“As long as he is rampaging out there in the Belt there can be no peace.”
Stavenger shook his head. “But Fuchs started his… rampage, as you call it, in reaction to the violence that Humphries’s people began.”
“That makes no difference now,” Dieterling said, dropping his voice almost to a whisper. “We can get Humphries and Ms. Lane to let bygones be bygones and forget the past. No recriminations, no acts of vengeance. They are willing to make a peaceful settlement.”
“And stick to it, do you think?”
“Yes. I’m certain of it. This war is becoming too expensive for them. They want it ended.”
“They can end it this afternoon, if they want to.”
“Only if Fuchs is stopped,” Dieterling said. “He is the wild card, the terrorist who is beyond ordinary political control.”
Stavenger nodded glumly. “He’s got to be stopped, then. Dammit.”
Humphries stepped into the washroom, relieved himself of a morning’s worth of coffee, then washed up and popped another tranquilizing pill. He thought of them as tranquilizers, even though he knew they were much more than that.
As he stepped out into the corridor, Amanda came out of the ladies’ room. His breath caught in his throat, despite the pill. She was dressed in a yellow pant suit that seemed faded from long use, yet in Humphries’s eyes she glowed like the sun. No one else was in sight; the others must have all gone into the room where lunch was laid out.
“Hello, Amanda,” he heard himself say.
Only then did he see the cold anger in her eyes.
“You’re determined to kill Lars, aren’t you?” she said flatly.
Humphries licked his lips before replying, “Kill him? No. Stop him. That’s all I want, Amanda. I want him to stop the killing.”
“Which you started.”
“That doesn’t matter anymore. He’s the problem now.”
“You won’t rest until you’ve killed him.”
“Not—” He had to swallow hard before he could continue. “Not if you’ll marry me.”
He had expected her to be surprised. But her eyes did not flicker, the expression on her utterly beautiful face did not change one iota. She simply turned and headed up the corridor, away from him.
Humphries started to after her, but then he heard Stavenger and Dieterling coming up the hall behind him. Don’t make an ass of yourself in front of them, he told himself sternly. Let her go. For now. At least she didn’t say no.
CHAPTER 52
As Fuchs studied the image of asteroid 38-4002, Nodon ducked through the hatch and stepped into the bridge. Fuchs heard him ask the pilot if the long-range scan showed any other ships in the area. “None,” said the pilot.
What could raise a lump on a beanbag collection of pebbles? Fuchs asked himself for the dozenth time.
Wishing he had a full panoply of sensors to play across the asteroid’s surface, Fuchs noted again that there were several noticeable craters on its surface, but none of them had the raised rims that formed when a boulder crashed into a solid rock. No, this is a collection of nodules, he thought, and the only way to build a blister like that is for something to push the pellets up into a mound.
Something. Then it hit him. Or someone. He turned in his chair and looked up at Nodon. “Warm up laser number one,” he commanded.
Nodon’s big eyes flashed, but he nodded silently and left the bridge.
Turning back to the image of the approaching asteroid, Fuchs reasoned, If something natural pushed up that mound, then there should be a depression next to it, from where the pebbles were scooped up. But there isn’t. Why not? Because something is buried under that mound. Because someone dug a hole in that porous pile of rubble and buried something in it.
What?
“Cut our approach velocity in half,” he said to the pilot. The Asian complied wordlessly.
Several minutes later, Nodon called from the cargo bay, “Laser number two is ready.”
“Number two?” Fuchs replied sharply. “What happened to number one?”
“Its coolant lines are being flushed. Routine maintenance.”
“Get it on line,” Fuchs snapped. “Get number three on line, too.”
“Yes, sir.” Fuchs could hear Nodon speaking in rapid dialect to someone else down in the cargo bay.
“Slave number two to my console,” Fuchs ordered.
He began to reconfigure his console with fingertip touches on its main display screen. By the time he had finished, the laser was linked. He could run it from the bridge.
He put the asteroid on-screen and focused on that suspicious mound of rubble. He saw the red dot of the aiming laser sparkling on the dark, pebbly ground and walked it to the middle of the mound. Then, with a touch of a finger, he fired the high-power laser. Its infrared beam was invisible to his eyes, but Fuchs saw the ground cascade into a splash of heat, a miniature fountain of red-hot lava erupting, spraying high above the asteroid’s surface.
His face set in a harsh scowl, Fuchs held the cutting laser’s beam on the spewing geyser of molten rock. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Twenty…
The mound erupted. Half a dozen spacesuited figures scurried in all directions like cockroaches startled out of their nest, stumbling across the rough surface of the asteroid.
“I knew it!” Fuchs shouted. The three Asians on the bridge turned toward him.
Nodon called from the cargo bay, “They were waiting for us to pick up the transceiver!”
Fuchs ignored them all. He swung the laser toward one of the figures. The man had tripped and sprawled clumsily in the minuscule gravity of the little asteroid, then when he tried to get up, he had pushed himself completely off the ground. Now he floated helplessly, arms and legs flailing.
Fuchs walked the laser beam toward him, watched its molten path as it burned across the asteroid’s gravelly surface.
“Waiting to trap me, were you?” he muttered. “You wanted to kill me. Now see what death is like.”
For an instant he wondered who was inside that spacesuit. What kind of a man becomes a mercenary soldier, a hired killer? Is he like my own crew, the castoffs, the abandoned, so desperate that they’ll do anything, follow anyone who can give them hope that they’ll live to see another day? Fuchs watched the spacesuited figure struggling, arms and legs pumping frantically as he drifted farther off the asteroid. He certainly had no experience in micro-gravity, Fuchs saw. And his comrades are doing nothing to help him.
You’re going to die alone, he said silently to the spacesuited figure.
Yet he turned off the cutting laser. His hand had touched the screen icon that deactivated its beam before his conscious mind understood what he had done. The red spot of the low-power aiming laser still scintillated on the asteroid’s surface. Fuchs moved it to shine squarely on the flailing, contorted body of the mercenary.
Kill or be killed, he told himself. It took an effort, though, to will his hand back to the high-power laser’s firing control. He held it there, poised a bare centimeter above it.
“Two ships approaching at high acceleration,” called the pilot. “No, four ships, coming in from two different directions.”
Fuchs knew he couldn’t murder the man. He could not kill him in cold blood. And he knew that their trap had worked.
It all fell in on him like an avalanche. They knew where the transceivers were hidden. Someone had told them. Someone? Only Amanda knew where the transceivers were located. She wouldn’t betray him, Fuchs told
