The Aftermath gt-16 Read online

  “Chrysalis II,” Elverda murmured.

  “Yes,” said Dorn. “You’ll be safe there, and you can find passage back to Earth or Selene. Without me.”

  “You’ll return here,” she said.

  He gave no answer. None was required; she knew his need.

  Abruptly, Elverda turned in the command chair and began to peck at the communications console.

  “What are you doing?” Dorn asked.

  “I’m calling the news media. There’s a woman in Selene, Douglas Stavenger’s wife, she’s a famous news anchor.”

  “No,” said Dorn.

  “Why not? Once the world knows what we’re trying to accomplish, not even Martin Humphries would dare to harm us.”

  “You’d tell them you’re with Dorik Harbin, the monster?”

  “I’ll tell them I’m with Dorn, the priest, the man who has dedicated his life to recovering the bodies of those killed in the wars.”

  “Humphries knows who I am,” said Dorn. “He has whole battalions of public relations experts. Your story will be swamped by his. Vigilantes will come out here to find me. The hunt will become a news event. Our deaths will be called executions.”

  She took her hand away from the keyboard. “You want to die, don’t you?”

  “I deserve to die,” he said.

  * * *

  “I need a ship,” said Victor Zacharias.

  Big George Ambrose leaned back in his swivel chair and nodded resignedly. “You’ve been tellin’ me that for nearly three fookin’ years now.”

  The two men were sitting in Big George’s office in the half-finished Chrysalis II habitat. It was hardly an imposing room, no larger than most of the office spaces aboard the habitat. George’s massive desk and intimidating figure made it seem even smaller. The walls were blank at the moment: smart screens that could display anything in the habitat’s computer files or show views of the outside, where teams of engineers and robots were working to complete the structure.

  Victor’s jet black ringlets were neatly trimmed, but in the three years of his enforced stay at Ceres he had grown a thickly curled beard. He wore the maroon coveralls that identified him as a member of the habitat’s technical staff. Big George still looked like a shaggy mountain man with his untamed mane of brick red hair and wild beard. His coveralls were light blue, rumpled, frayed at the cuffs from long wear.

  With the icy calmness of a man who was trying hard to control his anger, Victor said, “My family is out there somewhere and I’ve got to find them.”

  George shook his bushy head. “Look, Vic, you’ve gotta face facts. They’re dead by now.”

  “No,” Victor insisted. “The ship had plenty of provisions and—”

  “Why haven’t we heard from them, then? In all this time? It’s been more’n three years, hasn’t it?”

  Victor glared at his boss. With that dark beard, he would have looked fiercely intimidating to anyone else. But George Ambrose knew better. By the time the task of finding all the bodies from the massacre of the original Chrysalis was finished, Big George had learned that Victor Zacharias had been an architect, a builder. As head of the rock rats’ governing council, George had persuaded the International Astronautical Authority to fund the building of a new habitat in orbit around Ceres. The IAA got support for the project from Selene and the major corporations involved in space industries.

  The new habitat—Chrysalis II—would not be a ramshackle Tinkertoy assemblage of old and disused spacecraft. George Ambrose wanted a structure that was designed and constructed specifically to be a home for the rock rats. And he wanted Victor Zacharias to head the team that built it.

  Victor reluctantly agreed to do the job, but only if Big George would provide him with a ship afterward.

  “Face it, Vic,” George said from behind his desk. “They’re gone.”

  “You promised me a ship,” Victor said again, relentless.

  “When the job’s done. It’s only half finished.”

  “The design is complete,” Victor insisted. “The major structural work is finished. You don’t need me for the rest of it. A couple of trained chimpanzees could finish the job.”

  “Nearest trained chimps are Earthside, Vic. But you’re here and you’re gonna stay here until the fookin’ job’s finished. And that’s it.” George slapped his heavy hands on the desktop and rose to his feet, an imposing red-bearded giant of a man who would brook no further discussion.

  Victor got out of his chair, his eyes smoldering. But he said nothing further. He knew that this conversation was finished. Silently he walked to the door.

