The man’s high cheekbones, which made him look north Asian despite his Caucasian features, wrinkled. Not a smile and not a frown. “Your extremities. Feet, fingers and toes. Any numbness.”
The man had reverted to standard Belter talk. He grinned. “Fine, fine, fine, none.”
The man looked up and over at a wallscreen monitor. Jack turned his head. The flat screen showed his entire body, from bones to organs to veins, plus arteries and major nerves. It resembled a medical ebook he’d studied during his last year of Remote Tutoring. His brainwaves and electrocardiogram were two signals he recognized. The man looked back. “The Surgical Monitor agrees with you. Sit up. Slowly.”
Putting his hands to either side of the medbed, he pushed up. Rather quickly since he’d forgotten about Vesta’s low gee gravity. The straps over his waist kept him from flying up to hit the ceiling. The man looked amused. “Hey doc! You did good work. Uh, what work did you do?”
The man tap-tapped on a panel sticking out from the side of the medbed. “Took out your ruptured right kidney. Put in artificial one. Cleaned your blood of resin-based poisons. That were on the machete blade,” the man said in response to Jack’s surprised look. “Sutured internal muscles. Applied Fake Skin. Guidelines say we can release you. You wish?”
Release? Go free of the cool, antiseptic looking room that made him feel like he had awoken inside the innards of some Tech device? “Yes! Uh, I mean, thank you for the repair work. Uh, will you replace the Tech kidney with one cloned from my stem cells? In the future?”
“You’re welcome. Yes. Try to stand up. Here, beside me.”
Jack liked the man’s Belter talk vibes. Tapping the snaplock on the waist strap, he felt it release. Moving slowly and carefully, he swung his legs over to the edge of the medbed, pushed them down, saw a pair of magslippers waiting for his feet on the floor and pushed off the medbed. A brief swirl of dizziness hit him. It passed quickly. With his hands held out for balance, he snugged his bare feet into the magslippers. That’s when he realized he was naked. And his right arm was still connected to the IV. “Uh, doc, the IV?”
The man nodded to the surgical nurse. Who walked quickly to Jack’s side, put a white cloth patch over the needle insertion point, pulled the needle out so quickly it barely hurt, then pulled the floating IV bag-pump and line back to the room’s wall. Where the stuff stuck to something like a velcro patch. Jack looked to Nikola. “Uh, dearest, you got a fresh leotard for me?”
She gave him the biggest smile he’d seen in some while. “Yes!” She dug into her shoulder carrybag, grabbed a black leotard and walked over to him. Lowering the legs portion, she held it with both hands. “Step in.”
Looking around Jack realized the medoc had stepped back a few paces. The nurse was also back at the foot of the medbed. Oh. Clearly this was a test of his recovery. Could he maintain his balance while leaving a magslipper stuck to the metal floor, insert one leg into the bottom half of the leotard, grab the ‘tard from Nikola, then repeat the process with his other leg? Zipping up the front of the leotard would be child’s play. Or so he thought. Three minutes later he stood dressed, shoed and eager to escape the watchful eyes of the medoc and the surgical nurse. He grabbed Nikola’s warm hand. “Hey boss lady, get me the hell out of here!”
Together, they walked out of the room, down a hall filled with robotic med boxes and hurrying staff, which they dodged easily in Vesta’s low gravity. Nikola squeezed his hand as they stopped before a red-lined hatchway. “The waiting room is on the other side. Your sisters, your parents, Max, Ignacio, Maureen, everyone is waiting for you!”
He felt his heart pumping quickly. He put that down to excitement at survival and the chance to escape a place where people and bots repaired folks. He took a deep breath and gave her a wink. “Hey Miss Wanderer, you got a bottle of booze and a cigar waiting for me out there? I think I earned it.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Two days later Jack boarded the new Lander Anneli Korhonen II with Nikola, Max, Cassie and Maureen. All of them dressed in vacsuits. Elaine and Denise were on duty in the Pilot Cabin, while Archibald and Blodwen were off ship. Blodwen was meeting with people on Vesta who needed meeting. Like the Dean of Vesta’s Academy of Sociology who had demanded that Blodwen, his prize student, come report to him on all the Alien societies they’d seen in their last trip. The Welsh lass had departed on a Vesta robot shuttle that came and went at the call of a human, her carrybag filled with datachips, vidcrystals and a few bottles of Sharp Roar beer. For the Dean, she had said when Jack stopped in the Food Refectory for a mid-day snack. Archibald was still hanging at their upcoming stop, the New Physics Research Institute that lay in the middle of Minucia crater. Walking into the cargo hold of the lander he turned and made to walk forward to the Pilot Cabin.
