Asimov's SF, January 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Oh.” She paused. “I don't understand. You're not here to take the cargo?”

  “Well, something like that, yes.” He was, in fact, intending to ride with the cargo, at least as far as the orbital whip. Once he got to the whip, though, he had other plans.

  “So,” her voice came out to him, chatting just as lightly as if he were nothing more than another shipmate, “how did you manage to make your ship invisible, anyway?”

  “Trade secret,” he said. “Sorry.”

  He finished his quick search of the cabin. It was still possible that a weapon might be hidden deeper in the systems, under panels or inside electronics enclosures, but he judged it unlikely. If she had been tipped off about piracy, despite all his precautions, a weapon would have been out for ready use, not buried away deep. And if she hadn't been tipped off, there would be no weapons at all; space ships were not normally armed.

  He hadn't expected anything, actually, but now that he had verified that nothing was in easy reach, he relaxed very slightly. The ship was still full of weapons, of course—in space, a thousand things ranging from oxygen cylinders to power lines would be deadly, if used right—but he knew what to watch for.

  When she emerged from the sleep cubby, she was wearing a one-piece ship-suit, a thin jumper in an innocent light blue, tight enough to keep from having loose cloth snag on protrusions, but loose enough to hide most of her curves. He'd already seen her, though, and could easily enough visualize what was underneath.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “you would be so good as to tell me your name.”

  “May,” she said, and then, after a pause, “May Hamilton.”

  “May,” he repeated. “You work for Hayes Minerals, I take it.”

  “Of course,” she said. “And may I also ask who you are? Or is that a secret?”

  “I am Domingo Bonaventura,” he said. “Of Anteros colony.”

  Her eyes widened slightly. “Oh,” she said. It was likely that she'd already heard of his name. Lies, probably—stories got around, and were usually distorted and exaggerated in the telling—but he hoped that, at least, the stories she'd heard hadn't made him seem too cruel.

  Her eyes drifted down to the gun, which he'd stuck with Velcro to his thigh. It was still in easy reach, although no longer in his hand. He raised his eyebrows slightly.

  “A projectile gun?” she said. “I don't think you'd use it. Not inside a pressurized cabin.”

  He smiled. “Think not? Think again. We're not amateurs, you know. The weapon is carefully designed. It won't penetrate a cabin. Shred flesh, yes indeed; you can bet that I would make a mess of anybody I shoot. But it won't depressurize the cabin. Better not count on me hesitating. If I need to use it, I won't.”

  “Oh.”

  Was she disappointed? He couldn't say. For all he could tell, she was just making conversation.

  “But I'll offer you a deal,” he said. “You will promise not to try to hurt me, or try to escape or call for rescue or make any kind of secret signal. If I ask you to do something, you'll do it. Fair?”

  “A deal?” she said. “So, what's your half of the deal? That you won't kill me?”

  “My half of the deal,” he said, “is that I will trust you.”

  “You'll trust me?” she said.

  “To a limited extent. When I say I'll trust you, that means I won't tie you up with electrical cables, cover the whole bundle with glue until you can't move a centimeter, and stuff you into a cargo hold until we reach a spot where I can put you and a locator beacon into a body bag and eject you in the general direction of somebody who might be able to pick you up. Which is what I will do if I decide I can't trust you. Fair?”

  “Sounds fair to me,” she said. “And when we get to the whip?”

  “You'll be free to go.”

  “You're going to subvert the whip,” she said. It wasn't a question.

  Domingo smiled. He was really beginning to like her.

  “You're not planning to brake into Earth orbit,” she said. “Of course not, why would you? You're going to ride the whip, but you're going to use it to grab the cargo and toss it into another orbit, somewhere in the outer belt. You have a trajectory all planned, I bet you do. Your destination is the out and out. That's why your ship didn't stay; you don't need a ship. You're not just pirating a little bit of water, you're taking the whole cargo.”

