The Aftermath (16 page)

Where would he be heading? According to the intelligence from HHS headquarters he's on some fanatical mission to recover the bodies of all those killed in the war's battles. That's most likely dope smoke, but he was at this site, I've got to admit. We've got the other battle sites pinpointed, but the bodies hurled out of exploding ships could fly fifty, a hundred thousand kilometers over the years since the battles were fought. Farther, even. And they won't all be near the ecliptic, either; some of those bodies might have gotten flung out at high inclinations.

Lips pressed together in a troubled, almost angry line, Yuan realized, Crap! I might have to spend years chasing after this nutcase.

Then he realized that the other officers on the bridge were all watching him, waiting for his next orders. He straightened up in his command chair and put on a careless grin.

“We'll find him,” he said. “We'll find him.” Suddenly a new realization popped into his mind. Cheerfully he told them, “And I know how to do it!”

*   *   *

The radar contact turned out to be a shard of metal, a fragment of a ship destroyed long ago.

Dorn leaned over Elverda's shoulder as she sat in
Hunter'
s command chair and traced a finger along the navigation screen. She wished he were on her other side, with the human half of his face toward her. Even though she admired its workmanship, his metal half felt cold, heartless to her.

“A body here,” his flesh-and-bone finger tapped the screen, “and a fragment of a ship here. We must be approaching a cloud of debris.”

“And bodies?” she asked.

“And bodies,” he confirmed. “Yes, there will be bodies.”

Elverda pursed her lips, then heard herself ask, “Would it be possible to retrieve some of the debris?”

She could see no expression on the metal side of his face, but she heard the puzzlement in his voice. “You want to pick up pieces of debris?”

“Nothing too large,” she said.

For several heartbeats Dorn said nothing. Then, “You wish to create a sculpture.”

“I didn't realize it until just now. Yes, a sculpture. Nothing grand. Just a small monument that we can leave drifting through the Belt.”

He made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “I should have expected it.”

“Me too,” she said.

Dorn turned like a machine pivoting and went to the hatch. “I'll suit up.”

“You don't have to take this piece. Later, when you're going out anyway for the bodies. There'll be scraps of metal there, won't there?”

“Very likely,” he said, his prosthetic leg already through the hatch. “But we might as well take this one. It will give you something to start with.”

*   *   *

Yuan said to his navigation officer, “Plot a course for the next nearest battle site.”

“Sir?” she asked, uncertainty in her voice, her face.

Smiling patiently, Yuan said, “Break off the pursuit course we've been on and get us to the next nearest battle site.”

His first mate, a chunky dour Hawaiian sitting at the propulsion console, said, “Captain, he's not at that site. He's—”

“I know he's not there yet,” Yuan said, still smiling but with an edge of steel in his voice. “But he will be. And when he gets there we'll be waiting for him.”

All three officers were clearly unhappy with their captain's order.

Yuan asked, “How many hard-shell space suits are we carrying?”

“We haven't used the cermet suits since we were issued the nano—”

“I didn't ask that,” Yuan snapped. “How many of the old suits are still in storage?”

His first mate tapped into the logistics program. “Six, sir,” he said grudgingly.

“Check with the other two ships and see how many they're carrying.”

Plainly perplexed, the first mate asked, “Sir, why do you want—”

His smile turning smug, Yuan said, “Our quarry used an empty suit to lure us away from him. Well, two can play at that game. Only, we'll use empty suits to lure him
toward
us. Like bait for our trap.”

HABITAT
CHRYSALIS II
: GEORGE AMBROSE'S OFFICE

“No,” said Big George. “Not until the fookin' construction job's finished.”

Sitting in front of George's desk, Victor tried to hold on to his temper. “All the design work is done. There's nothing more for me to do but supervise the work crews. You don't need me for that.”

It was difficult to tell George's expression beneath all that flaming red hair, but Victor heard the inflexible tone of his voice. “Look, Vic, gettin' the habitat finished isn't the most important thing. It's the
only
thing! You're not leavin' Ceres until the last weld's welded and the last pisser's plumbing is workin'.”

