"02 - The Rock Rats 2.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

THE

ROCK RATS

Book II of the Asteroid Wars

TOR®

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

BEN BOVA

    This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

THE ROCK RATS: BOOK II OF THE ASTEROID WARS

    Copyright © 2002 by Ben Bova

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

    Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

A Tor Book

    Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

    175 Fifth Avenue

    New York, NY 10010

     www.tor.com

Tor* is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bova, Ben,

    The rock rats / Ben Bova.—1st ed. p.    cm. —(The asteroid wars; bk. 2) "A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-765-30227-6 (alk. paper)

    1. Mines and mineral resources—Fiction.    2. Women air pilots—Fiction. 3. Space warfare—Fiction.    4. Asteroids—Fiction.    I. Title.

PS3552.O84R63   2002 813'.54-dc21

    2001058464

First Edition: April 2002

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321

To Charles N. Brown and the Locus team

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young.

And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of Lust,

Some with the hands of Gold: The kindest use a knife, because

The dead so soon grow cold.

— Oscar Wilde

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

THE

ROCK RATS

PROLOGUE: SELENE

    Amanda clutched at her husband's arm when Martin Humphries strode into the wedding reception, unannounced and uninvited.

    The Pelican Bar went totally silent. The crowd that had been noisily congratulating Amanda and Lars Fuchs with lewd jokes and lunar "rocket juice" froze as if somebody had doused the place with liquid nitrogen. Fuchs patted his wife's hand gently, protectively, as he scowled up at Humphries. Even Pancho Lane, never at a loss for a quip, simply stood by the bar, one hand holding her drink, the other balling into a fist.

    The Pelican wasn't Humphries's kind of place. It was the workers' bar, the one joint in Selene's underground warren of tunnels and cubicles where the people who lived and worked on the Moon could come for relaxation and the company of their fellow Lunatics. Suits like Humphries did their drinking in the fancy lounge up in the Grand Plaza, with the rest of the executives and the tourists.

    Humphries seemed oblivious to their enmity, totally at ease in this sea of hostile stares, even though he looked terribly out of place, a smallish manicured man wearing an impeccably tailored imperial blue business suit in the midst of the younger, boisterous miners and tractor operators in their shabby, faded coveralls and their earrings of asteroidal stones. Even the women looked stronger, more muscular than Humphries.

    But if Humphries's round, pink-cheeked face seemed soft and bland, his eyes were something else altogether. Gray and pitiless, like chips of flint, the same color as the rock walls and low ceiling of the underground bar itself.

    He walked straight through the silent, sullen crowd to the table where Amanda and Fuchs sat.

    "I know I wasn't invited to your party," he said in a calm, strong voice. "I hope you'll forgive me for crashing. I won't stay but a minute."

    "What do you want?" Fuchs asked, scowling, not moving from his chair beside his bride. He was a broad, dark-haired bear of a man, thick in the torso, with short arms and legs heavily muscled. The tiny stud in his left ear was a diamond that he had bought during his student days in Switzerland.

    With a rueful smile, Humphries said, "I want your wife, but she's chosen you instead."

    Fuchs slowly got up from his chair, big thick-fingered hands clenching into fists. Every eye in the pub was on him, every breath held.

    Amanda glanced from Fuchs to Humphries and back again. She looked close to panic. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, with a wide-eyed innocent face and lusciously curved figure that made men fantasize and women stare with unalloyed envy. Even in a plain white jumpsuit she looked utterly stunning.

    "Lars," Amanda whispered. "Please."

    Humphries raised both hands, palms out. "Perhaps I phrased myself poorly. I didn't come here for a fight."

    "Then why did you come?" Fuchs asked in a low growl.

    "To give you a wedding present," Humphries replied, smiling again. "To show that there's no hard feelings ... so to speak."

    "A present?" Amanda asked.

    "If you'll accept it from me," said Humphries.

    "What is it?" Fuchs asked.

    "Starpower 1."

    Amanda's china blue eyes went so wide that white showed all around them. "The ship?"

    "It's yours, if you'll have it. I'll even pay for the refurbishment necessary to make it spaceworthy again."

    The crowd stirred, sighed, began muttering. Fuchs looked down at Amanda, saw that she was awed by Humphries's offer.

    Humphries said, "You can use it to return to the Belt and start mining asteroids. There's plenty of rocks out there for you to claim and develop."

    Despite himself, Fuchs was impressed. "That's. . . very generous of you, sir."

    Humphries put on his smile again. With a careless wave of his hand, he said, "You newlyweds need some source of income. Go out and claim a couple of rocks, bring back their ores, and you'll be fixed for life."

    "Very generous," Fuchs muttered.

    Humphries put out his hand. Fuchs hesitated a moment, then gripped it in his heavy paw; engulfed it, actually. "Thank you, Mr. Humphries," he said, pumping Humphries's arm vigorously. "Thank you so much."

    Amanda said nothing.

    Humphries disengaged himself and, without another word, walked out of the bar. The crowd stirred at last and broke into dozens of conversations. Several people crowded around Fuchs and Amanda, congratulating them, offering to work on their craft. The Pelican's proprietor declared drinks on the house and there was a general rush toward the bar.

    Pancho Lane, though, sidled through the crowd and out the door into the tunnel, where Humphries was walking alone toward the power stairs that led down to his mansion at Selene's lowest level. In a few long-legged lunar strides she caught up to him.

    "I thought they threw you out of Selene," she said.

    Humphries had to look up at her. Pancho was lean and lanky, her skin a light mocha, not much darker than a white woman would get in the burning sunshine of her native west Texas. She kept her hair cropped close, a tight dark skullcap of ringlets.

    He made a sour face. "My lawyers are working on an appeal. They can't exile me without due process."

    "And that could take years, huh?"

    "At the very least."

    Pancho would gladly have stuffed him into a rocket and fired him off to Pluto. Humphries had sabotaged Starpower 1 on its first—and, so far, only—mission to the Belt. Dan Randolph had died because of him. It took an effort of will for her to control her temper.

    As calmly as she could manage, Pancho said, "You were pretty damn generous back there."

    "A gesture to true love," he replied, without slowing his pace.

    "Yeah. Sure." Pancho easily matched his stride.

    "What else?"

    "For one thing, that spacecraft ain't yours to give away. It belongs to—"

    "Belonged," Humphries snapped. "Past tense. We wrote it off the books."

    "Wrote it off? When? How in hell can you do that?"

    Humphries actually laughed. "You see, Ms. Director? There are a few tricks to being on the board that a greasemonkey like you doesn't know about."

    "I guess," Pancho admitted. "But I'll learn 'em."

    "Of course you will."

    Pancho was newly elected to the board of directors of Astro Manufacturing, over Humphries's stern opposition. It had been Dan Randolph's dying wish.

    "So we've written off Starpower 1 after just one flight?"

    "It's already obsolescent," said Humphries. "The ship proved the fusion drive technology. Now we can build better spacecraft, specifically designed for asteroid mining."

    "And you get to play Santy Claus for Amanda and Lars."

    Humphries shrugged.

    The two of them walked along the nearly-empty tunnel until they came to the power stairs leading downward.

    Pancho grabbed Humphries by the shoulder, stopping him at the top of the moving stairs. "I know what you're up to," she said.

    "Do you?"

    "You figger Lars'll go battin' out to the Belt and leave Mandy here in Selene."

    "I suppose that's a possibility," Humphries said, shaking free of her grip.

    "Then you can move in on her."

    Humphries started to reply, then hesitated. His face grew serious. At last he said, "Pancho, has it ever occurred to you that I really love Amanda? I do, you know."

    Pancho knew Humphries's reputation as a womanizer. She had seen plenty of evidence of it.

    "You might tell yourself that you love her, Humpy, but that's just because she's the only woman between here and Lubbock that won't flop inta bed with you."

    He smiled coldly. "Does that mean that you would?"

    "In your dreams!"

    Humphries laughed and started down the stairs. For a few moments Pancho watched him dwindling away, then she turned and headed back toward the Pelican Bar.

    As Humphries rode down to Selene's bottommost level, he thought, Fuchs is an academic, the kind who's never had two pennies in his hands at the same time. Let him go out to the Belt. Let him see how much money he can make, and all the things that money can buy. And while he's doing it, I'll be here at Amanda's side.

    By the time he reached his palatial home, Humphries was almost happy.

DATA BANK: THE ASTEROID BELT

Millions of chunks of rock and metal float silently, endlessly, through the deep emptiness of interplanetary space. The largest of them, Ceres, is barely a thousand kilometers wide. Most of them are much smaller, ranging from irregular chunks a few kilometers long down to the size of pebbles. They contain more metals and minerals, more natural resources, than the entire Earth can provide.

    They are the bonanza, the El Dorado, the Comstock Lode, the gold and silver and iron and everything-else mines of the twenty-first century. There are hundreds of millions of billions of tons of high grade ores in the asteroids. They hold enough real wealth to make each man, woman, and child of the entire human race into a millionaire. And then some.

    The first asteroid was discovered shortly after midnight on January 1, 1801, by a Sicilian monk who happened to be an astronomer. While others were celebrating the new century, Giuseppi Piazzi was naming the tiny point of light he saw in his telescope Ceres after the pagan goddess of Sicily. Perhaps an unusual attitude for a pious monk, but Piazzi was a Sicilian, after all.

    By the advent of the twenty-first century, more than fifteen thousand asteroids had been discovered by earthbound astronomers: As the human race began to expand its habitat to the Moon and to explore Mars, millions more were found.

    Technically, they are planetoids, little planets, chunks of rock and metal floating in the dark void of space, leftovers from the creation of the Sun and planets some four and a half billion years ago. Piazzi correctly referred to them as planetoids, but in 1802 William Herschel (who had earlier discovered the giant planet Uranus) called them asteroids, because in the telescope their pinpoints of light looked like stars rather than the disks of planets. Piazzi was correct, but Herschel was far more famous and influential. We call them asteroids to this day.

    Several hundred of the asteroids are in orbits that near the Earth, but most of them by far circle around the Sun in a broad swath in deep space between the orbits of Mars and giant Jupiter. This Asteroid Belt is centered more than six hundred million kilometers from Earth, four times farther from the Sun than our homeworld.

    Although this region is called the Asteroid Belt, the asteroids are not strewn so thickly that they represent a hazard to space navigation. Far from it. The so-called Belt is a region of vast emptiness, dark and lonely and very far from human civilization.

    Until the invention of the Duncan fusion drive the Asteroid Belt was too far from the Earth/Moon system to be of economic value. Once fusion propulsion became practical, however, the Belt became the region where prospectors and miners could make fortunes for themselves, or die in the effort.

    Many of them died. More than a few were killed.

THREE YEARS LATER

    CHAPTER 1

I said it would be simple," Lars Fuchs repeated. "I did not say it would be easy."

    George  Ambrose—Big George  to  everyone  who  knew him —scratched absently at his thick red beard as he gazed thoughtfully out through the window of Starpower 1's bridge toward the immense looming dark bulk of the asteroid Ceres. "I di'n't come out here to get involved in daft schemes, Lars," he said. His voice was surprisingly high and sweet for such a shaggy mastodon of a man.

    For a long moment the only sound in the compartment was the eternal hum of electrical equipment. Then Fuchs pushed between the two pilots' seats to drift toward Big George. Stopping himself with a touch of his hand against the metal overhead, he said in an urgent whisper, "We can do it. Given time and resources."

    "It's fookin' insane," George muttered. But he kept staring out at the asteroid's rock-strewn, pockmarked surface.

    They made an odd pair: the big, bulky Aussie with his shaggy brick-red mane and beard, hovering weightlessly beside the dark, intense, thickset Fuchs. Three years in the Belt had changed Fuchs somewhat: he was still burly, barrel-chested, but he had let his chestnut brown hair grow almost to his collar, and the earring he wore was now a polished chip of asteroidal copper. A slim bracelet of copper circled his left wrist. Yet in their individual ways, both men looked powerful, determined, even dangerous. "Living inside Ceres is bad for our health," Fuchs said.

    George countered, "Plenty of radiation protection from the rock."

    "It's the microgravity," Fuchs said earnestly. "It's not good for us, physically."

    "I like it."

    "But the bones become so brittle. Dr. Cardenas says the rate of fractures is rising steeply. You've seen that yourself, haven't you?"

    "Maybe," George half-admitted. Then he grinned. "But th' sex is fookin' fantastic!"

    Fuchs scowled at the bigger man. "Be serious, George."

    Without taking his eyes off Ceres's battered face, George said, "Okay, you're right. I know it. But buildin' a bloody O'Neill habitat?"

    "It doesn't have to be that big, not like the L-5 habitats around Earth. Just big enough to house the few hundred people here in Ceres. At first."

    George shook his shaggy head. "You know how big a job you're talkin' about? Just the life support equipment alone would cost a mint. And then some."

    "No, no. That's the beauty of my scheme," Fuchs said, with a nervous laugh. "We simply purchase spacecraft and put them together. They become the habitat. And they already have all the life support equipment and radiation shielding built into them. We won't need their propulsion units at all, so the price will be much lower than you think."

    "Then you want to spin the whole fookin' kludge to an Earth-normal g?"

    "Lunar normal," Fuchs answered. "One-sixth g is good enough. Dr. Cardenas agrees."

    George scratched at his thick, unkempt beard. "I dunno, Lars. We've been livin' inside the rock okay. Why go to all this trouble and expense?"

    "Because we have to!" Fuchs insisted. "Living in microgravity is dangerous to our health. We must build a better habitat for ourselves."

    George looked unconvinced, but he muttered, "Lunar g, you say?"

    "One-sixth normal Earth gravity. No more than that."

    "How much will it cost?"

    Fuchs blinked once. "We can buy the stripped-down spacecraft from Astro Corporation. Pancho is offering a very good price."

    "How much?"

    "The preliminary figures work out. . ." Fuchs hesitated, took a breath, then said, "We can do it if all the prospectors and miners put in ten percent of their income."

    George grunted. "A tithe, huh?"

    "Ten percent isn't much."

    "A lot of us rock rats don't make any income at all, some years."

    "I know," said Fuchs. "I factored that into the cost estimate. Of course, we'll have to pay off the spacecraft over twenty- or thirty-year leases. Like a mortgage on a house, Earthside."

    "So you want everybody here in Ceres to take on a twenty-year debt?"

    "We can pay it off sooner, perhaps. A few really big strikes could pay for the entire project all by themselves."

    "Yeah. Sure."

    With burning intensity, Fuchs asked, "Will you do it? If you agree, most of the other prospectors will, too."

    "Whyn't you get one of the corporations t' do it?" George asked. "Astro or Humphries. . ." He stopped when he saw the look on Fuchs's face.

    "Not Humphries," Fuchs growled. "Never him or his company. Never."

    "Okay. Astro, then."

    Fuchs's scowl shifted into a troubled frown. "I've spoken to Pancho about it. The Astro board would not vote for it. They will sell stripped-down spacecraft to us, but they won't commit to building the habitat. They don't see a profit from it."

    George grunted. "Lot they care if we snap our bones."

    "But you care," Fuchs said eagerly. "It's our problem, George; we have to solve it. And we can, if you'll help."

    Running a beefy hand through his thick mop of red hair, Big George said, "You're gonna need a techie team to do the integration job. There's more to puttin' this habitat of yours together than just connectin' Tinkertoys, y'know. You'll need a flock of geek boys."

    "That's already in the cost estimate," Fuchs replied.

    George huffed a mighty sigh, then said, "All right, Lars, I'm in. I guess it would be pretty good to have a base out here in the Belt with some decent gravity to it."

    Fuchs smiled. "You can always have sex aboard your own ship."

    George grinned back at him. "Believe it, mate. Believe it."

    Fuchs went with George to the ship's main airlock and helped the bigger man get back into his hard-shell spacesuit.

    "They're testin' lightweight suits back at Selene, y'know," he said as he slid into the rigid torso and worked his arms through the stiff sleeves. "Flexible. Easy to put on."

    "And the radiation protection?" Fuchs asked.

    "Magnetic field surrounds the suit. They claim it's better'n this stuff." He rapped his knuckles against the torso's cermet carapace.

    Fuchs gave a little snort of disdain. "They'll need years of testing before I'd buy one."

    As he wormed his hands into the gloves, George said, "Me too."

    Handing the bigger man his fishbowl helmet, Fuchs said, "Thanks for agreeing, George. It means a lot to me."

    George nodded solemnly. "I know. You two want to have kids."

    Fuchs's cheeks reddened. "It's not that!"

    "Isn't it?"

    "Well, not alone, no." Fuchs looked away from George for a moment, then slowly admitted, "I worry about Amanda, yes. I never thought she would want to stay out here with me. I never thought I myself would be out here this long."

    "There's a lot of money to be made here in the Belt. A lot of money."

    "Yes, yes indeed. But I worry about her. I want her to be in a safer place, with enough gravity to keep her from deconditioning."

    "And enough radiation shielding to start a family," George said, grinning. Then he pulled on his helmet before Fuchs could think of a reply.

    CHAPTER 2

    Once George had cycled through Starpower 1's airlock and jetted back to his own Waltzing Matilda, Fuchs went down the ship's narrow central passageway to the compartment where his wife was working.

    She looked up from the wallscreen as Fuchs slid the compartment door open. He saw that she was watching a fashion show beamed from somewhere on Earth: slim, slinky models in brightly colored gowns of outrageous designs. Fuchs frowned slightly: half the people of Earth displaced by floods and earthquakes, starvation rampant almost everywhere, and still the rich played their games.

    Amanda blanked the wallscreen as she asked, "Has George left already?"

    "Yes. And he agreed to it!"

    Her smile was minimal. "He did? It didn't take you terribly long to convince him, did it?"

    She still spoke with a trace of the Oxford accent she had learned years earlier in London. She was wearing an oversized faded sweatshirt and cutoff work pants. Her golden blonde hair was pinned up off her neck and slightly disheveled. She wore not a trace of makeup. Still, she was much more beautiful than any of the emaciated mannequins of the fashion show. Fuchs pulled her to him and kissed her warmly.

    "In two years, maybe less, we'll have a decent base in orbit around Ceres with lunar-level gravity."

    Amanda gazed into her husband's eyes, seeking something. "Kris Cardenas will be happy to hear it," she said.

    "Yes, Dr. Cardenas will be very pleased," Fuchs agreed. "We should tell her as soon as we arrive."

    "Of course."

    "But you're not even dressed yet!"

    "It won't take me a minute," Amanda said. "It's not like we're going to a royal reception." Then she added, "Or even to a party in Selene."

    Fuchs realized that Amanda wasn't as happy as he'd thought she would be. "What's the matter? Is something wrong?"

    "No," she said, too quickly. "Not really."

    "Amanda, my darling, I know that when you say 'not really' you really mean 'really.'"

    She broke into a genuine smile. "You know me too well."

    "No, not too well. Just well enough." He kissed her again, lightly this time. "Now, what's wrong? Tell me, please."

    Leaning her cheek on his shoulder, Amanda said very softly, "I thought we'd be home by now, Lars."

    "Home?"

    "Earth. Or even Selene. I never dreamt we'd stay in the Belt for three years."

    Suddenly Fuchs saw the worn, scuffed metal walls of this tiny coop of a cubicle, the narrow confines of the ship's passageway and the other cramped compartments; smelled the stale air with its acrid tinge of ozone; felt the background vibrations that rattled through the ship every moment; consciously noticed the clatter of pumps and wheezing of the air fans. And he heard his own voice ask inanely:

    "You're not happy here?"

    "Lars, I'm happy being with you. Wherever you are. You know that. But—"

    "But you would rather be back on Earth. Or at Selene."

    "It's better than living on a ship all the time."

    "He's still at Selene."

    She pulled slightly away, looked straight into his deep-set eyes. "You mean Martin?"

    "Humphries," said Fuchs. "Who else?"

    "He's got nothing to do with it."

    "Doesn't he?"

    Now she looked truly alarmed. "Lars, you don't think that Martin Humphries means anything to me?"

    He felt his blood turning to ice. One look at Amanda's innocent blue eyes and full-bosomed figure and any man would be wild to have her.

    Coldly, calmly, he said, "I know that Martin Humphries wants you. I think that you married me to escape from him. I think—"

    "Lars, that's not true!"

    "Isn't it?"

    "I love you! For god's sake, don't you know that? Don't you understand it?"

    The ice thawed. He realized that he held in his arms the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen. That she had come to this desolate emptiness on the frontier of human habitation to be with him, to help him, to love him.

    "I'm sorry," he muttered, feeling ashamed. "It's just that... I love you so much..."

    "And I love you, Lars. I truly do."

    "I know."

    "Do you?"

    He shook his head ruefully. "Sometimes I wonder why you put up with me."

    She smiled and traced a fingertip across his stubborn, stubbled jaw. "Why not? You put up with me, don't you?"

    With a sigh, he admitted, "I thought we'd be back on Earth by now. I thought we'd be rich."

    "We are. Aren't we?"

    "On paper, perhaps. We're better off than most of the other prospectors. At least we own this ship . . ."

    His voice faltered. They both knew why. They owned Star-power because Martin Humphries had given it to them as a gift.

    "But the bills do mount up," Amanda said swiftly, trying to change the subject. "I was going over the accounts earlier. We can't seem to stay ahead of the expenses."

    Fuchs made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a snort. "If you count how much we owe, we certainly are multimillionaires."

    It was a classic problem, they both knew. A prospector might find an asteroid worth hundreds of billions on paper, but the costs of mining the ores, transporting them back to the Earth/Moon region, refining them—the costs of food and fuel and air to breathe—were so high that the prospectors were almost always on the ragged edge of bankruptcy. Still they pushed on, always seeking that lode of wealth that would allow them to retire at last and live in luxury. Yet no matter how much wealth they actually found, hardly any of it stayed in their hands for long.

    And I want to take ten percent of that from them, Fuchs said to himself. But it will be worth it! They'll thank me for it, once it's done.

    "It's not like we're spendthrifts," Amanda murmured. "We don't throw the money away on frivolities."

    "I should never have brought you out here," Fuchs said. "It was a mistake."

    "No!" she contradicted. "I want to be with you, Lars. Wherever you are."

    "This is no place for a woman such as you. You should be living comfortably, happily—"

    She silenced him with a single slim finger across his thin lips. "I'm perfectly comfortable and happy here."

    "But you'd be happier on Earth. Or Selene."

    She hesitated a fraction of a second before replying, "Wouldn't you?"

    "Yes," he admitted. "Of course. But I'm not going back until I can give you all the things you deserve."

    "Oh, Lars, you're all that I really want."

    He gazed at her for a long moment, then said, "Yes, perhaps. But I want more. Much more."

    Amanda said nothing.

    Brightening, Fuchs said, "But as long as we're out here, at least I can make a decent home for you in Ceres orbit!"

    She smiled for her husband.

    CHAPTER 3

    Build a habitat big enough to house everyone living at Ceres?" asked Martin Humphries, incredulous.

    "That's what the rumble is," said his aide, a winsome brunet with long-lashed almond eyes, full pouty lips, and a razor-sharp mind. Even though her image on his bedroom wallscreen showed only her head and shoulders and some background of her office, the sight of her set Humphries's mind wandering.

    Humphries leaned back in his wide, luxurious bed and tried to concentrate on business. He had started the morning with a vigorous tussle with a big-breasted computer analyst who nominally worked in Humphries Space Systems' transportation department. She had spent the night in Humphries's bed, yet even in the midst of their most passionate exertions he found himself closing his eyes and fantasizing about Amanda.

    His bedmate was in the shower now, and all thoughts about her or Amanda were pushed aside as Humphries talked business with his aide, whose office was several levels up in Selene's underground network of corridors.

    "It sounds ridiculous," Humphries said. "How reliable is this information?"

    The aide let a wintry smile cross her tempting lips. "Quite reliable, sir. The prospectors are all talking about it, back and forth, from one ship to another. They're chattering all across the Belt about it."

    "It still sounds ridiculous," Humphries grumbled.

    "Beg to differ, sir," said the aide. Her words were deferential, but the expression on her face looked almost smug. "It makes a certain amount of sense."

    "Does it?"

    "If they could build a habitat and spin it to produce an artificial gravity that approaches the grav field here on the Moon, it would be much healthier for the people living out there for months or years on end. Better for their bones and organs than sustained microgravity."

    "H'mmph."

    "In addition, sir, the habitat would have the same level of radiation shielding that the latest spacecraft have. Or even better, perhaps."

    "But the prospectors still have to go out into the Belt and claim the asteroids."

    "They are required by law to be present at an asteroid in order for their claim to be legal," the aide agreed. "But from then on they can work the rock remotely."

    "Remotely? The distances are too big for remote operations. It takes hours for signals to cross the Belt."

    "From Ceres, sir," the aide said stiffly, "roughly five thousand ore-bearing rocks are within one light-minute. That's close enough for remote operations, don't you think?"

    Humphries didn't want to give her the satisfaction of admitting she was right. Instead he replied, "Well, we'd better be getting our own people out there claiming those asteroids before the rock rats snap them all up."

    "I'll get on that right away," said the aide, with enough of a smile curving her tempting lips to show that she had already thought of it. "And mining teams, too."

    "Mining operations aren't as urgent as claiming the stupid rocks."

    "Understood," she said. Then she added, "The board meeting is this morning at ten. You asked me to remind you."

    He nodded. "Yes, I know." Without another word he tapped the keypad on the nightstand and her wallscreen image winked off.

    Slumping deeper into the pillows, he heard the woman who'd spent the night in his bed singing in the shower. Off-key. Well, he said to himself, music isn't her best talent.

    Fuchs. The thought of Lars Fuchs pushed all other notions out of his mind. He's out there with Amanda. I never realized she'd stay out in that wilderness with him. She doesn't belong there, living in a crummy ship like some gypsy, some penniless drifter wandering out there in the empty wastes. She should be here, with me. This is where she belongs.

    I made a mistake with him. I underestimated him. He's no fool. He's not just prospecting and mining. He's building an empire out there. With Pancho Lane's help.

    The young woman appeared at the bathroom door, naked, her skin dewy and flawless. She posed enticingly and smiled for Humphries.

    "Do we have time for one more? Are you up to it?" Her smile turned just a tad impudent.

    Despite himself, Humphries felt stirred. But he said gruffly, "Not now. I've got work to do."

    And he thought, This twat could get possessive. I'd better transfer her to some job back on Earth.

Martin Humphries drummed his fingers impatiently on his desk, waiting for the lame-brained techs to make all the connections so the board meeting could get underway.

    After all these years, he fumed to himself, you'd think that setting up a simple virtual reality meeting with a half-dozen idiots who refuse to leave Earth would be an easy matter. He hated waiting. He loathed being dependent on anyone or anything.

    Humphries refused to leave Selene. His home was on the Moon, he told himself, not Earth. Everything he wanted was here in the underground city, and what wasn't here could be shipped to Selene upon his order. He had fought Selene's legal system to a standstill to prevent them from exiling him back to Earth.