  “You seem to be telling me my plan,” Domingo said. “Since you seem to know it all, please, go on.”

  “So you're not stopping at Earth orbit at all, are you? And what about me? You say you'll let me go? So what do you mean by that?”

  “I have a pod.”

  “A pod. You're going to drop me in a pod?”

  “Crude,” Domingo said, “But I personally guarantee that it's functional. Are you objecting to the deal?”

  “No,” she said. “I understand. If a pod is what you've got, I'll take it.” She paused for a moment, and then added, “Thanks.”

  “In that case, if you're done asking questions?” Domingo said. “As long as you ask me before you go near the communications console, please feel free to go about your life.”

  “Thank you.”

  He tilted his head ironically.

  “No, really, I mean it,” she said. “The cargo's insured. You could have—” she paused. “You could have been a lot worse.”

  “So,” Domingo said. “You're welcome.”

  Domingo went to the control console and made a show of checking out systems, ostentatiously pretending to be paying no particular attention to her. He really did need to check out the ship and familiarize himself with its controls; when they got to the whip, he would need to do some rapid manual maneuvering. He had three days to become completely familiar with the control systems, and there would be no margin for error on maneuvers that would have to be done with perfect timing and no computer control. When he was done, he made sure that the ship was set to answer routine traffic control queries with an automatic “systems nominal” response.

  She, for her part, kept well clear of him, drifting over to a spot near her sleep-cubby to read a book. He wondered if she was really reading, or if she were pretending just as much as he was.

  He did trust her, to a limited extent, but he nevertheless remained wary. He wasn't trusting enough to allow himself to fall asleep with her free in the cabin. He knew how to sleep in a spaceman's cat nap, with part of his attention always aware, still listening for anomalies and ready to break into full consciousness in an instant, but he wasn't quite willing to trust to his reflexes. He inspected the door to the sleep cubby, but it was little more than painted paper; there was no real way to lock anybody inside. After some thinking, when the evening came according to ship's time, he had her get in her suit again, and he carefully glued it immobile. He left her visor up, so she could breathe ship's air.

  She seemed remarkably patient about the process, watching him with a slight grin on her face.

  He finished up by gluing the helmet down to the hardshell carapace to make sure she wouldn't be able to do her trick of sliding an arm out. Sleeping in the suit would be comfortable enough; he'd done it many times. In free-fall, she would be floating loose inside, and sleeping inside the suit would be no different than inside a mesh hammock.

  “Everything okay?” he said. “Nothing binding?”

  “No complaints,” she said.

  “Sorry for the indignity,” he said. “It's not that I don't trust you.”

  “—but you don't trust me,” she said. “I understand. No problem. Good night.”

  And she closed her eyes.

  * * * *

  After he had awakened in the morning and used the small head and then gone into the small freefall shower facility to clean up, she was still asleep. Domingo watched her face for a little while, soft and unlined, with wisps of hair straying out from the helmet, and then went to the galley, which was quite well appointed for its compact size. He was pleasantly surprised to see that it
had a pressure-percolator to brew up coffee, something that was an expensive luxury in the belt. Hayes apparently thought a lot of their employees. Then he went back to her. He left the suit glued to the bulkhead, but unsealed the chest and the helmet, pulling them away as a single piece. Her eyes opened sleepily just as soon as he started unfastening the dogs.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Arise, arise, a new day dawns.”

  She tried to suppress a yawn. “So soon? What time is it?”

  “Soon?” he said. “It's been five hours. How long did you plan to sleep?”

  “Longer than that,” she complained. “God. I'm going to need a nap.”

  “As you like. There's coffee, if you want some.”

  “God yes,” she said.

