Asimov's SF, January 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He was committed.

  With gentle taps on the pod's braking thrusters, he slowed his course relative to his quarry until his relative motion was only a few centimeters per second. When he was done, the pod coasted to a bump against a cargo-support truss, and a final blast of the thruster brought it to a full stop. An external glue-gun extruded a bolus of vacuum-solidifying adhesive to tack the pod firmly to the strut; a quick shot of solvent would release it in an instant, if he needed it, but for the moment it would be docked firmly enough to stay in place even if the quarry made an unexpected attitude-adjustment burn.

  Domingo suited up, working methodically but with swift practiced motions, checking each seal three times, and counting out the suit drill checklist aloud, even though there was no one to listen. He had already been breathing pure oxygen, so there was no decompression prebreathing time needed, and as soon as he checked his helmet seal, he punched for hatch opening. Pumps compressed the air from the cabin into tanks, saving it not so much for reuse (although reuse was reflexive where Domingo came from, as much a religion as a habit), but mostly to keep the hatch opening from releasing a cloud of oxygen that might signal to hypothetical telescopes that something was amiss. When the cabin pressure dropped to under a torr, he judged that the residual gas would be indistinguishable from normal outgassing of the quarry, and cracked the hatch. He took his tools and pushed off.

  The white thermal blankets that kept the cargo cool were brilliant in the sunlight, and the LCD visor of his suit darkened to compensate. Towing his tools, he floated around the spacecraft.

  He came around from the polar direction, away from view of the portholes, and aimed his infrared sensor at the closest of the fins to get a reading on how much waste heat was being rejected: 370 Kelvin.

  Okay. As expected, the habitat module was live.

  Somebody inside was about to have a very bad day.

  He clipped his safety tether to a handhold just below the hatch to keep himself from floating away, and inspected it. The hatch was held in with six electromechanical dogs. Explosives would make short work of the hatch, but there was no point in destroying perfectly good hardware. Still staying out of the view of the portholes, and being careful not to make even the slightest jar against the habitat, he found the right spot and cut through the outer skin with a micro-torch, revealing color-coded wiring below. It was a standard design that he knew well. He shorted the two outermost wires, disabling the automated interlocks, and then clipped the next pair, bypassing the computer control.

  There was no point in conserving oxygen at this point. He had to just hope no distant observers were looking in this precise direction at this precise instant. He checked his tether, and then selected two guns out of his tool pack. One he slung around his shoulders where it would be in easy reach, and the other, a glue-tipped harpoon gun, he held in his left hand. In his right hand he gripped a body-bag.

  Domingo positioned himself out of the way, feet hooked against an edge of the thermal radiator. He counted silently down from five to calm his mind, and on zero he put forty volts across the two innermost wires: release.

  The hatch blew.

  The atmosphere expanded out in a silent spray, flashing instantly into ice crystals that glittered in the sun. Loose papers, hand tools, and some unidentifiable containers and other bits of debris flew by him, spinning into space. He ignored them, watching intently for a body entrained in the outrushing atmosphere.

  Within a second, the outrush of atmosphere was complete. A few final bits of debris floated out of the hatch.

  No body.

  Time was critical. He pushed off from the habitat, hard, relying on the tether line to swing him around and then letting his momentum carry him through the open hatch without slowing. As he entered into the habitat his eyes searched left, right, upward, downward, seeking the body that had to be there, probably already unconscious from the shock of explosive depressurization.

  No body.

  In a single motion he flipped over and checked his motion, simultaneously releasing the body bag and unslinging the second gun. There were two suits racked in a niche to the side of the open hatch, one bright blue, one crimson. The suit to the right, the crimson one, was empty. On the blue suit to the left, however, although he could not see a face in the helmet, the indicator lights on the status display at the collar were green, green, green.

