by Jack Dann
I guess, the answer is, if there’s a place people can live, they will live there. And love it, too.
But the thing is, we don’t have wars. Wars are something they do down there on Earth, not up here. There are disagreements, sure, but you never find one colony fighting another. Space is hard, and cold, and there are a thousand ways to die.
Who would murder a colony?
***
Further in.
“Look at this,” Barb said.
It was a tank, but it had been refitted with an airlock, crudely welded on, so that the tank could hold pressure and serve as a habitat.
I examined it. “There’s people living here,” Kibbie said.
“You think?” I said.
“The Adders?” Barb said, and then, “No, couldn’t be—not unless they’ve been here for a few decades. Some of the welds here look like they’ve been here a long time.”
“Maybe other gangs have been coming here,” Kibbie said.
Barb’s voice was low in my headphones, on the private band.
“Don’t move, guys,” she said. “I see something.”
“Adders?”
“I think so. My right, your left. See it?”
A flash of motion, purple and gray. “Shoot. Yeah.”
“He see us?” And then there was a flash of suit illuminators, swinging in our direction and then stopping, glaring directly in my eyes. Three of them.
“Yeah,” I said. “Move!”
All three of us hit our jets. Barb was fastest, and Kibbie right behind her. They were both ahead of me and gaining ground when Barb collided right into three more of the Adders, coming the opposite direction.
All three of them tumbled into a crazy ball, and Kibbie, firing his suit jets frantically to stop, careened straight into the whole mess. Barb reacted immediately, but there were two more of them right behind, and they weren’t slow. One grabbed her arm. She kicked free, but it put her into a tumble, and before she could correct and get free, the other two had grabbed her.
Kibbie was still free, but the Adder with the spit that had the snake coiled around it drifted forward to confront them. The Snake. He had a short spear in one hand, and gestured with it for Kibbie to move over next to Barb.
“Better do it,” I whispered. “No telling what would make him use that thing.”
I had been far enough behind that I didn’t think they had seen me, so when the three that had been behind us floated up, I drifted back into the shadows, trying to move slowly so as to not attract notice. Their attention was focused on Barb and Kibbie, not on me. I flicked my radio over to the common band.
“Found you,” the Snake said. “You know, I was just playing with you before. You shoulda known that.” He rotated around until his helmet was almost up against Barb’s. “I was just going to scare you a bit, make you run back home. But you shouldn’t have attacked me, you know? I can’t allow you to get away with that.”
“You can’t do anything to us,” Barb said. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Sure, I can,” the Snake said. “Nobody knows you’re here. Nobody’s going to help you. Nobody’s even going to find you. We can do anything we want. And we will.”
Not quite nobody, I thought. Rip would know we were here, since he knew we’d hitched a ride on his oat-boat. He—
But I cut that thought off abruptly. Rip knew we were here, sure, but he wasn’t waiting for us—we’d told him we would make our way home ourselves. It would be days before he realized we hadn’t come back. When it turned out we were missing, would he even tell anybody he’d let us ride over to Hercules? Or would he be afraid to reveal how he’d broken safety rules? And, even if he did, it would be far too late by then anyway.
We needed help now.
“This place is dangerous,” the Snake said. “You knew that when you came here, didn’t you? Well, now you two children are going to see just how dangerous it can be.”
The rest of the Adders had arrived and clustered around. I counted eight, and all of them were watching Kibbie and Barb. Nobody was looking for me, but why should they? They didn’t seem to realize that there were more than two of us. In the poor light, Kibbie’s orange-striped suit could easily be mistaken for my yellow-striped one—they’d only seen it once, after all.
So it was up to me to rescue them! That was the wrong way around—Barb was the clever one, not me. So, what would Barb do?
That had been a neat trick she’d done with the urine dump. I doubted that it would work twice, though. I looked around. The shadowed area I had been drifting into was once a power-switching sub-station. Voltage busses and circuit breakers surrounded me.
