The Aftermath gt-16 Read online

  “It’s not your fault, Thee,” Angie consoled. “It was the stupid designers. Why’d they have to put all the antennas on the same section of the hull? That was just plain stupid.”

  “They weren’t designing a man-of-war,” Pauline said. “They never expected an ore carrier to be attacked.”

  Fighting to hold back tears of frustration, Theo looked across the coffee table to his sister. “Maybe we could figure out some way to rig up an antenna, Angie.”

  “You think so?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I can look through the maintenance vids again, I suppose.”

  “Do you think there’s something in them?” Pauline asked softly.

  “I’ll look. It’s better than doing nothing, I guess.”

  “Good. That’s all we can ask of you.”

  “I’ll go through the vids with you, Thee,” said Angie. “Two heads are better than one.”

  Theo started to glare at her, but it melted into a grin. “Unless they’re on the same person,” he said tamely.

  They all laughed together.

  ORE SHIP SYRACUSE:

  OUTSIDE

  Theo’s nose twitched at the sharp tang of his own perspiration that pervaded his space suit. He was floating at the end of a buckyball tether, watching the squat little maintenance robots place a new section of meteor bumper atop the ship’s outer skin.

  “Your suit temperature has risen five degrees in the past ten minutes, Thee,” Angie’s voice sounded in his helmet earphones. She didn’t seem worried about it; just doing her job of monitoring his EVA from the command pod.

  “Turning up the suit fans,” Theo obediently replied, jabbing a gloved finger on the proper key in the control pad on his left wrist. He heard the pitch of the suit’s cooling fans rise slightly. His father had often said the fans sounded like the whine of mosquitoes on a summer night; Theo had never heard mosquitoes, never experienced a summer night on Earth.

  “Ten more minutes on the timeline,” Angie called.

  He nodded inside his bubble helmet. “We’re gonna run a little long. They haven’t got the bumper fastened in place yet.”

  “We have an extra thirty minutes built into the timeline.”

  “Right.” Theo knew his suit held enough air for another hour and more. No sweat, he told himself, then grimaced at the phrase. He was sweating plenty inside the heavily insulated suit. Funny, he thought, this far from the Sun you’d think it’d be freezing out here. But even the wan distant Sun was powerful enough to drench him with perspiration. The suit didn’t let heat out, he knew. Maybe I ought to build a radiator into the backpack for long excursions like this.

  He had ventured out the main airlock four hours ago to direct the robots in their task of removing this section of pitted old meteoroid bumper and replacing it with a new section, straight from the storage bay. The robots, about the size of a snare drum with four many-jointed dexterous arms, were programmed for simple, repetitive maintenance tasks. Something as complicated as removing the old bumper and replacing it with the new one required constant commands from a human being.

  Theo imagined himself to be some kind of wizard out of an old fantasy vid, commanding a squad of trolls or gnomes. He wondered if he could build voice synthesizers into the robots and have them say, “Yes, master,” to him.

  At last the job was done. The shiny new bumper was in place and the robots had used their cutting lasers to slice up the pitted old one into sections small enough to feed into the ship’s miniature smelter, to be melted down into new raw material.

  Theo pictured himself leading an army of laser-armed robots against the type of murdering bastard who had attacked their ship. Slice ’em to bloody ribbons, he told himself.

  “What did you say?” Angie asked.

  “Huh? Nothing.”

  “You mumbled something.”

  “Nothing important. I’m coming in now.”

  * * *

  Victor lay in bed, wide awake, beside Cheena Madagascar, who was snoring softly. I ought to feel guilty, he thought, sleeping with this woman instead of my wife. But life takes strange twists. If I want to use this ship to search for Pauline and the kids I’ve got to keep the captain happy.

  Despite himself, he grinned into the shadows of the darkened bedroom. You’ve got to admit, he said to himself, that if this is what it takes to keep her happy, well… it’s better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.

