Ripley died instantly. The picosecond laser pulse pulped most of his brain into jelly.
CHAPTER 13
Lars Fuchs was sitting at his desk talking to the prospector to whom he’d leased
“I’ve been snookered out of two good rocks by HSS people,” she said, her anger showing clearly in her image on Fuchs’s wallscreen. “I’m going out to the far side of the Belt and get me a good-sized metallic ’roid. Anybody comes near me, I’ll zap ’em with the cutting laser!”
Fuchs stared at her face. She couldn’t be much more than thirty, a former graduate student like himself. Yet she looked far harder, more determined, than any graduate student he remembered. Not a trace of makeup; her hair shaved down to a dark fuzz; her cheek bones and jawline gaunt, hungry.
“I can arrange for you to transfer to another ship that’s available for lease,” Fuchs said reasonably.
The prospector shook her head. “No deal. I’m working my way around the far side. By this time tomorrow it’ll take half an hour for messages to catch up with me. Sayonara, Lars.”
The screen went blank. Fuchs leaned back in his creaking desk chair, his thoughts churning slowly. There is no way I can force her to bring
No matter which way he looked at it, he could find no answer to his problem. If we’re going back to Earth it will have to be as passengers on someone else’s ship.
Amanda came through the door from the tunnel at the same moment that the phone chimed. Fuchs automatically said, “Answer,” to the phone, but then he saw the awful expression on his wife’s face.
“What is it?” he asked, rising from his chair. “What’s wrong?”
“Ripley,” she said in a voice that sounded frightened. “They found him by the airlock, outside. He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Fuchs felt shocked. “How? What happened?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” said Kris Cardenas, from the wallscreen.
Fuchs and Amanda both turned to her image.
Cardenas looked grim. “They brought Ripley’s body to me, here in the infirmary.”
“What happened to him?” Fuchs asked again.
Cardenas shook her head warily. “Nothing wrong with his suit. He didn’t die of asphyxiation or decompression. The suit’s scuffed up a lot, but there was no system failure.”
“Then what?” Amanda asked.
She frowned with uncertainty. “I’m going to do a multi-spectral scan and try to find out. The reason I called you was to find out if he has any next-of-kin here on Ceres.”
“No, no one closer than New Jersey, in the United States,” said Fuchs. “I’ll transfer his personnel file to you.”
“He was working on the habitat?” Cardenas asked, even though she knew the answer.
“Yes,” said Fuchs absently. “Now the project will have to stop until we find someone to replace him.”
Amanda said, “We’re coming to the infirmary, Kris. We’ll be there in five minutes.”
Cardenas said, “Hang on. Give me an hour or so to do this scan. I’ll know more about it by then.”
Amanda and Fuchs both nodded their agreement.
Despite her youthful appearance, Kris Cardenas looked grave, almost angry as she ushered Amanda and Fuchs into her tiny infirmary. It was the only medical facility on Ceres, the only medical facility between the Belt and the exploration bases on Mars. Cardenas could handle accident cases, if they weren’t too severe, and the usual run of infections and strains. Anything worse was sent to Selene, while Cardenas herself remained among the rock rats.
She was twice an exile. Because her body was teeming with nanomachines, no government on Earth would allow her to land on its territory. This had cost her, her husband and children; like most of Earth’s inhabitants, they were terrified by the threat of runaway nanotechnology causing pandemic plagues or devouring cities like unstoppable army ants chewing everything into a gray goo.
Her anger at Earth and its unreasoning fears led her to cause Dan Randolph’s death. It was inadvertent, true enough, but Selene banned her from her own nanotech laboratory as a punishment for her actions and a precaution against future use of nanomachines for personal motives. So she left Selene, exiled herself among the rock rats, used her knowledge of human physiology to establish the infirmary on Ceres.
“Have you found what killed Ripley?” Amanda asked her as she and Fuchs took the chairs in front of Cardenas’s desk.
“I wouldn’t have caught it, normally,” Cardenas said tightly. “I’m not a pathologist. It damned near slipped right past me.”
The office was small, crowded with the three of them in it. Cardenas tapped a keypad on her desktop and the wall opposite the doorway turned into a false-color display of Niles Ripley’s body.
“There was nothing obviously wrong,” she began. “No visible trauma, although there were a few small bruises on his chest and back.”
“What caused them?” Fuchs asked.
“Maybe when he fell down, inside his suit”
Fuchs scowled at her. “I’ve fallen down in a spacesuit. That doesn’t cause bruising.”
Cardenas nodded. “I know. I thought maybe he died of a cardiac infarction, a heart attack. That’s when I went for the scan,” she explained. “But the coronary arteries look clean and there’s no visible damage to the heart itself.”
Fuchs squinted at the image. A human body, he thought. One instant it’s alive, the next it’s dead. What happened to you, Ripley?
Amanda echoed his thoughts. “So what happened to him?”
Cardenas’s expression grew even tighter. “The next thing I looked for was a stroke. That’s still the number one killer, even back on Earth.”
“And?”
“Look at his brain.”
Fuchs peered at the wallscreen, but he didn’t know what was normal in these false-color images and what was not. He could make out the white outline of the skull and, within it, the pinkish mass of the man’s brain. Tangles of what he took to be blood vessels wrapped around the brain and into it, like a mass of tiny snakes writhing inside the skull.
“Do you see it?” Cardenas asked, her voice as sharp as a bayonet.
“No, I don’t see… wait a minute!” Fuchs noticed that while most of the brain was a light pink color, there was an area of deeper hue, almost a burnt orange, that ran straight through the brain mass, from front to back.
“That orange color?” he said, not certain of himself.
“That orange color,” Cardenas repeated, hard as ice.
“What is it?” Amanda asked.
“It’s what killed him,” said Cardenas. “Ruptured neurons and glial cells from the front of his skull to the back. It did as much damage as a bullet would, but it didn’t break the skin.”
“A micrometeor?” Fuchs blurted, knowing it was stupid even as his mouth said it.
Amanda objected, “But his suit wasn’t ruptured.”
“Whatever it was,” said Cardenas, “it went through the transparent plastic of his helmet, through his skin without damaging it, through the cranial bone, and pulped his brain cells.”
“I have two more bits of evidence,” Cardenas said, sounding more and more like a police investigator.