I took a sip from my water bottle, and then closed the valve and detached it from my suit. I could see another powerswitching sub-station next to the Snake; he was holding onto a panel of aluminum that had peeled away from it. I tried to see if there were any of the red light-emitting diodes glowing in the darkness. I could imagine I saw one, but with the Adders’ illuminators glaring in all directions, it was hard to tell.
I hefted the water bottle, waited until none of the Adders were looking in my direction, then cracked the valve and tossed it.
The water squirting out the opening acted like a feeble rocket. I’d tried to make it spin when I threw it, but it wobbled as it spun, and so it flew with an odd, erratic motion, wavering in a scribbled line across the vacuum, going only vaguely in the direction I aimed it.
The water bottle rebounded off a wall next to one of the Adders, and bounced up, spinning. As it tumbled, it sprayed out a jet of water that instantly turned into snow as it boiled into the vacuum.
I heard a shout over the radio. “What the crap is that?”
The ones holding Barb were ready for that trick, though, and weren’t distracted this time. “Where did that come from?” Two of the Adders shone their illuminators back in the direction that they thought it had come from, but the trajectory had been so wobbly that they were peering in the wrong direction. One of the Adders reached out to grab at the bottle as it wobbled past. He missed, and in process he batted it away. It tumbled off, bouncing and spinning and squirting the remains of the water into the power sub-station next to the Snake.
Which is where I had aimed it in the first place.
It wasn’t my imagination; there really was a red glow from a light-emitting diode. The bottle sprayed water and ice across the exposed high-voltage conductors.
Vacuum is an excellent electrical insulator. Water vapor and tiny particles of ice, sprayed into vacuum, is not. There was a purple-red flash as a high-voltage arc discharged, accompanied by a spangle of electrical noise in my headphones. Tiny droplets of molten aluminum sprayed away from the power bus, and a ball of glowing purple mist blossomed out in a lumpy sphere, crackling and snapping. The Snake jumped backward, tumbling through the vacuum. Gotcha! I thought. It didn’t look like he was seriously damaged, but I was ready to bet that the electrical arc must have taken out his radio, and that would slow him down a bit.
And it was the distraction Barb had been waiting for. “Go!” I shouted.
Barb sprang away first, not down the corridor in the direction I’d expected, but through a gap between two of the tanks.
Kibbie was already springing down the corridor. I sailed out after him, and I managed to grab his foot as he coasted by. We spun around in a crazy tumble. “Kibbie!” I shouted, as I frantically used my suit-thruster to kill our momentum. “Not that way. Follow Barb!”
We straightened out, and I pushed off through the gap, dragging Kibbie behind me. A bolo thrown by the closest of the Adders ricocheted off the tank behind him, just missing tangling in Kibbie’s feet. We’d only taken a couple of seconds, but we had blown our advantage of surprise, and now they were right behind us. I grabbed Kibbie around the waist, and turned his and my main thrusters on full, accelerating to follow the dwindling figure of Barb down a narrow space between the tanks and a bulkhead. “Hold on,” I said. Barb made an abrupt turn
through a gap in the bulkhead. I reversed our thrust for three seconds, and reached out a hand to snag the edge of the bulkhead as we sailed past, swinging both of us around.
It was a long corridor, perfectly circular, with hundreds of tiny openings leading off from every side. For a moment, I couldn’t imagine what it had been, but after a moment it clicked in: a sewer pipe. It opened up at the end to a wide space that once might have been a waste-water reservoir, but now had been ripped open. I released Kibbie—now that we were clear, it would be easier for us to maneuver separately, and pushed off down the tube, adding a little rocket thrust to increase my speed.
I looked back. Kibbie was right behind me. Behind him, the Adders had made the turn, but they had stopped at the end of the pipe. They were watching us flee without making any move to follow. As I looked, one of the Adders extinguished his suit illuminator, and then the other two followed, leaving them in darkness.
