Stavenger suddenly shot out of his chair, grabbed Humphries by the collar of his tunic and hauled him to his feet.
“Why don’t I just break your damned neck here and now and get this war over with?” he snarled.
Humphries went white. He hung limply in Stavenger’s grasp, not even able to raise his hands to defend himself.
Stavenger pushed him back onto the sofa. “Martin, I can see that you’re not going to stop this war of your own volition. It won’t stop until you’re stopped.”
Some color returned to Humphries’s face. With a trembling hand he pointed to Pancho. “What about her? She started it!”
“I started it?” Pancho yelped. “That’s the biggest motherhumping lie I ever heard.”
“You started arming your ships!”
“You tried to assassinate me!”
“I did not!”
“The cable car from Hell Crater, remember? You’re saying you didn’t do that?”
“I didn’t!”
“Liar.”
“I didn’t do it!”
“Then who the hell did?”
“Not me!”
Stavenger’s phone chimed, interrupting their finger-pointing.
“Phone answer,” Stavenger called.
Edith Elgin’s face appeared on the screen. She looked tense, worried, almost frightened. “Doug, I know you’re going to hear about this one way or the other. The rock rats’ habitat at Ceres is being threatened by somebody who wants Lars Fuchs. It must be a Humphries operation. I’m safe on the Elsinore so far, but we don’t know what’s going to happen. This could get ugly.”
The screen went blank.
“Edith!” Stavenger called.
The screen remained gray, but a synthesized voice said, “Transmission was interrupted at the source. The system will attempt to reconnect.”
Stavenger whirled on Humphries. “If anything happens to my wife I’ll kill you. Understand me? I’ll kill you!”