“Chaim—”
He turned his head; body and bag revolved toward her. The blank look stayed on his face as he registered her presence. He looked at her, saying nothing; his eyes were red-rimmed.
“How are you?”
He grimaced, at her or at himself, she wasn’t sure. “I don’t know.”
“I’m better.” She glanced down. “Better than I’ve been in a long time, I think.”
The incomprehension returned, chill with resentment. And yet somewhere an ember of understanding still strained toward fire…
She breathed on it tentatively, afraid of being left alone in the darkness now. “I found what you wrote in my book.”
Slow surprise filled his face. “Yeah?” He pulled himself partway out of the sleeping bag.
A nod. “When you’re so lonely, you feel like you’re the only one…” She twisted her hand around the support bar.
He laughed softly, unexpectedly. “You are.”
She let her mouth relax, and found that it began to smile. She put her free hand up, feeling the strangeness of her face, the smile’s distortion of it, the puffiness that remained of her grief. “Chaim—I don’t hate myself, anymore. Not the way I’ve hated myself since Planet Two, at least.”
He plucked at the seal on his sleeping bag, separating his cocoon. “Does that mean I can stop hating myself, then?”
She blinked. “Yes…I suppose it does.”
He searched her eyes for affirmation; she met his gaze, no longer afraid. He pushed up from the bed, a man released. “Partners, then?” He reached out to her.
She nodded; took his hand and squeezed it briefly before she let it go. Warmth stayed in her palm.
The chameleon left its perch and began to creep down the wall, moving with extreme deliberation, going in search of its dwindling, ever-moving food supply. Chaim watched its progress for a long moment. He crossed his arms gingerly against the front of his coveralls, looking up at the ceiling as if he could see through it into space. “So where do we go from here? Where do we look, what do we try next?”
She jerked abruptly at the handhold. “Damn it! I’m not ready to face that now, too.” She shook her head.
“We’ve got to face it, sooner or later. It’s better if we do it now.” He unzipped his pockets and pushed his hands into them. “Everybody in creation’s been over the Main Belt with tweezers. We don’t have supplies enough to keep random-searching for as long as it’ll take to hit a strike. We’ve got to think of something better.”
“There must be something nobody’s tried, something everybody’s overlooked, for some reason. Like the station on Planet Two that Sekka-Olefin found.” She turned, following his drifting motion out into the room. “Chaim, you’re the prospector; isn’t there something you heard about, some clue?”
“That’s the point—I’m not such a damn great prospector, Mythili! Neither was my old man. He had lousy luck; even when he made a strike, it killed him. And I never learned half of what he knew.” His eyes grew distant. “Except…I do remember something. I told you back at the start, he had a lot of wild get-rich schemes. And there’s one that didn’t sound as crazy as the rest…about that factory rock from the Demarchy, that just disappeared during the war. Nobody ever found a trace of it, they all figured it must’ve been hit with a nuke barrage that kicked it clear out of the system. But the odds are against that; it takes a lot of energy to give escape velocity to a rock that big. There was a whole atomic battery plant on it. It was…” he frowned, concentrating, “let’s see…my father said that even if it was knocked out of the fore-trojans—and it must’ve been, since they would have found it by now if it was still there—if it was, then its orbit should still have similar elements. That means it would drift around the Belt over a gigasecond or so, and it should’ve been spotted again eventually.”
She frowned, concentrating. “So either it was completely fragmented or it did leave the system.”
“Unless somehow it got trapped in another equilibrium point.”
“But the only way that could have happened in so short a time would be if it was hit twice, or collided with some other rock…” They looked at each other and she felt their fantasy building, layer on layer.
“The most likely place would be in the other Lagrange points.”
“Right, and probably a stable one—”
“The aft-trojans,” he finished it for her. “It could be there right now, as good as new.” He looked up again at the ceiling as though he actually expected to see it.
“As good as new?” Her face twisted.
