Of course, a pebble could shatter your ship if it hits you with enough velocity.
So we were running silent, but following the flight plan Sam had registered with the IAA. We got to the first rock Sam had scheduled and loitered around it for half a day. No sign of Fuchs. If he was anywhere nearby, he was running as silently as we were.
“He’s gotta be somewhere around here,” Sam said as we broke orbit and headed for the next asteroid on his list. “He’s gotta be.”
I could tell that Sam was feeling Judge Myers’s eager breath on the back of his neck.
Me, I had a different problem. I wanted to get that message chip away from Sam long enough to send a copy of it to Martin Humphries. With a suitable request for compensation, of course. Fifty million would do nicely, I thought. A hundred mil would be even better.
But how to get the chip out of Sam’s pocket? He kept it on his person all the time; even slept with it.
So it floored me when, as we were eating breakfast in Achernar’s cramped little galley on our third day out, Sam fished the fingernail-sized chip out of his breast pocket and handed it to me.
“Gar,” he said solemnly, “I want you to hide this someplace where nobody can find it, not even me.”
I was staggered. “Why . . . ?”
“Just a precaution,” he said, his face more serious than I’d ever seen it before. “When Fuchs shows up, things might get rough. I don’t want to know where the chip is.”
“But the whole point of this flight is to deliver it to him.”
He nodded warily. “Yeah, Humphries must know we’re looking for Fuchs. He’s got IAA people on his payroll. Hell, half the people in Ceres might be willing to rat on us. Money talks, pal. Humphries might not know why we’re looking for Fuchs, but he knows we’re trying to find him.”
“Humphries wants to find Fuchs too,” I said. “And kill him, no matter what he promised his wife.”
“Damned right. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a ship tailing us.”
“I haven’t seen anything on the radar plot.”
“So what? A stealth ship could avoid radar. But not the hair on the back of my neck.”
“You think we’re being followed?”
“I’m sure of it.”
By the seven sinners of Cincinnati, I thought. This is starting to look like a class reunion! We’re jinking around in the belt, looking for Fuchs. Judge Myers is on her way, with a complete wedding party. And now Sam thinks there’s an HSS stealth ship lurking out there somewhere, waiting for us to find Fuchs so they can pounce on him.
But all that paled into insignificance for me as I stared down at the tiny chip Sam had placed in the palm of my hand.
I had it in my grasp! Now the trick was to contact Humphries without letting Sam know of it.
I couldn’t sleep that night. We were approaching the second asteroid on Sam’s itinerary on a dead-reckoning trajectory. No active signals going out from the ship except for the short-range collision avoidance radar. We’d take up a parking orbit around the unnamed rock midmorning tomorrow.
I waited until my eyes were adapted to the darkness of the sleeping compartment, then peeked down over the edge of my bunk to see if Sam was really asleep. He was on his side, face to the bulkhead, his legs pulled up slightly in a sort of fetal position. Breathing deep and regular.
He’s asleep, I told myself. As quietly as a wraith, I slipped out of my bunk and tiptoed in my bare feet to the cockpit, carefully shutting the hatches of the sleeping compartment and the galley, so there’d be no noise to waken Sam.
I’m pretty good at decrypting messages. It’s a useful talent for a con man, and I had spent long hours at computers during my one and only jail stretch to learn the tricks of the trade.
Of course, I could just offer the chip for sale to Humphries without knowing what was on it. He’d pay handsomely for a message that his wife wanted to give to Lars Fuchs.
But if I knew the contents of the message, I reasoned, I could most likely double or triple the price. So I started to work on decrypting it. How hard could it be? I asked myself as I slipped the chip into the ship’s main computer. She probably did the encoding herself, not trusting anybody around her. She’d been an astronaut in her earlier years, I knew, but not particularly a computer freak. Should be easy.
It wasn’t. It took all night, and I still didn’t get all the way through the trapdoors and blind alleys she’d built into her message. Smart woman, I realized, my respect for Amanda Cunningham Humphries notching up with every bead of sweat I oozed.
At last the hash that had been filling the central screen on the cockpit control panel cleared away, replaced by an image of her face.
That face. I just stared at her. She was so beautiful, so sad and vulnerable. It brought a lump to my throat. I’ve seen beautiful women, plenty of them, and bedded more than my share. But gazing at Amanda’s face, there in the quiet hum of the dimmed cockpit, I felt something more than desire, more than animal hunger.
Could it be love? I shook my head like a man who’s just been knocked down by a punch. Don’t be an idiot! I snarled at myself. You’ve been hanging around Sam too long, you’re becoming a romantic jackass just like he is.
Love has nothing to
