Isabella slapped sensors onto his chest and slid a tube over Marco’s mouth. The machine started giving him breaths, and Marco’s chest began to rise and fall. It didn’t give Victor any comfort. The machine was doing all the work. Isabella pulled a syringe from her bag, bit off the needle cap, spat it away, and stuck the needle into Marco’s arm. She flipped on a second machine, and Victor heard the sustained beep of a flatline. His heart wasn’t beating. Isabella pressed a disc to Marco’s chest. She squeezed the handle, and Marco’s body twitched. Victor thought for half a second that whatever Isabella had done had revived him; that Marco was coming around and jerking awake. But he wasn’t. His body became still again. Isabella jolted him three more times. Four. Still the flatline persisted.
Isabella looked lost. She removed the disc from Marco’s chest and pushed it away. Her hands went back in her bag. They came out with the bone pad. She placed it on Marco’s chest, and the skeletal structure appeared on the screen. Isabella slowly moved the pad up to Marco’s neck and held it there for a long time, her face just inches from the pad. Finally, she switched off the pad and looked up, defeated.
“His neck is broken. It severed his spinal column. I’m sorry.”
The words felt hollow to Victor, like words from a dream. She was telling them that Marco was dead, that there was nothing more she could do. She was giving up.
No, Marco couldn’t be dead. Victor had been with Marco just moments ago. They had been working together, laughing.
Father was speaking quietly into his handheld, calling someone down to the airlock.
“There has to be something we can do,” said Victor.
“There isn’t, Vico,” said Isabella, removing the tube from Marco’s mouth.
“So we’re just giving up?”
“I can’t fix what’s broken here. He was dead before you brought him in. I’m sorry.”
Victor felt numb. His fingers were tingling. Marco was dead. The word hit him like the Juke ship had. Dead. Why had the corporates attacked them? This wasn’t the Asteroid Belt. This was the Kuiper Belt. The family had left the A Belt for this very reason: to get away from the corporates.
How had they gotten so close without us detecting them?
Victor looked down at Marco. He has a family, Victor told himself. A wife, Gabi, and three girls-one of whom, Chencha, was just a year younger than Victor.
Father disconnected the lifeline from the back of his own suit and moved for the door into the cargo bay. “Let’s go, Vico.”
“We’re leaving?”
“You and I have work to do.”
He meant the ship. Victor had seen some of the damage. The power generator was fried. Sensors were gone. PKs were gone. And the auxiliary generators wouldn’t last forever. If the family was going to survive, Victor and Father needed to make big repairs fast.
Victor nodded to Father and moved toward the hatch.
“Gabi and Lizbet are on their way down now,” Father said to Isabella. “I’d stay, but Concepcion wants us on the helm immediately.”
Lizbet was Marco’s mother. She still doted on her son.
“Go,” said Isabella. “I’ll wait for them here.”
Father was up and flying. Victor launched after him. A moment later they were in the hall, which was empty now. Father turned toward the helm, taking a side passageway. Before following, Victor looked down the hall in the opposite direction, back toward the fuge, and saw two women coming, still a distance away, heading for the cargo bay. Gabi and Lizbet. Wife and mother. Even at a distance, he could see the terror and panic on their faces.
“Vico, let’s go,” said Father.
Victor was moving again, following Father, weaving through the passageways of the ship. They arrived at the helm, and Victor was surprised to see the entire flight crew here, all busily working. Some were running cables and setting up lights. Others were at their workstations, speaking into their headsets or typing in commands. Concepcion saw Father and flew to him immediately. Victor could tell from her expression that she knew about Marco. Father must have called her.
“Gabi and Lizbet are with him now,” said Father.
Concepcion nodded. “Are either of you hurt?”
“The corporate ship hit Victor,” said Father.
“I’m fine,” said Victor.
Concepcion looked concerned. “You sure? I’m going to need you, Victor, like I’ve never needed you before.”
“I’m fine,” he repeated, though he felt anything but fine. Marco was dead. The ship was damaged, perhaps irreparably so.
“Come with me,” said Concepcion, turning and flying back to the holotable.
Selmo was there, looking at a large holo schematic of the ship in the holospace above the table. A dozen blinking red dots on the schematic marked damaged areas. “The electrical generator is out, of course,” he said. “We don’t yet know how badly it’s damaged. That should be our first priority. The backup generators are fine, but they can only output about fifty percent of the power we typically use every day. So we’ll need to ration power and turn off a bunch of lights and all nonessential equipment. Most of the power will need to go to the air ventilators and the heaters. I’d rather work in the dark than freeze to death.”
“Victor and I will handle the main generator,” said Father. “What about the reactors?”
“The reactors are fine,” said Selmo. “So the thrusters are good. The corporates knew what they were doing. They beat us up, but they left us with the ability to run away as fast as we can.”
“Which is exactly what we are going to do,” said Concepcion. “Once we get our bearings and pick our course, we are out of here. We’re no match for a ship that size or that well defended. I know some of you would like to blow them out of the sky right now, but we are in no position to do so. We don’t have the capabilities, and we are not going to endanger anyone else on this ship. That asteroid is not worth dying for. We’re running.”
