by Ben Bova
Now, though, as he glowered at George’s unhappy countenance, Fuchs felt considerably less than grateful.
“That’s what his fookin’ party was for,” George was saying, morosely. “He got up on the fookin’ piano bench to tell all those people that he was gonna be a father. Pleased as a fat snake, he looked.”
Fuchs wiped George’s image off the screen and got up from his chair. His compartment was only three strides across, and he paced from one side of it to the other twice, three times, four …
It was inevitable, he told himself. She’s been married to him for eight years. She’s been in his bed every night for all that time. What did you expect?
Yet a fury boiled within him like raging molten lava. This is Humphries’s way of taunting me. Humiliating me. He’s showing the whole world, the whole solar system, that he’s the master. He’s taken my wife and made her pregnant with his son. The bastard! The crowing, gloating, boasting filthy swine of a bastard! I’ve been fighting him for all these years and he fights back by stealing my wife and making her bear his son. The coward! The gutless shit-hearted spineless slimy coward.
His hands balled into fists, Fuchs advanced to the blanked screen, the image of George’s shaggy-maned face still burning in his eyes. He had to hit something, anything, had to release this fury somehow, now, before it exploded inside him.
“Contact,” sang Nodon’s voice over the intercom. “We have radar contact with a vessel.”
Fuchs’s head jerked to the speaker built into the bulkhead.
“It appears to be a logistics ship,” Nodon added.
Fuchs’s lips curled into a humorless smile. “I’m coming up to the bridge,” he said.
By the time he got to the compact, equipment-crammed bridge, Nodon had the approaching logistics ship on the main screen. Amarjagal was in the pilot’s seat, silent and dour as usual. Fuchs stood behind her and focused his attention on the ship.
“What’s a logistics ship doing this deep in the Belt?” he wondered aloud.
Nodon shifted his big, liquid eyes from the screen to Fuchs, then back again. “Perhaps it is off course,” he suggested.
“Or a decoy,” Fuchs snapped. “Any other ships in sight?”
“Nosir. The nearest object is a minor asteroid, less than a hundred meters across.”
“Distance?”
“Four hundred kilometers. Four thirty-two, to be precise.”
“Could it be another ship, disguised?”
Amarjagal spoke up. “There could be a ship behind it. Or even sitting on it.”
The communications receiver’s light began blinking amber.
“They’re trying to speak to us,” Nodon said, pointing to the light.
“Listen, but don’t reply,” Fuchs commanded.
“This is the Roebuck,” the comm speaker announced. A man’s voice; it sounded a little shaky to Fuchs. He’s excited, maybe nervous.
“We have a full cargo of supplies for you. Be willing to accept credit if you don’t have hard goods to trade.”
“Is Roebuck an HSS vessel?” Fuchs asked Nodon.
His fingers flicked across the keyboard set into the control panel. “Nosir. It is registered as an independent.”
“Are the lasers ready?”
Pointing to the green lights of the weapons board, Nodon replied, “Yessir. The crews are all in place.”
In Roebuck’s cargo bay the team of trained mercenaries was already in their spacesuits and warming up the laser weapons.
“Don’t open the hatches until I give the word,” their captain said from his post on the catwalk that ran around the interior of the spacious bay. “I don’t want to give Fuchs any hint that we’re ready to fry his ass.”
Fuchs rubbed his broad, stubbled chin as he stared at the image of the logistics vessel on the bridge’s main screen.
“Why would an independent logistics ship be this deep in the Belt?” he repeated. “There aren’t any miners or prospectors out here.”
“Except us,” agreed Amarjagal.
“Fire number one at their cargo bay,” Fuchs snapped.
Nodon hesitated for a fraction of a moment.
“Fire it!” Fuchs roared.
The first laser blast did little more damage than puncturing the thin skin of Roebuck’s cargo bay hull. As the air rushed out of the bay, their spacesuited commander gave the order to open the hatches and begin firing back at Nautilus.