  Domingo had two cups squirted out of the brewer and waiting for her by the time she'd finished with the head. The cups were designed for use in either freefall or gravity, with a mesh latticework of ceramic that held the liquid in place by surface tension and yet allowed the coffee to be sipped slowly. He raised his cup to the small Buddha statue he'd installed on the bulkhead opposite, lowered his eyes for a moment, and then drank. Symbolically, raising the cup counted as making an offering to the Buddha. If the Buddha actually wanted to drink, he was free to come over and have a fresh cup squirted out for him; there was no point in actually wasting real coffee on symbolism.

  May followed his eyes and noticed the Buddha statue. “God,” she said. “Or, I mean, Gods. You don't actually believe in that stuff, do you?”

  Domingo sipped his coffee and considered. “No, not exactly. The rituals instill a certain amount of discipline that I like to encourage my people to follow, and I observe the forms, so as to not give them any temptation to slack off. But if you mean, do I believe a three-thousand-year-old dead Indian guy is watching over us from the great beyond, I'll reserve judgment on that until I see him.”

  “Your people?” she said. “You mean, you have followers who believe whatever you tell them to?”

  “We're a pretty anarchic group,” he said, “but, yes, to some extent, my people tend to look at what I'm doing.”

  She wrinkled her forehead. “So, pirates are Buddhist? I wouldn't have believed it.”

  “We don't like to be called pirates, if you don't mind,” he said.

  “Really? So what do you call coming on board a cargo ship with a gun and hijacking the cargo to god-knows-where?”

  “I would,” he said, “call it survival.”

  * * * *

  Over the next few days they fell into a routine. Space travel is boring, and there was only so much time that could be filled in by practicing with the control systems and making sure he was ready. He was accustomed to spending the long blank hours in space by sitting in meditation—floating in meditation, really—but, even though he'd more or less come to trust her, he didn't want to give her a temptation to surprise him with something that would compel him to respond with force. He spent much of the time inspecting the ship, making some minor adjustments to fittings, verifying that back-up systems were operational and ready to use, cleaning the filters, and recalibrating a few instruments that had drifted slightly. It was busywork, mostly, but he liked to have a ship in which he knew every component by having worked with it.

  “I'm not used to company,” he said, when he found her floating in the cabin, not really doing anything, just watching him as he took apart a fan motor to repack a bearing. The fan had been making a slight hum. “It's a little disconcerting.”

  “What about your crew?” she said.

  “Crew?”

  “Your ship.”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “I misled you a little on that. No back-up. Just me.”

  “Oh,” she said, working it out. “The pod. Of course. You didn't even have a ship, did you? No wonder your ship could be invisible; it doesn't even exist. A pod. All you ever had was a pod. You floated, God knows how far, all alone? Don't you get lonely?”

  “No.”

  “Don't you want companionship? Do you spend all your time like that, out in the deep, all alone?”

  “Well, I'm not alone all the time. I was married at sixteen.” When she looked at him with what seemed to be surprise, he said, “In the out and out, we tend to get married early.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So, is she nice, your wife?”

  “The best. Competent, intelligent, hard as vanadium steel. The kind of person you want at your side prospecting.”

  “You used to be a prospector?”

  “Of course. We didn't set out to be pirates, you know.”

  After a pause, she said, “So, where is she now? Waiting for you back at Anteros?”

  “She died.”

  May waited for more, and when no more was forthcoming, she said “That's it? She died? Nothing more?”

  “Of course there's more. I don't think I'll tell it.” Domingo paused, and then said, “If I started to tell you about her I expect I wouldn't stop, not for a week and a day, and then maybe another week. And if we had a couple of liters of good distillation, and if we weren't enemies, and if we weren't on a spaceship, and if people weren't depending on me, and if I didn't have a hijacked cargo to fly to the right place at the right time, maybe you could talk me into telling it to you. But we don't, and I won't. And it's not your business anyway.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

  * * * *

  One day out from Earth approach, and Domingo decided it was past time that he went out to inspect the cargo. He suited up, and had her suit up with him, partly because she knew the ship and would save him some time, and partly because he wasn't ready to trust her alone in the cabin.

