The Aftermath (15 page)

Yuan looked around the bridge. All his officers' eyes were on him. He half expected applause but they simply gazed at him, waiting for his next words.

So he said, “All ships, battle stations.”

HABITAT
CHRYSALIS II
: OBSERVATION BLISTER

Victor Zacharias stood alone in the observation blister and looked out at the distant, uncaring pinpoints of light. The stars gazed back at him, cold and silent. Jupiter glowed in the darkness; Victor thought he could make out two sparks of moons near its ruddy, flattened disk. Off to his left a blue light gleamed: Earth.

Curving away on either side of the glassteel blister was the massive wheel shape of the unfinished habitat. Victor knew every girder, every panel, every weld. To one side of him the wheel was nothing more than unfinished ribs of metal, like the fossil bones of a giant dinosaur. He saw flashes of welders' lasers flickering in the darkness out there. Construction crews worked twenty-four/seven under the booming roar of Big George's demands.

But the construction of
Chrysalis II
was not urgent to Victor. His family was, and he chafed under the inflexible restraints that Ambrose had bound upon him. It's not Big George, Victor told himself. It's the war, it's that murdering sonofabitch who wiped out the original
Chrysalis,
it's the laws of physics, it's fate. Victor felt the weight of the universe trying to bow him down, bend his knees.

He squared his shoulders and stood straighter. “I'll find you,” he muttered. “Through hell and time and space I'll find you out there.”

Ceres was a pitted ball of rock, close enough, it seemed, to reach out and touch. None of the other asteroids were bright enough to be seen but Victor knew they were swinging in their ever-shifting orbits out there in the cold darkness. And among them was a ship, his ship,
Syracuse,
and the family he wanted to save.

Are they already dead? he asked himself for the thousandth time. And he found the same answer as always:
No.
They're alive. The ship may be crippled but they're alive. They have provisions enough to last for years. Pauline will keep them going. She's strong, brave, resourceful.

It all depends on Theo, he realized. He's the one with the technical smarts and know-how. But he's only fifteen! Then Victor realized, no, he must be nearly nineteen by now. A young man, with the responsibility of keeping the ship's systems functioning. Pauline can help him, but Theo's the one I was training to run the ship.

And Angela, my little angel. What of her? She should be here at Ceres finding a husband, starting her own family, starting her own life. Instead she's marooned on a crippled ship drifting through the Belt.

I've got to find them, Victor told himself again. I've got to get a ship, one way or the other, and find them.

He heard the soft hiss of the hatch sliding open, a tinkle of bracelets clinking together.

“I thought you'd be here.”

Pulled out of his thoughts, Victor turned to see the darkly clad figure of Cheena Madagascar step through the hatch into the dimly lit glassteel blister.

“It's like standing in empty space, isn't it,” she half-whispered once the hatch slid shut behind her and the lights dimmed again. “Like a god walking among the stars.”

He snorted disdainfully. “Take a good look at Ceres, pitted and cracked and ugly as sin.”

Cheena chuckled in the shadows. “Very romantic, Victor.”

“I hate this place.”

She came up and stood beside him. He could see her gold-flecked eyes shining in the shadows of the diffused lighting.

“I like the beard,” she said. “Makes you look … dangerous.”

He didn't know what to say, so he merely shrugged his shoulders.

“You've been avoiding me,” she said softly.

Despite himself, he smiled at her. “It's best to avoid temptation.”

“Really? You didn't avoid me when you were on
Pleiades.
”

“You were the ship's captain. I had to follow orders.”

“You seemed to enjoy the duty.”

He shrugged. “I'm only flesh and blood.”

“What a compliment.”

“Cheena, please, what happened aboard
Pleiades
was very good, but—”

“No buts,” she whispered, sliding her arms around his neck.

“This isn't right, Cheena. I have a wife. She's alive, I know she is.”

“Even if she is, my reluctant lover, she's far, far away and I'm right here, in your arms.”