  Cheena was an accomplished lover, he’d found. At first he’d been surprised at her demand, thinking that a woman who’d prefer to have her children through cloning and avoid being tied to a man in marriage would probably not be all that interested in sex games. But he’d been wrong. Captain Madagascar was passionate in bed, demanding. He’d done his best to satisfy her, and apparently his best was good enough to please her.

  According to her calculations, they were nearly finished with the grisly task of picking up the dead bodies from the Chrysalis massacre. Soon—perhaps as soon as the next few days—Captain Madagascar could report to Big George Ambrose that the job was completed.

  Then what? Victor wanted this ship so he could go deeper into the Belt and find his family, drifting aboard what was left of Syracuse. For that, he’d need not only Cheena’s agreement, but Big George’s as well. They’ll tell me my family is dead by now, Victor thought. They’ll say searching for them would be a waste of time and effort.

  He clenched his jaw in the darkness. And I’ll tell George that my family are victims of the Chrysalis massacre, too. We’ve got to find them even if they’re dead, like all the others.

  But they won’t be dead, he told himself. They’re alive. Pauline is keeping them alive. Syracuse is keeping them alive. I’ll find them. If I have to steal this ship from Cheena, I’ll find them.

  Then a new thought struck him. What if they agree? What if Cheena takes me out searching for Syracuse? And we find them? What happens when Pauline and Cheena meet?

  * * *

  “Theo?”

  He opened his eyes, surprised to realize that he’d fallen asleep on the sofa. His mother was bending over him.

  “I guess I nodded off,” he said, feeling slightly sheepish.

  “You’ve been working very hard,” said Pauline.

  “We all have.”

  She sat on the sofa beside him.

  “Angie’s gone to bed?” he asked.

  “Yes. She was tired too.”

  He nodded and pulled himself up to a sitting position. “She was really good today, monitoring my EVA. She sat there all suited up for nearly five hours, ready to go outside if I got into trouble.”

  Pauline smiled faintly. “Angela’s growing up.”

  “I guess she is.”

  “You are too.”

  “Think so?”

  “I know so. You’ve taken charge of the ship, Theo. Six months ago you were complaining that your father didn’t trust you—”

  “He always did everything himself. He never gave me a chance to learn, to show him what I can do.”

  “Yes, I know,” Pauline said gently. “I understand. But I trust you, Theo. I know that you’ve put us on the right course to get back to Ceres and you’ll keep this ship running until we get there.”

  Theo felt a warm glow inside. But he didn’t know what to say, how he should respond to his mother’s praise.

  “Now don’t you think you’d better get some sleep?” Pauline suggested. “Tomorrow’s another day.”

  “You’re right.” He swung his long legs off the sofa and got to his feet.

  “Good-night, Theo,” said Pauline.

  “Good-night, Mom.”

  She’s right, he thought as he padded to his own cubicle. Tomorrow’s another day. With fifteen hundred and thirty-four more to go.

  BOOK II

  THREE YEARS LATER

  Eternal process moving on,

  From state to state the spirit walks;

  And these are but the shatter’d stalks,

&
nbsp; Or ruin’d chrysalis of one.

  SMELTER SHIP HUNTER:

  BRIDGE

  They made an unlikely pair.

  Although Elverda Apacheta was near the end of her long life, she was still a regally tall, slim woman with the carriage of an empress. Yet her once haughty eyes of sparkling jet now looked out at the world with a weariness that grew heavier each passing day. Her high flaring cheekbones and imperious nose spoke of her Andean background, but her long colorfully woven robe hung loosely on her emaciated body and her dead-white hair was disheveled, chopped unevenly, as if she no longer cared who saw her.

  Her only companion on Hunter had already died once, or tried to. When he had been a mercenary soldier he had pressed a mini-grenade to his chest and set it off. Now he was as much machine as man, a cyborg whose face was half metal etched with swirling hair-thin lines. He wore the threadbare remains of a military uniform, all insignias and signs of rank rudely ripped off its fabric. He called himself Dorn and said he was a priest. He and Elverda Apacheta had been on this lonely, interminable, thankless mission for more than two years.

