The Aftermath

“Eight years?” she whimpered.

Trying to fight down the anger rising inside him, Theo said, “Yes. Eight years, seven months and four clays.”

“You don’t have to be so happy about it!”

“I’m not happy, Angie.”

“You’re gloating! You don’t care how long it takes. You don’t care about me at all!”

“I told you I’m trying to figure out a way to shorten it,” Theo protested. “What more can I do, for Christopher Columbus’s sake?”

She plopped herself down on the bench beside him. “Eight years! I’ll be an old woman by the time we get back.”

“If we get back,” he said. He knew he shouldn’t have said it but there it was.

“If?”

“There’s a good chance we’ll die on this bucket. The recyclers might wear out, the fusion reactor could fail, our hydrogen fuel is going to run out—”

Angie clapped her hands to her ears. “I don’t want to hear it! You’re just being spiteful!”

“It’s the truth, Angie.”

“No,” she said. “We’ll live. We’re not going to die here. If something breaks down we’ll fix it.”

“If we can.”

“And you’ll find a way to get us back to Ceres quicker, too, won’t you? You’re just teasing me, trying to make me cry.”

“Angie, I’m just telling you the facts.”

“I can’t sit here for eight years, Theo! I’ll be twenty-six years old by then! Twenty-six! All the guys my age will already be married.”

Suddenly Theo understood what was really bothering her.

“Angie,” he asked, “that bozo you dated when we were docked at Chrysalis last year—”

“He’s not a bozo! His name is Leif Haldeman.”

“How serious are you about him?”

She blinked several times before murmuring, “I love him, Theo.”

“Have you been to bed with him?”

Her cheeks flamed. “That’s none of your business!”

“Does Mom know? Or Dad?”

“There’s nothing for them to know. I love Leif and he loves me. We were going to tell Mom and Dad about it when we got back to Ceres.”

“He was living on Chrysalis?”

“He was looking for a job with one of the rock rats. He’s a mining engineer.”

Feeling totally miserable, Theo said softly, “Angie, if he was still on Chrysalis when we were approaching Ceres…”

Angie’s eyes went wide as she realized what her brother was trying to tell her. “You think he was killed?”

“I don’t think anybody aboard Chrysalis survived, Angie.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “He probably found a berth on one of the mining ships. He was probably out in the Belt somewhere when Chrysalis was attacked.”

“I hope so,” said Theo.

“He had to be!”

“I hope so,” he repeated.

* * *

Victor was roused from a troubled sleep by a beeping noise. Any sound at all aboard the cramped little pod was alarming. The muted hum of the air fans and the constant buzz of the electronics had long since faded into an unnoticed background. But a new sound—a ping, a beep, a creak—meant danger.

Instantly awake, Victor swiftly scanned the control board. No red lights, all systems functioning nominally.

The beeping sounded again, and Victor saw a yellow light flashing in a corner of the control panel.

The comm laser, he realized. What’s wrong— His breath caught in his throat. That’s the message light! Wiping sleep from his eyes with the heel of one hand, he punched up the communications system on his main screen.

TORCH SHIP ELSINORE. The yellow letters blazed on the otherwise dark screen. His mind raced. Elsinore was one of the vessels in orbit around Ceres when the attack started.

Victor pounded on the comm key. “Elsinore, this is Syracuse. What’s left of it, anyway.”

A woman’s voice replied, “We have you in sight. Will rendezvous with you in twenty minutes. Be prepared to come aboard.”

Victor wanted to kiss her, whoever she was. But then he remembered, “I don’t have a suit. I can’t go EVA.”

Several heartbeats’ silence. Then a man’s voice answered, “Very well, we will send a shuttlecraft and mate to your airlock.”

“Thank you,” Victor said fervently. He had never felt so grateful in his life. “Thank you. Thank you.”

* * *

After dinner Theo was so tired that all he wanted was to crawl into his bunk and sleep. But as he got up from the galley’s narrow table, Angie said, “Thee, isn’t there anything I can do to help you?”

He looked down at his sister. Was she asking out of a sense of duty, or because their mother had told her to? She looked sincere.

“I mean,” Angie went on, “I just sit around here all day with nothing to do but keep the kitchen appliances in working order.”

“You’re helping me work out our diets,” Pauline said, from the sink where she was scraping dishes and putting them into the microwave dishwasher. Instead of using precious water, the dishwasher blasted everything clean with pulses of high-power microwaves. Theo wondered if it wouldn’t be better to wash the dishes with recycled water than use the fusion reactor’s dwindling fuel supply to power the microwave cleaner.

“Mom, that’s nothing more than busywork,” Angie said. “I want to do something useful.”

Theo was impressed. Angie had never shown a desire to be useful before. Their parents had always raised Angie to be a little queen, he thought, lording it over him while Mom pampered her. Maybe her telling me about her boyfriend is bringing us closer together, he thought. But then a different voice in his head sneered, Or maybe she just wants to stay close to you to make sure you don’t tell Mom about her love life.

“Don’t look so surprised, Thee!” Angie demanded. “What can I do to help you?”

He blinked, then grinned. “Well…” he started, drawing out the word, “most of what I’m doing in the workshop is dogwork chemistry: mixing things and seeing if the mixtures have the conductivity I need for repainting the antennas…”

“I could help you do that, couldn’t I?” Angie asked. “I mean, you could tell me what to do and I could do it.”

Slowly he nodded. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“Good!” Angela seemed genuinely pleased. “Tomorrow morning I’ll go to the workshop with you.”

Theo glanced at his mother, still by the sink. She was smiling. Did Mom get Angie to do this? he wondered. With a mental shrug, he said to himself, doesn’t matter. Maybe Mom talked Angie into it, or maybe Angie’s growing