The Aftermath (6 page)

His outbound course would bring him back almost to the exact spot where he'd separated the pod from
Syracuse
—in roughly four and a half years.

Victor didn't bother to calculate the perturbations on his course that the gravitational fields of the inner planets would cause. Why bother? Long before he reached even Mars's orbit he'd be dead of starvation. Of course, if the pod's cranky air recycler crapped out, he could die of asphyxiation long before that.

*   *   *

In
Syracuse
's backup command pod, Theo felt like screaming or pounding his gloved fists against the control board. He had carefully switched on the pod's electrical power, then booted up the control instruments and sensors one at a time, to make certain he didn't overload the system and trip any circuits.

Now he stared at the red lights glaring at him from one end of the panel to the other. Propulsion fuel tanks. Air reserve tanks. Structural integrity. All in the red. The fusion reactor and main engine were undamaged, apparently, but the level of hydrogen fuel left in the battered tanks was dangerously, critically low. The fusion reactor generated the ship's electrical energy and powered the main engine. At the rate the engine was roaring along now, the tanks would be totally dry in hours.

Theo shut down the main engine. We're going to need that aitch-two for electrical power, he thought. We can coast for the time being: Dad had us going like a bat out of Hades to get away from that murdering son of a female dog.

He began to use the cameras on the ship's tiny maintenance robots to assess the damage to the ship's structure.

“God, she's falling apart,” he whispered to himself. When the attacker slagged the antennas his laser beams sliced through the hull of that section of the wheel, gutting their main propulsion fuel tanks. Penetrated to the tunnels, too, Theo saw. That's how we lost the air in there.

Sitting in the command chair, Theo realized that
Syracuse
was badly damaged and heading deeper into the Belt, away from Ceres, away from any chance of help. The antennas are gone, our fuel is down to a couple of days' worth, we're going to lose electrical power and die.

For the first time since he'd been a baby Theo wanted to cry. He wanted to curl up into a fetal ball and let his fate overtake him. But that would mean Mom and Angie would die too.

He lifted his chin a notch. It's up to me, he told himself. I've got to repair this damage. Angie can't do it, not by herself anyways. I've got to get this ship back in operating condition and heading toward civilization. I've got to keep Mom and Angie alive.

He thought that his father would know what to do and how to do it. But Dad's gone. There's nobody here but me.

“It's up to me now,” he said aloud.

ORE SHIP
SYRACUSE
: LAVATORY

Angela stepped out of the shower stall vigorously rubbing a towel over her body. As she tucked it around her and wrapped a second towel over her wet hair she muttered something.

Pauline was at the sink brushing her teeth. The mirror was fogging from the steam of her daughter's shower. She rubbed a clear spot with a hand towel as Angela finished drying herself.

“It's not fair,” Angela muttered again.

Pauline rinsed her mouth, then asked, “What's not fair?”

“Theo's got a lav all to himself while we're bumping into each other in here.”

“Theo shared the other lav with your father when he was here,” Pauline said.

“Still, it's not fair. He ought to—”

Pauline silenced her daughter with a stern glance. “Angela, you've got to stop fighting with your brother.”

“Me?” She seemed genuinely shocked. “
He
's the one who's always calling me names, yelling that I boss him around. I'm the older one, he ought to be taking orders from me.”

“Young lady,” Pauline said, the way she always did when she was about to tell her daughter something Angela didn't want to hear, “I will say this only once more. I want you to stop arguing with Theo. He's had an enormous burden of responsibility dumped on his shoulders.”

“Me too!”

“Yes, I know, but Theo's a male and he automatically assumes he's got to take charge.”

“That's dumb.”

“Maybe it is, but you and I will have to deal with it. Thee would welcome help from you if only you'd be pleasant about it and stop calling him names.”

“I don't—”

“Angela, you're the older sibling. It's up to you to set the tone between you and your brother. I will
not
have you two bickering over every little thing that comes up. We're in enough danger here, we all need to work together if we're going to survive.”