“No argument,” said Father. “But if we can, we should try to collect as many of the parts and sensors as possible that were cut away from the ship. They’re just out there floating in space right now, and we might be able to salvage some of the parts. Especially the lasers. Some of those components are irreplaceable. I don’t want to push our luck and aggravate the corporates by sticking around, but we should scoop up as much as we can before we rocket out of here.”
“Agreed,” said Concepcion. “Selmo, as soon as we’re done here, work with Segundo and Victor on a plan to quickly collect as much of the severed equipment as we can.”
Selmo nodded. “The miners can help with that. I’ve got thirty men already asking what they can do.”
“What else is damaged?” asked Father.
Selmo sighed. “Both laser drills are gone. The corporates severed them from the ship, and then sliced them to pieces. There’s no way we can repair them. I’ve already pulled video of the attack. The drills are irreparable. See for yourself.” He entered some commands into the holotable, and surveillance video of the exterior of the ship appeared in the holospace. There was the old laser drill, the one with Victor’s stabilizer, illuminated by a pair of the safety lights. Selmo fast-forwarded the video, and Victor and Father watched as lasers sliced the drill the ribbons. The light was so bright and the cuts happened so quickly that Selmo rewound the video and showed it to them again in slow motion. Victor felt sick. All his modifications and improvements to the drill, all of which he had created in his head and rarely written down before building them, were gone. Chopped into worthless scrap. Worse still, the drills were the family’s livelihood, the two most important pieces of equipment, the means by which the family earned money and survived.
And now they were gone.
Father said nothing for a moment. He understood the implication. The corporates had crippled more than the ship; they had crippled the family’s future. How could they mine now? How could they get money for needed supplies or spare parts? How could they exist in the D
eep without good drills?
“What else?” asked Father.
“Four of our PKs are gone as well,” said Selmo. “That leaves us with two. Here again, the corporates knew what they were doing. They left us with one PK on either side of the ship, enough for us to fly out of here and defend ourselves against most collision threats, but not enough to retaliate and attack their ship. The only upside here, if there is one, is that they didn’t slice up the PKs. They just cut them loose. I take that to mean they expect us to recover them and repair them elsewhere.”
“How kind of them,” said Father. “Remind me to send flowers. What else?”
“Our other big loss is communication. The laserline transmitter’s gone. We can’t send a distress message even if we wanted to.”
“It also means we can’t warn anyone about the starship,” said Victor.
“True,” said Selmo, “but that’s the least of our problems right now.”
“What about ice?” asked Father. “How are we with air and fuel?”
Selmo smiled. “That’s a ray of sunshine. The holding bay is ninety-five percent full of ice. We harvested as much as we could from the asteroid when we first got here. So we’re fine for fuel and oxygen for a while. That’s more than enough to get us wherever we want to go within, say, five to six months from here.”
Victor felt relieved to hear that, at least. Ice was life. The reactors melted it and separated the hydrogen from the oxygen. The hydrogen they used for fuel. The oxygen they breathed.
Selmo moved his stylus in the holospace and rotated the schematic. “If you’d like more good news, it appears as if the other life-support systems are undamaged. Water purifiers are good. Air pumps are fine. Whoever these corporates are they picked their targets carefully.”
“Leaks?” asked Father.
“None that we can detect,” said Selmo. “We’re running another scan just to be certain, but it looks like we got through without a breach. We were lucky. The impact wasn’t that hard, and their lasers weren’t trying to penetrate. Plus the armor helped.”
“Who are they?” Father asked. “Why didn’t we see this coming?”
Selmo sighed. “That’s my fault. This is the corporate ship we sent the laserline to ten days ago. I should have suspected something when they didn’t show up on the scans anymore. I assumed that they had moved on. I never thought that they were creeping up on us.”
“No one is at fault,” said Concepcion. “They knew our scanning capabilities and they exploited them. End of story.”
“If they got our message, why would they attack us?” Father asked.
“Selmo and I did the math,” said Concepcion. “When we sent out the laserline, they were already coming for us. They never got our message. They missed it. This has nothing to do with the laserline. They wanted the asteroid, pure and simple.”
Dreo came to the holotable. “I’ve got their network. Give the word and we’re a go.”
Father turned to Concepcion. “We launched a snifferstick?” he asked.
Sniffersticks were small hacker satellites launched from one ship to spy on another. To work, they had to be within range of a ship’s network yet far enough away to avoid triggering the ship’s PKs. Fifty meters was about as close as any snifferstick dared. Accessing the ship’s network was the tricky part, especially if it was a corporate ship. Corporates had armies of coders and specialists who did nothing but devise defenses against sniffersticks. Most families wouldn’t dream of even trying to hack a corporate. But most families didn’t have Dreo, either, who could wiggle his way into any network.
“We launched it just before you came to the helm,” said Concepcion. “I want to know who bumped us.”
“What if they detect us nosing around their network?” said Father. “That might instigate another attack.”
“They won’t know,” said Dreo. “I’ve taken every precaution.”
