Authors: Ben Bova
“Theo?”
He opened his eyes, surprised to realize that he'd fallen asleep on the sofa. His mother was bending over him.
“I guess I nodded off,” he said, feeling slightly sheepish.
“You've been working very hard,” said Pauline.
“We all have.”
She sat on the sofa beside him.
“Angie's gone to bed?” he asked.
“Yes. She was tired too.”
He nodded and pulled himself up to a sitting position. “She was really good today, monitoring my EVA. She sat there all suited up for nearly five hours, ready to go outside if I got into trouble.”
Pauline smiled faintly. “Angela's growing up.”
“I guess she is.”
“You are too.”
“Think so?”
“I know so. You've taken charge of the ship, Theo. Six months ago you were complaining that your father didn't trust youâ”
“He always did everything himself. He never gave me a chance to learn, to show him what I can do.”
“Yes, I know,” Pauline said gently. “I understand. But I trust you, Theo. I know that you've put us on the right course to get back to Ceres and you'll keep this ship running until we get there.”
Theo felt a warm glow inside. But he didn't know what to say, how he should respond to his mother's praise.
“Now don't you think you'd better get some sleep?” Pauline suggested. “Tomorrow's another day.”
“You're right.” He swung his long legs off the sofa and got to his feet.
“Good-night, Theo,” said Pauline.
“Good-night, Mom.”
She's right, he thought as he padded to his own cubicle. Tomorrow's another day. With fifteen hundred and thirty-four more to go.
Eternal process moving on,
From state to state the spirit walks;
And these are but the shatter'd stalks,
Or ruin'd chrysalis of one.
They made an unlikely pair.
Although Elverda Apacheta was near the end of her long life, she was still a regally tall, slim woman with the carriage of an empress. Yet her once haughty eyes of sparkling jet now looked out at the world with a weariness that grew heavier each passing day. Her high flaring cheekbones and imperious nose spoke of her Andean background, but her long colorfully woven robe hung loosely on her emaciated body and her dead-white hair was disheveled, chopped unevenly, as if she no longer cared who saw her.
Her only companion on
Hunter
had already died once, or tried to. When he had been a mercenary soldier he had pressed a mini-grenade to his chest and set it off. Now he was as much machine as man, a cyborg whose face was half metal etched with swirling hair-thin lines. He wore the threadbare remains of a military uniform, all insignias and signs of rank rudely ripped off its fabric. He called himself Dorn and said he was a priest. He and Elverda Apacheta had been on this lonely, interminable, thankless mission for more than two years.
She had once been a worlds-renowned sculptress, the woman who carved
The Rememberer
out of a two-kilometer-long asteroid. The magnificent sculpture rode in a high orbit around Earth, a work of art that attracted tourists from the Earth, the Moon, and the man-made habitats in space between the two.
Now she and Dorn searched for the dead, out in the silent darkness of the Asteroid Belt. And fled from the mercenaries who had been hired to kill them.
Hunter
was a massive ship, much too large for just the two of them. It had originally been built to smelt asteroidal ores on the way from the Belt inward to the Earth/Moon vicinity. But the advent of nanotechnology made such bulk smelters obsolete. Virus-sized nanomachines separated pure elements out of the asteroidal rocks.
Hunter
went on the market at a bargain price. Dorn had use for the smelter, so Elverda Apacheta had emptied her retirement accounts to buy the vessel.
For all its size and mass,
Hunter
was capable of bursts of high acceleration when they needed to flee an intruding vessel. They had not seen another ship, though, in several months.
“We're approaching the coordinates you plugged into the navigation computer,” said Elverda into the ship's intercom microphone. She was sitting in the command chair on the ship's compact bridge; Dorn was somewhere in the bowels of
Hunter'
s equipment bay.
“I will come to the bridge,” his deep, heavy voice replied. She always wondered what his voice had been like before his shattered body had been turned into a cybernetic organism.
“No hurry,” she said. “It will be an hour before we reach the exact spot.”
