The Aftermath gt-16

by Ben Bova

  “Do you think he’s… he got killed?”

  Pauline had to pull in a breath before she could reply, “No.”

  “Really, Ma? Really and truly?”

  “Really and truly, my little angel. He’s not dead. I know it in my bones. He’s out there somewhere trying to find us, trying to save us.”

  Angela threw her arms around her mother’s neck. “I’ll be good, Ma, I promise,” she said tearfully. “I’ll treat Theo better, you’ll see.”

  “I know,” Pauline said, holding her daughter in her arms. “I know.”

  That night, as she slipped into her oversized bed alone, Pauline thought that she should have a talk with Theo, as well. It takes two to make a fight; Angela’s not the only one who needs to improve her behavior.

  She turned out the lights and lay back on her pillow. The bed seemed empty, lonely without Victor beside her. He’s not dead, Pauline told herself. He left us to decoy that attacker away from us, to save us from being destroyed. He got away, I know he did. I’d know if he were dead. I’d feel it, somehow.

  Pauline Osgood Zacharias was made of strong fiber. Born in Selene while her astronomer parents were teaching at the university there, she had grown up in the sunless corridors and confined living quarters of that underground city. To Pauline, the “outdoors” meant strolling along the winding pathways of Selene’s Grand Plaza, beneath its arching concrete dome, admiring the miniature trees and shrubbery that the lunar citizens so lovingly tended.

  She was fifteen before her parents allowed her to go without them out onto the surface of the giant crater Alphonsus. Selene was dug into the crater’s ringwall mountains, and the area out on the flat was dotted with solar-cell farms, factories that took advantage of the Moon’s airlessness, and the Armstrong Spaceport, where ships took off for Earth or other worlds deeper in the solar system.

  She studied astronomy, just as her parents had. But by the time she was ready to graduate, a family crisis arose. Her parents were preparing to return to Earth. Despite the greenhouse floods and the devastation of so many cities—or perhaps because of that—her parents felt they had to go back to the homeworld, back to their roots in Colorado. Pauline desperately wanted to stay on the Moon. She was working as a teaching assistant at the new astronomy complex being built at Farside. She had met Victor Zacharias and fallen in love with him.

  Her parents left for Earth, with Pauline’s promise that she and Victor would come to visit them as soon as they could. But by the time Pauline and her newly married husband reached Denver it was too late: both her parents had been killed in a food riot.

  She clung to Victor then, returned to the Moon, bore him two children, and went with him when he decided to become a rock rat, to live aboard a rattletrap ship he had managed to lease, to ply through the Asteroid Belt collecting ores from the miners and selling them to the big corporations at Ceres. She raised her daughter and her son, content to make the tiny world of the ore carrier Syracuse her island of home, her whole universe.

  When the occasional violence in the Belt flared into the Second Asteroid War, Victor told her, “Not to worry. We don’t belong to either corporation. Nobody’s going to attack the independents; that would stop the flow of resources from the Belt and neither Humphries nor Astro wants that.”

  She believed her husband. Until that moment when their ship was nearly destroyed by an anonymous attacker.

  Now she tried to sleep, alone in her bed, desperately afraid that she would never see Victor again, almost frantic with the fear that she kept stifled all day, each day, every waking moment. She couldn’t let her children see her fear. But alone in the dark, it threatened to overwhelm her.

  ORE SHIP SYRACUSE:

  GALLEY

  Theo eyed the steaming roast on his plate.

  “Eat up,” his mother urged. “This is the last feast we’re going to have for a long time. Tomorrow we start rationing our provisions. We’ve got to make them last.”

  Theo was too tired to eat. For the past six days he had spent virtually every waking moment trying to repair the ship, directing the tiny-brained maintenance., robots to weld patches where the wheel and the tunnels had been punctured, worming his way into the narrow access tubes to reconnect wiring, digging through the logistics storage bays to find the spare parts that he needed for the repairs. Most of his evenings he spent in the backup command pod, bringing systems back on line. He saw through eyes bleary with fatigue that one by one the red lights on the display panels were turning to green or at least amber. Mostly amber, but that was the best he could accomplish.

