“Obviously Shavro disagreed,” Jimmy said.
“We argued about it for a week. We got so bad Damio would cry when we raised our voices, then he’d go into fits, and we’d spend the rest of the day trying to get Damio stabilized.”
“So when did Shavro take off?”
“He didn’t. Our former military men stood in my husband’s way. Literally. I don’t know how George got a pistol onboard this mission, but he pulled it on my husband when Shavro wouldn’t back down. There was …”
Henrietta close her eyes, remembering the blood.
“Go on,” Jimmy said.
“There was a fight. Ross tried to separate them. Shavro and Ross both got shot, while Shavro brained George with a heavy wrench. Ross was the only one with in-depth medical training, and he was the first to bleed out. Then Shavro after him. George lingered for days, but his cranial injury was too severe. I had to watch all three of them die in front of me.”
“Damio?”
“Damio got worse every day for a month afterward. Then came the seizure that wouldn’t stop. His little eyes ultimately rolled up in his dead and he choked to death in my arms.”
At this point Henrietta could see Jimmy openly gaping at her.
“That’s horrible,” he said.
“You have no idea. Losing the others took me right to the edge. Losing Damio too? I went over the edge.”
“Is that why the thruster-pushers and mining robots were never deployed? You were completely out of it?”
“Yes.”
“Ground thought something catastrophic had happened.”
“Something catastrophic did happen.”
“I mean, a technical failure. An explosion. Something. One day the log updates and telemetry from 33 Riga just stopped coming. No explanation. No warning. It was like you all went to sleep. Or worse. For most of the way out here, I expected to find a disaster scene. And corpses. I am thankful that at least one person made it. But I’m curious, why is the ascent stage still missing if your husband never got to it?”
“I put the bodies in it,” Henrietta said, her face pale with vivid, terrible memory. “At first I tried to keep them outside, but even knowing they were there—little Damio especially—was insufferable. It made me even crazier than I think I already was. So I put them all in the ascent stage, programmed the ascent stage for a long-trajectory burn for the sun, and launched it. Doubtless they’ve long since burned up. I can deal with that better than I can deal with the idea of their corpses still being here. On the asteroid.”
“Another woman might have chosen to end her life,” Jimmy said.
“I almost did. Several times. But I couldn’t. Instead, I just kept everything turned off, used the onboard supplies and tools and equipment to set myself up for long-term habitation, and said goodbye to the rest of the human universe. I never wanted to see another person again. Something about holding Damio to my chest as he died … I don’t remember too much about the weeks that followed. Other than putting the bodies in the ascent stage. I remember that. Too well. Everything else …”
“PTSD,” Jimmy said. “My grandfather’s brother Mel came back with it when he was deployed with the Army. Grandpa said Mel never was the same after that. Though Mel didn’t go to counseling like the VA said he should. Mel was too proud. I hope when we get you back to civilization you’re not too proud.”
“I am not sure any counselor can help this,” Henrietta said. “The very idea of being around other human beings, at this point, fills me with terror.”
“You got over having me around,” Jimmy said, smiling slightly.
“There is always an exception to everything.”
“Yeah, I guess there is.”
The two of them remained quiet for several minutes while they stared at the Earth. The Moon was now clearly visible as a little white companion.
“You think you’ll be up for more work tomorrow? Getting that thruster-pusher up and running by myself was a royal pain. I really do need your help if we’re going to make this work.”
“I’ll give it my best,” Henrietta said.
“I think your best is better than most,” Jimmy said, retrieving his drinking bulb and raising it in Henrietta’s direction, before putting it to his mouth and taking a double-shot’s worth.
• • •
To Henrietta’s surprise, she didn’t have even a single episode throughout the entirety of the following day. Nor the day after that. Nor the day after that. Time once again began to spin by. Little by little, she and Jimmy brought the entire thruster-pusher array up to full strength, their fuel piped from electrolyzed wells deep in the rock.
