The Aftermath gt-16

by Ben Bova

  Theo glanced at the pistol. It bore the imprint of Astro Corporation. Valker must’ve taken this from a ship he captured, he thought.

  “Both those men are in space suits,” Victor went on. “Puncture the suits. Rip them open so they can’t get off the ship.”

  “Right,” Theo agreed.

  Dorn said, “Wouldn’t it be better to let them get off this ship? Let them have Pleiades and leave us in peace.”

  “So they can steal other ships and kill their crews?” Victor snapped, almost snarling. “No. There’s no law out here. It’s up to us.”

  “Vengeance is not justice,” Dorn murmured.

  Victor glared at him, then answered, “This isn’t vengeance. This is extermination. You heard what Valker called them: cockroaches. You don’t let cockroaches go free. You kill them.”

  Dorn stopped walking. “I can’t help you do that.”

  “Then go back to the bridge,” Victor said.

  “I could take those two men for you. Without killing them.”

  Victor stared at the cyborg.

  “If I succeed, you will have them without risk to yourself or your son. If I fail, then you can attack them your way.”

  Theo tapped Dorn’s prosthetic shoulder. “Is your arm working okay?”

  Dorn lifted the arm, turned it in a full circle. “Your maintenance work is holding fine.”

  “Let him try it, Dad,” Theo urged. “What do we have to lose?”

  Victor looked from his son to the cyborg and back again. At last he reluctantly murmured, “All right.”

  CARGO SHIP PLEIADES:

  BRIDGE

  Suspicion smoldering in his mind, Kirk flicked through Pleiades’s internal camera views. Every section of the ship seemed empty, abandoned.

  “There’s nobody here,” said the scavenger at his elbow. “This’s a ghost ship.”

  “Your great-grandmother’s a ghost ship,” Kirk growled. “He’s aboard somewhere. He’s hiding.”

  One of the other crewmen piped up. “He sure don’t have a crew with him. He musta been alone.”

  “He’s in here someplace,” Kirk insisted, watching each camera view intently for a few moments, then skipping to the next. “We’ve gotta find him.”

  “It’s a big ship, Kirk. There’s only the four of us. It’ll take a day or two to search every compartment.”

  “So it takes a day or two!”

  “Yeah, but while we’re playin’ hide-and-seek with the bastard, Valker and the other guys got the women.”

  Kirk glared at the crewman. Gritting his teeth in indecision, he finally admitted, “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Least we can call Valker and tell him the bum’s hiding out someplace.”

  “Yeah. Let’s call Valker.” The others all agreed.

  Kirk tried his suit radio. No answer. Grimacing with anger, he turned to Pleiades’s comm console.

  “Valker, this is Kirk.”

  No reply.

  “Valker, this is Kirk. We can’t find anybody on Pleiades. We’re coming back.”

  Still nothing but the hiss of the comm signal’s carrier wave.

  Kirk snatched up the power drill he’d lain on the control board. “Something’s wrong. Let’s get back to Hunter.”

  * * *

  Nicco, meanwhile, was feeling equally frustrated aboard Syracuse. He and the two scavengers with him had searched the living quarters, the command pod, and even the storm cellar. No sign of the two women.

  “They ain’t here,” Nicco said as he stepped out of the radiation shelter’s cramped womblike interior.

  “They’ve gone?”

  “Looks like it.”

  The other crewman said, “This is a pretty big ship. We’ve only searched a quarter of it.”

  “The rest is in vacuum,” Nicco told him. “No air. All shut down. They can’t be in there.”

  “Not unless they’re in suits.”

  “Suits only hold a few hours’ air; they can’t stay in ’em for long.”

  “Maybe they can hold their breaths for a couple hours,” said the first crewman. “I bet they both got big lungs.”

  Nicco did not laugh. Frowning with frustration, he said, “C’mon, we better get back to Valker. Maybe he can figure this out.”

  * * *

  Dorn stopped a good fifty meters before the airlock area.

