But I had to get it away from Sam first.
Judge Myers was not happy with my equivocating reports to her. Definitely not happy.
There’s no way to have a conversation in real time between Ceres and Earth; the distance makes it impossible. It takes nearly half an hour for a message to cross one-way, even when the two bodies are at their closest. So I sent reports to Judge Myers and—usually within an hour—I’d get a response from her.
After my first report, she had a wry grin on her face when she called back. “Garrison, I know it’s about as easy to keep Sam in line as nailing tapioca to a wall in zero G. But all the plans for the wedding are set, it’s going to be the biggest social event of the year. You’ve got to make sure that he’s here. I’m depending on you, Garrison.”
A day later, her smile had disappeared. “The wedding’s only a week from now, Garrison,” she said after my second call to her. “I want that little scoundrel at the altar!”
Third call, the next day: “I don’t care what he’s doing! Get him back here! Now!”
That’s when Sam came up with his bright idea.
“Pack up your duds, Gar,” he announced brightly. “We’re going to take a little spin around the belt.”
I was too surprised to ask questions. In less than an hour, we were back in Achernar and heading out from Ceres. Sam had already filed a flight plan with the IAA controllers. As far as they were concerned, Sam was going to visit three specific asteroids, which might be used as tourist stops if and when he started his operation in the belt. Of course, I knew that once we cleared Ceres, there was no one and nothing that could hold him to that plan.
“What are we doing?” I asked, sitting in the right-hand seat of the cockpit. “Where are we going?”
“To meet Fuchs,” said Sam.
“You’ve made contact with him?”
“Nope,” Sam replied, grinning as if he knew something nobody else knew. “But I’m willing to bet somebody has. Maybe Big George. Fuchs saved his life once; did you know that?”
“But how—?”
“It’s simple,” Sam answered before I could finish the question. “We let it be known that we want to see Fuchs. Everybody says they don’t know where he is. We go out into the belt, away from everything, including snoops who might rat out Fuchs to Martin Humphries. Somebody from Chrysalis calls Fuchs and tells him about us. Fuchs intercepts our ship to see what I want. I give him Amanda’s message chip. QED.”
It made a certain amount of sense. But I had my doubts.
“What if Fuchs just blasts us?”
“Not his style. He’s only attacked unmanned ships.”
“He wiped out an HSS base on Vesta, didn’t he? Killed dozens.”
“That was during the war between him and Humphries. Ancient history. He hasn’t attacked a crewed ship since he’s been exiled.”
“But suppose—”
The communications console pinged.
“Hah!” Sam gloated. “There he is now.”
But the image that took form on the comm screen wasn’t Lars Fuchs’s face. It was Jill Myers.
She was beaming a smile that could’ve lit up Selene City for a month. “Sam, I’ve got a marvelous idea. I know you’re wrapped up in some kind of mysterious mission out there in the belt, and the wedding’s only a few days off, so . . .”
She hesitated, like somebody about to spring a big surprise. “So instead of you coming back Earthside for the wedding, I’m bringing the wedding out to you! All the guests and everything. In fact, I’m on the torch ship Statendaam right now! We break Earth orbit in about an hour. I’ll see you in five days, Sam, and we can be married just as we planned!”
To say Sam was surprised would be like saying Napoleon was disturbed by Waterloo. Or McKenzie was inconvenienced when his spacecraft crashed into the Lunar Apennines. Or—well, you get the idea.
Sam looked stunned, as if he’d been pole-axed between the eyes. He just slumped in the pilot’s chair, dazed, his eyes unfocused for several minutes.
“She can’t come out here,” he muttered at last.
“She’s already on her way,” I said.
“But she’ll ruin everything. If she comes barging out here, Fuchs’ll never come within a lightyear and a half of us.”
“How’re you going to stop her?”
Sam thought about that for all of a half second. “I can’t stop her. But I don’t have to make it easy for her to find me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Run silent, run deep.” With deft finger, Sam turned off the ship’s tracking beacon and telemetry transmitter.
“Sam! The controllers at Ceres will think we’ve been destroyed!”
He grinned wickedly. “Let ’em. If they don’t know where we are, they can’t point Jill at us.”
“But Fuchs won’t know where we are.”
“Oh, yes, he will,” Sam insisted. “Somebody at Ceres has already given him our flight plan. Big George, probably.”
“Sam,” I said patiently, “you filed that flight plan with the IAA. They’ll tell Judge Myers. She’ll come out looking for you.”
“Yeah, but she’ll be several days behind. By that time the IAA controllers’ll tell her we’ve disappeared. She’ll go home and weep for me.”
“Or start searching for your remains.”
He shot me an annoyed glance. “Anyway, we’ll meet with Fuchs before she gets here, most likely.”
“You hope.”
His grin wobbled a little.
I thought the most likely scenario was that Fuchs would ignore us and Judge Myers would search for us, hoping that Sam’s disappearance didn’t mean he was dead. Once she found us, I figured, she’d kill Sam herself.
It was eerie, out there in the belt. Flatlanders back on Earth think that the asteroid belt is a dangerous region, a-chock with boulders, so crowded that you have to maneuver like a kid in a computer game to avoid getting smashed.
Actually, it’s empty. Dark and cold and four times farther from