And for the first time that Henrietta could remember, 33 Riga enjoyed gravity. If after a fashion. Everything in the house had to be rearranged for the sake of an up-down existence—where things fell, and you couldn’t just float your way around. But because the amount of constant thrust was relatively weak—ion engines only being capable of so much—the environment was forgiving. Such that the few times Henrietta did fall, she caught herself well before injury. And dropped items? They floated to the floor like feathers.
The Earth and the Moon grew larger.
With the thrusters completed it was time to engage the mining ‘bots and the refinery. Things that could have been done in orbit, but since the original orders had said to spend the return trip to Earth doing as much advanced digging and smelting as possible, Jimmy was eager to complete the plan. So that 33 Riga would arrive in orbit with an abundance of valuable ores and minerals already accumulated.
“We’ll sell it at a deep discount—at first,” Jimmy said as he and Henrietta worked on a mining robot’s chassis. Even with the original four crew, robot assembly would have been slow. With just two now, and one of them not entirely familiar with the old system, the process was much slower.
“The Consortium won’t be making any profits that way,” Henrietta said, twisting a bolt with her ratchet wrench.
“Not to start,” Jimmy said, using his own ratchet wrench with an experienced and vigorous repetitive snap of the elbow. “But with 33 Riga secured and providing refined product in orbit—for a fraction of a fraction of what it would cost to lift the same product out of Earth’s gravity well—I don’t think it will be long before customers are lined up with their billfolds in their hands. And once that happens, ADC can launch bigger and better refinery equipment. Maybe even some milling and machining stations, the ones where you feed in three-dee models and the automated system spits out whatever shape you want. Eventually we’ll launch more missions to more NEOs, as was originally planned. With several captured asteroids all producing, manufacturing … there won’t be anything to hold us back. The moon colonies will be completed, and populated. Our mining and refining tech for the asteroids should be adaptable to the lunar environment. I tell you, Henrietta, once there are a few thousand people in space, the cork will be out of the bottle. Everybody will be wanting to come up. And this time, they’ll be able to afford it too.”
• • •
The mining robots went to work, grinding slowly but surely down through the silicates that layered the outer crust of 33 Riga. It wasn’t long before they began to hit pay dirt, bringing hunks of iron and copper ore back to the surface. These raw materials were cordoned off in separate piles on the surface of the asteroid—opposite the thruster-pushers, so as to take advantage of the thrust-induced gravity. Otherwise they’d have just floated away into space.
Once the refinery was on-line, the ore began to be fed into the hopper, with spools and bricks of the refined metal dispensed on the other end. Not in huge quantities. Like all else about the asteroid-capture project, the 33 Riga refinery was a pint-sized version of the big automated refineries already working on an industrial scale, back on Earth.
But as the months passed, the stacks and coils of iron, copper, aluminum, and even gold and silver, began to accumulate. Jimmy’s mood grew buoyant as a result. He’d be contacting ground soon, to r
elay not only the news of his successful operation of the refinery, but also to help fine-tune their insertion trajectory.
Come in too shallow and 33 Riga might be flung off into a wild orbit, taking it far out of humanity’s grasp. Come in too steep and 33 Riga might impact—the equivalent of a couple thousand megatons. Enough to wipe out a country, and induce apocalyptic tsunamis, to say nothing of the more long-lived environmental after-effects. A comet or asteroid not terribly bigger than 33 Riga was still presumed to have ended the epoch of the dinosaurs. Do it wrong, and ADC’s attempt to capture 33 Riga for humanity’s future, might end up spelling humanity’s doom.
Through it all, Jimmy and Henrietta kept talking. A bit here, and a bit there. As both schedule and energy allowed. By the time their first year had elapsed, Henrietta actually began to think of him as her friend. Something she’d not been able to say about another person for a long, long time.
Then came the day when they were standing together in the observation dome, and the Earth was no longer a marble, nor a golf ball, nor even a baseball, but a beach ball in the black sky.