  “You two wait here,” he whispered. “Give me three minutes, then come ahead.”

  Victor nodded. Theo licked his lips, thinking, If this cyborg can’t handle those two scavengers I’ll kill them both. I’ll cut them up with this laser. I’ll chop them into pieces.

  Then he saw the look on the human half of Dorn’s face and remembered the priest’s words: Vengeance is not justice.

  Dorn walked slowly, deliberately, toward the main airlock. The two scavengers that Valker had left were lounging at the inner airlock hatch, which was sealed shut. They stiffened at the sight of the approaching cyborg, gripped their weapons in their hands. One had a cordless power drill, the other an elaborately wicked-looking knife with a serrated blade.

  “What’re you doin’ here?” asked the taller of the two, the one with the drill.

  “Captain Valker sent me,” Dorn replied, shifting his steps slightly so that the one with the knife was on his prosthetic side.

  “Valker? What for?”

  “Why di’n’t he come himself?”

  “Or call us on the intercom?”

  Dorn was within arm’s reach of the pair of them. They seemed wary, distrustful. They both edged half a step backward as Dorn approached them.

  The one with the knife lifted its blade so that its point was level with Dorn’s prosthetic eye.

  “Why don’t I just carve you up here and now, ’stead of waitin’?”

  Praying that his arm would work properly, Dorn grabbed the blade in his metal hand and twisted. The blade bent and the man holding it yowled in sudden pain. His partner, jaw dropped wide, fumbled for the power button on his drill as he backed away from Dorn.

  Yanking the knife out of the first one’s hand, Dorn growled to the other, “Drop that toy before I shove it up your colon.”

  For an instant both men stood frozen in shocked silence. Then Dorn heard Zacharias and his son running up the passageway. Seeing the weapons in their hands, the scavenger dropped his power drill to the deck with a dull clunk. The would-be knife wielder raised his hands over his head.

  “Good work,” Victor said to Dorn. “That’s two of them.”

  “There are seven more,” said Dorn.

  * * *

  Sitting in the bridge’s command chair, Elverda heard Kirk’s call from Pleiades, saw the angry irritation in his chiseled features. “Should we reply to him?” Pauline asked.

  “No,” said Elverda. “Not until the men return.”

  Angela stared at the frozen image of Kirk on the screen, but said nothing.

  Elverda cut off the message and pulled up a view of the passageway where Dorn, Victor and Theo were leading the two scavengers back from the main airlock.

  With Pauline standing on one side of her and Angela on the other, Elverda asked softly, “The men did not harm you?”

  “No,” Angela said.

  Turning to Pauline, Elverda dropped her voice to a near-whisper and asked, “Will you tell your husband?”

  Pauline glanced at her daughter, then replied, “I suppose I will, sooner or later.”

  “He’ll want to kill Valker.”

  “Mother!” Angela blurted. “He raped you?”

  Pauline pressed her lips together, then replied, “No, he didn’t rape me.”

  “But…” Angela’s eyes went wide as she realized what her mother implied. “You mean… willingly?”

  “Not willingly. I had no choice,” Pauline said, her voice flat and cold.

  Angela’s mouth hung open but no words came out.

  “Your husband will kill Valker,” Elverda repeated, “once he knows.”

  Pa
uline said nothing.

  * * *

  “Look!” cried one of the scavengers. “That’s Nicco and the others comin’ over from Syracuse.”

  Kirk and the three crewmen with him were jetting back to Hunter. He twisted in the emptiness and saw the three sunlit figures heading toward him.

  “What’s goin’ on with you?” Kirk asked over his suit radio.

  “Damn ship’s empty,” Nicco’s voice answered. “The women are gone.”

  “They must be hiding.”

  “They’re gone. And Valker ain’t answering us.”

  Kirk nodded grimly inside his inflated helmet. “We can’t raise Valker either. Something’s gone wrong.”

  The two groups of scavengers came together like gliding vultures, shifting clumsily in their flight.