“Hey!” Maureen growled from behind him. “I go first! And I handle the engines. You really should let Nikola handle the NavTrack seat.”
“No!” he said. The woman stepped in front of him, gave him a sour look through her helmet, and headed for the cabin. Which anyone could see was empty. Plus it had been docked in their ship’s midbody hold since they had picked up the replacement at Mathilde. “Okay, you handle the thrusters and the nose lasers. But I can handle the piloting. Did good enough when we landed at the South Pole Naval Academy!”
“True,” she muttered as she pulled one of her revolvers and pointed it forward as she entered the cabin. She inspected the small space. Which contained just two seats with the NavTrack computer module in the middle. The cabin hatch that opened into the roomy cargo hold, with its passenger benches on either side, was dogged against the inner wall of the hold. “But then you were not recovering from a kidney operation. And I don’t believe in taking chances. Never have. Shoulda personally checked out the history of every damn booze server in—”
“Enough, Maureen!” called Nikola as his six months pregnant wife took a bench seat location close to the cabin hatch. Max and Cassie sat on the opposite bench. Jack nodded to them as they locked their restraint straps. “You are not to blame!” his lifemate said. “Nothing human is a hundred percent perfect.”
“Hmmph,” grunted the older woman as she pulled her sword and javelin out from the scabbards on the back of her vacsuit, laid them beside her Drive Engineer seat, sat down and snaplocked her own restraint straps.
Jack barely managed not to smile as he entered the cabin and turned left to sit in the Pilot seat. While his gunbelt with two revolvers made snapping the locks of the restraint straps a bit complicated, he’d done it before. Anyway, he might technically still be in recovery but he felt fine. And his piss was normal. “Elaine,” he called over the suit’s comlink, “open the hold’s airlock so we can go awandering.”
“Done,” she said, her tone soft. Which it had been ever since he’d been stabbed by that SOB. While she had spent time since then with Ignacio in the Badger, she had insisted on remaining close to him. As had Cassie and every member of his crew.
Looking down at the NavTrack panel he noted the air being pumped out of the hold. In seconds it was absent. A tremor shook his seat as the giant hatch that allowed the Lander to enter and exit the Uhuru slowly lowered down on hinges covered in silicone grease. It stopped with a thump that reverberated. He tapped on the panel, telling the ship to move to Flight status. Which it did.
“Lander ready to depart ship Uhuru,” said the dry tone of the panel’s expert system.
“Lift from deck locks on belly jets, rotate and exit using attitude thrusters. Main thrusters to ignite at fifty meters from Uhuru,” Jack told the simple-minded AI unit.
“Lifting. Rotating. Exiting,” it said, sounding all too much like Anonymous. To which, come to think of, it was cross-linked by way of wireless and laser datalinks. A sense of weightlessness hit Jack as they left the confines of the Uhuru and the one gee gravity maintained there by the ship’s grav-pull drive. Three beeps sounded. “Ready to engage thrusters. Define target location,” squeaked the AI unit.
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“Asteroid Vesta, crater Minucia, landing field adjacent to New Physics Research Institute, 21 degrees north, 209 degrees east, reference Dawn spacecraft coordinates,” Jack said. He could have tapped it all into the NavTrack panel. But he liked giving verbal orders that were understood by smart AI programs.
“Location recognized. Coordinates accepted. Departing orbit on one gee thrust,” the AI said, sounding even more mech.
The back of his seat pushed against him. Tapping his NavTrack panel caused the Lander to lift the metal shades that covered the clear quartz of the front view-window. Black space dotted with white stars and the silvery tubes of five Mars fleet ships filled his view. Then the ships rotated upward as the lander’s attitude thrusters pointed them nose down toward the basalt rock mantle of Vesta. The push against his back increased. Soon he felt his normal Earth-level weight.
It was sad to see the Mars ships vanish. Hideyoshi’s Bismarck and the four destroyers of his Mars fleet rode orbit close by the Uhuru. The man had insisted on mounting a spaceborne guard after the assassination attempt. Further out, in the shipping vectors that approached Vesta, automated robot guard modules outfitted with HF lasers challenged any approaching ship. Every ship that now came to Vesta had to provide a live person ID to someone on Vesta who knew them. Or they did not land at the giant asteroid’s admin HQ in Aricia Tholus.