He shrugged. “Let’s face it—if the factory itself took a hit, the reactor would probably be spilling radiation. You couldn’t miss it. But nobody ever reported anything like that from the aft-trojans. If the plant was blown up, there wouldn’t be much point going after it; but if it wasn’t…we could buy the whole goddamn Demarchy with that find!” He rubbed his hands together.
“How would we ever find it, in the whole of the aft-trojans?”
“They were mostly uninhabited, anything with any manmade stuff would stand out in the readings. That signal separater Fitch gave us could be just the edge we need for this.”
“But even the core-trojans are spread over a hundred and forty thousand kilometers—” She pictured them in her mind, their tenuous teardrop spread veil-thin through endless vacuum.
“I didn’t say it would be easy. It’s probably not even there; this whole thing is insane. But you wanted a long shot, and that’s the only one I’ve got. It’s either shoot our wad on this or go on the way we have, bleeding to death.” He shrugged. “Your choice is mine. What do you say?”
She took a deep breath. “What the hell. Let’s gamble, let’s throw it all away on the trojans! What the hell have we got to lose?” She raised her arms and swept them down, rising defiantly through the air.
He nodded, his eyes shining. “Only our chains.”
“Nothing.” Chaim looked up from the read-outs. They had been in the aft-trojans, sixty degrees behind Discus, for more than two megaseconds. And so far they had found nothing that should not have been there; no trace of radiation or any material that had not been formed in the original fusion of stone out of primordial dust.
Mythili sighed, saying nothing because she could not think of anything to say. She finished a handful of nuts, feeling the presence of every hard, broken fragment prick the tight walls of her stomach; they had begun rationing their supplies to stretch their search time. Wasted time. She tried not to think it, and failed. She looked away at the chameleon, which clung to the wall beside her with its tonglike toes. It seemed to crave their company more and more; or perhaps there was simply nothing else left for it to do. There did not seem to be a single cricket remaining on the ship, and there was nothing in their own dwindling supplies the lizard would eat. She wondered how long it could survive without food. Lucky…she thought, and sighed.
“You want to check out the twin?” Chaim twisted to look directly at her. “There was something in the long-range scan; I’m not losing my mind—” he murmured, as if he wasn’t absolutely certain of it himself.
She shrugged. “We’re here; we might as well.” The kilometers-long piece of stone below orbited a common center of gravity with a larger mate she could see shining, a spurious star, above the bleak, dead mass they had just close-scanned.
She altered their course again, feeling the delicate mastery of her skills that she had regained and enhanced these past megaseconds. This was something that used her abilities fully, challenged them, honed them…But soon it would all be gone. She didn’t regret the decision they had made in gambling on the long shot; but she did regret that it would do them no good—that the satisfaction of this moment would only leave her more hungry, when their last chance and this ship were gone.
They closed with the second planetoid. Chaim put the results of the reconnaissance scan on the screen almost perfunctorily, below the actual view of naked stone frame
d in the ship’s viewing port. A binary…it was hopeless, the original factory had not been part of a binary system. Their long-range instruments must be going bad on top of everything else. She watched morosely over his shoulder as the readings began to appear, lining up as she had learned to expect them, high in iron and nickel ores. Anticipating zero on hydrocarbons and metal alloys, she looked out at the barren scape below them before she saw the actual figures…She blinked, and looked again. “Chaim.” She reached out, her hand brushed his arm unthinkingly.
He glanced up. “Oh, God,” he breathed. “Oh, God…” His arm knotted and trembled. A pragmatic, colorless dawn was breaking across its surface; the growing light glanced from the bristling discontinuity of towers and domes. She tore her eyes away from the sight of them: The readings continued to come, and looking down she saw that they were not zero anymore.
“Ninety-five,” Chaim murmured. “Look at that! Look! We’ve found it! Geez Allah, we’re rich!” He caught her hand, pulling her toward him, sending them out in a spin until they rebounded from the control room’s ceiling. “He was right, the old man was right, God damn him…he finally did something for me!”