He was born Dorik Harbin in a Balkan village that was swept up in one of the bloody frenzies of ethnic cleansing that swept that region of Earth every few generations.
Shortly before his twelfth birthday, the militia from the next valley descended on his village, raping, killing, burning everything in their fervent zeal. Dorik Harbin saw his mother nailed to a cross, naked, bleeding, dying. The young boy ran away, lived like an animal in the hills until he was caught pilfering an apple from the kitchen tent of a different militia band. Brought before the group's commander, he was given the choice of joining the militia or being shot.
He learned to kill. Remembering what had been done to his mother, his sisters and brothers and father, he marched into other villages and killed everything living in them, down to the livestock and household pets. Carrying an assault rifle that was almost as big as he was, he became an adept killer.
But his sleep was haunted by terrible dreams. He saw those he killed, heard the pleas for mercy that he never listened to in waking life. Sometimes, in his dreams, he killed his own mother. That was when he began taking the drugs that were freely available among the roving militia bands. The narcotics helped him to sleep, helped him to keep on killing despite his nightmares.
Peacekeepers from the newly reorganized United Nations finally suppressed the militias and established an uneasy peace in the region. The dead were buried, the fires extinguished, the acrid smoke that hung over the region finally cleared away.
Dorik Harbin was sixteen by then. The Peacekeepers recruited him into their forces and tried to train him to enforce the peace with a minimum of killing. It was nonsense, and young Dorik knew it, but he allowed his superior officers to believe that he had been rehabilitated. They smiled at his progress as a model Peacekeeper and turned a blind eye to his growing dependency on what they termed “pharmaceuticals.”
He was among the Peacekeeper troops who were sent to the Moon in the UN's ill-fated attempt to wrest control of Moonbase from its rebellious citizens. After that fiasco, once Moonbase became recognized as the independent nation of Selene, Dorik Harbin quit the Peacekeepers and joined the private security forces of Humphries Space Systems, Inc.
In a short time he was killing again, this time as commander of spacecraft that attacked other spacecraft in the dark emptiness of the Asteroid Belt. His prowess came to the attention of Martin Humphries himself, who personally assigned Harbin to the task of tracking down and killing his archenemy, Lars Fuchs.
Humphries also saw to it that Harbin had an adequate supply of specialized drugs, pharmaceuticals that enhanced his battle prowess, that made him sharper, faster, drugs that fed his inner rage.
It was in such a drug-enhanced fury that he methodically destroyed the rock rats' habitat,
Chrysalis,
killing all of the one thousand seventeen men, women and children aboard. Attacking the ore ship
Syracuse
was merely a minor skirmish in the immediate aftermath of that slaughter.
Once his mind cleared and he realized what he had done, Dorik Harbin held a minigrenade to his chest and detonated it. He knew of no other way to end the horror that obsessed his sleep.
But the corporation that literally owned his body would not let him die. Their medical specialists tested their own skills and theories and turned him into a cyborg, half machine, half human. And sent him back to his duties as a mercenary soldier in the employ of Humphries Space Systems, Inc.
The Asteroid Wars were over by then, forced to an end by the shock of the
Chrysalis
massacre. Dorik Harbin took no credit for the unexpected result of his atrocity. Humphries Space Systems saw to it that no one learned that the cyborg was the mass murderer. Dorik Harbin went about his unexciting duties as mechanically as if he were entirely a machine. But still he dreamed.
Then he was assigned to head the security detail for a small asteroid that the corporation had quietly bought from a rock rat family, deep in the Belt. Martin Humphries himself was coming from his home on the Moon to inspect the asteroid. There was something inside the rock, something artificial, something staggeringly unusual, something that was perhaps not made by human hands.
As part of his duties Dorik Harbin inspected the artifact buried deep inside the asteroid. The experience shattered him. He saw his life, all the pain and horror, all the grief and remorse that filled his dreams.
