaughtered his family and then committed suicide.
“He must’ve gone nuts,” said the police chief. “It happens. A guy just snaps, for no apparent reason.”
Case closed.
At Selene, the maintenance technician who had planted the tiny explosive device that knocked the car off its cable was also found dead: of an overdose of narcotics. His papers showed that although he was an employee of Selene’s maintenance department, he had recently received a sizeable amount of money from some unknown benefactor. The money was untraceable; apparently he had used it to buy the drugs that killed him.
Rumors quickly bruited through Selene that the money had come from Humphries Space Systems. There was no hint that it had actually been provided by Yamagata Corporation.
HUMPHRIES MANSION
“Somebody tried to kill Pancho?” Martin Humphries could barely hide his elation. “You mean there’s somebody else who wants that guttersnipe offed?”
Grigor Malenkovich was not smiling. Humphries sometimes wondered if the man knew how to smile. The chief of HSS’s security department, Grigor was a lean, silent man with thinning dark hair combed straight back from his forehead, and dark, probing eyes. He said little, and moved like a furtive shadow. He habitually wore suits of slate gray. He could fade into a crowd and remain unnoticed by all except the most discerning eye. Humphries thought of him as the ultimate bureaucrat, functioning quietly, obeying any order without question, as inconspicuous as a mouse, as dangerous as a plague bacillus.