    Earth was crippled, dying. The greenhouse flooding had wiped out most coastal cities and turned hundreds of millions of people into homeless, starving wanderers. Farmlands withered in droughts while tropical diseases found fresh territories in what used to be temperate climates. Electrical power grids everywhere faltered and sputtered lamely. A new wave of terrorism unleashed man-made plagues while crumbling nations armed their missiles and threatened nuclear war.

    It's only a matter of time, Humphries knew. Despite all the efforts by the so-called world government, despite the New Morality's fundamentalism and relentless grip on the political reins of power, despite the suspension of individual freedoms all across the globe, it's only a matter of time until they start nuking each other into extinction.

    Safer here on the Moon. Better to be away from all that death and destruction. What was it Dan Randolph used to say? When the going gets tough, the tough get going—to where the going is easier.

    Humphries nodded to himself as he sat in his high-backed chair. He was alone in his sumptuous office, a mere twenty meters from his bedroom. Most of Humphries Space Systems' board members also lived in Selene now, yet hardly any of them were allowed into the house. They stayed in their own homes, or came to the HSS offices up in the Grand Plaza tower.

    Damned waste of time, Humphries grumbled to himself. The board's just a rubber stamp, anyway. The only member who ever gave me any trouble was Dad, and he's gone now. Probably trying to tell St. Peter how to run heaven. Or more likely arguing with Satan in hell.

    "We're ready now, sir," said his aide's silky voice in the stereo earplugs Humphries wore.

    "Then do it."

    "Are your goggles in place, sir?"

    "I've been wearing my contacts for damned near fifteen minutes!"

    "Of course."

    The young woman said nothing else. An instant later, the long conference table that existed only in Humphries's computer chips sprang into existence before his eyes, each seat filled by a board member. Most of them looked slightly startled, but after a few seconds of turning in their chairs to see if everyone was there, they began chatting easily enough with one another. The half-dozen who were still on Earth were at a disadvantage, because it took nearly three seconds for signals to make the round-trip from Moon to Earth and back again. Humphries had no intention of holding up the proceedings for them; the six old farts had little power on the board, no need to worry about them. Of course, they each had a lot to say. Humphries wished he could silence them. Permanently.

    He was in a foul mood by the time the meeting ended, cranky and tired. The meeting had accomplished nothing except very routine decisions that could have been made by a troop of baboons. Humphries called for his aide over the intercom phone. By the time he had gone to the lavatory, slipped his VR contacts out of his eyes, washed his face and combed his hair, she was standing in his office doorway, wearing a cool powder blue pantsuit accented with asteroidal sapphires.

    Her name was Diane Verwoerd, born of a Dutch father and Indonesian mother, a teenaged fashion model in Amsterdam when her dark, sultry looks first attracted Humphries's notice. She was a little on the skinny side, he thought, but he paid her way through law school anyway and watched her climb his corporate ladder without ever once succumbing to his attempted seductions. He liked her all the more for her independence; he could trust her, rely on her judgment, which was more than he could say about the women who did flop into his bed.

    Besides, he thought, sooner or later she'll give in. Even though she knows that'll be the end of her job in my office, she'll crawl into bed with me one of these nights. I just haven't found the right motivation for her yet. It's not money or status, I know that much about her. Maybe power. If it's power she's after, she could be dangerous. He grinned inwardly. Playing with nitroglycerine can be fun, sometimes.

    Keeping those thoughts to himself, Humphries said without preamble as he stepped back to his desk, "We need to get rid of the rock rats."

    If the statement surprised her, Verwoerd showed no hint of it. "Why should we?" she countered.

    "Simple economics. There's so many of them out there claiming asteroids that they're keeping the price of metals and minerals too low. Supply and demand. They're overdoing the supply."

    "Commodities prices are low, except for food products," Verwoerd agreed.

    "And sinking," Humphries pointed out. "But if we controlled the supply of raw materials—"

    "Which means controlling the rock rats."

    "Right."

    "We could stop selling them supplies," Verwoerd suggested.

    Humphries waved a hand in the air. "They'd just buy their goods from Astro. I don't want that."

    She nodded.

    "No, I think our first step should be to establish a base of operations on Ceres."

    "On Ceres?"

    "Ostensibly, it will be a depot for the supplies we sell to the rock rats," Humphries said, sliding into his commodious high-backed chair. If he desired, the chair would massage his body or send waves of soothing warmth through him. At this moment, Humphries wanted neither.

    Verwoerd gave the appearance of thinking over his statement for several moments. "And actually?"

"It'll be a cover for putting our own people out there; a base for knocking the rock rats out of the Belt."

    Verwoerd smiled coldly. "Once we open the base, we cut our prices for the supplies we sell the prospectors and miners."

    "Cut our prices? Why?"

    "To get them buying from HSS and not Astro. Tie them to us."

    Nodding, Humphries said, "We could give them more favorable terms for leasing spacecraft, too."

    Now she took one of the upholstered chairs in front of his desk. Crossing her long legs absently, she said, "Better yet, lower the interest rates on purchase loans."

    "No, no. I don't want them to own the vessels. I want them to lease the spacecraft from us. I want them tied to Humphries Space Systems."

    "Under contract to HSS?"

    Humphries leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. "Right. I want those rock rats working for me."

    "At prices that you set," she said.

    "We allow the prices for raw ores to keep going down," Humphries mused. "We encourage the independents to bring in so much ore that the prices are forced constantly downward. That will drive them out of the field, sooner or later."

    "Leaving only the people who are under contract to HSS," Verwoerd agreed.

    "That way, we gain control of the costs of exploration and mining," he said, "and on the other end we also control the prices for the refined metals and other resources that we sell to Selene and Earth."

    "But individual rock rats could sell to companies on Earth on their own, independently," she pointed out.

    "So what?" Humphries snapped. "They'll just be undercutting each other until they drive themselves out of business. They'll be cutting their own throats."

    "Supply and demand," Verwoerd murmured.

    "Yes. But when we get the rock rats working exclusively for us, we'll control the supply. No matter what the demand, we'll be able to control prices. And profits."

    "A little on the devious side." She smiled, though.

    "It worked for Rockefeller."

    "Until the anti-trust laws were passed."

    "There aren't any anti-trust laws in the Belt," Humphries said. "No laws at all, come to think of it."

    Verwoerd hesitated, thinking, then said, "It will take some time to drive out all the independents. And there's still Astro to consider."

    "I'll handle Astro when the time comes."

    "Then you'll have complete control of the Belt."

    "Which means that in the long run it won't cost us anything to set up a base on Ceres." It was a statement, not a question.

    "That's not exactly how the accounting department will see it."

    He laughed. "Then why don't we do it? Establish a base on Ceres and bring those rock rats under our control."

    She gave him a long, careful look, a look that said, I know there's more to this than you're telling me. You've got a hidden agenda, and I'm pretty sure I know what it is.

    But aloud all she said was, "We can use this base on Ceres to centralize all the maintenance work, as well."

    He nodded an acknowledgement to her. "Good idea."

    "Offer the lowest possible terms on the maintenance contracts."

    "Get the rock rats to come to HSS for maintenance," he agreed.

    "Make them dependent on you."

    He laughed again. "Gillette's dictum."

    She looked puzzled.

    "Give 'em the razor," he explained. "Sell 'em the blades."

DOSSIER: OSCAR JIMINEZ

    The illegitimate son of an illegitimate son, Oscar Jiminez was picked up by the police in one of their periodic sweeps through the barrios of Manila when he was seven years old. He was small for his age, but already an expert at begging, picking pockets, and worming his way past electronic security systems that would have stopped someone bigger or less agile. The usual police tactic was to beat everyone mercilessly with their old-fashioned batons, rape the girls and the better-looking boys, then drive their prisoners far out into the countryside and leave them to fend for themselves. Until they got caught again. Oscar was lucky. Too small and scrawny to attract even the most perverse of the policemen, he was tossed from a moving police van into a roadside ditch, bleeding and covered with welts.

    The lucky part was that they had thrown him out near the entrance to the regional headquarters of the New Morality. The Philippines were still heavily Catholic, but Mother Church had grudgingly allowed the mostly Protestant reformers to operate in the island nation with only a minimum of interference. After all, the conservative bishops who ran the Philippine Church and the conservatives who ran the New Morality saw eye to eye on many issues, including birth control and strict obedience to moral authority. Moreover, the New Morality brought money from America into the Philippines. Some of it even trickled down enough to help the poor. So Oscar Jiminez became a ward of the New Morality. Under their stern tutelage his life of crime ended. He was sent to a New Morality school, where he learned that unrelenting psychological conditioning methods could be far worse than a police beating. Especially the conditioning sessions that used electric shock. Oscar swiftly became a model student.

    CHAPTER 4

     Kris Cardenas still looked little more than thirty. Even in a gritty, shabby one-room habitat carved out of one of Ceres's countless   natural   crevices,   she   radiated   the   blonde, sapphire-blue-eyed, athletic-shouldered look of a California surfer. That was because her body was filled with therapeutic nanomachines, virus-sized contrivances that pulled apart molecules of fat and cholesterol in her bloodstream, repaired damaged cells, kept her skin smooth and her muscles taut, acted as a purposeful immune system to protect her body from invading microbes.  Nanotechnology was forbidden on Earth; Dr.  Kristine Cardenas, Nobel laureate and former director of Selene's nanotechnology laboratory, was an exile on Ceres.

    For an exile who had chosen to live on the ragged frontier of human settlement, she looked happy and cheerful as she greeted Amanda and Lars Fuchs.

    "How are you two doing?" she asked as she ushered them into her quarters. The twisting tunnel outside her door was a natural lava tube, barely smoothed by human tools. The air out there was slightly hazy with fine dust; every time someone moved in Ceres they disturbed the rock dust, and the asteroid's gravity was so slight that the dust hung in the air constantly.

    Amanda and Fuchs shuffled their feet across Cardenas's bare rock floor and made their way to the room's sofa—actually a pair of reclining seats scavenged from a spacecraft that had limped to Ceres and never made it out again. The seats still had safety harnesses dangling limply from them. Fuchs coughed slightly as he sat down.

    "I'll turn up the air fans," Cardenas said, gliding to the control panel set into the room's far wall. "Settle the dust, make it easier to breathe."

    Amanda heard a fan whine from somewhere behind the walls. Despite being dressed in a long-sleeved, high-buttoned jumpsuit, she felt chilled. The bare rock always felt cold to her touch. At least it was dry. And Cardenas had tried to brighten up the underground chamber with holowindows that showed views of wooded hillsides and flower gardens on Earth. She had even scented the air slightly with something that reminded Amanda of her childhood baths in real tubs with scads of hot water and fragrant soap.

    Cardenas pulled an old laboratory stool from her desk and perched on it before her visitors, locking her legs around its high rungs. "So, how are you?" she asked again.

    Fuchs cocked an eye at her. "That's what we come to you to find out."

    "Oh, your physical." Cardenas laughed. "That's tomorrow, at the clinic. How are you getting along? What's the news?"

    With a glance at Amanda, Fuchs answered, "I think we'll be able to go ahead with the habitat project."

    "Really? Has Pancho agreed—"

    "Not with Astro's help," he said. "We're going to do it ourselves."

    Cardenas's eyes narrowed slightly. Then she said, "Is that the wisest course of action, Lars?"

    "We really don't have that much of a choice. Pancho would help us if she could, but Humphries will hamstring her as soon as she brings it up to the Astro board of directors. He doesn't want us to improve our living conditions here."

    "He's going to establish a depot here," Amanda said. "Humphries Space Systems will, that is."

    "So you and the other rock rats are going to pursue this habitat program on your own?"

    "Yes," said Fuchs, quite firmly.

    Cardenas said nothing. She clasped her knees and rocked back slightly on the stool, looking thoughtful.

    "We can do it," Fuchs insisted.

    "You'll need a team of specialists," Cardenas said. "This isn't something that you and your fellow prospectors can cobble together."

    "Yes. I understand that."

    Amanda said slowly, "Lars, I've been thinking. While you're working on this habitat project you'll have to stay here at Ceres, won't you?"

    He nodded. "I've already given some thought to leasing Star-power to someone else and living here in the rock for the duration of the project."

    "And how will you earn an income?" Cardenas interjected.

    He spread his hands. Before he could reply, though, Amanda said, "I think I know."

    Fuchs looked at his wife, clearly puzzled.

    "We can become suppliers for the other prospectors," Amanda said. "We can open our own warehouse."

    Cardenas nodded.

    "We can deal through Astro," Amanda went on, brightening with each word. "We'll obtain our supplies from Pancho and sell them to the prospectors. We can sell supplies to the miners, too."

    "Most of the mining teams work for Humphries," Fuchs replied darkly. "Or Astro."

    "But they still need supplies," Amanda insisted. "Even if they get their equipment from the corporations, they'll still need personal items: soap, entertainment videos, clothing..."

    Fuchs's face was set in a grimace. "I don't think you would want to handle the kinds of entertainment videos these prospectors buy."

    Undaunted, Amanda said, "Lars, we could compete against Humphries Space Systems while you're directing the habitat construction."

    "Compete against Humphries." Fuchs rolled the idea on his tongue, testing it. Then he broke into a rare grin. It made his broad, normally dour face light up. "Compete against Humphries," he repeated. "Yes. Yes, we can do that."

    Amanda saw the irony in it, although the others didn't. The daughter of a small shopkeeper in Birmingham, she had grown up hating her middle-class background and the lower-class workers her father sold to. The boys were rowdy and lewd, at best, and they could just as easily become dangerously violent. The girls were viciously catty. Amanda discovered early that being stunningly beautiful was both an asset and a liability. She was noticed wherever she went; all she had to do was smile and breathe. The trick was, once noticed, to make people see beyond her physical presence, to recognize the highly intelligent person inside that tempting flesh.

    While still a teenager she learned how to use her good looks to get boys to do what she wanted, while using her sharp intellect to keep one jump ahead of them. She escaped her father's home and fled to London, took lessons to learn to speak with a polished accent, and—to her complete astonishment—found that she had the brains and skill to be a first-rate astronaut. She was hired by Astro Manufacturing Corporation to fly missions between Earth and the Moon. With her breathless looks and seeming naivetй, almost everyone assumed she had slept her way to the top of her profession. Yet the truth was just the opposite; Amanda had to work hard to fend off the men—and women—who wanted to bed her.

    It was at Selene that she had met Martin Humphries. He had been her gravest danger: he wanted Amanda and he had the power to take what he wanted. Amanda had married Lars Fuchs in part to get away from Humphries, and Lars knew it.

    Now, here out on the fringe of humankind's expansion through the solar system, she was about to become a shopkeeper herself. How father would howl at that, she thought. The father's revenge: the child becomes just like the parent, in the end.

    "Humphries won't like competition," Cardenas pointed out.

    "Good!" exclaimed Fuchs.

    Shaken out of her reverie, Amanda said, "Competition will be good for the prospectors, though. And the miners, too. It will lower the prices they have to pay for everything."

    "I agree," said Cardenas. "But Humphries won't like it. Not one little bit."

    Fuchs laughed aloud. "Good," he repeated.

TWO YEARS LATER

    CHAPTER 5

     As soon as he stepped out onto the surface of Ceres, Fuchs realized that this was the first time he'd been in a spacesuit in months. The suit still smelled new; he'd only used it once or twice. Mein gott, he said to himself, I've become a bourgeois. The suit didn't fit all that well, either; the arms and legs were a trifle too long to be comfortable. His first venture into space had been aboard Starpower 1's ill-fated maiden voyage, five years earlier. He'd been a graduate student then, heading for a doctorate in planetary geochemistry. He never returned to school. Instead, he married Amanda and became a rock rat, a prospector seeking his fortune among the asteroids of the Belt. For nearly two years now, he had abandoned even that to run a supply depot on Ceres and supervise the habitat project. Helvetia Ltd. was the name Fuchs had given his fledgling business, incorporating it under the regulations of the International Astronautical Authority. He was Helvetia's president, Amanda its treasurer, and Pancho Lane a vice president who never interfered in the company's operations; she seldom even bothered to visit its headquarters on Ceres. Helvetia bought most of its supplies from Astro Corporation and sold them to the rock rats at the lowest markup Amanda would allow. Humphries Space Systems ran a competing operation, and Fuchs gleefully kept his prices as low as possible, forcing Humphries to cut his own prices or be driven off Ceres altogether. The competition was getting to the cutthroat level; it was a race to see who would drive whom out of business. The rock rats obviously preferred dealing with Fuchs to dealing with HSS. To his pleasant surprise, Helvetia Ltd. prospered, even though Fuchs considered himself a mediocre businessman. He was too quick to extend credit on nothing more than a rock rat's earnest promise to repay once he'd struck it rich. He preferred a handshake to the small print of a contract. Amanda constantly questioned his judgment, but enough of those vague promises came through to make Helvetia profitable. We're getting rich, Fuchs realized happily as his bank account at Selene fattened. Despite all of Humphries's tricks, we are getting rather wealthy.

    Now, gazing around the bleak battered surface of Ceres, he realized all over again how lonely and desolate this place was. How far from civilization. The sky was filled with stars, such a teeming profusion of them that the old familiar constellations were lost in their abundance. There was no friendly old Moon or blue glowing Earth hanging nearby; even the Sun looked small and weak, dwarfed by distance. A strange, alien sky: stark and pitiless. Ceres's surface was broodingly dark, cold, pitted by thousands of craterlets, rough and uneven, boulders and smaller rocks scattered around everywhere. The horizon was so close it looked as if he were standing on a tiny platform rather than a solid body. For a giddy instant Fuchs felt that if he didn't hang on, he'd fall up, off this worldlet, into the wild wilderness of stars.

    Almost distraught, he caught sight of the unfinished habitat rising above the naked horizon, glittering even in the weak sunlight. It steadied him. It might be a ramshackle collection of old, used, and stripped-down spacecraft, but it was the handiwork of human beings out here in this vast, dark emptiness.

    A gleam of light flashed briefly. He knew it was the little shuttlecraft bringing Pancho and Ripley back to the asteroid's surface. Fuchs waited by the squat structure of the airlock that led down into the living sections below ground.

    The shuttle disappeared past the horizon, but in a few minutes it came up over the other side, close enough to see its insect-thin legs and the bulbous canopy of its crew module. Pancho had insisted on flying the bird herself, flexing her old astronaut muscles.

    Now she brought it in to a smooth landing on the scoured ground about a hundred meters from the airlock.

    As the two spacesuited figures climbed down from the shuttle, Fuchs easily recognized Pancho Lane's long, stringy figure even in her helmet and suit. This was the first time in nearly a year that Pancho had come to Ceres, doubling up on her roles of Astro board member and Helvetia vice president.

    Tapping on the communications keyboard on his left wrist, Fuchs heard her talking with Ripley, the engineer in charge of the construction project.

    "... what you really need is a new set of welding lasers," she was saying, "instead of those clunkers you're workin' with."

    Rather than trying to walk in the low-gravity shuffle that was necessary on Ceres, Fuchs took the jetpack control box into his gloved hand and barely squeezed it, feather-light. As usual, he overdid the thrust and sailed over the heads of Pancho and the engineer, nearly ramming into the shuttlecraft. His boots kicked up a cloud of dark dust as he touched down on the surface.

    "Lord, Lars, when're you gonna learn how to fly one of those rigs?" Pancho teased.

    Inside his helmet Fuchs grinned with embarrassment. "I'm out of practice," he admitted, sliding his feet across the surface toward them, raising still more dust. The ground felt gritty, pebbly, even through his thick-soled boots.

    "You were never in practice, buddy."

    He changed the subject by asking the engineer, "So, Mr. Rip-Icy, will your crew be able to assemble the latest additions on schedule?"

    "Believe it or not," Ripley replied archly, "they will."

    Niles Ripley was an American of Nigerian heritage, an engineer with degrees from Lehigh and Penn, an amateur jazz trumpet player who had acquired the nickname "Ripper" from his headlong improvisations. The sobriquet sometimes caused problems for the mild-mannered engineer, especially in bars with belligerent drunks. The Ripper generally smiled and talked his way out of confrontations. He had no intention of letting some musclebound oaf damage his horn-playing lip.

    "Your schedule will be met," Ripley went on. Then he added, "Despite its lack of flexibility."

    Fuchs jabbed back, "Then your crew will earn its bonus, despite their complaints about the schedule."

    Pancho interrupted their banter. "I've been tellin' ol' Ripper here that you'd get this job done a lot faster with a better set of welding lasers."

    "We can't afford them," Fuchs said. "We are on very tight budget restraints."

    "Astro could lease you the lasers. Real easy terms."

    Fuchs made an audible sigh. "I wish you had thought of that two years ago, when we started this operation."

    "Two years ago the best lasers we had were big and inefficient. Our lab boys just came up with these new babies: small enough to haul around on a minitractor. Very fuel efficient. They've even got a handheld version. Lower power, of course, but good enough for some jobs."

    "We're doing well enough with what we have, Pancho."

    "Well, okay. Don't say I didn't make you the offer." He heard the resigned, slightly disappointed tone in her voice.

    Pointing a gloved hand toward the habitat, which was nearly at the far horizon, Fuchs said, "We've done quite well so far, don't you think?"

    For a long moment she said nothing as the three of them watched the habitat glide down the sky. It looked like an unfinished pinwheel, several spacecraft joined end to end and connected by long buckyball tethers to a similar collection of united spacecraft, the entire assembly slowly rotating as it moved toward the horizon.

    "Tell you the truth, Lars old buddy," said Pancho, "it kinda reminds me of a used-car lot back in Lubbock."

    "Used-car lot?" Fuchs sputtered.

    "Or maybe a flyin' junkyard."

    "Junkyard?"

    Then he heard Ripley laughing. "Don't let her kid you, Lars. She was pretty impressed, going through the units we've assembled."

    Pancho said, "Well, yeah, the insides are pretty good. But it surely ain't a thing of beauty from the outside."

    "It will be," Fuchs muttered. "You wait and see."

    Ripley changed the subject. "Tell me more about these handheld lasers. How powerful are they?"

    "It'll cut through a sheet of steel three centimeters thick," Pancho said.

    "How long does it take?" asked Ripley.

    "Couple nanoseconds. It's pulsed. Doesn't melt the steel, it shock-blasts it."

    They chatted on while the habitat sank out of sight and the distant, pale Sun climbed higher in the dark, star-choked sky. Fuchs noticed the zodiacal light, like two long arms outstretched from the Sun's middle. Reflections from dust motes, he knew: microscopic asteroids floating out there, leftovers from the creation of the planets.

    As they started toward the airlock, Pancho turned to Fuchs. "Might's well talk a little business."

    She raised her left arm and tapped the key on her cuff that switched to a secondary suit-radio frequency. Ripley was cut out of their conversation now.

    Fuchs hit the same key on his control unit. "Yes, business by all means."

    "You asked us to reduce the prices for circuit boards again," Pancho said. "We're already close to the bone, Lars."

    "Humphries is trying to undersell you."

    "Astro can't sell at a loss. The directors won't stand for it."

    Fuchs felt his lips curl into a sardonic smile. "Humphries is on your board of directors still?"

    "Yup. He's promised not to lower HSS's prices any further."

    "He's lying. They're offering circuit boards, chips, even repair services at lower and lower prices. He's trying to drive me out of the market."

    "And once he does he'll run up the prices as high as he pleases," she said.

    "Naturally. He'll have a monopoly then."

    They had reached the airlock hatch. It was big enough for two spacesuited people, but not three, so they sent Ripley through first.

    Pancho watched the engineer close the hatch, then said, "Lars, what Humphries really wants is to take over Astro. He's been after that since the git-go."

    "Then he'll have a monopoly on all space operations, everywhere in the Belt...everywhere in the whole solar system," Fuchs said, feeling anger rising within him.

    "That's what he's after."

    "We've got to prevent that! Whatever it takes, we must stop him."

    "I can't sell you goods at below cost, buddy. The board's made that clear."

    Fuchs nodded wearily. "Then we'll have to think of something else."

    "Like what?"

    He tried to shrug his shoulders, but inside the spacesuit it was impossible. "I wish I knew," he admitted.

    CHAPTER 6

    I'm becoming dependant on this woman, Humphries thought, watching Diane Verwoerd as they rode down the moving stairs toward his mansion, in Selene's bottommost level.

    She was coolly reading out the daily list of action items from her handheld palmcomp, ticking them off one by one, asking him to okay the staff assignments she had already made to handle each item.

    Humphries rarely left his house. Instead, he had made it into a haven of luxury and security. Half the house was living quarters, the other side given over to the scientists and technicians who maintained and studied the gardens that surrounded the mansion. Il had been a brilliant idea, Humphries thought, to talk Selene's governing board into letting him create a three-hundred-hectare garden down in the deepest grotto in Selene. Officially, the house was the Humphries Trust Research Center that ran the ongoing ecological experiment: Can a balanced ecology be maintained on the Moon with minimal human intervention, given adequate light and water? Humphries didn't care in the slightest what the answer was, so long as he could live in comfort in the midst of the flourishing garden, deep below the radiation and other dangers of the Moon's surface.

    He relished the knowledge that he had fooled them all, even Douglas Stavenger, Selene's founder and youthful eminence grise. He had even talked them into rescinding their foolish decision toe exile him from Selene after his part in Dan Randolph's death had become known. But he hadn't fooled the tall, exotic, silky Diane Verwoerd, he knew. She saw right through him.

    He had invited her to lunch at the new bistro just opened in the Grand Plaza. She had turned down his earlier offers of dinner, but a "working lunch" outside the house was something she could not easily refuse. So he had taken her to lunch. And she had worked right through the salad and soy cutlets, barely taking a sip of the wine he ordered, refusing dessert altogether.

    And now, as they rode on the powered stairs back to his office/home, she held her palmcomp before her and rattled off problems facing the company and her solutions for them.

    She's become almost indispensable to me, he realized. Maybe that's her game, to become so important to me businesswise that I'll stop thinking of her as a hotbody. She must know that I don't keep a woman around for long once I've had her in bed.

    He grinned inwardly. You're playing a tricky game, Ms. Verwoerd. And, so far, you've played it just about perfectly.

    So far.

    Humphries refused to admit defeat, although it was obvious that this luncheon idea had been no victory. He listened to her long recitation with only half his attention, thinking, I'll get you sooner or later, Diane. I can wait.

    But not much longer, another voice in his head spoke up. No woman is worth waiting for this long.

    Wrong, he answered silently. Amanda is.

    As they neared the bottom of the last flight of moving stairs, she said something that abruptly caught his full attention.

    "And Pancho Lane flew all the way out to Ceres last week. She's on her way back now."

    "To Ceres?" Humphries snapped. "What's she doing out there?"

    "Talking to her business associates, Mr. and Mrs. Fuchs," Verwoerd replied calmly. "About undercutting our prices, I imagine."

    "Undercutting me?"

