The Aftermath (36 page)

But what if … what if …

When he finally stretched out on his bunk and closed his eyes to sleep, the “what ifs” filled his mind.

ALONE

Theo knew he had less than an hour left to live. Pinwheeling through space, he tried to ignore the stars swirling dizzyingly around him and concentrate on the condition of his suit. The diagnostics displays splashed on the inner surface of his helmet confirmed his worst fears. Kirk had punctured his main oxy tank; the oxygen jetting from the puncture had acted as a miniature rocket, thrusting him away from
Syracuse,
away from Mom and Angie, away from any possibility of help.

His radio was gone; there was no way he could call for help. Big spitting deal, he thought: the nearest help is out at Jupiter.

The suit's auxiliary oxygen tank held a half-hour supply. In half an hour I'll die, Theo knew. No, he corrected himself, less time than that. A lot less.

He tried to look back toward
Syracuse
but the ship was already too far away from him to see. Besides, his spinning motion made it almost impossible to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. It made his stomach queasy to watch the universe whirling around him.

They've got Mom and Angie, he realized. Valker and his bastard crew have Mom and Angie and there's no way I can do a thing about it.

Squeezing his eyes shut, he muttered to himself, “You might as well die. You're not good for anything else.”

*   *   *

Dorn sat in
Hunter
's command chair as tensely as a bird dog that's spotted a partridge.

“That's a body,” he repeated.

Elverda strained her eyes, but saw only a featureless blip on the radar screen. “How can you be certain…?”

But Dorn was already tapping on the navigation keyboard, maneuvering
Hunter
toward the radar contact. Elverda felt the soft nudge of the maneuvering jets. Minutes passed and the radar blip grew larger, sharper, better defined. Sure enough, Elverda could make out arms and legs.

“Matching velocity vectors,” Dorn muttered, bent over the keyboard as he called up the propulsion program. “Setting up a rendezvous trajectory.”

Hunter
glided after the figure. Elverda could see that it was tumbling, spinning slowly as it coasted through space. She thought she saw the arms moving but knew it must be her imagination.

“Was there a battle here?” she asked Dorn.

“None that I know of.”

“Then what's a body doing out here?”

He shook his head slowly. “Maybe we'll find some evidence on the corpse to tell us what happened to it.”

“Can we get close enough?” she asked.

Dorn got up from the command chair. “I'll get into a suit and go outside for him. You take the con.”

She nodded as she slid into the chair, warm from his body. “Couldn't we use the grapples? Then you wouldn't have to go outside.”

“That would be tricky,” Dorn replied. “I can try, but I'd still better be suited up, so I can go out if I have to.”

Elverda understood that standard safety procedures called for her to suit up, too, so she could serve as a backup, if necessary. But she knew she'd be no good at it: too old, too slow, too tired to be of any use. Dorn didn't mention the subject and neither did she.

*   *   *

Pauline went with Valker down the tube tunnel to the ship's zero-g hub, where the scavengers had set up the flexible connector to link
Syracuse
with
Vogeltod.

“I mean it about Ceres,” Valker said, his face utterly serious. “I want to start a new life with you.”

She nodded. “As long as you protect my daughter.”

“Of course,” he said. Then he grasped her by the shoulders and kissed her, hard.

Taken by surprise, Pauline closed her eyes as he pressed against her lips. Then he let her go, grinned, and headed lightly along the spongy tube. At the hatch on the
Vogeltod
end he turned and waved, beaming a bright smile. Pauline made herself smile back at him.

As soon as the hatch at the far end of the tube closed behind Valker, Pauline slammed shut the hatch on
Syracuse
and punched the intercom console on the bulkhead alongside it.

“Angela!” she said sharply. “Angela!”

“Mom?”

Pauline felt a grateful sigh gust out of her. For once the intercom was working.

“Get out of there and meet me at the hub. Right away. It's urgent.”

“But Theo said—”

“Never mind what Theo said! Get here at once, do you hear me?”