Angela sagged back onto the edge of the sink. “Are we really in that much trouble?”

“Yes, we are.”

She stared down at her bare toes for several moments. Then, in a low voice, “Do you think Dad really ran away?”

“Not for a picosecond,” Pauline said firmly. “He lured that attacker away from us. He saved our lives.”

“Do you think he's … he got killed?”

Pauline had to pull in a breath before she could reply, “No.”

“Really, Ma? Really and truly?”

“Really and truly, my little angel. He's not dead. I know it in my bones. He's out there somewhere trying to find us, trying to save us.”

Angela threw her arms around her mother's neck. “I'll be good, Ma, I promise,” she said tearfully. “I'll treat Theo better, you'll see.”

“I know,” Pauline said, holding her daughter in her arms. “I know.”

That night, as she slipped into her oversized bed alone, Pauline thought that she should have a talk with Theo, as well. It takes two to make a fight; Angela's not the only one who needs to improve her behavior.

She turned out the lights and lay back on her pillow. The bed seemed empty, lonely without Victor beside her. He's not dead, Pauline told herself. He left us to decoy that attacker away from us, to save us from being destroyed. He got away, I know he did. I'd know if he were dead. I'd feel it, somehow.

Pauline Osgood Zacharias was made of strong fiber. Born in Selene while her astronomer parents were teaching at the university there, she had grown up in the sunless corridors and confined living quarters of that underground city. To Pauline, the “outdoors” meant strolling along the winding pathways of Selene's Grand Plaza, beneath its arching concrete dome, admiring the miniature trees and shrubbery that the lunar citizens so lovingly tended.

She was fifteen before her parents allowed her to go without them out onto the surface of the giant crater Alphonsus. Selene was dug into the crater's ringwall mountains, and the area out on the flat was dotted with solar-cell farms, factories that took advantage of the Moon's airlessness, and the Armstrong Spaceport, where ships took off for Earth or other worlds deeper in the solar system.

She studied astronomy, just as her parents had. But by the time she was ready to graduate, a family crisis arose. Her parents were preparing to return to Earth. Despite the greenhouse floods and the devastation of so many cities—or perhaps because of that—her parents felt they had to go back to the homeworld, back to their roots in Colorado. Pauline desperately wanted to stay on the Moon. She was working as a teaching assistant at the new astronomy complex being built at Farside. She had met Victor Zacharias and fallen in love with him.

Her parents left for Earth, with Pauline's promise that she and Victor would come to visit them as soon as they could. But by the time Pauline and her newly married husband reached Denver it was too late: both her parents had been killed in a food riot.

She clung to Victor then, returned to the Moon, bore him two children, and went with him when he decided to become a rock rat, to live aboard a rattletrap ship he had managed to lease, to ply through the Asteroid Belt collecting ores from the miners and selling them to the big corporations at Ceres. She raised her daughter and her son, content to make the tiny world of the ore carrier
Syracuse
her island of home, her whole universe.

When the occasional violence in the Belt flared into the Second Asteroid War, Victor told her, “Not to worry. We don't belong to either corporation. Nobody's going to attack the independents; that would stop the flow of resources from the Belt and neither Humphries nor Astro wants that.”

She believed her husband. Until that moment when their ship was nearly destroyed by an anonymous attacker.

Now she tried to sleep, alone in her bed, desperately afraid that she would never see Victor again, almost frantic with the fear that she kept stifled all day, each day, every waking moment. She couldn't let her children see her fear. But alone in the dark, it threatened to overwhelm her.

ORE SHIP
SYRACUSE
: GALLEY

Theo eyed the steaming roast on his plate.

“Eat up,” his mother urged. “This is the last feast we're going to have for a long time. Tomorrow we start rationing our provisions. We've got to make them last.”

