“But—”
“No buts! I’m not going to let you set me up for an ambush.” I could practically feel the suspicion in his voice, his scowling face. And something more. Something really ugly. Hatred. Hatred for Humphries and everything associated with Humphries. Including his ex-wife.
“I’m no Judas goat,” Sam snarled back. I was surprised at how incensed he seemed to be. You can never tell with Sam, but he seemed really teed off.
“I’m Sam Gunn, goddammit, not some sneaking decoy. I don’t take orders from Martin Humphries or anybody else in the whole twirling solar system, and if you think . . .”
While Sam was talking, I glanced at the search radar, to see if it had locked onto Fuchs’s ship. Either his ship was super stealthy, or it was much farther away than I had thought. He must be a damned good shot with that laser, I realized.
Sam was jabbering, cajoling, talking a mile a minute, trying to get Fuchs to trust him enough to let us deliver the chip to him.
Fuchs answered, “Don’t you think I know that the chip you’re carrying has a homing beacon built into it? I take the chip and a dozen Humphries ships come after me, following the signal the chip emits.”
“No, it’s not like that at all,” Sam pleaded. “She wants you to see this message. She wouldn’t try to harm you.”
“She already has,” he snapped.
I began to wonder if maybe he wasn’t right. Was she working for her present husband to trap her ex-husband? Had she turned against the man whose life she had saved?
It couldn’t be, I thought, remembering how haunted, how frightened she had looked. She couldn’t be a Judas to him; she had married Humphries to save Fuchs’s life, from all that I’d heard.
Then a worse thought popped into my head. If Sam gives the chip to Fuchs, I’ll have nothing to offer Humphries! All that money will fly out of my grasp!
I had tried to copy the chip, but it wouldn’t allow the ship’s computer to make a copy. Suddenly I was on Fuchs’ side of the argument: Don’t take the chip! Don’t come anywhere near it!
Fate, as they say, intervened.
The comm system pinged again, and suddenly the screen split. The other half showed Judge Myers, all smiles, obviously in a compartment aboard a spacecraft.
“Sam, we’re here!” she said brightly. “At The Rememberer. It was so brilliant of you to pick the sculpture for our wedding ceremony!”
“Who the hell is that?” Fuchs roared.
For once in his life, Sam actually looked embarrassed. “Um . . . my, uh, fiancée,” he stumbled. “I’m supposed to be getting married in two days.”
The expression on Fuchs’ face was almost comical. Here he’s threatening to blow us into a cloud of ionized gas and all of a sudden, he’s got an impatient bride-to-be on the same communications frequency.
“Married?” he bellowed.
“It’s a long story,” said Sam, red-cheeked.
Fuchs glared and glowered while Judge Myers’s round, freckled face looked puzzled. “Sam? Why don’t you answer? I know where you are. If you don’t come out to The Rememberer, I’m going to bring the whole wedding party to you, minister and boys’ choir and all.”
“I’m busy, Jill,” Sam said.
“Boys’ choir?” Fuchs ranted. “Minister?”
Not even Sam could carry on two conversations at the same time, I thought. But I was wrong.
“Jill, I’m in the middle of something,” he said, then immediately switched to Fuchs: “I can’t hang around here, I’ve got to get to my wedding.”
“Who are you talking to?” Judge Myers asked.
“What wedding?” Fuchs demanded. “Do you mean to tell me you’re getting married out here in the belt?”
“That’s exactly what I mean to tell you,” Sam replied to him.
“Tell who?” Judge Myers asked. “What’s going on, Sam?”
“Bah!” Fuchs snapped. “You’re crazy! All of you!”
I saw a flash of light out of the corner of my eye. Through the cockpit’s forward window, I watched a small, stiletto-slim spacecraft slowly emerge from the cloud of pebbles surrounding the asteroid, plasma exhaust pulsing from its thruster and a bloodred pencilbeam of laser light probing out ahead of it.
Fuchs bellowed, “I knew it!” and let loose a string of curses that would make an angel vomit.
Sam was swearing too. “Those sonsofbitches! They knew we’d be here, and they were just lying in wait in case Fuchs showed up.”
“I’ll get you for this, Gunn!” Fuchs howled.
“I didn’t know!” Sam yelled back.
Judge Myers looked somewhere between puzzled and alarmed. “Sam, what’s happening? What’s going on?”
The ambush craft was rising out of the rubble cloud that surrounded the asteroid. I could see Fuch’s ship through the window now because he was shooting back at the ambusher, his own red pencilbeam of a spotting laser lighting up the cloud of pebbles like a Christmas ornament.
“We’d better get out of here, Sam,” I suggested at the top of my lungs.
“How?” he snapped. “Fuchs took out the thruster.”
“You mean we’re stuck here?”
“Smack in the middle of their battle,” he answered, nodding. “And our orbit’s taking us between the two of them.”
“Do something!” I screamed. “They’re both shooting at us!”
Sam dove for the hatch. “Get into your suit, Gar. Quick.”
I never suited up quicker. But it seemed to take hours. With our main thruster shot away, dear old Achernar was locked into its orbit around the asteroid. Fuchs and the ambusher were slugging it out, maneuvering and firing at each other with us in the middle. I don’t think they were deliberately trying to hit us, but they weren’t going out of their way to avoid us either. While I wriggled into my spacesuit and fumbled through the checkout procedure, Achernar lurched and quivered again and again.
“They’re slicing us to ribbons,” I said, trying to keep from babbling.
Sam was fully suited up; just the visor of his helmet was open. “You got the chip on you?”
For an instant I thought