Every day he stood before the artifact. Every day the deeds of his life were peeled away, moment by moment, murder by murder. It was if he were being flayed alive, one layer of skin after another stripped from his bleeding, quaking flesh.
At last there was nothing left. The personality that he had built for himself since he'd been twelve had been stripped bare and a new persona, one that had been hidden deep inside his old one, at last came forth.
He tore all the insignias of rank from his uniform, turning it into the tattered gray costume of a penitent. Dorik Harbin ceased to exist. Out of the warrior came a priest named Dorn, as single-minded in his quest for atonement as he had once been in his missions of murder.
He still dreamed when he slept, but now his dreams were of mercy and justice.
Elverda saw a glint reflected in the bridge's main display screen. It was Dorn stepping through the hatch, silent as a wraith, the metal half of his face catching the light from the overhead lamps.
Touching a keypad with a long, slim finger, Elverda superimposed a navigation grid on the scene their forward camera showed.
“There,” she said, tapping the screen with her fingernail. “That's the spot.”
She sensed Dorn nodding as he leaned over her shoulder.
“It's empty,” she said, turning her head slightly. The human half of his face was so close she could feel its warmth, hear his slow, steady breathing.
“It wasn't empty five years ago,” said Dorn. “We destroyed a dozen Astro warships here. Led them into a trap and ran a swarm of pebbles into them.”
“A dozen ships? How many⦔ She caught herself and choked off her question.
But Dorn understood. “There must have been at least ten mercenaries in each ship. Probably more. I've tried to get the exact number from Astro Corporation but they refuse to release such information.”
“A hundred and twenty men and women.”
“At least.”
Elverda knew what came next. They would fly a search spiral expanding outward from this site, probing with radar and telescopes for the bodies of the dead that had been drifting in space since the battle that had killed them. It would take weeks, perhaps months, to find them all.
If they lived that long.
With his prosthetic hand Dorn tapped out a command on the keyboard. The image on the screen changed subtly.
“Ultraviolet?” she asked, slightly puzzled.
“Lyman alpha,” he replied. “Ionized hydrogen.”
“Why are you looking for ionized hydrogen?”
“Exhaust trail.” With the cool metal fingers of his left hand Dorn worked the keyboard.
Even after knowing him for more than two years Elverda shuddered at the sight of the mechanical hand. She looked up at the main screen and saw that he was panning the cameras three hundred and sixty degrees, then up and down doing a complete global sweep around their ship.
“Nothing,” she said.
Dorn did not reply. The screen's view climbed up, then swung downward.
“We're alone.”
“Are we?” he countered. “Humphries's people know that a battle was fought here. They know that we will come here to seek the dead and give them proper rites.”
She gestured toward the screen, empty except for the unblinking stars, so distant and aloof. “There are no ships out there.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But there is a small asteroid that does not appear on the nav charts.”
Almost feeling annoyed at his wariness, Elverda said, “Asteroid orbits change constantly. The charts are never up to date.”
“True enough,” he said. “But let's check out that rock before we proceed further.”
“It's barely twenty meters across,” Elverda objected. “It can't be a camouflaged vessel.”
“I know.”
Elverda stared at him for a long, disquieting moment. Dorn looked back at her, his electro-optical eye unblinking, the overhead lights glinting on the etched metal of his skullcap. With a sigh that was half exasperation she punched in the commands that would bring
Hunter
to within fifty meters of the tiny asteroid.
They shared a modest lunch in the galley while
Hunter
cruised at minimum thrust and established itself in co-orbit near the asteroid. When they returned to the bridge, they saw that the object outside was a jagged chunk of debris, a shard torn from what had once been a spacecraft, probably an attack vessel. They trooped down to the main airlock, where she helped Dorn into a nanofabric space suit. When she had first met Dorn she'd been surprised at how agile he was: the metal half of his body was lithe and supple, not at all like a cumbersome clanking machine. Now, though, more than two years later, he seemed slower, more careful, as if his mechanical half were developing the robotic analog of arthritis.