The Aftermath gt-16

by Ben Bova

  Angela nodded. “I will if he will.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Theo said to his sister. Then he added, “As long as you don’t try to lord it over me.”

  “Lord it over you? When did I ever—”

  “You’re always pulling that older sister stuff, like you know it all.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Yes it is, dammit!”

  “Stop it!” Pauline shouted. “Stop it this instant! Theo, I won’t have you using such language. And Angela, you will treat your brother with respect. Is that clear? Both of you?”

  Angela nodded, her lips pressed into a thin bloodless line.

  “Theo?” his mother demanded.

  “Yes, ma’am. Sorry about the language.”

  “You should be. If your vocabulary is so limited you should study your dictionary.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he mumbled again. It was Mom’s old line, about the dictionary. He looked over at Angie; she glared back at him.

  “You two have to work together,” their mother insisted. “We don’t have time for your little spats and name-calling. You both have to start behaving like adults.”

  Angie behave like an adult? Theo grumbled silently. When the universe stops expanding, maybe.

  Pauline stood up. “Now then, if we all work together we can get through this. It’ll be quite an adventure to tell your children about!”

  “Your grandchildren,” Angie said, with a faint smile.

  Theo shook his head. Busywork, he said to himself. Mom just wants to keep us busy so we won’t have time to think about the fix Dad’s left us in. But she’s right; nobody’s going to help us, so we’ll have to help ourselves. Or die.

  “Theo, we need the backup command center up and functioning. The sooner the better.”

  “Right,” he said, thinking, Maybe she’s right. Maybe, if I can get the backup command pod on line, maybe we can patch up this bucket and steer it back to civilization. There’s nothing left at Ceres; we’ll have to get back to the Earth/Moon vicinity. Or maybe the exploration base at Mars. Where is Mars now? On our side of its orbit or all the way over on the other side of the Sun? I’ll have to check that once I get the nav system running.

  Or maybe, he thought, we could make contact with the research station around Jupiter. We’re heading in that direction anyway.

  His mother clapped her hands lightly, interrupting his thoughts. “Very well, then. On your feet, both of you! We all have work to do.”

  Theo started toward the auxiliary airlock, but his mother stopped him. “Thee, you’ll have to get into your suit.”

  “I know.”

  “And before you do, I want you to take a shower and put on clean clothes. You don’t smell very good, you know.”

  “Aw, jeezus—”

  Pauline leveled a stern finger at him. “Language, young man!” Then, despite herself, the beginnings of a smile curled the corners of her lips. “You’re not so big that I can’t wash out your mouth with detergent.”

  “Why should I take a shower now?” Theo protested. “I’m just gonna get sweated up again inside the suit.”

  “Then you can take another shower when you get back.”

  Angie smirked at him. But Pauline went on, “Angela, you’ll have to suit up and check the damage to the tunnels.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll try to save some hot water for you, Angel face,” Theo said, grinning maliciously at his sister.

  “He’s going to use up all the hot water on purpose, Mom,” Angela accused.

  Pauline shook her head. Some things never change, no matter what, she thought. Then she added, Thank god.

  I’ve got to be strong, she told herself. For both of them. They’re only children and they’re frightened. I’ve got to get them working, get them to repair the damage to the ship and put us on a trajectory that will take us back to civilization. It’s up to me. There’s no one else until Victor returns to us. I’ve got to make them feel that they’re contributing to our salvation, make them understand that they can save themselves—and me.

  * * *

  After a lightning-quick shower, Theo went alone to the main airlock and started pulling on his suit leggings. Mom’s being a pain in the butt, he said to himself. Shower first. Shower afterward. You’d think I smell like a garbage dump, the way she talks. And Angie just sits there and sneers at me, the dumb hippopotamus. As he wormed his feet into the insulated boots he thought, What if the backup pod’s been hit? Maybe that bastard took it out on purpose.