“Jack,” called Cassie from behind him, her voice sounding earnest over the vacsuit’s comlink tab. “Want my Intel report on the bastard who tried to kill you?”
It would be ten minutes before they arrived at Archie’s location. Anyway, it sounded like his sister had turned up more than had been reported by AV talking faces in the days after the attack. “Sure. What did you discover beyond the fact this guy hails from Pakistan?”
“Plenty,” she said eagerly. “Akram Mohammad Dijeel comes from the riverside village of Chitrāl, just below Tirich Mir mountain, in the Northwest Frontier province. Grew up there. Joined the remnants of the Kashmir Freedom League. Got thrown in jail for ten years by the Islamabad authorities. And,” she paused, “he is suspected of trying to buy weapons grade enriched uranium. So the League could toss a tactical nuke across the Line of Control at the Hindus in Srinagar.”
“Nasty,” Jack said. “So who sent him? The Pak authorities? Some Sunni mullah? And how the hell did he end up in the Asteroid Belt?”
“Well, India’s prime minister told me after the attack he suspected Islamabad sent the guy,” she said quickly. “But my contacts with the Belt Intel Service on Ceres say they believe it was the League that sent him. They have made AV broadcasts asserting that Earth should join the Hunters system as a way of opening up new worlds for colonizing by Muslim peoples.” She paused. “Some Sunni religious leaders from Saudi Arabia have supplied the League with piles of money for the last twenty years. Based on his pupil ID, Vesta Central reports him arriving from Earth two days after the fleet’s return from the Doomat system. He had a job waiting for him at a hetero sex provider in Domitia crater. When the call went out for the colony ship send-off event he was among nine men arriving from this provider.” She gave a hum. “All the other servers from the provider are long-time Belter residents. Only this guy was new to the Belt.”
Which should have prevented him from gaining a job at the departure event. “Helpful info. Good research. Any public statement from the bosses in Islamabad?” He split his attention between watching the dozens of brown, red and black crater rims draw nearer and thinking about the assassin.
“Just the normal stuff. A message of extreme sympathy from the Prime Minister of Pakistan. With an attached message from the Army’s top general pledging that the New ISI would scour the village and interrogate League operatives.”
Which meant nothing of substance would happen. “Pakistan withdrew from the Unity and has expelled their miltech people, right?”
“Right. They pledged their two spaceports would never host any Unity space vessel,” she said, her tone musing. “Plus they expelled all Unity personnel from the country. Still, we could antimatter zap both launching sites. As an object lesson to Islamabad, the League and any other Sunni jihadist types that we squash flat anyone who harms a Belter.”
Tempting. “Let’s hold off on doing that. Is the Belter Intel Service backtracking on that job with the sex provider? As in who bribed whom in order for the man to get the job, then who bribed someone else in order for him to show up at the send-off event.”
“Jackkk,” she said loudly. “I do know my job! Of course the BIS is doing all that. And more. Plus I’ve posted a 20 million dollar reward on the Black Side of the worldwide net. Money motivates.”
He knew that. And he knew his youngest sister, who had gone to Earth to try to locate the factory that created Earth’s first grav-pull drives, had insisted on doing that dangerous job. Which had resulted in her boyfriend being killed and her being beat up and tortured at the South Pole Naval Academy, before Jack and his buddies rescued her. “Many thanks Sis. You’re good at what you do. Please keep on with the BIS coordination and anything else you think should be done.”
“I will!” she said, sounding pleased.
Time for more positive news. “Nikola, you got any imagery of the colony ship’s departure? I missed seeing it and before the event I had no time to look up stuff on its target star.”
“Sure,” she said over the comlink, the warmth of her voice filling him with joy. She had told him after his exit from the hospital how much it meant to her that he had shielded her and the baby when the Pak guy attacked. “Here’s the AV vid of its departure on grav-pull. Heading out for Pluto and final departure on Alcubierre.”
Jack looked away from the true-light image of the approaching asteroid surface to a vidpanel projecting from the left arm of his seat. It showed the long red cigar of Humanity going sparkly as its grav-pull drive distorted nearby starlight with gravitational lensing. Then the cigar shot away almost faster than the videye camera could track. “Great imagery! Uh, I know it’s headed for some yellow star in Horologium constellation. But how far away is the system? What kind of planets are there?”
