The Aftermath gt-16

by Ben Bova

  “Just give the coordinates to my nav officer,” Yuan insisted.

  Again Dorn hesitated. Then, “I want your promise that Ms. Apacheta will not be harmed.”

  “The coordinates, dammit!” Yuan shouted. “Now!”

  “I don’t care what happens to me, but I want her to be safe.”

  Tamara said, “Do you want us to start pulling her fingernails out?”

  Clenching his metal fist, Dorn said, “The rest of this bridge will be destroyed if you try that. Some of you will die.” His voice was flat, unemotional, but the others on the bridge shot uneasy glances at one another.

  Before anyone could reply, Yuan broke into a forced chuckle. “All right. All right. I won’t touch a hair of her head. Does that satisfy you?”

  “No,” Dorn said calmly. “I want your guarantee that no harm will come to her, neither by you nor any other member of this ship’s crew.”

  Elverda complained, “Stop talking about me as if I’m not here.”

  Ignoring her, Dorn said to the captain, “You are under orders to kill us both. You can kill me, but let her go free.”

  “And what happens when Mr. Humphries finds out I’ve let her go?”

  Dorn smiled with the human side of his face. “Once I give you the coordinates you will go to the asteroid and try to gain control of Humphries through the alien artifact.”

  Yuan glanced at Tamara, who nodded minutely.

  “If you succeed in getting the upper hand with Humphries, then allowing Ms. Apacheta to go free will be of no consequence. If you fail we will all be killed.”

  “Including you,” said Yuan.

  “I will die one way or the other. That doesn’t matter. The life of this woman does matter. Very much. To me.”

  Moving beside him, Elverda said softly, “Dorn, I can’t let you throw your life away—”

  “If you finish the work we’ve started, if you find the other bodies and give them decent death rites, then my life doesn’t matter. It never did, except to cause agony and death. You can complete my atonement.”

  “Atonement?” Tamara blurted. “Is that what you’re after?”

  “Atonement,” Dorn repeated.

  Yuan said, “All right. Ms. Apacheta won’t be harmed in any way. Now give the coordinates to my nav officer.”

  Without another word, Dorn turned and stepped to the navigation officer’s console, then leaned over his shoulder and began pecking on his keyboard with both his hands.

  Turning to Tamara, Yuan commanded, “Notify Viking Two and Three to proceed to Ceres immediately.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “You don’t want them to go with us?”

  “No,” he said. “Do you?”

  She thought it over for all of two seconds. “No, you’re right. We do this by ourselves.”

  Elverda, still standing next to the captain’s chair, asked, “What about our ship, the Hunter?”

  “We don’t need it now. Let it drift.”

  * * *

  Valker whistled softly as he read Victor Zacharias’s dossier from the computer screen built into the bulkhead at the foot of his bunk.

  He was sitting up with the pillows bunched behind his back. His quarters were small but as sumptuous as he could make them, crammed with furniture and fixtures scavenged from salvaged vessels: a massive desk of actual teak filled one corner of the compartment, elephants and monkeys carved into its flanks and front; colorful draperies hung from the overhead; the entire lavatory had been ripped out of a luxurious corporate torch ship and shoehorned into place, gold faucets and all; the rich dark faux leather recliner that had been rammed into the other corner of the compartment had been taken from a prospector’s ship, the one luxury its late owner had possessed.

  Valker took all that for granted, including the fact that he had to maneuver carefully around his pilfered treasures to get across the jam-packed compartment. His attention was fully focused on Zacharias’s dossier. The man had a family—wife and two teenagers—but they’d been lost after being attacked by the same monster who’d wiped out the original Chrysalis habitat.

  So what’s he doing in a stolen ship this deep in the Belt? Valker asked himself. Searching for his family? Valker shook his head. Can’t be. It’s three years and more since his family disappeared. They’re dead by now. Have to be. Only a fool or a madman would still be searching for them. Only an idiot would steal a ship, make himself an outlaw with the rock rats, to go searching through this wilderness for his wife and kids.

