“You’ll like the money,” replied his partner, Indra Wanmanigee.
Abrams shot her a sour look. They were sitting side by side in the cockpit of Roebuck’s crew module. Normally the ship carried supplies from the habitat in orbit around Ceres to the miners and prospectors scattered around the Belt. This time, however, they were sailing deeper into the Belt than normal. And instead of supplies, Roebuck carried a team of mercenaries, armed with a pair of high-power lasers.
Tired of eking out a living as a merchant to the rock rats, Wanmanigee had made a deal with Humphries Space Systems to use Roebuck as a Trojan horse, drifting deep into the Belt in the hope that Lars Fuchs would intercept the ship to raid it for supplies. Fuchs would find, of course, not the supplies he and his crew wanted, but trained mercenaries who would destroy his ship and kill him. The HSS people offered a huge reward for Fuchs’s head, enough to retire and finally get married and live the rest of her life like a maharanee and her consort.
“I still don’t like it,” Abrams muttered again. “We’re sitting out here like a big, fat target. Fuchs could gut our crew module and kill us both with one pop of a laser.”
“He hardly ever kills independents,” she replied mildly. “More likely he will demand to board us and steal our cargo.”
Abrams grumbled something too low for her to understand. She knew he worried about the six roughnecks living in the cargo hold. There were two women among them, but still Abrams feared that they might take her into their clutches. Wanmanigee kept to the crew module; the only mercenary she saw was their captain—a handsome brute, she thought, but she wanted no man except her stoop-shouldered, balding, potbellied, perpetually worried Abrams. She could control him, and he genuinely loved her. No other man would be worth the trouble, she had decided years earlier.
Suddenly Abrams sat up straighter in his copilot’s chair. “I’ve got a blip,” he said, tapping a fingernail against the radar screen.
Aboard Nautilus Lars Fuchs sat in his privacy cubicle, staring bitterly at Big George’s image on the screen above his bunk.
Over the years of his exile, Fuchs had worked out a tenuous communications arrangement with Big George, who was the only man outside of his ship’s crew that Fuchs trusted. It was George who had commuted Fuchs’s death sentence to exile; the big Aussie with the brick-red hair and bushy beard had saved Fuchs’s life when Humphries had been certain that he’d seen the last of his adversary.
Fuchs planted miniaturized transceivers on tiny, obscure asteroids. From time to time, George squirted a highly compressed message to one of those asteroids by tight-beam laser. Each coded message ended with the number designation of the asteroid to which the next message would be beamed. In this way Fuchs could be kept abreast of the news from the rest of civilization. It was a halting, limping method of communication; the news reports Fuchs received were always weeks out of date, sometimes months. But it was his only link to the rest of the human race, and Fuchs was grateful to Big George for taking the trouble and the risk to do it.
Now, though, as he glowered at George’s unhappy countenance, Fuchs felt considerably less than grateful.
“That’s what his fookin’ party was for,” George was saying, morosely. “He got up on the fookin’ piano bench to tell all those people that he was gonna be a father. Pleased as a fat snake, he looked.”
Fuchs wiped George’s image off the screen and got up from his chair. His compartment was only three strides across, and he paced from one side of it to the other twice, three times, four …
It was inevitable, he told himself. She’s been married to him for eight years. She’s been in his bed every night for all that time. What did you expect?
Yet a fury boiled within him like raging molten lava. This is Humphries’s way of taunting me. Humiliating me. He’s showing the whole world, the whole solar system, that he’s the master. He’s taken my wife and made her pregnant with his son. The bastard! The crowing, gloating, boasting filthy swine of a bastard! I’ve been fighting him for all these years and he fights back by stealing my wife and making her bear his son. The coward! The gutless shit-hearted spineless slimy coward.