The Aftermath

“Are you all right?” his mother asked, sitting in the compartment’s only chair, the spindly little plastic one that fit under the desk.

“Yeah. I’m fine, Mom.”

“You’ve been working terribly hard, I know.”

“I just can’t get the right mixture for repairing the antennas.

Nothing I’ve tried has the right electrical conductivity. I just can’t find the proper materials.”

“You’ll find the right mixture sooner or later.”

“I’ve been working on the nav program, too. Trying to find some way to cut our trajectory so we can get back to Ceres sooner.”

“Angela’s very anxious to get back to Ceres as soon as we can.”

“I… I know.”

His mother took a deep breath, then said, “The thing is, Theo … I want to know, in all honesty, what is your feeling about our chances of getting through this? Our chances of survival.”

He looked into her pearl gray eyes and saw that she expected the worst.

“I don’t know, Mom. If I can get the antennas working—even just one antenna—if we could send out a distress call, then we might have a chance of being picked up.”

“And if not?”

“Then we just keep on sailing out toward Jupiter until the reactor runs out of hydrogen. Or the recyclers start breaking down.”

“You could repair the recyclers, couldn’t you?”

“Maybe. I think so. Unless we run out of spares.”

Pauline seemed to put it all together in her mind. “Then it comes down to a question of how long our food will last.”

Theo nodded glumly, thinking, It’s really a question of how long the hydrogen lasts.

“All right then.” She got to her feet and Theo stood up to face her, almost eye to eye. “We’ll just all go on stricter diets and make the food last as long as we possibly can. It will do Angie good to slim down. Me too.”

“Mom, even if I can fix the antennas, even if we can send out a distress call…”

“I know. No one may answer. We may be too far away to be rescued. We may all die.”

He grasped both her wrists. “I won’t let that happen, Mom. I’ll take care of you. Angie too. We’ll get through this. I’ll get us back to safety.”

His mother smiled, but there was sadness in it. “I know you will, Theo. I have no doubts about that at all.”

He was glad she said it, even though he knew she didn’t really believe it.

“I won’t let you die, Mom.”

“Of course not. Besides, your father will come back for us, sooner or later. He’s probably searching for us right now.”

Theo didn’t reply to his mother. But to himself he said bitterly, Like hell he is.

CERES SECTOR: SIX MONTHS LATER

It was simple economics, brutally simple economics and nothing more. Victor needed a ship to search for his family, drifting somewhere in the outer region of the Belt aboard Syracuse. A ship cost money. He had none.

On the other hand, Big George Ambrose was in a frenzy to recover the bodies of Chrysalis’s slaughtered men, women and children.

“You can work with one of the recovery teams,” George had told Victor. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a command.

So for six months Victor Zacharias worked as a crewman aboard Pleiades, once a cargo vessel that ferried supplies to the research station orbiting Jupiter, now pressed into duty recovering the dead. The cargo bays that once held food and scientific equipment now held corpses as Pleiades wandered through the space around Ceres in an ever-widening spiral, seeking bodies wafting, tumbling, drifting through the silent dark mausoleum of space.

It was soul-killing work, following a blip on the ship’s radar screen, hoping that it actually was the remains of a human being, catching up to it only to find—in most cases—it was a fragment of one of Chrysalis’s exploded modules, or a chunk of rock, another uncharted minor asteroid. Or —worst of all—a bloody piece of a body that had been ripped apart.

Grisly work. The hell of it, though, was that Victor knew the pay he was receiving would never be enough to lease a spacecraft to search for his family. I’ll have to steal this ship, he told himself, just as soon as the opportunity comes up.

So, for day after gruesome day, week after hideous week, month after sickening month, Victor pulled on a nanofabric space suit and went out to investigate the dark blob that the radar had found. The bodies were mangled and caked with dried blood: the sudden decompression when they’d been hurled into the vacuum of space had literally exploded their lungs and blood vessels. Their skins had been burned black by the Sun’s harsh unfiltered ultraviolet radiation.

One day he found the bloody remains of a young woman clutching a baby to her chest with both arms; their eyeballs were gone, nothing but empty dark accusing sockets. Victor bullied the ship’s medic into giving him enough alcohol to get thoroughly drunk that night.

The ship’s captain was a steel-eyed woman with the unlikely name of Cheena Madagascar. She obviously didn’t like this corpse-seeking mission any more than he did. But Big George Ambrose had the ear of Selene’s governing board, which in turn had the International Astronautical Authority in the palm of its hand, so the IAA was paying for the rescue operation—at minimum rates. Selene agreed with George’s insistence that all the bodies had to be found and accounted for. All eleven hundred and seventeen of them.

Selene and the IAA faced the harsh necessities of simple economics, too. Selene and the research outposts scattered across the solar system needed the resources of the asteroids: the metals and minerals, the oxygen and water baked out of asteroidal rock or melted from icy ’roids. Big George made it abundantly clear that there would be no mining or smelting done until the rock rats could rebuild their habitat at Ceres—and the bloody war between Humphries Space Systems and Astro Corporation was brought to an end.

Douglas Stavenger, the power behind Selene’s governing council, hammered out a peace agreement between Martin Humphries and Astro’s CEO, Pancho Lane. Meanwhile, Victor Zacharias and the other crewmen of Pleiades hunted for the dead bodies drifting through the Belt.

The morning after his drunken oblivion Victor stayed in his bunk instead of reporting for duty. That earned him a visit from the ship’s medic. The young woman looked decidedly nervous as she entered Victor’s privacy cubicle unannounced.

His head still buzzing, Victor lay on his back and blinked blearily at her, tugging at the bedsheet that half covered him.

“I need a day to recover,” he told her before she could say anything.

Her lips were pressed into a thin line. She was slim, with long legs like a colt; her shoulder-length hair was dark, her cheekbones high, her deep brown eyes were flecked with gold.

“We’re both in trouble,” she said, in a near-whisper.

Victor’s brows rose.

“The captain wants to see us both. Immediately.”

He puffed out a breath. “I’ll have to get dressed, then.”

“Please hurry.” And she stepped outside his cubicle.

Sitting up was an exercise in teeth-gritting willpower. The tiny cubicle swam giddily for long moments. But at last Victor got to his feet—shakily—and pulled on his coveralls and softboots.

As he pushed his doorscreen open and stepped into the crew’s common area, he asked, “Do I have time to