The Aftermath gt-16

by Ben Bova

  With hands sweaty from the exertion Elverda guided the arm into its socket and heard the clear mechanical snap as the connectors locked.

  Handing her a pencil-shaped probe, he said, “Kindly check each of the connectors. They’re marked by blinking lights.”

  Elverda worked the probe all the way around his shoulder. One by one the telltale lights winked out.

  “Now for the acid test,” he said. Standing, he raised the arm over his head, then swung it in a full arc, flexing his fingers as he did so.

  “It’s fine,” said Dorn. She thought she heard a note of relief in his voice. “Thank you very much.”

  “De nada,” she murmured.

  As they headed back toward the bridge Elverda asked, “When it isn’t working properly, do you feel… pain?”

  “Something akin to pain,” he said. “The circuits send electrical signals to the biocomputer that’s linked to my brain. My conscious mind interprets those signals as…” he searched for a word,.”… as a sort of dull ache. A discomfort, not the same as a pain in the organic side of my body.”

  Elverda nodded as they stepped into the bridge. “And the mechanical side is powered by a nuclear source?”

  “It’s well shielded,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about radiation.”

  “I was wondering how long it will last,” she said as she sank gratefully into the command chair.

  “It’s only a small thermionic system,” said Dorn. “It will need to be replaced in a hundred years or so.”

  Elverda laughed. Humor from Dorn was rare.

  The radar pinged. Suddenly alert, Elverda called up its display on the main screen. A tiny pinpoint of a gleam, artificially colored bright red by the computer. Near it, a slightly larger blip, which the computer painted in blue. It appeared slightly oblong to Elverda, even at this distance.

  “We have a radar contact,” she said.

  “I see,” Dorn answered.

  Working the keyboard, Elverda overlaid a gridwork of navigational lines atop the radar image. Numbers came up automatically. They were twelve hours away from the contact, fourteen hours from the second blip, the location of the battle that was their destination. While most of the old battle sites were empty spaces, this location was centered on a five-kilometer-long asteroid; the callout on the screen labeled it as 66-059.

  The asteroid was registered in the IAA files, Elverda saw. She called up its file photo: an ungainly oblong of rock, its lumpy surface strewn with boulders and smaller stones, dented here and there with craterlets. Ugly, she decided, like a face marred by hideous scars and pimples. It had been claimed by Astro Corporation years earlier. A battle had been fought over it; men and women had died for it. Now it rode silently through the vacuum of the Belt, alone, forgotten, as it had coasted through space for all the billions of years since the solar system had been created.

  Not forgotten, Elverda told herself. One of the warriors who fought here has remembered you. One of the mercenary soldiers who fought other mercenaries here has returned as a priest to pay final tribute to those he killed.

  Dorn leaned in over her shoulder. Elverda saw his reflection in the main screen, his prosthetic eye gleaming red as he studied the chart and the radar image beneath it.

  “Sixty-six oh five nine,” Dorn read the asteroid’s designation from the screen. “I remember this battle. We were outnumbered, but we won.”

  “What do you make of the other image?” she asked.

  “Too far away to tell,” Dorn replied, “although it must be fairly large to give a return at this distance.”

  “Not a body, then?”

  “Perhaps a cloud of debris.” He straightened up, then rubbed his chin of etched metal with his human fingers. “But I would expect that a debris cloud would have expanded much farther than that in the time that’s elapsed since the battle.”

  “Could it be in orbit around the asteroid?” Elverda mused aloud. “Held there by the rock’s gravity?”

  Dorn refused to speculate. “We’ll find out in twelve hours’ time. While we wait, let’s take a meal.”

  Elverda smiled up at him. He’s like a little boy sometimes: when there’s nothing better to do, eat.

  CARGO SHIP PLEIADES:

  BRIDGE

  Like most of the deep-space vessels plying the Asteroid Belt, Pleiades was built on the circular plan of a wheel, so that its rotation could impart a feeling of gravity to its crew and passengers.