I could smell the stink of my own sweat; the recycler wasn’t keeping up with my exertion. I tweaked up the cooling-unit power to lower my suit temperature a few degrees.
Barb got to the end of the corridor first, and swung around out of sight. Kibbie and I followed a moment later.
Barb was just hanging there, one toe hooked under a handhold.
I fired a burst from my attitude thruster to bring me to a stop and rotate myself around so that I was oriented in the same direction as Barb. The space we were in had a dozen tanks, probably a water-processing facility, with every one of the tanks ripped open by the ancient disaster. “Barb?” I said. I wasn’t looking at her, but was watching the pipe, watching for Adders to start coming out of it. But they hadn’t seemed to be following. Maybe they decided they had scared us enough, and it was time to let us go. Or maybe they went back for reinforcements. I started to look for something I might be able to use as a weapon.
“Dylan?” Barb said. “Turn around.”
I rotated and looked up. While I had been staring at the end of the pipe, people had come up to us. These weren’t the Adders. These were people in dented and patched-up hard-suits, ancient space-suit designs that I had seen before only in history lessons.
The man in the front of the group held a crossbow.
The metal of his suit was scratched and abraded. You could still see the places where it had once been painted red—a good color, often used for easy visibility—but the paint had long ago rubbed away in most of the places, leaving dull, bare metal. The glass of his helmet was so scratched and pitted that it was hard to guess how he could see through it.
I couldn’t help staring at the crossbow. It was loaded with a length of hollowed rod, electrical conduit, sharpened at the end. He had another half dozen in a belt-loop, ready to reload. A crossbow is a rotten weapon to use in free-fall: when you fired it, the reaction force would send you spinning backward, and the bolt would almost certainly go anywhere except where you aimed it. But he held the crossbow down low, the butt against his belly. It was exactly at his center of gravity, I would guess, so he wouldn’t spin when it fired. He would still recoil backward, but if he were adept enough in low gravity to avoid spinning even the least bit? It would have to take an awful lot of practice to use it.
From the confidence with which he held it, I guessed he’d had a lot of practice. And some of it had come from shooting Adders.
I scrolled frantically through the radio channels until I found one where he was talking.
“—are you,” he said, in a voice strained by years of sucking oxygen at too low a pressure. “What are you doing in our home?”
I started to answer, and Barb moved in front of me.
“Hello,” she said. “Good afternoon. How are you? We’re really pleased to meet you. This is my friend Dylan—” She waved at me—“And here is my friend Kibbie. I’m Barb.” She did something that approached a bow, and I hurriedly tried to copy her.
“Ah, very pleased to meet you,” I said. “Sir.”
To my astonishment, the old man in the red suit returned the bow. His low-gravity movement put even Barb’s grace to shame. At no time did the crossbow waver in its aim. It was pointed just exactly halfway between Barb and me, not a threat exactly, more of a threat of a threat.
“What do you want?” he repeated.
“We’re just looking around?” I said.
“We don’t mean you any harm,” Barb added.
I could see his lips moving, apparently talking to some of the others on a private channel. They adjusted their positions, closing around us in a globe. They moved with precise economy of motion, showing years or maybe decades of microgravity experience. They were carrying things that might or might not be weapons—staffs, tethers that might be used as whips. At least none of the others had a crossbow.
None that I could see, anyway.
“You should go back where you came from,” he said. “We don’t like you hoodlums coming in here, busting everything up.”
It took me a moment to even understand what he was saying. I don’t think anybody had used the word “hoodlum” in a century. When I understood what he said, I realized he took us for members of the Adders, or some other cluster.
“We were just ready to leave, sir,” Kibbie said, at the same time that Barb said, “We’re not going to destroy anything. We’re not like that.”
His eyes flicked from Barb to Kibbie and back, and his crossbow shifted slightly. It was aimed right at Barb now. He allowed himself to drift closer to her.