He hadn't realized that he'd wrapped his arms around her waist. She was pressing close to him. He could smell the clean tang of her shampoo, feel her breathing, the beating of her heart.

“Life belongs to the living, Victor,” Cheena murmured.

“She's not dead,” he insisted, in a whisper.

“I'll make you a deal,” she said, with a teasing smile in her voice. “I'll let you use my ship for six months. If we haven't found them in six months you'll give it up and stay with me.”

“Six months…”

“You'll be mine until we find them. If we don't, it wouldn't be so terrible to stay with me, would it?”

Before he could decide rationally he was clasping her to him in a fiercely passionate kiss. Six months, said a voice in his mind. Six months. You can search for them. You can find them.

Then the voice added, If you can get away from Big George.

SMELTER SHIP
HUNTER
: MAIN AIRLOCK

“It's definitely a body,” Dorn said. He tugged on his nanofabric space suit and began sealing its front.

Elverda nodded as he pulled up the hood and inflated it into a bubble of a helmet. She had never gone outside the ship, never taken a space walk. What did the technical people call it? she asked herself. EVA. Extravehicular activity. How pretentious! How bloodless! Spacewalk is much more descriptive.

They had flown more than eighty thousand kilometers from the coordinates where the old battle had been fought, radars probing in every direction. Twice they had found chunks of debris. This was the first corpse they had located.

Elverda remembered the other bodies they had found from other battles. Desiccated, like ancient mummies. Hollow-eyed, shriveled, skin blackened by the hard ultraviolet radiation of space. Many of the dead were in space suits: they had gone into battle as fully protected as possible. Still it did them no good. They died when their ships were destroyed. Elverda shuddered at the thought of drifting through space alive, knowing that there would be no rescue, knowing that within hours or days or perhaps weeks the air in the suit would give out or you would starve or die groaning of thirst.

Worse were the poor devils who had been blown out of their ships without a space suit. Their lungs exploded in showers of blood. Their eyes burst out of their sockets. Elverda vomited the first time Dorn had brought such a corpse aboard.

“Where there is one body,” Dorn said as he clumped to the airlock's hatch, “there must be others. They've scattered, but they're out there waiting to be found.”

“Be careful,” she said as she always did.

With the swipe of his human fingers, Dorn sealed the helmet to the collar of his suit. She saw him nod. “Of course,” he said.

Then he stepped over the hatch's sill and touched the control button that slid it shut. He raised his other gloved hand in what might have been a hesitant wave.

Elverda watched the lights on the airlock panel cycle from green through amber to red as the lock pumped down to vacuum and the outer hatch opened. Nodding to herself, she hurried along the passageway to the bridge to monitor Dorn's EVA.

He had been a soldier all his life, from childhood. This she knew from what little he had told her about himself. Most of his revelations were confessions. As calmly as if he were talking about someone else, he told her that while in a drug-heightened rage of jealousy he had murdered a woman who claimed she loved him. Later, his mind again boiling in drugs that his employer distributed freely to enhance the mercenaries' battle prowess, he methodically wiped out the habitat
Chrysalis.
And attacked another ship,
Syracuse,
immediately afterward.

Now he lived a life of atonement, searching for the dead who'd been left to drift through the Asteroid Belt after the war's battles. But Elverda knew that it was more than atonement that Dorn sought: he was waiting for death. He had tried to kill himself and been prevented from succeeding at that. Now he waited for death's hand to reach him.

And it was coming, Elverda knew. Martin Humphries's assassins were tracking through the Belt searching for them. His own cyborg body was beginning to break down, as was her human one.

How can I save him? she wondered. How can I protect him? How can I heal him?

*   *   *

“It's gone, sir.”

Kao Yuan planted his fists on his hips as he loomed before the two crewmen who'd gone out to find the tiny chunk of debris on which they had planted the sensor many months earlier.

“Gone?”

They stood in the compartment just outside the ship's main airlock, where the suit lockers stood in a silent row. The two crewmen were peeling off their nanofabric space suits as they reported to their captain.