“Yes. I'm coming.”

“Quickly!”

*   *   *

Elverda wished she were a better pilot. Dorn had set up a rendezvous plot on the navigation program, but a really sharp pilot would be able to edge
Hunter
much closer to the body that was spinning out there.

They were close enough to use the cameras now, in addition to the radar. The image on her main screen was clear and sharp: a human body encased in one of the old-fashioned hard-shell space suits.

Best not to touch anything, she told herself as she scanned the control board. We won't get close enough to use the grapples; he'll have to go out and retrieve the corpse. He's done it before, hundreds of times. He knows what he's doing.

Still, she wished she could help, wished he didn't have to leave the ship.

Then she sat up straight in the command chair. “It moved!” Elverda said aloud. It moved both its arms!

“Dorn!” she called into the intercom. “I think it's alive.”

For a moment he didn't answer. Then, “Alive? How can that be?”

“It moved its arms.”

“I don't believe—”

“There! The arms moved again!” She pointed to the image on the main screen.

“That's impossible,” said Dorn.

“It's not a dead body,” Elverda insisted. “At least, it's not dead yet.”

*   *   *

At first Theo thought he was hallucinating. Oxygen deprivation, he told himself. The brain's starting to break down. He seemed to see a ship spiraling out there, a big wheel-shaped vessel. And it was drawing closer to him. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, took a deep breath of what precious little was left of his oxygen. When he opened his eyes again the ship was still there, swinging around against the background of stars as he pinwheeled.

Could it be real?

“Hey!” he yelled. “I'm here! Come and get me!”

Then he realized how foolish it was. Kirk had ripped the radio out of his backpack. Theo began to wave at the oncoming ship, swinging both his arms frantically.

*   *   *

Pauline hovered in the zero-g hub of
Syracuse,
alongside the closed hatch of the connector tube. Valker could come back through that hatch at any second, she knew. Where is Angie? Why is she taking so long to—

“Mom! Here I come!”

Angie's voice! Pauline pushed herself to the opening of the tube tunnel that led from the storm cellar and saw Angie diving toward her headfirst, arms flat by her sides, hurtling like a sleek dark-haired torpedo.

“Look out, Mom!” Angie yelled, reaching out to the ladder rungs set into the tube's sides.

Pauline watched aghast as Angela neatly slowed her rush, tucked into a compact ball, and landed lightly on her softbooted feet at her side.

“You told me to be quick,” she said before Pauline could open her mouth to speak.

“You … you could have broken every bone in your body,” Pauline said, once she found her voice.

Angie laughed lightly. “Tunnel diving. Theo showed me how to do it. It's easy when you're going upwards, weightless. Gets trickier when you're going downhill, down to the rim.”

Pauline nudged her daughter toward the tube that led to the backup command pod. “Come along, we don't have any time to lose.”

Grabbing one of the tunnel's projecting rungs, Angie pulled herself lightly along. “Where's that Captain Valker? And the other men? Where's Theo?”

Following behind her daughter, Pauline said, “Theo's dead. Valker's men killed him.”

“Dead?” Angie's wail echoed off the tube walls. “Theo's dead?”

Pauline swatted her daughter's behind lightly. “Keep moving. We'll be dead too if we don't get to the pod before those murderers get back here.”

“But what happened?” Angie asked as she resumed clambering along the rungs. “What's going on?”

“We're going to do just what your father did,” Pauline said grimly. “We're going into the pod and blast ourselves out of here before Valker and his crew can get their hands on us.”

CAPTURE

“She's veered off,” said Nicco, scowling at the main screen on
Vogeltod
's bridge.

“I can see that,” Valker snapped from the command chair.

“Something's spooked her,” said the scavenger sitting at the navigation console.

“Maybe,” Valker conceded. “Or maybe they're just being careful.”

“Should we hail them?” Nicco asked.

Valker thought it over for a moment. “No. I don't want them to know we're here. Let them think
Syracuse
is alone and needs their help.”