    "What else? If they can drive HSS out of Ceres they'll have the whole Belt for themselves. You're not the only one who wants to control the rock rats."

    "Helvetia Ltd.," Humphries muttered. "Silly name for a company."

    "It's really a front for Astro, you know."

    He looked around the smooth walls of the escalator well without replying. At this deep level beneath Selene, no one else was riding down. There was no sound except the muted hum of the electric motor powering the stairs.

    "Pancho's using Fuchs and his company to make it much tougher for you to take control of Astro. The more business she does through Helvetia, the more the Astro board sees her as a real hero. They might even elect Pancho chairman when O'Banian steps down."

    "Drive me out of the Belt," Humphries growled.

    "That's what we're trying to do to them, isn't it?"

    He nodded.

    "We'd better do it, then, before they do it to us," said Diane Verwoerd.

    Humphries nodded again, knowing she was right.

    "What we need, then," she said slowly, "is a plan of action. A program aimed at crushing Helvetia once and for all."

    He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time since they'd finished lunch. She's thought this whole thing through, he realized. She's leading me around by the nose, by god. Humphries saw it in her almond eyes. She has this all figured out. She knows exactly where she wants to lead me.

    "So what do you suggest?" he asked, really curious about where she was heading.

    "I suggest a two-pronged strategy."

    "A two-pronged strategy?" he asked dryly.

    "It's an old technique," Verwoerd said, smiling slyly. "The carrot and the stick."

    Despite his efforts to remain noncommittal, Humphries smiled. "Tell me about it," he said as they reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped off.

Once he got back to his office, Humphries cleared his calendar and leaned back in his chair, thinking, worrying, planning. All thoughts of Diane left his conscious mind; he pictured Amanda out there with Fuchs. Amanda wouldn't try to hurt me, he told himself. But he would. He knows I love her and he'd do anything to damage me. He's already taken Amanda away from me. Now he wants to drive me out of the Belt and stop me from taking Astro. The sonofabitch wants to ruin me!

    Diane is right. We've got to move, and move fast. Carrot and stick.

    Abruptly, he sat up straight and ordered the phone to summon his chief of security. The man rapped softly at his office door a few moments later.

    "Come in, Grigor," said Humphries.

    The security chief was a new hire: a lean, silent man with dark hair and darker eyes. He wore an ordinary business suit of pale gray, the nondescript costume of a man who preferred to remain in the background, unnoticed, while he noticed everything. He remained standing despite the two comfortable chairs in front of Humphries's desk.

    Tilting his own chair back slightly to look up at him, Humphries said, "Grigor, I want the benefit of your thinking on a problem I have."

    Grigor shifted slightly on his feet. He had just been recruited from an Earth-based corporation that was floundering financially because most of its assets had been destroyed in the greenhouse flooding. He was on probation with Humphries, and he knew it.

    "Those rock rats out in the Belt are getting a bigger and bigger share of their supplies from Helvetia Ltd. instead of from Humphries Space Systems," Humphries said, watching the man closely, curious about how he would respond.

    Grigor said nothing. His face betrayed no emotion. He listened.

    "I want Humphries Space Systems to have exclusive control of the rock rats' supplies."

    Grigor just stood there, unmoving, his eyes revealing nothing.

    "Exclusive control," Humphries repeated. "Do you understand?"

    Grigor's chin dipped in the slightest of nods.

    "What do you think must be done?" Humphries asked.

    "To gain exclusive control," said Grigor, in a throaty, guttural voice that sounded strained, painful, "you must eliminate your competitor."

    "Yes, but how?"

    "There are many ways. One of them is to use violence. I presume that is why you have asked my opinion."

    Raising one hand, Humphries said sharply, "I don't mind violence, but this needs to be done with great discretion. I don't want anyone to suspect that Humphries Space Systems has anything to do with it."

    Grigor thought in silence for a few heartbeats. "Then the action must be taken against individual prospectors, rather than Helvetia itself. Eliminate their customers and the company will shrivel and die."

    Humphries nodded. "Yes," he said. "Exactly."

    "It will take some time."

    "How much time?"

    "A few months," Grigor said. "Perhaps a year."

    "I want it done faster than that. Sooner than a year."

    Grigor closed his eyes briefly, then said, "Then we must be prepared to escalate the violence. First the individual prospectors, then personnel and facilities on Ceres itself."

    "Facilities?"

    "Your competitor is constructing an orbital habitat there, is he not?"

    Humphries fought to suppress a satisfied grin. Grigor's already been studying the situation, he realized. Good.

    When his employer failed to reply, Grigor continued, "Stopping the habitat project will help to discredit the man who started it. If nothing else, it will show that he is powerless to protect his own people."

    "It's got to look accidental," Humphries insisted. "No hint of responsibility laid at my doorstep."

    "Not to worry," said Grigor.

    "I never worry," Humphries snapped. "I get even."

    As Grigor left his office, silent as a wraith, Humphries thought, Carrot and stick. Diane will offer the carrot. Grigor's people will provide the stick.

ONE MONTH LATER

THE LADY OF THE LAKE

Ooh, Randy," gushed Cindy, "you're so big."

    "And hard," added Mindy.

    Randall McPherson lay back in the small mountain of pillows while the naked twins stroked his bare skin. Some guys liked sex in microgravity, but Randy had spun up his ship to almost a full terrestrial g for his encounter with the twins. His partner, Dan Fogerty, complained about the fuel cost of spinning up the ship, but Randy had ignored his bleating. Fogerty was known to all the miners as Fatso Fogerty, he had allowed himself to blubber up so shamelessly, living in microgravity most of the time. McPherson spent hours of his spare time in their ship's exercise centrifuge, or had the whole ship spun up to keep his muscles in condition. Fogerty was lucky to have a levelheaded man such as McPherson to team with him, in McPherson's opinion.

    The twins were actually back at Ceres, of course, but the virtual reality system was working pretty well. Hardly a noticeable lag between a request by Randy and a smiling, slinky, caressing response from Cindy and Mindy.

    So Randy was more than a little irked when Fogerty's voice broke into his three-way fantasy.

    "There's a bloomin' ship approaching us!"

    "What?" McPherson snapped, sitting up so abruptly that the VR images of the twins were still wriggling sensuously on the pillows even though he was no longer lying between them.

    "A ship," Fatso repeated. "They're askin' to dock with us."

    McPherson muttered a string of heartfelt profanities while the twins lay motionless, staring blankly.

    "Sorry, ladies," he said, pushing himself up off the pillows, feeling half embarrassed, half infuriated. He lifted the VR goggles off and saw the real world: a dreary little compartment on a scruffy clunker of a ship that badly needed a refit and overhaul after fourteen months of batting around the Belt.

    Awkwardly peeling off his VR sensor suit and pulling on his coveralls as he made his way up to the bridge, McPherson bellowed, "Fatso, if this is one of your goddam jokes I'm gonna wring your neck till I hear chimes!"

    He ducked through the hatch and into the cramped, overheated bridge. Fogerty overflowed the pilot's seat, one hand clenching half a meat pie; most of the rest of it was spattered over his chins and his coveralls front. He was globulously lumpy, stretching the faded orange fabric of his coveralls so much that McPherson was reminded of an overripe pumpkin. He smelled overripe, too, and the additional spicy aroma from the meat pie made McPherson's stomach churn. Reckon I don't smell much better, McPherson told himself, trying to keep an even temper.

    Fogerty half-turned in the creaking chair and jabbed a thick finger excitedly toward the main display screen. McPherson saw the two-kilometer-long chunk of rock they had just claimed, dark and lumpy, and a silvery spacecraft that looked too sleek and new to be a prospector's ship.

    "A mining team?" Fogerty half-suggested.

    "Out here already?" McPherson snapped. "We just sent in our claim. We haven't contacted any miners."

    "Well, there they are," said Fogerty.

    "That's not a miner's ship."

    Fogerty shrugged. "Shall I give 'em permission to come aboard?"

    McPherson had to squeeze past his partner's bulk to get into the right-hand seat. "Who in blazes are they? And what are they doing here? With the whole Belt to poke into, why are they sticking their noses into our claim?"

    Fogerty grinned at his partner. "We could ask 'em."

    Grumbling, McPherson flicked on the communications channel. "This is The Lady of the Lake. Identify yourselves, please."

    The screen swirled with color momentarily, then a darkly bearded man's face took form. He looked vaguely oriental to McPherson: high cheekbones, hooded eyes.

    "This is Shanidar. We have a boxful of videodisks that we've viewed so often we can lip-synch the dialogue. Do you have any to trade?"

    "What've you got?" Fogerty asked eagerly. "How recent are they?"

    "Private stuff, mostly. Muy piquante, if you know what I mean. You can't get them through the normal channels. They were brand-new when we left Selene, six months ago."

    Before McPherson could reply, Fogerty broke into a dimpled, many-chinned smile. "We can swap you one-for-one, but our stuff is older."

    "That's okay," said the bearded man. "It'll be new to us."

    "What're you doing out here?" McPherson demanded. "We claimed this rock, you know."

    "We're not prospecting any more," came the reply. "We've hit our jackpot and made a deal with Humphries Space Systems to process the ores. Got our money in the bank. We just thought we'd unload these videodisks before we head back home."

    "Sure," said Fatso. "Why not?"

    McPherson felt uneasy. But he saw the eager look on his partner's fleshy face. After fourteen months in the Belt they had barely cleared the payments on their ship. They needed another week, at least, to negotiate a mining contract with one of the corporations. McPherson had no intention of accepting the first offer they received. And the prices for ores just kept going down; they'd be lucky if they netted enough to live on for six months before they had to go out again.

    "Okay," he said reluctantly. "Come on over and dock at our main airlock."

    Fogerty nodded happily, like a little kid anticipating Christmas.

    CHAPTER 7

     Amanda thought again about how housekeeping on Ceres—inside Ceres, actually—was different from living on a ship. Not that their living quarters were that much more spacious: the single room that she and Lars shared was a slightly enlarged natural cave in the asteroid, its walls, floor, and ceiling smoothed and squared off. It wasn't much bigger than the cubic volume they had aboard Starpower. And there was the dust, always the dust. In Ceres's minuscule gravity, every time you moved, every time you took a step, you stirred up the everlasting dust. It was invisibly fine inside the living quarters, thanks to the air blowers. Once they moved up to the orbiting habitat, the dust would be a thing of the past, thank god.

    In the meantime, though, it was a constant aggravation. You couldn't keep anything really clean: even dishes stored in closed cupboards had to be scoured under air jets before you could eat off them. The dust made you sneeze; half the time Amanda and most of the other residents wore filter masks. She worried that her face would bear permanent crease marks from the masks.

    But living in Ceres offered something that shipboard life could not duplicate. Company. Society. Other people who could visit you or you could drop in on. Strolls through the corridors where you could see neighbors and say hello and stop for a chat. The corridors were narrow and twisting, it was true; natural lava tubes through the rock that had been smoothed off enough for people lo shuffle through in a low-gravity parody of walking. Their walls and ceilings were still curved and unfinished raw stone; it was more like walking through a tunnel than a real corridor. And there was the dust, of course. Always the dust. It was worse in the tunnels, so bad that everyone wore face masks when they went for a stroll.

    Lately, though, people's attitudes had changed noticeably. There was an aura of expectation in the air, almost like the slowly building excitement that the year-end holiday season had brought when she'd been a child on Earth. The habitat was growing visibly, week by week. Everyone could see it swinging through the sky on their wallscreens. We're going to live up there, everyone was saying to themselves. We're going to move to a new, clean home.

    When Lars had first told Amanda about the orbiting habitat, she'd been worried about the radiation. One advantage of living inside a big rock was that it shielded you from the harsh radiation sleeting in from the Sun and deep space. But Lars had shown her how the habitat would use the same magnetic radiation shielding that spacecraft used, only stronger, better. She studied the numbers herself and became convinced that the habitat would be just as safe as living underground—as long as the magnetic shielding worked.

    Lars was up on the unfinished habitat again with Niles Ripley. He and the Ripper were working on a recalcitrant water recycler that refused to operate as programmed. Meanwhile, she was running the office, routing prospectors' requests for supplies and equipment to the proper inventory system, and checking to make certain that the material actually was loaded aboard a ship and sent to the people who had requested it.

    Then there was the billing procedure. Miners were usually no problem: most of them were on corporate payrolls, so whatever they owed could be deducted automatically from their paychecks. Prospectors, though, were something else. The independents had no paychecks to deduct from. They were still searching for an asteroid to mine, waiting to find a jackpot. Yet they needed air to breathe and food to eat just as much as did miners working a claim. At Lars's insistence, Amanda ran a tab for most of them, waiting for the moment when they struck it rich.

    Strange, Amanda thought, how the system works. The prospectors go out dreaming of making a fortune. Once they find a likely asteroid they have to make a deal to mine its ores. That's when they realize that they'll be lucky if they can break even. The prices for metals and minerals roller coasted up and down—mostly down—depending on the latest strikes; the commodities markets Earthside were hotbeds of frantic speculation, despite the sternest efforts of the Global Economic Council to keep things under control.

    Yet there were just enough really big finds to keep the stars in the prospectors' eyes. They kept doggedly searching for the one asteroid that would allow them to retire in wealth and ease.

    The real way to make a fortune, Amanda had learned, was to be a supplier to the prospectors and miners who seemed to be rushing out to the Belt in steadily increasing numbers. They did the searching and the finding, the mining and refining. But the people here on Ceres were the ones who were getting rich. Lars had already amassed a small fortune with Helvetia Ltd. Humphries's people were piling up bigger and bigger sums in their bank accounts, too. Even the twins, with their virtual reality bordello, were millionaires several times over.

    The real profits, though, went to the corporations. Astro and Humphries Space Systems made most of the money; only a small percentage of it stays with people like Lars and me, Amanda knew.

    Amanda rubbed at the aching back of her neck. It had become stiff from staring at the wallscreen for so many hours on end. With a tired sigh, she decided to call it a day. Lars would be coming in soon. Time to scrub up and put on a clean set of coveralls for dinner and maybe take a walk to the Pub afterward. Before shutting down for the day, though, Amanda flicked through the list of incoming messages awaiting her attention. Routine. Nothing that needed immediate attention.

    Then she noticed that one of the messages had come in not from the ships plying the Belt, but from Selene. From the headquarters of Humphries Space Systems.

    Her first instinct was to ignore it. Or perhaps delete it altogether. Then she saw that it was addressed to Lars, not her. It was not marked personal, and did not bear Martin Humphries's signature. No harm in reading it, Amanda thought. It won't be a two-way conversation, face-to-face. She glanced at her mirror by the bed, across the narrow room. I'm certainly not dressed to impress anyone, she thought. But even if it is from Martin, it was recorded and sent hours ago. Whoever sent it won't see me.

    She didn't bother to take off her filter mask as she called up the message from HSS.

    The wallscreen flickered momentarily, then showed an attractive dark-haired woman with the kind of sculpted high cheekbones that Amanda had always envied. The ID line beneath her image read diane verwoerd, special assistant to the ceo humphries space systems.

    "Mr. Fuchs," said Verwoerd's image, "I have been authorized by the management of Humphries Space Systems to engage in negotiations for buying out Helvetia Limited. The buyout would include your supply depot, inventory, and all the services that Helvetia performs. I'm sure you'll find our terms very attractive. Please call me at your earliest convenience. Thank you."

    The screen blanked to the HSS logo against a neutral gray background. Amanda stared at it, seeing the woman's image, hearing her words. Buy us out! We could go back to Earth! We could live well and Lars could even go back to graduate school and get his doctorate!

    She was so excited that she paid no attention to the message from the supply ship that was supposed to make rendezvous with The Lady of the Lake.

    CHAPTER 8

    Don't you see, Lars?" Amanda said eagerly. "We could go home! To Earth! You could go back to your studies and get your doctorate."

    Fuchs was sitting on the edge of their bed, his thin slash of a mouth turned down grimly, Amanda beside him. Together they had watched Diane Verwoerd's full message offering him ten million international dollars for his supply service and its facilities on Ceres. "It's a bribe," he growled.

    "It's the opportunity of a lifetime, darling. Ten million inter-national dollars! Think of it! Ten million, free and clear, just like that!" She snapped her fingers. "For nothing more than signing your name."

    "And getting out of Ceres."

    "And returning to Earth. We could go to London, or Geneva, if you prefer."

    "It's a bribe," he repeated stubbornly.

    Amanda took both his big, callused hands in hers. "Lars, darling, we can go back to Earth and live comfortably wherever you choose. We can begin a new life together."

    He said nothing, simply stared at the blanked wallscreen as if he were looking down the muzzle of a gun. "Lars, we could have children."

    That stirred him. He turned his head to look into her eyes. "I want to have a baby, Lars. Your baby. We can't do that here, you know that."

    He nodded bleakly. "The gravity. . ." he muttered.

    "If we lived on Earth, we could lead normal lives. We could raise a family."

    "The frozen zygotes are waiting for us at Selene," he said.

    She slid her arms around his neck. "We won't need them, Lars. Not if we live on Earth like normal people."

    He started to pull her to him, but then something crossed his face. His expression changed; he looked almost as if he were in pain.

    "They want us to leave Ceres."

    "And you want to stay?" Amanda had meant it to be joking; lighthearted. But it sounded bitter, almost like nagging, even to her.

    "The prospectors. The miners," he said, almost whispering. "All the others rock rats out here . . . our friends, our neighbors."

    "What of them?"

    "We'd have to leave them."

    "We'll make new friends. They'll understand."

    He pulled away from her and got to his feet. "But we'll be leaving them to him, to Humphries."

    "What of it?"

    "Once we're out of his way, once he's bought us out, he'll be the only source for supplies in the entire Belt. No one else would dare to compete against him."

    "Astro might. Pancho—"

    "He's on Astro's board of directors. Sooner or later he'll take control of Astro, too. He'll control everything! And everybody."

    Amanda had known all along that her husband would stick on this point. She had tried to keep it out of her mind, but there it was, in the open, standing between them.

    "Lars," she said slowly, picking her words with care, "whatever feelings Martin may have once had for me are long gone, I'm certain. There is no need to view this as a competition between you and he."

    He walked away from her, paced the little room in six strides and then turned back toward her, a barrel-chested bear of a man dressed in faded dark gray coveralls, his broad heavy-featured face glowering with distrust.

    "But it is a competition, Amanda. Between Humphries Space Systems and Helvetia Limited. Between him and Astro, actually. We're caught in the middle of it, whether we like it or not."

    "But we can get out of it," she said. "You can take me back to Earth and we'll be rid of Humphries and Astro and the rock rats for good."

    He strode to the bed and dropped to his knees before her. "I want to take you back home, dearest. I know how much you want to be away from here, how brave you've been to stay here with me—"

    "I love you, Lars," she said, reaching out to tousle his dark hair. "I want to be with you wherever you are."

    He sighed heavily. "Then we must remain here. At least for a little while longer."

    "But why...?"

    "Because of them. The rock rats. Our neighbors and friends here on Ceres. We can't leave them to Humphries."

    Amanda felt her eyes misting over. "We can't let this opportunity pass us by, Lars. Please, please accept their offer."

    He started to shake his head stubbornly, but then he noticed the tears in her eyes. He got to his feet and sat heavily beside her again on the edge of the bed.

    "Amanda, dearest, I can't turn my back on all the people here. They trust me. They need me."

    "I need you, too, Lars," Amanda said. "We've been out here for five years. I haven't complained once, have I?"

    "No, you haven't," he admitted. "You've been very wonderful."

    "I'm asking you now, Lars. I'm begging you. Please accept this offer and take me back home."

    He stared into her glistening eyes for long, silent moments.

    She could see that he was thinking, searching for some way to do what she wanted without feeling that he had betrayed the other rock rats in the Belt.

    At last he said, "Let me talk to Pancho."

    "Pancho? Why?"

    "To see if Astro will make a similar offer."

    "And if they won't?"

    With obvious, painful reluctance, Fuchs said, "Then we'll accept Humphries's offer."

    "You will?"

    He nodded, smiling sadly. "Yes, I'll take his money and leave the Belt and bring you home to Earth."

DOSSIER: JOYCE TAKAMINE

    The name on her birth certificate read Yoshiko Takamine, but once she started at public school everyone called her Joyce. Her parents didn't mind; they were fourth-generation Americans, with only a vague feeling of nostalgia for the family's roots in Japan. The first time one of her schoolmates called her a "Jap," Joyce thought she meant "Jewish American Princess. "

    Father moved them to the hills above Sausalito, but when the greenhouse floods wiped out most of the electrical power generation plants in the Bay area, they were plunged into darkness along with everyone else. Those were desperate times, with half the county thrown out of their jobs. No electricity, no work. Joyce's class held their senior prom by candlelight, and there was talk of bringing in drilling companies to bore wells deep enough to tap the natural gas that lay kilometers below-ground.

    All the kids had to find some kind of job to help support the family. Joyce did what her great-grandmother had done more than a century earlier: migrant stoop labor in the farms down in the rich valleys of California. The floods hadn't reached that far inland, although prolonged drought was searing the orchards and vineyards mercilessly. It was hard, bitter work, picking fruits and vegetables beneath the hot sun while grim-faced men armed with shotguns kept on patrol against wandering bands of starving looters. They expected casual sex from the workers. Joyce quickly learned that it was better to please them than to go hungry.

    When Joyce returned home that winter, she was shocked to see how much her parents had aged. An epidemic of dengue fever had swept the coast and even reached into the hills where they lived. Her mother sobbed softly at night; her father stared into the hot cloudless sky, racked with bouts of coughing that left him gasping for breath. When he looked at his daughter he seemed ashamed, as if all this devastation, all this ruination of the family's plans, was his fault alone.

    "I wanted you to become an engineer," he told Joyce. "I wanted you to rise beyond my station in life."

    "I will, Dad," she told him, with the careless assurance of youth. And when she turned her eyes to the sky, she thought about the wild frontier out along the Asteroid Belt.

    CHAPTER 9

    He's put in a call to Pancho Lane," said Diane Verwoerd.

    She and Humphries were strolling through the courtyard outside his mansion. Humphries claimed he enjoyed taking a walk in the "outdoors"—or as near to outdoors as you could get on the Moon. Humphries's home was in the middle of a huge grotto down at the deepest level of Selene's network of underground corridors and habitation spaces. The big, high-ceilinged cavern was filled with flowered shrubbery, profusions of reds and yellows and delicate lilacs blooming from one rough-hewn rock wall to the other. Taller trees rose among the profusion of flowers: alders and sturdy maples and lushly flowering white and pink gardenias. No breeze swayed those trees; no birds sang in the greenery; no insects buzzed. It was a huge, elaborate hothouse, maintained by human hands. Hanging from the raw rock ceiling were strips of full-spectrum lamps to imitate sunlight.

    Verwoerd could see the enormous garden beyond the ornate fountain that splashed noisily in the courtyard. The house itself was massive, only two stories high, but wide, almost sprawling. Built of smoothed lunar stone, its roof slanted down to big sweeping windows.

    Compared to the gray underground drabness of the rest of Selene, this garden and home were like a paradise in the midst of a cold, forbidding desert. Verwoerd's own quarters, several levels up from this grotto, were among the best in Selene, but they seemed cramped and colorless compared to this.

    Humphries claimed he enjoyed walking in the open air. The only other open space in Selene was the Grand Plaza, under the big dome up on the surface, and anyone could take a stroll up there. Here he had his privacy, and all the heady color that human ingenuity and hard work could provide on the Moon. Verwoerd thought he enjoyed the idea that all this was his more than any aesthetic or health benefits he could gain from walking among the roses and peonies.

    But any pleasure he might have enjoyed from this stroll was wiped away by her announcement.

    "He's called Pancho?" Humphries snapped, immediately nettled. "What for?"

    "She scrambled his message and her reply, so we don't know the exact words as yet. I have a cryptologist working on it."

    "Only one message?"

    With a small nod, Verwoerd answered, "His incoming to her, and hers outgoing to him immediately after."

    "H'mm."

    "I can guess what the subject was."

    "So can I," Humphries said sourly. "He wants to see if she'll better our offer."

    "Yes."

    "He's playing her against me."

    "It would seem so."

    "And if she outbids me, then Astro gets full control of his Helvetia Limited." He pronounced the name sneeringly.

    Verwoerd frowned slightly. "He's already using Astro as his supplier. What does Pancho have to gain by buying him out?"

    "She keeps us from buying him out. It's a preventive strike, that's what it is."

    "So we increase our bid?"

    "No," Humphries snapped. "But we increase our pressure."

Seyyed Qurrah laughed with delight as he gazed through the thick quartz observation port at his prize, his jewel, his reward for more than two years of scorn and struggle and near starvation. He feasted his eyes as the irregular chunk of rock slid across his view, grayish brown where the sunlight struck it, pitted and covered here and there with boulders the size of houses.

    "Allah is great," he said aloud, thanking the one God for his mercy and kindness.

    Turning to the sensor displays in his cabin's control panel, he saw that this lump of stone bore abundant hydrates, water locked chemically to the silicates of the rock. Water! In the desert that was the Moon, water fetched a higher price than gold. It was even more valuable at Ceres, although with only a few hundred people living at the big asteroid, the demand for precious water was not as high as that of Selene's many thousands.

    Qurrah thought of the contempt and ridicule that they had heaped upon him back home when he'd announced that he intended to leave Earth and seek his fortune in the new bounty of the Asteroid Belt. "Sinbad the Sailor" was the kindest thing he'd been called. "Seyyed the Idiot" was what most of them said. Even when he had reached Ceres and leased a ship with the last bit of credit his dead father had left him, even there the other prospectors and miners called him "Towel Head" and worse. Well, now the shoe was on the other foot. He'd show them!

    Then he pictured how happy Fatima would be when he returned to Algiers, wealthy and happy at last. He would be able to shower her with diamonds and rich gowns of silk with gold threading. Perhaps even acquire a second wife. He was so pleased that he decided to take a full meal from his meager foodstocks, instead of his usual handful of boiled couscous.

    But first he would register his claim with the International Astronautical Authority. That was important. No, before that, he must make his prayer to Allah. That was more important.

    He realized he was nearly babbling out loud. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, Qurrah decided, prayer first, then register with the IAA, then celebrate with a whole meal.

    He kept his ship spinning all the time, counterbalancing his habitation unit with the power generator and other equipment at the end of the kilometer-long tether. Not for him the long months in microgee, with his muscles going flabby and his bones decalcifying so that he would have to spend even longer months in lunar orbit rebuilding his body cells. No! Qurrah lived in almost a full earthly gravity.

    So he had no trouble unfurling his prayer rug once he had taken it from its storage cabinet. He was spreading the rug on the one uncluttered area of his compartment when his communications receiver chimed.

    A message? He was startled at the thought. Who would be calling me out here, in this wilderness? Only Fatima and the IAA knows where I am—and the people back at Ceres, of course, but why would they call a lonely prospector?

