The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 41

Diane Verwoerd was in bed with Dorik Harbin when her phone buzzed and the wallscreen began blinking with priority message in bright yellow letters.

She disentangled herself from him and sat up. “It’s almost two,” he grumbled. “Aren’t you ever off-duty?”

But Diane was already staring at the frightened face of her caller and listening to his breathless, almost incoherent words. Then the screen showed a man hanging by the neck, eyes bulging, tongue protruding from his mouth like an obscene wad of flesh. “Great god,” said Harbin.

Verwoerd slipped out of bed and began to get dressed. “I’ll have to tell Martin about this personally. This isn’t the kind of news you relay by phone.”

She found Humphries still awake and alone in the big mansion’s game room.

“We have troubles,” she said as she entered the room. He was bent over the pool table, cue in hand. Humphries had spent many long hours learning how to shoot pool on the Moon. The one-sixth gravity only subtly affected the way the balls rolled or caromed. A visitor could play a few rounds and think nothing was different from Earth. That’s when Humphries would offer a friendly wager on the next game.

“Troubles?” he said, intent on his shot. He made it; the balls clicked and one of the colored ones rolled to a corner pocket and dropped neatly in. Only then did Humphries straighten up and ask, “What troubles?”

“Fuchs raided the warehouse and killed one of the men there. Hanged him.”

Humphries’s eyes widened. “Hanged him? By the neck?”

“The others have quit,” Verwoerd went on. “They want no part of this fight.”

He snorted disdainfully. “Cowardly little shits.”

“They were hired to bully people. They never thought that Fuchs would fight back. Not like this.”

“I suppose they expect me to pay for their transport back to Earth,” Humphries groused.

“There’s more.”

He turned and stacked his cue in its rack. “Well? What else?”

“Fuchs has stolen an Astro ship, the Lubbock Lights. He’s left—”

“How the hell could he steal a ship?” Humphries demanded angrily.

Verwoerd kept the pool table between them. “According to the captain—”

“The same limp spaghetti that allowed Fuchs to commandeer his ship on the way in to Ceres?”

“The same man,” Verwoerd replied. “He reported to the IAA that a half-dozen Asians boarded the ship under the pretense of loading ores. They were armed and took control of the ship. Then Fuchs came up from Ceres with another Oriental, apparently the man who was with him when he was here for the hearing. They packed the captain and regular crew into the shuttlecraft and sent them back down to Ceres.”

“Son of a bitch,” Humphries said fervently.

“By the time the Peacekeepers arrived, Fuchs was gone.”

“In one of Pancho’s ships.” He grinned. “Serves her right.”

Verwoerd pursed her lips, weighing the dangers of antagonizing him further against the pleasures of yanking his chain a little bit. “If possession is nine-tenths of the law,” she said slowly, “then it’s mostly his ship now, not Astro’s.”

He glared at her, fuming. She kept her expression noncommittal. A smile now could set off a tantrum, she knew.

He stood in angry silence for several long moments, face flushed, gray eyes blazing. Then, “So those pansies you hired to clean out Fuchs want to quit, do they?”

“Actually, Grigor hired them,” Verwoerd said. “And, yes, they want out. Fuchs made them watch while he hanged their leader.”

“And Amanda? She went with him?”

With a shake of her head, Verwoerd answered, “No, she’s still on Ceres. Apparently Fuchs’s people took back most of the items that were looted from their warehouse.”

“He left her on Ceres? Alone?”

“He hanged the man because he made some crack about her. Nobody’s going to go near her, believe me.”

“I don’t want anybody to go near her,” Humphries snapped. “I want her left strictly alone. I’ve given orders about that!”

“No one’s harmed her. No one’s threatened her.”

“Until this asshole opened his big mouth in front of Fuchs.”

“And he strung him up like a common criminal.”

Humphries leaned both hands on the rim of the pool table and hung his head. Whether he was overwhelmed with sorrow or anger or the burden of bad news, Verwoerd could not tell.

At last he lifted his head and said crisply, “We need someone to go after Fuchs. Someone who isn’t afraid of a fight.”

“But nobody knows where he’s gone,” Verwoerd said. “It’s an awfully big area, out there in the Belt. He’s not sending out a tracking beacon. He’s not even sending telemetry data. The IAA can’t find him.”

“He’ll run out of fuel sooner or later,” Humphries said. “He’ll have to come back to Ceres.”

“Maybe,” she said, uncertainly.

Pointing a finger at her as if he were pointing a pistol.

Humphries said, “I want somebody out there who can find him. And kill him. I want somebody who knows how to fight and isn’t afraid of being shot at.”

“A professional soldier,” Verwoerd said.

Humphries smiled thinly. “Yes. Like your boy-toy.”

She had known from the moment she’d heard about Fuchs’s actions that it would come down to this. “I agree,” she said, keeping her voice even, emotionless. “Harbin would be perfect for this task. But…” She let the word dangle in the air between them.

“But?” Humphries snapped. “But what?”

“He’ll want to be paid a lot more than he’s been getting.”

He stared at her for a moment. “Are you representing him now? Are you his goddamned agent?”

She made herself smile at him. “Let’s just say that I know him a lot better than I did a few weeks ago.”