“But they'll see us when they get closer.”

“
If
they get closer,” Kirk growled. “They're moving away from us now.”

“But they're slowing down,” Valker pointed out. “Strange behavior.”

“What the hell are they up to?”

“Wait and see,” said Valker. “Wait and—”

The communications screen lit up to show an image of Elverda Apacheta's arid, withered face. Nicco immediately put it on the main screen.

“Attention
Syracuse,
” the old woman said. “This is
Hunter.
We have been diverted temporarily. We estimate rendezvous with you in approximately five hours.”

“Diverted?”

“By what?”

Valker fought down an impulse to reply and ask the woman why they changed course. Instead, he made a soothing motion with both hands and said, “Calm down, boys, calm down. She'll be here in five hours.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Kirk, go to the boys at the airlock and tell them they can stand easy for another four hours and more. We won't be boarding
Hunter
until then.”

He got out of the big padded chair, stretched his arms up to brush the overhead, then started for the hatch.

“And where're you going?” Kirk demanded.

Valker grinned. “Back to
Syracuse,
to keep the ladies happy.”

“How about taking us with you?” Nicco said.

“Not yet. You maniacs would scare that woman out of her skull. I need her to produce the daughter first. Then we'll have them both.”

“We can find the daughter without the mother's help.”

“You stay right here and keep an eye on
Hunter.
That's our prize. The two women are just icing on our cake.”

“Yeah,” Kirk sneered. “Looks like you're going over there to lick the icing.”

“You'll get yours soon enough,” Valker said, grinning. Then he ducked through the hatch while the other crewmen snickered behind his back.

*   *   *

Theo was coughing so hard his eyes watered. Not much oxy left to breathe, he knew. But the ship was edging closer, close enough for him to make out the glassteel windowed bulge of what must be her bridge, and ports and other pods along her curving flanks. Airlock hatches, too. Through his tear-filled eyes Theo saw several of them as the ship rotated ponderously, drawing ever closer.

“Come on,” he muttered, but the effort started a new fit of coughing. I'm breathing my own fumes, he realized. It's only a matter of minutes until I choke to death.

His vision was blurring badly, but he thought he saw one of the airlock hatches slide open. He could see the figure of a man standing at the lip of the hatch, outlined against the dim red lights of the hatch's interior.

He knew he couldn't call to them; his suit's radio was gone. But he waved both his arms frantically. He felt hot, beads of sweat trickling down his face, along his ribs. Coughing again. Can't catch my breath!

It all went gray, foggy. Don't pass out! Theo commanded himself. Stay awake!

But you need oxygen to stay awake, he said to himself. 'Sfunny, he's so close, he can almost reach out his arm and grab me, but I'm gonna be dead by the time he gets his hands on me.

Everything slid into blackness.

*   *   *

Sheathed in a nanofabric suit, Dorn stood at the lip of the open airlock hatch, his eyes riveted on the space-suited body spiraling out there in the emptiness. Its arms had been pumping until a few heartbeats ago, proving that the person inside the suit was still alive. But now the arms had stopped, slumped, extended motionless from the figure's shoulders in a weightless crouch, like a drowned man floating facedown in the water.

Dorn checked the control pad of the propulsion pack on his back. “I'm going out after him,” he told Elverda.

“Are you tethered?” she asked.

“He's too far for a tether to reach,” Dorn said, stepping off the hatch's rim and into nothingness. “This is a free-flight mission.”

She said nothing, but Dorn could sense her apprehension. Squeezing the control rod, he felt a sudden thrust push at the small of his back. He jetted the few hundred meters to the inert body, wrapped his prosthetic arm around it, and looked into the transparent bubble helmet.

“It's a man,” he called to Elverda. “Very young. He seems unconscious.”

“Or dead?”

“We'll see.” With his human arm Dorn fumbled with the oxygen hose from his own life support pack. He found the emergency port on the unconscious man's suit and pumped fresh oxygen into it.