  But on this flight, the vessel had no passengers and only one crew member. Victor Zacharias was flat on his back on the deck underneath the main control panel, cursing fluently, an electro-optical magnifier over one eye as he traced the microthin circuitry of the ship’s control systems through the labyrinthine innards of the command consoles. Access panels and electronic modules were strewn across the plastic tiles of the deck around him. He had banged his head at least a half-dozen times, his knuckles were skinned, and his temper was fraying badly.

  It wasn’t enough to steal the ship; now he had to control it. By himself. So he was working, fuming, struggling to reconfigure the ship’s control systems, to automate as much of them as possible and bring the rest of them together so that one man could operate all the controls from one console on the bridge.

  It wasn’t easy. Unlike his rickety old Syracuse, Pleiades had been designed to be operated by a crew of six. Cheena Madagascar could sit in her command chair like a queen and have her lackeys run the vessel while she did nothing more than utter commands. Victor didn’t have lackeys: only himself.

  He found himself wishing that he had Theo here to help him; even the teenager’s clumsy efforts would have been some relief. That started him thinking about Pauline and Angela and the three of them alone on Syracuse drifting out to god knows where and … He squeezed his eyes shut. Stop it, he commanded himself. Stop it or you’ll drive yourself crazy.

  Hunger finally made him crawl out from under the consoles and climb stiffly to his feet, scratching at his sweaty beard. Pleiades was racing outward from Ceres under a full g acceleration. The ship’s main wheel had ceased its rotation and all the compartments inside it had pivoted on their bearings to orient themselves properly to the acceleration. If Victor closed his eyes it felt as if he were standing on Earth.

  “I’ll cut the acceleration in an hour or so,” Victor said aloud as he headed for the galley. He was certain that no one was chasing after him. Cheena Madagascar was probably sputtering with anger, Big George was undoubtedly volcanic, but there was really nothing much that they could do. Send a ship after him? They’d have to be willing to spend the money for a ship and crew, and even then Victor had such a good lead on any potential pursuer that a chase would be fruitless.

  Besides, he was running silent, emitting neither a tracking beacon nor telemetry reports on his condition. He didn’t want to be found. Not yet.

  * * *

  It had been a tricky maneuver, hunkering down so close to the pitted, boulder-strewn surface of asteroid 66-059. Viking was almost as wide as the oblong, elongated rock’s breadth. The bridge was absolutely silent as Yuan piloted the wheel-shaped vessel to within a few meters of the asteroid’s grainy, dusty surface. It’s like a computer game, he told himself as he worked the fingertip controls on the armrests of his command chair with practiced delicacy. Easy does it. Easy.

  “Close enough,” Yuan breathed as he cut the ship’s maneuvering jets. He saw that his officers had their eyes locked on him, then realized his face was beaded with perspiration.

  “We’ll rotate with the rock,” he said. “If they probe with radar they won’t be able to distinguish us against the normal backscatter.”

  “Their resolution will get better as they come closer,” Tamara countered, from her comm console.

  “By then it’ll be too late for them,” Yuan snapped.

  Koop nodded slowly, but the expression on his face said, I hope you’re right.

  Yuan’s other two ships had dispersed to a distance of an hou
r’s flight, at one g acceleration, and gone silent. No communications now, Yuan told himself. Now we sit and wait, quiet as a tiger crouching in the reeds by a waterhole.

  “Computer shows we’re drifting slightly,” the navigation officer said, almost in a whisper.

  “Maybe we should grapple the rock,” Koop suggested.

  Yuan shook his head. “No. I want to be able to jump out at an instant’s notice.” To the nav officer he asked, “How bad’s the drift?”

  “One point four meters per minute. We can correct for it, captain.”

  “Cold jets only. I don’t want to give them any signature that they can pick up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Better get yourselves a meal while we’re waiting,” Yuan said. Then he added, “One at a time. Fix a tray in the galley and bring it back here.”

  Tamara got up from her comm console. “I’ll make a tray for you, captain.”

