The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 38

“He’s what?” Hector Wilcox did not believe his ears.

Zar looked stunned as he repeated, “He’s taken over the Lubbock Lights. He’s accelerating at top speed to Ceres. Our flight controllers have ordered him to cease and desist, but he’s paying no attention to them.”

Wilcox sagged back in his desk chair. “By god, the man’s committed an act of piracy.”

“It would seem so,” Zar agreed cautiously. “According to our people on Ceres, someone broke into Fuchs’s warehouse and cleaned out everything. They murdered one of the people working there. A woman.”

“His wife?”

“No, an employee. But you can understand why Fuchs wants to reach Ceres as quickly as he can.”

“That doesn’t justify piracy,” Wilcox said sternly. “As soon as he arrives at Ceres, I want our people there to arrest him.”

Zar blinked at his boss. “They’re only flight controllers, not policemen.”

“I don’t care,” Wilcox said sternly. “I won’t have people flouting IAA regulations. This is a matter of principle!”

Diane Verwoerd had spent most of the morning combing her apartment for bugs. She found none, which worried her. She felt certain that Humphries had bugged her place; how else would he know what she was doing? Yet she could find no hidden microphones, no microcameras tucked in the ventilator grills or anywhere else.

Could Martin have been guessing about Bandung Associates? She had thought she’d covered her trail quite cleverly, but perhaps naming her dummy corporation after the city in which her mother had been born wasn’t so clever, after all.

Whatever, she decided. Martin knows that I’ve winkled him out of several choice asteroids and he’s willing to let that pass—if I carry his cloned baby for him.

She shuddered at the thought of having a foreign creature inserted into her womb. It’s like the horror vids about alien invaders we watched when we were kids, she thought. And she had heard dark, scary stories about women who carried cloned fetuses. It wasn’t like carrying a normal baby. The afterbirth bloated up so hugely that it could kill the woman during childbirth, they said.

But the rational part of her mind saw some possible advantages. Beyond the monetary rewards, this could put me in a position of some power with Martin Humphries, she told herself. The mother of his clone. That puts me in a rather special position. A very special position, actually. I might even gain a seat on his board of directors, if I play my cards well.

If I live through it, she thought, shuddering again.

Then she thought of Harbin. Beneath all that steely self-control was a boiling hot volcano, she had discovered. If I play him correctly, he’ll sit up and roll over and do any other tricks I ask him to perform. A good man to have at my side, especially if I have to deal with Martin after the baby is born.

The baby. She frowned at the thought, wondering, Should I tell Dorik about it? Eventually, I’ll have to. But not now. Not yet. He’s too possessive, too macho to accept the fact that I’ll be carrying someone else’s baby while I’m letting him make love to me. I’ll have to be very careful about the way I handle that little bit of news.

She walked idly through her apartment, thinking, planning, staring at the walls and ceilings as if she could make the electronic bugs appear just by sheer willpower. Martin’s snooping on me. She felt certain of it. He certainly got his jollies watching me do it with Dorik.

With a reluctant sigh she decided she would have to call in some expert help to sweep the apartment. The trouble is, she told herself, all the experts I know are HSS employees. Can I get them to do the job right?

Then she thought of an alternative. Doug Stavenger must know some experts among Selene’s permanent population. I’ll ask Stavenger to help me.

Both of the IAA flight controllers were waiting at the cave that served as a reception area at Ceres’s spaceport when Fuchs returned. He had left Lubbock Lights in orbit around the asteroid, turned the ship back to its captain, and ridden a shuttlecraft down to the surface. The two controllers left their posts in the cramped IAA control center and went to the reception area to meet him.

As Fuchs stepped out of the pressurized tunnel that connected the shuttlecraft to the bare rock cave, the senior controller, a thirtyish woman of red hair and considerable reputation among the men who frequented the Pub, cleared her throat nervously and said:

“Mr. Fuchs, the IAA wants you to turn yourself in to the authorities to face a charge of piracy.”