  “By th’ way,” Big George called to him, “Pleiades is due in later t’day. Cheena Madagascar’ll be lookin’ you up.”

  Over his shoulder, Victor grumbled, “Thanks for the good news.”

  ATTACK SHIP VIKING:

  CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS

  It’s good to be the captain, Kao Yuan thought as he lay stretched out in his double-sized bunk. His communications officer, the lissome young brunette with sloe eyes and surprising athletic abilities, was in his shower stall, singing to herself. Off-key, Yuan realized. But what the hell. She’s got other talents.

  Tamara, he pronounced silently, rolling her name around in his mind. Tamara Vishinsky. In bed, she had told Yuan that she’d studied for ballet as a child. The training serves her well, he thought.

  HSS headquarters had added her to his crew at the last moment, flying her all the way out from the Moon to reach Viking before Yuan started his hunt for the renegade. She came with high qualifications in communications systems. And in sexual gymnastics, Yuan thought, grinning inwardly.

  He badly wanted to turn over and sleep for another hour. I deserve the rest, he told himself. But Viking and its accompanying two ships were fast approaching the area where the sensor had reported Dorik Harbin’s vessel to be. We could be in battle today, he knew.

  Reluctantly, Yuan rolled out of bed and padded to the steamy shower stall. Opening the door, he said sternly, “This is your captain speaking. Now hear this.”

  The comm officer reached out with both arms and pulled him into the hot, sudsy stall. He slid his arms around her and pressed close. We’ve got plenty of time, he thought. Plenty of time.

  * * *

  Elverda paced the short passageway between Hunter’s bridge and the hatch that led into the main airlock. Despite all the rejuvenation therapies, you are still an old, old woman, she reminded herself. You must exercise your legs. After a lifetime in low-gravity environments the ship’s acceleration was punishing her, even though Dorn kept it well below one g.

  He was up in the bridge, sitting in the command chair as impassively as a sculpture of steel. Is he fleeing from the assassins coming after us, Elverda wondered, or rushing to find the bodies of the slain? Some of both, she concluded. We seldom do anything for merely one reason.

  And you, she asked herself, what are you fleeing from? What are you rushing to?

  Death, she answered. The answer to both questions is the same.

  Her creative career had been finished many long years ago. Decades ago. She was going through the motions of teaching at Selene University when Martin Humphries swept her out to the Asteroid Belt, agog to see the artifact that a rock rat family had accidentally discovered.

  It has to be the work of alien intelligence, Elverda told herself. No human could have made it. Yet it related to humans in a way that stirred the soul, viscerally, beyond the five senses. The artwork—for Elverda was convinced it was a work of superhuman artistry—bored directly into one’s mind, into the depths of the unconscious intellect that lay hidden and disguised beneath the conscious personality.

  When Elverda had seen the artifact she had been ready for death, eager to end the pain and loneliness of her life. Then she had looked into its glowing depths and saw herself, saw the mother who had loved her so completely, saw the baby she had never borne, the path of her life from its beginning and through all the twists of fate and p
ride and remorse.

  She was ready to face life again after seeing the artifact. She had the strength to stand next to Dorn, the self-mutilated ex-mercenary who had tried to atone for the thousands he had slaughtered, and failed.

  Martin Humphries had seen the artifact and it nearly killed him. She saw in her mind’s eye once again how Humphries staggered out of the crypt that housed the artifact: his handsome face twisted and sweating, his eyes wild with fear; how he curled into a fetal ball, crying, spittle dribbling from his lips, babbling frantically, helplessly.

  It must have shown him his own life, Elverda thought, shown him how despicable he’s been, shown him all the people he’s destroyed. Now Humphries has sent assassins to kill us, because we saw him in his moment of pain and weakness. He has learned nothing from the artifact. Nothing.

  She wondered what had happened to the artifact. There had never been a report about it in the news media: Humphries had prevented that. But the rumor floated through the cold emptiness of the Belt; not even Martin Humphries could keep the news of an alien artifact completely suppressed. The tale spread to the Moon and to Earth, she was certain, where most people took it as gossip from the rock rats, a fable from the frontier, a legend without basis in fact.