In the cockpit Abrams felt cold sweat break out all over his body. “He’s shooting at us!”
Wanmanigee tensed, too. “We should get into our space suits! Quickly!”
Those were her last words.
His eyes glued to the main screen, Fuchs saw Roebuck’s cargo bay hatches open.
“They’re firing back,” reported Amarjagal, her voice flat and calm.
“All weapons fire,” Fuchs said. “Tear her to shreds.”
It was a totally unequal battle. Roebuck’s laser beams splashed off Nautilus’s copper armor shields. Nautilus’s five laser weapons slashed through Roebuck’s thin hull, shredding the cargo bay and crew pod within seconds. Fuchs saw several space-suited figures tumble out of the wreckage.
“Cease firing,” he said.
Jabbing a finger at the image of the space-suited people floating helplessly, Nodon asked, “Shall we pick them up?”
Fuchs sneered at him. “Do you want to share your rations with them?” Nodon hesitated, obviously torn.
“And if we take them aboard, what do we do with them? How do we get rid of them? Do you think we can cruise back to Ceres and land them there?”
Nodon shook his head. Still, he turned back to watch the helpless figures floating amidst the wreckage of what had been a vessel only a few moments earlier. His finger hovered over the communications keyboard.
“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.”
Pancho shook her head. Once Selene had been virtually self-sufficient, mining water from the deposits of ice at the lunar poles, and using the raw materials scraped from the Moon’s surface layers of regolith. Selene even exported fusion fuels to Earth and supplied the aluminum and silicon for building solar power satellites in Earth orbit.
But once Selene’s government decided to allow limited immigration from the devastated Earth, the lunar nation’s self-sufficiency ended. Selene became dependent on the metals and minerals, even the water, imported from the asteroids. And the trickle of immigration from Earth had become an ever-increasing stream, Pancho knew.
“What’re you going to do?” Pancho repeated.
Looking decidedly unhappy, Stavenger said, “I’ll have a talk with Humphries. Not that it’ll do much good, I expect.”
Pancho heard his unspoken words. It’s up to me to stop Humphries, she realized. I’ve got to fight him. Nobody else can.
“Okay,” she said to Stavenger. “You talk. I’ll act.”
“No fighting here,” Stavenger snapped. “Not here.”
“Not here, Doug,” Pancho promised. Already in her head she was starting to figure how much it would cost to go to war against Humphries Space Systems out in the Asteroid Belt.
Flying in the rattling, roaring helicopter from SeaTac Aerospaceport, the Asian-American who had been assigned to make certain that Pancho Lane survived the sabotage of the cable car looked forward to returning to his home in the mountains of Washington State’s Olympic peninsula. His family would be waiting for him, he knew. So would the fat stipend from Yamagata Corporation.
The helicopter touched down on the cleared gravel area at the foot of the path that led up to his cabin. Strangely, no one was there to greet him. Surely his wife and children heard the copter’s throbbing engines. He walked to the edge of the helipad, clutching his travel bag in one hand, squinting in the miniature sandstorm of gravel and grit from the helicopter’s swirling rotors.
From the gravel pad he could see downslope to the drowned city of Port Townsend and the cluster of scuba-diving camps huddled around it. On a clear day, he could gaze through binoculars at the shattered remains of Seattle’s high-rise towers poking up above the waters of Puget Sound.
It had been a curious assignment, he thought. Fly to the Moon as a tourist—at a cost that would have emptied his life savings—and ride in a certain cable car at a certain time, carrying emergency survival equipment to make certain that Ms. Lane would not be killed by the “accident.”
He shrugged his heavy shoulders as he watched the helicopter dwindle into the cloudy sky, then turned and headed up the winding path toward his home.
He never saw his wife and children, who lay in their bloody beds, each of them shot through the head. Two men grabbed him as he stepped through the front door of his cabin and put a gun to his temple. By the time the local police arrived on the scene, several days later, it seemed obvious to them that the man had slaughtered his family and then committed suicide.
