The Aftermath gt-16

by Ben Bova

  “They’re drifting outward,” Victor said.

  “Yes, but what’s their track? We can’t go traipsin’ all over the Belt to search for them. There’s too much to do here and too little to do it with.”

  “Can’t you scan the area with radar?” Edith Elgin asked. “They have those huge radar arrays back Earthside. They can pick out a thumbtack a million kilometers away.”

  George slowly shook his shaggy head. “They can pick up a beacon from a spacecraft, that’s what they do.”

  Edith turned back to Victor. “Your ship’s sending out a beacon, isn’t it? A tracking beacon?”

  Victor felt totally hollowed out. “He destroyed our antennas. Syracuse can’t send out any kind of signal.”

  George took another huge gulp of beer, then placed his mug firmly on the tiny table.

  “Face it, mate,” he said to Victor. “Your family’s gone and there’s nothin’ we can do for ’em.”

  ORE SHIP SYRACUSE:

  THEO’S COMPARTMENT

  Theo was stretched out on the bunk of his tight little compartment, VR goggles over his eyes and sensor gloves on his hands, deeply immersed in the virtual reality program. He knew he should be studying the navigation program, but he’d spent all day staring at graphs and lists and numbers. Now he was trying to relax with an entertainment VR he had smuggled past his parents’ watchful eyes.

  I’m old enough to have adult VRs, he said to himself. Old enough to really experience what these women are doing. Full sensory input: sight, sound, touch…

  He heard a faint tapping and then the squeak of his accordion-pleated door starting to slide open. With a sudden twitch of guilty-fear he yanked the goggles off his head and pulled off the gloves.

  “May I come in, Theo?” his mother asked.

  Shoving the goggles and gloves under his pillow, Theo sat up, swinging his long legs off the bunk.

  “I knocked at your door, Thee,” said Pauline as she entered the compartment, “but I guess you didn’t hear me.”

  Not over the panting and moaning of the scene you interrupted, Mom, he replied silently.

  “Are you all right?” his mother asked, sitting in the compartment’s only chair, the spindly little plastic one that fit under the desk.

  “Yeah. I’m fine, Mom.”

  “You’ve been working terribly hard, I know.”

  “I just can’t get the right mixture for repairing the antennas.

  Nothing I’ve tried has the right electrical conductivity. I just can’t find the proper materials.”

  “You’ll find the right mixture sooner or later.”

  “I’ve been working on the nav program, too. Trying to find some way to cut our trajectory so we can get back to Ceres sooner.”

  “Angela’s very anxious to get back to Ceres as soon as we can.”

  “I… I know.”

  His mother took a deep breath, then said, “The thing is, Theo … I want to know, in all honesty, what is your feeling about our chances of getting through this? Our chances of survival.”

  He looked into her pearl gray eyes and saw that she expected the worst.

  “I don’t know, Mom. If I can get the antennas working—even just one antenna—if we could send out a distress call, then we might have a chance of being picked up.”

  “And if not?”

  “Then we just keep on sailing out toward Jupiter until the reactor runs out of hydrogen. Or the recyclers start breaking down.”

  “You could repair the recyclers, couldn’t you?”

  “Maybe. I think so. Unless we run out of spares.”

  Pauline seemed to put it all together in her mind. “Then it comes down to a question of how long our food will last.”

  Theo nodded glumly, thinking, It’s really a question of how long the hydrogen lasts.

  “All right then.” She got to her feet and Theo stood up to face her, almost eye to eye. “We’ll just all go on stricter diets and make the food last as long as we possibly can. It will do Angie good to slim down. Me too.”

  “Mom, even if I can fix the antennas, even if we can send out a distress call…”

  “I know. No one may answer. We may be too far away to be rescued. We may all die.”

  He grasped both her wrists. “I won’t let that happen, Mom. I’ll take care of you. Angie too. We’ll get through this. I’ll get us back to safety.”

  His mother smiled, but there was sadness in it. “I know you will, Theo. I have no doubts about that at all.”