  Strange that the scientists of the IAA and the universities haven’t spoken out, Elverda thought. Has Humphries silenced them? Money can buy almost anything, she knew, but would all the scientists in the solar system remain silent?

  Then a new thought struck her. Perhaps he’s destroyed the artifact! Blown up the little asteroid in which it was found, wiped it out of existence. That would be just like Humphries: destroy what he feels is threatening him. Just as he is determined to destroy us.

  “Radar contact.” Dorn’s voice issued from the intercom speaker set into the passage’s overhead, as flatly unemotional as a computer’s synthesized announcement.

  He’s human, Elverda reminded herself. Despite the machinery that keeps him alive, he’s a human being. He has feelings, emotions, just as I do. We wouldn’t be out here trying to recover the dead if he didn’t.

  Yet that machinery is failing. One day he’ll be as dead as the corpses we’re trying to retrieve.

  She hurried along the passageway to see what he’d found.

  * * *

  Freshly showered and dressed in a set of coveralls that bore his captain’s stripes on its cuffs, Kao Yuan slid into the command chair and nodded to the man sitting at the communications console.

  “Give me a channel for all three ships,” he commanded.

  A green light in his chair’s armrest winked on.

  “This is the captain speaking,” Yuan said, trying to make his voice firm, authoritative.

  “We are about to enter battle against an experienced and ruthless opponent. I have every confidence that if each of us performs his assigned task properly we will destroy our adversary.

  “The Asteroid Wars have been over for some years now,” Yuan went on, “but the mission we’re on is a piece of unfinished business. The enemy we seek is the man who wiped out the Chrysalis habitat. He slaughtered more than a thousand defenseless men, women and children. Our mission is to bring justice to him and anyone aboard his ship assisting him. Our goal is to avenge those thousand people he murdered.”

  The others on the bridge were staring at him. Keeping his face solemn, Yuan added, “We have been sent on this mission by Mr. Martin Humphries himself. He has a personal interest in seeing that the last remnant of the old wars is erased once and for all. Once we’ve fulfilled our mission and returned to Earth, each of us will receive a very generous bonus—but our real reward will be the knowledge that we have paid a rightful and fitting retribution to the mass murderer, Dorik Harbin.”

  Yuan looked around the bridge. All his officers’ eyes were on him. He half expected applause but they simply gazed at him, waiting for his next words.

  So he said, “All ships, battle stations.”

  HABITAT CHRYSALIS II:

  OBSERVATION BLISTER

  Victor Zacharias stood alone in the observation blister and looked out at the distant, uncaring pinpoints of light. The stars gazed back at him, cold and silent. Jupiter glowed in the darkness; Victor thought he could make out two sparks of moons near its ruddy, flattened disk. Off to his left a blue light gleamed: Earth.

  Curving away on either side of the glassteel blister was the massive wheel shape of the unfinished habitat. Victor knew every girder, every panel, every weld. To one side of him the wheel was nothing more than unfinished ribs of metal, like the fossil bones of a giant dinosaur. He saw flashes of welders’ lasers flickering in the darkness out there. Construction crews worked twenty-four/seven under the booming roar of Big George’s demands.

  But the construction of Chrysalis II was not urgent to Victor. His family was, and he chafed under the inflexible restraints that Ambrose had bound upon him. It’s not Big George, Victor told himself. It’s the war, it’s that murdering sonofabitch who wiped out the original Chrysalis, it’s the laws of physics, it’s fate. Victor felt the weight of the universe trying to bow him down, bend his knees.

  He squared his shoulders and stood straighter. “I’ll find you,” he muttered. “Through hell and time and space I’ll find you out there.”

  Ceres was a pitted ball of rock, close enough, it seemed, to reach out and touch. None of the other asteroids were bright enough to be seen but Victor knew they were swinging in their ever-shifting orbits out there in the cold darkness. And among them was a ship, his ship, Syracuse, and the family he wanted to save.

