The Sam Gunn Omnibus (116 page)

“What’s fer yew?” she asked. She looked like she was into weightlifting.
The gray sweatshirt she was wearing had the sleeves cut off; plenty of muscle
in her arms. The expression on her squarish face was no-nonsense, unsmiling.

“West Tennessee,” said Sam. “Right?”

The bartender looked
surprised. “Huntsville, ‘Bama.”

“Heart of the Tennessee
Valley,” Sam said. “I come from the blue grass country, myself.”

Which was a complete
lie. Sam was born in either Nevada or Pennsylvania, according to which of his dossiers
you read. Or maybe Luzon, in the Philippines.

Well, in less than six minutes
Sam’s got the bartender laughing and trading redneck jokes with him. Her name
was Belinda. I just sat beside him and watched the master at work. He could
charm the devil out of hell, Sam could.

Sam ordered Tennessee
corn mash for both of us. While he chatted up the bartender, though, I noticed
that the place was emptying out. The three guys at the bar got up and left
first, one by one. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the guys in the
booths heading for the door. No big rush, but within a few minutes they had all
walked out. On tiptoes.

I said nothing, but soon
enough Sam realized we were alone.

“What happened?” he
asked Belinda. “We chased everybody out?”

She shook her head. “Rock
rats worry about strangers. They prob’ly think you’re maybe a tax assessor or a
safety inspector from the IAA.”

Sam laughed. “Me? From
the IAA? Hell, no. I’m Sam Gunn. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”

“No! Sam Gunn? You
couldn’t be!”

“That’s me,” Sam said,
with his Huckleberry Finn grin.

“You were the first guy
out here in the Belt,” said Belinda, real admiration glowing in her eyes.

“Yep. Captured a
nickel-iron asteroid and towed her back to Earth orbit.”

“Pittsburgh. I heard
about it. Took you a couple of years, didn’t it?”

Sam nodded. He was
enjoying the adulation.

“That was a long time
ago,” Belinda said. “I thought you’d be a lot older.”

“I am.”

She laughed, a hearty
roar that made the glasses on the back bar rattle. “Rejuve therapy, right?”

“Why not?”

Just then a red-haired mountain
strode into the bar. One of the biggest men I’ve ever seen. He didn’t look fat,
either: just
big,
with a shaggy mane of brick-red hair and a shaggier beard to match.

He walked right up to
us.

“You’re Sam Gunn.” It
wasn’t a question.

“Right,” said Sam.
Swiveling toward me, he added, “And this young fellow here is Garret G.
Garrison III.”

“The third, huh?” the
redhead huffed at me. “What happened to the first two?”

“Hung for stealin’
horses,” I lied, putting on my thickest Wild West accent.

Belinda laughed at that.
The redhead simply huffed.

“You’re George Ambrose,
right?” Sam asked.

“Big George, that’s me.”

“The mayor of this fair
community,” Sam added.

“They elected me th’
fookin’ chief,” Big George said, almost belligerently. “Now, whattaya want to
see me about?”

“About Lars Fuchs.”

George’s eyes went cold
and narrow. Belinda backed away from us and went down the bar, suddenly busy
with the glassware.

“What about Lars Fuchs?”
George asked.

“I want to meet him. I’ve
got a business proposition for him.”

George folded his beefy
arms across his massive chest. “Fuchs is an exile. Hasn’t been anywhere near
Ceres for dog’s years. Hell, this fookin’ habitat wasn’t even finished when we
tossed him out. We were still livin’ down inside th’ rock.”

Sam rested his elbows on
the bar and smiled disarmingly at Big George. “Well, I’ve got a business
proposition for Fuchs and I need to talk to him.”

“What kind of a business
proposition?”

With a, perfectly
straight face Sam answered, “I’m thinking of starting a tourist service here in
the Belt. You know, visit Ceres, see a mining operation at work on one of the
asteroids, go out in a suit and chip some go
l
d
or diamonds to bring back home. That kind of thing.”

George said nothing, but
I could see the wheels turning behind that wild red mane of his.

“It could mean an influx
of money for your people,” Sam went on, in his best snake-oil spiel. “A hotel
here in orbit around Ceres, rich tourists flooding in. Lots of money.”

George unbent his arms,
but he still remained standing. “What’s all this got to do with Fuchs?”

“Shiploads full of rich
tourists might make a tempting target for a pirate.”

“Bullshit”

“You don’t think he’d
attack tour ships?”

“Lars wouldn’t do that.
He’s
not a fookin’
pirate. Not in that
sense, anyway.”

“I’d rather hear that
from him,” Sam said. “In fact, I’ve got to have his personal assurance before my
backers will invest in the scheme.”

George stared at Sam for
a long moment, deep suspicion written clearly on his face. “Nobody knows where
Lars is,” he said at last. “You might as well go back home. Nobody here’s gonna
give you any help.”

WE LEFT THE
bar with Big George glowering at our backs so
hard I could
feel the heat. Following the maps
on the wall screens in the passageways, we found the adjoining rooms tha
t I had booked for us.

“Now what?” I asked Sam
as I unpacked my travel bag.

“Now we wait.”

Sam had simply tossed
his bag on the bed of his room and barged through the
connecting door
into mine. We had packed for only a three-day
stay at Ceres, although we had more gear stowed in
Achernar.
Something had to happen pretty quick, I thought.

“Wait for what?” I asked.

“Developments.”

I put my carefully
folded clothes in a drawer, hung my extra pair of wrinkle-proof slacks in the
closet, and set up my toiletries in the lavatory. Sam made himself comfortable
in the room’s only chair, a recliner designed to look like an astronaut’s
couch. He cranked it down so far I thought he was going to take a nap.