  He was glad she said it, even though he knew she didn’t really believe it.

  “I won’t let you die, Mom.”

  “Of course not. Besides, your father will come back for us, sooner or later. He’s probably searching for us right now.”

  Theo didn’t reply to his mother. But to himself he said bitterly, Like hell he is.

  CERES SECTOR:

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  It was simple economics, brutally simple economics and nothing more. Victor needed a ship to search for his family, drifting somewhere in the outer region of the Belt aboard Syracuse. A ship cost money. He had none.

  On the other hand, Big George Ambrose was in a frenzy to recover the bodies of Chrysalis’s slaughtered men, women and children.

  “You can work with one of the recovery teams,” George had told Victor. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a command.

  So for six months Victor Zacharias worked as a crewman aboard Pleiades, once a cargo vessel that ferried supplies to the research station orbiting Jupiter, now pressed into duty recovering the dead. The cargo bays that once held food and scientific equipment now held corpses as Pleiades wandered through the space around Ceres in an ever-widening spiral, seeking bodies wafting, tumbling, drifting through the silent dark mausoleum of space.

  It was soul-killing work, following a blip on the ship’s radar screen, hoping that it actually was the remains of a human being, catching up to it only to find—in most cases—it was a fragment of one of Chrysalis’s exploded modules, or a chunk of rock, another uncharted minor asteroid. Or—worst of all—a bloody piece of a body that had been ripped apart.

  Grisly work. The hell of it, though, was that Victor knew the pay he was receiving would never be enough to lease a spacecraft to search for his family. I’ll have to steal this ship, he told himself, just as soon as the opportunity comes up.

  So, for day after gruesome day, week after hideous week, month after sickening month, Victor pulled on a nanofabric space suit and went out to investigate the dark blob that the radar had found. The bodies were mangled and caked with dried blood: the sudden decompression when they’d been hurled into the vacuum of space had literally exploded their lungs and blood vessels. Their skins had been burned black by the Sun’s harsh unfiltered ultraviolet radiation.

  One day he found the bloody remains of a young woman clutching a baby to her chest with both arms; their eyeballs were gone, nothing but empty dark accusing sockets. Victor bullied the ship’s medic into giving him enough alcohol to get thoroughly drunk that night.

  The ship’s captain was a steel-eyed woman with the unlikely name of Cheena Madagascar. She obviously didn’t like this corpse-seeking mission any more than he did. But Big George Ambrose had the ear of Selene’s governing board, which in turn had the International Astronautical Authority in the palm of its hand, so the IAA was paying for the rescue operation—at minimum rates. Selene agreed with George’s insistence that all the bodies had to be found and accounted for. All eleven hundred and seventeen of them.

  Selene and the IAA faced the harsh necessities of simple economics, too. Selene and the research outposts scattered across the solar system needed the resources of the asteroids: the metals and minerals, the oxygen and water baked out of asteroidal rock or melted from icy ’roids. Big George made it abundantly clear that there would be no mining or smelting done until the rock rats could rebuild their habitat at Ceres—and the bloody war between Humphries Space Systems and Astro Corporation was b
rought to an end.

  Douglas Stavenger, the power behind Selene’s governing council, hammered out a peace agreement between Martin Humphries and Astro’s CEO, Pancho Lane. Meanwhile, Victor Zacharias and the other crewmen of Pleiades hunted for the dead bodies drifting through the Belt.

  The morning after his drunken oblivion Victor stayed in his bunk instead of reporting for duty. That earned him a visit from the ship’s medic. The young woman looked decidedly nervous as she entered Victor’s privacy cubicle unannounced.

  His head still buzzing, Victor lay on his back and blinked blearily at her, tugging at the bedsheet that half covered him.

  “I need a day to recover,” he told her before she could say anything.

  Her lips were pressed into a thin line. She was slim, with long legs like a colt; her shoulder-length hair was dark, her cheekbones high, her deep brown eyes were flecked with gold.