She heard her own laughter echoing through his shouts, echoing through the ship—her own laughter, as alien as a voice out of deep space. Chaim’s arms closed around her, she felt suddenly as solid as steel, as ephemeral as bubbles. She pulled his face toward her own and kissed him.
He stared, speechless, as she broke away again. He kissed her back, eyes closed, arms tightening, pressing himself against her with sudden urgency.
She broke away and struggled back toward the panel. “I—I’ll take us down.” She felt her blood sweep to the ends of her body and recoil through every artery, capillary, vein; dazed by a feeling as strong as terror, that was not. Her hands stumbled over the instruments.
Chaim nodded, clearing his throat. “Sure…Let’s see what we’ve got.” He settled down to the instrument panel beside her, his voice husky. “Look at that; there’s no radiation leaking at all. It must be in perfect shape!” He grinned, abruptly reoriented.
She felt her own excitement change form again as she looked down at the readings beside him. The figures twitched unexpectedly on the screen, still plagued by the random fluctuation that had been with them from the start. It struck her as ironic that after a gigasec this factory was in better shape than their own equipment. Her eyes tracked on across the readings, caught again. “Chaim, look. It looks like there’s something in orbit here besides us.”
“Another ship?”
She nodded, pointing at the screen.
“Showing any power?” He peered past her.
“No…”
“Hm.” He let himself drift again abruptly. “Must be a derelict; doesn’t look like much. We can check it out later, see what’s left of it. But first I want to see that factory!”
She didn’t argue.
She brought the ship in as close to the source of their readings as she could, handling the difficult rendezvous perfectly with only half her concentration. They went through the ritual of suiting up, emerging through the lock onto the airless surface of another unfamiliar world, seeming to move through it all for the first time. The planetoid rolled sunward into another fleeting day, and the light of distant Heaven silvered the razed stone surface of the docking field, limned the eerie insect-silhouette of the Mother behind them—etched the shining reality of the factory up ahead against the black surface of the sky. It seemed to grow out of the stone itself, an iceberg jutting above a frozen sea, the greater part of its plant buried beneath the surface. Beautiful, incongruous, immense—flawed. Unfamiliar with its form, still she recognized the gaping, unnatural breach along one side: “Chaim, it looks like it did take a hit.”
“I know. But there’s no radiation.” He repeated the reading like a prayer. “The reactor has to be intact. That’s still worth a ship and then some…it’s still worth plenty! And look at the waldoes, they haven’t been touched. I know a factory back home that’d pay a mint just for those.”
They crossed the distance toward the factory’s evaporating shadow in bounds that seemed effortless, her body as light as her spirits. The airlock that faced on the empty docking field gaped open in a cry of perpetual astonishment; but this time the morbid image did not stay in her mind. They passed on through it into the factory’s fractured cavern.
Near the entrance their spotlights picked out the broad access tunnel that led down into the planetoid’s insulating heart, where the factory’s hundreds of workers had lived before the war. Passing it by, they moved on into the plant itself. Dim illumination suffused the interior from the broken wall to their right, and gradually their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Looking up, Mythili saw cranes and unnameable appendages dripping like stalactites from the ceiling high overhead, the shadowy walls and partitions that broke the space into a maze of soundless mysteries through which they drifted like lost souls. “Do you know where we’re going?” she asked, suddenly uncertain. “What are we looking for?”
Chaim nodded, ahead of her. “More or less. I almost worked at one of these places; they gave me an orientation. I want to see the reactor, and what kind of damage there’s been.”
Mythili glanced down at the radiation counter at the wrist of her suit. It still registered nothing; she followed his slow, searching progress without further questions. The light grew stronger as they neared the ragged break in the dome’s fragile outer shell. She found herself wondering that a hit which had apparently come so close to the reactor itself had not damaged it enough to cause even a small leakage.
