by Allen Steele
“Lee-Bose, Jeri. Captain, TBSA Comet.”
“Furland, Rohr. First officer, TBSA Comet.”
Hisher stubby fingers tapped rapidly at the pad. “Nature of visit?”
Kidnapping, I was tempted to reply. “Transport of cargo to this station,” Jeri said, just as officiously. “Picking up cargo bound to Highgate.”
“Personal I.D.s, cargo manifest, and vessel registry.” The dockmaster held out hisher hand without looking up from the datapad. “Are you carrying any contraband such as drugs, unregistered weapons, untaxed liquor, and/or any other items proscribed under Article Three of the Descartes Convention, or transporting any individuals not a member of your ship’s crew?”
“No, we’re not.” Jeri handed over her I.D. and the other cards.
“Unless you count ten kilos of heroin and a dozen underage…ow!”
I dropped my I.D. as Jeri kicked my right ankle. The dockmaster effortlessly plucked it from the air before it hit the floor. Swift little neut, even in one-tenth gravity. “Please refrain from levity regarding these matters,” heshe said stiffly, passing the cards before hisher scanner. “Evening Star takes pride in being a vice-free station, and our general manager is not fond of…” heshe cast me a quick, baleful look “…visitors making jokes at our expense.”
“Many apologies,” Jeri said. “My first mate meant no offense.”
“No. Sorry. Didn’t mean it.” I stood on one foot, massaged my ankle. Damn, Jeri could sure be a bitch when she wanted to be.
The dockmaster nodded, accepting our apologies with aloof detachment as heshe continued checking off hisher list. Two more spacers fresh off the boat from Highgate. Heshe could forgive and forget a little bad humor, so long as we’d filled out all the proper forms. “We’ve never been here before.” Jeri said after a moment. “Nice to see a station which isn’t…well, corrupt.”
“Thank you. We try to do our best.” A slight thaw in hisher voice.
“In fact, who’s your GM? I’d like to meet him…her. Maybe buy her a drink.”
The dockmaster looked up from hisher pad. I pretended to study the walls. Jeri was coming on too hard, too fast. I would have liked to nudge her, if not return the kick in the shins.
“She’s usually not available,” the dockmaster replied, “but most of the crew usually spend their off-duty time in the taproom.”
“The taproom? Where’s that located?”
“Module N4, located at the end of the north axis.” Heshe nodded to the left. “Aphrodite’s Shell. Just follow the signs.” Heshe hesitated. “If I happen to see the GM, I’ll tell her that you’d like to meet her. Perhaps she can find time in her schedule.”
Jeri gave her a sweet smile. “Thank you, I greatly appreciate it.” She hesitated. “In fact, I’d like to invite her over to my ship for dinner, if that’s at all possible.”
The dockmaster’s expression was so glacial, even the Maxwell Montes volcano couldn’t have melted it. “It’s our first visit here, after all,” Jeri added. “I’d like to establish a good relationship, should this voyage turn out to be sufficiently profitable. And my first mate is a very good chef.”
God, she had nerve. And she was a liar: I couldn’t boil an egg without a cookbook. “Yeah, we’d love to have her over,” I said. “I was planning on making omelettes tonight.”
“I’ll be certain to pass the invitation along.” The dockmaster handed our cards back to us, then stepped aside. “Welcome to Evening Star. Enjoy your stay.”
When we were further down the passageway, I glanced over my shoulder to make sure we were out of earshot. “Remind me not to think aloud in your presence,” I murmured.
“It wasn’t a bad idea,” Jeri said softly. “She may even go for it. Every station manager I’ve ever met complains that they feel cooped up after awhile. If this gives her a chance to get away from…”
A sphincter hatch we had just walked past suddenly opened, and a young man wearing a ConSpace jumpsuit nearly bumped into us as he came out. He excused himself as he sidestepped to the right and started walking back the way we had just come. The hatch started to close, but something within caught my attention. I quickly passed a hand in front of its eye, keeping it open for a moment longer.