  He raised both guns. In his earphones, he could hear the almost inaudible sounds of electronic handshaking as the microprocessor in his suit negotiated frequency. And then, very slowly, the arms of the blue spacesuit raised above its head. In his earphones, a soft voice: “Don't shoot. I surrender.”

  A girl's voice.

  He brought the gun to bear, and fired two short bursts, one into the faceplate of the helmet, the second into the suit. It was the right gun, the glue harpoon, and he had it set in the glue-only mode. The streamer of glue congealed almost instantly in vacuum, obscuring the faceplate and restricting the figure's freedom of movement. Domingo tapped his receiver off before he could hear any protests from the captive. Two more short bursts tacked down the captive's hands, just in case there was a weapon within reach.

  According to the timer in his display, elapsed time from the moment he had blown the exterior hatch was just under four seconds.

  The tangle of glue held the space-suited figure blind and immobile, the suit arms spread-eagled awkwardly and glued to the bulkhead. Domingo kept a small portion of his attention on the captive as he reset the hatch electronics, closed the hatch and reset the interlocks, and brought the habitat back up to full atmosphere. It took five minutes before his gauges all showed green, and in that time he did a quick check of the systems, verifying that everything was nominal, and that no messages had been received suggesting that anybody outside had seen something unusual. He paused for a moment, considering, and then removed his helmet and pulled off his gloves. It felt good to be breathing unconfined air again. The cabin air had the cold and dry tank-air feel of recent repressurization, with almost a metallic smell.

  With the cabin back to pressure, it was time for him to deal with his captive. He examined the suit. The glue held it firmly immobile, and a large spatter of dark gray glue covered the visor of the helmet. A neatly block-lettered label, written in dark marker on the suit's hardshell carapace, said “May.” His captive's name, presumably. First or last?

  He had already put the glue harpoon down. He kept the other gun in his left hand, a little railgun that shot a tiny loop of wire at hypersonic velocity. It had almost no recoil—an important feature for a gun used in microgravity—and while the wireloop projectile would easily shred flesh, it wouldn't penetrate pressure walls.

  He found the solvent spray in his tool pack, brought it out, and sprayed it over the glob of glue covering over his captive's helmet. He popped the quick-release flanges and gave it a quarter twist, still one-handed, and pulled the helmet away.

  “Thanks,” she said. She shook her head, dirty blonde hair swinging left and right, and then sneezed once.

  This was the first look he'd gotten at her face. Buddha. How old was she, eighteen? Certainly no more than twenty, at the maximum.

  She looked down at the gun he still held in his left hand, and then up again at his face. Was she actually smiling? “You don't need that,” she said. “I already told you; I surrender. I'm ready to do whatever you tell me to. I won't go back on my word.”

  She wasn't about to do anything just then; both her hands and her torso were still glued to the walls. He looked at her, and then lowered the gun, not letting it go, but at least aiming away to the side.

  “So you said,” he said. “But should I trust you?”

  She looked at him. Her gaze was disconcertingly direct. “I don't know,” she said. “Should you?”

  He laughed, without actual humor. “No,” he said. “I don't think I should.”

  He paused, and then said, “You were suited up when I blew the hatch. Why?”

/>   “I felt a jar in the spacecraft,” she said. “Indicators didn't show anything, but I thought some of the cargo might be venting, thought I'd take a look.” She paused, and said, “That must have been you docking, I take it.”

  Domingo considered. That was plausible, although she must have been extremely sensitive to notice the tiny bump as he docked against the much larger cargo ship, since large spacecraft sometimes shudder erratically from thermal expansion waves created when parts move into or out of sunlight. It was hard to believe that a girl as young as she was could have enough experience in space to be able to tell the slight bump of his docking from normal quivering of the ship. And she was fast—it had been less than five minutes from his docking to blowing the hatch. On the other hand, the Venus to Earth transfer was long and boring, and she very likely had been hoping for something, anything, to do, to break the monotony.