  Theo looked up at the blank, scuffed metal bulkhead. Jeezus, if the backup pod’s out we’re not just up the creek without a surfboard. We’re dead.

  ORE SHIP SYRACUSE:

  BACKUP COMMAND POD

  Theo wormed into the leggings of his space suit, then pulled on the thick-soled boots. As he hefted the suit’s torso over his head and slid his arms into its sleeves he thought about turtles back on Earth with their shells. Born on the Moon, Theo had never been to Earth, had never faced a full Earthly g, although his parents had always insisted that he and Angie spend hour after pointless hour in the cramped little centrifuge in Syracuse’s gym.

  “Your body’s genetically equipped to handle a full g,” Dad repeated endlessly, “but you’ve got to make sure that your muscles are trained up to their full potential.”

  Yeah, right, Dad, Theo thought as he worked his arms into the straps of the suit’s cumbersome backpack. Make sure we’re ready for any emergency. And when it happens, you split out of here as fast as you jackrabbit can.

  Theo felt angry. And betrayed. And guilty that he should feel this way about his own father.

  He was locking the helmet into the suit’s collar ring when his mother came into the equipment bay, her face tight, tense.

  “I’ll check you out,” Pauline said.

  “Where’s Angie?”

  “She’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  “Maybe I should check the tunnels,” he said.

  “No. Let your sister do it. There’s more than enough to keep you both busy.”

  And separated, Theo realized. Mom’s pretty sharp.

  “You be careful. Thee,” said Pauline. “Make certain the pod’s safe before you do anything else.”

  He nodded inside the helmet. “I’ll be okay, Mom.”

  “I know you will. I just fret.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Theo… your father did not abandon us. I don’t want you thinking that he did. He’ll come back, you’ll see.”

  Theo couldn’t answer. He knew that if he spoke he’d say something that would hurt his mother.

  But she could see the anger in his face. “He did not abandon us,” she repeated.

  “Yeah.” He slid the visor down, hoping it would keep his mother from seeing his expression, and clumped in the heavy boots toward the equipment bay hatch.

  Up the central tunnel he climbed, the g load getting lighter with every step, and through the mini-airlocks that had automatically shut. When he came to the cross tunnel he floated weightlessly through the hatch and started downhill, toward the backup control pod. He was always surprised at how much effort it took to move himself in zero-g. You’d think it’d be like floating on a cloud, he thought as he clambered along the tunnel’s protruding rungs. Instead, you had to consciously exert your muscles all the time. If you relaxed you curled up into an apelike crouch with your arms dangling chest-high.

  The cross tunnel was filled with air at normal pressure, according to the sensors on the right wrist of his suit. Theo stayed buttoned up inside the suit anyway, just to be on the safe side. When he finally arrived at the end of the tunnel, the telltales on the hatch’s control panel were all in the green. He puffed out a sigh of relief. The backup pod hasn’t been punctured, he said to himself. Then he added, if I can believe the sensors.

  He tapped out the code on the hatch’s panel and the hatch slid open with a slight grating sound. Hasn’t been used in a while, Theo real
ized. Dust gets into everything sooner or later.

  Cautiously he pushed himself through the hatch and climbed to his feet inside the pod. It was a near-duplicate of the main control center: curving panel of instruments and sensors; electronic keyboards right, left and center; display screens arrayed above the panel; command chair fastened to the deck by its short rails. But the screens were all blank, the instruments and sensors dark.

  Theo took a deep double lungful of canned air, noticing for the first time how flat and metallic it tasted. His suit’s sensors told him the air in the pod was perfectly fine. Cautiously, he cracked his helmet visor a millimeter or two and sucked in an experimental breath.

  “Nothing wrong with that,” he said aloud.

  He raised the visor all the way, made a full turn, and decided to take off the helmet altogether.

  First, though, he called his mother. “I’m in the pod. It’s undamaged.”

  “Good.” He heard a world of relief in his mother’s solitary syllable. She must be using one of the suit radios, he realized. The intercom’s still out.