  Yuan suppressed a pleased grin. “Do that,” he said.

  * * *

  The human half of Dorn’s face was frowning as he studied the image on Hunter’s main screen.

  Sitting beside him on the bridge’s padded rolling chair, Elverda said, “It looks like bodies. Five… no, six bodies.”

  “How could they still be so close to the asteroid?” Dorn asked. “The battle was more than four years ago. They should have dispersed far into space, like the others we’ve recovered.”

  Elverda shrugged her frail shoulders. “Does it matter? The bodies are there.”

  “Yes,” he murmured. Tapping on the keyboard before him, he called up the velocity vectors of the images on the screen.

  “They all have the same velocity,” Elverda saw.

  “Within a hair’s breadth.”

  “Is that normal?”

  “If they were all blasted into space at the same time, by the same explosion.”

  Elverda felt a chill creeping along her spine. There is something eerie about this, she thought. We’ve never seen a group of bodies clustered together this way.

  “If you multiply their velocities by the length of time since the battle was fought,” Dorn said, “they should be thousands of kilometers from the asteroid. Tens of thousands of kilometers.”

  “But they’re not. They’re here.”

  “Which means that they were placed here recently. Perhaps only a few days ago.”

  “Could there have been another battle here?”

  Dorn sank back in the command chair, his eyes never leaving the radar image on the screen with its superimposed vector numbers. Elverda looked at him, waiting for him to make a decision.

  “I’ve sworn to recover all the bodies that have been left drifting through the Belt,” he said, as much to himself as to her.

  “Humphries knows that,” she whispered.

  “This could be a trap, then.”

  “Do you think…?”

  “There’s one way to find out,” Dorn said, tapping the keyboard to call up the propulsion program.

  INTO THE TRAP

  “He’s accelerating!” the nav officer shouted.

  “I can see that,” Yuan said testily as he leaned forward in his command chair so hard that the meal tray slid off his lap and clattered to the deck.

  “He’s turning away,” Koop said.

  “Power up,” Yuan commanded. “Now!”

  “He didn’t fall into your trap,” said Tamara. “He’s too smart for that.”

  Feeling the surge of acceleration as Viking climbed away from the asteroid, Yuan said, “It doesn’t matter. He’s close enough for us to get him.”

  Fingers flicking on the keyboards set into his armrests, Yuan called up the weapons display on the bridge’s main screen. “Comm, tell the other ships to power up and converge on the target’s vector.”

  “Yessir,” Tamara said.

  Yuan smiled as he peered at the main screen. The renegade’s ship was nothing but an electronic blip, accelerating away from him. But he knew how to play this game. His other two ships would close the trap while he moved in for the kill.

  To his first mate he commanded, “Koop, activate the laser.”

  The big Hawaiian pecked at his console’s keys. “Activating weapon system, sir.”

  “I’ll handle the weapons officer duty,” Yuan said. “You’re my backup, Koop.”

  “Backup. Right.”

  Yuan couldn’t see Koop’s face, but he heard the resignation in his voice. Maybe it was resentment, he thought. The first mate was ordinarily the weapons officer in battle. But Yuan wanted that task for himself. That’s where the fun is. The chase and then the kill.

  * * *

  Dorn had swung Hunter into a wide turn away from the asteroid. Sitting beside him, Elverda watched the image of the asteroid as their ship’s cameras swiveled to keep it in view. Off in the distance behind the rock she could see the faint gleam of the cluster of bodies floating in the emptiness.

  And then a ship rose up from behind the rock, a big vessel that radiated power, purpose, menace.

  “I’ll have to increase our acceleration,” Dorn said, a tendril of concern in his voice. “You’d better get to your compartment and into your bunk.”

  “I’ll stay here,” Elverda replied, “with you.”

  He turned his head to look at her, but said nothing. His prosthetic hand pushed the throttle forward. Elverda sensed nothing at first, but then inexorably the thrust built up and she felt herself sinking into the chair’s liquid-filled cushions.

