Only Superhuman (3 page)

Not everyone had agreed, of course, and matters had very nearly come to a cataclysmic level until the Great Compromise was struck, granting Earth rule over everything in its orbital space (including the Moon and all five Earth-Moon Lagrange points) in exchange for the independence of the Main Asteroid Belt. Afterward, the newly independent Striders had perhaps relished their individuality too much, and the wartime coalition had collapsed. Rivalries had erupted—between the powerful states of Ceres and Vesta and the smaller independent habitats, between the Cereans and Vestans themselves for economic dominance, between the puritanism of the pioneer generation and the rebelliousness of the young, between all of them and the new habitats that had relocated, voluntarily or otherwise, from cislunar space. And many of the mods, both states and individuals alike, had exploited the chaos to assert dominance over the less enhanced. So it had only seemed natural for Arkady to keep using his combat-rigged symbot to defend his home and family. And then it had only seemed natural to help his neighbors when they couldn’t help themselves, to fend off the conquerors and raiders and mobsters so they wouldn’t keep hurting good honest folk. After all, he was hardly the only vet to do that sort of thing, though others had done it in their own ways, with their own special tech or mods.

But not all of them had been as concerned about nonlethality as Arkady, or as hesitant to profit from their “protection” efforts. Before long, these “Troubleshooters” were fighting each other as much as the bad guys, or at least clashing over methods, jurisdiction, and miscommunications. So when Yukio Villareal, one of the architects of the Great Compromise, had proposed to his fellow Troubleshooters that they found a corps to coordinate their efforts and regulate their own members—an independent, nongovernmental organization recruiting and training the best and brightest from all over the Belt—it had only seemed natural to sign on.

The media may have painted Arkady as some great frontier hero, but he was just a guy who’d done what came naturally. At heart he was still just a simple, brawny lug who was good at driving a symbot.

And he knew space habitats. So he had a pretty good sense of what was wrong with Chakra City even before he tapped into their security web. As soon as the groaning began, he gathered up Emerald in his arms (something she accepted far more easily now than on that terrible day nine years ago) and rocketed for the nearest exit into the habitat’s interior space. He had to blast out a few conduits to get there, but that was the least of Chakra City’s problems—as he and Emerald saw clearly as soon as they were in view of the skylights that arched overhead, forming the inner half of the toroidal shell. The radiators—the two long, narrow panels that extended from the axis on the northern side of the habitat rings, permanently edge-on to the Sun—were gone. White-hot stubs remained where they had connected to the hub, and a glowing scar ripped across the industrial block between them. “Oh, Goddess,” he heard Emry gasp, sounding like she actually meant it for once.
At least some good might come out of this, then,
he thought—though he preferred a more traditional interpretation of the divine.

The security reports and his suit cameras complemented each other in telling the tale. A ship docked to the hub beyond the radiators, no doubt under Neogaian control, had ripped free of its cradle and turned its fusion-drive nozzle toward the station hub, sweeping a cone of exhaust plasma across it and severing both radiators at their connection points. The pressure from the drive exhaust and the vaporized coolant that burst from the ruptures conspired to accelerate the radiators toward the habitat rings, striking their northern side with some force. One had bounced off the uncompleted northernmost ring, smashing a number of the heavy, chevron-shaped mirror strips that directed sunlight into the torus while shielding it from direct radiation. The mirrors had been knocked into the skylight panels below, shattering several and causing an atmosphere breach; however, it would take hours for the pressure loss from that breach to become significant.

But by misfortune or design, the other radiator had snagged on the end cap of the newly added ring section he and Emerald were in. Suddenly imparted with angular acceleration, the radiator had acquired weight, falling down and antispinward. That, combined with its existing motion athwart the rings, had caused the long, flat array of panels to wrap around their top half—or rather, to crash against them, for its weight grew quickly as it fell. The skylight arch on the next ring over was badly damaged; it looked as though it might have caught the edge of the ship’s plasma exhaust as well.