The compartment was long and narrow, and almost totally blacked-out save for the amber illumination of a wallflat. It displayed a real-time radar map of the venusian surface; tiny white spots slowly moved across its equatorial zone near the rugged highlands surrounding volcanoes and vents, which glowed red-hot against the rust-colored background. Silhouetted against the screen were a half-dozen figures reclining in couches, wearing bowl-like HMD helmets, their hands grasping Y-shaped control yokes suspended above their chests. Cloud divers, manipulating telerobotic mining equipment on the planet far below. For all intents and purposes they were on Venus, driving enormous vehicles across blistering terrain, harvesting metallic ore belched up from the planet’s mantle. You could make a good living doing this sort of thing if it didn’t first drive you insane, or so I’d heard. I’m a big fan of reality, though; any substitutes are just a bit too spooky for my taste.
A woman walked past the hatch, glanced around, saw us standing there. She turned and was about to say something, but I pulled my hand away from the eye and gave her a sheepish smile as the hatch irised shut again.
“So much for keeping a low profile,” Jeri whispered as we walked away.
“That?” I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. Probably happens all the time.”
She nodded pensively, but didn’t reply. We walked a few more meters, made a turn to the left, found ourselves at the beginning of the long passageway leading to the station’s north end. It was almost vacant save for a couple of crewmen and a custodian ’bot. Just as the dockmaster told us, a wall sign pointed the way to Aphrodite’s Shell. The gravity-gradient was a little stronger now, so we didn’t have to walk quite so carefully. I picked up the pace a bit. I was getting thirsty, and I’ve never met a bar I didn’t like.
“Did you notice the flat?” Jeri asked.
“Hmm? No, not really. Why, was there something I should have seen?”
“I don’t know, but it looked like the surface was a little more active.”
“More active compared to what?” I gave her a sidelong glance. “This is Venus we’re talking about. If you don’t like the geography, wait ten minutes.”
“Never mind.” She shook her head: another Primary gesture she’d picked up from me. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
“Yeah, sure.” Then I realized what she was asking. “No, I’m not, but I don’t think we’ve…”
“Got a choice.” She sighed. “That’s what we’ve been telling ourselves, but we do. We could drop off the cargo, refuel the Comet, take on supplies, tell the Brain to plot a course for the Belt that wouldn’t take us past Earth. It would take us a little longer than usual to get there, but we could make Ceres in…”
“Twelve months, sixteen, sure. But we’d never be able to go home.”
And in the meantime, Jarvis and Dann would have made good of their implied threat. The full story of what happened aboard the Fool’s Gold would have been made public, and our reputations would be forever ruined. Within a year, no self-respecting outfit would ever hire us. We’d be in worse shape than even when McKinnon was captain; back then, the worse that could be said about the TBSA Comet was that it was commanded by a fool.
And, damn it, I had come to enjoy my new-found fame and fortune. I liked respectability, I liked not being in debt, and I liked not having to scramble just to make a living. If keeping all that meant having to do a dirty job for the Pax…well, so be it. I’d hold my nose, and hope that I could still look myself in the mirror after I’d betrayed one of the heroes of my youth and delivered her to her enemies.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” I whispered, “but that’s not an option. Like it or not, we’re committed.”
She didn’t say anything. She was the capta
in, of course, and that took precedence over being my wife. If she wanted to call this off, she could rightfully do so, and I was obliged to follow her orders, both legally and morally. Yet she knew the score as well as I did. We were trapped…
No, not trapped. Cursed. Cursed by Captain Future. I’d just glimpsed Hell; if Bo McKinnon was down there, the ugly bastard was probably laughing his ass off.
I hoped there wasn’t an afterlife. It wasn’t the prospect of meeting Bo McKinnon that bothered me, though. It was having to explain what I had done to Dad.
And that’s how, a few minutes later, we found ourselves sitting in Aphrodite’s Shell, waiting for an old woman we had been ordered to drug, kidnap, and haul back to the Pax. Bad music, worse company. I was beginning to wonder whether Jenny Pell had received our dinner invitation when a shadow fell over our table and someone asked if I was Captain Future.
Curt jumped toward the space-suit locker which in the Nova, as in most ships, was in the airlock. He snatched out a space-suit and donned it hastily, as Quorn’s followers battered madly at the door.