Fuchs ignored her and started for the tunnel that led to the underground living quarters. She glanced at her partner, a portly young man with a round face, high forehead, and long ponytail hanging halfway down his back. They both started after Fuchs.

He said, “Mr. Fuchs, please don’t make this difficult for us.”

Kicking up clouds of dark gray dust as he shuffled into the tunnel, Fuchs said, “I will make it very easy for you. Go away and leave me alone.”

“But, Mr. Fuchs—”

“I have no intention of turning myself in to you or anyone else. Leave me alone before you get hurt.”

They both stopped so short that swirling clouds of dust enveloped them to their knees. Fuchs continued shambling down the tunnel, heading for his quarters and his wife.

He was no longer the raging, bellowing puppet yanked this way and that by strings that Martin Humphries controlled. His fury was still there, but now it was glacially cold, calm, calculating. He had spent the hours in transit to Ceres calculating, planning, preparing. Now he knew exactly what he had to do.

There was no guard at his door. Hands trembling, Fuchs slid it open. And there was Amanda sitting at the work desk, her eyes wide with surprise.

“Lars! No one told me you had arrived!” She jumped out of her chair and threw her arms around his neck.

“You’re all right?” he asked, after kissing her. “No one has tried to harm you?”

“I’m fine, Lars,” she said. “And you?”

“I’ve been charged with piracy by the IAA. They probably want me to turn around and return to Selene for a trial.”

She nodded gravely. “Yes, they sent me a message about it. Lars, you didn’t need to take over the ship. I’m quite all right.”

Despite everything, he grinned at her. Feeling her in his arms, most of his fears dissolved. “Yes,” he breathed, “you’re more than all right.”

Amanda smiled back at him. “The door’s still open,” she pointed out.

He stepped away from her, but instead of closing the door, went to the desk. The wallscreen showed a form letter from their insurance carrier. Fuchs scanned it as far as the line telling them that their policy had been terminated, then blanked the screen.

“I’ve got to go to the warehouse,” he said. “Nodon will be waiting there for me.”

“Nodon?” Amanda asked. “George’s crewman?”

“Yes,” said Fuchs as he called up Helvetia’s personnel file. “He was with us at the farce of a hearing in Selene.”

“I know.”

Looking up at her, he asked, “Which of these people witnessed Inga’s murder?”

“Oscar Jiminez,” Amanda said, pulling up the room’s other chair to sit beside him.

“I must speak to him,” Fuchs said. He got up from his chair and went to the door, leaving Amanda sitting there alone.

Nodon was waiting for him at the warehouse. Feeling uneasy, irritable, Fuchs called Jiminez and two other Helvetia employees, both men, both young. When they all arrived at the warehouse’s little office area, the place felt crowded and suddenly warm from the press of their bodies. Jiminez, skinny and big-eyed, stood between the two other men.

“In a day or two,” Fuchs told them, “we’re going to the HSS warehouse and take back the material they stole from us.”

The men looked nervously at one another. “And we’re going to administer justice to the men who murdered Inga,” he added.

“They’ve gone,” Jiminez said, in a voice pitched high with tension.

“Gone?”

“The day after the raid on our warehouse,” said one of the older men. “Nine HSS employees left on one of their ships.”

“Where is it bound?” Fuchs demanded. “Selene?”

“We don’t know. Maybe it’s going to Earth.”

“We’ll never get them once they reach Earth,” Fuchs muttered.

“They brought in another bunch on the ship that took them away,” said the other man, a trim-looking welterweight with a military buzz cut and jewelry piercing his nose, both eyebrows and earlobes.

“I suppose they are guarding the HSS warehouse,” Fuchs said, glancing at Nodon, who remained silent, taking it all in.

The young man nodded.

“Very well, then,” Fuchs said. He took a deep breath. “This is what we’re going to do.”