“A crew pod means that the ship carries food,” he pointed out as he studied the image on the display screen.

“And medical supplies,” added Amarjagal.

“Both of which we could use,” said Nodon.

Fuchs shook his head ponderously. “It could be a trap.”

Neither of his crew replied. They glanced at each other but remained silent.

Fuchs wore a black pullover and shapeless black slacks, as usual. He was a short-limbed, barrel-chested little bear of a man, scowling with anger and implacable in his wrath. His broad, jowly face was etched with hatred, thin slash of a mouth set in a permanent glower, deepset eyes looking far beyond what the others saw. He looked like a badger, a wolverine, small but explosively dangerous.

For nearly a decade Lars Fuchs had been a pirate, an outcast, a renegade who cruised through the vast, silent emptiness of the Belt and preyed on ships owned by Humphries Space Systems.

Once he had considered himself the luckiest man in the solar system. A love-struck student riding the first crewed exploratory ship into the Asteroid Belt, he had actually married the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, Amanda Cunningham. But then he became ensnarled in the battle over the riches of the Belt, one man pitted against Martin Humphries, the wealthiest person off-Earth, and his Humphries Space Systems’ hired thugs. When the HSS mercenaries finally cornered him, Amanda begged Humphries to spare his life.

Humphries was merciful, in the cruelest manner imaginable. Fuchs was banished from Ceres, the only permanent settlement in the Belt, while Amanda divorced him and married Humphries. She was the price for Fuchs’s life. From that time on, Fuchs wandered through the vast dark emptiness of the Belt like a Flying Dutchman, never touching down at a human habitation, living as a rock rat, sometimes prospecting among the asteroids in the farthest reaches of the Belt and digging metal ores and minerals to sell to refinery ships.