“What’s wrong?” he demanded.
“Malfunction in the weapons pod,” said the pilot, his fingers playing over the console keypads. “Electrical failure and—”
The lights blinked. This time Harbin felt the ship shudder slightly.
“We’ve been hit!” he snapped.
“Mathilda isn’t firing at us,” the navigator said, staring at the main screen. “That vessel isn’t armed. It’s only a—”
Samarkand lurched noticeably.
“We’re spinning!” the pilot shouted. “Number two propulsion tank’s been ruptured!”
“They’re firing at us,” Harbin shouted.
“But they can’t!”
“Somebody’s firing at us!” he insisted. “Get us out of here! Now!”
“I’m trying to bring the ship under control,” the pilot yelled, her voice edgy, nearing panic.
We should get into our suits, Harbin knew. But there’s no time for that now.
“Get us out of here!” he repeated, trying to sound calm, measured.
That asteroid, he realized. Somebody’s on that asteroid and shooting at us. It must be Fuchs.
Lars Fuchs stood behind his pilot’s chair, legs spread slightly, fists on his hips, eyes blazing with anger as he studied the display screen.
They fired on George’s ship, he said to himself. Why? Did they think I was aboard? Or were they trying to kill Pancho? Probably both.
“The enemy is escaping,” Nodon said. He spoke softly, keeping his tone neutral, making as certain as he could not to anger Fuchs.
“Let them go,” Fuchs said. “The dog is whipped, no sense daring him to turn back and snap at us.”
None of the crew on the bridge raised any objection.
“Sanja,” Fuchs said to the man on the communications console, “see if you can contact the ship they attacked.”
Within a few minutes Big George’s face appeared on the screen, his brick-red hair and beard still stuffed inside the fishbowl helmet of his space suit.
“We lost one man,” George said grimly. “No damage to the ship’s systems.”
Past George’s broad shoulder Fuchs could see space-suited personnel smearing epoxy across the bridge’s forward window.
“We’ll have air pressure back in half an hour, maybe less,” said George.
“Pancho is with you?” Fuchs asked.
“Yep. She’s okay.”
“You said she wanted to speak with me.”
“I’ll get her on the line,” said George.
Fuchs waited impatiently, fighting the urge to pace the narrow confines of Nautilus’s bridge. Within a few minutes Pancho’s face replaced George’s on his screen. She was apparently in a privacy compartment, still in her space suit.
“He tried to assassinate you,” Fuchs said without any preliminaries.
“Humphries?” she replied.
“Who else.”
“Maybe he was trying to get you,” Pancho said.
“He promised Amanda he wouldn’t try to harm me,” Fuchs answered, his voice heavy with irony.
An odd expression crossed Pancho’s face. He could not determine what was going through her thoughts.
“It might’ve been a freelancer,” she said at last. “Plenty people are after your scalp, Lars.”
He shook his head, scowling. “That was no freebooter. He knew where you would be and he knew you were attempting to make a rendezvous with me. Only one of Humphries’s agents would have access to such intelligence.”
Pancho nodded inside her space-suit helmet. “I guess.”
Taking a deep breath, Fuchs said, “Well, Pancho, you wanted to speak with me. Here I am. What is it that’s so important?”
That strange expression clouded her face again. “Lars, I need to talk to you face to face about this. Not over a comm link.”
“Impossible. You can’t come aboard my ship and I won’t leave it. Talk now. What is it?”
She hesitated, obviously torn between conflicting emotions.
“Well?” he demanded.
“Lars… it’s about Amanda. Before she died she—”
“She died?” Fuchs felt his heart constrict beneath his ribs. “Amanda is dead?”
Pancho looked stricken. “I didn’t want to tell you like this. I wanted to—”
“She’s dead?” Fuchs repeated, his voice gone hollow. He felt as if he needed to sit down, but he couldn’t show that weakness here on the bridge, in front of his crew.
“She died in childbirth, Lars.”
“Giving birth to his son,” Fuchs muttered.
“No, not—”
“He killed her. Humphries killed her just as certainly as if he put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”
“Lars, you don’t understand,” said Pancho, almost pleading.