  “And what about you?” she said. “You blew the hatch, just like that? Not ever worrying about who might be inside? No warning at all? I know that pirates aren't supposed to be very nice, but killing people without warning is a little extreme.”

  “I don't think you're in much of a position to ask questions,” he said.

  She shrugged, or did as much of a shrug as her limited range of motion allowed. “So, if you're planning to shoot me, you would have done it already.”

  He laughed, this time with real amusement. “Point,” he said. He jerked his head at the body-bag, an emergency-orange sack now floating unattended near the pilot's console. “If there was somebody, I was ready to bag and repressurize them.”

  The body bags were standard pieces of emergency equipment, human-sized airtight fabric bags with a small cylinder of compressed oxygen. In the case of an explosive depressurization, an unsuited crewman could, in principle, crawl into one, seal it, pull the quick-tab to inflate it, and wait for rescue. Or a vacuum-suited comrade could snag non-suited personnel and jam them into a bag. They were last-gasp desperation equipment for serious emergencies—something that might save your life, not something you'd ever want to try out.

  She looked at him. “You really think you could find somebody, stuff them into a bag, and get them repressurized inside of sixty seconds?”

  He nodded. “Yep. In drills, I'm under fifteen seconds.”

  “I don't believe it,” she said.

  “We practice,” he said. “We drill. A lot.”

  “Yeah, but with real, living people, not dummies? I don't think so.”

  He looked at her steadily. “We practice with real people.”

  She shuddered. “God. You guys really are crazy.”

  Domingo looked at her. It was a tough universe out there. How could they not practice? “Maybe in the cozy, rich worlds you live in,” he said, speaking slowly and contemptuously, “maybe you didn't practice decompression drills. Maybe you're rich enough that you never have blowouts. I suppose everything's triple-redundant in the habitats you live in. You don't know what it's like. I guess you've never seen a blowout, never seen metal walls rip like potato chips under the pressure of escaping atmosphere, never seen your friends and family exposed to vacuum and known that anybody that you can't chase down and cram into a bag in sixty seconds or less is somebody you'll never again see alive.”

  He was getting angry now. “Well, girl, I'm not you. I don't live in that world. I live in the out and out, where things don't always work, where blowouts can happen any day, any night, and there's nobody else to rely on. Damn right we practice. Damn right we practice with real people.

  “You say you can't get somebody into a bag inside of ten seconds flat, seal the bag, and be looking for the next one in fifteen? Girl, I wouldn't even want you in the out and out. You'd die in a week, and I'd call it lucky if you didn't take somebody with you when you go.”

  “Oh,” she said, in a very small voice. “Okay. I believe you.”

  His burst of rage had passed now, and he felt empty. And thinking about seeing his friends die—because, one time, there were too many to save—he had little inclination to add another body to the universe's death toll. The universe was harsh enough. It might be acceptable if somebody died in the course of an operation; that was something you had to accept, but it was another thing to kill somebody in cold blood. “No, I probably shouldn't trust you,” he said. “But I will.”

  “Thank you,” she said, still in a small soft voice.

  He raised the solvent to release the glue holding her, but she shook her head, and said, “It's okay, I got it.”

  She squirmed a little, and the tips of the fingers of one hand came poking out of her suit, under her chin. She must have silently worked the arm loose from the glove and sleeve, and pulled it into the torso of the suit while he was checking the ship, leaving the suit arm that he'd glued to the bulkhead only an empty shell. The suit was slightly large for her, and the neck flange had just enough extra room that she could twist around and snake her arm out through the neck. Once she had her arm out to the shoulder, she reached down and carefully unsnapped the side latches on the hardshell chest segment, popped it free, and wriggled out into the cabin.

  Under the suit, she was wearing underwear and nothing else. He made his face rigid to hide a smile. She really had suited up in a hurry, he realized, skipping the suit liner and the entire thermal control subsystem fittings. No wonder she'd gotten the suit on so quickly.