    Fatima! he thought. Something has happened to her. Something terrible.

    His voice trembled as he answered, "This is the Star of the East. Who is calling, please?"

    A bearded man's face appeared on his main screen. He looked almost Asian to Qurrah, or perhaps Hispanic.

    "This is Shanidar. You are trespassing on territory that belongs to Humphries Space Systems, Incorporated."

    "This rock?" Qurrah was instantly incensed. "No sir! There is no registered claim for this asteroid. I was just about to send in my own claim when you hailed me."

    "You haven't registered a claim for it?"

    "I am going to, right now!"

    The bearded man shook his head, very slightly, just a small movement from side to side.

    "No you're not," he said.

    They were the last words Qurrah ever heard. The laser blast from Shanidar blew a fist-sized hole through the thin hull of his ship. Qurrah's death scream quickly screeched to silence as the air rushed out and his lungs collapsed in massive hemorrhages of blood.

THE PUB

    George Ambrose cradled his stone mug of beer in both his big paws. They call it beer, he grumbled inwardly. Haven't seen a decent beer since I came out here. Fookin' concoction these rock rats call beer tastes more like platypus piss than anything else. The real stuff was available, but the price was so high for anything imported that George gritted his teeth and sipped the local brew.

    As joints went, the Pub wasn't so bad. Reminded George of the Pelican Bar, back at Selene, except for the twins in their spray-paint bikinis. They worked behind the bar, under the protective eye of the owner/barkeep. More'n two hundred and sixty million kilometers away, the old Pelican was. Nearly a week's flight, even in the best of the fusion ships.

    He looked over the crowd. The Pub was a natural cave in Ceres's porous, rocky crust. The floor had been smoothed down but nobody'd ever bothered to finish the walls or ceiling. Be a shame to leave this behind when we move to the habitat, George thought. He'd grown fond of the joint.

    Everything in the Pub was either scavenged or made from asteroidal materials. George was sitting on an old packing crate, reinforced by nickel-iron rods and topped with a stiff plastic cushion cadged from some ship's stores. The table on which he was leaning his beefy arms was carved rock, as was his mug. Some of the crowd were drinking from frosted aluminum steins, but George preferred the stone. The pride and joy of the The Pub was its bar, made of real wood ferried in here by the daft old doddv who owned the joint. Maybe he isn't so daft, George mused. He's makin' more money than I am, that's for sure. More money than any of these rock rats.

    Men and women were jammed four deep at the bar and sitting at all the tables spotted across the place like stalagmites rising from the stone floor, four or five men to every sheila. A dozen or more stood along the back wall, drinks in their hands. A pair of women and another bloke were sitting at the same table as George, but he hardly knew them and they were chatting up each other, leaving him alone with his beer.

    A strange crowd, he thought. Prospectors and miners ought to be rough, hard-handed men, outback types like in the old videos. These blokes were college boys, computer nerds, family men and women with enough education and smarts to operate spacecraft and highly automated mining machinery. Not one of 'em ever used a pick or shovel, George knew. Hell's bells, I never did meself. Lately, though, a different sort had been drifting in: snotty-looking yobbos who kept pretty much to themselves. They didn't seem to have any real jobs, although they claimed they worked for HSS. They just hung around, as if they were waiting for something.

    Off in the far corner of the cave a couple of blokes were unpacking musical instruments and connecting their amplifiers. Niles Ripley walked in, loose-jointed and smiling at his friends—just about everybody—with his trumpet case in one hand. George pushed himself to his feet and shambled to the bar for a refill of his platypus brew. Several people said hello to him, and he made a bit of chat until Cindy slid the filled mug back to him. Or was it Mindy? George could never tell the twins apart. Then he went back to his table. Nobody had swiped his seat. That's the kind of place the Pub was.

    As the music began, low and sweet, George found himself thinking about his life. Never dreamed I'd be out here in the Belt, digging ores out of fookin' asteroids. Hard work, but better than prospecting, poking around the Belt for months on end, looking for a really rich asteroid that the corporations haven't already claimed, hoping to make the big strike so you can go home and live in luxury. Life takes weird turns.

    The Ripper, who had been playing along with the other musicians, finally stood up and tore into a solo that rocked the cave. His trumpet echoed off the stone walls, bringing everyone to their feet, swaying and clapping in time to his soaring notes. When he finished they roared with delight and insisted on more.

    The evening flew by. George forgot about the ship that he owed money on, forgot about getting up early tomorrow morning to finish the repair job on Matilda's main manipulator arm so he could get the hell out of Ceres and finish the mining job he'd signed up for before the contract deadline ran out and he had to pay a penalty to Astro Corporation. He just sat there with the rest of the crowd, grooving on the music, rushing to the bar along with everyone else when the band took a break, drinking all night long yet getting high on the music, not the beer.

    It was well past midnight when the band broke up, after several encores, and started to pack their instruments and equipment. People began to file out of the Pub, tired and happy. The twins had disappeared, as usual. Nobody laid a hand on them, except in virtual reality. George plowed through the crowd and made his way to the Ripper.

    "Lemme buy you a beer, mate?"

    Ripley clicked his trumpet case shut, then looked up.

    Smiling, he said, "Maybe a cola, if you can afford it."

    "Sure thing, Rip. No worries."

    A few determined regulars still stood at bar, apparently with no intention of leaving. George saw four of the new guys there, too, grouped together, bent over their drinks and talking to one another in low, serious tones. They all wore coveralls with the HSS logo over their name tags.

    "Another beer for me and a cola for the Ripper, here," George called to the barkeep.

    "A cola?" sneered one of the yobbos. The others laughed.

    Ripley smiled down the bar at them. "Can't have any alcohol after midnight. I'm working on the habitat in the morning."

    "Sure," came the reply.

    George scowled at them. They were so new to Ceres they didn't realize that an imported cola cost half the earth. He turned back toward Ripley. "Helluva show you put on tonight."

    "They seemed to like it."

    "Ever think of playin' professionally? You're too good to be sittin' out on this rock."

    Ripley shook his head. "Naw. I play the trumpet for fun. If I got serious about it, it'd become work."

    "You hurt my ears with that damned noise," said another of the yobbos.

    "Yeah," said one of his mates. "Why the hell d'you hafta play so damned loud?"

    Before George could say anything, Ripley replied, "Gee, I'm sorry about that. Maybe next time I'll use a mute."

    The complainer walked down the bar toward Ripley. "Next time my ass. What're you going to do about the frickin' headache you've given me?"

    He was a tall, rangy sort, athletically built; short blond hair, with a funny little tail in the back, like an old-time matador. He was young, George saw, but old enough to have better manners.

    The Ripper's smile started to look a little forced. Very gently, he replied, "I guess I could treat you to a couple of aspirins."

    "Fuck you and your aspirins." The guy threw his drink into the Ripper's face.

    Ripley looked shocked, totally at a loss. He blinked in confusion as beer dripped from his nose, his ears.

    George stepped between them. "That wasn't very smart," he said.

    "I'm not talking to you, Red. It's this wiseass noisemaker I'm talking to."

    "He's my friend," said George. "I think you owe him an apology."

    "And I think you ought to pull your shaggy ass out of this before you get hurt," said the yobbo, as his three companions came up to stand with him.

    George smiled pleasantly. This was getting interesting, he thought. To the beer-thrower, he said, "Mr. Ripley, here, isn't the sort to get involved in a barroom brawl. He might hurt his lip, y'see, and then everyone here would be upset with the people who made that happen."

    The guy looked around. The Pub was almost empty now. The few remaining regulars had backed away from the bar, drinks in their hands. A handful of others who had been leaving now stood at the doorway, watching. The barkeep had faded back to the other end of the bar, the expression on his face somewhere between nervous and curious.

    "I don't give a fuck who gets upset with who. And that includes you, big ass."

    George grabbed the guy by the front of his shirt and lifted him, one hand, off the floor to deposit him with a thump on the bar. He looked very surprised. His three friends stood stock-still.

    Ripley touched George's other arm. "Come on, pal. Let's not have a fight."

    George looked from the yobbo sitting on the bar to his three standing partners, then broke into a shaggy grin.

    "Yeah," he said to the Ripper. "No sense breakin' the furniture. Or any heads."

    He turned and started for the door. As he knew they would, all four of them leaped at him. And none of them knew beans about fighting in low gravity.

    George swung around and caught the first one with a backhand swat that sent him sprawling. The next two tried to pin his arms but George threw them off. The original troublemaker came at him with a high-pitched yowl and a karate kick aimed at his face. George caught his foot in mid-kick and swung him around like a kid's toy, lifted him totally off his feet, and then tossed him flying in a howling slow-motion spin over the bar. He crashed into the decorative glassware on the shelves along the back wall.

    "Goddammit, George, that costs money!" the barkeep yelled.

    But George was busy with the three recovered yobbos. They rushed him all at once, but it was like trying to bring down a statue. George staggered back a step, grunting, then smashed one to the floor with a single sledgehammer blow between his shoulder-blades. He peeled the other two off and held them up off the floor by the scruffs of their necks, shook them the way a terrier shakes a rat, then banged their heads together with a sound like a melon hitting the pavement after a long drop.

    He looked around. Two men were unconscious at his feet, a third moaning facedown on the floor. The barkeep was bending over the yobbo on the floor behind the bar amid the shattered glassware, shouting, "Well, somebody's got to pay for this damage!"

    "Are you all right, George?" Ripley asked.

    George saw that the Ripper had a packing-crate-chair in his hands. He laughed. "What're you gonna do with that, post 'em back to Earth?"

    Ripley broke into a relieved laugh, and the two men left the Pub. Half a minute later the Ripper ran back in and retrieved his trumpet. The bartender was on the phone, calling Kris Cardenas, the only qualified medical help on Ceres. He held a credit chip from one of the yobbos in his hand.

    CHAPTER 10

    Even after five years on Astro Corporation's board of directors, Pancho Lane still thought of herself as a neophyte. You got a lot to learn, girl, she told herself almost daily.

    Yet she had formed a few working habits, a small set of rules for herself. She spent as little time in Astro's corporate offices as possible. Whether at La Guaira on Earth or in Selene, Pancho chose to be among the engineers and astronauts rather than closeting herself with the suits. She had come up through the ranks, a former astronaut herself, and she had no intention of reading reports and studying graphs when she could be out among the workers, getting her hands dirty; she preferred the smell of machine oil and honest sweat to the quiet tensions and power jockeying of the corporate offices.

    One of her self-imposed rules was to make decisions as soon as she had the necessary information, and then to act on her decisions quickly. Another was to deliver bad news herself, instead of detailing some flunky to handle the chore.

    Still, she hesitated to put in the call to Lars Fuchs. It won't make him happy, she knew. Instead, she called his wife. Pancho and Amanda had worked together five years earlier; they had copiloted Starpower 1's maiden mission to the Belt. They had watched helplessly as Dan Randolph died of radiation poisoning—murdered by remote control, by Martin Humphries.

    And now the Humper was offering to buy out Lars and Mandy, get them off Ceres, establish his own Humphries Space Systems as the sole supplier for the rock rats out there. Pancho had tried to fight Humphries, tried to keep Astro in the competition through Fuchs's little company. But she had been thoroughly outmaneuvered by Humphries, and she knew it.

    Angry more at herself than anyone else, she marched herself to her office in La Guaira and made the call to Amanda. She paid no attention to the lovely tropical scenery outside her office window; the green, cloud-topped mountains and gently surging sea held no attraction for her. Planting her booted feet on her desktop, wishing there was some way to help Mandy and Lars, she commanded her phone to send a message to Amanda Cunningham Fuchs, on Ceres.

    "Mandy," she began unceremoniously, "'fraid I got bad news for you and Lars. Astro won't top Humphries's buyout offer. The board wouldn't vote to buy you out. Humphries has a nice little clique on the board and they voted the whole proposition down the toilet. Sorry, kid. Look me up when you get back to Selene, or wherever you're goin'. Maybe we can spend some time together without worryin' about business. See ya."

    Pancho was startled when she realized she'd been sitting at her desk for nearly half an hour without instructing the phone to transmit her message.

    Finally she said, "Aw shit, send it."

The headquarters of the International Astronautical Authority were still in Zurich, officially, but its main working offices were in St. Petersburg.

    The global warming that had melted most of the glaciers in Switzerland and turned the snowpacks of the Alpine peaks into disastrous, murderous floods had forced the move. The administrators and lawyers who had been transferred to Russia complained, with some resentment, that they had been pushed off the greenhouse cliff.

    To their surprise, St. Petersburg was a beautiful, cosmopolitan city, not at all the dour gray urban blight they had expected. The greenhouse warming had been kind to St. Petersburg: winters were nowhere near as long and bitter as they had once been. Snow did not start to fall until well into December and it was usually gone by April. Russian engineers had doggedly built a series of weirs and breakwaters across the Gulf of Finland and the Neva River to hold back the rising seas.

    Even though the late winter sunlight had to struggle through a slate-gray layer of clouds, Erek Zar could see from his office window that most of the snow had already melted from the rooftops. It promised to be a good day, and a good weekend. Zar leaned back in his desk chair, clasped his hands behind his head, looked out across the rooftops toward the shimmering harbor, and thought that, with luck, he could get away by lunchtime and spend the weekend with his family in Krakow.

    He was not happy, therefore, when Francesco Tomasselli stepped through his office door with a troubled expression on his swarthy face. Strange, Zar said to himself: Italians are supposed to be sunny and cheerful people. Tomasselli always looked like the crack of doom. He was as lean as a strand of spaghetti, the nervous sort. Zar felt like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: Let me have men about me that are fat; sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights.

    "What's the matter, Franco?" Zar asked, hoping it wasn't serious enough to interfere with his travel plans.

    Tomasselli plopped into the upholstered chair in front of the desk and sighed heavily. "Another prospecting ship is missing."

    Zar sighed too. He spoke to his desktop screen and the computer swiftly showed the latest report from the Belt: a spacecraft named Star of the East had disappeared; its tracking beacon had winked off, all telemetry from the craft had ceased.

    "That's the third one this month," Tomasselli said, his lean face furrowed with worry.

    Spreading his hands placatingly, Zar said, "They're out on the edge of nowhere, sailing alone through the Belt. Once a ship gets into trouble there's no one near enough to help. What do you expect?"

    Tomasselli shook his head. "When a spacecraft gets into trouble, as you put it, it shows up on the telemetry. They send out distress calls. They ask for help, or advice."

    Zar shrugged.

    "We've had ships fail and crews die, god knows," Tomasselli went on, the faint ring of vowels at the end of most of his words. "But these three are different. No calls for help, no telemetry showing failures or malfunctions. They just disappear—poof!"

    Zar thought a moment, then asked, "Had they claimed any asteroids?"

    "One of them had: Lady of the Lake. Two weeks after the ship disappeared and the claim was officially invalidated, the asteroid was claimed by a vessel owned by Humphries Space Systems: the Shanidar."

    "Nothing irregular there."

    "Two weeks? It's as if the Humphries ship was waiting for Lady of the Lake to disappear so they could claim the asteroid."

    "You're getting melodramatic, Franco," said Zar. "You're accusing them of piracy."

    "It should be investigated."

    "Investigated? How? By whom? Do you expect us to send search teams through the Asteroid Belt? There aren't enough spacecraft in the solar system for that!"

    Tomasselli did not reply, but his dark eyes looked brooding, accusing.

    Zar frowned at his colleague. "Very well, Franco. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll talk to the Humphries people and see what they have to say about it."

    "They'll deny everything, of course."

    "There's nothing to deny! There's no shred of evidence that they've done anything wrong!"

    Tomasselli muttered, "I am going to examine all the claims made by HSS ships over the past month."

    "What for?"

    "To see if there are any in the regions where those two other missing ships disappeared."

    Zar wanted to scream at the man. He's nothing but a suspicious-minded young Italian, Zar thought, seeing nefarious plots and skullduggery wherever he looks. But he took a deep breath to calm himself and said in an even, measured tone:

    "That's fine, Franco. You check the claims. I'll speak to the HSS people. Monday. I'll do it first thing Monday morning, after I come back from the weekend."

    CHAPTER 11

    There was no meeting hall in Ceres, no single place designated for public assemblies. That was mainly because there had never been a need for one; Ceres's ragtag collection of miners and prospectors, repair people and technicians, merchants and clerks had never come together in a public assembly until now. The closest thing to a government on Ceres was a pair of IAA flight controllers who monitored the take-offs and landings of the ships that were constantly arriving for supplies and maintenance, then departing into the dark emptiness of the Belt.

    So when Fuchs called for a public meeting, it took some doing for him to convince the other rock rats that a gathering was necessary and beneficial. As it was, hardly forty men and women out of the several hundred in the asteroid showed up at the Pub, which Fuchs had commandeered for his meeting. A few dozen others attended electronically, from their ships in transit through the Belt. Big George was among those latter; he had left Ceres in his Waltzing Matilda several days before Fuchs's meeting convened.

    It was a good-natured crowd that came together in the Pub at 1700 hours that afternoon. Like most spacecraft and off-Earth facilities, Ceres kept Universal Time. The Pub's owner/barkeep had allowed his place to be used for the meeting upon Fuchs's promise that it would take no longer than an hour. The "six o'clock swill" could proceed as usual.

    "I'm no public speaker," Fuchs said, standing atop the bar so everyone in the milling, chattering crowd could see him. Three big flatscreens had been wheeled into the back of the room; they showed nearly a score of individuals attending the meeting remotely. Many of the prospectors refused to do even that, claiming that they didn't want anyone to know where they were, outside of the usual IAA trackers, whom they tolerated only because of the IAA's tradition of confidentiality and non-interference in spacecraft operations, except for safety conditions.

    "I'm no public speaker," Fuchs repeated, louder.

    "Then what're you doing up there?" came an irreverent voice from the crowd. Everyone laughed.

    Grinning back at the heckler, Fuchs rejoined, "It's a dirty job..."

    ". . . but somebody's got to do it," the whole crowd finished with him.

    Fuchs laughed, a little sheepishly, and looked at Amanda, standing off by the wall toward his right. She smiled encouragement at him. The twins stood beside her, fully clothed in glittering metallic outfits. Even in plain coveralls Amanda still looked far more beautiful than they, in Fuchs's eyes.

    "Seriously," he said, once the crowd settled down, "it's time we talked about something that most of us find distasteful—"

    "What'samatter Lars, the toilets backing up again?"

    "The recycler breaking down?"

    "No," he said. "Worse than that. It's time to start thinking about forming some kind of a government here."

    "Aw, shit!" somebody yowled.

    "I don't like the idea of rules and regulations any more than you do," Fuchs said quickly. "But this community is growing and we don't have any laws or law enforcement."

    "We don't need 'em," a woman shouted.

    "We've been getting along okay without any."

    Fuchs shook his head. "There have been two brawls right here in the Pub in the past month. Someone deliberately damaged Yuri Kubasov's ship last week. Deliberate sabotage."

    "That's a private matter," came a voice from the back of the chamber. "Yuri was chasing the wrong woman."

    A few people snickered knowingly.

    "Then there was the break-in in my warehouse," Fuchs added. "That was no minor affair; we lost more than a hundred thousand dollars worth of inventory."

    "Come on, Lars," a woman challenged. "Everybody knows that you're competing against HSS. So they're playing a little rough; that's your problem, not ours."

    "Yeah, if you and Humphries are battling it out, why try to drag us into your fight?"

    Glancing again toward Amanda, Fuchs answered, "It's not my fight. It's yours."

    "The hell it is!" said one of the men, heatedly. "This is between you and Humphries. It's personal and it's got nothing to do with us."

    "That's not true, as you'll soon find out."

    "What's that supposed to mean?"

    Reluctantly, surprised at how hard it was to bring out the words, he told them, "It means that Amanda and I will be leaving Ceres shortly. We'll be returning to Earth."

    "Leaving?"

    Feeling real pain, Fuchs went on, "Humphries has made an offer that's much too generous for us to us to ignore. HSS will be taking over Helvetia's warehouse and all its services."

    For several heartbeats there was absolute silence through the Pub.

    Then, from one of the flatscreens, Big George said, "That means HSS will be our only supplier."

    "They'll have a monopoly here!" someone else wailed.

    With a grave nod, Fuchs said, "That's why it's important for you to form some kind of government, some group that can represent you, maybe get Astro to set up another facility—"

    "fire," said the synthesized computer voice from the speakers by the Pub's entryway. "fire in section four-cee."

    "That's my warehouse!" Fuchs blurted.

    The crowd bolted through the entryway and out into the tunnel. Fuchs jumped down from the bar, grabbed Amanda by the hand, and raced along behind the others.

    Each section of the underground settlement was connected to the others by the tunnels. Airtight hatches stood in the tunnels every hundred meters or so, programmed to seal themselves shut in case of a drop in air pressure or other deviation from normal conditions. By the time Fuchs reached the entrance to his warehouse, still grasping Amanda's hand, the hatch that sealed off the cave had long been shut tight. He pushed through the crowd from the Pub, coughing violently at the dust they had raised, and touched the hatch's metal surface. It felt hot.

    "The warehouse cameras are out," said one of the technicians. "Must be a pretty intense fire."

    Fuchs nodded, scowling. "Nothing to do but wait until it consumes all the air in there and kills itself off."

    "Was anyone inside?" Amanda asked.

    "I don't believe so," Fuchs said. "Not any of our people; they were all at the meeting."

    "So we wait," said the technician. He fumbled in his coverall pocket, then pulled out a breathing mask and slipped it on.

    Several people in the crowd murmured condolences. Most of the others drifted off, buzzing with low-voiced conversations. Here and there someone coughed or spluttered from the dust.

    "He did this," Fuchs muttered.

    "Who?" asked Amanda.

    "Humphries. One of his people."

    "No! What would he—"

    "To convince us to leave Ceres. The money offer he made was a ruse. We haven't told him of our decision to accept it, so now he uses force."

    "Lars, I can't believe that he'd do that."

    "I can."

    Amanda looked at the few people remaining in the tunnel and said to her husband, "There's nothing we can do here. We should go home; we can come back later, when the fire's burned itself out."

    "No," Fuchs said. "I'll wait here."

    "But you don't have a breathing mask and—"

    "You go. I'll wait here."

    Amanda tried to smile, failed. "I'll wait with you."

    "There's no need . . ."

    "I'd rather be with you," Amanda said, taking his big-knuckled hand in both of hers.

    Standing there with nothing to do except wait, coughing in the gritty dust, Fuchs felt a seething anger rising within him, a burning hatred for the man who could order such a thing and his henchmen who actually did it.

    The swine, he said to himself. The filthy, sneaking, murderous swine. A fire! In a sealed community like this. If the safety hatches didn't work they could have killed us all! The fire could consume all our air and asphyxiate every one of us!

    Murderers, he told himself. I'm dealing with men who would commit murder to get what they want. I'm taking Humphries's money and running away from this place like a lackey being paid off by the lord of the manor.

    "Lars, what wrong?" Amanda asked.

    "Nothing."

    She looked truly worried. "But you were trembling. You looked—I've never seen such an expression on your face before."

    He tried to control the rage boiling inside him, tried to hide it, keep it bottled up where no one could see it, not even his wife.

    "Come on," he said gruffly. "You were right. There's nothing we can do here until we can open the hatch and see how much damage has been done."

    When they got back to their apartment, he picked at the dinner Amanda set before him. He could not sleep. The next morning, when he and a pair of technicians went back to the warehouse, the airtight hatch was fused shut. They had to use one of Astro's mining lasers to cut it open and then wait several minutes for the big, gutted chamber to fill with breathable air.

    The warehouse was a blackened shambles. The technicians, both of them young men new to Ceres, stared at the wreckage with round eyes.

    "Jeez," muttered the one on Fuchs's right as they played their hand lights around the still-hot ruins.

    Fuchs couldn't recognize the place. The shelving had collapsed, metal supports melted by the heat of the blaze. Tons of equipment were reduced to molten lumps of slag.

    "What could've caused such a hot fire?" wondered the kid on Fuchs's left.

    "Not what," Fuchs muttered. "Who."

    CHAPTER 12

    It's a good thing that it takes so long for communications to go back and forth, Amanda thought. Otherwise Lars would be screaming at the woman by now.

    She had watched her husband, his face grimed from the ashes of the warehouse and his mood even darker, as he placed his call to their insurance carrier to inform them of the fire. Then he had called Diane Verwoerd, at Humphries Space Systems' offices in Selene.

    Even though messages moved at the speed of light, it took more than an hour for Ms. Verwoerd to respond. With the distance between them, there could be no real conversation between Ceres and the Moon. Communications were more like video mail that true two-way links.

    "Mr. Fuchs," Verwoerd began her message, "I appreciate your calling me to inform us about the fire in your warehouse. I certainly hope that no one was injured."

    Fuchs started to reply automatically, and only stopped himself when Verwoerd coolly went on, "We will need to know the extent of the damage before opening our negotiations on acquiring Helvetia Limited. As I understand it, a major part of your company's assets consisted of the inventory in your warehouse. I understand that this inventory was insured, but I'm certain that your insurance won't cover much more than half the value of the damaged property. Please inform me as soon as you can. In the meantime, I will contact your insurance carrier. Thank you." Her image winked out, replaced by the stylized logo of Humphries Space Systems.

    Fuchs's face looked like a thundercloud, dark and ominous. He sat at the computer desk of their one-room apartment, staring silently at the wallscreen. Amanda, sitting on the bed, didn't know what she could say to make him feel better.

    "We won't be getting ten million," he muttered, turning to her. "Not half that, I imagine."

    "It's all right, Lars. Three or four million is enough for us to—"

    "To run away with our tails between our legs," he snapped.

    Amanda heard herself answer, "What else can we do?"

    Fuchs's head drooped defeatedly. "I don't know. I don't know. We're wiped out. The warehouse is completely gutted. Whoever set the fire did a thorough job."

    Warily, she asked, "Do you still think it was deliberately set?"

    "Of course!" her husband shouted angrily. "He never intended to pay us ten million! That was a lure, a ruse. He's kicking us off Ceres, out of the Belt entirely."

    "But why would he make the offer...?" Amanda felt confused.

    Almost sneering with contempt, Fuchs said, "To put us in the proper frame of mind. To get us accustomed to the idea of leaving the Belt. Now he's waiting for us to come crawling to him and beg for as much of the ten million as he's willing to give us."

    "We won't do that," Amanda said. "We won't crawl and we won't beg."

    "No," he agreed. "But we will leave. We have no choice."

    "We still have the ship."

    His heavy brows rose. "Starpower? You'd be willing to go prospecting again?"

    Amanda knew that she really didn't want to take up the life of a rock rat again. But she nodded solemnly, "Yes. Why not?"

    Fuchs stared at her, a tangle of emotions burning in his deep-set eyes.