  “We have a chance,” Dorn said, “if we can accelerate quickly enough. He’s starting from a standstill.”

  “He was hiding behind the asteroid,” she said, puffing out the words.

  “Clever. But we can outrun him.”

  “If he’s alone.”

  He turned toward her again. “Yes. If he’s alone.”

  * * *

  Yuan’s two other ships were designated Viking 2 and Viking 3. They were smaller than Viking itself, each crewed by only three people.

  Yuan bared his teeth in a feral grin as his main screen showed their quarry’s vector racing away from the asteroid—and toward his other two ships, which were now accelerating to an intercept point on the renegade’s extended track.

  The screen was showing a holographic view now, allowing Yuan to see the game in three dimensions. It’s not a game, he told himself. This is real. This is what Humphries is going to pay that bonus for. But he couldn’t help smiling grimly as he watched the three-dimensional view. It’s so simple. I played more complex games when I was a kid. This one’s easy.

  “He’s increasing his distance from us,” the navigation officer said. Then she added, “Sir.”

  “For the moment,” Yuan murmured. “We’ll catch up with him.”

  Tamara said, “Two and three report they’re on course to intercept.

  “I can see that,” said Yuan, without taking his eyes from the main screen.

  “Do you have any further orders for them?”

  Despite his focus on the screen, Yuan noted that Tamara did not address him properly.

  “Officer Vishinsky,” he said. “You will use correct military respect when speaking to your captain. Is that understood?”

  “Understood, captain,” she replied instantly.

  “Good.” The whole crew knows we’re sleeping together, he said to himself. Can’t have them thinking that our sex life gives her any special privileges. Can’t allow discipline to get sloppy.

  Glancing at her, he saw that Tamara was sitting rigidly at the comm console, looking neither right nor left. You don’t have to call me captain in bed, he said to her silently. Then he turned his attention back to the game that was unfolding on the main screen.

  * * *

  “We’re outrunning him,” Elverda said. It came out as a gasp, almost. The acceleration was weighing her down, making her bones ache, her chest almost too heavy to speak.

  “Get into a suit,” Dorn said.

  “Why? We’re pull
ing away—”

  Dorn raised his arm and pointed. Two new radar images were gleaming on the main screen.

  “He isn’t alone,” said Dorn.

  “We’re trapped!”

  “It looks that way.” But his fingers were playing on the console keys. “I’m cutting our acceleration. Get into a suit, please.”

  “What about you?”

  “You first.”

  Elverda struggled to her feet. The acceleration made her feel heavy, as if her legs were made of lead. But lead wouldn’t hurt so much, she said to herself. She took three steps toward the hatch, then felt a red-hot searing pain flash through her chest. She turned back, groped for the chair and sank into it again.

  “I can’t…” she panted.

  “If I cut the acceleration much lower they’ll catch up to us in less than an hour.”

  “Do what… you need … to do,” Elverda said through teeth gritted by pain.

  “Strap in, then.”

  She fumbled for the restraint straps from the seat’s back and buckled them across her chest and lap. The pain was getting worse, flaring down her arm now, even along her jaw. Her thoughts swimming, she wondered if the chair’s wheels were locked into their grooves on the deck. I should check that they’re locked. But she could barely move her head.

  “They’ll be firing at us soon,” Dorn said. His voice was flat, as unemotional as ice.

  Elverda could feel her heart clenching beneath her ribs. How many g’s are we pulling? she asked silently.

  The ship rocked. Red warning lights sprang up on the console.

  “Good shooting,” Dorn muttered.

  Elverda’s vision was blurring. The radar images on the main screen looked like streaks to her, arrows hurtling toward her. It was all going gray and hazy.

  Through the fog of agony she saw Dorn turn toward her, the human side of his face twisted with sudden alarm.

  As if from a great distance she heard Dorn’s voice: “Cease firing. We have a sick woman on board. She needs immediate medical assistance. We surrender.”