The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 36

Straining to keep a satisfied smile off her face, Diane Verwoerd led the squad of Humphries employees out of the hearing room, leaving Fuchs and his two friends standing there in helpless, confused frustration.

Out in the corridor she made polite small talk with Douglas Stavenger and Pancho Lane as they left, looking disappointed at the outcome of the hearing. Verwoerd knew that Pancho was Humphries’s chief opponent on the board of Astro Corporation, and that Humphries would not be satisfied until he had full control of Astro. Which means, she told herself, that once we’ve finally gotten rid of Fuchs, Pancho is next.

She hurried to the power stairs that led down to her office. Once there, alone, she put through a tight-beam laser call to Dorik Harbin. He should be arriving at Ceres in another hour or so, she knew.

It took nearly twenty minutes before his face appeared on her wallscreen: smolderingly handsome without the beard, his chin firm and hard, his eyes icy blue, intent.

“I know you can’t reply to this before you land,” she said to Harbin’s image. “But I wanted to wish you good luck and tell you that… well, I’m counting the minutes until you get back here to me.”

She took a deliberate breath, then added, “I’ve made arrangements with the HSS people at Ceres. The drugs you need will be there, waiting for you.”

Verwoerd cut the connection. The screen went dark. Only then did she smile. Keep him personally bound to you, she told herself. Use his weaknesses; use his strengths. He’s going to be very valuable, especially if you ever have to protect yourself from Martin.

She turned and studied her reflection in the mirror on the far wall of her office. Delilah, she said to herself, and laughed.

“So whattawe do now?” George asked as he, Fuchs and Nodon made their way down the power stairs.

Fuchs shook his head miserably. “I don’t know. This hearing was a farce. The IAA has given Humphries a free hand to do whatever he wants.”

“Looks that way,” George agreed, scratching at his beard.

Nodon said nothing.

“Amanda,” Fuchs said. “I must tell her what’s happened. I must tell her that I’ve failed.”

Harbin looked over the eight men that had been assigned to his command. A ragtag bunch, at best. Roughnecks, hoodlums, petty thugs. Not one of them had a scrap of combat training or true military discipline. But then, he remembered, this isn’t really a military operation. It’s a simple theft, nothing more.

He had spent the high-g flight from Selene studying the plan and background information Diane had given him, but he had expected reliable men to work under him, not a gaggle of hooligans. Steeling himself to his task, Harbin silently repeated the mantra that the workman does not blame his tools, and the warrior must fight with what he has at hand. The first task is to instill these morons with some purpose other than cracking skulls and making money.

Harbin assumed that none of the louts assigned to him gave a damn about what had happened to the hotheaded Tracy Buchanan, but the doctrine that his old sergeant had drilled into him asserted that it was beneficial to a unit’s cohesion and teamwork to build group solidarity in any way possible.

So he said to them, “You remember what that man Fuchs did to Trace Buchanan?” It was purely a rhetorical question.

They nodded unenthusiastically. Buchanan had been a bully and a fool; he did not have friends, only associates who were afraid to make him angry. None of them mourned the late Mr. Buchanan.

But Harbin felt he had to whip up some enthusiasm among his eight underlings. He had brought them together in the cramped little office at the HSS warehouse: eight men who had been flown to Ceres specifically because they could follow orders and weren’t strangers to mayhem.

“Okay,” Harbin told them. “Tonight we even the score. Tonight we hit Fuchs’s warehouse and clean it out once and for all.”

“I got a better idea,” said Santorini.

Harbin felt the old anger simmering inside him. Santorini had the intelligence of a baboon. “What is it?”

“You wanna get even with Fuchs, why don’t we do his wife?”

The others all grinned at the thought.

Are these the best that Diane could hire? Harbin asked himself. Or did somebody in her office merely scrape a few barroom floors and send these specimens here to Ceres?

“Our orders are to leave her strictly alone,” he said sharply. “Those orders come from the top. Don’t even go near her. Understand? Anybody who even looks in her direction will be in deep shit. Is that clear?”

“Somebody up there likes her,” one of the lunks said.

“Somebody up there’s got the hots for her,” agreed the goon next to him.