  The fuel supply for the fusion reactor worried him most. Without the reactor the ship’s electrical power systems would go down. When that happened, the lights, the air and water recyclers, the food refrigerators and microwave cookers would go down too.

  The navigation program told him that they were coasting deeper into the Belt, away from help, away from the rest of the human race. He knew the ship didn’t have enough fuel to change their course significantly. For a while he hoped that they might drift outward far enough to reach the research station orbiting Jupiter, but the navigation program showed that would be impossible unless they added a major jolt of thrust to their velocity vector, and there wasn’t enough hydrogen left in the tanks for anything like that.

  They were going to die aboard Syracuse, Theo realized: probably of asphyxiation, certainly of starvation. All his brave thoughts and hard work could not change that.

  “Theo,” his mother said gently. “I know you’re tired. But you’ve got to eat to keep up your strength.”

  He focused on her face smiling encouragingly from across the narrow galley table.

  “Right, Mom,” he mumbled, digging a fork into his dinner.

  Angie’s appetite seemed normal, even better than normal, he thought. His sister was chewing on a slab of roast pseudomeat: artificial protein created by cellular biologists and marketed to the rock rats and other spacefarers as Faux Beef (or pork, or veal, or even pheasant).

  “So our food stores are okay,” he muttered, pushing the meat around his plate listlessly.

  “Enough for years, if we’re careful,” his mother said guardedly as she got up and went to the galley’s stainless steel sink.

  Theo glanced at Angie, munching away. Dieting will do her good, he thought. But he didn’t say it. Instead, he told his mother, “We’re going to need enough for years.”

  Angie looked up at him, startled. “For years?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “But you said the fusion engine was okay, didn’t you?”

  He gave his sister a bleak look. “The engine’s fine, Angie. But when that freaking illegitimate slagged our antennas he ripped up the fuel tanks as well. They’re just about dry. Only two cells out of twenty have any hydrogen left in them.”

  He saw his mother’s hands clench on the sink’s edge; her knuckles went white.

  “I’ve shut down the engine until I can figure out some way to get us turned around and headed back to civilization. We’re coasting now.”

  Pauline made a brittle little smile. “Then I suppose we’ll just have to coast for a while.”

  “For how long?” Angie asked, looking suspicious, as if this was some kind of trick Theo was playing on her.

  He pursed his lips, then replied, “Right now we’re on a trajectory that takes us halfway to Jupiter before we curve back and start toward the inner Belt again.”

  “How long?” Angie repeated.

  He had memorized the numbers. “Three thousand, one hundred and thirty-seven days,” Theo said.

  “Three thousand—”

  “That’s eight years, seven months and four days.”

  “Eight years? I’ll be twenty-six years old!”

  “That’s to get us back to Ceres,” Theo explained, “where we were when we were attacked, more or less.”

  Pauline went to her daughter and laid a calming hand on Angie’s shoulder. “We have enough food to l
ast that long,” she said. “If we’re careful. And we recycle our water and air, so life support shouldn’t be an issue.”

  If all the equipment keeps on working, Theo countered silently.

  “Can’t you do something, Thee?” Angie asked, her face agonized. “I mean, eight years!”

  “I’m working on it,” he said. “Maybe we can use what little fuel we have left to cut the time down. But I’ve got to be real careful. I don’t want to make things worse than they are now.”

  “How could they get worse?” Angie grumbled.

  “Is there any chance of repairing the antennas?” Pauline asked. “Then we could call for help.”

  Theo nodded. “That’s my next priority. There must be some ships in this region of the Belt. Miners, other rock rats.”

  “Sure!” said Angie, brightening a little.

  “Trouble is,” Theo went on, “we’ve been busting along at a pretty high delta vee. Dad goosed the main engines before he split.”