  Are they already dead? He asked himself for the thousandth time. And he found the same answer as always: No. They’re alive. The ship may be crippled but they’re alive. They have provisions enough to last for years. Pauline will keep them going. She’s strong, brave, resourceful.

  It all depends on Theo, he realized. He’s the one with the technical smarts and know-how. But he’s only fifteen! Then Victor realized, no, he must be nearly nineteen by now. A young man, with the responsibility of keeping the ship’s systems functioning. Pauline can help him, but Theo’s the one I was training to run the ship.

  And Angela, my little angel. What of her? She should be here at Ceres finding a husband, starting her own family, starting her own life. Instead she’s marooned on a crippled ship drifting through the Belt.

  I’ve got to find them, Victor told himself again. I’ve got to get a ship, one way or the other, and find them.

  He heard the soft hiss of the hatch sliding open, a tinkle of bracelets clinking together.

  “I thought you’d be here.”

  Pulled out of his thoughts, Victor turned to see the darkly clad figure of Cheena Madagascar step through the hatch into the dimly lit glassteel blister.

  “It’s like standing in empty space, isn’t it,” she half-whispered once the hatch slid shut behind her and the lights dimmed again. “Like a god walking among the stars.”

  He snorted disdainfully. “Take a good look at Ceres, pitted and cracked and ugly as sin.”

  Cheena chuckled in the shadows. “Very romantic, Victor.”

  “I hate this place.”

  She came up and stood beside him. He could see her gold-flecked eyes shining in the shadows of the diffused lighting.

  “I like the beard,” she said. “Makes you look… dangerous.”

  He didn’t know what to say, so he merely shrugged his shoulders.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” she said softly.

  Despite himself, he smiled at her. “It’s best to avoid temptation.”

  “Really? You didn’t avoid me when you were on Pleiades.”

  “You were the ship’s captain. I had to follow orders.”

  “You seemed to enjoy the duty.”

  He shrugged. “I’m only flesh and blood.”

  “What a compliment.”

  “Cheena, please, what happened aboard Pleiades was very good, but—”

  “No buts,” she whispe
red, sliding her arms around his neck.

  “This isn’t right, Cheena. I have a wife. She’s alive, I know she is.”

  “Even if she is, my reluctant lover, she’s far, far away and I’m right here, in your arms.”

  He hadn’t realized that he’d wrapped his arms around her waist. She was pressing close to him. He could smell the clean tang of her shampoo, feel her breathing, the beating of her heart.

  “Life belongs to the living, Victor,” Cheena murmured.

  “She’s not dead,” he insisted, in a whisper.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she said, with a teasing smile in her voice. “I’ll let you use my ship for six months. If we haven’t found them in six months you’ll give it up and stay with me.”

  “Six months…”

  “You’ll be mine until we find them. If we don’t, it wouldn’t be so terrible to stay with me, would it?”

  Before he could decide rationally he was clasping her to him in a fiercely passionate kiss. Six months, said a voice in his mind. Six months. You can search for them. You can find them.

  Then the voice added, If you can get away from Big George.

  SMELTER SHIP HUNTER:

  MAIN AIRLOCK

  “It’s definitely a body,” Dorn said. He tugged on his nanofabric space suit and began sealing its front.

  Elverda nodded as he pulled up the hood and inflated it into a bubble of a helmet. She had never gone outside the ship, never taken a space walk. What did the technical people call it? She asked herself. EVA. Extravehicular activity. How pretentious! How bloodless! Spacewalk is much more descriptive.

  They had flown more than eighty thousand kilometers from the coordinates where the old battle had been fought, radars probing in every direction. Twice they had found chunks of debris. This was the first corpse they had located.

  Elverda remembered the other bodies they had found from other battles. Desiccated, like ancient mummies. Hollow-eyed, shriveled, skin blackened by the hard ultraviolet radiation of space. Many of the dead were in space suits: they had gone into battle as fully protected as possible. Still it did them no good. They died when their ships were destroyed. Elverda shuddered at the thought of drifting through space alive, knowing that there would be no rescue, knowing that within hours or days or perhaps weeks the air in the suit would give out or you would starve or die groaning of thirst.