“You’re a girl,” he said. “I don’t like that. Girl gangs, they’re bad business, bad bad business.”
“We’re not a gang!” Barb said. “I told you.”
“Only three,” he said, musing. “Where’s the rest of ya?”
Without moving his eyes, he said something on the private channel, and in the edges of my vision I could see some of the people surrounding us slip into the-shadows and away.
“We’re it,” Barb said. “There are only three of us.”
“Three ain’t a gang,” he said. Then, not bothering to switch to the private channel, he said, “Whatta they got?”
I felt a touch, and twisted around. While I had been distracted, my pack and pockets were being ransacked, so expertly that I’d only just noticed. The contents floated spread out, sorted into neat categories—batteries, lights, ration packs, utility knife, suit-repair kit, mesh nets to carry things in, list after list of laminated safety checklists (all of which I’d long ago memorized), navigation aids, emergency beacon, low vapor-pressure fluid for de-gunking a fogged visor, several pencils, first-aid kit, instruction manuals, zero-torque tools including a small welding torch (not that I’d been planning on needing tools, but they were the usual suit pack and I didn’t see any reason to leave them out), reels of utility tape, thermal gloves, spare hose connectors and three sizes of O-rings, restraints and tethers and quick-clips to use to keep from drifting away while working, two paint spraycans, and a pocket full of other useless clutter. Some of it was stuff I hadn’t even realized I’d had with me, including for no particular reason, three small plastic dinosaurs. They had even detached my urine collection pouch (half full), my fecal collection bags (still empty), and the spares.
The man sorting through it separated out three things; the welding torch from the tool kit, the utility knife, and the long tether. Most important of this was the long tether, which we would need for the swing back to Malina. Except for the bag of urine, the rest he scooped up into one of the mesh sacks and pushed toward me. The welding torch, knife, and long tether— the three things that could be taken as possible weapons, I thought—he held up to show the red-suited man.
My mouth was dry, and I wished that I still had the water bottle that I’d tossed at the Adders.
While the man had been rummaging through my stuff, others checked over Barb and Kibbie’s possessions. They found pretty much the same things, except that the one looking over Barb’s stuff had found a fine gold chain with a locket in one of her pockets, and was
looking at it with curiosity.
“That’s not a weapon,” Barb said indignantly. “That’s mine.” She reached out carefully, plucked it out of the man’s hand, and put it back into a pocket at her breast. I was intensely curious about what it was—she’d never shown any hint of interest in jewelry before—but decided that now was the wrong time to ask.
The inspection complete, they made a quick consultation with the leader—again on the private band—and then, much to my surprise, the tools, knives, and tether were politely returned. Apparently they’d decided they would take Barb at her word, and we were no threat.
The only items they kept were the bags of urine, two of them half-filled, the third nearly empty.
As suddenly as they had appeared, the people surrounding us melted away. Only the leader in the once-red suit remained. “Look around?” he said, as if thinking it over. “Okay,” he said. “Don’t stay,” and he bent to push off.
“Wait,” Barb said, and he turned for a moment. “Who are you? How long have you lived here?”
“How long?” he asked. “We’ve always lived here.”
“But, where did you come from?”
“Come from? We didn’t come from anywhere. This is where we come from.”
The Hercules disaster had been seventy-eight years ago. Could it be true, that some people had survived, and that they had lived here, in the wreckage, for nearly eighty years? It seemed impossible. How did they survive? What did they live on? Surely one of the other colonies would have taken in survivors.
No, I thought, it was impossible. These must be refugees, rejects from other colonies, people who had come here fleeing some political system. Out of the ten thousand colonies it would be unlikely that they couldn’t find one that would choose to take them in, but perhaps they preferred their independence over their comfort.
“But what happened?” Barb continued. She gestured around her at the wrecked colony. “What did this?”
“That was a long time ago,” the leader said. He had unstrung his crossbow, and without the weapon aimed at us, he seemed no more than a tired old man. “A long, long time.”
