He thought of Diane Verwoerd. No woman had ever gained a hold on his emotions, but Diane was unlike anyone he had ever known before. He had had sex with many women, but Diane was far more than a bedmate. Intelligent, understanding, and as sharply driven to get ahead in this world as Harbin was himself. She knew more about the intrigues and intricacies of the corporate world than Harbin had ever guessed at. She would be a fine partner in life, a woman who could stand beside him, take her share of the burden and then some. And the sex was good, fantastic, better than any drug.
Do I love her? Harbin asked himself. He did not understand what love truly was. Yet he knew that he wanted Diane for himself, she was his key to a better world, she could raise him above this endless circle of mercenary killing that was his life.
He also knew that he would never have her until he found this elusive madman Fuchs and killed him.
“She’s carrying a heavy load of ores,” the crewman noticed.
Harbin turned his attention to the approaching ore freighter in the display screen on his bridge. Damaged in a fight with Fuchs, her captain had said. But he could see no signs of damage. Maybe they’re hidden by that pile of rocks she’s carrying, he thought. More likely the frightened rabbit raced away from the first sign of trouble and scurried here for protection.
Harbin’s beard had grown thick again over the months he had been chasing Fuchs across the Belt. He scratched at it idly as a new thought crossed his mind. How did this ore freighter know that we are building a base here? It’s supposed to be a secret. If every passing tugboat knows about it, Fuchs will hear of it sooner or later.
What difference? Harbin asked himself. Even if he knows about it, what can he do? One man in one ship, against a growing army. Sooner or later we’ll find him and destroy him. It’s only a matter of time. And then I can return to Diane.
As he watched the display screen, he noticed that the approaching freighter didn’t seem to be braking into an orbit. Instead, it was accelerating. Rushing toward the asteroid.
“It’s going to crash!” Harbin shouted.
Maneuvering a spinning spacecraft with pinpoint accuracy was beyond the competence of any of Fuchs’s people. Or of Nielsen’s crew. But to the ship’s computer it was child’s play: simple Newtonian mechanics, premised on the first law of motion.
Fuchs felt the ship’s slight acceleration as Durant followed the programmed course. Standing spread-legged on the bridge, he saw the rugged, pitted surface of the asteroid rushing closer and closer. He knew they were accelerating at a mere fraction of a g, but as he stared at the screen it seemed as if the asteroid was leaping up toward them. Will we crash? he asked himself. What of it? came his own mind’s answer. If we die that’s the end of it.
But as Durant accelerated silently toward the asteroid, its maneuvering jets fired briefly and the clamps holding nearly fifteen hundred thousand tons of asteroidal ores let go of their burden. The ship jinked slightly and slipped over the curve of the asteroid’s massive dark rim, accelerating toward escape velocity. The jettisoned ores spread into the vacuum of space like a ponderous rock slide, pouring down slowly toward the crater where the HSS base was being built.
In that vacuum, a body in motion stays in motion unless some outside force deflects it. In Vesta’s minuscule gravity, the rocks actually weighed next to nothing. But their mass was still nearly fifteen hundred thousand tons. They fell gently, leisurely, toward the asteroid’s surface, a torrent of death moving with the languid tumbling motion of a nightmare.
“Sir? Incoming call from Shanidar.” The woman’s voice in Giap’s earphones sounded strained, almost frightened.
Without waiting for him to tell her, she connected Harbin. “That ship is on a collision course with—no, wait. It’s released its cargo!”
It was difficult to look up from inside the spacesuit helmet, but when Giap twisted his head back and slightly sideways, all he could see was a sky full of immense dark blobs blotting out the stars.
He heard Harbin’s tense, strained voice, “Break us out of orbit!”
Then the ground jumped so hard he was blasted completely off his feet and went reeling, tumbling into an all-engulfing billow of black dust.
Aboard Shanidar, Harbin watched in horror as the rocks dropped ever-so-softly toward the construction site in the crater. The ore freighter was masked by them and heading over the curve of the asteroid’s bulk. The men and women down in that crater were doomed, condemned to inexorable death.
“Break us out of orbit!” he shouted to the woman in the pilot’s chair.
“Refueling isn’t completed!”
“Forget the mother-humping refueling!” he yelled. Pounding the intercom key on the console before him, he called to the crew, “Action stations! Arm the lasers! Move!”
But he knew it was already too late.
With nothing to impede their motion the landslide of rocks glided silently through empty space until they smashed into the surface of Vesta. The first one missed the buildings but blasted into the rim of the crater, throwing up a shower of rocky debris that spread leisurely across the barren landscape. The next one obliterated several of the metal huts dug halfway into the crater floor. Then more and more of them pounded in, raising so much dust and debris that Harbin could no longer see the crater at all. The dust cloud rose and drifted, a lingering shroud of destruction and death, slowly enveloping the entire asteroid, even reaching out toward his ship. Harbin unconsciously expected it to form a mushroom shape, as nuclear bombs did on Earth. Instead the cloud simply grew wider and darker, growing as if it fed on the asteroid’s inner core. Harbin realized it would hang over the asteroid for days, perhaps weeks, a dark pall of death.
By the time Shanidar had broken out of orbit, the ore freighter was long gone. The damnable dust cloud even interfered with Harbin’s attempts to pick it up on a long-range radar sweep.
CHAPTER 47
“He what?” Martin Humphries screamed.
“He wiped out the base on Vesta,” Diane Verwoerd repeated. “All fifty-two people on the surface were killed.” Humphries sank back in his desk chair. He had been on the phone negotiating a deal to sell high-grade asteroidal nickel-iron to the government of China when she had burst into his office, tight-lipped and pale with shock. Seeing the expression on her face, Humphries had fobbed the Chinese negotiator off onto one of his underlings in Beijing as politely as possible, then cut the phone link and asked her what was the matter.
“Wiped out the entire base?” he asked, his voice gone hollow. “One of our ships in orbit around Vesta got caught in the dust cloud and—”
“What dust cloud?” Humphries demanded irritably. Verwoerd sank into one of the chairs in front of his desk and explained as much as she knew of Fuchs’s attack. Humphries had never seen her look so stunned, so upset. It intrigued him.
“Fifty-two people killed,” she murmured, almost as if talking to herself. “And the crew of the ship that was damaged by the dust cloud…four of them died when their life support system broke down.”
Humphries calmed himself, then asked, “And Fuchs got away?”
“Yes,” she said. “Harbin tried to give chase, but he was too low on fuel. He had to turn back.”
“So he’s still out there, hatching more mischief.”
“Mischief?” She looked squarely at him. “This is more than mischief, Martin. This is a massacre.”
He nodded, almost smiled. “That’s right. That’s exactly what it was. A deliberate massacre.”