Pancho smiled at her. Sometimes I forget how smart she is, Pancho thought. I let her sweet face and nice boobs fool me.
Then she looked at Fuchs. He sat with his drink untouched before him, his eyes staring off into some private universe. Whatever he’s thinking about, Pancho realized, he’s a zillion kilometers from here.
Once they got back inside the ship, it took George and Nodon hours to patch the holes punched through the hull by the attacker’s laser and check out all the systems. They were both dead tired by the time they were able to take off their spacesuits and clump wearily, fearfully to the bridge.
George took the command chair, Nodon slipped into the chair at his right.
“You run a diagnostic on the power generator,” said George. “I’ll check the nav computer and see where th’ fook we’re headin’.” They worked in silence for another twenty minutes. At last Nodon said, “I can repair the generator. He knocked out one set of electrodes. We have spares.”
George nodded. “Okay, then. If you can get the generator back on line we won’t hafta worry about electrical power for the life support systems.”
Nodding, Nodon said, “That is good news.”
“Right. Now here’s the bad news. We’re up shit’s creek without a paddle.”
Nodon said nothing. He held his bony face impassive, but George saw that even his shaved pate was sheened with perspiration. It sure isn’t the temperature in here, George told himself. In fact, the bridge felt decidedly chilly.
With a heavy sigh, George said, “He knocked enough holes in the propellant tanks to send us jettin’ deeper into the Belt.”
“And the main engine is beyond repair.”
“Prob’ly.”
“Then we will die.”
“Looks that way, mate. Unless we can get some help.”
“The comm system is down. He must have lasered the antennas.”
George nodded. “So that’s what the soddin’ bastard was doing.”
“He was very thorough.”
Sitting there, staring at the control panel with half its telltale lights glowering red, George tried to think.
“We’re okay on life support,” he mused aloud.
“Once the generator is running again,” Nodon corrected. “Otherwise the batteries will run out in…” He glanced at the displays “…eleven hours.”
“Better fix the generator, then. That’s our first priority.”
Nodon started to get up from his seat. He hesitated, asked, “And our second priority?”
“Figurin’ out if we can nudge ourselves into a trajectory that’ll bring us close to Ceres before we starve to death.”
CHAPTER 20
Amanda would have preferred to stay in Selene for just a few days more, but Fuchs insisted that they start back for Ceres as soon as possible. He learned from Pancho that an Astro ship was due to depart for Ceres the next day, carrying a load of equipment that Helvetia had ordered before the warehouse fire. “We’ll go back on that ship,” Fuchs told his wife. “But it’s a freighter. It won’t have passenger accommodations,” Amanda protested.
“We’ll go back on that ship,” he repeated. Wondering why her husband was so insistent on returning as quickly as possible, Amanda reluctantly packed her travel bag while Fuchs called Pancho to beg a ride.
The next morning they rode the automated little tractor through the tunnel that led out to Armstrong Spaceport and climbed aboard the spindly-legged shuttlecraft that would lift them to the
“Newest ship in the solar system,” said her captain as he welcomed them aboard. He was young, trim, good- looking, and stared openly at Amanda’s ample figure. Fuchs, standing beside her, grasped his wife’s arm possessively.
“I’m afraid, though, that she’s not built for passenger service,” the captain said as he led them down the habitat module’s central passageway. “All I can offer you is this cabin.”
He slid an accordion-pleated door back. The cabin was barely large enough for two people to stand in.
“It’s kind of small,” the captain said, apologetically. But he was smiling at Amanda.
“It will do,” said Fuchs. “The trip is only six days.”
He stepped into the compartment, leading Amanda.
The captain, still out in the passageway, said, “We break orbit in thirty minutes.”
“Good,” said Fuchs. And he slid the door shut.
Amanda giggled at him. “Lars, you were positively rude to him!”
With a sardonic grin back at her, he said, “I thought his eyes would fall out of his head, he was staring at you so hard.”
“Oh, Lars, he wasn’t. Was he?”
“He most certainly was.”
Amanda’s expression became sly. “What do you think he had on his mind?”
His grin turned wolfish. “I’ll show you.”
Even though they took place in the tropical beauty of La Guaira, on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, the quarterly meetings of Astro Manufacturing Corporation’s board of directors had turned into little less than armed confrontations. Martin Humphries had built a clique around himself and was working hard to take control of the board. Opposing him was Pancho Lane, who had learned in her five years on the board how to bring together a voting bloc of her own.
As chairman of the board, Harriett O’Banian tried her best to steer clear of both groups. Her job, as she saw it, was to make Astro as profitable as possible. Much of what Humphries wanted to do was indeed profitable, even though Pancho opposed virtually anything Humphries or one of his people proposed.
But now Pancho was proposing something that might become an entirely new product line for Astro, and Humphries seemed dead set against it.
“Scoop gases from the atmosphere of Jupiter?” Humphries was scoffing. “Can you think of anything—any idea at all—that carries more risk?”
“Yeah,” Pancho snapped. “Lettin’ somebody else get a corner on the fusion fuels market.”
Red-haired Hattie O’Banian was no stranger to outbursts of temper. But not while she chaired the board. She rapped on the long conference table with her knuckles. “We
Pancho slumped back in her chair and nodded unhappily. She was seated almost exactly across the table from Humphries. O’Banian had to exert some self-control to keep from smiling at her. Pancho had come a long way since her first awkward days on the board. Underneath her west Texas drawl and aw-shucks demeanor, she had a sharp intelligence, quick wit, and the ability to focus on an issue with the intensity of a laser beam. With Hattie’s help, Pancho had learned how to dress the part of a board member: today she wore a trousered business suit of dusky rose, touched off with accents of jewelry. Still, Hattie thought, her lanky, long-legged tomboy image came through. She looked as if she wanted to reach across the table and sock Humphries between the eyes.
For his part, Humphries seemed perfectly at ease in a casual cardigan suit of deep blue and a pale lemon turtleneck shirt. He wears clothes well, Hattie thought, and hides his thoughts even better.
