The technician nodded and bent over his console.
In her compartment aboard Elsinore, Edith Elgin stopped in mid-sentence as the wall screen suddenly broke into jagged, hissing lines of hash.
“Something’s wrong,” she said to Big George. “The link’s gone dead.”
George frowned. “He doesn’t want us talkin’ to anybody. Prob’ly knocked out the antennas.”
“You mean he attacked this ship?” Edith was shocked.
Nodding, George said, “And he’ll do worse in another fifteen minutes if we don’t produce Lars.”
“But Fuchs isn’t here!”
“Tell it to him.”
Yannis Ritsos was alone on duty in Chrysalis’s communications center when Harbin’s ultimatum came through.
It was a dull night shift; nothing but boringly routine chatter from the far-scattered ships of the miners and prospectors, and the coded telemetry sent routinely from their ships. With everything in the center humming along on automatic, and no one else in the comm center at this late hour, Yanni opened the computer subroutine he used to write poetry.
He had hardly written a line when the central screen suddenly lit up to show a dark-bearded man whose eyes glittered like polished obsidian.
“Attention, Chrysalis,” the stranger said, in guttural English. “This is the attack vessel Samarkand. You are harboring the fugitive Lars Fuchs. You will turn him over to me in ten minutes or suffer the consequences of defiance.”
Annoyed at being interrupted in his writing, Yanni thought it was some jokester in the habitat pulling a prank.
“Who is this?” he demanded. “Get off this frequency. It’s reserved for incoming calls.”
The dark-bearded face grew visibly angry. “This is your own death speaking to you if you don’t turn Fuchs over to me.”
“Lars Fuchs?” Yanni replied, only half believing his ears. “God knows where he is.”
“I know where he is,” the intruder snapped. “And if you don’t surrender him to me I will destroy you.”
Irritated, Yanni shot back, “Fuchs hasn’t been here for years and he isn’t here now. Go away and stop bothering me.”
Harbin stared at the comm screen in Samarkand’s bridge. They’re stalling for time, he thought. They’re trying to think of a way to hide Fuchs from me.
He took a deep breath, then said with deadly calm, “Apparently you don’t believe me. Very well. Let me demonstrate my sincerity.”
Turning to the weapons tech, Harbin ordered, “Chop one of the habitat’s modules.”
The man swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “Sir, there are civilians in those modules. Innocent men and women—”
“I gave you an order,” Harbin snapped.
“But—”
“Get off the bridge! I’ll take care of this myself.”
The weapons tech glanced at the others on the bridge, looking for support.
“Chrysalis is unarmed, sir,” said the pilot softly, almost in a whisper.
Cold fury gripped Harbin. “Get out. All of you,” he said, his voice hard as ice. “I’ll tend to this myself.”
The entire bridge crew got up and swiftly went to the hatch, leaving Harbin alone in the command chair. He pecked furiously at the keyboards on his armrests, taking control of all the ship’s systems.
Fools and weaklings, he raged to himself. They call themselves mercenaries but they’re no good for anything except drawing their pay and pissing their pants in fear. Chrysalis is unarmed? I’ll believe that when pigs fly. They’re harboring Fuchs and they’re stalling for time, trying to hide him, trying to lure me into sending my crew over there so they can ambush and slaughter them. I’ve seen ambushes, I’ve seen slaughters. They’re not going to do that to me or my crew.
He called up the weapons display for the main screen, focused on the module of the Chrysalis closest to his ship and jabbed a thumb against the key that fired the lasers. Three jagged lines slashed across the thin skin of the module. Puffs of air glittered briefly like the puffs of a person’s breath on a winter’s day.
“Give me Fuchs,” he said to the comm screen.
Yanni heard screams.
“What’s going on?” he asked the empty communications center.
The face on the screen smiled coldly. “Give me Fuchs,” he said.
Before Yanni could reply, the comm center’s door burst open and a woman in bright coral coveralls rushed in. “Module eighteen’s been ripped apart! They’re all dead in there!”