Heaven Chronicles

voice said, “What are you doin' here?”

Betha's mouth quivered; helpless with disbelief, she began to laugh. “W-what are we doing here?”

Clewell grunted. “We could ask you the same question; and it wouldn't be nearly as funny. You're lucky you're here at all.”

“We thought the ship was dead; we didn't even know you had power till your lock cycled.” The taller suit shrugged. “You've got a hole in you, and—you mean, you run this thing, you already claimed it?”

“We didn't ‘claim’ it, we own it.” Betha caught her shoe under a restraining bar and twisted to face them. “I'm Captain Torgussen. This is my navigator. We let you come aboard because I thought you were in trouble. Your craft's power unit is leaking radiation; you're barely mobile. Is that why you intercepted us?”

The silvered faceplates showed her nothing, only her own tiny, distorted face. The voice was tinnily indignant. “What do you mean, leaking? There's nothin' wrong with our drive. We been out a megasec this trip, already.”

Nothing wrong? Betha glanced at Clewell, saw his eyes widen. A megasecond—a million seconds—nearly two weeks. Whoever faced her, whatever insanity moved them, their lives were going to be short and sick spent in a ship like that.

The blind face went on, “We intercepted because we thought this ship was salvage, and we wanted it. I guess it's not.” A gloved hand rose from his side, threatening, holding something that glinted. “But we have to have it. So we're taking it anyhow. Get away from those controls.” The hand twitched.

“You'll regret it. The two of you can't possibly handle this ship.” Betha carefully let go of the bar, her feet centimeters above the rug, her eyes on the panel. When she touched one button this room would be under an abrupt one-gravity acceleration: one stranger would fall onto his head, the other one onto his back.… And break their necks? She hesitated. “If you think—”

A blob of mottled fur squeezed out of a plastic port in the wall; Rusty mrred pleasantly, circling the knees of the two strangers. Betha herd one of them gasp. He pulled back, bouncing off his companion. “Look out!” Rusty darted sideways eagerly, enjoying the game. “What is it?” Their voices rose. “Shadow Jack, get it off me!”

Betha jerked the computer remote from her belt and threw it. It struck the stranger's arm and his weapon flew out into the room. Clewell moved past her to pick it from the air; the hijackers pressed back against the wall, waiting.

“Rusty. Come here. Rusty,” Betha put out her hand, and brindle ears twitched. Slowly Rusty crossed the room to sidle along her waist, purring in satisfaction. Betha scratched under the ivory chin, stroked the brindle back, shaking her head. “Rusty, you make fools of us all.”

“Well, I'll be damned!” Clewell began to pry at the weapon; strange shapes bristled along its length. “This is a can opener! Corkscrew, fork … I don't know what this one is.…” He pulled himself down. “I've heard of ailurophobes, but I've never seen the likes of those.”

Betha caught hold of a chair back, unsmiling. “You two. Get out of the suits.” They stripped obediently, rising like moths from the cocoons of their spacesuits: a man and a woman … a boy and a girl, incredibly tall and thin, neither of them more than seventeen; barefoot, in drab, stained coveralls. She blinked as the smell of them reached her. “You've just committed an act of piracy. Now tell me why I shouldn't send you out the airlock for it, without your suits.” She wondered if the threat sounded as credible or as terrible as she wanted it to.

The boy glared back at her, across a muffled fit of coughing. The girl moved away from the wall. “It was a matter of life and death.” Her voice was strained in a dry throat.

“We offered you help. That's not good enough.”

“Not our lives.” She shook her head. “We need the ship for … for …” She broke off, her eyes darted away, searching the room.

“Bird Alyn, they know why we need the ship.” Betha saw a terrible, impersonal hatred settle on the boy's face as he turned back. “You know what we are. We're just junkers, we haven't done anything to you. Let us go.”

Betha laughed again in disbelief. “You ‘just’ tried to commandeer my ship. I ‘just’ asked you why I shouldn't space you for it. But you expect me to let you go? Is everyone in Heaven system crazy?” Her voice almost slipped out of control.

“It doesn't matter.” He let go of the handhold, shrinking in on himself. “We'll die anyway. Everybody's dying. You've still got it good, you Demarchists. It's nothing to you to let us go, or let us die.”

Betha found her pipe drifting, fumbled in a pocket of her jacket for matches. “We're not ‘Demarchists,’ whatever they are. We've come from another system to establish contact with the Heaven Belt; and since we've been here we've been attacked twice, with no provocation, near the rings of Discus and by you. Now, maybe you believe you had some sort of ‘right’ to do it, and maybe you can even make me believe it. Or maybe I'll take you to Lansing to be tried for piracy.” She saw surprise on their faces. “But first you're going to answer some questions …. To begin with: who are you, and where do you come from?”

“I'm Shadow Jack,” the boy said, “and this's Bird Alyn. We come from Lansing.” He waited.

“But that's where we're going—” Clewell began.

“Why?” the girl said, blinking.

“Because it's the government center for Heaven Belt.” Betha looked back at her sharply. “Your capital must have come on hard times.”

“You really are from Outside, aren't you?” Shadow Jack folded his legs like a buddha, somehow managing not to flip over backward. “There hasn't been any Heaven Belt for two and a half gigasecs.”

“What?”

He stared, silent; Clewell gestured threateningly at the cat.

“There was a war, the Civil War. Everything got blown up, all the industry. Nobody can keep anything going anymore, except the Demarchy and the Ringers. They're the only ones far enough out to have snow on some of their rocks. Lansing is capital of zero, nothin'; most everybody in the Main Belt's dead by now.”

“I don't understand,” Betha said, not wanting to understand. Oh, God, don't let our very reason for coming here have been pointless.… “We heard that Heaven Belt had the perfect environment, that it had a higher technology than any Earth colony, than even Old Earth.”

“But they couldn't keep it goin'.” Shadow Jack shook his head.

Betha saw suddenly the fatal flaw the original colonizers, already Belters, must never have considered. Without a world to hold an atmosphere, air and water—all the fundamentals of life—had to be processed or manufactured or they didn't exist. And without a technology capable of the processing and manufacturing, in a system without an Earthlike world to retreat to, any Dark Age would mean their extinction.

As if he had followed her thoughts. Shadow Jack said, “We'll all be dead, in the end, even the Demarchy.” He looked away, forcing out the words, “But our rock is out of water now. Everybody there'll die if we have to go around Heaven again without it. And we don't have a ship left that'll take us to the Ringers—to Discus—for hydrogen to make more. We've got to find enough salvage parts to put one together. That's why we were out here. It's a gigasec before we'll be close enough to Discus to make the trip again.”

“You trade with Discus for hydrogen?” Clewell broke her silence.

“Trade?” Shadow Jack looked blank. “What would we trade? We steal it.”

“What happens if the—Discans catch you in their space?” Clewell reached under the panel for his covered drinking cup, pulled up on the straw.

Shadow Jack shrugged. “They try to kill us. Maybe that's why they attacked you: they thought you came from the Demarchy. Or maybe they wanted your ship; anybody'd want this ship. Can you run it all with only two people—?” His mismatched eyes wandered speculatively.

“Not two untrained people,” Betha said, “in case you still have any ideas. It's not even easy for us. There were five more people in our crew; the Discans killed them all.” And all for nothing.

He grimaced. “Oh.” Betha saw the girl flinch.

“One more question.” She took a deep breath. “Tell me what this ‘Demarchy’ is, that everyone seems to confuse with us.”

Shadow Jack glanced away, suddenly oblivious, as Clewell finished his drink. Bird Alyn licked her lips, rubbed her mouth with a misshapen hand.