  She had once been a worlds-renowned sculptress, the woman who carved The Rememberer out of a two-kilometer-long asteroid. The magnificent sculpture rode in a high orbit around Earth, a work of art that attracted tourists from the Earth, the Moon, and the man-made habitats in space between the two.

  Now she and Dorn searched for the dead, out in the silent darkness of the Asteroid Belt. And fled from the mercenaries who had been hired to kill them.

  Hunter was a massive ship, much too large for just the two of them. It had originally been built to smelt asteroidal ores on the way from the Belt inward to the Earth/Moon vicinity. But the advent of nanotechnology made such bulk smelters obsolete. Virus-sized nanomachines separated pure elements out of the asteroidal rocks. Hunter went on the market at a bargain price. Dorn had use for the smelter, so Elverda Apacheta had emptied her retirement accounts to buy the vessel.

  For all its size and mass, Hunter was capable of bursts of high acceleration when they needed to flee an intruding vessel. They had not seen another ship, though, in several months.

  “We’re approaching the coordinates you plugged into the navigation computer,” said Elverda into the ship’s intercom microphone. She was sitting in the command chair on the ship’s compact bridge; Dorn was somewhere in the bowels of Hunter’s equipment bay.

  “I will come to the bridge,” his deep, heavy voice replied. She always wondered what his voice had been like before his shattered body had been turned into a cybernetic organism.

  “No hurry,” she said. “It will be an hour before we reach the exact spot.”

  DOSSIER:

  DORN

  He was born Dorik Harbin in a Balkan village that was swept up in one of the bloody frenzies of ethnic cleansing that swept that region of Earth every few generations.

  Shortly before his twelfth birthday, the militia from the next valley descended on his village, raping, killing, burning everything in their fervent zeal. Dorik Harbin saw his mother nailed to a cross, naked, bleeding, dying. The young boy ran away, lived like an animal in the hills until he was caught pilfering an apple from the kitchen tent of a different militia band. Brought before the group’s commander, he was given the choice of joining the militia or being shot.

  He learned to kill. Remembering what had been done to his mother, his sisters and brothers and father, he marched into other villages and killed everything living in them, down to the livestock and household pets. Carrying an assault rifle that was almost as big as he was, he became an adept killer.

  But his sleep was haunted by terrible dreams. He saw those he killed, heard the pleas for mercy that he never listened to in waking life. Sometimes, in his dreams, he killed his own mother. That was when he began taking the drugs that were freely available among the roving militia bands. The narcotics helped him to sleep, helped him to keep on killing despite his nightmares.

  Peacekeepers from the newly reorganized United Nations finally suppressed the militias and established an uneasy peace in the region. The dead were buried, the fires extinguished, the acrid smoke that hung over the region finally cleared away.

  Dorik Harbin was sixteen by then. The Peacekeepers recruited him into their forces and tried to train him to enforce the peace with a minimum of killing. It was nonsense, and young Dorik knew it, but he allowed his superior officers to believe that he had been rehabilitated. They smiled at his progress as a model Peacekeeper and turned a blind eye to his growing dependency on what they termed “pharmaceuticals.”

  He was among the Peacekeeper troops who were sent to the Moon in the UN’s ill-fated attempt to wrest control of Moonbase from its rebellious citizens. After that fiasco, once Moonbase became recognized as the independent nation of Selene, Dorik Harbin quit the Peacekeepers and joined the private security forces of Humphries Space Systems, Inc.

  In a short time he was killing again, this time as commander of spacecraft that attacked other spacecraft in the dark emptiness of the Asteroid Belt. His prowess came to the attention of Martin Humphries himself, who personally assigned Harbin to the task of tracking down and killing his archenemy, Lars Fuchs.