  “So we’re accelerating too much for another ore ship or a miner to reach us?” Pauline asked.

  “I’ve shut down the main engine,” Theo repeated. “We’re not accelerating anymore, just coasting. But still, we’re spitting along damn fast. I don’t know if one of the rock rats could catch up to us, even if they wanted to.”

  His mother didn’t flinch at his minor vulgarity. She’s just as scared as Angie, Theo thought, but she hides it better.

  “Eight years,” Angie repeated, in a whisper.

  Theo nodded. He knew their hydrogen fuel wouldn’t last anywhere near that long. The reactor would shut down and the ship would lose all its electrical power well before then. They’d freeze and choke to death when the heaters and air recyclers shut down.

  “Well then,” their mother said, as brightly as she could manage, “once the antennas are working again we can call for assistance. With Chrysalis gone, there must be a lot of rock rats stranded out here in the Belt calling back toward Earth for help.”

  “Guess so,” Theo said.

  “So fixing the antennas is our first priority,” Pauline continued. “Thee, what can we do to help you?”

  He glanced at Angie and thought, Keep out of my way. But to his mother he said, “I don’t know yet. I’ve got some studying to do.”

  For the next two days Theo stayed mostly in his own compartment studying the tutorials and maintenance videos about the antennas. He saw that he would have to go outside to assess the damage that the attacker’s laser beams did. The maintenance robots could be helpful, but only if he could program them with exact instructions.

  He was stretched out on his bunk, so intent on the maintenance video that he didn’t hear the scratching on his privacy partition.

  “Thee? You in there?” Angie’s voice.

  He yanked the plug out of his ear and looked up. His sister inched the accordion-fold partition back a sliver. “Can I come in?”

  “May I come in,” he corrected.

  Angie pushed the partition wide open. “May I. All right. Satisfied?”

  “Come on in,” he said, swinging his stockinged feet to the tiled deck. He clicked the remote and the instruction vid disappeared from the screen built into the bulkhead at the foot of his bunk.

  Angie sat in the spindly little desk chair, her fists clenched on her knees.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “Okay. I’m learning a lot about how the antennas work. I’ll have to go outside and check the damage. Prob’ly tomorrow.”

  “You want me to go with you? You know, like backup?”

  He started to say that she’d be more trouble than help, but bit back the reply and answered instead, “You could be a big help by monitoring me from the control pod.”

  Angie’s eyes widened eagerly. “I could do that,” she said.

  “Okay. Good. I’ll tell Mom.”

  “Thee?”

  “What?”

  “She cries.”

  “Who? Mom?” A blast of something close to panic jolted through him.

  Nodding, fighting back tears herself, Angie said, “At night. After we go to bed. I can hear her in her compartment. She tries to muffle it but I can hear her crying.”

  Theo couldn’t believe his mother was afraid of anything. “It’s about Dad, I bet. She’s crying about Dad.”

  “You don’t really think he ran away from us, do you?”

  “What else? We’re here and he’s not.”

  “But Mom says he did it to protect us. To draw the attack ship away from us.”

  A thousand thoughts raced through Theo’s mind, all jumbled up, blurring together.

  “Thee, you don’t really think he abandoned us, do you?”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what I think. Dad’s prob’ly dead.”

  “No!”

  “Most likely. But we’re alive, and I intend to keep us that way.”

  * * *

  Victor Zacharias was alive, but starving.

  The pod in which he was coasting sunward carried only a minifridge’s worth of packaged food: mostly sandwiches and preserved fruits. He had been living on one sandwich and one piece of fruit per twenty-four hours. His stomach rumbled hollowly.

  As the pod sailed silently through the dark emptiness he had plenty of time to think. And plan.

  The pod had an emergency transponder that could beam out a distress signal. But it was a notoriously weak signal, Victor knew, and bound to be swamped by the comm chatter that would be sweeping over the area where Chrysalis once orbited Ceres. It was bitterly ironic, he thought: There must be whole fleets of rescue and salvage ships heading for Ceres, a regular armada of vessels and people. But they wouldn’t be looking for a small, weak-voiced pod hurtling inward from the Belt, thousands of kilometers from the asteroid.

