by Allen Steele
On 2010 TK7, he’d made a good life for himself. Over the years he gradually expanded the Stone House’s underground maze of tunnels and rooms until it had almost as much square-footage as any of the homes he’d owned on Earth. Once he’d tapped into subsurface ice deposits and installed pumps, filters, and pipes, he had an almost-inexhaustible supply of fresh water. And his greenhouse was amazing; his vegetable gardens could have fed a dozen guests, and in low gravity the ivy and honeysuckle vines he’d cultivated had spread outward into the tunnels, clinging to the rock walls and lending his home a leafy appearance much like the walls of a country manor.
A writer for a prestigious and well-established magazine—print, not electronic—approached me to ask if he could interview Jerry for a profile. By then, Jerry had been living on 2010 TK7 for nearly 25 years. ConSpace was long gone, and even Alberto Diaz was dead, having suffered a fatal stroke a few years earlier. I took the writer’s proposal to Jerry, and after some discussion he agreed to an in-depth interview. Charlie David was still Jerry’s doctor, though, and he was concerned that his patient might no longer have natural immunity to any germs or viruses the reporter might carry into Jerry’s home. So the interviews were conducted long-distance, although Jerry cheerfully agreed to carry a camera around the Stone House so that the writer could see where he lived.
The interviews were conducted over three days, and the writer touched on just about everything, from how Jerry had made his fortune to his former playboy life to the possible social anxiety disorders which led him to seek solitude. Jerry was as candid as I’d ever known him to be, perhaps even more. He even addressed a persistent rumor that he wasn’t, in fact, in space at all, but instead was living on a remote island in the south Pacific and had been faking the whole asteroid thing the entire time. Jerry settled that by turning upside-down, pulling a small rubber ball from his pocket, and playing fetch with a couple of fogz kits.
Yet he remained evasive about why he’d moved to 2010 TK7 when, as the writer pointed, it would have been easier for him to build a private habitat on the far side of the Moon. When that question came up, Jerry’s smile became enigmatic. “I came out here because I could,” he said. “I had my reasons…let’s just leave it at that.”
The article that came out of the interviews was published a couple of months later. It was a good piece that earned the writer a Pulitzer nomination, but it was also the last time Jerry spoke publically. He clammed up again after that, and stayed that way.
If Jerry had returned to Earth, or at least Earth orbit, he would have witnessed the changes that occurred during the last seventeen years of his life. He would have seen Queen Macedonia’s death and King Lucius’s coronation, and his subsequent declaration of war against the Ares Alliance. He would have watched as the System War raged from Venus all the way to Titan, not ending until the Treaty of Ceres ceded Callisto to the Pax Astra and Saturn’s moons to the Alliance. He would have seen the rise of Homo superior, the so-called googles, and how they came to dominate the outer solar system. He would have seen the mysterious Pasquale Chicago transform another asteroid, 4442 Garcia, into a generation ship, its flight beyond our solar system commencing just after the turn of the new century. And in 2102, he would have outlived King Lucius and, if he’d cared to do so, celebrated the collapse of the Pax Astra.
Jerry was around for all this, but I don’t think he noticed anything that happened beyond his own little rock. I sent him a news digest every day, but I think he seldom opened it, let alone read it. When he spoke to me, he spoke as an old man whose outlook hadn’t changed in decades. So far as I could tell, he’d stopped paying attention to…well, just about everything…around 2085, and didn’t give a damn anyway.
It might have been just as well that he’d remained a recluse all the way to the end. The truth of the matter is, Jerry Stone no longer had anything to contribute. The age of the space tycoon was over. Humankind had not only come to inhabit most of the solar system, but had also made the first steps to the stars beyond, and the 22nd Century had no place for either emperors or entrepreneurs. Even his most daring innovation, the beam-propulsion system, was a relic of the past, a technology that never went into mass production.
Jerry Stone had nothing left to offer anyone. Or so it seemed.