Niles Ripley was dead tired as he shuffled slowly across the desolate dark ground, heading for the airlock. A four-hour shift of working on the habitat was like a week of hard labor anywhere else, he felt. And riding the shuttlecraft back down to the surface of Ceres was always nerve-racking; the ground controller ran the little hopper remotely from underground, but Ripley twitched nervously without a human pilot aboard. The shuttle had touched down without mishap, though, landing a few meters from a Humphries craft being loaded for a supply run to one of the miners' ships hanging in orbit.

    It'll be good to get to the Pub and sip a brew or two, Ripley said to himself. By god, I'll even spring for the imported stuff tonight.

    The construction work was going well. Slower than Fuchs had expected, but Ripley was satisfied with the progress that the crew was making. Looking up through his fishbowl helmet, he could see the habitat glinting in the sunlight as it spun slowly, like a big pinwheel.

    Okay, he thought, so maybe it does look like a clunky kludge. Bunch of spacecraft tacked together in a circle, no two of 'em exactly the same. But by god the kludge was pretty near finished; soon people could go up and live in that habitat and feel just about the same gravity as on the Moon.

    Got to get the radiation shielding working first, he reminded himself. Sixteen different sets of superconducting magnets and more to come. Getting them to work together is gonna be a bitch and a half.

    The work was so damned tedious. Flatlanders back on Earth thought that working in microgee was fun. And easy. You just float around like a kid in a swimming pool. Yeah. Right. The reality was that you had to consciously plan every move you made; inside the spacesuit you had to exert real strength just to hold your arms out straight or take a few steps. Sure, you could hop around like a jackrabbit on steroids if you wanted to. Hell, I could jump right off Ceres and go sailing around like Superman if I had a mind to—and I if didn't worry about breaking every bone in my legs when I landed. Working in microgee is tough, especially in these damned suits.

    Well, I'm finished for today, he said to himself as he watched the habitat slowly disappear beyond the sharp, rugged horizon. Ceres is so small, he thought. Just a glorified hunk of rock hanging in the middle of nothing. Ripley shook his head inside his bubble helmet, amazed all over again that he was working 'way out here, in this no-place of a place. He started back toward the airlock again, kicking up lingering clouds of gritty dust with each careful, sliding step. Looking down awkwardly from inside the helmet, he saw that the suit was grimy with dark gray dust all the way up the leggings, as usual. The arms and gloves were crummed up, too. It'll take a good half-hour to vacuum all this crud off the suit, he told himself.

    The airlock was set into a dome of local stone, its thick metal hatch the only sign of human presence on Ceres's surface, outside of the two spindly-looking shuttlecraft sitting out there. Ripley was almost at the hatch when it swung open and three spacesuited figures stepped out slowly, warily, as if testing each step they made in this insubstantial gravity. Each of their spacesuits showed a HSS logo on the left breast, just above their name tags. Ripley wondered if they might be the guys Big George had shellacked in the Pub. They had all been Humphries employees, he recalled.

    They were carrying bulky packing crates, probably filled with equipment. In Ceres's low gravity, a man could carry loads that required a small truck elsewhere. All of them had tools of various sorts clipped to belts around their waists.

    "Where you goin', guys?" Ripley asked good-naturedly over the common suit-to-suit radio frequency.

    "Loading up the shuttle," came the answer in his earphones.

    "Same old thing every day," another of them complained. "More crap for the mining ships up in orbit."

    They got close enough to read Ripley's name stenciled on the hard shell of his suit. Ripley realized that they were so new to

    Ceres they hadn't gotten their own individual suits yet. They had apparently picked the suits they were wearing from HSS's storage; their names were lettered on adhesive strips pasted onto the torsos.

    "Buchanan, Santorini, and Giap," Ripley read aloud. "Hi. I'm Niles Ripley."

    "We know who you are," Buchanan said sourly.

    "The horn player," said Santorini.

    Ripley put on his peacemaking smile, even though he figured they couldn't see it in the dim lighting.

    "Hey, I'm sorry about that brawl couple nights ago," he said placatingly. "My friend got carried away, I guess."

    All three of them put their crates down on the pebbled, dusty ground.

    Buchanan said, "I hear they call you the Ripper."

    "Sometimes," Ripley said guardedly.

    "Where's your trumpet?"

    With a little laugh, Ripley said, "Back in my quarters. I don't carry it with me everywhere I go."

    "Too bad. I'd really like to jam it up your ass."

    Ripley kept smiling. "Aw, come on now. There's no reason to—"

    "That big ape of yours put Carl in the infirmary with three crushed vertebrae!"

    "Hey, I didn't start the fight. And I'm not looking for one now." Ripley started to walk past them, toward the still-open airlock hatch.

    They stopped him. They grabbed his arms. For a ridiculous instant Ripley almost felt like giggling. You can't fight in spacesuits, for chrissakes! It's like boxers wearing suits of armor.

    "Hey, come on, now," Ripley said, trying to pull his arms free.

    Buchanan kicked his feet out from under him and Ripley fell over backward, slowly, softly, in the dreamy slow motion of micro-gee. It seemed to take ten minutes as he toppled over; numberless hordes of stars slid past his field of view, silently, solemnly. Then at last he hit the ground, his head banging painfully inside the helmet, a thick cloud of dust enveloping him.

    "Okay, Ripper," Buchanan said. "Rip this!"

    He kicked Ripley in the side of his spacesuit. The others laughed and started kicking, too. Ripley bounced around inside the suit, unable to get up, unable to defend himself. It didn't hurt that much, at first, but each kick got worse and he worried that they might tear his air line loose. He tasted blood in his mouth.

    When they finally stopped kicking him, every part of Ripley's body throbbed with pain. They were still standing over him. Buchanan stared down at him for a long, silent moment. Then he unhooked a tool from the belt at his waist.

    "You know what this is?" he asked, holding it up in his gloved hand. It was a short, squat, smooth greenish rod with a helical glass flash-lamp coiled around its length and a pistol grip beneath. A heavy black cord ran from the heel of the grip to a battery pack clipped to Buchanan's belt.

    Before Ripley could say anything Buchanan explained.

    "This is a Mark IV gigawatt-pulse neodymium laser. Puts out picosecond pulses. We use it to punch neat little holes in metal. What kind of a hole do you think it'll punch through you?"

    "Hey, Trace," said Santorini. "Take it easy."

    Ripley tried to move, to crawl away. His legs wouldn't carry him. He could see the laser's guide beam walking up the front of his spacesuit, feel it come through his transparent helmet, inch over his face, past his eyes, onto his forehead.

    "Trace, don't!"

    But Buchanan slowly lowered himself to one knee and bent over Ripley, peering into his eyes. This close, their helmets almost touching, Ripley could see a sort of wild glee in the man's eyes, a manic joy. He moved one arm, tried to push his tormentor away; all he accomplished was to pull the name tag off Buchanan's suit.

    "They didn't say to kill him," Santorini insisted.

    Buchanan laughed. "So long, noisemaker," he said.

    Ripley died instantly. The picosecond laser pulse pulped most of his brain into jelly.

    CHAPTER 13

    Lars Fuchs was sitting at his desk talking to the prospector to whom he'd leased Starpower. The woman flatly refused to give up the ship until the term of her lease expired, four months in the future.

    "I've been snookered out of two good rocks by HSS people," she said, her anger showing clearly in her image on Fuchs's wallscreen. "I'm going out to the far side of the Belt and get me a good-sized metallic 'roid. Anybody comes near me, I'll zap 'em with the cutting laser!"

    Fuchs stared at her face. She couldn't be much more than thirty, a former graduate student like himself. Yet she looked far harder, more determined, than any graduate student he remembered. Not a trace of makeup; her hair shaved down to a dark fuzz; her cheek bones and jawline gaunt, hungry.

    "I can arrange for you to transfer to another ship that's available for lease," Fuchs said reasonably.

    The prospector shook her head. "No deal. I'm working my way around the far side. By this time tomorrow it'll take half an hour for messages to catch up with me. Sayonara, Lars."

    The screen went blank. Fuchs leaned back in his creaking desk chair, his thoughts churning slowly. There is no way I can force her to bring Starpower back. She's on her way out and she won't be back for at least four months. When she returns she'll either have claim to a rich metallic asteroid or she'll be so dead broke she won't even be able to pay me the final installment on the lease.

    No matter which way he looked at it, he could find no answer to his problem. If we're going back to Earth it will have to be as passengers on someone else's ship.

    Amanda came through the door from the tunnel at the same moment that the phone chimed. Fuchs automatically said, "Answer," to the phone, but then he saw the awful expression on his wife's face.

    "What is it?" he asked, rising from his chair. "What's wrong?"

    "Ripley," she said in a voice that sounded frightened. "They found him by the airlock, outside. He's dead."

    "Dead?" Fuchs felt shocked. "How? What happened?"

    "That's what I want to talk to you about," said Kris Cardenas, from the wallscreen.

    Fuchs and Amanda both turned to her image.

    Cardenas looked grim. "They brought Ripley's body to me, here in the infirmary."

    "What happened to him?" Fuchs asked again.

    Cardenas shook her head warily. "Nothing wrong with his suit. He didn't die of asphyxiation or decompression. The suit's scuffed up a lot, but there was no system failure."

    "Then what?" Amanda asked.

    She frowned with uncertainty. "I'm going to do a multi-spectral scan and try to find out. The reason I called you was to find out if he has any next-of-kin here on Ceres."

    "No, no one closer than New Jersey, in the United States," said Fuchs. "I'll transfer his personnel file to you."

    "He was working on the habitat?" Cardenas asked, even though she knew the answer.

    "Yes," said Fuchs absently. "Now the project will have to stop until we find someone to replace him."

    Amanda said, "We're coming to the infirmary, Kris. We'll be there in five minutes."

    Cardenas said, "Hang on. Give me an hour or so to do this scan. I'll know more about it by then."

    Amanda and Fuchs both nodded their agreement.

Despite her youthful appearance, Kris Cardenas looked grave, almost angry as she ushered Amanda and Fuchs into her tiny infirmary. It was the only medical facility on Ceres, the only medical facility between the Belt and the exploration bases on Mars. Cardenas could handle accident cases, if they weren't too severe, and the usual run of infections and strains. Anything worse was sent to Selene, while Cardenas herself remained among the rock rats.

    She was twice an exile. Because her body was teeming with nanomachines, no government on Earth would allow her to land on its territory. This had cost her, her husband and children; like most of Earth's inhabitants, they were terrified by the threat of runaway nanotechnology causing pandemic plagues or devouring cities like unstoppable army ants chewing everything into a gray goo.

    Her anger at Earth and its unreasoning fears led her to cause Dan Randolph's death. It was inadvertent, true enough, but Selene banned her from her own nanotech laboratory as a punishment for her actions and a precaution against future use of nanomachines for personal motives. So she left Selene, exiled herself among the rock rats, used her knowledge of human physiology to establish the infirmary on Ceres.

    "Have you found what killed Ripley?" Amanda asked her as she and Fuchs took the chairs in front of Cardenas's desk.

    "I wouldn't have caught it, normally," Cardenas said tightly. "I'm not a pathologist. It damned near slipped right past me."

    The office was small, crowded with the three of them in it. Cardenas tapped a keypad on her desktop and the wall opposite the doorway turned into a false-color display of Niles Ripley's body.

    "There was nothing obviously wrong," she began. "No visible trauma, although there were a few small bruises on his chest and back."

    "What caused them?" Fuchs asked.

    "Maybe when he fell down, inside his suit"

    Fuchs scowled at her. "I've fallen down in a spacesuit. That doesn't cause bruising."

    Cardenas nodded. "I know. I thought maybe he died of a cardiac infarction, a heart attack. That's when I went for the scan," she explained. "But the coronary arteries look clean and there's no visible damage to the heart itself."

    Fuchs squinted at the image. A human body, he thought. One instant it's alive, the next it's dead. What happened to you, Ripley?

    Amanda echoed his thoughts. "So what happened to him?"

    Cardenas's expression grew even tighter. "The next thing I looked for was a stroke. That's still the number one killer, even back on Earth."

    "And?"

    "Look at his brain."

    Fuchs peered at the wallscreen, but he didn't know what was normal in these false-color images and what was not. He could make out the white outline of the skull and, within it, the pinkish mass of the man's brain. Tangles of what he took to be blood vessels wrapped around the brain and into it, like a mass of tiny snakes writhing inside the skull.

    "Do you see it?" Cardenas asked, her voice as sharp as a bayonet.

    "No, I don't see . . . wait a minute!" Fuchs noticed that while most of the brain was a light pink color, there was an area of deeper hue, almost a burnt orange, that ran straight through the brain mass, from front to back.

    "That orange color?" he said, not certain of himself.

    "That orange color," Cardenas repeated, hard as ice.

    "What is it?" Amanda asked.

    "It's what killed him," said Cardenas. "Ruptured neurons and glial cells from the front of his skull to the back. It did as much damage as a bullet would, but it didn't break the skin."

    "A micrometeor?" Fuchs blurted, knowing it was stupid even as his mouth said it.

    Amanda objected, "But his suit wasn't ruptured."

    "Whatever it was," said Cardenas, "it went through the transparent plastic of his helmet, through his skin without damaging it, through the cranial bone, and pulped his brain cells."

    "Mein gott," Fuchs muttered.

    "I have two more bits of evidence," Cardenas said, sounding more and more like a police investigator.

    The wallscreen image changed to show Ripley's dead face. Fuchs felt Amanda shudder beside him and reached out to hold her hand. Ripley's eyes were open, his mouth agape, his milk-chocolate skin somehow paler than Fuchs remembered it. This is the face of death, he said silently. He almost shuddered himself.

    Cardenas tapped her keyboard again and the image zoomed in on the area just above the bridge of Ripley's nose.

    "See that faint discoloration?" Cardenas asked.

    Fuchs saw nothing unusual, but Amanda said, "Yes, just a tiny little circle. It looks . . . almost as if it had been charred a little."

    Cardenas nodded grimly. "One more piece of the puzzle." She reached into her desk drawer.

    Fuchs saw her pull out a thin strip of tape, not even ten centimeters long.

    "This was stuck on Ripley's right glove when he was found," Cardenas said, handing the tape to Fuchs.

    He stared at it. Hand-lettered on the tape in indelible ink was

    BUCHANAN.

    Coldly, mercilessly, Cardenas said, "Buchanan is a mechanic for Humphries Space Systems. He has access to tools such as hand lasers."

    "A hand laser?" Fuchs asked. "You think a hand laser killed Ripley?"

    Cardenas said, "I got one from the HSS warehouse and tried it on my soysteak dinner. One picosecond blast ruptures the cells pretty much the way Ripley's brain cells were destroyed."

    "Do you mean that this man Buchanan deliberately murdered Ripley?" Amanda asked, her voice faint with shock.

    "That's exactly what I mean," said Cardenas, as hard and implacable as death itself.

    CHAPTER 14

    By the time he and Amanda got back to their own quarters, Fuchs was blazing with rage. He went straight to the closet by the minikitchen and started rummaging furiously through it.

    "Lars, what are you going to do?"

    "Murderers!" Fuchs snarled, pawing through the tools and gadgets stored on the closet shelves. "That's what he's brought here. Hired killers!"

    "But what are you going to do?"

    He pulled out a cordless screwdriver, hefted it in one hand. "It's not much, but it will have to do. It's heavy enough to make a reasonable club."

    Amanda reached for him, but he brushed her away. "Where are you going?" she asked, breathless with fear. "To find this man Buchanan."

    "Alone? By yourself?"

    "Who else is there? How much time do we have before this Buchanan takes off in one of Humphries's ships and leaves Ceres altogether?"

    "You can't go after him!" Amanda pleaded. "Let the law handle this!"

    Storming to the door, he roared, "The law? What law? We don't even have a village council. There is no law here!"

    "Lars, if he's really a hired killer, he'll kill you!" He stopped at the door, tucked the screwdriver into the waistband of his slacks. "I'm not a complete fool, Amanda. I won't let him kill me, or anyone else."

    "But how can you . . ."

    He grabbed the door, slid it open, and marched out into the tunnel, leaving her standing there. Billows of dust followed his footsteps.

    The Pub was crowded when Fuchs got there. He had to push his way to the bar.

    The barkeep recognized him, but barely smiled. "Hello, Lars. Gonna call another town meeting?"

    "Do you know a man named Buchanan?" Fuchs asked, without preamble.

    The barkeep nodded warily.

    "Do you know where I can find him?"

    The man's eyes shifted slightly, then came back to lock onto Fuchs's. "What do you want him for?"

    "I need to talk to him," said Fuchs, struggling to keep his voice even, calm.

    "He's a badass, Lars."

    "I'm not here to start a fight," Fuchs said. He even felt it was true.

    "Well, that's Buchanan right down there at the end of the bar."

    "Thank you."

    Fuchs accepted a frosted aluminum goblet of beer, then wormed his way through the crowd until he was next to Buchanan. The man was with two friends, talking to a trio of miniskirted young women, their drinks on the bar in front of them. Buchanan was tall, with wide sloping shoulders, and young enough to have a flat midsection. His blond hair was cut short, except for a tiny imitation matador's twist at the back of his head. His face was lean, unlined, relaxed.

    "You are Mr. Buchanan?" Fuchs asked, putting his aluminum goblet on the bar.

    Buchanan turned to him, looked Fuchs over and saw a stocky older rock rat in a shapeless gray velour pullover and wrinkled slacks with the build of a weasel and a sour expression on his broad, heavy-featured face. The guy had a tool of some sort tucked in his waistband.

    "I'm Buchanan," he said. "Who the fuck are you?"

    Fuchs replied, "I am a friend of the late Niles Ripley."

    He said it quietly, flatly, but it was as if he had shouted the words through a power megaphone. Everything in the Pub stopped. Conversation, laughter, even motion seemed to freeze in place.

    Buchanan leaned his right elbow on the bar as he faced Fuchs. "Ripley won't be blowing his horn around these parts anymore," he said, grinning. One of the men behind him snickered nervously.

    Fuchs said, "Your name tag was found in his dead hand."

    "Oh, so that's where it got to. I was wondering where I'd lost it."

    "You killed him."

    Buchanan reached slowly behind him and pulled a hand laser from the pouch strapped to his waist. He laid it down carefully on the bar, next to his drink. Its power cord trailed back to his belt; its business end pointed at Fuchs.

    "If I did kill him, what're you going to do about it?"

    Fuchs took a breath. The lava-hot rage he had felt only a few minutes earlier had turned to ice now. He felt cold, glacially calm, but not one nanobit less enraged than he had been before.

    He replied softly, "I thought you and I could go back to Selene and let the authorities there investigate the murder."

    Buchanan's jaw dropped open. He gawked at Fuchs, standing like a stubborn little bull in front of him. Then he lifted his head and brayed with laughter. His two friends laughed, also.

    No one else did.

    Fuchs slapped Buchanan's laughing face, hard. Shocked, Buchanan touched his bleeding lip, then reached for the laser on the bar. Fuchs was prepared for that. He clamped Buchanan's hand to the bar with a viselike grip and pulled the screwdriver from his waistband with his right hand.

    The laser cracked once. Fuchs's aluminum goblet went spinning, leaking beer through a tiny hole, while Fuchs thumbed the screwdriver on and jammed it into Buchanan's chest. Blood geysered and Buchanan looked terribly surprised, then slumped to the floor, gurgling briefly before he went silent forever.

    Splashed with Buchanan's blood, still holding the buzzing screwdriver in his right hand, Fuchs picked up the hand laser. Buchanan's fall had wrenched the power cord out of the base of its grip.

    He glanced down at the dead body, then looked at Buchanan's two friends. Their eyes were wide, their mouths agape. Unconsciously, they both backed away from Fuchs.

    Without another word, Fuchs turned around and strode out of the silent Pub.

THREE WEEKS LATER

    CHAPTER 15

    They held a trial of sorts. Under Fuchs's own prodding, the people of Ceres picked a judge by sorting through the computerized personnel files and coming up with a woman who worked for Humphries Space Systems as a contracts lawyer. A jury was selected by lot; no one picked was allowed to refuse the duty. For the defense, Fuchs represented himself. No less than the owner and barkeep of the Pub volunteered to prosecute the case.

    The trial, held in the Pub itself, took all of forty-five minutes. Practically everyone in Ceres jammed into the rock-walled chamber. Chairs and two tables had been moved up to the bar to accommodate the accused and the counselors. The judge sat on a high laboratory stool behind the bar. Everyone else stood.

    Six different witnesses told substantially the same story: Fuchs had asked Buchanan to go to Selene with him for a formal investigation of Ripley's murder. Buchanan reached for the laser. Fuchs stabbed him with the power tool. Even Buchanan's two companions admitted that that was the way it had happened.

    Fuchs's punctured beer goblet was presented as evidence that Buchanan had indeed fired his laser with intent to kill.

    The only question arose when the prosecutor asked Fuchs why he had come into the Pub armed with the tool that eventually killed Buchanan.

    Fuchs admitted openly, "I knew that he was a dangerous man. I knew that he had murdered Niles Ripley—"

    The judge, sitting on a high stool behind the bar, snapped,

    "That's inadmissible. This trial is about you, Mr. Fuchs, not about Ripley's death."

    With only the slightest of frowns, Fuchs said, "I was afraid he would be dangerous. I had been told that he had come to the Pub before and started a fight. And that he had several friends with him."

    "So you armed yourself with a lethal weapon?" asked the prosecutor.

    "I thought it might be useful as a club, if it came to a fight. I had no intention of using it to stab him."

    "Yet that's exactly what you did."

    "Yes. When he tried to shoot me I suppose I reacted without thinking of the consequences. I defended myself."

    "Very thoroughly," the judge grumbled.

    The verdict was never in doubt. Fuchs was acquitted, the killing called justifiable self-defense. Then the prosecutor displaced the judge behind the bar and proclaimed that there would be a round of drinks on the house for everybody.

    Amanda was delighted with the outcome, but Fuchs was morose for the next several days.

    "This isn't the end of it," he told her one night as they lay in bed together.

    "Lars darling," said Amanda, "you mustn't let this get you down so. You acted in self-defense."

    "I really would have gone with him to Selene," Fuchs said. "But I knew he would never do that. Never."

    "It's not your fault that you had to kill him. It was self-defense. Everyone knows that. You mustn't feel bad about it."

    "But I don't!" He turned to face her. In the darkened room, lit only by the glow of the digital clock numerals in one corner of the wallscreen, he could barely make out the puzzled expression on her lovely face.

    "I don't feel bad about killing that vermin," Fuchs said, in a low, firm voice. "I knew I would have to. I knew he would never listen to reason."

    Amanda looked surprised, almost fearful. "But Lars—"

    "No one would do a thing about it. I knew I was the only one who would bring him to justice."

    "You knew? All along you knew?"

    "I wanted to kill him," Fuchs said, his voice almost trembling with fervor. "He deserved to die. I wanted to kill the arrogant fool."

    "Lars. . . I've never seen you this way."

    "What's worrying me," he said, "is Humphries's reaction to all this. The negotiations for buying out Helvetia are obviously finished. Buchanan was part of his attempt to force us out of the Belt. What is he going to try next?"

    Amanda was silent for a long while. Fuchs watched her adorable face, so troubled, so filled with care for him. He almost smiled. The face that launched a thousand spaceships, he thought. Well, at least several hundred.

    Yet she was thinking that her husband had turned into an avenging fury. Perhaps only for an hour or so, but Lars had gone out to the Pub deliberately to kill a man. And it didn't worry him, didn't frighten him at all.

    It terrified her.

    What can I do? Amanda asked herself. How can I stop him from becoming a brute? He doesn't deserve this; it isn't fair to force him to become a monster. She racked her brain, but she could see only one way back to sanity.

    At last she said, "Lars, why don't you speak directly to Martin?"

    He grunted with surprise. "Directly? To him?"

    "Face-to-face."

    "Over this distance that's not possible, really."

    "Then we'll go to Selene."

    His expression hardened. "I don't want you that near to him."

    "Martin won't hurt me," she said. Tracing a hand across his broad chest, she went on, "And you're the man I love. You have nothing to fear from Martin or any other man in the universe, on that score."

    "I don't want you at Selene," he whispered firmly.

    "We can't go to Earth unless we go through weeks and weeks of reconditioning."

    "The centrifuge," he muttered.

    Amanda said, "I'll stay here, Lars, if that's what you want. You go to Selene and talk this out with Martin."

    "No," he said immediately. "I won't leave you here."

    "But...?"

    "You come to Selene with me. I'll talk to Humphries, assuming he'll agree to talk to me."

    Amanda smiled and kissed his cheek. "We can put an end to this before it becomes an out-and-out war."

    Pulling her to him, Fuchs said gently, "I hope so. I truly hope so."

    She sighed. That's more like it, she thought. That's more like the man I love.

    But he was thinking, It's Amanda that Humphries wants, nothing less. And the only way he'll get Amanda is over my dead body.

"She's coming here?" Martin Humphries asked, hardly daring to believe what his aide had just told him. "Here, to Selene?"

    Diane Verwoerd allowed a tiny frown of displeasure to crease her forehead. "With her husband," she said.

    Humphries got up from his high-backed chair and practically pranced around his desk. Despite his aide's sour look he felt like a little kid anticipating Christmas.

    "But she's coming to Selene," he insisted. "Amanda is coming to Selene."

    "Fuchs wants to talk to you face-to-face," Verwoerd said, folding her arms across her chest. "I doubt that he'll let his wife get within a kilometer of you."

    "That's what he thinks," Humphries countered. He turned to the electronic window on the wall behind his desk and tapped at his wristwatch several times. The stereo image on the wide screen flicked through several changes. Humphries stopped it at an Alpine scene of a quaint village with steeply-pitched roofs and a slim church steeple against a background of snow-covered peaks.

    That's ancient history, Verwoerd thought. There hasn't been that much snow in the Alps since the great avalanches.

    Turning back to her, Humphries said, "Fuchs is coming here to surrender. He'll try to wheedle as much of the ten million we offered him as he can get. But he's bringing Amanda because he knows—maybe in his unconscious mind, maybe not consciously— but he knows that what I really want is Amanda."

    "I think we should look at this a little more realistically," Verwoerd said, stepping slowly toward the desk.

    Humphries eyed her for a moment. "You think I'm being unrealistic?"

    "I think that Fuchs is coming here to negotiate your buyout of his company. I very much doubt that his wife will be part of the deal."

    He laughed. "Maybe you don't think so. Maybe he doesn't think so. But I do. That's what's important. And I bet that Amanda does, too."

    Verwoerd had to deliberately keep herself from shaking her head in disagreement. He's insane about this woman. Absolutely gonzo over her. Then she smiled inwardly. How can I use this? How can I turn his craziness to my advantage?

DOSSIER: OSCAR JIMINEZ

    When he finished the New Morality high school, at the age of seventeen, Oscar was sent to far-off Bangladesh for his two years of public service. It was compulsory; the New Morality demanded two years of service as partial repayment for the investment they had made in a youth's education and social reformation. Oscar worked hard in what was left of Bangladesh. The rising sea levels and the terrifying storms that accompanied each summer's monsoon inundated the low-lying lands. Thousands were swept away in the floods of the Ganges. Oscar saw that many of the poor, miserable wretches actually prayed to the river itself for mercy. In vain. The swollen river drowned the heathens without pity. Oscar realized that just as many of the faithful were drowned, also.