“That's my reward for helping you for more than three years?”

“Listen, mate: You're alive because we picked you up and saved your bloody butt. You'd be floatin' into the Sun, already dead, if it weren't for me. You owe your life to me and the people of this habitat, what's left of 'em.”

Victor clenched his jaw so hard that pain shot through his head.

“The people of this habitat?” he snapped. “The original people of this habitat were slaughtered by the same madman who attacked my ship.”

“There are plenty of newbies streamin' in. We need
Chrysalis II
to house 'em. Prob'ly have to enlarge the fookin' habitat before we even finish it.”

“My family's out in the Belt,” Victor insisted. “I've got to find them!”

“Your family's dead, Vic. Admit it. It'll simplify your life.”

Every impulse in his body was urging Victor to leap over the desk between them and squeeze George's windpipe until his eyes popped out. But his rational mind told him that the giant redhead would pull him loose like a gorilla flicking off a flea. And then where would I be? he asked himself.

George leaned forward, resting his beefy arms on the desktop. “Look, Vic, I'm not bein' unreasonable. Another six months, a year at the most, and you'll be free to go wherever you want.”

“The habitat will be finished in six months,” Victor muttered. “Seven, at most.”

“There y'are,” said George. “Then you're free as a bird.”

“Unless you decide to start enlarging the place.”

George shrugged massively.

His innards trembling with rage, Victor slowly rose to his feet. “As soon as the habitat's finished I'm leaving.”

“You'll need a ship, of course.”

“I'll get a ship.” Mentally he added, One way or the other.

George got to his feet, too, like a ruddy jagged mountain rising out of a geological fault. He stuck out his hand. “Till the habitat's finished.”

Victor kept his hands at his sides, balled into fists. “Until my sentence is served out.”

He turned his back to George and went to the door.

“Don't go gettin' any ideas about skippin' outta here,” George warned. “I'm puttin' security on notice. Nobody's gonna allow you anywhere near a dockin' port.”

His back still to George, Victor nodded. “So be it,” he muttered.

*   *   *

Elverda pushed up her goggles with one hand and clicked off the handheld laser welder with the other. The work was not going very well, she thought.

For three weeks Dorn had been recovering bodies left drifting in space, and bringing back scraps of metal and plastic, the twisted remains of spacecraft that had been shattered in battle.

The trouble is, she said to herself, that you have no clear vision of what you want this monument to be. She glared critically at the coiling column that was growing from the deck plates of her makeshift workshop. The compartment had once been the ship's loading bay, where asteroidal ores were brought aboard before being fed into the smelter. Now it was a grimy, empty, low-vaulted echoing chamber of gray metal, darkly shadowed except for the brilliant pool of light that Dorn had rigged for her. Broken chunks of metal lay scattered on the deck around her and her unfinished construct, looking hopelessly useless.

The column itself seemed just as utterly pointless to Elverda. It's going nowhere, she told herself. It says nothing. Your talent has left you, long years ago. There's nothing remaining: no imagination, no inspiration, no soul.

“Do you need more material?”

Dorn's voice startled her. She hadn't heard him enter the capacious bay.

Turning, she saw that he was eying the misbegotten sculpture intently.

“I need more ideas,” Elverda said unhappily. “I need more talent.”

Dorn shook his head slowly, a ponderous shift from side to side. “No,” he said. “You need more time.”

She placed the hand laser carefully down on the deck. “I've put enough time into it today.”

“Are you ready for dinner, then?”

“I'm not hungry.”

He seemed to smile. It was sometimes difficult for her to tell. “Will you join me, though? It's depressing to eat alone.”

She grinned at him, widely. “You're trying to psych me into eating, aren't you?”

“A little broth,” he coaxed. “It will do you good.”

Once in the galley she sipped at the broth, then forked down the slivers of pseudomeat that he put on the table in front of her.

