The Aftermath gt-16

by Ben Bova

  “I don’t know who’s attacking us,” Theo said, “but he’s smashed up Chrysalis pretty awful.”

  “But Ceres is neutral territory!”

  “Not anymore.”

  Pauline opened her son’s suit locker.

  “Mom,” Theo said, stretching the truth only slightly, “Dad said I should help you with your suit before I get into mine.”

  “What about me?” Angie snapped.

  Theo smirked at her. “He knew Mom would have his precious little chubbo all suited up by the time I got here.”

  “Mom!” she yowled.

  Pauline sat down on the bench that ran in front of the lockers. “Don’t you two start,” she warned. “This is no time for bickering.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Theo. But he saw Angie stick her tongue out at him behind their mother’s back. As he pulled his mother’s suit torso from its rack he thought that his sister might be two years older than he, but she was still nothing more than a bratty girl.

  Dad had spoken more than once about buying new nanofabric space suits for them, the kind you could pull on like plastic coveralls and be suited up in a minute or less. But they cost too much. All they had aboard Syracuse were these old-fashioned cumbersome hard-shell suits, with their big ungainly boots and heavy backpacks and glassteel bubble helmets. At least the suits ran on oxygen at normal air pressure; you didn’t have to spend an hour prebreathing low-pressure oxy like the earliest astronauts did.

  They said little as they donned their suits. The ship shuddered and jolted a few times, whether from being hit by the attacker’s laser beams or from Dad jinking to get away, Theo had no way of knowing. Dull booming noises echoed distantly. Angie’s eyes widened with every thud and shake; their mother looked grim.

  Leaving the visors of their helmets up, the three of them inspected each other’s suits, making certain all the connections were in place and the seals tight. Theo noticed that his hands were trembling slightly.

  “What do we do now?” Angie asked. Theo thought her voice sounded shaky. She’s scared now, he realized. I am too, but I can’t let them see it. I’ve got to be the man here.

  Pauline said, “Now we wait. If the ship is badly punctured we can live inside the suits until we repair the damage.”

  Theo pressed the stud on his left cuff. “Dad, we’re suited up. Waiting for your orders.”

  No answer.

  “I told you the intercom wasn’t working, chimpbrain,” Angie said.

  “The suit radios are on a different frequency, dumbbutt,” Theo told her. “Dad, we’re in our suits. What’s your situation?”

  Nothing but silence. Not even the crackle of the radio’s carrier wave.

  “Dad!” Theo shouted.

  Angie’s face went ashen. “Do you think…”

  Theo turned from his sister to his mother. For the first time in his life she looked fearful.

  VICTOR SULEIMAN ZACHARIAS

  He was born in one of the tent cities strung along the craggy ridges of eastern Kentucky ; his parents were refugees from the greenhouse flooding that had inundated most of Chicago. Victor’s father had once owned a restaurant in the part of that city called Greek Town. His mother was a Palestinian exile who had barely managed to escape the nuclear devastation of Israel and Lebanon. Victor was their only child; his father refused to bring another baby into a world ravaged by the savagery of nature and the cruelty of men.

  At sixteen his mother died and Victor ran away from the tattered city of tents to join the army. He was short, underweight and underage but the recruiters asked few questions. After four years of guarding food warehouses and putting down riots, he won a scholarship to study—of all things—architecture at Syracuse University in the middle of New York state. He graduated just as the earthquakes in the Midwest brought on a new wave of flooding, and the Gulf of Mexico washed halfway up the Mississippi valley. Returning home, he found that his father had drowned while doing forced labor on a press gang building levees.

  There was plenty of work for builders, but little for young architects who wanted to create something more than barracks for flood victims or cookie-cutter new cities for refugees. Victor was attracted to the lunar nation of Selene, far from the miseries and despair of Earth: he heard there were plans afoot to build an astronomy complex on the Moon’s farside.

