Opening Acts

by SFnovelists

  *** ***

  Geoff looked down from orbit and saw the geodesic collapse. He spotted a man go down amid the wreckage. An unsuited man. Then the lumpy horizon swallowed the scene. "Holy shit!"

  Geoff checked his heads-up. Orbital time at this altitude was nearly forty minutes; far too long. The guy had ninety seconds, max. Geoff programmed a powered reversal that would get him to the landing pad in just over a minute.

  It was a risk. If he miscalculated, he could make a new crater in the asteroid. But the time he bought might save the man's life. The main rockets cut in and his bike shuddered. The stabilizers kept him from going into a tumble. And the ground sped beneath, dangerously close.

  Carl worked in the warehouses. Don't let it be him.

  He alerted the others. Someone-Amaya-beamed an emergency message to the life support teams. But all Geoff's attention was on that uneven horizon. The cable station and warehouses crawled back into view, and as his rockets slowed him, he guided his bike in.

  His wheels barked on the landing pad next to the Klosti-Alpha cable, but the pad was too short for his speed. The bike swerved wildly across the concrete and bounced off the edge of it, nearly unseating him. Using braking bursts from his rockets he soared, jounced, and dodged rocks to the warehouse, steering one-handed as he wrestled his spare life bag and pony bottle out of the saddlebag. His buddies were at least a dozen seconds behind him. By the time he reached the site of the collapse, the front face of the ice mountain was roiling and gas was billowing away. A thin mist filled the crater. He heard Kamal's exclamation of dismay as he leaped off his bike. But there wasn't time to think about that. He bounded over the rocks to where he had seen the figure go down.

  He saw then he needn't have bothered with the powered orbit. The man was blue, ballooned up to twice the size of a normal human, and stiff: a giant corpsicle. And he did not have to see the face. That was his shirt, whose collar showed above the work overalls; Carl had borrowed it that morning. Those were Carl's shoes.

  Geoff knelt next to Carl and rolled him over. His brother's eyes were whitish due to frost, run through with dark, swollen veins. His tongue had swollen up, too, and was jutting out of his mouth. His black hair was stiff as straw.

  By this time Amaya, Kamal, and Ian had reached them. They recognized Carl, too.

  "Hidoi…" Amaya gasped. Horrible…She was originally from Japan, and used Japanese slang.

  "Are you sure he's dead?" Kam asked.

  "Shit, man, look at him! What do you think?" Ian.

  "Shut up," Kam said. "Just shut up. All right?"

  Geoff stood up again, and looked down at his brother. He did not notice his friends' stares or their words. He felt nothing. But his mind was racing. He was thinking, Carl can't be dead. This is a dream. He was thinking, what if I had paused to let that other biker use the ramp? I'd have been closer to touchdown. Or if I had talked Carl into ditching work and coming out with us. Fat chance. Geoff would not have even asked; Carl would never shirk his duties.

  He was trying to remember the last thing he had said to Carl. He couldn't. He was imagining what the muscles in his parents' faces would do, when they heard the news.