Worse—from the way the skylight sagged under the twisted panel, Arkady could tell that the radiator wasn’t breaking apart as it should. He cursed the antiquated design of the thing. Now there was a long strip of material massing kilotonnes hanging down over a hundred meters below the ring, weighted down by gravity approaching and maybe even surpassing Earth’s. And it was tugging on the rest of the panel, worsening the strain on the mirror strips and skylight and threatening to tear clear through it and smash down on the people below—not to mention the far worse air loss that would result from a breach of that size. It was night, so there were few people outdoors to be hit by falling debris; but that wouldn’t matter if the whole sky fell on their roofs. And the sun mirror to the south had already switched from black to reflective as the habitat went into emergency daylight mode.

They forced open the hatch and crossed into the damaged section, where air and debris were rushing out of the growing rift in the skylight. The occupants were running for the exits, and the Troubleshooters hastened to assist in an orderly evacuation. <
We were wrong!
> Emerald called, using her subvocal transceiver to be heard over the wind and the groaning of the skylight framework. <
We thought they were gonna let the virus spread through normal traffic to Earth—but they wanted to force an evac, get as many infected refugees as possible in contact with other people!
> Hence the severing of the radiators, Arkady realized. Even these hull breaches wouldn’t be fatal for the habitat; there was plenty of air to spare if the holes could be patched in time. But with no radiators, a habitat this small and this close to the Sun would become uninhabitably hot in less than a day. And Chakra’s daily seventy-odd minutes in Earth’s shadow had ended barely an hour ago.

<
They must’ve sabotaged the dock sensors,
> Emry went on.
> Arkady had been wondering about that. A ship that even warmed up its fusion or plasma drive anywhere near a habitat would set off alarms and be blown out of the sky if it didn’t shut down before its engines were ready to fire. They would’ve had to bribe or otherwise compromise the human dock monitors as well. This was a bigger operation than he’d realized.

Still, he didn’t get one thing. “There wouldn’t have been time for the viruses to spread yet!” Not that Arkady doubted Emry’s insight—despite her brawn-over-brain impulses, she had it in her to be a fine detective. He was so proud of her for that, even though he’d had nothing to do with it. Arkady was just a big lug who needed things explained to him.

<
They would’ve waited a few days! But we forced their hand! Now Krieger’s gonna try to infect as many people as he can in the chaos of the evac.
>

“He’ll be heading up to the spaceport, then.” The passage to the docks led through the damaged industrial block, but should be deep enough within it to remain passable.

But a renewed groaning brought Arkady’s attention back to the immediate problem, as the skylight framework buckled a little more under the weight of the radiator and mirror strips, causing several more heavy window panels to fall from the sky. Unfortunately the radiator slanted directly over one of the more heavily populated sectors of the ring. “We have to get the people out! We’ll worry about Krieger when we reach the port.”

After that it was an efficient scramble, coordinating with the Chakran police and emergency crews to manage the evacuation, to hurry the people toward the nearest elevator shaft to the hub, to keep them calm despite the terrifying groaning and the shuddering and the ominous whistling of the air across the twisted girders of the skylight frame. Arkady tried to estimate how long it might take Wulf Krieger to get to the port and infect its ships with his polyviruses. He got on the comm and issued instructions that no escaping ship be allowed to land on Earth or dock with any other habitat until a medical team checked it out, but he couldn’t be sure how fully that would be heeded in the chaos. He just had to hope that the crush of the crowd would impede Krieger, giving them time to head him off. If there was any comfort here, it was that the bad guy had been forced to improvise.

But then the skylight frame buckled and gave way with a terrible shrieking sound, and tonnes of glass, metal, and composite rained down as the radiator panel overhead sagged and twisted, its connections to the adjacent panels breaking free one by one, way too late. Arkady realized it would come down virtually on top of the last group of stragglers he was with. “Everybody, run! Move, move, move! Quickly!” he cried, amplifying his voice to shock them into motion. Emerald caught his sense of urgency and began herding them forward as fast as she could.

But a large chunk of the skylight frame was falling right for him, a pair of massive mirror strip panels riding on its back. Without a second’s thought, Arkady stopped running and lifted his arms skyward, bracing his legs and locking the symbot’s joints. The impact drove his arms and torso down and his servos whined and overheated, but the symbot held, and the last few Chakrans were able to start scrambling out from under once he urged them out of their terrified paralysis.

