I could die in here! he realized. A hundred times he went to the airtight panel, touched it gingerly with his fingertips. It felt cool. He pressed both hands on it. Flattened his cheek against it. The fire must be out by now, he thought. His wristwatch told him that more than twenty hours had gone by. The fire’s got to be out by now. But what about the air? Is there any air to breathe on the other side of the panel?
Somebody will come, he assured himself. My security chief knows about this shelter. If he wasn’t killed in the fire. If he didn’t suffocate from lack of oxygen. Ferrer. Victoria might have gotten out. She’ll tell them I’m here. But then he wondered, Will she? I wouldn’t let her in here with me; she could be sore enough to let me rot in here, even if she got out okay. But even so, somebody will send people to go through the house, assess the damage. The Selene safety inspectors. The goddamned insurance people will be here sooner or later.
Later, a sardonic voice in his mind told him. Don’t expect the insurance adjusters to break their butts getting here.
It’s all that motherless architect’s fault, Humphries fumed. Idiot! Builds this emergency shelter without a phone to make contact with the outside. Without sensors to tell me if there’s air on the other side of the door. I’ll see to it that he never gets another commission. Never! He’ll be panhandling on street corners by the time I get finished with him.
There’s not even a water fountain in here. I could die of thirst before anybody finds me.
He slumped to the floor and wanted to cry, but his body was too dehydrated to produce tears.
BALLISTIC ROCKET
From her seat by the narrow window Pancho could see out of the corner of her eye the rugged lunar highlands gliding swiftly past, far below. She was the only passenger on the ballistic rocket as it arced high above the Moon’s barren surface, carrying her from Astro’s Malapert base back to Selene. Her ankle was set in a spraycast; she was heading for Selene’s hospital, and injections of nanomachines that would mend her broken bones and repair the damage that radiation had done to her body.
Pancho had precious little time to study the scenery. She was deep in conversation with Jake Wanamaker, whose craggy unsmiling face reminded her of the rocky land below.
“… should be releasing the nanomachines right about now,” Wanamaker was saying.
“And everybody on Vesta is belowground?” Pancho asked.
“Ought to be, with that radiation cloud sweeping over them. Anybody up on the surface is going to be dead no matter what we do.”
Pancho nodded. “All right. Now what’s this about Humphries’s mansion burning down?”
Wanamaker grimaced with distaste. “A group of four fanatics infiltrated into the grotto down there on the bottom level. Why, we don’t know yet. They’re being held by Selene security in the hospital.”
“And they burned the house down?”
“Set the whole garden on fire. The place is a blackened wasteland.”
“Humphries?”
“No sign of him. Selene inspectors are going through the place now. Apparently the house is still standing, but it’s been gutted by the fire.”
Strangely, Pancho felt no elation at the possibility that Humphries was dead. “Have they found his body?”
“Not yet.”
“And the people who attacked the place are in the hospital?”
“Under guard.”
Pancho knew only one person in the entire solar system who would be crazy enough to attack Humphries in his own home. Lars Fuchs.
“Was Lars Fuchs one of the attackers?”
Wanamaker’s acid expression deepened into a dark scowl. “He gave his name as Karl. Manstein. I don’t think Selene security has tumbled to who he really is.”
For an instant Pancho wondered how Wanamaker knew that Manstein was am alias for Fuchs. But she put that aside as unimportant. “Get him out of there,” she said.
“What?”
“Get him out of the hospital. Out of Selene. Send him back to the Belt, to Ceres, anywhere. Just get him loose from Selene security.”
“But he’s a murderer, a terrorist.”