The Sam Gunn Omnibus (118 page)

“She seemed very anxious to get this message to you, sir,” Sam wheedled. “She
hired us to come all the way out to the Belt to deliver it to you personally.”

He fell silent. I could feel my heart thumping against my ribs. Then Fuchs
snarled, “It seems more likely to me that you’re bait for a trap Humphries
wants to spring on me. My former wife hasn’t anything to say to me.”

“But—”

“No buts! I’m not going to let you set me up for an ambush.” I could
practically
feel
the suspicion in his
voice, his scowling face. And something more. Something really ugly. Hatred.
Hatred for Humphries and everything associated with Humphries. Including his
wife.

“I’m no Judas goat,” Sam snarled back. I was surprised at how incensed he
seemed to be. You can never tell, with Sam, but he seemed really teed off.

“I’m Sam Gunn, goddammit, not some sneaking decoy. I don’t take orders
from Martin Humphries or anybody else in the whole twirling solar system and if
you think ...”

While Sam was talking, I glanced at the search radar, to see if it had
locked onto Fuchs’s ship. Either his ship was super-stealthy or it was much
farther away than I had thought. He must be a damned good shot with that laser,
I realized.

Sam was jabbering, cajoling, talking a mile a minute, trying to get Fuchs
to trust him enough to let us deliver the chip to him.

Fuchs answered, “Don’t you think I know that the chip you’re carrying has
a homing beacon built into it? I take the chip and a dozen Humphries ships come
after me, following the signal the chip emits.”

“No, it’s not like that at all,” Sam pleaded. “She wants you to see this message.
She wouldn’t try to harm you.”

“She already has,” he snapped.

I began to wonder if maybe he wasn’t right. Was she working for her
present husband to trap her ex-husband? Had she turned against the man whose
life she had saved?

It couldn’t be, I thought, remembering how haunted, how frightened she had
looked. She couldn’t be a Judas to him; she had married Humphries to save Fuchs’s
life, from all that I’d heard.

Then a worse thought
popped into my head. If Sam gives the chip to Fuchs I’ll have nothing to offer
Humphries! All that money would fly out of my grasp!

I had tried to copy the
chip but it wouldn’t allow the ship’s computer to make a copy. Suddenly I was
on Fuchs’s side of the argument: Don’t take the chip! Don’t; come anywhere near
it!

Fate, as they say,
intervened.

The comm system pinged
again and suddenly the screen split. The other half showed Judge Meyers, all
smiles, obviously in a compartment aboard a spacecraft.

“Sam, we’re here!” she
said brightly. “At The Rememberer. It was so brilliant of you to pick the
sculpture for our wedding ceremony!”

“Who the hell is that?”
Fuchs roared.

For once in his life,
Sam actually looked embarrassed. “Um ... my, uh, fiancée,” he stumbled. “I’m
supposed to be getting married in two days.”

The expression on Fuchs’s
face was almost comical. Here he’s threatening to blow us into a cloud of
ionized gas and all of a sudden he’s got an impatient bride-to-be on the same
communications frequency.

“Married?” he bellowed.

“It’s a long story,”
said Sam, red-cheeked.

Fuchs glared and
glowered while Judge Meyers’s round freckled face looked puzzled. “Sam? Why don’t
you answer? I know where you are. If you don’t come out to The Rememberer I’m
going to bring the whole wedding party to you, minister and boys’ choir and
all.”

“I’m busy, Jill,” Sam
said.

“Boys’ choir?” Fuchs
ranted. “Minister?”

Not even Sam could carry
on two conversations at the same time, I thought. But I was wrong.

“Jill, I’m in the middle
of something,” he said, then immediately switched to Fuchs: “I can’t hang
around here; I’ve got to get to my wedding.”

“Who are you talking to?”
Judge Meyers asked.

“What wedding?” Fuchs
demanded. “Do you mean to tell me you’re getting married out here in the Belt?”

“That’s exactly what I mean
to tell you,” Sam replied to him.