Theo was too tired to eat. For the past six days he had spent virtually every waking moment trying to repair the ship, directing the tiny-brained maintenance robots to weld patches where the wheel and the tunnels had been punctured, worming his way into the narrow access tubes to reconnect wiring, digging through the logistics storage bays to find the spare parts that he needed for the repairs. Most of his evenings he spent in the backup command pod, bringing systems back on line. He saw through eyes bleary with fatigue that one by one the red lights on the display panels were turning to green or at least amber. Mostly amber, but that was the best he could accomplish.

The fuel supply for the fusion reactor worried him most. Without the reactor the ship's electrical power systems would go down. When that happened, the lights, the air and water recyclers, the food refrigerators and microwave cookers would go down too.

The navigation program told him that they were coasting deeper into the Belt, away from help, away from the rest of the human race. He knew the ship didn't have enough fuel to change their course significantly. For a while he hoped that they might drift outward far enough to reach the research station orbiting Jupiter, but the navigation program showed that would be impossible unless they added a major jolt of thrust to their velocity vector, and there wasn't enough hydrogen left in the tanks for anything like that.

They were going to die aboard
Syracuse,
Theo realized: probably of asphyxiation, certainly of starvation. All his brave thoughts and hard work could not change that.

“Theo,” his mother said gently. “I know you're tired. But you've got to eat to keep up your strength.”

He focused on her face smiling encouragingly from across the narrow galley table.

“Right, Mom,” he mumbled, digging a fork into his dinner.

Angie's appetite seemed normal, even better than normal, he thought. His sister was chewing on a slab of roast pseudomeat: artificial protein created by cellular biologists and marketed to the rock rats and other spacefarers as Faux Beef (or pork, or veal, or even pheasant).

“So our food stores are okay,” he muttered, pushing the meat around his plate listlessly.

“Enough for years, if we're careful,” his mother said guardedly as she got up and went to the galley's stainless steel sink.

Theo glanced at Angie, munching away. Dieting will do her good, he thought. But he didn't say it. Instead, he told his mother, “We're going to need enough for years.”

Angie looked up at him, startled. “For years?”

“Looks that way.”

“But you said the fusion engine was okay, didn't you?”

He gave his sister a bleak look. “The engine's fine, Angie. But when that freaking illegitimate slagged our antennas he ripped up the fuel tanks as well. They're just about dry. Only two cells out of twenty have any hydrogen left in them.”

He saw his mother's hands clench on the sink's edge; her knuckles went white.

“I've shut down the engine until I can figure out some way to get us turned around and headed back to civilization. We're coasting now.”

Pauline made a brittle little smile. “Then I suppose we'll just have to coast for a while.”

“For how long?” Angie asked, looking suspicious, as if this was some kind of trick Theo was playing on her.

He pursed his lips, then replied, “Right now we're on a trajectory that takes us halfway to Jupiter before we curve back and start toward the inner Belt again.”

“How long?” Angie repeated.

He had memorized the numbers. “Three thousand, one hundred and thirty-seven days,” Theo said.

“Three thousand—”

“That's eight years, seven months and four days.”

“Eight
years?
I'll be twenty-six years old!”

“That's to get us back to Ceres,” Theo explained, “where we were when we were attacked, more or less.”

Pauline went to her daughter and laid a calming hand on Angie's shoulder. “We have enough food to last that long,” she said. “If we're careful. And we recycle our water and air, so life support shouldn't be an issue.”

If all the equipment keeps on working, Theo countered silently.

“Can't you do something, Thee?” Angie asked, her face agonized. “I mean, eight years!”

“I'm working on it,” he said. “Maybe we can use what little fuel we have left to cut the time down. But I've got to be real careful. I don't want to make things worse than they are now.”

“How could they get worse?” Angie grumbled.

“Is there any chance of repairing the antennas?” Pauline asked. “Then we could call for help.”

Theo nodded. “That's my next priority. There must be some ships in this region of the Belt. Miners, other rock rats.”