View from Ararat

by Caswell, Brian

  And what he sees brings the bile rushing into his throat.

  With an effort he forces it down and slides the door open. It moves with surprisingly little resistance.

  ‘Mac?’ The voice in his headset is Cindy’s.

  She is young. It is her first trip, and despite the hardships they have shared over the past year she hasn’t yet developed the hard shell that characterises the rest of the Ganymede Horizon’s experienced crew. ‘You OK, Boss?’

  ‘Fine, Cindy.’ He smiles to himself. A half-smile. ‘Just fine . . .’

  The meteor struck without warning, of course, and the decompression was so sudden that there was no time for the computer to react and activate the airtight doors. Which was probably a disguised blessing for the doomed crew, because before they were really aware of the danger they were already dead.

  There are worse ways of buying it.

  He allows the thought to form, before he realises where it is heading.

  Like having just enough time to clamber into a pressure suit, then waiting among the dead for the air to slowly run out . . .

  A quick death. A blessing for the crew, but a waking nightmare for the poor jerk who lands the job of finally discovering them – which is the reason he has chosen to come alone onto the crew-deck of the ore-shuttle.

  For all their bravado and all their hard-won experience, apart from Cox and Avram the crew of the Ganymede Horizon is young. Deep-space mining is a young person’s sport. Few last at it beyond thirty, if they survive that long.

  They are young, and none of them has seen what happens to a human body when you introduce it to the vacuum and absolute cold of deep space, totally unprotected.

  How every individual cell in that body disintegrates, as the pressure inside ruptures the delicate membranes. How blood and fluids explode from the distorted mass in a red cloud that freezes instantly into minute floating crystals, spreading gradually to fill the surrounding space. Crystals that stick to the static field of your pressure suit and to the visor of your helmet, until you stare at the horror through a shimmering, red haze. While you wait for the end to creep up on you . . .

  None of them has seen it, but Mac Porter has.

  And it is the memory of that long-suppressed horror which turns his stomach as he floats across the airless cabin among the grotesque remains of the lo Trader’s crew.

  JMMC Mining-Drone Ganymede Horizon

  in elliptical orbit around Jupiter

  December 31, 2331ad

  CINDY’S STORY

  ‘Face it, Cind, when it’s your time, it’s your time . . .’

  Elroy Cox leaned back philosophically in his gravity couch and sipped his drink, holding my gaze like one of the tutors at the Institute. I noticed a few drops had dribbled from the end of the straw. They hung unmoving in the air in front of his bearded face.

  ‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ Avram shot back, mimicking. ‘And did you work that one out all by yourself, Einstein?’

  The trip had been too long, and the mutual dislike the two older miners had shown in the first weeks had grown into a constant game of one-upmanship.

  I had kind of a soft spot for Cox. In spite of his ‘act’, he wasn’t half as tough as he made out. I’d hacked into the confidential personnel files on the third day out from Earth, before we went into stasis for the sub-light acceleration. Cox’s wife was dead, and he was supporting four kids and an old mother. Which explained why someone his age was still out in the Jovian sector jockeying ore when he should have been riding a desk – on Earth or on Lunar.

  Avram, I couldn’t stand. He was bitter and sarcastic, and sexist, and all he was supporting was a massive gambling habit, which ate all his earnings, and then some. But far worse – at least from the point of view of the crew – he could be bone-lazy if the mood took him, which it did, far too often.

  ‘I was just saying . . .’ I persevered, in another attempt to ride over their constant interruptions. As the ‘rookie’, I was still fighting to finish a sentence, even after the best part of a year. ‘I was pointing out that it was just such incredible bad luck. Half a second difference in trajectory in either direction and the meteor would have missed them completely. It hit them almost head-on, ruptured the hull in the forward starboard quadrant, and travelled on through the bulkheads, the cabin and the sleeping quarters. But look at the computer mock-up. No exit hole. The decompression ripped the ship apart at the point of entry, but there’s no other damage to the hull. Which means—’

  ‘There’s an extra piece of rock in the cargo hold,’ Cox cut in. ‘Mind you, it probably disintegrated on impact. It wouldn’t matter how fast it was travelling. Nothing that size has got the momentum to punch a hole through 10,000 tonnes of high-grade ore.’

