risk, alerting us with that radio squeal, waiting for us to get back. She wanted us to know she was innocent. And she wanted to give us a chance to get our story straight.”
Maris nodded. “It’s a pretty thought, but we’ll never know for sure.”
Ty suddenly kicked back from his locker, waving something as he tumbled backward down the long axis of the living quarters. It was his TV, rolled up in a neat scroll. “Will you look at this,” he said.
The scroll was tied with a length of blue wire. The wire Alice had regurgitated. The cargo she had guarded all this time.
The consequences of Barrett’s murder and the sabotage of the Symbiosis ship took a couple of dozen days to settle. Maris and the rest of Wrecking Gang #3 spent some of that time in jail, but were eventually released without trial.
Before the cops came for them, they agreed to take equal shares of Alice’s gift. At first, Ty didn’t want to give Somerset anything, and Somerset refused to take its share of the wire.
“I have agreed to lie about what happened. I have agreed to tell the police that my injury was caused by an accident. I do not need payment for this; I do it to make amends to you all.”
“It isn’t payment,” Maris said. “It’s a gift. You take it, Somerset. What you do with it is up to you.”
Maris hid the wire by splicing it into the control cable of her p-suit’s thruster pack. It turned out to be an unnecessary precaution; Symbiosis believed that the passenger had taken the missing vacuum organism spores with her, after she had killed Barrett and hijacked the engine section of his ship, and the police’s search of the hab-module was cursory. After they were released, the members of Wrecking Gang #3 met just once, to divide the spore-laden spool of wire into four equal lengths. They never saw each other again.
Somerset and Bruno sold their portions on the grey market. Somerset donated the money to his temple’s refugee center; Bruno bought a ticket on a Pacific Community liner to the Jupiter System. Maris became a farmer. With an advance on the license fees for the two novel varieties of vacuum organism that her length of wire yielded, she and her family set up an agribusiness on Iapetus, ten thousand square kilometers of the black, carbonaceous- rich plains of Cassini Regio. The farm prospered: the population of the Outer System was expanding rapidly as the economy recovered and migrants poured in from Earth. Maris married the technician who had helped type her vacuum organisms. He was ten years younger than her, and eager to start a family. The dangerous idea of exploring the ruins of the domed crater where Alice’s family had lived was an itch that soon dissolved in the ordinary clamor of everyday life.
A few years later, on a business trip to Tethys, Maris paid a spur-of-the-moment visit to the hearth-home of Ty’s clan. She learned that he’d given them his length of wire and set off on a Wanderjahr. His last message had been sent from a hotel in Camelot, the only city on Mimas, the small, icy moon whose orbit lay between Saturn’s G and E rings. It seemed that Ty had taken a sled on a trip to the central peak of Hershel, the huge crater smashed into the leading edge of Mimas, and had not returned. The sled had been found, but his body had never been recovered.
Maris believed that she knew what grail Ty might have been searching for under the geometric glory of Saturn’s rings, but she kept her thoughts to herself. Tales of feral communities, fiddler’s greens, pirate cities, rebel hideouts, edens, posthuman clades, and other wonders hidden in the millions of moonlets of Saturn’s rings were by now the mundane stuff of sagas, psychodramas, and the generic fictions broadcast on illicit TV. Maris knew better than most that a few of these stories had been grown from grains of truth, but by now there were so many that it was impossible even for her to tell fact from fable.
The Political Officer - CHARLES COLEMAN FINLAY
New writer Charles Coleman Finlay made his first sale last year to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and has since followed it up with three more sales to that magazine, including the taut and suspenseful story that follows, which takes us on a deeply hazardous top secret mission into deep space, with a hard-pressed crew who soon discover that for all the dangers outside, the biggest dangers may be the ones that lurk within…
Finlay lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio.
Laxim Nikomedes saw the other man rush toward him but there was no room to dodge in the crate-packed corridor. He braced for the impact. The other man pulled up short, his face blanching in the pallid half-light of the “night” rotation. It was Kulakov, the chief petty officer. He went rigid and snapped a salute.
“Sir! Sorry, sir!” His voice trembled.
“At ease, Kulakov,” Max said. “Not your fault. It’s a tight fit inside this metal sausage.”
Standard ship joke. The small craft was stuffed with supplies, mostly food, for the eighteen-month voyage ahead. Max waited for the standard response, but Kulakov stared through the hull into deep space. He was near sixty, old for the space service, old for his position, and the only man aboard who made Max, in his mid-forties, feel young.
Max smiled, an expression so faint it could be mistaken for a twitch. “But it’s better than being stuck in a capped-off sewer pipe, no?”
Which is what the ship would be on the voyage home. “You’ve got that right, sir!” said Kulakov.
“Carry on.”
Kulakov shrank aside like an old church deacon, afraid to touch a sinner lest he catch the sin. Max expected that reaction from the crew, and not just because they’d nicknamed him the Corpse for his cadaverous and dead expression. As the political officer, he held the threat of death over every career aboard: the death of some careers would entail a corporeal equivalent. For the first six weeks of their mission, after spongediving the new wormhole, Max had cultivated invisibility and waited for the crew to fall into the false complacency of routine. Now it was time to shake them up again to see if he could find the traitor he suspected. He brushed against Kulakov on purpose as he passed by him.
He twisted his way through the last passage and paused outside the visiting officers’ cabin. He lifted his knuckles to knock, then changed his mind, turned the latch and swung open the door. The three officers sitting inside jumped at the sight of him. Guilty consciences, Max hoped.
Captain Ernst Petoskey recovered first. “Looking for someone, Lieutenant?”
Max let the silence become uncomfortable while he studied Petoskey. The captain stood six and a half feet tall, his broad shoulders permanently hunched from spending too much time in ships built for smaller men. The crew loved him and would eagerly die-or kill-for him. Called him Papa behind his back. He wouldn’t shave again until they returned safely to spaceport, and his beard was juice-stained at the corner by proscripted chewing tobacco. Max glanced past Lukinov, the paunchy, balding “radio lieutenant,” and stared at Ensign Pen Reedy, the only woman on the ship.
She was lean, with prominent cheekbones, but the thing Max always noticed first were her hands. She had large, red-knuckled hands. She remained impeccably dressed and groomed, even six weeks into the voyage. Every hair on her head appeared to be individually placed as if they were all soldiers under her command.
Petoskey and Lukinov sat on opposite ends of the bunk. Reedy sat on a crate across from them. Another crate between them held a bottle, tumblers, and some cards.
Petoskey, finally uncomfortable with the silence, opened his mouth again.
“Just looking,” Max pre-empted him. “And what do I find but the captain himself in bed with Drozhin’s boys?”
Petoskey glanced at the bunk. “I see only one, and he’s hardly a boy.”
Lukinov, a few years younger than Max, smirked and tugged at the lightning-bolt patch on his shirtsleeve. “And what’s with calling us Drozhin’s boys? We’re just simple radiomen. If I have to read otherwise, I’ll have you up for falsifying reports when we get back to Jesusalem.”
He pronounced their home Hey-zoo-salaam, like the popular video stars did, instead of the older way, Jeez-us-