  “Now to get all the systems up and working,” he said.

  “Don’t take off your suit,” she cautioned. “Even if you’re breathing ship’s air.”

  “Right.” But as soon as he clicked off the suit radio he unlatched his helmet and lifted it off his head. Easier to see and work without the helmet in my way, he reasoned.

  * * *

  Victor Zacharias sat in his sweatshirt and shorts, staring into the emptiness displayed on the pod’s central screen.

  “He’s gone,” Victor muttered to himself. He made the cameras do a full global scan of space around the pod, but there was no sign of the vessel that had attacked him. Nothing out there but dark emptiness and the cold, distant stars watching him like the eyes of ancient gods.

  “He’s gone,” Victor repeated. He wiped out Chrysalis, smashed our ship, and now he’s gone off somewhere. Looking for Lars Fuchs, he said. The man must be insane, a total barbarian. Unable to believe that the attacker would just peel away, Victor scanned the area again. Nothing to be seen but dark emptiness and the distant unblinking stars.

  Has he gone back to find Syracuse? The thought frightened Victor. No, he told himself. Syracuse is accelerating toward the outer edge of the Belt. He won’t follow them that far. I hope. If I were religious I’d pray. Then he realized, Even if he is going after them there’s nothing I can do about it now. Not a goddamned thing.

  No time for remorse, Victor said to himself. I’ve got to figure out where I am, where I’m heading.

  They call it the Asteroid Belt, but the region is actually just as empty as a vacuum can be, almost. The asteroids sprinkled through the area are rare and small, most of them the size of dust grains. Ceres, the largest of them, is barely a thousand kilometers across. Put all the millions of asteroids together and they wouldn’t amount to a body as large as Earth’s Moon, Victor knew. Some “belt,” he thought. More like an enormous football stadium with only a few dozen people scattered among the seats.

  “No time for philosophy,” Victor told himself sternly. “See where you are and how quick you can get back to the ship.”

  He began running through the navigational computer’s data. The pod’s thruster had fired him off roughly in the direction of Ceres, while Syracuse—with Pauline and the kids in it—had been accelerating in the opposite direction, toward the Belt’s outer fringes. Not good, he thought. Not good at all.

  The pod had no real propulsion system, only the rocket thruster that had hurled it clear of the ship once he’d fired the explosive bolts to separate from Syracuse. He had small cold-gas jets for fine maneuvering, but no engine that could turn him around and head him back to the ore carrier.

  “Okay,” he said to himself. “Then where am I heading?”

  Again, the news was not good. The pod was on a trajectory that would miss Ceres by several thousand kilometers. Not that there was anything or anybody left at Ceres who could help him. Chrysalis was destroyed, and its rock rat inhabitants slaughtered. The few ore carriers and smelter ships that had been in orbit around Ceres must have lit off and fled out of there as fast as they could.

  “Besides,” he said aloud, “I don’t have any communications that could reach them. I’m deaf and mute.”

  No sense moaning, he told himself. Find out where in hell you are and where you’re heading.

  He ran through the navigation program twice, then a third time. The numbers did not change. The control pod was coasting through space sunward. It would miss Ceres by exactly seventeen point nine thousand kilometers and continue sailing inward, past the orbit of Mars—which was all the way over on the other side of the Sun now—then past the orbits of Earth, Venus and Mercury. It looked as if he would miss running into the Sun and instead would swing around it and start heading outward again. If he didn’t broil first as he approached the Sun’s searing brilliance.

  His outbound course would bring him back almost to the exact spot where he’d separated the pod from Syracuse—in roughly four and a half years.

  Victor didn’t bother to calculate the perturbations on his course that the gravitational fields of the inner planets would cause. Why bother? Long before he reached even Mars’s orbit he’d be dead of starvation. Of course, if the pod’s cranky air recycler crapped out, he could die of asphyxiation long before that.