She laughed happily. “Been waiting for you to ask!” she said. “Three days ago it launched for the star HD 27631, a G3V main sequence star located 148.4 light years from Sol. As for planets, there are five. The first was discovered early this century in 2012. It’s a Jupiter-sized gas giant orbiting at 3.25 AU out from the star. The gas giant’s orbit is a bit eccentric. It swings closer and away by a factor of 12 percent. But that does not mess with the four inner planets.” She tap-tapped from her seat in the cargo hold. “Here’s a plan view of the system. Its habitable zone extends from one AU out to 1.8 AUs. Planet one is a small rocky Mercury-type planet at one-half AU. Then there’s a Venus-type planet orbiting at three-fourths AU. Planet three is the Earth duplicate, based on spectroscopic readings of its atmosphere. Which is oxy-nitro and full of water vapor. Which means oceans.” The planet appeared as a blue dot on the plan view map that appeared split-screen on the vidpanel. “The planet is located 1.2 AU out from its star, which gives it a light intensity slightly less than what we get on Earth. Planet four is smaller, about the size of Mars according to the Long Baseline Stellar Interferometer. It orbits in the hab zone at 1.7 AU. Which makes it icier and colder than planet three.” She paused, tapped and a fourth blue dot showed on the system map. “Planet five is the gas giant. Which likely has plenty of large moons orbiting it, like Jupiter and Saturn do. So. Our colonists have two habitable planets for the present and for their future growth.”
Damn fine news. Maybe they could visit the colony sometime in the future. After they defeated the Arbitor. Jack told himself to think just that way—not if, but when! “Thank you love! Sounds like they’ve found a fine system to head for. I assume the star is not showing on the Nasen star holo as belonging to some species?”
“Course not!” she said, her tone a copy of Cassie’s incensed tone. Well, it was a logical question. “
The nearest Hunter subject people star is 15 light years away. It is part of the Yiplak Hunt territory.”
Which left their Lander’s target for him to focus on. That being the giant torus which was the offices, Tech machines, classrooms and habrooms of the institute. From what he could see as the lander slowed to 30 kilometers above Minucia crater, the institute torus filled only a small part of the 22 kilometer-wide basin. Course it resembled all the habitation toruses that spun on every occupied asteroid in the Belt. Thereby giving occupants spin-gee gravity. Except this torus was stationary. Like the torus inside the Dock Cavern of Mathilde. He guessed that meant someone had built a grav-pull drive, set it to the low-G band emission level and set graviton contact points at opposite ends of the torus. Creating thereby a full one gee gravity inside the torus. Which meant the grav-pull drive had to be in the center of the torus, where its support pillar lifted it above the crater surface. That would give the inner habrings a sense of gravity that pushed out toward the torus rim. The fact that such artificial gravity was horizontal to the surface of Vesta meant nothing. The asteroid’s natural gravity was just three percent of Earth’s, far too weak to make anyone in the torus feel unbalanced. The stationary torus made him think of his silent buddy.
“Max! That torus is stationary. Looks like they have a grav-pull drive down there, maybe in the pillar. Yes?”
“You guessed right,” his first ally said. “Professor Cumberland’s accelerator, I heard from Archie, has produced enough Dark Matter to power up twelve Belter-made grav-pull drives. Three of which have gone to give one gee gravity to admin toruses on Ceres, at Tholus and down below. The other nine are onboard ships of the Third Belter Fleet. Which I think is now being managed by Heloise Beauchamp.”
“Really?” Interesting to hear that the captain of the commerce raider ship Ferocious now led a fleet of a size similar to Gareth’s Second Belter Fleet. With the departure of Ferocious that left the second fleet with just nine ships, counting Gareth’s ship Dragon. Both groups were smaller than Hideyoshi’s Mars fleet, but all Belter fleet ships were now outfitted with antimatter, neutral particle beam and HF laser weapons. Plus they had Alcubierre stardrives and, for Ferocious, a Higgs Disruptor. “Good news,” Jack said as the lander’s belly jets flashed on to lower them to the blackened basalt plain that lay just a hundred meters away from the outer torus edge. A tower rose up from the field edge to contact the torus ring. Which said it would be their entry point into the institute. Also on the landing field stood a Lander similar to theirs. It was too distant for him to read the ship’s name on its hull. Though it could just belong to the institute. “Uh, where’s the accelerator ring? I thought it was out in the open, in vacuum.”
Aliens Vs. Humans (Aliens Series Book 4) Page 20