I spoke to him less and less during his last years. I made sure that he continued to receive regular cargo shipments even though he told me that he was completely self-sufficient, and occasionally sent him a letter telling him what I was doing now that I was retired and enjoying the life of a geriatric desert rat. I didn’t get much from him in return, but I’d come to expect that. For me, he became just another old guy I knew, just a little more crazy than most.
And then one morning, I got a call from the deep-space communication center in Texas that I’d hired to monitor Jerry’s bracelet, informing me that all his vital signs had flatlined. I’d been anticipating this day for quite some time, so I wrote his obituary and sent it to all the major news sites, and then I had a shot of whisky in honor of my dead friend.
That might have been the end, but it wasn’t. A few days later, I got a call from an attorney in Benny Klein’s old law firm. Benny was long gone, of course, but his firm was representing Jerry’s estate. I was told that Jerry’s relatives were planning to hire people to travel out to 2010 TK7 and retrieve his body. They weren’t doing this just to give him a decent funeral; in order to properly execute Jerry’s will to the satisfaction of the probate court, they needed to have someone come along who could identify the corpse and ascertain that it was Jerry’s. Since I was the only person who’d been in regular contact with him during the last years of his life, I was the obvious choice.
I agreed to make the trip. The Stone family was offering generous compensation—after all, they had much to gain from Jerry’s estate, which was still worth billions—but that wasn’t the only reason. I figured that I owed it to my friend to see that he was treated well. And besides, I was curious. What had he been doing while living without physical human contact for more than forty years? I wanted to know.
A doctor gave me a thorough examination and pronounced me fit a long space voyage, provided that my vessel provided me with artificial gravity for most of the journey. So an old Mars cycleship was refitted with a solar sail, then launched via photon beam toward 2010 TK7. I endured the voyage about as well as could be expected for a 70-year-old guy who’d left Earth only twice in his life, and a little more than four weeks later the ship rendezvoused with the Trojan asteroid.
Once we decelerated and made orbit with the asteroid, I joined the three crewmen who boarded an orbital ferry. After a reconnaissance flyby, we located the airlock node installed by the original construction crew. Ironically, this was the same place from where Jerry had sent his first transmission. The pilot was able to dock directly with the node, and once he ascertained that there was an atmosphere on the other side of the hatch, we entered the airlock. This was the front door of Jerry’s home; I couldn’t help but feel as if we should have rung a doorbell, or at least wiped our feet on the mat.
A half dozen fogzes were waiting for us on the other side of the hatch. A couple of them growled and bared their teeth, looking for all the world like guard dogs wary of unexpected guests, but the others yip-yapped and spun their tails in joy. Apparently they had some means of feeding themselves without Jerry’s help. For a second, I was afraid that they might have been dining on their master’s body, until I remembered that they were vegetarians and that Jerry had once mentioned having rigged an automatic dispenser for their kibble.
A couple of surprises awaited us as we made our way through the underground habitat. One was that there were more fogzes here than I’d ever suspected. Every time we entered a room or tunnel, another two or three animals were already there. I tried to keep count, but gave up after awhile; eventually, we’d discover that two dozen fogzes lived in the asteroid. The air had a canine reek barely masked by the sweet smell of honeysuckle, but I s
uppose you could get used to it after awhile, particularly if mutant foxes were your only companions for 37 years.
The other surprise was just how large the Stone House had become. We went in there expecting a handful of rooms and a large hydroponics greenhouse, not to mention maintenance facilities. What we found instead was room after room after room carved out of solid rock, dozens in all, connected to one another by a labyrinthine network of tunnels. The tunnels were bored deep into the mantle and seemed to lead in all six axial directions, and were lighted by fiberoptic cables which brought underground sunlight captured on the surface. Honeysuckle had spread through the tunnels and into the rooms, clinging to the rock walls as a dense, leafy shroud. It was easy to get lost in there, so mazelike the asteroid’s interior had become.
