The automated systems built into the archway directly in front of the inspector’s booth scanned his one travel bag and his body without a problem. Fuchs had nothing with him or on him that would trigger an alarm. The human inspector sitting in the booth behind the automated machinery looked bored, his thin smile forced. Fuchs handed him his falsified identity chip and the inspector slipped it into his desktop.
“Karl Manstein?”
“Ja,” Fuchs answered.
The inspector asked, “Purpose of your visit?” in standard English; the booth’s synthesized computer voice translated his words into German.
“Vacation.”
For a heart-stopping moment the inspector studied his screen display, his eyes narrowing. Then he popped Fuchs’s thumbnail-sized chip out of his computer and slid it over the countertop to him.
“Welcome to Selene, Herr Manstein. Enjoy your vacation.”
“Thank you,” Fuchs replied gratefully, scooping up the chip in one meaty hand and hurrying past the inspector, toward the electric-powered cart that would carry him into Selene.
His first task, once he was safely in his suite at the Hotel Luna, would be to send innocuous-seeming messages to his three most trusted crew members, waiting at Ceres. “I have arrived at Selene, and everything is fine.” That was the code phrase that would tell them to head for Selene also. Fuchs intended to kill Humphries, and he knew he could not do it alone.
ORE FREIGHTER SCRANTON
Chick Egan was mildly surprised to find a ship approaching Scranton at high speed. The ore freighter was almost clear of the inner fringe of the Belt, heading toward Selene, carrying a full load of asteroidal metals under contract to Astro Corporation. Astro’s people were busily auctioning off the metals on the commodities market at Selene, desperately hoping to get prices high enough to make a minimal profit.
Sitting sideways in the pilot’s seat, his legs dangling over the armrest, Egan had been talking with his partner, “Zep” Zepopoulous, about the advisability of getting a laser weapon for the old, slow Scranton.
“Makes about as much sense as giving Santa Claus a six-shooter,” Zep argued. He was a lean, wiry Greek with thick jet black hair and a moustache to match. “We’re in the freight-hauling business, we’re not fighters.”
Egan’s strawberry-blond hair was shorn down to a military buzz cut. “Yeah, but all the other ships are puttin’ on lasers. For self-defense.”
“This tub isn’t worth defending,” Zep replied, gesturing around the cramped, shabby cockpit with its scuffed bulkheads and worn-shiny seats. “Somebody wants what we’re carrying, we just give it to them and let the insurance carrier worry about it.”
“HSS is going after Astro ships,” Egan said. “And vice versa.”
“We’re only under contract to Astro for this one flight. We could sign up with HSS next time out.”
“Sam Gunn’s arming all his ships,” Egan countered. “Astro, HSS, a lot of the independents, too.”
“Let ’em,” said Zepopoulous. “The day I start carrying weapons is the day I quit this racket and go back to Naxos.”
“What’s left of it.”
“The flooding’s stabilized now, they say. I’ll be a fisherman, like my father.”
“And starve like your father.”
That was when the radar pinged. Both men looked at the screen and saw a ship approaching at high speed.
“Who the hell is that?” Zep asked. The display screen showed only blanks where a ship’s name and ownership would normally appear.
“Lars Fuchs?” Egan suggested.
“What would he want a load of ores for? We’re not an HSS ship, and we don’t have any supplies he’d want to take.”
Feeling decidedly nervous, Egan turned to the communications unit. “This is Scranton. Independent inbound for Selene. Identify yourself, please.”
The answer was a laser bolt that punched a hole through the skin of the cockpit. Egan’s last thought was that he wished he had armed Scranton so he could at least die fighting.
George Ambrose listened to the reports in gloomy silence. The six other members of Ceres’s governing council sitting around the oval conference table looked even bleaker.
Eight ships destroyed in the past month. Warships being built at Selene and sent to the Belt by Astro and Humphries Space Systems.
“The HSS base on Vesta has more than two dozen ships orbiting around it,” said the council member responsible for relations with the two major corporations. She was a Valkyrie-sized woman with sandy hair and a lovely, almost delicate fine-boned face that looked out of place on her big, muscular body.