  “We’re both in trouble,” she said, in a near-whisper.

  Victor’s brows rose.

  “The captain wants to see us both. Immediately.”

  He puffed out a breath. “I’ll have to get dressed, then.”

  “Please hurry.” And she stepped outside his cubicle.

  Sitting up was an exercise in teeth-gritting willpower. The tiny cubicle swam giddily for long moments. But at last Victor got to his feet—shakily—and pulled on his coveralls and softboots.

  As he pushed his doorscreen open and stepped into the crew’s common area, he asked, “Do I have time to wash my face and do my teeth?”

  The medic gave him a distressed look.

  “Comb my hair, at least?”

  “Be quick.”

  Nine minutes later, Victor and the medic were standing before the sliding partition of the captain’s quarters. The medic rapped lightly on the5 bulkhead.

  “Enter,” came the captain’s voice.

  Her quarters were a surprise to Victor: very feminine, pale pink covers on the bunk, an ornate vase on the desk filled with colorful flowers. Artificial, of course, he thought.

  Cheena Madagascar herself was a collection of contradictions. She wore a set of jet black coveralls with a bright pink scarf around her throat, its ends tucked into her unbuttoned collar. Soft doeskin boots and a wide black belt studded with asteroidal silver, midnight dark hair cropped military style close to her skull, but silver rings glittering with gems on seven of her fingers and silver earrings dangling from her lobes. She was no taller than Victor, almost as slim as the medic, but her tight coveralls showed ample bosom and hips. Cosmetic nanotherapy, he guessed.

  Without preamble, she demanded of the medic, “You gave this man alcohol to drink?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I did,” the medic whispered.

  She turned to Victor and he saw that her eyes were the same gold-flecked brown as the medic’s. “You got yourself so plastered that you couldn’t report for duty?”

  “That’s right,” Victor answered.

  “Or maybe it was an excuse to take a day off?”

  “No. Not that.”

  The captain glared at him. “Not that, huh?”

  “Not that,” he repeated.

  She turned to the medic. “You may go.” Before the younger woman had a chance to turn around, the captain added, “And no more dispensing alcohol. To anyone. Understand me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Barely audible.

  “Get out of here.”

  The medic fled, leaving Victor alone with the captain.

  “Do you have any excuse for your behavior?”

  Victor thought of the mother and baby he had recovered. But he said, “Not really.”

  “Not really, huh? I heard you picked up something really stomach-turning. Is that right?”

  “A woman. With a baby in her arms.”

  “Upsetting.”

  Before he realized he was saying it, Victor revealed, “I have a wife and children somewhere out in the Belt…” He stopped himself.

  The captain stared at him for a long moment. Then she said, more softly, “I have a family too. I keep them with me.”

  He recognized the sculptured cheekbones, the gold-flecked eyes. “The medic?”

  “One of my daughters. The other one’s an engineer with the flight crew.”

  “Is your husband aboard too?” he asked.

  “Never had one. Never wanted one. Cloning works fine.”

  Victor’s insides felt hollow, his legs weak. “I don’t know where my family is now.”

  She seemed to stiffen, and drew herself up to her full height, eye to eye with Victor. “Well, you’re aboard my ship now and you’ll do the work you’ve signed on to do. No more booze and no more days spent in your bunk. Understand me?”

  “Yes, captain.”

  “Report to the infirmary at once. I want you to take a full physical and psych exam. I want you detoxed; get that alcohol out of your bloodstream.”

  “Yes, captain.” Victor turned to leave.

  “At twenty hundred hours, report back here.”

  He blinked with surprise. “Here?”

  “To my quarters. Twenty hundred hours. Understand me?”

  “Yes, captain.”

  ORE SHIP SYRACUSE:

  THE GALLEY

  Pauline Zacharias wondered why they had these meetings in the galley. The family’s living quarters included a perfectly comfortable sitting room, but somehow whenever they had something to discuss the three of them always huddled together over the narrow table of the galley.