“He must’ve gone nuts,” said the police chief. “It happens. A guy just snaps, for no apparent reason.”
Case closed.
At Selene, the maintenance technician who had planted the tiny explosive device that knocked the car off its cable was also found dead: of an overdose of narcotics. His papers showed that although he was an employee of Selene’s maintenance department, he had recently received a sizeable amount of money from some unknown benefactor. The money was untraceable; apparently he had used it to buy the drugs that killed him.
Rumors quickly bruited through Selene that the money had come from Humphries Space Systems. There was no hint that it had actually been provided by Yamagata Corporation.
HUMPHRIES MANSION
“Somebody tried to kill Pancho?” Martin Humphries could barely hide his elation. “You mean there’s somebody else who wants that guttersnipe offed?”
Grigor Malenkovich was not smiling. Humphries sometimes wondered if the man knew how to smile. The chief of HSS’s security department, Grigor was a lean, silent man with thinning dark hair combed straight back from his forehead, and dark, probing eyes. He said little, and moved like a furtive shadow. He habitually wore suits of slate gray. He could fade into a crowd and remain unnoticed by all except the most discerning eye. Humphries thought of him as the ultimate bureaucrat, functioning quietly, obeying any order without question, as inconspicuous as a mouse, as dangerous as a plague bacillus.
He stood before Humphries’s desk, sallow-faced, humorless.
“You are being blamed for the attempt on her life,” he said, his voice low and soft as a lullaby.
“Me?”
Grigor nodded wordlessly.
“I didn’t order her killed,” Humphries snapped. “If you freelanced this—”
“Not me,” said Grigor. “Nor anyone in my department.”
“Then who?”
Grigor shrugged.
“Find out,” Humphries commanded. “I want to know who tried to kill Pancho. Maybe I’ll give him a reward.”
“This is not funny, sir,” Grigor replied. “An order has gone out from Astro Corporation headquarters to arm Astro’s vessels in the Belt.”
Humphries could feel his cheeks flush with anger. “That damned greasemonkey! She wants a war, does she?”
“A
pparently she believes that you want one.”
Humphries drummed his fingers on his desktop. “I don’t,” he said at last. “But if she wants to fight, by god I’ll flatten her! No matter what it costs!”
Long after Grigor had left his office, Humphries’s phone said in its synthesized voice, “Incoming call from Douglas Stavenger.”
Humphries glared at the phone’s blinking amber light. “Tell him I’m not available at present. Take his message.”
Humphries knew what Stavenger’s message would be. He wants to be the peacemaker again, just as he was eight years ago. But not this time, Humphries decided. Pancho wants to go to war, and I’m going to accommodate her. I’ll get rid of her and take control of Astro in one swoop.
What was it that German said, he wondered silently, the guy who wrote about war? Then he remembered: War is a continuation of politics by other means.
Other means. Humphries smiled, alone in his office, and told his phone to instruct Grigor to contact that mercenary, Dorik Harbin. He’s a one-man Mongol horde, Humphries remembered. A madman, when he’s high on drugs. Time to get him onto Pancho’s trail.
Amanda kept her eyes closed and her breathing deep and regular. Humphries lay beside her in their sumptuous bedroom, twitching slightly in his sleep. Nightmares again, she thought. He’s such a powerful and commanding person all day long, demanding and imperious, but when he sleeps he whimpers like a whipped little boy.
She couldn’t hate Martin Humphries. The man was driven by inner demons that he allowed no one to see, not even his wife. He was alone in his torments, and he kept a high wall of separation around the deepset fears that haunted his dreams. Even his sexual excesses were driven by a desperate need to prove himself master of his world. He says he does it to excite me, Amanda told herself, but we both know it’s really to control me, to make me obey him, to prove that he’s my master.