    Luck touched him again, once he finished his two years of public service. The New Morality administrator in Dacca, an American from Kansas, urged Oscar to consider accepting a job in space, far away from Earth.

    Oscar knew better than to argue with authority, but he was so surprised at the idea that he blurted, "But I'm not an astronaut."

    The administrator smiled a kindly smile. "There are all kinds of jobs up there that need to be filled. You are fully qualified for many of them."

    "I am?" Oscar's qualifications, as far as he knew, were mainly lifting and toting, handling simple invoices, and following orders. With a nod, the administrator said, "Yes. And, of course, there is God's work to be done out there among the godless humanists and frontier ruffians."

    Who could refuse to do God's work? Thus Oscar Jiminez went to Ceres and was hired by Helvetia, Ltd., to work in their warehouse.

    CHAPTER 16

    Selene's Hotel Luna had gone through several changes of management since it was originally built by the Yamagata Corporation.

    In those early days, just after the lunar community had won its short, sharp war against the old United Nations and affirmed its independence, tourism looked like a good way to bring money into the newly-proclaimed Selene. Masterson Aerospace's lunar-built Clipperships were bringing the price of transportation from Earth down to the point where the moderately well-heeled tourist—the type who took "adventure vacations" to Antarctica, the Amazonian rain forest, or other uncomfortable exotic locales—could afford the grandest adventure vacation of them all: a trip to the Moon.

    Sadly, the opening of the hotel coincided almost exactly with the first ominous portents of the greenhouse cliff. After nearly half a century of scientific debate and political wrangling, the accumulated greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere and oceans started an abrupt transition in the global climate. Disastrous floods inundated most coastal cities in swift succession. Earthquakes devastated Japan and the American midwest. Glaciers and ice packs began melting down, raising sea levels worldwide. The delicate web of electrical power transmission grids collapsed over much of the world, throwing hundreds of millions into the cold and darkness of pre-industrial society. More than a billion people lost their homes, their way of living, everything that they had worked for. Hundreds of millions died.

    Tourism trickled down to nothing except the extremely wealthy, who lived on their financial mountaintops in ease and comfort despite the woes of their brethren.

    Hotel Luna became virtually a ghost facility, but it was never shut down. Grimly, hopefully, foolishly, one owner after another tried to make at least a modest success of it.

    To a discerning visitor, the lavish, sprawling lobby of the hotel would appear slightly seedy: the carpeting was noticeably threadbare in spots, the oriental tables and easy chairs were scuffed here and there, the ornate artificial floral displays drooped enough to show that they needed to be replaced.

    But to Lars Fuchs's staring eyes, Hotel Luna's lobby seemed incredibly posh and polished. He and Amanda were riding down the powered stairway from the hotel entrance up in the Grand Plaza. Glistening sheets of real, actual water slid down tilted slabs of granite quarried from the lunar highlands. The water was recycled, of course, but to have a display of water! What elegance!

    "Look," Fuchs exclaimed, pointing to the pools into which the waterfalls splashed. "Fish! Live fish!"

    Beside him, Amanda smiled and nodded. She had been brought to the hotel on dates several times, years ago. She remembered the Earthview Restaurant, with its hologram windows. Martin Humphries had taken her there. The fish in those pools were on the restaurant's menu. Amanda noticed that there were far fewer of them now than there had been back then.

    As they reached the lobby level and stepped off the escalator, Fuchs recognized the music wafting softly from the ceiling speakers: a Haydn quartet. Charming. Yet he felt distinctly out of place in his plain dark gray coveralls, like a scruffy student sneaking into a grand palace. But with Amanda on his arm, it didn't matter. She wore a sleeveless white pantsuit; even zippered up to the throat it could not hide her exquisitely-curved body.

    Fuchs didn't pay any attention to the fact that the spacious lobby was practically empty. It was quiet, soothing, an elegant change from the constant buzz of air fans and faint clatter of distant pumps that was part of the everyday background of Ceres.

    As they reached the registration desk, Fuchs remembered all over again that Martin Humphries was footing their hotel bill. Humphries had insisted on it. Fuchs wanted to argue about it as they rode a Humphries fusion ship from Ceres to Selene, but Amanda talked him out of it.

    "Let him pay for the hotel, Lars," she had advised, with a knowing smile. "I'm sure he'll take it out of the price he pays you for Helvetia."

    Grudgingly, Fuchs let her talk him into accepting Humphries's generosity. Now, at the hotel desk, it rankled him all over again.

    When it had originally opened as the Yamagata Hotel, there had been uniformed bellmen and women to tote luggage and bring room service orders. Those days were long gone. The registration clerk seemed alone behind his counter of polished black basalt, but he tapped a keyboard and a self-propelled trolley hummed out of its hidden niche and rolled up to Fuchs and Amanda. They put their two travel bags onto it and the trolley obediently followed them into the elevator that led down to the level of their suite.

    Fuchs's eyes went even wider once they entered the suite.

    "Luxury," he said, a reluctant smile brightening his normally dour face. "This is real luxury."

    Even Amanda seemed impressed. "I've never been in one of the hotel's rooms before."

    Suddenly Fuchs's smile dissolved into a suspicious scowl. "He might have the rooms bugged, you know."

    "Who? Martin?"

    Fuchs nodded gravely, as if afraid to speak.

    "Why would he bug the rooms?"

    "To learn what we plan to say to him, what our position will be in the negotiation, what our bottom figure will be." There was more, but he hesitated to tell her. Pancho had hinted that Humphries videotaped his own sexual encounters in the bedroom of his palatial home. Would the man have cameras hidden in this bedroom?

    Abruptly, he strode to the phone console sitting on an end table and called for the registration desk.

    "Sir?" asked the clerk's image on the wallscreen. A moment earlier it had been a Vickrey painting of nuns and butterflies.

    "This suite is unacceptable," Fuchs said, while Amanda stared at him. "Is there another one available?"

    The clerk grinned lazily. "Why, yessir, we have several suites unoccupied at the moment. You may have your pick."

    Fuchs nodded. Humphries can't have them all bugged, he thought.

"I'm glad you decided to meet me in person," Martin Humphries said, smiling from behind his wide desk. "I think we can settle our business much more comfortably this way."

    He leaned back, tilting the desk chair so far that Fuchs thought the man was going to plant his feet on the desktop. Humphries seemed completely at ease in his own office in the mansion he had built for himself deep below the lunar surface. Fuchs sat tensely in the plush armchair in front of the desk, feeling uneasy, wary, stiffly uncomfortable in the gray business suit that Amanda had bought for him at an outrageous price in the hotel's posh store. He had left Amanda in the hotel; he did not want her in the same room as Humphries. She had acquiesced to his demand, and told her husband that she would go shopping in the Grand Plaza while he had his meeting.

    Humphries waited for Fuchs to say something. When he just sat there in silence, Humphries said, "I trust you had a good night's sleep."

    Suddenly Fuchs thought of hidden cameras again. He cleared his throat and said, "Yes, thank you."

    "The hotel is comfortable? Everything all right?"

    "The hotel is fine."

    The third person in the room was Diane Verwoerd, sitting in the other chair in front of the desk. She had angled it so that she faced Fuchs more than Humphries. Like her boss, she wore a business suit. But while Humphries's dark burgundy suit was threaded with intricate filigrees of silver thread, Verwoerd's pale ivory outfit was of more ordinary material. Its slit skirt, however, revealed a good deal of her long slim legs.

    Silence stretched again. Fuchs looked at the holowindow behind Humphries's desk. It showed the lush garden outside the house, bright flowers and graceful trees. Beautiful, he thought, but artificial. Contrived. An ostentatious display of wealth and the power to flaunt one man's will. How many starving, homeless people on Earth could Humphries help if he wanted to, instead of creating this make-believe Eden for himself here on the Moon?

    At last Verwoerd said crisply, all business, "We're here to negotiate the final terms of your sale of Helvetia Limited to Humphries Space Systems."

    "No, we are not," said Fuchs.

    Humphries sat up straighter in his chair. "We're not?"

    "Not yet," Fuchs said to him. "First we must deal with several murders."

    Humphries glanced at Verwoerd; for just that instant he seemed furious. But he regained his composure almost immediately.

    "And just what do you mean by that?" she asked calmly.

    Fuchs said, "At least three prospectors' ships have disappeared over the past few weeks. Humphries Space Systems somehow acquired the claims to the asteroids that those prospectors were near to."

    "Mr. Fuchs," said Verwoerd, with a deprecating little smile, "you're turning a coincidence into a conspiracy. Humphries Space Systems has dozens of ships scouting through the Belt."

    "Yes, and it's damned expensive, too," Humphries added.

    "Then there is the out-and-out murder of Niles Ripley on Ceres by a Humphries employee," Fuchs went on doggedly.

    Humphries snapped, "From what I hear, you took care of that yourself. Vigilante justice, wasn't it?"

    "I stood trial. It was declared justifiable self-defense."

    "Trial," Humphries sniffed. "By your fellow rock rats."

    "Your employee murdered Niles Ripley!"

    "Not by my orders," Humphries replied, with some heat. "Just because some hothead on my payroll gets himself into a brawl, that's not my doing."

    "But it was to your benefit," Fuchs snapped.

    Coolly, Verwoerd asked, "How do you come to that conclusion, Mr. Fuchs?"

    "Ripley was the key man in our habitat construction program. With him gone, the work is stopped."

    "So?"

    "So once you acquire Helvetia, the only organization capable of finishing the project will be HSS."

    "And how does that benefit me?" Humphries demanded. "Finishing your silly-assed habitat doesn't put one penny into my pocket."

    "Not directly, perhaps," said Fuchs. "But making Ceres safer and more livable will bring more people out to the Belt. With your company in control of their supplies, their food, the air they breathe, even, how can you fail to profit?"

    "You're accusing me—"

    Verwoerd interrupted the budding argument. "Gentlemen, we're here to negotiate the sale of Helvetia, not to discuss the future of the Asteroid Belt."

    Humphries glared at her again, but took in a breath and said grudgingly, "Right."

    Before Fuchs could say anything, Verwoerd added, "What's done is done, and there's no way of changing the past. If an HSS employee committed murder, you made him pay the full price for it."

    Fuchs searched for something to say.

    "Now we should get down to business," said Verwoerd, "and settle on a price for Helvetia."

    Humphries immediately jumped in with, "My original offer was based on your total assets, which have gone down almost to nothing since the fire in your warehouse."

    "Which was deliberately set," Fuchs said.

    "Deliberately set?"

    "It was no accident. It was arson."

    "You have proof of that?"

    "We have no forensics experts on Ceres. No criminal investigators."

    "So you have no proof."

    "Mr. Fuchs," Verwoerd said, "we are prepared to offer you three million international dollars for the remaining assets of Helvetia Limited, which—frankly—amounts to the good will you've generated among the miners and prospectors, and not much more."

    Fuchs stared at her for a long, silent moment. So sure of herself, he thought. So cool and unruffled and, yes, even beautiful, in a cold, distant way. She's like a sculpture made of ice.

    "Well?" Humphries asked. "Frankly, three million is pretty much of a gift. Your company's not worth half that much, in real terms."

    "Three hundred million," Fuchs murmured.

    "What? What did you say?"

    "You could make your offer three hundred million. Or three billion. It doesn't matter. I'm not going to sell to you."

    "That's stupid!" Humphries blurted.

    "I won't sell to you at any price. Never! I'm going back to Ceres and starting all over again."

    "You're crazy!"

    "Am I? Perhaps so. But I would rather be crazy than give in to you."

    "You're just going to get yourself killed," Humphries said.

    "Is that a threat?"

    Again Humphries looked at Verwoerd, then turned back to Fuchs. He smiled thinly. "I don't make threats, Fuchs. I make promises."

    Fuchs got to his feet. "Then let me make a promise in return. If you want to fight, I can fight. If you want a war, I'll give you a war. And you won't like the way I fight, I promise you that. I've studied military history; it was required in school. I know how to fight."

    Humphries leaned back in his desk chair and laughed.

    "Go ahead and laugh," Fuchs said, pointing a stubby finger at him. "But consider: you have a great deal more to lose than I do."

    "You're a dead man, Fuchs," Humphries snapped.

    Fuchs nodded agreement. "One of us is."

    With that, he turned and strode out of Humphries's office.

    For several moments, Humphries and Verwoerd sat there staring at the doorway Fuchs had gone through.

    "At least he didn't slam the door," Humphries said with a smirk.

    "You've made him angry enough to fight," Verwoerd said, with a troubled frown. "You've backed him into a corner and now he feels he has nothing to lose by fighting."

    Humphries guffawed. "Him? That little weasel? It's laughable. He knows how to fight! He's studied military history!"

    "Maybe he has," she said.

    "So what?" Humphries replied testily. "He's from Switzerland, for god's sake! Hardly a martial nation. What's he going to do, smother me in Swiss cheese? Or maybe yodel me to death."

    "I wouldn't take it so lightly," said Verwoerd, still looking at the empty doorway.

    CHAPTER 17

    "Piracy?" Hector Wilcox's eyebrows rose almost to his silver-gray hairline.

    Erek Zar looked uncomfortable, unhappy, as the two men strolled along the lane through the park just outside the IAA office building. Spring was in the air, the trees were beginning to bud, the local St. Petersburg populace was thronging the park, glad to see the sun. Women were sunbathing on the grass, their long dark coats thrown open to reveal their lumpy, thick bodies clad only in skimpy bikinis. It's enough to make a man take a vow of celibacy, Wilcox thought, eying them distastefully.

    Zar was normally a placid, cheerful, good-natured paper shuffler whose most urgent demands were for an extra day off here and there so he could nip off to his family in Poland for a long weekend. But now the man's ruddy, round face was dead serious, flushed with emotion.

    "That's what he's charging," Zar said. "Piracy." Wilcox refused to have his postprandial constitutional destroyed by an underling suddenly gone bonkers. "Who is this person?"

    "His name is Lars Fuchs. Tomasselli brought the matter to me. Fuchs is accusing Humphries Space Systems of piracy, out in the Asteroid Belt."

    "But that's ridiculous!"

    "I agree," Zar said swiftly. "But Tomasselli's taken it seriously and opened an official file on it."

    "Tomasselli," said Wilcox, as if the word smelled bad. "That excitable Italian. He saw a conspiracy when Yamagata made that takeover offer to Astro Corporation."

    "The takeover was never consummated," Zar pointed out, "mainly because Tomasselli got the GEC to go on record as opposing it."

    "And now he's taking accusations of piracy seriously? Against Humphries Space Systems?"

    Nodding unhappily, Zar said, "He claims there's some evidence to substantiate the accusation, but as far as I can see it's all circumstantial."

    "What on earth does he expect me to do about it?" Wilcox grumbled mildly. He was not the kind of man who lost his self-control. Not ever. You didn't get as far up on the intricate chain of command of the International Astronautical Authority as he had by recklessly blowing off steam.

    "It's an open file now," Zar said, apologetically.

    "Yes. Well, I suppose I'll have to look it over." Wilcox sighed. "But, really, piracy? In the Asteroid Belt? Even if it's true, what can we do about it? We don't even have an administrator on Ceres, for goodness' sake. There isn't an IAA presence anywhere in the Belt."

    "We have two flight controllers at Ceres."

    "Bah!" Wilcox shook his head. "What do they call themselves out there? Rock rats? They pride themselves on their independence. They resisted the one attempt we made to establish a full-fledged office on Ceres. So now they're crying to us about piracy, are they?"

    "It's only one person making the accusation: this man Fuchs."

    "A maniac, no doubt," said Wilcox.

    "Or a sore loser," Zar agreed.

WLTZING MATILDA

    Big George's stomach rumbled in complaint.

    He straightened up—no easy task in the spacesuit— and looked around. Waltzing Matilda hung in the star-strewn sky over his head like a big dumbbell, its habitat and logistics modules on opposite ends of a kilometer-long buckyball tether, slowly rotating around the propulsion module at the hub.

    Been too many hours since you've had a feed, eh? he said to his stomach. Well, it's gonna be a few hours more before we get any tucker, and even then it'll be mighty lean.

    The asteroid on which George stood was a dirty little chunk of rock, a dark carbonaceous 'roid, rich in hydrates and organic minerals. Worth a bloody fortune back at Selene. But it didn't look like much: just a bleak lump of dirt, pitted all over like it had the pox, rocks and pebbles and outright boulders scattered across it. Not enough gravity to hold down a feather. Ugly chunk of rock, that's all you are, George said silently to the asteroid. And you're gonna get uglier before we're finished with ya.

    Millions of kilometers from anyplace, George realized, alone in this cold and dark except for the Turk sittin' inside Matilda monitoring the controls, squattin' on this ugly chunk of rock, sweatin' like a teen on his first date inside this suit and me stomach growlin' 'cause we're low on rations.

    And yet he felt happy. Free as a bloomin' bird. He had to make a conscious effort not to sing out loud. That'd startle the Turk, he knew. The kid's not used to any of this.

    Shaking his head inside the fishbowl helmet, George returned to his work. He was setting up the cutting laser, connecting its power pack and control module, carefully cleaning its copper mirrors of clinging dust and making certain they were precisely placed in their mounts, no wobbles. It was all hard physical work, even though none of the equipment weighed anything in the asteroid's minuscule gravity. But just raising your arms in the stiff, ungainly suit, bending your body or turning, took a conscious effort of will and more muscular exertion than any flatlander could ever appreciate. Finally George had everything set, the laser's aiming mirrors pointing to the precise spot where he wanted to start cutting, the power pack's superconducting coil charged and ready.

    George was going to slice out chunks of the asteroid that Matilda could carry back to Selene. The prospector who'd claimed the rock wouldn't make a penny from it until George started shipping the ores, and George was far behind schedule because the wonky laser kept malfunctioning time and again. No ores, no money: that was the way the corporations worked. And no food, George knew. It was a race now to see if he could get a decent shipment of ores off toward Selene before Matilda's food locker went empty.

    As he worked, a memory from his childhood school days back in Adelaide returned unbidden to his mind; a poem by some Yank who'd been in on the Yukon gold rush nearly two centuries ago:

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear, And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear; With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold, A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold; While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars?—

    Then you've a hunch what the music meant...hunger and night and the stars.

George nodded solemnly as he checked out the laser's focus. Hunger and night and the stars, all right. We've got plenty of that. And a stark, dead world, too, aren't you? he said to the impassive asteroid. Come to think of it, you've prob'ly got some gold tucked away inside you, huh? Strange kinda situation when water's worth more'n gold. Price of gold's dropped down to its value as an industrial metal. Jewelers must be going bonkers back Earthside.

    "George?" the Turk's voice in his helmet speaker startled him.

    "Huh? What'sit?"

    The kid's name was Nodon. "Something is moving out at the edge of our radar's resolution range."

    "Moving?" George immediately thought that maybe this asteroid had a smaller companion, a moonlet. But at the extreme range of their search radar? Not bloody likely.

    "It has a considerable velocity. It is approaching very fast."

    That was the longest utterance the kid had made through the whole flight. He sounded worried.

    "It can't be on a collision course," George said.

    "No, but it is heading our way. Fast."

    George tried to shrug inside the spacesuit, failed. "Well, keep an eye on it. Might be another ship."

    "I think it is."

    "Any message from 'im?"

    "No. Nothing."

    "All right," said George, puzzled. "Say hullo to him and ask his identification. I'm gonna start workin' the ores here."

    "Yes, sir." The kid was very respectful.

    Wondering what—or who—was out there, George thumbed the activator switch and the laser began to slash deeply into the asteroid's rocky body. In the airless dark there was no sound; George couldn't even feel a vibration from the big ungainly machine. The dead rock began to sizzle noiselessly along a pencil-slim line. The cutting laser emitted in the infrared, but even the guide beam of the auxiliary laser was invisible until the cutting raised enough dust to reflect its thin red pointing finger.

    Be a lot easier if we could get nanomachines to do this, George thought. I've got to twist Kris Cardenas's arm when we get back to Ceres, make her see how much we need her help. Little buggers could separate the different elements in a rock, atom by atom. All we'd hafta do is scoop up the piles and load 'em on the ship.

    Instead, George worked like a common laborer, prying up thick, house-sized slabs of asteroidal rock as the laser's hot beam cut them loose, clamping them together with buckyball tethers, and ferrying them to Matilda's bulky propulsion module, which was fitted with attachment points for the cargo. By the time he had carried three such loads, using the jetpack of his suit to move the big slabs, feeling a little like Superman manhandling the massive yet weightless tonnages of ores, he was soaked with perspiration.

    "Feels like a bloody swamp in this suit," he complained aloud as he started back toward the asteroid. "Smells like one, too."

    "It is a ship," said Nodon.

    "You're sure?"

    "I can see its image on the display screen."

    "Give 'em another hail, then. See who they are." George didn't like the idea of another ship in the vicinity. It can't be coincidence, he told himself.

    He landed deftly on the asteroid about fifty meters from where the laser was still slicing up the rock. Why would a ship be heading toward us? Who are they?

Dorik Harbin sat at the controls of Shanidar, his dark bearded face impassive, his darker eyes riveted on the CCD display from the ship's optical sensors. He could see the flashes of laser-heated rock spurting up from the asteroid and the glints of light they cast on the Waltzing Matilda, parked in orbit around the asteroid. The information from Grigor had been accurate, as usual. There was the ship, precisely where Grigor had said it would be.

    Death was no stranger to Dorik Harbin. Orphaned from birth, he was barely as tall as the assault rifle the village elders gave him when Harbin had dutifully marched with the other preteens to the village down the road, where the evil people lived. They had killed his father before Harbin had been born and raped his pregnant mother repeatedly. The other boys sometimes sniggered that Dorik was conceived by one of the rapists, not the father that the rapists had hacked to death.

    He and his ragamuffin battalion had marched down to that evil village and shot everyone there: all of them, men, women, children, babies. Harbin even shot the village dogs in a fury of vengeance. Then, under the pitiless eyes of the hard-faced elders, they had set fire to each and every house in that village. Dousing the bodies with petrol where they lay, they burned the dead, too. Some of them were only wounded, pretending to be dead to escape the vengeance they had reaped, until the flames ignited their clothing.

    Harbin still heard their screams in his sleep.

    When the blue-helmeted Peacekeeper troops had come into the region to pacify the ethnic fighting, Harbin had run away from his village and joined the national defense force. After many months of living in the hills and hiding from the Peacekeepers' observation planes and satellites, he came to the bitter conclusion that the so-called national defense force was nothing more than a band of renegades, stealing from their own people, looting villages and raping their women.

    He ran away again, this time to a refugee camp, where well-clad strangers distributed food while men from nearby villages sold the refugees hashish and heroin. Eventually Harbin joined those blue-helmeted soldiers; they were looking for recruits and offered steady pay for minimal discomfort. They trained him well, but more importantly they fed him and paid him and tried to instill some sense of discipline and honor in him. Time and again his temper tripped him; he was in the brig so often that his sergeant called him "jailbird."

    The sergeant tried to tame Harbin's wild ferocity, tried to make a reliable soldier out of him. Harbin took their food and money and tried to understand their strange concepts of when it was proper to kill someone and when it was not. What he learned after a few years of service in the miserable, pathetic, deprived regions of Asia and Africa was that it was the same everywhere: kill or be killed.

    He was picked for a hurry-up training course and sent with a handful of other Peacekeeper troops to the Moon, to enforce the law on the renegade colonists of Moonbase. They even allowed the specially-selected troopers dosages of designer drugs which, they claimed, would enhance their adaptation to low gravity. Harbin knew it was nothing more than a bribe, to keep the "volunteers" satisfied.

    Trying to fight the tenacious defenders of Moonbase from inside a spacesuit was a revelation to Harbin. The Peacekeepers failed, even though the lunar colonists took great pains to avoid killing any of them. They returned to Earth, not merely defeated but humiliated. His next engagement, in the food riots in Delhi, finished him as a Peacekeeper. He saved his squad from being overrun by screaming hordes of rioters, but killed so many of the "unarmed" civilians that the International Peacekeeping Force cashiered him.

    Orphaned again, Harbin took up with mercenary organizations that worked under contract to major multinational corporations. Always eager to better himself, he learned to operate spacecraft. And he quickly saw how fragile spacecraft were. A decent laser shot could disable a vessel in an eyeblink; you could kill its crew from a thousand kilometers away before they realized they were under attack.

    Eventually he was summoned to the offices of Humphries Space Systems, the first time he had returned to the Moon since the Peacekeepers had been driven off. Their chief of security was a Russian named Grigor. He told Harbin he had a difficult but extremely rewarding assignment for a man of courage and determination.

    Harbin asked only, "Who do I have to kill?"

    Grigor told him that he was to drive the independent prospectors and miners out of the Belt. Those working under contract to HSS or Astro were to be left untouched. It was the independents who were to be "discouraged." Harbin grimaced at the word. Men like Grigor and the others back at Selene could use delicate words, but what they meant was anything but refined. Kill the independents. Kill enough of them so that the rest either quit the Belt or signed up with HSS or Astro Corporation.

    So this one had to die, like the others.

    "This is Waltzing Matilda," he heard his comm speaker announce. The face on his display screen was a young male Asian, head shaved, eyes big and nervous. His cheeks seemed to be tattooed. "Please identify yourself."

    Harbin chose not to. There was no need. The less he spoke with those he must kill, the less he knew about them, the better. It was a game, he told himself, like the computer games he had played during his training sessions with the Peacekeepers. Destroy the target and win points. In this game he played now, the points were international dollars. Wealth could buy almost anything: a fine home in a safe city, good wines, willing women, drugs that drove away the memories of the past.

    "We are working this asteroid," the young man said, his shaky voice a little higher-pitched than before. "The claim has already been registered with the International Astronautical Authority."

    Harbin took in a deep breath. The temptation to reply was powerful. It doesn't matter what you have claimed or what you are doing, he answered silently. The moving finger has written your name in the book of death, nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line; nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

    By the time he'd made his eighth ore-ferrying trip, George felt dead tired. And starving.

    He turned off the laser and said into his helmet microphone, "I'm comin' in."

    The Turk replied only, "Copy that."

    "I'm sloshin' inside this suit," George said. "The power pack needs rechargin', too."

    "Understood," said Nodon.

    George unhooked the power pack and toted it in his arms back to Matilda's airlock. It was twice his size, and even though it weighed virtually nothing he was careful handling it; a mass that big could squash a man no matter what the ambient gravity. The law of inertia had not been repealed.

    "What's our visitor doin'?" he asked as he sealed the lock's outer hatch and started pumping air into it.

    "Still approaching on the same course."

    "Any word from 'im?"