“Gone, sir. He must have found the sensor on it.”

Yuan nodded. “That explains why it stopped transmitting its signal.”

He turned abruptly and strode back toward the bridge. The renegade found my sensor. He knows he's being tracked. What will he do now? Which way will the mouse jump?

By the time he reached the bridge and slid into his command chair he'd made up his mind. “Navigator, program a search spiral course. He can't be far from here.”

The navigator said, “Search spiral. Aye, sir.”

Yuan grinned inwardly. It still gave him a special pleasure to realize that he was actually captain of this ship. This isn't a computer game, he told himself. It's real! I'm captain of an actual attack ship. I've got two other ships under my command.

And once I've destroyed the renegade, I'll have enough money to go back to Shanghai and open the best restaurant the city's ever seen.

Life is good, thought Kao Yuan. Life is good.

*   *   *

The body was in an old-fashioned hard-shell space suit. Thank god, Elverda thought gratefully. Until Dorn slid its helmet visor open and she saw the agonized expression on its shriveled, wrinkled face. Lips pulled back over its teeth in terror, eyes wide and staring as if to ask, “Why me? Why is this happening to me?”

Dorn stared into those blank, dead eyes. “I wonder what I will look like when death reaches me.”

Elverda had no answer for him.

Working together, they laboriously removed the space suit from the stiffened corpse. Dorn put the suit together again and tossed it back into the airlock, then popped it out into space again.

“Maybe our pursuers will follow it,” he said, “and give us a little more time to continue our work.”

Elverda smiled weakly.

Then Dorn tenderly lifted the corpse in his strong arms and carried it to the cremation chamber. He had personally built this oven, modified from the ship's standard smelting furnace, the kind that the rock rats had once used to refine the ores they pried out of metallic asteroids. Elverda always felt uneasy in this part of the ship, as if she were trespassing in a haunted house. The spirits of the dead hover around us here, she thought. This is a chamber of desolation.

Yet Dorn seemed to smile as he carefully placed the desiccated body in the exact center of the oven. He had to stoop inside the low-ceilinged chamber; when he stepped back outside it and stood beside her his face looked satisfied, at ease, almost happy.

“Your atoms will rejoin the cosmic dust,” he intoned as he swung the metal door shut and primed the heaters. “The substance of your body will someday help to build a new star, new worlds.”

Elverda knew it was Dorn's desperate attempt at salvation, his belief that the universe recycles constantly, that nothing is ever wasted, not even the tiniest atom.

The smelter furnace roared to life. Elverda felt its heat, welcomed it warmth on her aged bones. Inside the star-hot oven the corpse was quickly vaporized, flesh boiled into gases. Finally Dorn shut down the smelter and pressed the buttons that exhausted its gases out of the ship, into the interplanetary void.

“It is finished,” he said.

As if in counterpoint, the ship's synthesized computer voice announced, “Radar contact.”

They both hurried to the bridge.

ATTACK SHIP
VIKING
: BRIDGE

“Sir, there's nobody inside this suit.”

Kao Yuan's brows knitted as he stared at the main display screen. The three other officers on the bridge were also focusing their attention on the view of two crewmen outside the ship in nanofabric space suits grasping an empty hard-shell suit. They had unfastened the suit's helmet as they floated in the vacuum: one of the crewmen had tucked it under his arm, like a severed head.

We've been tracking an empty suit, Yuan said to himself. He's damned clever, this Dorik Harbin or whatever he calls himself now. Send out the suit as a decoy to lead us on a wild goose chase.

“Bring it inside,” he commanded. To his navigation officer he asked, “Can you backtrack the suit's trajectory? I want to know where his ship is.”

The woman looked uncertain. “I can try, sir.”

“Do so.” Turning to his propulsion officer, Yuan said, “Minimum power. Communications, I want a full sweep at all frequencies. That ship of his can't be too far away from here.”

But a nagging voice in his head countered, Yes it can. He could have released that suit days ago. He got you to chase after it while he's heading off in a different direction altogether.