  The cargo was, in essence, an enormous sack of water, and in the openings between the mesh the flexible material bulged out, like a balloon held in a fishnet. He did a fly-around to inspect it, verifying that there were no discontinuities in the webbing, checking the interior pressure and verifying that the temperature and pressure monitors were all well seated. At the temperatures of the Venus trajectory, the water was liquid, but the reflective thermal blanket kept it from heating up too much and building up a dangerous pressure.

  The main part of his inspection was the high-strength cables that secured the bag. In freefall, they were under no stress, but when cargo would be grabbed by the orbital whip, the cables would be suddenly under tension. He wanted to verify that the cargo wouldn't rip free.

  “I already checked those,” May's voice said, over the suit-to-suit. She was floating in her sky-blue suit about five meters away. He'd instructed her to stay clear of the cargo but to remain in sight; and he'd locked her suit radio so it would broadcast only on low-power mode, enough to communicate with him, but not to broadcast a distress signal.

  “Good,” he said. “I'll still check it myself, though, if you don't mind.” He did his flyaround in silence for a few moments, and then added casually, almost as if talking to himself, “I saw an accident, once, where a sack of water worth seventy million ripped open into vacuum because the mining company shepherding it had been in a hurry, and skipped the cable inspection before they put their cargo under acceleration.”

  That was back before Anteros went rogue, when they were still working on contract, still trying to scratch out a hard living on the far edge of the sky. The blowout had sprayed glistening snowflakes across the black, the water evaporating and also freezing at the same time. The ship Domingo had been in was coated with snow to a thickness of several meters on the side that had faced the blowout. In the parts of the ship that were in shadow, the snow had persisted for almost a week before slowly sublimating away. Although the accident had claimed no lives, it had still been a disaster for the mining company, which had been too deeply in debt to be able to survive the loss of cargo. It had been one more failure in the long slow chain of events that brought the Anteros colony to the brink of bankruptcy.

  When Domingo finished inspecting the cargo retention cables, which (just as she had said) had no
evident flaws, he went over to where he'd glued his pod to a truss. He gave it a visual inspection, no problems, and then did a remote systems boot. Everything checked out as normal, so he unglued it and moved it around to a position near the hatch of the hab module.

  “You crossed over to here in that?” May's voice said. “Kind of small, isn't it?”

  “Sufficient for the job,” he said.

  “How long were you in that?”

  “Sorry; trade secret.”

  “Must have been at least a couple of weeks, I'd reckon,” she said. “Some kind of ship must have dropped you into the transfer orbit, but if anything had ever been nearby, I should have seen it.”

  “You can make that assumption, if you like,” he said.

  * * * *

  When they returned to the ship, there was an incoming message waiting.

  “Venus cargo, this is Interplanetary control, come in please. We have an off-nominal here. Venus cargo, come in please.”

  All of Domingo's senses ratcheted up to full alert. He was, in fact, slightly off the expected trajectory, but in a deviation that had been carefully calibrated to be not far enough off the nominal path to rate a query from traffic control. He looked at May. She seemed as surprised as he was; she looked back at him, and shook her head slightly. He shrugged and sent out a response.

  “Traffic control, this is Cargo Hayes VE-seven. What's up?”

  After the light-delay pause, he heard, “Listen, seven, we have a problem on this end. Hohmann whip is down. Repeat, Hohmann whip is down. Do you copy?”

  May whistled softly, and floated over toward the other console. Domingo cursed under his breath. The whip out of business! “Roger, we copy,” he said. “Negative on the whip. Can you list us the abort modes?”

  After the delay, the voice said, “Hold on, seven. Things are pretty confused around here. I think you're on your own, though.” The voice was a young man's. He seemed somewhat rattled.

  It must be bad out there. “What happened?”

  “Not sure yet. There was a major structural failure near the 70 percent mark; several cables broken, a lot of people lost. We think we must have had an impact, don't know yet by what.”