Harbin snarled, “That somebody will fry your testicles and then feed them to you in slices if you don’t follow orders. Our job is to hit the warehouse. We go in, we do the job, and then we leave. If we do it right you can all go back to Earth with a big fat bonus in our accounts.”

“Plenty of slash back home.”

“Yeah, ’specially if you got money.”

Harbin let them think about how they were going to enjoy their bonuses. Get them away from thinking about Fuchs’s wife. Diane had been very specific about that. She is not to be harmed or even threatened. Not in any way, shape, or form.

The warehouse was something else.

“Where the hell have you been?” Humphries snapped.

Verwoerd allowed herself a small smile. “I took a long lunch. A victory celebration.”

“The whole damned afternoon?”

Humphries was sitting in the mansion’s dining room, alone at one end of the long rosewood table, the remains of his dinner before him. He did not invite his assistant to sit down with him.

“I expected you here as soon as the hearing ended.”

“You got the news without me,” she said coolly. “In fact, you knew how the hearing would turn out before it ever started, didn’t you?”

His frown deepened. “You’re pretty damned sassy this evening.”

“Fuchs is on his way back to Ceres,” she said. “By the time he gets there he won’t have a warehouse. His company will be broke, he’ll be ruined, and you’ll be king of the Asteroid Belt. What more do you want?”

She knew what he wanted. He wanted Amanda Cunningham Fuchs. For that, though, it won’t be enough to ruin Fuchs, she thought. We’ll have to kill the man.

Humphries’s frown dissolved slowly, replaced by a sly smile. “So,” he asked, “what are you doing for sex now that you’ve sent your soldier boy off to Ceres?”

Verwoerd tried to keep the surprise off her face. The sneaking bastard has been keeping me under surveillance!

“You bugged his quarters,” she said coldly.

Grinning, Humphries said, “Would you like to see a replay?”

It took her a moment to get her emotions under control.

Finally she managed to say, “He’s an interesting man. He quotes Persian poetry.”

“In bed.”

Still standing, Verwoerd stared down at him for a long moment, then conceded the point with a curt nod, thinking, He probably has my apartment bugged, too! Does he know about Bandung Associates?

But Humphries seemed more amused than annoyed. “I have a proposition for you.”

Guardedly, she asked, “What kind of a proposition?”

“I want you to bear my child.”

She could feel her eyes go round. “What?”

Laughing, Humphries leaned back in the cushioned dining room chair and said, “You won’t go to bed with me, the least you can do is carry my child for me.”

She pulled out the chair closest to her and sank slowly into it.

“What are you saying?” she asked.

Almost offhandedly, Humphries said, “I’ve decided to have a child. A son. My medical experts are picking the best possible egg cells for me to inseminate. We’re going to clone me. My son will be as close to me as modern biological science can make him.”

“Human cloning is outlawed,” Verwoerd murmured.

“In most nations on Earth,” Humphries conceded. “But even on Earth there are places where a man of means can have himself cloned. And here in Selene, well—why not?”

Another little Martin Humphries, Verwoerd thought. But she said nothing.

“The cloning procedure is still a bit dicey,” he went on, as casually as a man discussing the stock market, “but my people should be able to produce some viable fertilized eggs and get a few women to carry them.”

“Then why do you want me?”

He waved a hand. “You’re a very good physical specimen; you ought to make a good home for my clone. Besides, it’s rather poetic, don’t you think? You won’t have sex with me, but you’ll bear my son. That boy-toy of yours isn’t the only one with a poetic soul.”

“I see,” Verwoerd said, feeling slightly numbed by his cheerful arrogance.

“What I need is several wombs to carry the zygotes to term. I’ve decided you’d be perfect for the job. Young, healthy, and all that.”

“Me.”

“I’ve gone through your medical records and your family history,” Humphries said. “You might say that I know you inside out.”

She was not amused.

“You carry my son to term,” he said, his smile fading, his tone more commanding. “You’ll get a very sizable bonus. I’ll even transfer a couple more of my asteroids to your Bandung Associates.”

The pit of her stomach went hollow.

“Did you think you could embezzle three very profitable asteroids from me without my finding out about it?” Humphries asked, grinning with satisfaction.

Verwoerd knew it was hopeless. She felt glad that she had Dorik on her side.