    "Nothing."

    That worried George. By the time he had wormed his way out of the ripe-smelling suit and plugged the big power pack into the ship's recharging unit, though, his first priority was food.

    He half-floated up the passageway to the galley.

    "Spin 'er up a bit, Nodon," he hollered to the bridge. "Gimme some weight while I chow down."

    "One-sixth g?" the Turk's voice came back down the passageway.

    "Good enough."

    A comfortable feeling of weight returned as George pulled a meager prepackaged snack from the freezer. Should've loaded more food, he thought. Didn't expect to be out here this long.

    Then he heard a scream from the bridge. The air-pressure alarm started hooting and the emergency hatches slammed shut as the ship's lights went out, plunging George into total darkness.

    CHAPTER 18

    Amanda was aghast. "You refused to sell at any price?"

    Fuchs nodded grimly. Some of the blazing fury he had felt during his meeting with Humphries had burned off, but still the smoldering heat of anger burned deep in his guts. Only one thing was certain: he was going to fight. On the way from Humphries's office to their hotel suite Fuchs had made up his mind once and for all. He was going to wipe the smug smile from Humphries's face, no matter what it cost.

    Amanda was in the sitting room of their suite when Fuchs barged through the door, angry and impatient. He saw the expectant look on her face and realized she'd been waiting for him all the while; she'd never gone shopping or done anything other than wait for his return.

    "I couldn't do it," Fuchs said, so low that he wasn't sure she'd heard him. He cleared his throat, repeated, "I couldn't sell to him. Not at any price."

    Amanda sank into one of the small sofas scattered about the room. "Lars...what do you expect to do now?"

    "I don't know," he told her. That wasn't quite true, but he wasn't sure of how much he could tell her. He sat in the chair next to Amanda and took her hands in his. "I told him I was going back to Ceres and start over."

    "Start over? How?"

    He tried to smile for her, to hide his true thoughts. "We still have Starpower. We can go back to prospecting, I suppose."

    "Live aboard the ship again," she murmured.

    "I know it's a step backward." He hesitated, then found the courage to say, "You don't have to come with me. You can stay on Ceres. Or ... or wherever you would prefer to live."

    "You'd go without me?" She looked hurt.

    Fuchs knew that if he told her his real plans, his true goal, Amanda would be terrified. She would try to talk him out of it. Or worse, once she realized that he was unshakable, she would insist on staying with him every step of the way.

    So he temporized. "Amanda, dearest... it wouldn't be fair for me to ask you to live that way again. I've made a mess of things, it's up to me to—"

    "Lars, he'll kill you!"

    She was truly frightened, he saw.

    "If you go back to the Belt by yourself," Amanda said urgently, "he'll have someone track you down and murder you."

    Fuchs remembered Humphries's words: You're a dead man, Fuchs.

    "I can take care of myself," he said grimly.

    Amanda thought, I've got to go with him. Martin won't strike at Lars if there's a possibility of hurting me.

    Aloud, she said to her husband, gently, soothingly, "I know you can take care of yourself, darling, but who's going to take care of me?" And she reached up to stroke his cheek.

    "You'd go with me?"

    "Of course."

    "You want to go with me?" He was filled with joyful wonder at the idea.

    "I want to be with you, Lars," Amanda said softly, "wherever you go."

    To herself, though, she said, It's me that Martin wants. I'm the cause of all this. I'm the reason my husband is in such danger.

    And Fuchs was saying to himself, She wants to be away from Humphries. She's afraid of him. She's afraid that if I'm not near enough to protect her, he'll steal her away from me.

    And the embers of his anger burst into flaming rage again.

WALTZING MATILDA

    The emergency lights came on, dim but better than utter darkness. George groped through the shadows along the narrow passageway from the galley to the closed hatch of the bridge. He tapped the code on the bulkhead keypad and the hatch popped open slightly.

    At least there's proper air pressure in the bridge, George thought as he pushed the hatch all the way open. Hatch wouldn't have opened otherwise.

    Nodon was sitting in the command pilot's chair, eyes wide with shock or fright, hands racing along the console keyboard. The regular lights came back on, but they seemed weaker than usual.

    "What th' fook happened, mate?" George asked, sliding into the copilot's chair.

    "I got an electric shock," said Nodon. "A spark jumped from the panel and the lights went out."

    George could see the kid was checking out all the ship's systems. The control panel's displays flickered almost too quickly for the eye to register as Nodon raced through one system diagnostic after another.

    The kid's good, George thought. I made the right decision when I hired him.

    Nodon was a skinny youngster who'd claimed to be twenty-five, but George figured the kid was barely out of his teens. No real experience, outside of working on computers back on Ceres, but he had an intensity, a bright eager desire to succeed, that made George pick him as his crewman for this mining job. George called him "Turk" but Nodon was actually a Mongol, with the decorative spiral tattoos on both his cheeks to prove it. He claimed he'd been born on the Moon, of miners who'd fled Earth when the Gobi Desert engulfed the grasslands of their ancestral homeland. He was all bone and sinew, skin the color of old parchment, head shaved bald, big expressive deep brown eyes. He'd look damned handsome if it weren't for those bloody scars, George thought. He was trying to grow a moustache; so far it was nothing more than a few wisps that made his upper lip look dirty.

    Sitting tensely in the command chair, flicking through diagnostics almost faster than George could follow, Nodon wore only a comfortable sleeveless mesh shirt over a pair of ragged shorts.

    "The power generator is off-line," he said. "That's why the lights went out."

    "We're on batteries now?" George asked.

    "Yes, and—"

    The alarms hooted again and George felt his ears pop. The airtight hatch slammed shut once more.

    "Jeezus God!" George shouted. "The bugger's shootin' at us!"

Dorik Harbin scowled at his display screens. His first shot should have taken out the ship's habitat module, but they'd increased their spin just a split second before he'd fired. He'd hit something, he was certain of that, but it wasn't a fatal hit.

    It had taken a few minutes for the big laser to recharge; this had given Harbin enough time to choose his target carefully. He had the full schematics of Waltzing Matilda on one of the screens, courtesy of Humphries Space Systems. Their intelligence data was well-nigh perfect. Harbin knew where to find the ships he went after, and what each ship's layout was.

    Not much of a challenge to a soldier, he thought. But then, what soldier wants challenges? When you put your life on the line, the easier the job the better. For just the flicker of a moment he thought about the fact that he was shooting at unarmed civilians. Perhaps there was a woman aboard that ship, although the HSS intelligence data didn't indicate that. What of it? he told himself. That's the target and you're being paid to destroy it. It's a lot easier than killing people face to face, the way you had to in Delhi.

    That had been a mess, a fiasco. One battalion of mercenary troops trying to protect a food warehouse against a whole city. That idiot commander! Stupid Frenchman. Harbin still saw the maddened faces of the ragged, half-starved Indians, bare hands against automatic rifles and machine guns. Still, they nearly swarmed us down. Only when he was foolish enough to let one of the women get close enough to knife him did his blood-rage surge and save him. He shot her point-blank and led a howling murderous charge that sent the mob running. He stopped firing into their backs only when his automatic rifle finally jammed from overheating.

    He pushed the nightmare images out of his mind and concentrated on the job at hand. By the time he was ready to fire again, Matilda's spin had moved the hab module enough so that it was partially shielded by the big slabs of ores the miners had hung on their central propulsion module. But their main comm antenna was in his sights. He squeezed off a shot. The laser's capacitors cracked loudly and he saw a flash of light glance off the rim of the antenna. A hit.

    Now to get the auxiliary antennas, he said to himself. I'll have to move in closer.

"Shooting at us?" Nodon's voice went high with sudden fright.

    "Fookin' bastard," George growled. "Get into your suit. Quick!"

    Nodon bolted from his chair and went to the hatch. He tapped out the keyboard code swiftly and the hatch swung open all the way.

    "The air pressure is falling," he called over his shoulder as George followed him down the passageway toward the airlock.

    George was thinking, If we had the bloody laser on board we could give the bastard a taste of his own medicine. But the laser was sitting on the asteroid and its power pack was recharging; at least, it had been until the generator had been hit.

    As they scrambled into their suits, George said, "We'd better power down the ship. Save the batteries."

    Nodon was already pulling his bubble helmet over his head. "I'll go to the bridge and do it," he said, his voice muffled by the helmet.

    "Turn off everything!" George yelled after his retreating back. "Let 'em think we're dead!"

    He added silently, It won't be far from wrong, either.

    Nodon returned from the bridge as George was closing the neck seal of his helmet. Leaning toward the kid so their helmets touched, he said, "Don't even use the suit radio. Play dead."

    The kid looked worried, but he forced a sickly grin as he nodded back to George.

    They got to the airlock and went out together. George grasped Nodon's suited arm and, without using his jetpack, pushed off toward the big slabs of ores attached to Matildas fusion engine. Get into the shadow of those chunks, he thought. Huddle up close to 'em and maybe this fookin' killer won't see us.

    Perspective is tricky in microgravity. Once George and his young crewman got to the nearest of the slabs, it seemed as if they were lying on a huge hard bed, side by side, looking up at the slowly-revolving shape of their habitation module as it swung on its long tether.

    The other ship glided into George's view. It was small, little more than a hab unit set atop a fusion engine and a set of bulbous propellant tanks. It looked almost like a cluster of mismatched grapes. Then he recognized the bulky shape of a high-power laser hanging just below the hab module. This ship was meant to be a destroyer, nothing else.

    The guide beam from the ship's auxiliary laser played over Matilda's habitation module. George watched as the smaller ship maneuvered leisurely, the evil red spot of the guide beam sliding away from the hab unit. For a moment it was lost in the depth of space, but then George's heart clutched in his chest. The red spot was moving across the slab to which he and Nodon were clinging.

    He knows we're here! George thought, sweat breaking out on his face. He's gonna slice us!

    But the red spot slid across the slab more than ten meters below their boots. It stopped on the bell-shaped nozzle of their fusion engine, then walked slowly up to the throat of the nozzle. A light flashed there. George blinked against the sudden, unexpected glare.

    Nodon bumped his helmet against George's. "The engine!" he whimpered.

    Another flash. This time George saw shards of metal fly off the rocket nozzle, glinting briefly in the pale sunlight as they spun out of sight, into the endless darkness.

    Again the laser fired. This time it hit the piping that fed cryogenic hydrogen into the nozzle's cooling capillaries. Fookin' bastard knows his business, George thought grimly. He's disabled the engine with three bloody shots.

    The attacking ship maneuvered leisurely, drifting out of George's sight, beyond the edge of the slab on which he and Nodon hid. For moments that seemed like hours, the two men lay there unmoving. What are we gonna do? George wondered. How can we get home without the main engine?

    In the darkness, George felt Nodon's helmet touch his again. "Do you think he's gone?" the young man asked.

    Before George could answer, he caught another glint in the corner of his eye. Pushing slightly away from the slab, he saw that their attacker was punching holes in their propellant tanks. Thin cold jets of cryogenic hydrogen and helium-three hissed noiselessly into the vacuum, brief whitish wisps of gas that dissipated into the emptiness of space in an eyeblink.

    "We're movin'," George muttered, even though Nodon could not hear him. Like a child's balloon when he lets the air out of it, the gases escaping from the punctured tanks were pushing Matilda slowly away from the asteroid.

    "We're gonna get a fookin' tour of the solar system," George said aloud. "Shame we'll be too dead to enjoy the sights."

    CHAPTER 19

    I'm surprised he hasn't had us thrown out of this hotel already," Fuchs said morosely.

    Pancho Lane   tried   to   smile   encouragingly.   Lars  and Amanda both looked so down, so— bewildered was the word for it, Pancho decided. Overrun by events and their own emotions. "Hey, don't worry about the hotel," she said, trying to sound cheerful. "Astro'll pay for it if Humphries reneges."

    Fuchs was still in the light gray business suit he'd worn for his meeting with Humphries. Amanda was wearing a pale turquoise knee-length frock, modest enough, but she still made Pancho feel gawky and shapeless, as usual. Mandy didn't mean to, but whenever Pancho was near her she felt like a beanpole standing beside a vid star.

    "We're going back to Ceres," Amanda said. "Back to prospecting."

    The two of them were sitting glumly on the sofa set beneath a hologram of Valles Marineris on Mars: the grandest Grand Canyon in the solar system.

    "What about Helvetia, Ltd.?" Pancho asked. "You're not gonna let Humphries muscle you out of business, are you?"

    Fuchs grunted. "What business? Our inventory went up in flames."

    "Yeah, but the insurance oughtta cover enough of it to get you started again."

    Fuchs shook his head wearily.

    "You got a lot of good will out there on Ceres," Pancho urged. "Shouldn't oughtta let that go to waste."

    Amanda's brows rose hopefully.

    "Don't want to let Humphries get a monopoly, do you, Lars ol' buddy?"

    "I'd prefer to strangle him," Fuchs growled.

    Pancho leaned back in her chair, stretched her long lean legs. "Tell you what: Astro'll advance you the credit to restock your warehouse, up to the limit that the insurance will pay you."

    Fuchs looked at her. "You can do this?"

    "I'm learnin' how to play the board of directors. I got a clutch of 'em on my side. They don't want Humphries to monopolize the Belt any more'n you do."

    Amanda asked, "Is your group strong enough to let you do what you just offered to do?"

    Nodding, Pancho replied, "Take my word for it."

    Turning to her husband, Amanda said hopefully, "Lars, we could start Helvetia all over again."

    "With a smaller inventory," he grumbled. "The insurance won't cover everything we lost."

    "But it's a start," Amanda said, smiling genuinely.

    Fuchs did not smile back. He looked away from his wife. Pancho thought there was something going on inside his head that he didn't want Mandy to see.

    "I'm going back to prospecting," he said, his eyes focused on the far wall of the sitting room.

    "But—"

    "I'll take Starpower back as soon as the current lease on her is finished."

    "But what about Helvetia?" Amanda asked.

    He turned toward her once more. "You'll have to run Helvetia. You can stay on Ceres while I take the ship out."

    Pancho studied them. There was something going on between them, some hidden agenda someplace, that she couldn't fathom.

    "Lars," said Amanda, in a very soft voice, "are you certain that this is what you want to do?"

    "It's what I must do, darling." His voice sounded implacable.

Pancho invited them both to dinner at the Earthview Restaurant, off the hotel's lobby.

    "Strictly a social evening," she told them. "No talk about Humphries or Ceres or any kind of business at all. Okay?"

    They agreed, halfheartedly.

    So naturally they talked about business through the entire meal. Pancho's business.

    The standing joke about the Earthview was that it was the finest restaurant within four hundred thousand kilometers. Which was perfectly true: the two other eateries in Selene, up in the Grand Plaza, were mere bistros. Two levels beneath the lunar surface, the Earthview featured sweeping windowalls that displayed holographic views from the Moon's surface. It was almost like looking through real windows at the gaunt, cracked floor of the giant crater Alphonsus and its worn, slumped ringwall mountains. But the Earth was always in that dark sky, hanging like a splendid glowing jewel of sparkling blue and glowing white, ever changing yet always present.

    The Earthview prided itself on having a human staff, no robots in sight. Pancho always felt that a truly top-rate restaurant should use tablecloths, but the Earthview used glittering placemats made of lunar honeycomb metal, thin and supple as silk.

    None of them had changed clothes for dinner. Fuchs was still wearing his gray suit, Amanda her turquoise knee-length dress. Pancho, who favored coveralls and softboots, had started the day in a business outfit of chocolate-brown slacks, pale yellow sweater, and light tan suede vest. Amanda had loaned her a light auburn Irish lace stole to "dress up your outfit."

    Once their handsome young waiter had brought their drinks and taken their dinner order, an awkward silence fell over their table. They had agreed not to talk business. What other topic of conversation was there?

    Pancho sipped at her margarita and watched the waiter's retreating back. Nice buns, she thought. Wonder if he's married?

    "So what have you been doing lately, Pancho?" Amanda finally said, more to break the silence than any other reason.

    "Me? I'm followin' up on something Dan Randolph talked about years ago: scoopin' fusion fuels from Jupiter."

    Fuchs's ears perked up. "Fusion fuels?"

    "Yeah. You know, helium-three, tritium, other isotopes. Jupiter's atmosphere is full of 'em."

    "That's a steep gravity well," said Amanda.

    "Tell me about it," Pancho said. "You know I've been approached by some nuts who want to go skimmin' Jupiter's atmosphere as a stunt? They even brought a network producer with 'em."

    "Insanity," Fuchs muttered.

    "Yeah, sure." Pancho pronounced the word shore. "But then there's a gaggle of scientists who wanta set up a research station in orbit around Jupiter. Study the moons and all."

    "But the radiation," Amanda said.

    "Tight orbit, underneath the Jovian Van Allen belts. Might be doable."

    "Astro would fund this?"

    "Hell no!" Pancho blurted. "Universities gotta come up with the funding. We'll build the sucker."

    "And use it as a platform for mining Jupiter's atmosphere," Amanda added.

    Pancho smiled at her. Sometimes I forget how smart she is, Pancho thought. I let her sweet face and nice boobs fool me.

    Then she looked at Fuchs. He sat with his drink untouched before him, his eyes staring off into some private universe. Whatever he's thinking about, Pancho realized, he's a zillion kilometers from here.

WALTZING MATILDA

    Once they got back inside the ship, it took George and Nodon hours to patch the holes punched through the hull by the attacker's laser and check out all the systems. They were both dead tired by the time they were able to take off their spacesuits and clump wearily, fearfully to the bridge.

    George took the command chair, Nodon slipped into the chair at his right.

    "You run a diagnostic on the power generator," said George. "I'll check the nav computer and see where th' fook we're headin'." They worked in silence for another twenty minutes. At last Nodon said, "I can repair the generator. He knocked out one set of electrodes. We have spares."

    George nodded. "Okay, then. If you can get the generator back on line we won't hafta worry about electrical power for the life support systems."

    Nodding, Nodon said, "That is good news."

    "Right. Now here's the bad news. We're up shit's creek without a paddle."

    Nodon said nothing. He held his bony face impassive, but George saw that even his shaved pate was sheened with perspiration. It sure isn't the temperature in here, George told himself. In fact, the bridge felt decidedly chilly.

    With a heavy sigh, George said, "He knocked enough holes in the propellant tanks to send us jettin' deeper into the Belt."

    "And the main engine is beyond repair."

    "Prob'ly."

    "Then we will die."

    "Looks that way, mate. Unless we can get some help."

    "The comm system is down. He must have lasered the antennas."

    George nodded. "So that's what the soddin' bastard was doing."

    "He was very thorough."

    Sitting there, staring at the control panel with half its telltale lights glowering red, George tried to think.

    "We're okay on life support," he mused aloud.

    "Once the generator is running again," Nodon corrected. "Otherwise the batteries will run out in . . ." He glanced at the displays ". . . eleven hours."

    "Better fix the generator, then. That's our first priority."

    Nodon started to get up from his seat. He hesitated, asked, "And our second priority?"

    "Figurin' out if we can nudge ourselves into a trajectory that'll bring us close to Ceres before we starve to death."

    CHAPTER 20

    Amanda would have preferred to stay in Selene for just a few days more, but Fuchs insisted that they start back for Ceres as soon as possible. He learned from Pancho that an Astro ship was due to depart for Ceres the next day, carrying a load of equipment that Helvetia had ordered before the warehouse fire. "We'll go back on that ship," Fuchs told his wife. "But it's a freighter. It won't have passenger accommodations," Amanda protested.

    "We'll go back on that ship," he repeated. Wondering why her husband was so insistent on returning as quickly as possible, Amanda reluctantly packed her travel bag while Fuchs called Pancho to beg a ride.

    The next morning they rode the automated little tractor through the tunnel that led out to Armstrong Spaceport and climbed aboard the spindly-legged shuttlecraft that would lift them to the Harper. The ship was in lunar orbit, but rotating at a one-sixth g spin. Fuchs felt grateful that he would not have to endure weightlessness for more than the few minutes of the shuttlecraft's flight.

    "Newest ship in the solar system," said her captain as he welcomed them aboard. He was young, trim, good-looking, and stared openly at Amanda's ample figure. Fuchs, standing beside her, grasped his wife's arm possessively.

    "I'm afraid, though, that she's not built for passenger service," the captain said as he led them down the habitat module's central passageway. "All I can offer you is this cabin."

    He slid an accordion-pleated door back. The cabin was barely large enough for two people to stand in.

    "It's kind of small," the captain said, apologetically. But he was smiling at Amanda.

    "It will do," said Fuchs. "The trip is only six days."

    He stepped into the compartment, leading Amanda.

    The captain, still out in the passageway, said, "We break orbit in thirty minutes."

    "Good," said Fuchs. And he slid the door shut.

    Amanda giggled at him. "Lars, you were positively rude to him!"

    With a sardonic grin back at her, he said, "I thought his eyes would fall out of his head, he was staring at you so hard."

    "Oh, Lars, he wasn't. Was he?"

    "He most certainly was."

    Amanda's expression became sly. "What do you think he had on his mind?"

    His grin turned wolfish. "I'll show you."

    Even though they took place in the tropical beauty of La Guaira, on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, the quarterly meetings of Astro Manufacturing Corporation's board of directors had turned into little less than armed confrontations. Martin Humphries had built a clique around himself and was working hard to take control of the board. Opposing him was Pancho Lane, who had learned in her five years on the board how to bring together a voting bloc of her own.

    As chairman of the board, Harriett O'Banian tried her best to steer clear of both groups. Her job, as she saw it, was to make Astro as profitable as possible. Much of what Humphries wanted to do was indeed profitable, even though Pancho opposed virtually anything Humphries or one of his people proposed.

    But now Pancho was proposing something that might become an entirely new product line for Astro, and Humphries seemed dead set against it.

    "Scoop gases from the atmosphere of Jupiter?" Humphries was scoffing. "Can you think of anything—any idea at all—that carries more risk?"

    "Yeah," Pancho snapped. "Lettin' somebody else get a corner on the fusion fuels market."

    Red-haired Hattie O'Banian was no stranger to outbursts of temper. But not while she chaired the board. She rapped on the long conference table with her knuckles. "We will have order here," she said firmly. "Mr. Humphries has the floor."

    Pancho slumped back in her chair and nodded unhappily. She was seated almost exactly across the table from Humphries. O'Banian had to exert some self-control to keep from smiling at her. Pancho had come a long way since her first awkward days on the board. Underneath her west Texas drawl and aw-shucks demeanor, she had a sharp intelligence, quick wit, and the ability to focus on an issue with the intensity of a laser beam. With Hattie's help, Pancho had learned how to dress the part of a board member: today she wore a trousered business suit of dusky rose, touched off with accents of jewelry. Still, Hattie thought, her lanky, long-legged tomboy image came through. She looked as if she wanted to reach across the table and sock Humphries between the eyes.

    For his part, Humphries seemed perfectly at ease in a casual cardigan suit of deep blue and a pale lemon turtleneck shirt. He wears clothes well, Hattie thought, and hides his thoughts even better.

    "Martin," said O'Banian. "Do you have anything else to add?"

    "I certainly do," Humphries said, with a crafty little smile. He turned his gaze to Pancho for a moment, then looked back at O'Banian. "I am opposed to fly-by-night schemes that promise a jackpot at the end of the rainbow but are in reality fraught with technical risks. And human dangers. Sending a ship to Jupiter in a crazy attempt to scoop hydrogen and helium isotopes from that planet's atmosphere is utter madness, pure and simple."

    Half a dozen board members nodded agreement. O'Banian noticed that a couple of them were not usually on Humphries' side in these quarrels.

    "Ms. Lane? Do you have anything more to say in support of your proposal?"

    Pancho sat up ramrod straight and looked squarely at Humphries. "I sure do. I've presented the facts, the engineering analysis, the cost estimates and the profit probabilities. The numbers show that scooping fusion fuels is within the capabilities of existing technology. Nothing new needs to be invented."

    "A ship that dives into Jupiter's atmosphere to collect its gases?" blurted one of the older men down the table. He was paunchy, bald, red-faced.

    Pancho forced a smile at him. "A ship that's being teleoperated from Jupiter orbit. It's well within existing capabilities."

    "There's no base in the Jupiter system for a remote operating team; we'd have to set it up it ourselves."

    "That's true," Pancho said evenly. "I didn't say it was existing state-of-the-art hardware. But it is within existing capabilities. We just have to build it and test it."

    "At what cost?" asked the gray-haired woman sitting two chairs down from Pancho.

    "You have all the cost figures in my presentation," Pancho said. Then, turning to O'Banian, she asked, "Can I finish my say without bein' interrupted, please?"

    O'Banian nodded. Raising her voice slightly, she said, "Let's give Pancho the same courtesy we gave Martin, everyone."

    Pancho said, "Thanks, y'all. Earth needs energy sources that won't put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Fusion is the answer, and fusion based on helium-three is the most efficient fusion system that's been built so far. There's trillions of dollars per year waitin' for the company that can supply fusion fuels for Earth. And don't forget that Selene, the Mars bases, Ceres, and lots of other facilities off Earth will buy fusion fuels, too. Not to mention the market for spacecraft propulsion."

    "Selene sells us deuterium-three," said the red-faced bald man. "They scoop it up out of the ground."

    Pancho countered, "There's not enough deuterium on the Moon to satisfy the potential market demand."

    "But going all the way out to Jupiter . . . that will make the price too damned high, won't it?"

    "Not once we get the facilities runnin'. It'll be a long-haul cargo run, a pipeline operation. We won't hafta undercut Selene's price; we'll just offer a million times more fusion fuels than Selene can dig up."

    The man mumbled to himself, unconvinced.

    Pancho looked back to O'Banian, but before the chairwoman could say anything, she went on, "One more thing. If we don't do this, Humphries Space Systems will."

    Humphries shot up from his chair and pointed an accusing finger at Pancho. "That's a deliberate insult!"

    "That's the truth and you know it!" Pancho fired back.

    The board room erupted with angry voices.

    O'Banian banged on the table, hard. "Quiet! All of you."

    "Do I still have the floor?" Pancho asked, once the commotion calmed down. Humphries was glaring at her from across the table.

    O'Banian threw an irritated look at Pancho. "As long as you refrain from personal attacks on other board members," she answered stiffly.

    "Okay," said Pancho. "But it seems to me like we got a problem here. Mr. Humphries here is in a position to block new ideas and then take 'em back to his own corporation and run with 'em."

    "You're accusing me of unethical behavior!" Humphries barked.

    "Damn right," said Pancho.

    "Wait! Quiet!" O'Banian demanded. "I will not have this meeting break down into a personal quarrel."

    The oldest member of the board, a frail-looking gentleman who hardly ever said a word, spoke up. "It seems to me," he said in a whispery voice, "that we do indeed have a conflict of interest here."

    "That's nonsense," Humphries snapped.

    "I'm afraid that the point has to be considered," O'Banian said. She tried to make it as mild and noncommittal as possible, but she was not going to let this point pass without a full discussion. She deliberately kept her eyes away from Pancho, afraid that her gratitude would show.