Having shed velocity with a prolonged downthrust, 33 Riga was lined up almost perfectly with its entry corridor. Once they were in the “pipe” they’d put the thruster-pushers into overdrive and conduct a final, tremendous deceleration burn. Enough to push the local gravitational equivalent of the asteroid up to 25% Earth normal—which was really saying something, and would stress every system on the asteroid. Including the people.
Jimmy pointed up to the planet, at the large ice-capped island off the eastern coast of North America.
“I figure I can negotiate something with the government. Get you a nice bit of tundra all to yourself. Nothing to do but freeze your butt off.”
Henrietta stared at where he was pointing.
“I think … I may have changed my mind.”
Jimmy’s arm dropped and he did a double take.
“Oh?” he said, visibly working to suppress his surprise. “You’re not doubting my powers of persuasion, are you? I’ve yet to meet a politician I couldn’t get to eat out of the palm of my hand.”
“It’s not that,” Henrietta said. “It’s just … well, I think I’m getting the bug again.”
“The bug?”
“The dream, as your grandfather might have called it. After Damio died I gave up on my dreams. Life was just something to be coped with. Endured. But now? I don’t know. The idea of being surrounded by people still spooks me. But you’re right. We’ve done OK, you and I. Something I would have said was impossible three years ago. Maybe having a little company around the asteroid won’t be so bad. And I have to admit, the vision you paint—of capturing more asteroids and using them all in concert to begin paving the road to the planets, and maybe even to the stars some day—it’s as alluring as it ever was. I lost my vision—in that way—for a long time. But I think having someone else around, who knows a little bit about what I’ve been through, has helped me get it back again.”
“Historic!” Jimmy said, clapping his hands together and grinning.
“Cool it,” Henrietta said. “We still have our insertion orbit to complete. The end is still nigh, though I think all the math’s worked out in our favor.”
“I hope you’re right,” Jimmy said, still smiling.
Henrietta looked at him. He was younger than she was, by at least a dozen years or more. But still handsome in his own way. His hair thick, and a dark silver color, whereas hers had gone mostly silver-white.
Impulsively, Henrietta grasped his shoulders in her hands, pulled herself up to eye level with him, and planted a kiss squarely on his lips.
“Oh my goodness,” was all he managed to say, completely floored.
Henrietta smiled, and curled the fingers of her left hand around his right palm.
“Come on Mister Space Tycoon, we’d better go get ourselves strapped in. It’s going to be a fun ride.”
“Yes,” Jimmy said, his eyes in a happy haze of surprise, “I think you’re right.”
This was one of those stories which started at the very end, and worked its way backward. The scene I had in my head, was that of two older people—a man and a woman—who’ve been beaten down by a lot of hard knocks, but who are also facing their mutual future with fresh eyes. In a moment of off-the-cuff enthusiasm, the woman—who has to this point been very reserved and standoffish—pecks the man on the lips. Thus signaling that there are more doors being opened than the reader might at first assume. Because romance isn’t just for teenagers.
The rest congealed around this initial scene, so that pretty soon I’d worked up not only a reason for the woman being standoffish, but also for the man being there in the first place, his own inner demons and how they contrast to those of the woman, and their overall predicament as a whole—science fictionalized, of course. I wanted to make sure I had something which would be at home in the pages of Analog magazine. So I concocted the notion of a do-or-die mission to revive an asteroid harvesting project gone terribly awry.
When I was much younger, I didn’t realize yet how truly burdensome one’s accumulated sum of lifetime choices can become. The good, the bad, the ugly. Hopefully all of us learn from the middle, and the latter, while enjoying the fruits of the former. And if we’re lucky, we get to pay back—to the universe, in karma points—whatever debts we’ve incurred through blunders and stumbles. But sometimes everything can pile up on a person to the point that no choice, short of unplugging and shutting down entirely, seems possible. Thus Henrietta’s neurosis manifests following the loss of her family and her coworkers in what is a tragic series of events.