  ‘Really high grade.’ Without removing his gaze from the screen in front of him, Mac entered the conversation for the first time. As usual, he was running some kind of diagnostic on the ship’s data frame.

  He might have been a couple of hours into his ‘down time’, but one thing you learned very early was that McEwan Porter was never really off duty.

  His confidential psych-profile – which I’d also accessed – mentioned mildly compulsive tendencies, but that was a bit of typical bureaucratic psycho-babble. He was just a dedicated human being who took his work very seriously. OK, it wasn’t exactly brain surgery, but let’s face it, take away the work and he really didn’t have anything else.

  He’d been riding the ore-shuttles and the mining drones since he was eighteen – which by an amazing coincidence was how old I’d be turning on my next birthday – if I made it that far.

  Personally, I couldn’t see myself sticking at anything for that long. But impatience has always been part of my problem. You should see my confidential psych-profile.

  Anyway, Mac pushed another button and the screen switched to a 3-D multicoloured bar-graph. ‘I’ve just finished the ore-sample analysis,’ he went on. ‘These guys must have hit the mother lode. Big time.’

  ‘Yeah, and a lot of damned good it did them,’ Avram unbuckled, and pushed himself across the cabin. ‘I’ll be glad when we can get this tub moving again. Damned weightlessness gives me the shits. Literally.’

  He pushed off the wall and headed down the corridor towards the head.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Mac called after him, ‘as soon as we can get the grapples connected properly. We don’t want this baby slipping loose under acceleration, while we’re in stasis—’

  ‘Just as a matter of interest, Boss,’ Cox cut in. ‘What’s the going rate on really high-grade ore, anyway? At last count . . .’

  He was getting at something. There was a tone that crept into his voice whenever he was about to suggest something questionable.

  ‘About one-ten, maybe one-twenty credits a tonne. Give or take.’ Mac played along, waiting to see where the conversation was headed. Although ‘boss’ of the group, he had very little real authority.

  Miners are naturally volatile creatures. The only way a team of them can function is with a loose kind of democracy. They’re constitutionally unable to follow orders just for the sake of it, which I guess is why I fitted in so well.

  Cox whistled. ‘So, that makes our little discovery worth . . .’ He wrinkled his forehead as he did the calculation. An act, of course. ‘A million one, maybe a million two . . . That’s a lot of creds.’

  ‘What are you getting at, Cox?’

  ‘About thirty per cent of that is . . .’

  ‘About three hundred thousand and change,’ I obliged. I didn’t really need to. No one on board was challenged in the IQ department. Not quite Funded Research calibre, maybe, but smart enough. A stupid miner was a dead miner. And so were the rest of his crew.

  ‘Three hundred thousand . . . and change,’ Cox went on, ‘which, split between the ten of us, is—’

  �
�A pretty good year’s wages,’ Mac interrupted. He was trying to control the exchange before it got out of hand. ‘A very good year’s wages.’

  ‘. . . somewhere around thirty thou,’ Cox continued, as if Mac hadn’t spoken. ‘Of course, if it wasn’t salvage, if we’d hit the mother lode and mined it ourselves, we’d be on sixty per cent, which would be . . . Well, enough for this little black duck to book a one-way ticket to a new life – with plenty left to live on.’

  He looked around the cabin. It was something they had all thought of. You could see it written in their eyes.

  And Cox wasn’t blind to the fact. He continued. ‘Come on, guys. The lo Trader’s been missing for twenty years. The company’s written it off. They’ve already spent the insurance from the ship, and they’ve paid the blood money to the widows. So what if they do pay a bit more than they should for a shipment of really high-grade ore? It’s still a bargain. Do you think they’re ever going to lose on the deal? Anyway, who takes all the risks? Who does all the freaking slave-work? The shareholders? This is our chance, people. Once in a lifetime.’