  She reached out one hand. “Solvent,” she said, apparently paying no attention to the fact that she was nearly naked, while he was bundled in a full vacuum suit, carrying a gun in one hand and a spray solvent can in the other.

  He tossed her the solvent, momentarily wondering if she could possibly be daring enough to try to spray him in the eyes and hope to grab his gun, but she turned to spray at the glue holding her suit in small, neat squirts, the minimum amount of spray needed to peel away the glue. Her back to him, she did a quick inspection of the seals, carefully making sure that no errant glue blobs might interfere with any of the fit, and then put the suit in its place on the rack behind it and plugged the electrical cables and air line into it to recharge it for the next use.

  He nodded to himself approvingly. With instincts like that, she might have some chance of survival in the out and out after all.

  While she had her back turned, he took the opportunity to do a visual inspection. The little she was wearing made it pretty easy to see that she had no place to hide a weapon.

  She turned back to him, catching him looking her over. “Now what?” she said, holding his gaze directly with hers.

  He averted his eyes slightly away from her body. “Now, what do you think?”

  “I don't know,” she said. “You have the upper hand; I expect that I'm going to do whatever you say I should do.”

  “In that case, I'd say that right now you might want to put on some more clothes.”

  Her eyebrows raised a tiny fraction of a millimeter, but she nodded and said, “Okay.”

  Buddha, all this time had she been thinking he was planning to rape her? What kind of a barbarian did she think he was? His Anteros crew weren't pirates because they liked to pillage and rape; they were pirates because they had no choice. Could she not know that?

  She pushed off to coast across the cabin. The main cabin was partitioned off, with six niches spaced evenly around the circumference. Other than the one that held the spacesuits, two of these were apparently storage, and two others served as a small galley and a head. The one opposite, to which she was heading, was apparently fitted out as a sleeping cubby. He pushed off behind her, and she looked back and down at him. “You're following me?” she said.

  Buddha! Was she still thinking he was about to rape her? She caught herself on the wall rail outside the cubby's door and stopped her motion; an instant later he braked himself to a spot next to her against the same rail.

  “One moment, please,” he said, and slid past her. He looked back. “If you don't mind, stay where I can see you.”

  He kept one
eye on her attuned to any unexpected motion, but the only movement she made was to occasionally touch a fingertip to the wall rail to keep herself from drifting. Domingo searched the sleeping cubby quickly but efficiently. It had a zippered mesh hammock tethered against the inner wall, and a number of cabinets, each of which he checked out. They were full of various pieces of loose-fitting one-piece ship's wear, a little more colorful than what he'd been used to, a lot of it decorated with whimsical horses and other animals. The cubby and the clothing both had a distinct scent of girl, not an unpleasant odor, but rather something that reminded him of other times, other places. He checked through it all, moving from the neatly folded clothing to the dirty laundry and then to towels and bathroom supplies. He caught her slight grin when he found her supply of tampons, but he kept searching, trying to keep his inspection pointedly disinterested. Clearly she wasn't using the drugs to suppress menarche, but her medical regimen was no business of his, and he was not so young as to be either shocked or titillated by indications of feminine biology. Here with her personal things would be a good place to hide a gun, if she had one, and he took extra care to make sure that he searched it thoroughly, without any loss of focus. After he finished, he floated out, saying “Okay. You can go in now.”

  She gave him a look of disgust, and pulled herself in. He expected that she would have flounced, if there'd been any way to do so in microgravity. “You sure made a mess,” she said.

  “No problem,” he said, and then, as she started to peel off her underwear, said, “you can go ahead and close the door if you like.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and did so. He took the time to do a quick search through the other compartments of the ship.

  Through the door, she said, “Are you bringing the rest of your crew in? Or will they just wait in your ship?”

  Ah—she thought he had a whole ship, and that he was just making excuses to be alone with her. “Oh, my ship,” he said. “No, they're already gone. They, ah, dropped me off, and went on to the next target already.”