Once he had the suit and helmet on, Curt opened the outer door of the airlock. The air in the lock at once puffed out into empty space.
—Hamilton: The Magician of Mars (1941)
Holding my breath didn’t help.
When the outer hatch’s double-doors slid apart, the airlock’s atmosphere was voided in a split second and we were blown out into hard vacuum like so much trash. My lungs couldn’t handle the sudden pressure drop; air exploded from the depths of my chest as my ears popped painfully and I tumbled head over heels into frigid darkness…
Then the cold hit, hard as an icy mallet. My skin tingled as sweat instantly froze, the cuts along my ribs burning as if I had been branded.
Jeri was ripped from my arms. A brief glimpse of her face, her mouth open in a silent scream, then she spun away from me, her arms and legs flailing helplessly. I reached out, tried to grab her again, but she hurtled away into darkness.
A nimbus of bright, harsh light surrounded us, and I had a second to wonder if this was what death was like. Then an irregular shape loomed behind the nimbus, and we fell through the light into a hatch that yawned open only a few meters from the airlock.
My back hit the far wall of a narrow compartment. I blindly grabbed for something; my left hand found the back of a couch, and I desperately clung to it, hanging on for dear life. Jeri was above me, upside-down, hugging another couch with both arms.
Then the hatch shut, and there was a long, deafening roar as oxygen flooded the compartment. I gasped, trying to force my tortured lungs to work again; my head swam and I almost blacked out, but pain kept me awake. We had been exposed to hard vacuum for only about ten seconds, perhaps even less, but that was long enough. It seemed as if every cell of my body had been flogged.
At long last, the compartment’s atmosphere equalized at 12 psi. The noise of emergency repressurization died off, although I could still hear a faint roaring in my ears. I looked up at my wife. Tiny red bubbles escaped from her nose, floated around her face; slight barotrauma, but no signs of decompression sickness. Her eyes were open, and she managed to give me a weak nod.
Now I saw where we were: the passenger compartment of the same ferry that had brought us over from the Comet only a little more than an hour ago. The young pilot was in the cockpit, wearing a softsuit; he loosened his seat harness and turned to peer at us through his helmet’s half-open faceplate.
“Copa, you?” he asked. “Nobody zeroed?”
My throat felt like it had been rubbed raw with sandpaper. “No, we’re still here,” I rasped. “Thanks for the save.”
“Drop the line, I didn’t. Frozen daiquiri, almost you both. Total sucky. Armstronged that maneuver, that you did.”
“So did you, dude. I owe you one.”
He grinned, then reached under his seat and pulled out a squeeze-bottle. “Brain fart not mine,” he said as he passed it back to me. “Get comtalk from your cap. Low flyby on east lock, dep and open hatch, standby for blowout. Nada reboot, just backslashed it.”
I glanced at Jeri, and she nodded weakly. So she had used her subcutaneous comlink to establish contact with the ferry pilot, and told him to maneuver close to the east airlock, depressurize and open his hatch, and wait for us to be blown out. That explained why she had been talking under her breath outside the airlock; she had been subvocalizing her instructions.
Fortunately, the kid didn’t ask why, but simply followed her orders. No, he hadn’t dropped the line.
I took a long draw from the squeeze bottle and passed it to Jeri. I hurt all over, and she didn’t look much better. “You’re going to get in trouble for this, you know,” I said, rubbing my arms against the cold. “Your friends wanted us dead.”
He shook his head. “Same time, ditto comtalk from GM.”
“What?”
“Fresh apples. Uplink with her now.” The pilot reached up to his com panel, toggled a switch. “Victor Alpha ComOps, X-Ray Charlie two-ten. Taken aboard two passengers, both alive and in good condition. Ready to receive open transmission.”
He flipped another switch; a crackle of static, then a voice came over the comlink: “Captain Lee-Bose, M’sser Furland, I assume you can hear me.”
Damn. It was Jenny Pell.