  There was a short pause. No one spoke to fill the silence, so he continued.

  ‘Take a look at it.’ A single finger pointed towards the image of the dead ship on the view-screen, but his eyes held Mac’s. There was only one person on board he really had to convince, and Elroy Cox knew it.

  ‘That could have been us, Mac. And you know it. You more than anyone else here.’ There was far more in the look that passed between them than I could read.

  He closed for the kill. ‘One shitty little piece of flying rock and it’s “sayonara baby”. And would they care? Not a chance. Not about us, at least. To them, the cargo’s gold. We’re expendable. We’re . . . scum.’

  I was watching Mac as he looked around at the faces in the cabin. The argument was convincing and he was weakening.

  It wasn’t hard to work out why.

  He was thirty-two next birthday – I’d checked. That meant he’d spent over thirteen years digging for ore on the moons of Jupiter. Which could, of course, make you very rich if you were one of the lucky few. But with five bad years for every good one, on average, and with the company manipulating the ore prices to suit the share price . . .

  Put it this way: you never got to see many ex-miners in the society pages on the ’net.

  Mac looked at the view-screen, then at the others. Thirteen years of breathing recycled air and drinking recycled waste, of living and working inside the metal coffin of the mining drone. Of sweating blood to fill the pockets of the faceless rich . . .

  I watched his eyes. Yes, the argument was convincing.

  But futile. At least as far as Mac was concerned.

  And it had nothing to do with some kind of misplaced loyalty to the company. The ‘boss’ might have been dedicated to his work, but he wasn’t totally insane. As usual, his objection was purely practical.

  ‘Forget it, Cox,’ he said. ‘Do you think you’re the first person ever to think up that particular scam? Why do you think they have the log? One look at the records and they’ll work out we didn’t mine that ore ourselves. After the fines and the legals, we’d be lucky not to be paying them thirty per cent. They own the game. And the umpires. Forget it.’

  But Cox just smiled and looked across the cabin to where I was sitting. And in that instant, reading the look on his face, I knew I wasn’t the only one who’d accessed the confidential personnel files.

  When he spoke again, it was to me. ‘Do you want to tell him, Cindy, or will I?’

  I just shrugged and nodded for him to continue. Either way I was ‘outed’, so why spoil his fun?

  ‘You’re a smart man, Boss. Didn’t it ever strike you as a bit odd that your newest crew-member knew so much about communications, computers and navigation – and just about everything else – but she’d signed on as a common hand?’

  I knew it had crossed Mac’s mind. I’d seen him watching me on occasions. And not the way Stevens and Chandrasingh, or that sleaze Avram, watched me, either.

  ‘Would it surprise you overly to learn that she’s a certified genius? Funded for Research at the age of twelve. Computers and technology, wasn’t it?’ He looked at me again, but not for confirmation. ‘Four years, with the whole world in front of her, but she blew it. What’d you do, Cindy, crash the company mainframe or something?’

  ‘Something like that.’ I held his gaze, giving nothing away. The details weren’t important.

  ‘Point is, Fearless Leader, for someone with Cindy’s background, a little thing like altering the company log is’ – he smiled again – ‘child’s play.’

  So it was settled.

  Hacking into the ship’s log was a breeze. I had it changed in a couple of hours. But if I’d been as smart as Cox claimed – or as lazy as Avram – I would have pretended it took a couple of days. Because that was how long it took to organise the transfer of the ore from the hold of the lo Trader to our own. A couple of days of no sleep and really heavy work.

  And, of course, there are no distinctions in space. Male or female, young or old, rookie or ‘boss’, everybody pulls equal duty.

  Then finally it was done. The ore was transferred and the hold secured.

  We sent the shell of the lo Trader off on its final one-way journey to burn up in the atmosphere of the giant planet, then we prepared for the trip back to Earth.