  Humphries also saw to it that Harbin had an adequate supply of specialized drugs, pharmaceuticals that enhanced his battle prowess, that made him sharper, faster, drugs that fed his inner rage.

  It was in such a drug-enhanced fury that he methodically destroyed the rock rats’ habitat, Chrysalis, killing all of the one thousand seventeen men, women and children aboard. Attacking the ore ship Syracuse was merely a minor skirmish in the immediate aftermath of that slaughter.

  Once his mind cleared and he realized what he had done, Dorik Harbin held a minigrenade to his chest and detonated it. He knew of no other way to end the horror that obsessed his sleep.

  But the corporation that literally owned his body would not let him die. Their medical specialists tested their own skills and theories and turned him into a cyborg, half machine, half human. And sent him back to his duties as a mercenary soldier in the employ of Humphries Space Systems, Inc.

  The Asteroid Wars were over by then, forced to an end by the shock of the Chrysalis massacre. Dorik Harbin took no credit for the unexpected result of his atrocity. Humphries Space Systems saw to it that no one learned that the cyborg was the mass murderer. Dorik Harbin went about his unexciting duties as mechanically as if he were entirely a machine. But still he dreamed.

  Then he was assigned to head the security detail for a small asteroid that the corporation had quietly bought from a rock rat family, deep in the Belt. Martin Humphries himself was coming from his home on the Moon to inspect the asteroid. There was something inside the rock, something artificial, something staggeringly unusual, something that was perhaps not made by human hands.

  As part of his duties Dorik Harbin inspected the artifact buried deep inside the asteroid. The experience shattered him. He saw his life, all the pain and horror, all the grief and remorse that filled his dreams.

  Every day he stood before the artifact. Every day the deeds of his life were peeled away, moment by moment, murder by murder. It was if he were being flayed alive, one layer of skin after another stripped from his bleeding, quaking flesh.

  At last there was nothing left. The personality that he had built for himself since he’d been twelve had been stripped bare and a new persona, one that had been hidden deep inside his old one, at last came forth.

  He tore all the insignias of rank from his uniform, turning it into the tattered gray costume of a penitent. Dorik Harbin ceased to exist. Out of the warrior came a priest named Dorn, as single-minded in his quest for atonement as he had once been in his missions of murder.

  He still dreamed when he slept, but now his dreams were of mercy and justice.

  SMELTER SHIP HUNTER:

  BRIDGE

  Elverda saw a glint reflected in the bridge’s main display screen. It was Dorn stepping through the hatch, si
lent as a wraith, the metal half of his face catching the light from the overhead lamps.

  Touching a keypad with a long, slim finger, Elverda superimposed a navigation grid on the scene their forward camera showed.

  “There,” she said, tapping the screen with her fingernail. “That’s the spot.”

  She sensed Dorn nodding as he leaned over her shoulder.

  “It’s empty,” she said, turning her head slightly. The human half of his face was so close she could feel its warmth, hear his slow, steady breathing.

  “It wasn’t empty five years ago,” said Dorn. “We destroyed a dozen Astro warships here. Led them into a trap and ran a swarm of pebbles into them.”

  “A dozen ships? How many…” She caught herself and choked off her question.

  But Dorn understood. “There must have been at least ten mercenaries in each ship. Probably more. I’ve tried to get the exact number from Astro Corporation but they refuse to release such information.”

  “A hundred and twenty men and women.”

  “At least.”

  Elverda knew what came next. They would fly a search spiral expanding outward from this site, probing with radar and telescopes for the bodies of the dead that had been drifting in space since the battle that had killed them. It would take weeks, perhaps months, to find them all.

  If they lived that long.

  With his prosthetic hand Dorn tapped out a command on the keyboard. The image on the screen changed subtly.

  “Ultraviolet?” she asked, slightly puzzled.

  “Lyman alpha,” he replied. “Ionized hydrogen.”

  “Why are you looking for ionized hydrogen?”

  “Exhaust trail.” With the cool metal fingers of his left hand Dorn worked the keyboard.