  “Only a fool or a madman,” Valker repeated aloud, softly.

  Why track after a madman? Even if you find him you’ll have to kill him; he won’t give up that ship without a fight. And even if we do take the ship, once we bring it back to Ceres its rightful owner will claim it. We’ll get the reward, but that’s peanuts compared to the price the ship would bring.

  Why bother? Let him go searching for his family. Let him die out there. Sooner or later we’ll run across his ship and take it.

  The message light beneath the display screen began to blink.

  “Answer,” Valker called out.

  His first mate’s bearded face filled the screen. “Contact, captain. Looks like a derelict. Seems intact, but there’s no beacon, no answer to our calls.”

  “Identification?”

  “Computer says its radar profile matches one of the ships in its files: Hunter. Some woman’s listed as the owner, Elverda Apacheta. Sounds like some Latina to me.”

  Valker nodded and swung his legs off the bunk, careful not to bang his shins against the big recliner.

  “I’m coming to the bridge,” he said.

  A derelict, Valker thought as he tugged on his softboots. If she’s really intact she’ll bring top dollar back at Ceres.

  He hurried to the bridge.

  ATTACK SHIP VIKING:

  ONE MONTH LATER

  “By god, there it is,” said Kao Yuan in a hushed, almost awed voice.

  From the navigation console, Koop wondered aloud, “Are you sure?”

  Yuan pointed to the main screen. “How many rocks out here have five—no, six ships patrolling around them?”

  “APPROACHING VESSEL, IDENTIFY YOURSELF.” The voice coming through the comm speaker sounded like a computerized synthesizer.

  It had taken a month for Yuan to track down asteroid 67-046. It hadn’t been at the coordinates Dorn had given. Sure enough, Humphries had moved the rock to a different orbit that swooped far below and then high above the ecliptic, out of the plane of the usual traffic through the Belt. For an entire month Viking followed trajectories that the navigation computer worked out, guesses based on the asteroid’s original orbit and the amount of energy it would take to move a rock of its mass.

  During those frustrating weeks of searching the dark emptiness, Yuan asked Tamara again and again, “But what do we do when we find the ’roid? It’s bound to be protected. Humphries won’t let it just sit there without guarding it.”

  Again and again Tamara would smile knowingly and say, “Leave that to me. I’ll get us past the guards.”

  “You’ll get us killed,” Yuan groused.

  He did not sleep with her anymore. He wanted to, but the realization that she’d been using him angered him too deeply. Instead he crooked his finger at one of the other crew members, a weapons specialist, young and slightly plump, but with silky dark hair and a willing smile. It’s good to be the captain, Yuan told himself. But he was certain that Tamara was sleeping with Koop now.

  “APPROACHING VESSEL, IDENTIFY YOURSELF, THIS AREA IS PROPRIETARY TO HUMPHRIES SPACE SYSTEMS, INCORPORATED. NO UNAUTHORIZED VESSELS ARE PERMITTED HERE.”

  Yuan looked at Tamara, who pressed the transmit key on her console and said crisply, “This is HSS vessel Viking. Authorization code delta four six nine.”

  “ONE MOMENT. VERIFYING AUTHORIZATION CODE.”

  Tamara glanced over her shoulder at Yuan, a self-satisfied smile curving her lips.

  The main screen abruptly s
howed a square-jawed man with iron gray hair cropped close to his skull. He wore a pale blue tunic with a high choker collar.

  “I am Commander Hugh Bolestos,” he said in a gravelly voice. “Your authorization code is out of date.”

  “We’ve been on special duty in the Belt,” Tamara answered smoothly. “We haven’t updated our comm codes for several months.”

  Commander Bolestos’s stern expression did not change by a millimeter. “I’ve had no word from headquarters to expect you.”

  “As I told you, we’re on special duty. My name is Tamara Vishinsky. Check your personnel files.”

  Bolestos’s eyes shifted away for a moment, widened noticeably, then returned to his main screen.

  “Says here you report personally to Mr. Humphries himself.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Tamara. “May I come aboard your vessel, please, commander?”