“I also assume this experience had taught you a valuable lesson,” she continued. “I could have not bothered to arrange for a ferry to receive you outside the airlock. If I hadn’t, you’d both be dead now. But I wanted to extend you the same degree of mercy that the Pax denied me many years ago. My former husband would have doubtless had me jettisoned had I not escaped first.”
I glanced at Jeri again. She had tried to save us, but Pell had beaten her to the punch. “Your true intentions were obvious the moment you came aboard,” she went on. “No one coming in from the Pax ever asks to see me…and as I said, M’sser Furland, your reputation precedes you. But I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’ve been expecting the Pax to send someone out here for a long time now. I don’t know if you were ordered to kill me, or simply bring me back to Clarke County. Either way, you’ve been exposed. So…”
A pause. “So let’s just drop it, here and now. I’ve demonstrated just how easily I could take your lives. I didn’t, so take it as a warning. Now go home. Goodbye.”
And that was it. The pilot switched off the comlink, looked over his shoulder at us again. “To your ship, back we go now. Comtalk with chief, no more. We…”
“Scrub the google-speak, willya?” I pushed myself over to Jeri. She had withdrawn into herself, her long legs pulled up against her chest, her hands clasped together between her knees. She was shivering, though not so much from the lingering chill as from terror. I had never seen her so frightened. Nor could I blame her. If this little ferry hadn’t been waiting just outside the airlock…
No point in thinking about that now. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, held her close. “Easy, sweetheart,” I murmured in her ear. “It’s over. It’s all over.”
She nodded against my chest, clutched my shirt with her long fingers. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the pilot staring at us. “Sorry,” I said to him. “Didn’t mean to sound ungrateful, but…”
“Can’t leave yet.” Jeri’s voice was very soft, barely audible; her teeth chattered faintly. “Unload cargo. Refuel ship.”
Elvis, the woman amazed me. She had just kissed death, and still managed to think like a captain. “The tugs are already taking off your cargo,” the pilot said. “They started just a few minutes ago.” At least he had dropped the phony Superior jive. “A fuel barge will rendezvous with your ship in about an hour. Fuel costs will be deducted from the wholesale value of your cargo.”
The freight in the Comet’s cargo bay was worth a lot more than a few kilotons of hydrogen. No sense in protesting, though; with whom would I lodge a complaint? Hell, we were lucky to still be alive. “All right,” I said. “Just get us back to our ship, and we’ll c
all it even.”
The pilot’s only response was to place his right hand on the throttle bar and move it forward a centimeter. The ferry shuddered slightly as its thrusters fired, moving us away from the station. I grabbed a ceiling rung with my free hand, watched through a porthole as the distant speck of light that was the Comet hove into view. In ten minutes we’d be back aboard ship, and I could get Jeri to the infirmary.
But we weren’t heading home just yet. I might have been lucky, but I was also angry, and I still had unfinished business aboard Evening Star.
“Cain, you’re coming with us.”
As he spoke, Captain Future started to draw the atom-pistol from his belt to enforce the command.
Desperation, and raw terror, flashed into Rab Cain’s sullen eyes.
“You’re not taking me, even if you are the Futuremen!” he yelled.
—Brett Sterling (Edmond Hamilton); Red Sun of Danger (1945)
I was wrong about Venus. Viewed from the Comet’s outer hull, the planet was actually rather pretty. As the twice-normal-size Sun rose above the planet’s limb, the regions along the terminator line were briefly gifted with subtle golden hues, the morning light casting vague drifting patterns across its cloud tops. A place of subtle and mysterious beauty, Venus. I could have stayed out there for another hour or so, just taking it in, but I had other things on my mind.
The fuel barge hovered only a few meters beneath the Comet’s engine superstructure, its trunk-like hose clamped against the intake valve forward of the Number Six tank. As I made my way, hand over hand, along the underside of the cargo bay, I was careful to remain in the shadows where the barge pilot couldn’t see me. He was visible through the cockpit windows; every now and then he would glance up from his board and I’d freeze as best I could, considering that I could have easily waved to him if I’d cared to free one of my hands. If he spotted me, though, he didn’t report my presence; I was monitoring his comlink channel, and all I’d heard was routine crosstalk between him, the Brain and the traffic controller on Evening Star.