    The discussion wrangled on for nearly two hours. Each board member demanded to have his or her say, whether or not the same sentiment had already been expressed by someone else. O'Banian sat patiently through it all, watching their egos on parade, trying to figure out how she could bring this to a vote. Throw Humphries off the board? Gladly. But there weren't enough votes for that. The best she could hope for was to pull his fangs.

    Humphries was no fool. He too listened to the board members' repetitious ramblings, clearly impatient, obviously calculating his odds. By the time it was his turn to speak in his own defense, he had come to a decision.

    Rising to his feet, he said slowly, calmly, "I'm not going to dignify the accusation that Ms. Lane made by trying to defend myself against it. I think the facts speak for themselves—"

    "They sure do," Pancho muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear.

    Humphries kept his temper, barely. "Therefore," he continued, "I will withdraw my opposition to this Jupiter concept."

    O'Banian realized she had been holding her breath. She let it out with a gush, surprised at how displeased she felt. She had hoped that Humphries would do the gentlemanly thing and resign from the board.

    "But let me tell you this," Humphries added, with an upraised finger. "When the costs mount up and the whole idea collapses around our heads, don't say I didn't warn you."

    O'Banian took another breath, then said, "Thank you, Martin, on behalf of the entire board."

    But Humphries's clique on the board still opposed the Jupiter project. The best they would agree to was to allow Pancho to seek a partner that would share at least one quarter of the project's costs. Failing that, the board would not allow the program to be started.

    "A partner?" Pancho groused. O'Banian threw her a sharp warning look. If Pancho complained openly that no one would join Astro in such a partnership, it merely proved Humphries's point that the idea was impractically far-fetched.

    "I think you might open up a dialogue with some of the major utilities corporations," O'Banian suggested. "After all, they have the most to gain from an assured supply of fusion fuels."

    "Yeah," Pancho mumbled. "Right."

    As the meeting broke up and the board members made their way out of the conference room, muttering and chattering to one another, Humphries came up to O'Banian.

    "Are you satisfied?" he asked, in a low, confidential voice.

    "I'm sorry it had to come to this, Martin," she replied.

    "Yes, I can see how sorry you are." He glanced across the room, to where Pancho was talking to the old red-faced man as they filed out of the room. "Clever work, using Pancho as your stalking horse."

    O'Banian was genuinely shocked. "Me? Using...?"

    "It's all right," Humphries said, smiling thinly. "I expect sneak attacks now and then. It's all part of the game."

    "But, Martin, I had no idea—"

    "No, of course you didn't. Well, go ahead with this Jupiter nonsense, if you can find some idiot foolish enough to go along with you. Once it flops I'll be able to use it to get you off the board. And that damned grease monkey, too."

WALTZING MATILDA

    "What spooks me," George was saying, "is how the fookin' bastard knew where our antennas were."

    He and Nodon were taking off their spacesuits, dog-tired after a five-hour EVA. They had patched the laser-punched holes in the propellant tanks, but most of the hydrogen and helium had already leaked away. Their communication antennas, even the backups, were slagged and useless.

    "He must have had complete specs on this ship," Nodon said, as he lifted off the torso of his hard-shell suit and placed it carefully on its rack. "Every detail."

    "Every fookin' detail," George agreed. He sat on the tiny bench in front of the suit racks, filling it so completely that Nodon sat on the deck to start removing his boots. George felt too weary even to bend over and pull his boots off.

    Piece by piece they finished unsuiting at last, then made their way to the galley. George mused aloud, "Y'know, somebody must've given him the specs for this ship."

    "Yes," Nodon agreed, trailing along behind him. The passageway was too narrow for them to proceed side by side.

    "But who? This is a piece of private property, its specs aren't public knowledge. You can't look 'em up in a fookin' net site."

    Nodon scratched his lean, bristly chin, then suggested, "Could he have access to the manufacturer's records?"

    "Or to the maintenance files at Ceres, maybe," George muttered.

    "Yes, that is possible."

    "Either way," said George, with growing conviction, "it has to be somebody in Humphries Space Systems. Their people do the maintenance on it."

    "Not Astro?"

    "Naw. HSS offered me a bargain price if I signed up for the maintenance contract."

    "Then it must be someone in HSS," Nodon agreed.

    "But why? Why did the bastard attack us?"

    "To invalidate the claim to the asteroid, certainly."

    George shook his head irritatedly. "There's millions of rocks in the Belt. And Humphries is the richest shrewdie in the fookin' solar system. What's he need a lousy asteroid claim for?"

    "Perhaps not him," Nodon said. "Perhaps someone in his corporation."

    "Yeah." George nodded. "Maybe."

    With a resigned shrug, Nodon said, "It is all academic, anyway."

    "Whatcha mean, mate?"

    Tapping a lean finger against the small wallscreen that displayed the galley's contents, Nodon pointed out, "We have enough food for only another twenty-two days. Perhaps as much as forty days, if we cut our daily ration to starvation level."

    George grunted at him. "No sense starvin' ourselves. We're gonna die anyway."

    CHAPTER 21

    Through the week-long trip on the Harper, Amanda sensed a strangeness in her husband, something odd, different, something she couldn't put her finger on. He seemed—not distant, exactly—certainly not distant: Lars spent almost the entire journey in bed with her, making love with a fierce intensity she had never known before. And yet, even in the midst of their passion there was something withdrawn about him; something that he was hiding from her. She had always been able to read his thoughts before: one look at the set of his jaw and she knew. He had never held anything back from her. But now his face was impassive, his expression guarded. His deepset blue eyes showed her nothing.

    It frightened Amanda to realize that Lars was keeping a secret from her. Perhaps more than one.

    Once they arrived back at their quarters on Ceres and began unpacking their travel bags, Amanda decided to confront the issue directly.

    "Lars, what's the matter?"

    He was stuffing a handful of socks and underwear into his bureau drawer. "The matter?" he asked, without looking up at her. "What do you mean?"

    "Something's on your mind and you're not sharing it with me." Straightening up, he came back toward her at the bed. "I'm thinking of everything that we have to do. The insurance, restocking the warehouse, getting Starpower back."

    Amanda sat on the bed, next to her opened bag. 'Yes, of course. And what else?"

    His eyes shifted away from her. "What else? Isn't that enough?"

    "There's something more, Lars. Something that's been bothering you since we left Selene."

    He looked down at her, then turned his attention to his travel bag again, started rummaging through it, muttering about his shaving kit.

    Amanda put her hand atop his, stopping him. "Lars, please tell me."

    He straightened up. "There are some things you shouldn't know, dear."

    "What?" She felt shocked. "What things?"

    He almost smiled. "If I told you, then you would know."

    "It's about Martin, isn't it? You've been this way ever since your meeting with him."

    Fuchs took a deep breath. She could see his chest expand and then deflate again. He pushed his bag aside and sat next to her on the bed.

    "All through our trip back here," he said, his voice heavy, low, "I've been trying to think of a way that we can stop him from gaining complete control of the Belt."

    "So that's it."

    He nodded, but she could see that there was still more. His eyes looked troubled, uncertain.

    "He wants that. He wants complete control of everyone and everything out here. He wants absolute power."

    Amanda blurted, "What of it? Lars, we don't have to fight against him. We can't! You're only one man. You can't stop him."

    "Someone has to do it."

    "But not you! Not us! We can cash in the insurance money and go back to Earth and forget about all this."

    With a slow shake of his head, Fuchs said, "Perhaps you can forget about it. I can't."

    "You mean you won't."

    "I can't."

    "Lars, you're obsessed with a foolish macho delusion. This isn't a battle between you and Martin. There's nothing to fight about! I love you. After all these years, don't you know that? Don't you believe it?"

    "It's gone beyond that," Fuchs said grimly.

    "Beyond ...?"

    "He's killed people. Friends of ours. Ripley. The men and women aboard the ships that have disappeared. He's a murderer."

    "But what can you do about it?"

    "I can fight."

    "Fight?" Amanda felt truly frightened now. "How? With what?"

    He held up his thick-fingered hands and slowly clenched them into fists. "With my bare hands, if I have to."

    "Lars, that's crazy! Insane!"

    He snapped, "Don't you think I know it? Don't you think it horrifies me down to the bottom of my soul? I'm a civilized man. I'm not a Neanderthal."

    "Then why . . . ?"

    "Because I must. Because there's an anger in me, a fury that won't let go of me. I hate him! I hate his smug certainty. I hate the idea that he can push a button and men are murdered millions of kilometers away while he sits in his elegant mansion and dines on pheasant. And fantasizes about you!"

    Amanda's heart sank. I'm the cause of all this, she realized all over again. I've turned this sweet, loving man into a raging monster.

    "I'd like to smash his face in," Fuchs growled. "Kill him just as he's killed so many others."

    "The way you killed that man in the Pub," she heard herself say.

    He looked as if she had slapped him in the face.

    Shocked at her own words, Amanda said, "Oh, Lars, I didn't mean—"

    "You're right," he snapped. "Absolutely right. If I could kill Humphries like that, I'd do it. In a hot second."

    She reached up and stroked his cheek as gently, soothingly as she could. "Lars, darling, please—all you're going to accomplish is getting yourself killed."

    He pushed her hand away. "Don't you think I'm already marked for murder? He told me he would have me killed. You're a dead man, Fuchs. Those were his exact words."

    Amanda closed her eyes. There was nothing she could do. She knew that her husband was going to fight, and there was nothing she could do to stop him. She knew he would get himself killed. Worse, she saw that he was turning into a killer himself. He was becoming a stranger, a man she didn't know, didn't recognize. That frightened her.

"And to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?" asked Carlos Vertientes.

    He's a handsome devil, Pancho thought. Aristocratic Castilian features. Good cheekbones. Neat little salt-and-pepper beard. He really looks like a professor oughtta, not like the slobs and creeps back in Texas.

    She was strolling along the Ramblas in Barcelona with the head of the university's plasma dynamics department, the tall, distinguished physicist who had helped Lyall Duncan build the fusion propulsion system that now powered most of the spacecraft operating beyond the Moon's orbit. Vertientes looked truly elegant in a dove-gray three-piece suit. Pancho was wearing the olive green coveralls she had traveled in.

    Barcelona was still a vibrant city, despite the rising sea level and greenhouse warming and displacement of so many millions of refugees. The Ramblas was still the crowded, bustling, noisy boulevard where everyone went for a stroll, a sampling of tapas and good Rioja wine, a chance to see and be seen. Pancho liked it far better than sitting in an office, even though the crowd was so thick that at times they had to elbow their way past clusters of people who were walking too slowly. Pancho preferred the chatting, strolling crowd to an office that might be bugged.

    "Your university's a shareholder in Astro Corporation," Pancho said, in answer to his question.

    Vertientes's finely-arched brows rose slightly. "We are part of a global consortium of universities that invests in many major corporations."

    He was slightly taller than Pancho, and slim as a Toledo blade. She felt good walking alongside him. With a nod, she replied, "Yup. That's what I found out when I started lookin' up Astro's stockholders."

    He smiled dazzlingly. "Have you come to Barcelona to sell more stock?"

    "No, no," Pancho said, laughing with him. "But I do have a proposition for you—and your consortium."

    "And what might that be?" he asked, taking her arm to steer her past a knot of Asian tourists posing for a street photographer.

    "How'd you like to set up a research station in orbit around Jupiter? Astro would foot three-quarters of the cost, maybe more if we can jiggle the books a little."

    Vertientes's brows rose even higher. "A research station at Jupiter? You mean a manned station?"

    "Crewed," Pancho corrected.

    He stopped and let the crowd flow around them. "You are suggesting that the consortium could establish a manned—and womanned—station in Jupiter orbit at one-quarter of the actual cost?"

    "Maybe less," Pancho said.

    He pursed his lips. Then, "Let's find a cantina where we can sit down and discuss this."

    "Suits me," said Pancho, with a happy grin. waltzing matilda

    George looked sourly at the screen's display.

    "Four hundred and eighty-three days?" he asked. He was sitting in the command pilot's chair, on the bridge; Nodon sat beside him.

    Nodon seemed apologetic. "That is what the navigation program shows. We are on a long elliptical trajectory that will swing back to the vicinity of Ceres in four hundred and eighty-three days."

    "How close to Ceres?"

    Nodon tapped at the keyboard. "Seventy thousand kilometers, plus or minus three thousand."

    George scratched at his beard. "Close enough to contact 'em with our suit radios, just about."

    "Perhaps," said Nodon. "If we were still alive by then."

    "We'd be pretty skinny."

    "We would be dead."

    "So," George asked, "what alternatives do we have?" Nodon said, "I have gone through all the possibilities. We have enough propellant remaining for only a short burst, nowhere nearly long enough to cut our transit time back to Ceres to anything useful."

    "But the thruster's bunged up, useless."

    "Perhaps we could repair it."

    "Besides, if we use the propellant for thrust we won't have anything left for the power generator. No power for life support. lights out."

    "No," Nodon corrected. "I have reserved enough of the remaining propellant to keep the power generator running. We are okay there. We won't run short of electrical power."

    "That's something," George huffed. "When our corpses arrive back in Ceres space the fookin' ship'll be well lit."

    "Perhaps we can repair the rocket thruster," Nodon repeated.

    George scratched at his beard again. It itched as if some uninvited guests had made their home in it. "I'm too fookin' tired to go out again and look at the thruster. Gotta get some shut-eye first."

    Nodding his agreement, Nodon added, "And a meal."

    Surveying the depleted list on the galley inventory screen, George muttered, "Such as it is."

    CHAPTER 22

    Amanda looked up from her screen and smiled as Fuchs entered their one-room apartment. He did not smile back at her. He had spent the morning inspecting the ruins of Helvetia's warehouse. The fire had turned the rock-walled chamber into an oven, melting what it did not burn outright. Before it consumed all the oxygen in the cave and died out, it reduced all of Fuchs's stock, all that he had worked for, all that he had planned and hoped for, to nothing but ashes and twisted stumps of melted metal. If the airtight hatches hadn't held, the fire would easily have spread down the tunnels and killed everyone in Ceres.

    Fuchs trembled with rage at the thought. The murdering vermin didn't worry about that. They didn't care. So everyone in Ceres dies, what is that to Humphries? What does it matter to him, so long as he gets his way and removes the thorn in his side?

    I am that thorn, Fuchs told himself. I am only a little inconvenience, a minor nuisance in his grandiose plans for conquest.

    Thinking of the blackened, ruined warehouse, Fuchs said to himself, This thorn in your side will go deeper into your flesh, Humphries. I will infect you, I will inflame you until you feel the same kind of pain that you've inflicted on so many others. I swear it!

    Yet by the time he trod back to his home, coughing in the dust stirred up by his strides, he felt more weary than angry, wondering how he had come to travel down this path, why this weight of vengeance had fallen onto his shoulders. It's not vengeance, he snarled inwardly. It's justice. Someone has to stand for justice; Humphries can't be allowed to take everything he wants without being accountable to anyone.

    Then he slid back the door to his quarters and saw Amanda's beautiful, radiant smile. And the anger surged back in full fury. Humphries wants her, too, Fuchs reminded himself. The only way he'll get Amanda is over my dead body.

    Amanda got up from her desk and came to him. He took her in his arms, but instead of kissing him, she rubbed her fingers against his cheek.

    "You have a smudge on your face," she said, still smiling. "Like a little boy who's been out playing in the streets."

    "Soot from the warehouse," he said bleakly.

    She pecked him on the lips, then said, "I have some good news."

    "Yes?"

    "The insurance money was deposited in Helvetia's account this morning. We can get started again without borrowing from Pancho."

    "How much?"

    Amanda's smile faded a fraction. "Just a tad less than half of what we applied for. About forty-eight percent of our actual loss."

    "Forty-eight percent," he muttered, heading for the lav.

    "It's more hard cash than we had when we started Helvetia, darling."

    He knew she was trying to cheer him. "Yes, that's true, isn't it?" he said as he washed his face. His hands were grimy with soot, too, he saw.

    He let the dryer blow over his face, noisy and rattling, remembering the luxury of having actual cloth towels at the hotel in Selene. We could do that here, Fuchs told himself. Vacuum clean them on the surface just as they do at Selene. It would save us electrical power, if we could keep the dust from up on the surface out of the laundry.

    "Any word from Starpower?" he asked as he stepped back into the main room.

    "She's on the way in," Amanda said. "She'll be here when the lease is up, at the end of the month."

    "Good."

    Amanda's expression turned grave. "Lars, do you think it's a good idea for you to take Starpower out? Can't you hire a crew and stay here?"

    "Crews cost money," he said. "And we'd have to share whatever we find with the crew. I can handle the ship by myself."

    "But you'll be alone...."

    He knew what she meant. Ships had disappeared out in the Belt. And he was marked for murder by Humphries.

    "I'll be all right," he said. "They won't know where I'm going."

    Amanda shook her head. "Lars, all they have to do is tap into the IAA's net and they'll see your tracking beacon. They'll know exactly where you are."

    He almost smiled. "Not if the tracking beacon is coming from a drone that I release a day or so after I've left Ceres."

    She looked totally surprised. "But that would be a violation of IAA regulations!"

    "Yes, it would. It would also make my life much safer."

The work of cleaning up the charred mess of his warehouse took several days. It was hard to find men or women to do the menial labor; they demanded the same level of pay they could get working someone's computer systems or crewing one of the prospecting ships. So Fuchs hired all four of the teenagers on Ceres. They were eager to have something to do outside of their school hours, happy to be away from their lesson screens, happier still to be earning spendable money. Still, Fuchs did most of the labor himself, since the kids could only work a couple of hours each day.

    After several days, though, the four youngsters failed to show up for work. Fuchs phoned each of them and got a variety of lame excuses.

    "My parents don't want me working."

    "I got too much studying to do."

    Only one of them hinted at the truth. "My father got an e-message that said he could lose his job if he let me work for you."

    Fuchs didn't have to ask who the father worked for. He knew: Humphries Space Systems.

    So he labored alone in the warehouse cave, finally clearing out the last of the charred debris. Then he started putting together new shelving out of discarded scraps of metal from the maintenance bays.

    One evening, as he scuffed wearily along the dusty tunnel after a long day of putting up his new shelving, Fuchs was accosted by two men wearing HSS coveralls.

    "You're Lars Fuchs, aren't you?" said the taller of the pair. He was young, not much more than a teenager himself: his dirty-blond hair was cropped close to his skull, and his coverall sleeves were rolled up past his elbows. Fuchs saw tattoos on both his forearms.

    "I am," Fuchs answered, without slowing down.

    They fell in step with him, one on either side. The shorter of the two was still a couple of centimeters taller than Fuchs, with the chunky build of a weightlifter. His hair was long and dark, his face swarthy.

    "I've got a piece of friendly advice for you," said the taller one. "Take your insurance money and leave Ceres."

    Still shuffling along the tunnel, Fuchs said, "You seem to know something about my business."

    "Just get out of here, before there's trouble," the other one said. His accent sounded Latino.

    Fuchs stopped and looked them up and down. "Trouble?" he asked. "The only trouble that happens here will be trouble that you start."

    The taller one shrugged. "Doesn't matter who starts it. What matters is, who's still standing when it's over."

    "Thank you," said Fuchs. "Your words will be useful evidence."

    "Evidence?" They both looked startled.

    "Do you think I'm a fool?" Fuchs said sharply. "I know what you're up to. I'm wearing a transmitter that is sending every word you say to IAA headquarters in Geneva. If anything happens to me, you two have already been voiceprinted."

    With that, Fuchs turned on his heel and strode away from the two toughs, leaving them dumbfounded and uncertain. Fuchs walked carefully, deliberately, stirring up as little dust as possible. He didn't want them to think he was running away from them; he also didn't want them to see how his legs were shaking. Above all, he didn't want them to figure out that his transmitter was a total bluff, invented on the spot to allow him to get away from them.

    By the time he got home, he was still trembling, but now it was with anger. Amanda flashed a welcoming smile at him from the computer desk. Fuchs could see from the wallscreen that she was ordering inventory to stock the warehouse. Most of the machinery and electronic gear she ordered came from Astro Corporation. Now, he saw, she was dealing with foodstuffs and clothing, which came from other companies. He went to wash up as she stared wistfully at the latest Earthside fashions.

    By the time he came back into the room, she was finished with the computer. She slid her arms around his neck and kissed him warmly.

    "What would you like for dinner?" she asked. "I just ordered a shipment of seafood from Selene and I'm famished."

    "Anything will do," he temporized as he disengaged from her and sat at the computer desk.

    Amanda went to the freezer as she asked, "Will you be ready by the time the supplies start arriving?"

    Working the computer, his eyes on the wallscreen display, Fuchs barely nodded. "I'll be ready," he muttered.

    Amanda saw that he was studying the specifications for handheld lasers.

    Frowning slightly, she said, "That looks like the laser that that Buchanan fellow killed Ripley with."

    "It is," Fuchs said. "And he tried to kill me with it, too."

    "I've already ordered six of them, with an option for another half-dozen when they're sold."

    "I'm thinking of ordering one for myself," said Fuchs.

    "For Starpower?"

    He looked up at her. His face was grim. "For myself," he said. "As a sidearm."

    CHAPTER 23

    Starpower swung lazily in the dark star-choked sky above Ceres. Strange, Fuchs noted as he climbed aboard the shuttlecraft, that the sky still seems so black despite all those stars. Other suns, he thought, billions of them blazing out their light for eons. Yet here on the rubble-heap surface of Ceres the world seemed dark, shadowy with menace.

    Shaking his head inside the fishbowl helmet, Fuchs clambered up the ladder and ducked through the shuttlecraft's hatch. No sense taking off the suit until I'm inside Starpower, he told himself. The shuttle flight would take mere minutes to lift him from the asteroid's surface to his waiting ship.

    The shuttle's hab module was a bubble of glassteel. Two other prospectors were already aboard, waiting to be transferred to their spacecraft. Fuchs said a perfunctory hello to them through his suit radio.

    "Hey, Lars," one of them asked, "what are you gonna do about the habitat?"

    "Yeah," chimed in the other one. "We put up good money to build it. When's it going to be finished so we can move in?"

    Fuchs could see their faces through their helmets. They weren't being accusative or even impatient. They looked more curious than anything else.

    He forced a weak smile for them. "I haven't had a chance to recruit a new project engineer, someone to replace Ripley."

    "Oh. Yeah. Too bad about the Ripper."

    "You did a good thing, Lars. That sonofabitch murdered the Ripper in cold blood."

    Fuchs nodded his acknowledgment of their praise. The voice of the IAA controller told them the shuttlecraft would lift off in ten seconds. The computer counted off the time. The three spacesuited men stood in the hab module; there were no seats, nothing except a tee-shaped podium that held the ship's controls, which weren't needed for this simple flight, and foot loops in the deck to hold them down in microgravity.

    Liftoff was little more than a gentle nudge, but the craft leaped away from Ceres's pitted, rock-strewn surface fast enough to make Fuchs's stomach lurch. Before he could swallow down the bile in his throat, they were in zero-g. Fuchs had never enjoyed weightlessness, but he put up with it as the IAA controller remotely steered the shuttle to the orbiting ship of the other two men before swinging almost completely around the asteroid to catch up with Starpower.

    Fuchs thought about hiring a replacement for Ripley. The funding for the habitat was adequate, barely. He had put the task on Amanda's list of action items. She'll have to do it, Fuchs said to himself. She'll have to use her judgment; I'll be busy doing other things.

    Other things. He cringed inwardly when he thought of the angry words he had flung at Humphries: I've studied military history.... I know how to fight. How pathetic! So what are you going to do, go out and shoot up Humphries spacecraft? Kill his employees? What will that accomplish, except getting you arrested eventually, or killed? You think too much, Lars Fuchs. You are quick to anger, but then your conscience frustrates you.

    He had thought long and hard about searching out HSS vessels and destroying them. Hurt Humphries the way he's hurt me. But he knew he couldn't do it.

    After all his bold words, all his blazing fury, the best he could think of was to find an asteroid, put in a claim for it, and then wait for Humphries's hired killers to come after him. Then he'd have the evidence he needed to make the IAA take official action against Humphries.

    If he lived through the ordeal.

    Once the shuttle made rendezvous with Starpower and docked at the spacecraft's main airlock, Fuchs entered his ship and began squirming out of the spacesuit, grateful for the feeling of gravity that the ship's spin imparted. The bold avenger, he sneered at himself. Going out to offer yourself as a sacrificial victim in an effort to bring Humphries down. A lamb trying to trap a tiger.

    As he entered the bridge, still grumbling to himself, the yellow message waiting signal was blinking on the communications screen.

    Amanda, he knew. Sure enough, the instant he called up the comm message, her lovely face filled the screen.

    But she looked troubled, distraught.

    "Lars, it's George Ambrose. His ship's gone missing. All communications abruptly shut off several days ago. The IAA isn't even getting telemetry. They're afraid he's dead."

    "George?" Fuchs gaped at his wife's image. "They've killed George?"

    "It looks that way," said Amanda.

Amanda stared at her husband's face on the wallscreen in their quarters. Grim as death, he looked.

    "They killed George," he repeated.

    She wanted to say, No, it must have been an accident. But the words would not leave her lips.

    "He had George killed," Fuchs muttered. "Murdered."

    "There's nothing we can do about it," Amanda heard herself say. It sounded more like a plea than a statement, even to her own ears.

    "Isn't there?" he growled.

    "Lars, please . . . don't do anything . . . dangerous," she begged.

    He slowly shook his head. "Just being alive is dangerous," he said.

    Dorik Harbin studied the navigation screen as he sat alone on the bridge of Shanidar. The blinking orange cursor that showed his ship's position was exactly on the thin blue curve representing his programmed approach to the supply vessel.

    Harbin had been cruising through the Belt for more than two months, totally alone except for the narcotics and virtual reality chips that provided his only entertainment. A good combination, he thought. The drugs enhanced the electronic illusion, allowed him to fall asleep without dreaming of the faces of the dead, without hearing their screams.

    His ship ran in silence; no tracking beacon or telemetry signals betrayed his presence in space. His orders had been to find certain prospectors and miners and eliminate them. This he had done with considerable efficiency. Now, his supplies low, he was making rendezvous with a Humphries supply vessel. He would get new orders, he knew, while Shanidar was being restocked with food and propellant.

    I'll have them flush my water tanks, too, and refill them, Harbin thought idly as he approached the vessel. After a couple of months recycled water begins to taste suspiciously like piss.

    He linked with the supply vessel and stayed only long enough for the replenishment to be completed. He never left his own ship, except for one brief visit to the private cabin of the supply vessel's captain. She handed him a sealed packet that Harbin immediately tucked into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit.

    "Must you leave so soon?" the captain asked. She was in her thirties, Harbin judged, not really pretty but attractive in a feline, self-assured way. "We have all sorts of, um . . . amenities aboard my ship."