The Rock Rats

hate him! I hate his smug certainty. I hate the idea that he can push a button and men are murdered millions of kilometers away while he sits in his elegant mansion and dines on pheasant. And fantasizes about you!”

Amanda’s heart sank. I’m the cause of all this, she realized all over again. I’ve turned this sweet, loving man into a raging monster.

“I’d like to smash his face in,” Fuchs growled. “Kill him just as he’s killed so many others.”

“The way you killed that man in the Pub,” she heard herself say.

He looked as if she had slapped him in the face.

Shocked at her own words, Amanda said, “Oh, Lars, I didn’t mean—”

“You’re right,” he snapped. “Absolutely right. If I could kill Humphries like that, I’d do it. In a hot second.”

She reached up and stroked his cheek as gently, soothingly as she could. “Lars, darling, please—all you’re going to accomplish is getting yourself killed.”

He pushed her hand away. “Don’t you think I’m already marked for murder? He told me he would have me killed. You’re a dead man, Fuchs. Those were his exact words.”

Amanda closed her eyes. There was nothing she could do. She knew that her husband was going to fight, and there was nothing she could do to stop him. She knew he would get himself killed. Worse, she saw that he was turning into a killer himself. He was becoming a stranger, a man she didn’t know, didn’t recognize. That frightened her.

“And to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” asked Carlos Vertientes.

He’s a handsome devil, Pancho thought. Aristocratic Castilian features. Good cheekbones. Neat little salt- and-pepper beard. He really looks like a professor oughtta, not like the slobs and creeps back in Texas.

She was strolling along the Ramblas in Barcelona with the head of the university’s plasma dynamics department, the tall, distinguished physicist who had helped Lyall Duncan build the fusion propulsion system that now powered most of the spacecraft operating beyond the Moon’s orbit. Vertientes looked truly elegant in a dove-gray three-piece suit. Pancho was wearing the olive green coveralls she had traveled in.

Barcelona was still a vibrant city, despite the rising sea level and greenhouse warming and displacement of so many millions of refugees. The Ramblas was still the crowded, bustling, noisy boulevard where everyone went for a stroll, a sampling of tapas and good Rioja wine, a chance to see and be seen. Pancho liked it far better than sitting in an office, even though the crowd was so thick that at times they had to elbow their way past clusters of people who were walking too slowly. Pancho preferred the chatting, strolling crowd to an office that might be bugged.

“Your university’s a shareholder in Astro Corporation,” Pancho said, in answer to his question.

Vertientes’s finely-arched brows rose slightly. “We are part of a global consortium of universities that invests in many major corporations.”

He was slightly taller than Pancho, and slim as a Toledo blade. She felt good walking alongside him. With a nod, she replied, “Yup. That’s what I found out when I started lookin’ up Astro’s stockholders.”

He smiled dazzlingly. “Have you come to Barcelona to sell more stock?”

“No, no,” Pancho said, laughing with him. “But I do have a proposition for you—and your consortium.”

“And what might that be?” he asked, taking her arm to steer her past a knot of Asian tourists posing for a street photographer.

“How’d you like to set up a research station in orbit around Jupiter? Astro would foot three-quarters of the cost, maybe more if we can jiggle the books a little.”

Vertientes’s brows rose even higher. “A research station at Jupiter? You mean a manned station?”

“Crewed,” Pancho corrected.

He stopped and let the crowd flow around them. “You are suggesting that the consortium could establish a manned—and womanned—station in Jupiter orbit at one-quarter of the actual cost?”

“Maybe less,” Pancho said.

He pursed his lips. Then, “Let’s find a cantina where we can sit down and discuss this.”

“Suits me,” said Pancho, with a happy grin. Waltzing Matilda.

George looked sourly at the screen’s display.

“Four hundred and eighty-three days?” he asked. He was sitting in the command pilot’s chair, on the bridge; Nodon sat beside him.

Nodon seemed apologetic. “That is what the navigation program shows. We are on a long elliptical trajectory that will swing back to the vicinity of Ceres in four hundred and eighty-three days.”

“How close to Ceres?”

Nodon tapped at the keyboard. “Seventy thousand kilometers, plus or minus three thousand.”

George scratched at his beard. “Close enough to contact ’em with our suit radios, just about.”

“Perhaps,” said Nodon. “If we were still alive by then.”

“We’d be pretty skinny.”

“We would be dead.”

“So,” George asked, “what alternatives do we have?” Nodon said, “I have gone through all the possibilities. We have enough propellant remaining for only a short burst, nowhere nearly long enough to cut our transit time back to Ceres to anything useful.”

“But the thruster’s bunged up, useless.”

“Perhaps we could repair it.”

“Besides, if we use the propellant for thrust we won’t have anything left for the power generator. No power for life support. lights out.”

“No,” Nodon corrected. “I have reserved enough of the remaining propellant to keep the power generator running. We are okay there. We won’t run short of electrical power.”

“That’s something,” George huffed. “When our corpses arrive back in Ceres space the fookin’ ship’ll be well lit.”

“Perhaps we can repair the rocket thruster,” Nodon repeated.

George scratched at his beard again. It itched as if some uninvited guests had made their home in it. “I’m too fookin’ tired to go out again and look at the thruster. Gotta get some shut-eye first.”

Nodding his agreement, Nodon added, “And a meal.”

Surveying the depleted list on the galley inventory screen, George muttered, “Such as it is.”

CHAPTER 22

Amanda looked up from her screen and smiled as Fuchs entered their one-room apartment. He did not smile back at her. He had spent the morning inspecting the ruins of Helvetia’s warehouse. The fire had turned the rock- walled chamber into an oven, melting what it did not burn outright. Before it consumed all the oxygen in the cave and died out, it reduced all of Fuchs’s stock, all that he had worked for, all that he had planned and hoped for, to nothing but ashes and twisted stumps of melted metal. If the airtight hatches hadn’t held, the fire would easily have spread down the tunnels and killed everyone in Ceres.

Fuchs trembled with rage at the thought. The murdering vermin didn’t worry about that. They didn’t care. So everyone in Ceres dies, what is that to Humphries? What does it matter to him, so long as he gets his way and removes the thorn in his side?

I am that thorn, Fuchs told himself. I am only a little inconvenience, a minor nuisance in his grandiose plans for conquest.

Thinking of the blackened, ruined warehouse, Fuchs said to himself, This thorn in your side will go deeper into your flesh, Humphries. I will infect you, I will inflame you until you feel the same kind of pain that you’ve inflicted on so many others. I swear it!

Yet by the time he trod back to his home, coughing in the dust stirred up by his strides, he felt more weary than angry, wondering how he had come to travel down this path, why this weight of vengeance had fallen onto his