  He won a job over several other aspiring young architects and went to the Moon, spending the next four years of his life shuttling between the underground city of Selene and the complex of astronomical observatories and housing units being built on the farside. There he met Pauline Osgood, a Selenite by birth who had never been to Earth. They returned once, to get married, and stayed for the funerals of Pauline’s parents, victims of a food riot in Denver.

  Back on the Moon, Victor settled in to work on the slow but steady expansion of Selene’s underground accommodations. For more than a year he helped to design the resort complex at Hell Crater, then signed up with Astro Manufacturing when they began their new manufacturing base at the Malapert Mountains, near the lunar south pole. He’d become the father of a baby girl by then, and while still working on the Malapert designs Pauline became pregnant once more, this time with the son that he so badly wanted.

  Victor was dragged into the Asteroid Wars almost by accident. Pancho Lane herself, CEO of Astro Manufacturing, asked him to head a small design team working on a space habitat that could serve as Astros military headquarters. Flattered, Victor completed the design within three months. He was aboard the unfinished habitat in its L-2 libration point site when it was attacked by ships of Humphries Space Systems. Victor was not injured, but seeing his construction project slagged into twisted structural beams and shattered living compartments angered him beyond words.

  The Asteroid Wars had started as a personal feud between Martin Humphries and Lars Fuchs. An uneven battle: Humphries was the wealthiest man in the solar system, founder and master of Humphries Space Systems. Lars Fuchs was a lone individual, too proudly stubborn to bow down to Humphries. He had taken to piracy out in the dark depths of the Asteroid Belt as his only means of survival. The First Asteroid War ended in the only way it could, with Humphries triumphant and Fuchs exiled from the rock rats’ habitat at Ceres.

  With peace came unemployment. Astro Corporation was not building any new facilities and Selene’s expansion had been halted for no one knew how long. Victor cashed in his modest savings, borrowed a lot more, and leased an aged ore vessel from Astro, which he dubbed Syracuse. With his young family he headed out to the Belt.

  He became a rock rat, content to ply the Belt buying ores from the miners who worked the asteroids and transporting them to ships waiting at Ceres to carry the raw materials to the Earth/Moon system. While billions of international dollars changed hands, very-little profit remained for Victor Zacharias’s pockets. Yet he was contented. His children were growing, his wife was happy. Life was serene.

  Until the Second Asteroid War broke out. This time there was no pretense: the war was a struggle for control of the Belt and its enormous resources, a struggle between Humphries Space Systems and Astro Corporation. Lars Fuchs was nothing more than an excuse for the two giant corporations to go to war.

  Now Victor Zacharias sat hunched in Syracuse’s control pod, sweating hard as he desperately tried to maneuver the lumbering ore ship out of range of the attacker’s fire.

  The attacking ship, much more agile, was swinging clear of the jumble of rocks that Victor had released. In another few minutes, he saw, the attacker would have a clean shot at Syracuse ; then it would be merely a matter of time before the ship was utterly destroyed and everyone aboard killed. Pauline, he thought. Angela. Theo.

  He couldn’t even call his attacker and surrender, Victor realized. The bastard’s knocked out my antennas. We’re mute. And deaf. He could be singing Christmas carols to me and I’d never hear him.

  “The intercom link with the ship’s living quarters was down, too. He saw the sullen red lights glari
ng at him from the control panel.

  How can I…?

  A desperate idea popped into his head. Looking up at the display screen again he saw that the attacking ship was at the edge of the swirling, tumbling cluster of rocks he’d released. It was only a matter of seconds now.

  His pulse hammering in his ears, Victor lifted the safety covers over the escape system’s dual butter yellow buttons.

  “Goodbye, Pauline,” he murmured. Then he pressed his stubby fingers against the twin buttons.

  Explosive bolts blew away the connectors holding the command pod to Syracuse’s main body. The pod’s internal rocket engine lit automatically; Victor felt himself pressed deep into the command chair’s padding. The control panel’s lights flickered madly, then winked out.

  He stared fixedly at the main screen. The camera view jerked violently, then swung its focus back on the attack vessel. Just as Victor had hoped, just as he’d prayed, the attacker swerved to follow him.