  How can I get them to notice me? Victor asked himself. He pondered that question through the long, lonely hours he spent in the command chair, staring at his useless instruments and sensors. He dreamed about it when he cranked the reclining chair back and willed himself to sleep. He worried that the nanobatteries powering the pod’s systems would run dry, but then he realized he’d starve to death long before that happened.

  At first he thought his hunger would be a sharp prod that would make him think. After a week he realized that starvation dulled the mind. No brilliant ideas surfaced; all he could think of was food.

  He wished he had the mental discipline of a Buddhist monk, capable of submerging himself into deep meditation. Victor’s mind was not so trained. He wanted an idea, a plan, a scheme. He wanted action, not the oblivion of Nirvana.

  He wanted, above all, to get back to Pauline and the children. With a shake of his head he reminded himself, they’re not children anymore. Angela’s ready for marriage. Theo is a man in every way except experience.

  And still the pod drifted, like a leaf caught in a tide, like a man-made asteroid sweeping along in its mindless orbit.

  Feeling weaker each day, Victor forced himself to check and recheck every item of equipment in the pod. Every piece of hardware, every computer program, every system. There’s got to be something here that I can use as a tool, something that I can use to get noticed, to get rescued.

  Again and again he checked his inventory. There was a communications laser built into the pod’s outer hull, but lasers were strictly for line-of-sight communications. Radio waves spread out like ripples on a pond, but the tight beam of a laser was good for communications only if it was pointed directly at the ship you wanted to communicate with.

  I could make the laser swing around in a circle, Victor thought. That might catch some ship someplace. But he knew that was a tactic of desperation. The chances of his pencil-thin laser beam reaching another ship’s receiving sensor were little better than the chances of being struck by lightning out here in the middle of empty space.

  Yet that night he dreamed of a star shining in the soft night sky of Earth. The star pulsated. Shepherds gathered in the de
sert and marveled at it.

  When he woke he thought he must be getting irrational. “Next thing you know you’ll be dreaming about Santa Claus,” he growled at himself.

  He fought off sleep but eventually it overpowered him. And he dreamed again of the star blinking in the cloudless sky of a desert on Earth. Blinking. Blinking.

  Victor awoke with a new sense of purpose. The first thing I’ve got to do is modify the laser, he told himself. Get its pulses down into the petasecond range. The shorter the pulses, the more power in each pulse. Each pulse will carry megawatts worth of power, plenty bright enough to see on Earth. There must be thousands of astronomers looking at the stars each night. They’ll have to notice me!

  But first I’ve got to modify the laser.

  * * *

  Theo was soaking in a hot shower after long hours in his space suit, working outside on the slagged antennas. Whoever their attacker was, he had done a thorough job of destroying the antennas: long ugly gashes sliced through the metallic monolayer that had been sprayed along Syracuse’s curving outer hull and gutted the fusion engine’s propellant tanks beneath them.

  He let the steaming water relax his cramped and aching muscles. Neither Mom nor Angie tried to hurry him out of the shower. What the hell, he rationalized, the water’s recycled. We’re not losing any of it: it just goes into the purifiers and back to the holding tank. He remembered when he was a kid, maybe seven years old, and he’d taken a pair of welder’s goggles into the shower with him and pretended he was swimming underwater on Earth, like the vids he’d seen. After three-quarters of an hour Dad got sore, he recalled, but Mom laughed when Dad told her about it.

  I can repair the antennas, Theo told himself. I know what to do and how to go about it. The maintenance robots can do most of the outside work, all I’ve got to do is program them and feed them the right materials. Tomorrow I’ll go through the logistics files and find what I need.

  But the next morning he found that the monomolecular spray that made up the antennas was not listed in the logistics files. Theo spent the next two days searching through the stores in the ship’s storage bays. No antenna spray.