  JMMC Ore-Processing Plant

  Puerto Limon, Costa Rica

  Caribbean/Southwest Sector, Old Earth

  April 30, 2332ad

  ÉLITA

  The girl sits on a pile of ore, rubbing the bruise that is already growing on the side of her shin. On the far side of the battlefield the boy raises his head from behind his own pile of rubble.

  ‘’Lita . . .? Qué pasa?’ He sounds concerned, which almost makes her smile in spite of the pain. For Ramón to even acknowledge her existence is a breakthrough, but concern . . .

  ‘I’m OK, hermano. Just a bruise.’

  Rule number one for playing with boys: Never show that it hurts.

  He crosses the space between them, and sits down next to her. He is ten years old next week. Her big brother. Her only brother, since the accident. Her only family.

  ‘Show me,’ he orders, and she obliges, lifting her leg onto his lap. He rubs the reddening mark gently. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to . . .’

  ‘I know.’ He looks so funny when he is guilty that she can’t help smiling, even though the bruise is beginning to throb. ‘It doesn’t hurt, Ramón. Really.’

  He looks at her for a moment, then at the distant fence.

  ‘Anyway,’ he says, removing her leg from his knees and standing up, ‘it’s time to go home.’

  The moment of closeness is over. He is big brother again. And big brothers are too cool to pay any attention to their little sisters.

  He probably won’t bring me here again, she thinks angrily. She knows her brother’s protective instincts too well.

  In frustration she picks up a jagged piece of ore and throws it as hard as she can towards a nearby pile. It bounces off the side and rolls away, but her eyes don’t follow it. They are captured by the small object lying at the base of the pile where it tumbled when the rock struck.

  It is different from anything else she has seen in the ore-yard. Black and smooth, it shines in the late-afternoon sunlight like a huge jewel, and she moves towards it, the throbbing in her leg forgotten momentarily.

  ‘’Lita, come on!’ Ramón sounds impatient, but he will have to wait. She moves closer.

  ‘Hey! You two. What are you doing there?’

  When the shout comes she is about to reach for the glowing treasure. She looks up and sees the security guard. He runs towards them, drawing his gun.

  She looks back at the strange stone, but before she can move t
o pick it up, Ramón’s strong grip is around her arm and he is dragging her away towards the fence.

  ‘Ramón!’ The sudden thought might have stopped her, but for her brother’s greater strength. ‘My coat. I left it on the pile.’

  The coat was the last present from her parents. It was her birthday a week before the accident took them. Sudden tears swell in her eyes, but her brother refuses to slow his pace.

  ‘I’ll come back for it later, when the coast’s clear. I promise.’

  She protests, but weakly. The sight of a uniform is enough to ensure obedience to her brother’s will.

  They turn and run. Sliding in the red dust, they make it to the place where the wire of the fence has been cut away from the support-post. Ramón holds it clear while she wriggles through, then he follows her.

  They sprint up the shallow slope, and don’t slow their pace until they reach the streets of drab, run-down houses which form the company suburb of Callas.

  There they slow to a walk.

  And as they walk, Ramón puts an arm around his sister’s shoulder, drawing her close. Only for a moment, but his touch is warm.

  Her breathing settles and her heart rate slows. She feels safe.

  But still, as they walk she looks back towards the battleground, recalling how the strange stone shone, black and beautiful in the dying sun.

  And imagining how it would have felt to hold it.

  JMMC Ore-Processing Plant

  Puerto Limon, Costa Rica

  Caribbean/Southwest Sector, Old Earth

  April 30, 2332ad

  CARLOS

  Carlos Ruiz smiles to himself and slides the safety-locked pistol back into its holster.

  Kids . . .

  They never seem to learn. The storage yards are dangerous places. Even apart from the giant machinery that moves around between the piles of ore, there is the ore itself. Cut and roughly crushed on the moons of Jupiter, and shipped back in sub-light ore-shuttles, it is sharp-edged and irregular, and the huge piles are dangerously unstable.

  But you just can’t keep the kids out.