“Tell who?” Judge Meyers
asked. “What’s going on, Sam?”

“Bah!” Fuchs snapped. “You’re
crazy! All of you!”

I saw a flash of light
out of the corner of my eye. Through the cockpit’s forward window I watched a
small, stiletto-slim spacecraft slowly emerge from the cloud of pebbles
surrounding the asteroid, plasma exhaust pulsing-from its thruster and a blood-red
pencil-beam of laser light probing out ahead of it.

Fuchs bellowed, “I knew it!” and let loose a string of curses that would make
an angel vomit.

Sam was swearing too. “Those sonsofbitches! They knew we’d be here and
they were just laying in wait in case Fuchs showed up.”

“I’ll get you for this, Gunn!” Fuchs howled.

“I didn’t know!” Sam yelled back.

Judge Meyers looked somewhere between puzzled and alarmed. “Sam, what’s
happening? What’s going on?”

The ambush craft was rising out of the rubble cloud that surrounded the
asteroid. I could see Fuchs’s ship through the window now because he was
shooting back at the ambusher, his own red pencil-beam from a spotting laser
lighting up the cloud of pebbles like a Christmas ornament.

“We’d better get out of here, Sam,” I suggested at the top of my lungs.

“How?” he snapped. “Fuchs took out the thruster.”

“You mean we’re stuck here?”

“Smack in the middle of their battle,” he answered, nodding. “And our
orbit’s taking us between the two of them.”

“Do something!” I screamed. “They’re both shooting at us!”

Sam dove for the hatch. “Get into your suit, Gar. Quick.”

I never suited up quicker. But it seemed to take hours. With our main
thruster shot away, dear old
Achernar
was
locked into its orbit around the asteroid. Fuchs and the ambusher were slugging
it out, maneuvering and firing at each other with us in the middle. I don’t
think they were deliberately trying to hit us, but they weren’t going out of
their way to avoid us, either. While I wriggled into my spacesuit and fumbled
through the checkout procedure
Achernar
lurched and quivered again and again.

“They’re slicing us to ribbons,” I said, trying to keep from babbling.

Sam was fully suited up; just the visor of his helmet was open. “You got
the chip on you?”

For an instant I thought I’d left it in the cockpit. I nearly panicked.
Then I remembered it was still in the waistband, of my shorts. At least I hoped
it was still there.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got it.”

Sam snapped his visor closed, then reached over to me and slammed mine
shut. With a gloved hand he motioned for me to follow him to the airlock.

“We’re going outside?” I squeaked. I was really scared. A guy could get
killed!

“You want to stay here while they take potshots at us?” Sam’s voice
crackled in my helmet earphones.

“But why are they shooting at us?” I asked. Actually, I was talking,
babbling really, because if I didn’t I probably would’ve started screeching
like a demented baboon.

“Fuchs thinks we led him into a trap,” Sam said, pushing me into the
airlock, “and the bastard who’s trying to bushwhack him doesn’t want any living
witnesses.”

He squeezed into the airlock with me, cycled it, and pushed me through the
outer hatch when it opened.

All of a sudden I was hanging in emptiness. My stomach heaved, my eyes
blurred. I mean there was nothing out there except a zillion stars but they
were so far away and I was falling, I could feel it, falling all the way to
infinity. I think I screamed. Or at least gasped like a drowning man.

“It’s okay, Gar,” Sam said, “I’ve got you.”

He grasped me by the wrist and, using the jetpack on his suit’s back,
towed me away from the riddled hulk of
Achernar.
We glided into the cloud of pebbles surrounding the asteroid. I could feel them
pinging off my suit’s hard shell; one of them banged into my visor, but it was
a fairly gentle collision, no damage—except to the back of my head: I flinched
so sharply that I whacked my head against the helmet hard enough to give me a
concussion, almost, despite the helmet’s padded interior.

Sam hunkered us down into the loose pile of rubble that was the main body
of the asteroid. “Safer here than in the ship,” he told me.

