“Don’t tap into their frequency,” Fuchs commanded. “I don’t want to hear them begging.”
For several moments Fuchs and his bridge crew watched the figures slowly, silently drifting. They must be screaming for help, Nodon thought. Beseeching us for mercy. Yet we will not hear them.
At last Fuchs broke the silence. “One-third g acceleration,” he ordered. “Back on our original course. Let’s find a real logistics ship and fill up our supplies.”
“But…”
“They’re mercenaries,” Fuchs snapped. “Hired killers. They came out here to kill us. Now they’ll be dead. It’s no great loss.”
Nodon’s face still showed his desolation. “But they’ll die. They’ll float out there … forever.”
“Think of it this way,” Fuchs said, his voice iron-hard. “We’ve added a few more minor asteroids to the Belt.”
SELENE: ASTRO CORPORATION HEADQUARTERS
“Sabotaged.” Pancho knew it was true, even though she did not want to believe it.
Doug Stavenger looked grim. He sat tensely before Pancho’s desk, wearing light tan slacks and a micromesh pullover. Only the slight sparkling in the air around him betrayed the fact that his image was a hologram; otherwise he looked as solid and real as if he were actually in Pancho’s office, instead of his own office, up in one of the towers that supported the Main Plaza’s dome.
“It could have been worse,” he said. “A solar storm broke out just hours after you were rescued. We had to suspend all surface operations because of the radiation. If it had come a little earlier you would have fried out there in the cable car.”
“Nobody can predict solar flares that fine,” Pancho said.
“No, I suppose not.”
“But—sabotage?” she repeated.
“That’s what our investigation showed,” Stavenger replied. “Whoever did it wasn’t even very subtle about it. They used an explosive charge to knock out the trolley wheels that the cable car rides on. The blast damaged one of the poles, too.”
Pancho leaned both elbows on her desk. “Doug, are you telling me we’ve got terrorists in Selene now?”
Stavenger shook his head. “I don’t believe so.”
“But who would want to knock out a cable car? That’s the kind of random violence a terrorist would do. Or a nutcase.”
“Or an assassin.”
Pancho’s insides clenched. There it was. The same conclusion her own security people had swiftly come to. Yet she heard herself ask, “Assassin?”
“Selene’s security investigators think somebody was trying to kill you, Pancho.”
And twenty-three other people who happened to be aboard the car, she added silently.
Stavenger asked, “What do your own security people think?”
“Exactly the same,” she replied.
“I’m not surprised,” said Stavenger.
“Neither am I, I guess,” she said. Then she admitted, “I just didn’t want to believe that he’d try to kill me.”
“He?”
“Humphries. Who else?”
And she remembered their exchange at Humphries’s party:
“Why don’t you retire gracefully, Pancho, and let me take my rightful place as chairman of the Astro board?”
“In your dreams, Martin.”
“Then I’ll just have to find some other way to take control of Astro.”
“Over my dead body.”
“Remember, you said that, Pancho. I didn’t.”
The sonofabitch! Pancho thought.
Stavenger took a deep breath. “I don’t want you fighting here in Selene.”
Pancho understood his meaning. If Astro and Humphries are going to war, let it be out in the Belt.
“Doug,” she said earnestly, “I don’t want a war. I thought we had ended all that eight years ago.”
“So had I.”
“The sumbitch wants control of Astro, and he knows I won’t step aside and let him take over.”
“Pancho,” said Stavenger wearily, rubbing a hand across his eyes, “Humphries wants control of the Belt and all its resources. That seems clear.”
“And if he gets the Belt, he’ll have control of the whole solar system. And everybody in it.”
“Including Selene.”
Pancho nodded. “Including Selene.”
“I can’t allow that to happen.”
“So what’re you going to do about it, Doug?”
He spread his hands in a gesture of uncertainty. “That’s just it, Pancho. I don’t know what I can do. Humphries isn’t trying to take political control of Selene. He’s after economic power. He knows that if he controls the resources of the Belt, he’ll have Selene and everyone else under his thumb. He can let us continue to govern ourselves. But we’ll have to buy our water and most of our other raw materials from him.”