Stavenger looked into his wife’s earnest eyes and knew he couldn’t stop her.
“I’ll go with you, then,” he said.
“Oh no! You’ve got to stay here!”
“I don’t think—”
“You’re my protection, Doug. What happens if we both get killed out there? Who’s going to lead Selene?”
“The duly elected governing council.”
“Oh, sure,” she sneered. “Without you pulling their strings they’ll dither and shuffle and do nothing, and you know it.”
“No, I don’t know that.”
She smiled again. “I need your protection, Doug, and I can only get it if you’re here at Selene, keeping things under control.”
“You give me more credit than I deserve.”
“And you’re the youngest eminence grise in the solar system.”
He laughed. It was an old standing joke between them.
“Besides,” Edith went on, “if you come out to Ceres all the attention will be on you. They’ll fall all over themselves trying to show you that everything’s all right. I’ll never get a straight story out of anybody.”
He kept the argument going for nearly another half-hour, but Stavenger knew that his wife would do what she wanted. And so would he. Edith will go to Ceres, he realized, and I’ll stay here.
Nobuhiko was brimming with excitement when he called his father to tell him that Pancho Lane was walking into the Nairobi base on the Moon.
The elder Yamagata was in his cell in the monastery, a fairly sizable room whose stone walls were covered now with bookshelves and smart screens. The room was furnished sparsely, but Nobu noticed that his father had managed to get a big, square mahogany desk for himself.
Saito was sitting on his haunches on a tatami mat, however, directly under the big wallscreen that displayed an intricate chart that Nobu guessed was the most recent performance of the Tokyo stock exchange.
“She’s going into the Nairobi base voluntarily?” Saito asked.
“Yes!” gushed Nobu. “I’ve ordered an interrogation team to get there immediately! The Africans can drug her and the team wring her dry and she’ll never even know it!”
Saito grunted. “Except for her headache the next day.”
Nobu wanted to laugh, but held back.
His father said nothing for long, nerve-racking moments. Finally, “You go to Shackleton. You, yourself.”
“Me? But why—”
“No interrogation team knows as much about our work as you do, my son. You can glean much more from her than they could without you.”
Nobu thought it over swiftly. “But if somehow she recognizes me, remembers afterward…”
“Then she must be eliminated,” Saito answered. “It would be a pity, but it would be quite necessary.”
COMMAND SHIP SAMARKAND
Since the battle that shattered Gormley’s fleet, the HSS base at Vesta had been busy. Ships were sent out in groups of two or three to hound down Astro freighters and logistics vessels. Although Astros crewed ships were armed, they were no match for the warships with their mercenary crews that Humphries was pouring into the Belt.
Sitting in the command chair of Samarkand, in charge of three attack ships, Dorik Harbin wondered how long the war could possibly go on. Astro’s vessels were being methodically eliminated. It was clear that Humphries’s mercenaries were on the verge of sweeping Astro entirely out of the Belt. Astro’s pitiful effort to stop HSS freighters from delivering ores to the Earth/Moon region had backfired hideously with the Starlight fiasco.
Yet the rumor was that more Astro ships were heading for the Belt. Better-armed ships, vessels crewed by mercenaries who were smart enough to avoid massed battles. The war was settling down to a struggle of attrition. Which corporation could better sustain the constant losses of ships and crews? Which corporation would decide the war was costing too much and call it quits?
Not Humphries, Harbin thought. He had met the man and seen the tenacity in his eyes, the dogged drive to succeed no matter what the cost. It’s only money to him, Harbin realized. He isn’t risking his neck, he’s in no danger of shedding his own blood. What does he care how many are killed out here in the empty silence of the Belt?
His communications technician flashed a red-bordered message onto the bridge’s main screen. A solar flare warning. Scanning the data, Harbin saw that it would be several days before the cloud reached the Belt’s inner fringes.