“No offense,” said Father, “but are you sure? We’ve been out here for years. Who knows what other sweeper programs they’ve got running these days? They might have new ways to detect us that we don’t know about. Is this a risk we want to take? They’re corporates. What else do we want to know?”
“They have no reason coming out to the Kuiper Belt when there are so many asteroids in the A Belt, ready for the taking,” said Concepcion. “If they’re moving out here now, the other families will want to know. This will affect all the clans. We’ve lived in relative peace for a long time now. If corporates are beginning to invade our space, that’s intel we need to spread. Dreo assures me we’ll remain invisible.”
“Then why don’t we upload some malware or venomware and damage their systems while we’re in there?” said Victor.
“Because we are not going to attack them at all,” said Concepcion. “I want information, not revenge.”
Victor looked at the faces around the table, and saw that not everyone shared in that opinion.
“Please proceed, Dreo,” said Concepcion. “And bring up their network on the holotable, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Dreo returned to his workstation, and the schematic of the ship in the holospace disappeared, replaced with a series of three-dimensional icons spinning in space: flight log, engineering, laserlines, field trials, Lem, Dr. Benyawe, and others.
“Give me the manifest,” said Concepcion. “Tell me who the captain is.”
Photos and a holovideo of a handsome man in his early thirties appeared. Concepcion selected the window of data beside one of the photos and expanded it.
“Lem Jukes,” she said, reading the name.
“As in the Jukes?” said Father. “Is he related?”
“Ukko’s son,” said Concepcion.
“I’ll be damned,” said Selmo. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“Copy as much of this data as we can,” said Concepcion. “I want to know what their intentions are. Then let’s get the severed sensors back in the ship and get out of here before Mr. Lem Jukes decides to take more potshots. I’m going to be with Gabi and Lizbet, and then I’ll head to the fuge to address the family.” She turned to Father. “Don’t waste time and energy working on what we can’t fix. Work with Selmo to identify those things we can repair. Power first, communication second.”
“What about the starship?” asked Victor.
“What about it?” said Concepcion. “Selmo’s right. We’re not in any position to address that right now. Nor can we relay what we’ve found. We’re silent until we get communication back online.”
“We’re not going to be able to recover everything,” said Father. “We’re going to need parts and supplies.”
“The nearest weigh station is four months away,” said Concepcion. “The closest help we have are the Italians. They received our message and are watching the sky. If we hurry, maybe we can reach them before they move on. They’ll have plenty of supplies we could use.”
Victor looked at Father and could tell that he was thinking the same thing Victor was. Going for the Italians was a risk. There was no way to send the Italians a transmission to tell them to stay put and wait. If El Cavador arrived and the Italians had moved on, the ship would be in serious trouble.
Concepcion left the bridge.
Victor turned back to the holospace and looked at Lem Jukes. Some of the photos were ID shots: a straight headshot, a profile shot. But others were more casual photos taken from the ship’s archives: Lem standing with his father, Ukko Jukes, in a ceremonial photo at what must have been the ship’s departure; a more editorial shot of Lem in action at the helm, leaning forward over some holodisplay, pointing at nothing in particular, clearly a staged shot for the press. And then there was the brief holovideo. It was twelve seconds long at the most, running on a loop, playing over and over again. Lem was at a dinner party, sitting at a table after a meal. Empty wineglasses, fancy cutlery, a slice of half-eaten cake on a plate. There was no audio, but Lem was clearly telling a story, using his hands and his charming
smile to emphasize his tale. Two beautiful women sat on either side of him, hanging on his every word. The story reached its end, and everyone burst out laughing, including Lem. Then the video began again.
Victor watched it a second time, and this time Victor imagined the words coming out of Lem’s mouth. “So we blow up their mooring cables,” Lem was saying. “And there were these three men out on the hull of their ship. The devil only knows what they were doing out there. So I told my pilot to rush them, to hit them hard and knock that PK right where they were standing. And lo and behold, that thing smacked one of those gravel suckers right between the eyes.”
Laughter from everyone at the table.
Father was talking with Selmo. Victor stared at the laughter in the video.
That man killed Marco, Victor thought. Lem Jukes, son of Ukko Jukes, heir to the fortune of thieves and murderers, killed Marco.
Concepcion wanted them to focus on power and communication. Fine. Victor would do that. But he was also going to rebuild one of the PKs, a special one, strong enough to wipe that stupid grin right off Lem Jukes’s face.
CHAPTER 7
India
Captain Wit O’Toole sat up front in the cockpit with the pilot until the plane was an hour away from the drop zone. The eight passengers in the cabin were Wit’s newest recruits, soldiers plucked from Special Forces units in New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Russia, and South Korea. In his most optimistic estimations, Wit had counted on finding six men to join MOPs. Coming home with eight was like Christmas come early.
None of the men had ever met one another before this flight, so Wit had intentionally left them alone immediately after the plane had taken off from a private airport in Mumbai. If he had sat with them, they would have deferred to him as their senior officer and waited for him to initiate conversation. But now, as Wit left the cockpit and made his way back to the cabin, he heard laughter and conversation as if the men were the oldest of friends.
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