I burrowed into that beanbag as deeply as I could, scooping out pebbles
with both hands, digging like a terrified gopher on speed. I would’ve dug all
the way back to Earth if I could have.

Fuchs and the ambusher were still duking it out, with a spare laser blast
now and then hitting
Achernar
as it swung
slowly around the ‘roid. The ship looked like a shambles, big gouges torn
through its hull, chunks torn off and spinning lazily alongside its main
structure.

They hadn’t destroyed the radio, though. In my helmet earphones I could
hear Judge Meyers’s voice, harsh with static:

“Sam, if this is another scheme of yours ...”

Sam tried to explain to her what was happening, but I don’t think he got
through. She kept asking what was going on and then, after a while, her voice
cut off altogether.

Sam said to me, “Either she’s sore at me and she’s leaving the Belt, or
she’s worried about me and she’s coming here to see what’s happening.”

I hoped for the latter, of course. Our suits had air regenerators, I knew,
but they weren’t reliable for more than twenty-four hours, at best. From the
looks of poor old
Achernar,
we were going
to need rescuing and damned soon, too.

We still couldn’t really see Fuchs’s ship; it was either too far away in
that dark emptiness or he was jinking around too much for us to get a visual
fix on him. I saw flashes of light that might have been puffs from maneuvering
thrusters, or they might have been hits from the other guy’s laser. The
ambusher’s craft was close enough for us to make out, most of the time. He was
viffing and slewing this way and that, bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter
trying to avoid his opponent’s punches.

But then the stiletto flared into sudden brilliance, a flash so bright it
hurt my eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut and saw the afterimage burning against my
closed lids.

“Got a propellant tank,” Sam said, matter-of-factly. “Fuchs’ll close in
for the kill now.”

I opened my eyes again. The stiletto was deeply gashed along its rear
half, tumbling and spinning out of control. Gradually it pulled itself onto an
even keel, then turned slowly and began to head away from the asteroid. I could
see hot plasma streaming from one thruster nozzle; the other was dark and cold.

“He’s letting him get away,” Sam said, sounding surprised. “Fuchs is
letting him limp back to Ceres or wherever he came from.”

“Maybe Fuchs is too badly damaged himself to chase him down,” I said.

“Maybe.” Sam didn’t sound at all sure of that.

We waited for another hour, huddled inside our suits in the beanbag of an
asteroid. Finally Sam said, “Let’s get back to the ship and see what’s left of
her.”

There wasn’t much. The hull had been punctured in half a dozen places.
Propulsion was gone. Life support shot. Communications marginal.

We clumped to the cockpit. It was in tatters; the main window was shot
out, a long ugly scar from a laser burn right across the control panel. The
pilot’s chair was ripped, too. It was tough to sit in the bulky space suits,
and we were in zero gravity to boot. Sam just hovered a few centimeters above
his chair. I realized that my stomach had calmed down. I had adjusted to
zero-gee. After what we had just been through, zero-gee seemed downright
comfortable.

“We’ll have to live in
the suits,” Sam told me.

“How long can we last?”

“There are four extra
air regenerators in stores,” Sam said. “If they’re not damaged we can hold out
for another forty-eight, maybe sixty hours.”

“Time enough for
somebody to come and get us,” I said hopefully.

I could see his freckled
face bobbing up and down inside his helmet.
“Yep ...
provided anybody’s heard our
distress call.”

The emergency radio
beacon seemed to be functioning. I kept telling myself we’d be all right. Sam
seemed to feel that way; he was positively cheerful.

“You really think we’ll
be okay?” I asked him. “You’re not just trying to keep my hopes up?”

“We’ll be fine, Gar,” he
answered. “We’ll probably smell pretty ripe by the time we can get out of these
suits, but except for that I don’t see anything to worry about.”

Then he added, “Except...”

“Except?” I yelped. “Except
what?”

He grinned wickedly. “Except
that I’ll miss the wedding.” He made an exaggerated sigh. “Too bad.”