Sitting on the bed, I told
him, “Sam I’ve got to call Judge Meyers.”

“Go right ahead,” he
said.

“What should I tell her?”

“Tell her we’ll be back
in time for the wedding.”

I doubted that.

TWO DAYS PASSED
without a word from anyone. Sam even tried to date
Belinda, he was getting so desperate, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with
him.

“They all know Fuchs,”
Sam said to me. “They like him and they’re protecting him.”

It was common knowledge
that Humphries had sworn to kill Fuchs, but Amanda had married Humphries on the
condition that he left Fuchs alone. Everybody in Ceres, from Belinda the
barmaid to the last rock rat,

thought that we were
working for Humphries, trying to find Fuchs and murder him. Or at least locate
him, so one of Humphries’s hired killers could knock him off. Fuchs was out
there in the Belt somewhere, cruising through that dark emptiness like some
Flying Dutchman, alone, taking a strangely measured kind of vengeance on
unmanned Humphries ships.

I had other fish to fry, though. I wanted to find out what was on the chip
that Amanda had given Sam. Her message to her ex-husband. What did she want to
tell him? Fuchs was a thorn in Humphries’s side; maybe only a small thorn, but
he drew blood, nonetheless. Humphries would pay a fortune for that message, and
I intended to sell it to him.

But I had to get it away from Sam first.

JUDGE MEYERS WAS
not happy with my equivocating reports to her. Definitely
not happy.

There’s no way to have a conversation in real time between Ceres and
Earth; the distance makes it impossible. It takes nearly half an hour for a message
to cross one way, even when the two bodies are at their closest. So I sent
reports to Judge Meyers and—usually within an hour—I’d get a response from her.

After my first report she had a wry grin on her face when she called back.
“Garrison, I know it’s about as easy to keep Sam in line as nailing tapioca to
a wall in zero-gee. But all the plans for the wedding are set; it’s going to be
the biggest social event of the year. You’ve got to make sure that he’s here. I’m
depending on you, Garrison.”

A day later, her smile had disappeared. “The wedding’s only a week from
now, Garrison,” she said after my second call to her. “I want that little
scoundrel at the altar!”

Third call, the next day: “I don’t care what he’s doing! Get him back
here! Now!”

That’s when Sam came up with his bright idea.

“Pack up your duds, Gar,” he announced brightly. “We’re going to take a
little spin around the Belt.”

I was too surprised to ask questions. In less than an hour we were back in
Achernar
and heading out from Ceres. Sam
had already filed a flight plan with the IAA controllers. As far as they were
concerned, Sam was going to visit three specific asteroids, which might be used
as tourist stops
,
if and when he
started his operation in the Belt. Of course, I knew that once we cleared Ceres
there was no one and nothing that could hold him to that plan.

“What are we doing?” I asked,
sitting in the right-hand seat of the cockpit. “Where are we going?”

“To meet Fuchs,” said
Sam.

“You’ve made contact
with him?”

“Nope,” Sam replied,
grinning as if he knew something nobody else knew. “But I’m willing to bet
somebody
has. Maybe Big George. Fuchs saved his
life once, did you know that?”

“But how—?”

“It’s simple,” Sam
answered before I could finish the question. “We let it be known that we want
to see Fuchs. Everybody says they don’t know where he is. We go out into the Belt,
away from everything, including snoops who might rat out Fuchs to Martin
Humphries. Somebody from Chrysalis calls Fuchs and tells him about us. Fuchs intercepts
our ship to see what I want. I give him Amanda’s message chip. QED.”

It made a certain amount
of sense. But I had my doubts.

“What if Fuchs just
blasts us?”

“Not his style. He’s
only attacked unmanned ships.”

“He wiped out an HSS
base on Vesta, didn’t he? Killed dozens.”

“That was during the war
between him and Humphries. Ancient history. He hasn’t attacked a crewed ship
since he’s been exiled.”

“But suppose—”

The communications
console pinged.

“Hah!” Sam gloated. “There
he is now.”

But the image that took
form on the comm screen wasn’t Lars Fuchs’s face. It was Jill Meyers’s.

She was beaming a smile
that could’ve lit up Selene City for a month. “Sam, I’ve got a marvelous idea.
I know you’re wrapped up in some kind of mysterious mission out there in the
Belt, and the wedding’s only a few days off
so ...”

She hesitated, like
somebody about to spring a big surprise. “So instead of you coming back
Earthside for the wedding, I’m bringing the wedding out to you! All the guests and
everything. In fact, I’m on the torch ship
Statendaam
right now! We break Earth orbit in about an hour. I’ll see you in five days,
Sam, and we can be married just as we planned!”

To say Sam was surprised
would be like saying Napoleon was disturbed by Waterloo. Or McKenzie was
inconvenienced when his spacecraft crashed into the Lunar Apennines. Or—well,
you get the idea.

Sam looked stunned, as
if he’d been poleaxed between the eyes. He just slumped in the pilot’s chair,
dazed, his eyes unfocused for several minutes.

“She can’t come out
here,” he muttered at last.

“She’s already on her
way,” I said.

“But she’ll ruin
everything. If she comes barging out here Fuchs’ll never come within a
light-year and a half of us.”

“How’re you going to
stop her?”

Sam thought about that
for all of a half-second. “I can’t stop her. But I don’t have to make it easy
for her to find me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Run silent, run deep.”
With a deft finger, Sam turned off the ship’s tracking beacon and telemetry
transmitter.

“Sam! The controllers at
Ceres will think we’ve been destroyed!”

He grinned wickedly. “Let
‘
em. If they don’t know where we are,
they can’t point Jill at us.”

“But Fuchs won’t know
where we are.”