  “You think they got Valker?” Nicco asked.

  “Don’t see how,” Kirk replied. “He had a pistol. The priest and the kid were unarmed.”

  “The women musta gone aboard Hunter.”

  “Or drifted into space.”

  “What about the guy from Pleiades?” one of the crewmen asked. “Where’d he go?”

  They coasted toward Hunter’s main airlock. Kirk saw that the hatch was open; the dimly lit airlock chamber looked empty.

  “All right, hold it,” Kirk said as they glided to Hunter’s curving hull. “We gotta take stock before we go in.”

  “Take stock of what?”

  “The situation.”

  “There’s seven of us against a priest, a kid, and an old lady.”

  “And maybe the two other women.”

  “And maybe the guy from Pleiades, too.”

  “We got weapons and they don’t.”

  Kirk sneered at them. “Weapons? You got a coupla power tools and some wrenches.”

  “I’ve got a pistol,” Nicco pointed out.

  “Yeah, and they prob’ly got Valker’s pistol. And the grenades he was carrying.”

  That quieted them.

  “Where’d you leave the heavy welder?” Kirk asked the two men who had disabled Hunters main thruster.

  “We put it on a tether after we were done with it.”

  “Go get it,” Kirk said. “We might need it to burn through some hatches.”

  SMELTER SHIP HUNTER:

  BRIDGE

  “So that’s how they disabled our fusion engine,” Dorn said, looking at Elverda.

  She was still sitting in the command chair as they listened to the suit-to-suit talk between Kirk and the other scavengers.

  “Maybe we can retrieve that heavy laser before they do,” Theo suggested.

  “No.” Victor shook his head. “They’re already outside, suited up. They’ll get to it long before we can.”

  “I’m still in my suit,” Theo pointed out. “So’re Mom and Angie. Angie and I could—”

  “No,” Victor repeated firmly.

  “Then what do we do?” Pauline asked.

  More to Dorn than the others, Victor said, “Once they get that heavy laser they’ll be able to burn through any of the hatches we try to keep locked against them.”

  “Yes,” said Dorn.

  “They’ll punch their way from the main airlock right up here to the bridge,” Victor muttered.

  “And free Valker on their way,” Theo added. “All we have is this one laser pistol.”

  “And those grenades,” Theo said, pointing to the belt that lay on the far side of the deck.

  * * *

  “Stay in your suits,” Kirk told his men as they came through the inner hatch of the main airlock. “They might try somethin’ cute, like cutting off the air in this section of the ship.”

  Nicco glanced over his shoulder at the two men lugging the heavy welder and its power pack. “You guys oughtta be up front,” he said.

  “Why do we hafta lug this clunker?” one of the men complained. “How ’bout you takin’ it for a turn?”

  “Whatsamatter, girls?” Nicco asked, laughing. “‘Fraid you’re gonna break a fingernail or somethin’?”

  The men glared at him but shuffled up to the front of the line, where Kirk stood peering down the passageway, left and right. He stepped to the wall screen and tapped its directory.

  “Okay,” he said, tracing a path on the main display. “The bridge is this direction.”

  They started along the passageway, Kirk in the lead, the two men with the welder grumbling right behind him, then the rest, with Nicco bringing up the rear.

  Kirk tried to raise Valker on his suit radio, again to no avail.

  “They musta killed him,” he mused aloud.

  “Then we’re gonna hafta elect a new captain,” said one of the men toting the laser welder.

  Kirk grinned toothily. “I nominate me.”

  From up the passageway they heard Valker’s sneering voice, “Over my dead body!”

  “It’s the skipper!”

  The passageway ran along the rim of the ship’s wheel, so that although it felt flat as long as the wheel was turning, it curved up and out of sight in both directions. Valker came striding toward them, smiling grimly. The two men Dorn had disarmed came into sight behind him.

  “Where’ve you been?” Kirk demanded.

  “They ganged up on me, that half-robot priest, the kid, and some other guy—he must be from Pleiades.”