Sometimes, it really can be too much to bear; facing the world.
I wanted Henrietta to discover that she’s not the only one who’s suffered, and that even when she’s walled up her feelings good and tight, a little warmth can still seep in through the cracks, stirring the seeds of her humanity; which she thought to be essentially dead and buried.
***
The Flamingo Girl
Elvira was seven feet of naked avian loveliness. The tiny feathers sprouting from her skin formed a luxurious layer of bright-pink, velvet-soft plumage, and her unblinking eyes stared at the ceiling with an expression of surprise. The bed upon which her body lay was a confused mess of satin blankets and pillows, with not a hint of whom else might have been with her, or why that person had resorted to murder.
“Señor Soto,” said a voice behind me. I turned, and beheld another seven-foot beauty, this one parrot-green. Her wings flexed and ruffled with agitation, and her sapphire-blue eyebrows hunched over a fear-filled gaze. Looking up into her face—we unmodified humans being generally shorter than Specials—I asked her what I could do for her.
“The other women are very nervous, Señor,” she said, “they are wanting to know what has happened. Madam Arquette asked me to ask you what to tell them.”
“And you are?” I said.
“Josefina,” said the green bird-woman.
“You may tell them that Elvira is dead, and that housekeeping is free to enter and clean the Flamingo Suite as soon as the city’s public mortician has removed the body.”
“There isn’t going to be an investigation?”
“That’s for the police to decide. They’ll be here shortly. I imagine that they’ll want to question a few people, so make sure none of the customers leave before that happens.”
In truth, the cops wouldn’t give a damn about another dead Special. It was unlikely they’d interrogate anyone at all. The Aerie was a busy waypoint on Hollywood Boulevard, in a city that spared little budget for true law enforcement. Myself and three other guards were what laughably passed for security at the Aerie—our presence being a formality so that Madam Arquette could claim to be honoring her adult merchant commission with the Greater Los Angeles Commerce Bureau.
“The Madam will not be pleased,” said Josefina.
“Then perhaps the Madam should have listened to me when
I warned her about cutting her private security expenses again. All the reputable adult businesses on the Boulevard hire triple our number.”
Josefina’s wings rustled violently.
“Look,” I said to her, “I’m sorry I can’t do more. I really am.”
I attempted to move past Josefina. She thrust out a wing that blocked my way.
“But you used to be a policeman,” she said with quivering indignation. “You were hired because of your experience. If you can’t help us now, what good are you?”
I stepped back, looked at the anger in her eyes, and felt the full weight of my fifty years settle on my shoulders. I had asked myself that same question ten times a day since coming to the Aerie. Once upon a time, I’d been an okay cop in the Long Beach supermetro. But when Carlita had left me, and taken the kids, and sold the house … whatever ties had been keeping me in Long Beach, seemed to evaporate. I’d retired early, and immediately sought the job with the least amount of real responsibility I could find, as far away from Carlita as possible.
I just looked at Josefina, a sympathetic frown on my face. “The police will be here soon, and they will handle this. It’s out of my purview.”
Eventually her wing withdrew, and small tears began to stain the lime-colored down around Josefina’s eyes.
“Look,” I said, “if you really want to find out who did this, give the cops something to go on. I know the Madam has in-house rules about customer confidentiality, but this time I think there needs to be an exception. City corporate policy says they can’t make her release her records, and knowing the Madam, I doubt she’d sacrifice her reputation on the strip for a single dead girl—”
“I will get the police what they need,” Josefina said, suddenly standing stiff.
“Will the Madam know about it?” I asked.
“Would it bother you if she didn’t?”
No, I had to admit, it wouldn’t.
“You’re taking this kind of hard,” I said. “Was Elvira a friend?”
“No, Señor Soto, she was my younger sister.”
Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen Page 10