“Do you feel better now?” Dorn asked as he took their dishes to the sink.

“I feel full,” she admitted. “How about you?”

“I feel puzzled.”

“Puzzled? About what?”

He returned to the table and sat down heavily. “The ship that is tracking us…”

“We haven't seen a ship.”

“No, but there is one following us. Perhaps more than one.”

Elverda nodded. Yes, she thought, Humphries must have sent someone to track us down.

“It hasn't approached us.”

“They haven't found us yet,” she said.

“Why not? They must know the locations of the old battles just as well as we do. They know what we are doing. Why haven't they reached us?”

Elverda said, “We've been retrieving bodies. That takes us on an erratic course. It makes us harder to find.”

He seemed to think about that for several moments. At last he muttered, “Perhaps.”

“Or perhaps,” she suggested, “we've been wrong all along and Humphries isn't trying to find us.”

Again Dorn fell silent. Then he asked, “Do you really believe that?”

“No,” she admitted. “He wants to silence us. I'm certain of that.”

“Yet his ships are not pursuing us.”

“Are you sure?”

“I've spent much of the day scanning the region as deeply as our equipment allows. No radar blips, no ion trails, nothing.”

“Have they given up?”

“More likely they've returned to Ceres or Vesta to refuel and resupply.”

Nodding, Elverda said, “That could be it.”

“No matter,” said Dorn. “Our work here is finished. We've recovered all the bodies in the area. Now we move on to the next site.”

“How far is it?”

“A week, at one-half g.”

Elverda knew that he kept the acceleration gentle to accommodate her; she had spent most of her life in low-g environments.

“And how many sites after that?” she asked.

He puffed out a sigh. “At least two, that I know of. There must be more, but we'll need more information from Humphries or Astro to confirm that.”

At least two more sites, she thought. And what will be waiting for us when we get to them?

HABITAT
CHRYSALIS II
: CONTROL CENTER

It took almost a month for Victor Zacharias to prepare for his escape. He thought of it as an escape. He was going to flee not only George Ambrose and the construction task he had imposed; he was going to get away from Cheena Madagascar and her demands as well.

Not demands, he told himself. It's not fair to call it that. You're willing enough. Cheena's a temptation, a siren that I'm not strong enough to resist. The only thing I can do is run away.

It wasn't easy. Big George knew that Victor was thoroughly unhappy with his forced labor on the rock rats' new habitat. Security personnel watched Victor: not obviously, not as if he were under guard. But Victor knew his every move was scrutinized by security cameras, night and day. Even when he spent the night with Cheena, he saw the unavoidable red eye of a surveillance camera in the passageway leading to her door, and it was still watching when he left the following morning.

Slowly and surely he drew his plans. Now, as he walked through the habitat's control center, he was ready to set them in motion.

The control center was
Chrysalis II
's brain. It hummed with constant activity, alive with the buzz of electrical circuitry and the muted talk of the men and women who observed every aspect of the habitat. Along one sweeping wall of the low-ceilinged chamber was a row of display screens, each set of six monitored by a human observer equipped with a communications set clipped to one ear. Walking slowly down the line behind them, Victor could watch every section of the habitat, oversee the construction teams working on the unfinished areas, check on the status of the life support systems, the electrical power supply, the water recyclers, everything.

On one set of screens he saw the docking ports where
Pleiades
and other ships were moored. A few screens down the row he could see an outside view of the maintenance robots installing new meteor bumpers on another ship's hull.

Victor glanced up at the master clock on the wall above the screens. Its digits read 15:44. A little more than eight hours to go, he told himself.

At exactly 1600 hours he left the control center, as usual, and walked down the passageway to the main cafeteria, where he loaded a tray with his last meal aboard
Chrysalis II.
Or so he hoped. As he ate, an island of solitude at a small table in the midst of the bustling, noisy cafeteria, he thought that if his scheme didn't work this might be the last meal of his life. Big George would probably be angry enough to kill him.