  Grinning at the bruise on Valker’s jaw, Kirk said, “Only three of ’em?”

  “They caught me by surprise. Then they locked me in a storage bay. Then they brought in Gig and Kelso, here.”

  Nicco came pushing through the group. “How’d you get out, skipper?”

  Valker gave him a sour look. “Accordion-fold door. They thought locking it would keep me inside. One kick is all it took.”

  “So the guy from Pleiades is aboard?” Kirk asked.

  Nodding, Valker added, “And the two women from Syracuse. They’re all up in the bridge, one tidy little package.”

  Raising the power drill he was carrying, Kirk shouted, “So let’s go get ’em!”

  * * *

  Victor and the others watched the scavengers’ impromptu reunion in the main passageway. Turning from the bridge’s screen, Victor muttered, “We’ve got to stop them.”

  “Yes,” agreed Dorn. “But how? There are ten of them.”

  “Close all the emergency hatches.”

  “They’ll burn through them with that big laser.”

  “I know. But that will take them time.”

  “So what good will that do?”

  “Theo,” Victor said, pointing to the belt lying on the deck, “get those grenades and come with me. You,” he said to Elverda, “seal all the hatches. Now.”

  As Elverda called up the life support program, Victor and Theo headed for the hatch.

  Pauline reached for his shoulder. “Victor, what are you going to do?”

  “Stop them,” he said.

  Dorn watched the two of them go, then, after a moment of indecision, followed after them.

  * * *

  The hatch up the passageway swung shut with a sharp clang. Turning, Valker saw the hatch behind them bang shut. They could hear more thumps in the distance.

  “The bastards’re sealing all the hatches,” Kirk growled.

  Valker grinned at him. “What else can they do? They’re just postponing the inevitable.”

  “They might try to pump out the air.”

  “So we stay in our suits,” Valker said, pulling up his hood and inflating it.

  He motioned to the two men carrying the heavy laser welder. “Now ain’tcha glad we brought this beauty along with us?”

  Nicco laughed. “We’ll burn right through the hatches.”

  “No need to,” Valker said, pointing to the control keypad on the bulkhead beside the sealed hatch. “Just burn out the pad and get to the manual override. Won’t take more’n a minute.”

  “For each hatch,” Kirk said.

  “So what?” Valker snapped. “They’re not going anywhere. A
nd we’re not going away.”

  * * *

  Following his father’s example, Theo peeled back the plastic sheeting that covered the passageway’s structural tubing and wedged the pebble-sized grenades into the exposed metal framework in a complete circle, from the deck to the overhead and then back down to the deck on the other side.

  Dorn stood in the middle of the passageway, arms folded against his chest. “I see what you intend to do. But blowing away this section of the wheel won’t stop them. They’re already in space suits. They’ll merely jet through the open area to the next hatch.”

  “Not if they’re in the section that we blow away,” Victor said.

  “No, they’ll still be able to jet back to us,” Dorn countered. “Unless they’re killed or injured by the blast.”

  “That’s the general idea,” said Victor.

  “I can’t be a party to that.”

  “You don’t have to be. Just stay out of my way.”

  Theo spoke up. “You can show us how to fuze the grenades so we can set them off from the bridge.”

  Dorn did not reply.

  Victor strode down the passageway to where Dorn was standing. “Now listen. These scavengers would kill you and your friend without blinking an eye. They’d kill my son and me. They’d rape my wife and daughter and then kill them, too. You expect me to let them do that?”

  For several heartbeats Dorn did not reply. At last he said, “I spent a lifetime killing. My soul is drenched in blood. I can’t help you to commit murder.”

  And he walked away, past Theo, back toward the bridge.

  Victor glowered at his back. “Finish the job, Thee,” he said to his son. “I’m going to the bridge.”

  SMELTER SHIP HUNTER:

  MAIN PASSAGEWAY

  “Ow!” Nicco yelped, wringing his hand. “That’s hot!”