This was what Jerry had spent four decades doing: using laser drills to carve out the inside of 2010 TK7, the way a worm chews through the inside of an apple while leaving its skin intact. There were more rooms than any one person could possibly use; in fact, only the four rooms originally made for him by the Achilles crew had ever been inhabited. The rest were vacant except for fogzes, who played among the vines like happy children.
Except for the largest room. That was where we found Jerry.
In death, he floated in the very place where gravity would have no hold upon him: at the asteroid’s core, within the center of a spherical chamber sixty feet in diameter. The fiberoptic light, filtered by the honeysuckle vine, cast autumnal shadows across the body that hung in midair, arms and legs limp, head slightly bowed. Jerry had let his hair grow out in the last years of his life, and like his beard it had gone a very pale shade of grey. He’d become mummified, but otherwise he was well preserved.
When I found him, I saw that his eyes were open, and he seemed to gaze in sightless wonder at something which, in his last moments of life, had given him reason to smile ever so slightly.
I had little doubt that he’d come here to die. Fogzes played around us as I gazed at him for a very long time, all too aware that, after all these years, this was the first time we’d ever met face to face. Hello, old friend, his expression seemed to say. How good to meet you at last.
Jerry had become sick of people, but he’d never given up on the human race. So he’d left us to go off and make a world of his own, then spent the rest of his life turning his home into a place we could inhabit when he was gone. His fortune went to his relatives, but the Stone House was bequeathed to everyone on the distant world he could always see but would never walk upon again. This was stipulated in his will; the Stone House is inhabited to this day, mainly by eccentrics—writers, artists, sculptors, dreamers—who just want to get away for a while.
Was he a madman or a visionary? For some people, I’m not sure there’s really a difference.
I love space opera.
Once upon a time, that’s an admission that would have gotten a serious writer of science fiction in a lot of trouble. After all, the term itself was originally derived from “soap opera” as a name for a low-brow form of science fiction. This has changed over the last couple of decades, though, and now it’s perfectly acceptable for a SF author to write space-op without being dismissed as a hack.
The Near Space series isn’t space opera, but rather more or less realistic space fiction; there’s a subtle difference between the two which would take an essay to thoroughly explain. Even so, every now and then I’ve let the series veer in to space-op, particularly when it concerns one of my favorite recurring characters, who makes an appearance here. This is the first time the Crew shows up, though, and I think I’d like to write about them again one day.
THE HEIRESS OF AIR
“Tell me about the job.”
Red couldn’t see the one who spoke to him. The voice came from the other side of the cone of light surrounding the chair in which he sat; it wasn’t unfriendly, but neither was it particularly kind. Two men stood behind him, menacingly silent. They might be told to offer him lunch or drag him to the nearest airlock; it all depended on how he answered the questions given to him by the unseen figure seated just out of sight.
“I think you know that already.” Red started to casually cross his legs, then decided against it; he didn’t want to come off as insolent. “I mean…not to be obtuse about such things, but if you don’t, then why am I here?”
“You were caught taking something that doesn’t belong to you.”
“Well, no. Not exactly.” Red tried not to smile. “We were taking back something that belongs to someone else. Besides, she doesn’t belong to anyone, not even her father. And you didn’t catch me…I’m here of my own free will.” He quietly hoped that hadn’t been a mistake.
A moment of silence. “All true,” the man on the other side of the lights admitted. “Which makes the situation even more interesting. If you could have avoided us, then why have you…?”
“I want to try to work things out.” This time Red smiled. “It’s not smart to get on your bad side. Everyone knows that. And if the Crew had known you had anything to do with this, we wouldn’t have taken the job in the first place.”