  “Certainly, Ms. Vishinsky! Of course!”

  * * *

  Valker approached Hunter cautiously. The vessel certainly looked abandoned. No tracking beacon, no telemetry signals, no reply to his repeated calls.

  Elverda Apacheta, he had discovered from a computer search, was a famous sculptress. But very old. She had bought Hunter on a whim, apparently, and disappeared into the depths of the Asteroid Belt several years earlier.

  A dotty old lady, Valker concluded. Maybe she came out here to carve more statues out of asteroids.

  “Vectors matched,” his navigation officer announced. “Close enough to board her.”

  Valker nodded. “I’ll go aboard.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.” He pointed to two of the crewmen who had crowded into the bridge. “Nicco and Kirk, stand by to come aboard when I give the signal.”

  The two crewmen went to the airlock with Valker, where they all pulled on nanofabric space suits that had been taken from the same luxury yacht that the captain’s oversized desk had come from.

  “Wait here. If there’s trouble, I’ll holler.”

  “Right,” they said in unison.

  And if there isn’t trouble, Valker thought as he stepped into the airlock chamber, I want to look through that ship and see if there’s anything worth taking for myself.

  * * *

  Yuan was shocked at the ease with which Tamara disposed of the guards protecting the artifact’s asteroid.

  She, Koop, and four crew members transferred to Commander Bolestos’s vessel. Less than an hour later her image appeared on Viking’s main screen, smiling smugly. “You can come aboard now. No need for weapons.”

  Feeling puzzled, uneasy, Yuan went to the airlock and floated through the spongy plastic tunnel that connected Viking’s airlock with that of the security guards’ orbiting vessel.

  On the bridge he found Koop sitting in the command chair with Tamara bending over him, spraying a bandage on his upper arm. A laser beam had burned through Koop’s sleeve and seared his flesh. Then Yuan saw Commander Bolestos and his guts heaved: the older man lay crumpled like a rag doll in a corner, his chest soaked with blood, his wide-eyed face looking very surprised.

  “You killed him?” Yuan gasped.

  “Change of command,” said Tamara. She pointed to the control panel that spanned one side of the bridge. “Now I’ve got all his authorization codes. I’m in charge of security for the artifact now. The grunts on the other ships are taking my orders, like good little corporate robots.”

  Yuan understood her tone clearly. I’m under her command now, too.

  “Bring the woman and the freak here,” Tamara said. “I want them to lead us down to the artifact.”

  Yuan couldn’t take his eyes off the corpse. He’d never seen a dead body before. All his kills had been at a distance, clean, impersonal.

  “You didn’t have a gun with you. How did you…?”

  Tamara flicked her right wrist and a wire-thin blade slid into her hand. “With this,” she said. “Close up and personal.”

  Then she added, “There are four other crew members down in the galley. And one of our people. The crew tried to make a fight of it.”

  “They’re all dead?” Yuan asked, his voice squeaking, his insides quaking.

  With a quick nod Tamara replied, “Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

  Yuan wanted to throw up.

  “Now get the woman and her cyborg friend over here. We’re going down to the asteroid.”

  THE ARTIFACT

  “You’re making a mistake,” Dorn warned.

  The four of them—Tamara, Yuan, Elverda and Dorn— were walking down the sloping tunnel inside the asteroid that led to the chamber where the artifact was housed. Tamara had placed Koop and a crewman at the tunnel’s opening, up on the surface, inside the glassteel dome that protected the hatch.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Tamara shot back, walking beside Dorn. “You can’t change my mind.”

  “The artifact won’t give you control over Humphries,” Dorn insisted. “You have no idea—”

  “Shut up!” she snapped.

  He walked in silence for several paces, then turned to Elverda and asked in a lower voice, “Do you want to see it again?”

  “Yes,” she said, with only a little trepidation. “And you?”

  “I see it every night in my dreams.”