  * * *

  In Syracuse’s backup command pod, Theo felt like screaming or pounding his gloved fists against the control board. He had carefully switched on the pod’s electrical power, then booted up the control instruments and sensors one at a time, to make certain he didn’t overload the system and trip any circuits.

  Now he stared at the red lights glaring at him from one end of the panel to the other. Propulsion fuel tanks. Air reserve tanks. Structural integrity. All in the red. The fusion reactor and main engine were undamaged, apparently, but the level of hydrogen fuel left in the battered tanks was dangerously, critically low. The fusion reactor generated the ship’s electrical energy and powered the main engine. At the rate the engine was roaring along now, the tanks would be totally dry in hours.

  Theo shut down the main engine. We’re going to need that aitch-two for electrical power, he thought. We can coast for the time being: Dad had us going like a bat out of Hades to get away from that murdering son of a female dog.

  He began to use the cameras on the ship’s tiny maintenance robots to assess the damage to the ship’s structure.

  “God, she’s falling apart,” he whispered to himself. When the attacker slagged the antennas his laser beams sliced through the hull of that section of the wheel, gutting their main propulsion fuel tanks. Penetrated to the tunnels, too, Theo saw. That’s how we lost the air in there.

  Sitting in the command chair, Theo realized that Syracuse was badly damaged and heading deeper into the Belt, away from Ceres, away from any chance of help. The antennas are gone, our fuel is down to a couple of days’ worth, we’re going to lose electrical power and die.

  For the first time since he’d been a baby Theo wanted to cry. He wanted to curl up into a fetal ball and let his fate overtake him. But that would mean Mom and Angie would die too.

  He lifted his chin a notch. It’s up to me, he told himself. I’ve got to repair this damage. Angie can’t do it, not by herself anyways. I’ve got to get this ship back in operating condition and heading toward civilization. I’ve got to keep Mom and Angie alive.

  He thought that his father would know what to do and how to do it. But Dad’s gone. There’s nobody here but me.

  “It’s up to me now,” he said aloud.

  ORE SHIP SYRACUSE:

  LAVATORY

  Angela stepped out of the shower stall vigorously rubbing a towel over her body. As she tucked it around her and wrapped a second towel over her wet hair she muttered something.

  Pauline was at the sink brushing her teeth. The mirror was fogging from the steam of her daughter’s shower.
She rubbed a clear spot with a hand towel as Angela finished drying herself.

  “It’s not fair,” Angela muttered again.

  Pauline rinsed her mouth, then asked, “What’s not fair?”

  “Theo’s got a lav all to himself while we’re bumping into each other in here.”

  “Theo shared the other lav with your father when he was here,” Pauline said.

  “Still, it’s not fair. He ought to—”

  Pauline silenced her daughter with a stern glance. “Angela, you’ve got to stop fighting with your brother.”

  “Me?” She seemed genuinely shocked. “He’s the one who’s always calling me names, yelling that I boss him around. I’m the older one, he ought to be taking orders from me.”

  “Young lady,” Pauline said, the way she always did when she was about to tell her daughter something Angela didn’t want to hear, “I will say this only once more. I want you to stop arguing with Theo. He’s had an enormous burden of responsibility dumped on his shoulders.”

  “Me too!”

  “Yes, I know, but Theo’s a male and he automatically assumes he’s got to take charge.”

  “That’s dumb.”

  “Maybe it is, but you and I will have to deal with it. Thee would welcome help from you if only you’d be pleasant about it and stop calling him names.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Angela, you’re the older sibling. It’s up to you to set the tone between you and your brother. I will not have you two bickering over every little thing that comes up. We’re in enough danger here, we all need to work together if we’re going to survive.”

  Angela sagged back onto the edge of the sink. “Are we really in that much trouble?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  She stared down at her bare toes for several moments. Then, in a low voice, “Do you think Dad really ran away?”

  “Not for a picosecond,” Pauline said firmly. “He lured that attacker away from us. He saved our lives.”