  They both left Syracuse far behind, dwindling into an invisible speck against the starry black of space.

  He thinks I’m carrying Fuchs with me, Victor thought gratefully. He thinks I’m trying to help Fuchs escape. He’s following me and leaving Pauline and the kids alone. I’ve saved them. I’ve saved them.

  ABANDONED

  Dad’s going to be boiled at me if he ever finds out, Theo thought as he hesitated at the lip of the auxiliary air lock hatch. He was fully suited up, with his helmet visor down and sealed. Standing on the ladder leading up to the hatch set in the ceiling, his head and shoulders above the hatch’s edge, Theo saw the long tube leading from the family’s living quarters to the control pod stretching above him, a narrow dimly lit tunnel of buckyball filament, stronger than steel, lighter than plastic.

  So he boils, Theo said to himself. This is an emergency. And he started climbing up the rungs set into the tube’s circular interior. It was laborious work in the cumbersome space suit. The emergency hatches were closed tight, he saw. Every hundred meters the tunnel was divided by double hatches that served as mini-airlocks. Usually they were kept open, but if a part of the tunnel was punctured, the hatches automatically sealed shut to prevent all the air from escaping into space. Now they were closed.

  Not a good sign, Theo told himself. The tunnel’s been punctured somewhere.

  Gravity melted away as he climbed; soon he was taking the rungs three, four, five at a time. As he approached the tunnel’s midpoint, where the g force was effectively zero, his booted feet weren’t touching the rungs at all.

  Once past the ship’s center, he allowed himself to fall, slowly at first, then with increasing speed as he neared the end of the tunnel. But the closed hatches of the airlocks stopped him from dropping all the way. He had to stop and manually open each hatch, then proceed to the next one. No tunnel diving, they way he used to when he was just a kid, eight or nine years old. Just drop from the midpoint to the end of the tunnel, let yourself fall like a stone. When his father had found out, the old man had exploded with fearful anger.

  “You could kill yourself falling against the rungs!” Victor had roared. “Tear your arms out of their sockets when you try to stop! Break every bone in your empty head!”

  But tunnel diving was too much fun to ignore. Theo had even gotten Angie to dive with him. Of course she banged herself up, broke an arm, and loudly wailed Theo’s guilt. Dad had confined Theo to his sleeping compartment for a week, with nothing to do but watch old vids.

  Now, encased in the hard-shell suit, he worked his way down the tunnel from one sealed hatch to the next. Finally he planted his boots against the last hatch, the one that opened into the command pod. Theo let out a gust of breath. The journey had been hard work instead of fun.

  No time for complaints, though. At his feet was the airtight hatch that opened into the command pod. Dad’s in there, Theo said to himself. Maybe his comm system’s been shot away. Maybe he’s hurt, wounded.

  He had to carefully, painfully turn himself around so he could see the hatch’s control panel. Its status light glared bright red. Vacuum on the other side of the hatch! Gripes, did Dad have enough time to get into his suit? The pod must be punctured!

  Theo was literally standing on his head, clinging to the ladder’s rung with one gloved hand. He reached for the hatch’s control panel, but stopped his shaking hand just in time. If I open the hatch to vacuum it’ll suck all the air out of the tunnel. But the tunnel’s already been punctured and the emergency hatches are shut. Whatever air we’re gonna lose we’ve already lost. Still he hesitated. Be better to conserve the air we’ve still got, he thought. We might be out here for who knows how long. Chrysalis is all torn up; there’s no help back at Ceres for us.

  Standing on a ladder rung, he punched at the suit radio’s keyboard on the wrist of his suit.

  “Mom?” he called.

  She answered immediately, “Yes, Theo.”

  “I need you to pump the air out of the tunnel.”

  He heard her sharp intake of breath. “There’s vacuum on the other side of the hatch?”

  Sharp, Mom, he thought. “That’s what the hatch pad says. And the tunnel’s been punctured someplace; all the emergency airlocks are closed. Pump out the air and store it in the standby tanks.”

  Pauline said, “All right. Can you talk with your father?”