A quiet laugh. For an instant, Red caught a glimpse of a face white as comet ice, eyes the color of the Martian sky. Then the face retreated back into the darkness. “No, I’m not someone to be trifled with, Captain McGee. And that brings us back to my original question. The job…”
“The job was to find Cozy and bring her home. That simple. Her father hired us. Finding her wasn’t a problem. But getting her back—” Red let out his breath “—well, I guess that’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”
It only made sense that the men who’d kidnapped Cosette Trudeau would head for Ceres. There were few other places they could have gone once they’d left the Moon. Cislunar traffic control hadn’t reported any vessels on an earthbound trajectory during the time-frame in which the abduction occurred that matched witness descriptions of the one that had lifted off from the Trudeau family’s private estate just outside Descartes City. Mars was currently at opposition on the other side of the Sun from Earth; Jupiter was too far away, and no one but the mad and the desperate go to Venus. Ceres was in conjunction, though, making it conveniently accessible for a deep-space craft fleeing for the outer system, and as the largest port between Mars and Jupiter, Ceres Station is the jump-off point for the rest of the belt.
So it made sense that the kidnappers would dock at Ceres Station, wait for its orbit to take it within distance of their ultimate destination—wherever that may be—then make the final sprint to whatever rockhound hideaway was awaiting them.
Unless, of course, Antoine Trudeau decided to pay the one million lox ransom the kidnappers had demanded in the laser transmission received by the Lunar Air Company twenty-four hours after three heavily armed men took the girl from her crater home. By then, pere Trudeau had already made that very decision. His people got in touch with the Crew and told Red McGee that he was willing to pay an identical sum to have his daughter brought back to him, plus expenses.
“I wonder why he didn’t just pay the ransom,” the voice behind the lights said. “It would have been easier.”
“But he’d lose face that way, wouldn’t he?” Red replied. “Money’s not a problem for someone like that, but reputation…well, that’s another matter, isn’t it? If it got out that one of the wealthiest men in the system could be horned out of a million lox by a bunch of lowlifes…” He shrugged. “So of course he’d rather hire someone to retrieve his little girl.”
“Of course. Go on. You figured out they were headed for Ceres…”
And wasted no time getting there. In fact, Wormtown Sally reached Ceres Station just hours after its traffic control center reported the arrival of a light-cargo freighter christened the Olympus Dreamer. Full thrust at 1-g had seen to that. Indeed, Sally could have even overtaken the Dreamer if Red had known for sure that it was the ship they were chasing, but it wasn’t until a friendly source at Ceres Traffic informed him that the freighte
r’s crew hadn’t left their vessel but instead were still inside that Red was certain—reasonably certain, at least—that the Dreamer was the right ship. And besides, rendezvousing and docking with another spacecraft is nearly impossible when both ships are under thrust.
So Wormtown Sally—itself another converted freighter, albeit with upgraded gas-core nuclear engines and with plasma-beam cannons concealed within its forward hull—quietly approached Ceres and, with the cooperation of the friendly trafco guy (“who received a nice finder’s fee for his tip,” Red added), slid into berth adjacent to the Dreamer. And even before the massive outer doors closed behind Sally, the Crew was getting ready to earn its pay.
There were four men in the Crew: Red, Raphael Coto, Jack Dog Jones, and Breaker. Tough guys. Hardasses. Red, Raphael, and Jack Dog were Pax Astra Royal Navy vets, while no one knew any more about Breaker’s background than they did his real name. They suited up in the airlock ready-room—body armor fitted with holo projectors, straps stuffed with tear gas and stun grenades—and then they loaded their flechette rifles, cycled through the portside hatch, and quietly went down the ladder.
Wormtown Sally and Olympus Dreamer lay side by side upon their retractable berths within Ceres’s cavernous spaceport. The docking tunnels had been repressurized after the ships came in. Dock workers and ’bots unloaded cargo and performed routine maintenance on other vessels berthed in adjacent tunnels, but no one was in sight near the two ships.
Peering through the narrow access tunnel leading from Sally’s berth to Dreamer’s, the four men studied the other ship. A ladder had been lowered from the port side, and fuel lines had been connected to the tank cluster, but the hatches remained shut. The lights were on in the command deck windows and side portholes, yet no one could be seen through them. No signs of exterior weapons; no sentries. If the people aboard were waiting it out, they weren’t taking any precautions.