  Like old-time families on Earth, she thought, coming together in the kitchen. Maybe it’s instinct. Gather where the food and warmth are centered, where the air smells of cooking and everybody feels at ease. But Syracuse’s galley didn’t smell of cooking, except for the brief moments when the cranky old microwave was opened and she was taking a sizzling hot prepackaged meal to the table. The galley wasn’t homey and warm; it had no fireplace, no cookpots simmering; its metal bulkheads and plastic deck tiles were cold and worn.

  Still, Pauline thought, it’s the closest thing to a safe cave that the children know.

  Children, she thought. They’re not children anymore. Angela’s old enough to start a family of her own. And Theo, he’s aged five years in the past six months, working night and day to keep this ship’s systems going, to keep us alive.

  Theo was sitting at the head of the little table, Angela on his left. Pauline herself sat with her back to the row of freezers and microwave ovens. She had placed a meager bowl of thawed fruit on the table and a glass of reconstituted juice at each of their three places.

  Theo was saying, “I’ve been working with the navigation program at night, trying to figure out some way to cut our trip time down and get us back to the Ceres area in less than eight years.”

  “And seven months,” Angela muttered.

  “And four days,” Theo added, grinning at her. Pauline realized that six months ago he would have lost his temper with his sister. Now he simply let her grumbles roll off his back. Theo’s growing up, she thought. All this responsibility is making a man of him.

  Angela is maturing too, she realized. She’s become a real help to Theo; she can run the command pod’s systems just as well as he can. Pauline smiled to herself: The idea of Theo and Angela working together on repairing the ship’s antennas would have been preposterous six months ago; yet they’ve slaved away at it together without fighting, without calling each other names. Even when it became painfully clear that they wouldn’t be able to get the antennas functioning again, they didn’t blame each other.

  Theo blames his father, though. He says Victor didn’t store the proper supplies for repairing the antennas. Maybe he’s right. None of us expected to be attacked. None of us expected the antennas to be so badly damaged.

  That was her greatest worry. Not that they were drifting halfway to Jupiter, alone and unable to call for help. Not that they might run out of food or have the recyclers break down past the point where they could be repaired. Pauline’s greatest
worry was that Theo blamed his father for this, blamed Victor for not supplying the ship adequately, blamed him for running away and abandoning them.

  “We might be able to cut the trip time in half,” Theo was saying, “but it’s an awfully risky maneuver.”

  With an effort of will, Pauline focused her attention on what her son was telling her.

  “We put it all on a graph,” Theo said, fingering the palm-sized remote in his hand.

  “We?” Pauline asked.

  “Angie and me.” He hesitated, then admitted, “Angie’s a lot better at math than I am.”

  A multicolored map appeared on the smart screen on the galley’s far bulkhead. Thin yellow lines looped across its gridwork background. Pauline realized that they were the orbits of major asteroids. A pulsing red dot was at its center.

  “The red clot is us,” Theo explained. “And here’s our current trajectory…”

  A blue curve arced outward. The view enlarged to show Syracuse’s trajectory soaring out the far side of the Asteroid Belt halfway to Jupiter before it finally swung back toward Ceres again.

  “I’ve gone through all the numbers a dozen times—”

  “We both did,” Angela said, without a hint of rancor.

  He dipped his chin in acknowledgement of his sister. “And here’s what we might be able to do.”

  A dotted blue curve appeared, much shorter than the solid one.

  Theo explained, “The nav program shows that we can get back to Ceres in a little more than four years if we fire the main engine and decelerate the ship.”

  “Four years, two months and sixteen days,” said Angela, looking almost happy about it. “Right, Thee?”

  “Right. Give or take an uncertainty of five percent.”

  “Couldn’t we make it less than that?” Pauline asked.

  Theo grimaced, then answered, “We don’t have the fuel for a longer burn, Mom. This maneuver’s gonna use up our last drop of hydrogen.”

  Pauline thought about that for a moment. “You don’t mean all our hydrogen?”