  Theo hadn’t even tried that. “I’ll see.” He called over the suit radio. No answer. He pounded a gloved fist against the hatch. No response.

  “He … he doesn’t answer,” he said at last.

  Again his mother hesitated before replying, “The tunnel’s evacuated.”

  “Right.”

  It took Theo two tries to peck out the combination that opened the hatch, his hand was shaking so much. When it finally did slide noiselessly open, his heart clutched in his chest.

  There was nothing there! The entire control pod was gone! Gasping, wide-eyed, Theo slowly climbed three more rungs until his head and shoulders were through the open hatchway.

  He was in empty space. Hard pinpoints of stars stared down at him from the black depths of infinity. The ship that had attacked them was nowhere in sight. Their cargo of ore was a distant cloud of rocks, spinning farther away every heartbeat. The wheel-shaped structure of the ore ship curved away on either side of him but there was no trace of the control pod. Theo saw the severed stumps of the struts that had held the pod in place, blackened by the blast of their explosive bolts.

  Gone. Dad’s gone. He’s left us.

  “Theo?” his mother’s voice called in his helmet earphones. “Is your father hurt? Or…”

  “He’s gone,” Theo said, feeling a deadly cold numbness creeping over him. “He’s abandoned us, Mom.”

  ADRIFT

  “Your father did not abandon us,” Pauline Zacharias said firmly.

  Theo thought she looked angry. At me. She’s boiled at me because Dad took off and left us. She’s not mad at Dad, she’s spitting mad at me.

  He was sitting tensely on the sofa in the family living room, feeling tired and angry and scared. Angie sat on the armchair at one end of the sofa, rigid and staring hard-eyed at him, as if he’d done something wrong. Mother was pacing slowly across the room, past the family portrait they’d taken years ago, when Theo was barely ten.

  “He didn’t abandon us,” Pauline repeated.

  “He blew the explosive bolts and took off in the control pod,” Theo said, his voice low, stubborn. “He left us here drifting.”

  His mother stopped pacing and looked directly at him. “What your father did,” she said in a hard, cold voice, “was to draw that attack ship away from us.”

  “Yeah,” Theo retorted. “And he left us without controls, without the navigation computer, without communications. The main tunnel’s been punctured, spit knows what other damage the ship’s taken.”

  Pauline stared at her son for a long moment, then sank into the nearest chair, her face frozen in a mask of doubt and worry.

&n
bsp; Angie broke the silence. “But we’ll be okay. Won’t we? I mean, we can get back to Ceres and—”

  “There’s nothing left at Ceres!” Theo snapped. “He killed them all! And we’re heading outward, deeper into the Belt, toward Jupiter!”

  For an instant Angie looked as if she would burst into tears. But Pauline reached across the space between them and grasped her arm.

  “It’s not that bad,” she said calmly. “We have plenty of food and water. We have the main engine—”

  “Which we can’t control.”

  “Can’t control?” Angie’s eyes went wide.

  “The command pod’s gone. All the controls’re gone.”

  Pauline fixed her son with a stern look. “There’s the backup command pod.”

  “If it works,” Theo said sourly. “Nobody’s even been in there for more’n a year.”

  “It will work,” Pauline said flatly. “That’s your responsibility, Theo. Yours and Angela’s. Get to the backup command pod and get it up and running. We can’t let ourselves continue to drift outward; we’ve got to get control of this vessel back in our hands.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he groused.

  “Yes, certainly,” Pauline said, with iron in her voice. “We’re not going to sit on our hands and do nothing. If we’re going to be saved, we’ve got to save ourselves.”

  “Can we…?” Angie murmured.

  “Of course we can,” said Pauline. “And as soon as you get into the backup pod you set up a tracking beacon so your father can home in on it and get back to us.”

  Theo started to answer that his father had run away from them and wouldn’t be likely to come back, but he held his tongue. Some things you just don’t say to your mother, even if they’re true, he thought.

  Turning to Angie, Pauline said, “I want the two of you to work together. No bickering. Do you understand?”