  Bringing up the rear of the little group, Yuan felt a mix of anticipation and dread. This asteroid was weird: it was one of the rocky type, but it seemed to be honeycombed with burrows that were apparently natural. Less than a kilometer in length, still the gravity here inside this tunnel was at least half an Earthly g: definitely not natural. And it was warm down in this tunnel, too; something, someplace was heating the area. Overheating, Yuan thought, feeling slightly uncomfortable.

  What if this alien contraption actually does give us power over Humphries? Yuan wondered. The cyborg says it won’t but what if it does? We’ll be in control of the richest, most powerful man in the solar system! But then he thought, Humphries isn’t a man to be fooled with. If he finds out what we’re doing he’ll have us all killed. If we can’t control him, what we’re doing here is writing our own death warrants.

  I’ve played plenty of computer games, he said to himself, but nothing like this. Tamara’s a real gambler. She’s willing to risk all of our lives for this. His throat felt dry, his insides fluttery.

  Still, he followed Tamara along the downward sloping tunnel. The rock walls narrowed; the ceiling got so low that Yuan began to stoop slightly. The old woman had slowed down so that she now walked beside him, her eyes bright and eager in her aged, withered face. Up ahead, the cyborg matched Tamara stride for stride.

  Tamara. She killed Bolestos, he reminded himself. She stood right next to the man and stabbed him in the heart. She’s a murderer, a cold-blooded killer. Yuan realized that she’d been in charge of this mission all along. I only thought I was the captain; she pulled my strings and reported my every move back to Humphries himself. Now she’s rebelling, gambling for the chance to seize all of Humphries’s power. And I’m being towed along; she hasn’t even asked me what I want to do. She’s in charge and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  The tunnel ended abruptly at a blank stainless steel wall.

  “Open it,” Tamara said to Dorn.

  “It slides open by itself,” Dorn told them.

  “When?”

  “On its own schedule. When the artifact was first discovered I was in command of the security detail Humphries sent here. I knew the gate’s timing down to the second. But I’ve been away so long that its schedule may have changed.”

  “We’ll have to wait, then,” said Elverda.

  “It might take days,” Dorn said.

  “We could blast the door down,” Tamara said.

  “No,” said Dorn. “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “The gate is protected by some sort of energy field,” he replied. “Besides, an explosion might damage the artifact, if it was powerful enough to blast the gate o
pen.”

  “All right,” Tamara decided. “We’ll wait.”

  Elverda took the colorful shawl from her shoulders, folded it into a makeshift pad, and sat on the stone floor. Dorn stood beside her like a protective guard.

  Tamara turned to Yuan, her face shining with anticipation.

  “We could still turn back,” he said. “It’s not too late to forget this whole scheme.”

  “Never!” she snapped. “This is the biggest opportunity of them all and I’m playing it out, all the way.”

  Yuan nodded. He knew she’d say something like that. Still, he wished he were a trillion kilometers away from here.

  “Whatever happened,” Elverda asked no one in particular, “to the scientists who were studying the artifact?”

  “Humphries never allowed the universities to send scientists here,” Tamara replied. “The IAA was furious, but Humphries had a legal claim to utilization of the asteroid’s resources, and that gave him the right to restrict visitors. He moved the ’roid out of its original orbit just to make it more difficult for anyone to reach it.”

  Dorn said, “I would have thought he would destroy it.”

  “He wanted to,” Tamara said. “He still might, if we give him the chance.”

  “That’s too much power for one man to have,” Elverda said.

  Tamara smirked at her. Yuan could read the expression on her face: soon one woman will have all that power.

  * * *

  At the other end of the tunnel, inside the glassteel dome built on the asteroid’s surface, Koop’s communicator buzzed. He flicked it open and saw the face of a security guard in one of the ships orbiting the asteroid. The woman looked upset, apprehensive.

  “We just received a message from headquarters. They want to know what your ship, Viking, is doing at this location.”

  Koop frowned back at the guard. “How’s headquarters know Viking’s out here? Who told ’em?”

  “There’s an automated identification system planted on the ’roid’s surface. It reports any vessel that comes within our perimeter back to headquarters.”