us.”
“Marvelous. Nairobi Industries doesn’t have a biotechnology division. We are only a small corporation, compared to Astro or Humphries Space Systems.”
“Well, we all had to start at the beginning,” Pancho said, thinking that it sounded fatuous.
Her visitor didn’t seem to notice. “However, in exchange for help in building our base here on the Moon we offer a unique entry into the growing markets of Africa and the Indian subcontinent.”
The Indian subcontinent, Pancho thought grimly; between their nukes and their biowar there isn’t much left for those poor bastards. And Africa’s still a mess, pretty much.
“We are also developing strong ties with Australia and New Zealand,” he went on. “They still hesitate to deal with Africans, but we are overcoming their prejudices with sound business opportunities for them.”
Pancho nodded. This guy’s a stalking horse, all right. Whoever he’s really working for thinks he’s damned smart sending a black man to make this offer. Thinks I’ll get all gooey and not see past the trap they’re setting up.
Humphries. It’s gotta be Martin Humphries, she reasoned. The old Humper’s been after Astro for years. This is just his latest maneuver. And he’s started knocking off our freighters again.
As if he could read her thoughts, the Nairobi representative added, in a confidential near-whisper, “Besides, an alliance between your corporation and mine will outflank Humphries Space Systems, so to speak. Together, we could take a considerable amount of market share away from HSS.”
Pancho felt her eyebrows hike up. “You mean the asteroidal metals and minerals that Earthside corporations buy.”
“Yes. Of course. But Selene imports a good deal from Humphries’s mining operations in the Belt, too.”
The big struggle, Pancho knew, was to control the resources of the Asteroid Belt. The metals and minerals mined from the asteroids were feeding Earthside industries crippled by the environmental disasters stemming from the greenhouse cliff.
“Well,” said the Nairobi executive, with his gleaming smile, “that’s just about the whole of it. Does it strike any interest in you?”
Pancho smiled back at him. “ ’Course it does,” she said, thinking about how the kids she grew up with in west Texas would cross their fingers when they fibbed. “I’ll give it a lot of thought, you can believe me.”
“Then you’ll recommend a strategic alliance to your board?”
She could see the eagerness on his handsome young face.
Keeping her smile in place, Pancho replied, “Let me think it over, get my staff to run the numbers. Then, if everything checks out, I’ll certainly bring it up before the board.”
He fairly glowed with pleasure. Pancho thought, Whoever sent this hunk of beefcake didn’t pick him because he’s got a poker face.
She got to her feet and he shot up so quickly that Pancho thought he’d bounce off the ceiling. As it was, he stumbled slightly, unaccustomed to the low lunar gravity, and had to grab a corner of her desk to steady himself.
“Easy there,” she said, grinning. “You only weigh one-sixth of Earth normal here.”
He made a shamefaced smile. “I forgot. The weighted boots aren’t all that much help. Please forgive me.”
“Nothing to it. Everybody needs a little time to get accustomed to lunar gee. How long will you be staying at Selene?”
“I leave tomorrow.”
“You won’t be talking to anybody from HSS?”
“No. Mr. Humphries has a reputation for swallowing up smaller corporations rather than helping them.”
Maybe he’s not from Humphries after all, Pancho thought.
She asked, “So you came up here just to see me?”
He nodded. “This alliance is very important to us. I wanted to speak to you about it face-to-face, not by videophone.”
“Good thinking,” Pancho said, coming around her desk and gesturing toward her office door. “That three- second lag in phone communication is enough to drive me loco.”
He blinked. “Loco? Is that lunar slang?”
With a laugh, Pancho answered, “West Texas, for crazy.”
“You are from Texas?”
“Long time ago.”
Pancho played it cool, watching how he tried to maneuver their conversation into a dinner invitation before she could shoo him out of her office. He smelled good, she noticed. Some sort of cologne that reminded her of cinnamon and tangy spices.
Finally he got to it. “I suppose a person of your importance has a very full calendar.”
“Yep. Pretty much.”
“I was hoping we might have dinner together. Actually, I don’t know anyone else in Selene City.”
She made a show of pulling up her schedule on the wallscreen. “Dinner engagement with my PR director.”
He looked genuinely crestfallen. “Oh. I see.”
Pancho couldn’t help smiling at him. “Hell, I can talk to her some other time. Let’s have dinner together.”
His smile grew even wider than before.
And he was good in bed, too, Pancho discovered. Great, in fact. But the next morning, once he was on his way back Earthside and Pancho had fed herself a breakfast of vitamin E and orange juice, she called her security director from her kitchen and told him to check the guy out thoroughly. If he’s not from Humphries, maybe somebody else wants to move into the territory.
She chuckled to herself as she headed for her office that morning. She had forgotten the man’s name.
TORCH SHIP
The ship had once been a freighter with the unlikely name of
Over the years, Fuchs had changed the spacecraft. It was still a dumbbell shape, rotating on a buckyball tether to provide a feeling of gravity for the crew. It still could carry thousands of tons of ores in its external grapples. But now it also bore five powerful lasers, which Fuchs used as weapons. And it was armored with thin layers of asteroidal copper fixed a few centimeters outside the ship’s true hull, enough to absorb an infrared laser beam for a second or more.
In the ship’s cramped bridge Fuchs leaned over the back of the pilot’s chair and scowled at the scanner display.
“It is a freighter, nothing more,” said Amarjagal, his pilot. She was a stocky, stoic woman of Mongol ancestry who had been with Fuchs since he’d fled from the mining center at Ceres to take up this life of exile and piracy.
“With a crew pod?” Fuchs sneered.
Nodon, the ship’s engineer, had also been part of Fuchs’s renegade team since the earliest days. He was rail-thin, all bone and sinew, his head shaved bald, spiral scars of ceremonial tattoos swirling across both cheeks. A menacing black moustache drooped down to his jawline, yet his dark brown eyes were big and expressive, soulful.
“A crew pod means that the ship carries food,” he pointed out as he studied the image on the display screen.