“Watch your step—” Chaim was silhouetted as he bounded up and over the heap of rubble from a collapsed wall. She followed him like a dancer over the shifting surface, saw him turn sharply left through a breach in a higher, heavier wall.
A sudden shout rattled in her helmet as he disappeared from sight. She threw herself forward in a long bound, and another, until she could see him again. He was struggling to get to his feet again, where he had fallen in another pile of girders and rubble. But just beyond him was the thing that had wrung the cry from him—a vast hole opening in the surface of the vaster floor.
Mythili caught a protruding end of beam, pulling herself up short at Chaim’s side. “What happened?” not directing the question at him, but at the hole beyond him.
“It’s gone.” His own thoughts followed hers to the rim of the pit. “The reactor—it’s gone!”
She clung harder to the beam-end, strangling the useless words that tried to form in her throat. Why? Where? Who? “How?” She voiced the one question that she could possibly imagine having an answer.
“I don’t know. I don’t know…” Chaim muttered, drawing himself up. “God help me. But this—” he waved a hand at the blasted wall, “—must’ve been done on purpose, for a way to get the thing out of here. Maybe the blast was what slowed the rock down enough to trap it here. They must’ve been in a hell of a hurry to rip it out the hard way.”
“Then you think someone found this place after the first attack, and—stole the reactor out of it?”
He grunted. “Yeah.”
“But what happened to it? Why wasn’t there ever any record of it?”
“I don’t know. If it happened during the war, it could be nobody ever knew it happened. Maybe the reactor’s in use somewhere in the Demarchy right now. Or whoever stripped it might have got blasted themselves, and the thing was lost forever. All we need to know is that the goddamn thing is gone!” He wrenched loose a piece of metal and hurled it. She watched its slow, graceful arc outward and down beyond the rim of the hole.
She bit her lip, feeling her own emotions stretched beyond the limits of control, beginning to break loose and recoil. “But the rest of the factory is still here!” She threw that undeniable fact in the face of her faltering courage. “There must be other things worth salvaging, that some factory could use—”
Chaim turned back to her; she searc
hed behind his faceplate glass. She heard the long, slow intake of his breath. “Maybe there is. The exterior waldoes we saw as we came across the field; they looked intact. The factory I told you about—its waldoes were damaged. If we can get these clear, we just might be able to sell them for our own ransom. Nobody else’s got replacement parts to offer.”
“I do.” A third voice, a stranger’s, filled the captive space of their helmets.
Mythili shook her head in disbelief; she saw the perplexed look that Chaim gave back to her. Together they turned, found a third figure standing, impossibly, behind them. A shudder crawled up her spine as she imagined that she saw a specter from the dead past, a ghostly guardian seeking vengeance on the violators of a tomb.
“What the hell…” Chaim whispered. “Who—?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me, Chaim. It wasn’t so long ago we met, back on Mecca. I’m your father’s friend, and yours, boy.”
“Fitch!” Chaim shook his head, uncomprehending. “What in the name of God? How—what the hell are you doing here?”
“Following you. You don’t think this was a coincidence, do you?”
“You tracked us all this way.” Mythili was already sure of the answer, sure there could be no other explanation. “How? The signal separater you gave us back at Mecca wasn’t bugged, I know it wasn’t!”
Fitch came toward them, his face still invisible to her. “You’re a bright girl,” he said mildly. “But not bright enough…How’s Lucky doing? And did you ever take a good look at his cage? That’s where the transmitter was hidden.” He laughed. “You must’ve paid a fortune for those damned crickets!”
She felt her face flush. “You bastard—” she murmured, hearing Chaim’s curse echo her own. She cursed herself, silently; knowing she should have realized that power leak meant something.
As Fitch approached, she saw that he carried something massive at his side, something she couldn’t identify. She felt herself beginning to sweat.
“What were you following us for?” Chaim asked, although the answer was as clear to her as the answer to how; and probably it was to him, too.
Outcasts of Heaven Belt Page 11