The problem was, the servos were starting to give out. Arkady realized he wouldn’t have the power left to push this thing off, not in the brief moments before the radiator panel gave way and came down on top of him. All he could do was hold it and make sure the Chakrans—and Emry—got to safety.

But then Emerald had to go and turn around. And then his wonderful, brilliant student had to be an idiot and run back to him. “Arkady!”

“Go! Save the others! My suit’s shot!”

“No, I won’t leave you!” Emry saw what was going to happen, he knew she did. But still she looked around desperately, grabbed a fallen girder and tried to use it to brace the ceiling fragment. She knew it was futile. But the poor lonely child couldn’t face it, couldn’t bear another loss. She’d blame herself, he knew it, and he hated doing this to the sweet girl. But she needed to live. Humanity needed her, needed the magnificent Troubleshooter she was destined to become.

Oh, God.
He longed to tell Emerald how much he loved her, like his own daughter, sometimes maybe more since she needed it so much more. But that would just make it harder for her to leave. “Damn you, you idiot!” he cried. “For once in your life, listen to me, you foolish child! Go! That’s an order!
Go!
” She jerked her head back as though he’d struck her, and gazed at him with a look of shock and betrayal and abandonment, tears pouring down her face, looking like the little girl he’d met nine years ago, just minutes too late. But she was listening.
“You have too many other lives to save,”
he told her, ramming each word home.

It got through to her. It was the only thing that could have. She was bawling at the top of her lungs like a baby as she turned away. But she turned away, and she ran. Arkady tried to call out his love to her, to say good-bye, but the radiator panel finally tore free with a final, mournful groan.

Arkady accepted the inevitable, finding peace. His old comrade had served him well, but it had reached its limits. At least the breaking of the radiator meant that its remaining pieces would fall free and put no more strain upon the habitat. At least he’d gotten the people out. That was what mattered. He’d just done his job, done what came naturally. He knew Pavel and the kids would understand.

He just prayed, with his last thought, that Emerald would.

2

The Troubleshooters

Demetria habitat
In orbit of Ceres

“… And it is with great pride that I promote Emerald Blair, the Green Blaze, to the status of full Troubleshooter, with all the rights and responsibilities that the title entails.”

Emry tried not to wince at the applause. At least it was subdued and respectful; the audience before her, consisting of fellow Troubleshooters in full uniform alongside TSC staffers, their families, and assorted dignitaries and reporters, understood what she had lost in order to gain this early promotion. Many of them had been as close to Arkady as she had been, if not more so.

Yukio Villareal had probably been closer to Arkady than anyone but his husband. The two men had been fast friends and allies for over twenty years. But his voice remained calm and commanding as he spoke, capturing the crowd’s attention as it always did. “And it is with equal pride that I confer upon our newest Troubleshooter a commendation … only her first, I’m sure … for service above and beyond the call of duty in preventing the Neogaian bioterror attack on our Terran cousins. While we mourn the thirty-seven souls who were lost in the disaster at Chakra City, including one of our own most cherished members, we owe Emerald Blair our deepest thanks for ensuring that the toll was not far worse.”

Only Emry’s wish not to embarrass Sensei Villareal kept her from resisting as he placed the medallion around her neck. The whole thing was a joke. All she’d done was track Krieger’s scent in an unthinking rage, like the predator he aspired to be, and beat him savagely until the local police had pulled her off. He was still in the hospital, under top security. Maybe incidentally she’d stopped him from infecting more than two ships, whose occupants had been successfully quarantined and were undergoing treatment, but who might have to go through life with some interesting cosmetic changes. Some had suffered severe allergic reactions to the foreign proteins produced by their virally altered DNA; if the viruses had been unleashed on Earth, the consequences would’ve been far worse than the Neogaians had apparently believed. Preventing that had earned Emry this commendation. But all she’d really done was lose control again, with the usual consequences to human life and limb. The fact that the victim had been a terrorist and murderer didn’t make it any better. She’d been acting on impulse, not thinking enough about anything other than vanity and wisecracks. She’d let herself grow complacent. That couldn’t happen again.