The Aftermath

The Asteroid Wars were over by then, forced to an end by the shock of the Chrysalis massacre. Dorik Harbin took no credit for the unexpected result of his atrocity. Humphries Space Systems saw to it that no one learned that the cyborg was the mass murderer. Dorik Harbin went about his unexciting duties as mechanically as if he were entirely a machine. But still he dreamed.

Then he was assigned to head the security detail for a small asteroid that the corporation had quietly bought from a rock rat family, deep in the Belt. Martin Humphries himself was coming from his home on the Moon to inspect the asteroid. There was something inside the rock, something artificial, something staggeringly unusual, something that was perhaps not made by human hands.

As part of his duties Dorik Harbin inspected the artifact buried deep inside the asteroid. The experience shattered him. He saw his life, all the pain and horror, all the grief and remorse that filled his dreams.

Every day he stood before the artifact. Every day the deeds of his life were peeled away, moment by moment, murder by murder. It was if he were being flayed alive, one layer of skin after another stripped from his bleeding, quaking flesh.

At last there was nothing left. The personality that he had built for himself since he’d been twelve had been stripped bare and a new persona, one that had been hidden deep inside his old one, at last came forth.

He tore all the insignias of rank from his uniform, turning it into the tattered gray costume of a penitent. Dorik Harbin ceased to exist. Out of the warrior came a priest named Dorn, as single-minded in his quest for atonement as he had once been in his missions of murder.

He still dreamed when he slept, but now his dreams were of mercy and justice.

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: BRIDGE

Elverda saw a glint reflected in the bridge’s main display screen. It was Dorn stepping through the hatch, silent as a wraith, the metal half of his face catching the light from the overhead lamps.

Touching a keypad with a long, slim finger, Elverda superimposed a navigation grid on the scene their forward camera showed.

“There,” she said, tapping the screen with her fingernail. “That’s the spot.”

She sensed Dorn nodding as he leaned over her shoulder.

“It’s empty,” she said, turning her head slightly. The human half of his face was so close she could feel its warmth, hear his slow, steady breathing.

“It wasn’t empty five years ago,” said Dorn. “We destroyed a dozen Astro warships here. Led them into a trap and ran a swarm of pebbles into them.”

“A dozen ships? How many…” She caught herself and choked off her question.

But Dorn understood. “There must have been at least ten mercenaries in each ship. Probably more. I’ve tried to get the exact number from Astro Corporation but they refuse to release such information.”

“A hundred and twenty men and women.”

“At least.”

Elverda knew what came next. They would fly a search spiral expanding outward from this site, probing with radar and telescopes for the bodies of the dead that had been drifting in space since the battle that had killed them. It would take weeks, perhaps months, to find them all.

If they lived that long.

With his prosthetic hand Dorn tapped out a command on the keyboard. The image on the screen changed subtly.

“Ultraviolet?” she asked, slightly puzzled.

“Lyman alpha,” he replied. “Ionized hydrogen.”

“Why are you looking for ionized hydrogen?”

“Exhaust trail.” With the cool metal fingers of his left hand Dorn worked the keyboard.

Even after knowing him for more than two years Elverda shuddered at the sight of the mechanical hand. She looked up at the main screen and saw that he was panning the cameras three hundred and sixty degrees, then up and down doing a complete global sweep around their ship.

“Nothing,” she said.

Dorn did not reply. The screen’s view climbed up, then swung downward.

“We’re alone.”

“Are we?” he countered. “Humphries’s people know that a battle was fought here. They know that we will come here to seek the dead and give them proper rites.”

She gestured toward the screen, empty except for the unblinking stars, so distant and aloof. “There are no ships out there.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But there is a small asteroid that does not appear on the nav charts.”

Almost feeling annoyed at his wariness, Elverda said, “Asteroid orbits change constantly. The charts are never up to date.”

“True enough,” he said. “But let’s check out that rock before we proceed further.”

“It’s barely twenty meters across,” Elverda objected. “It can’t be a camouflaged vessel.”

“I know.”

Elverda stared at him for a long, disquieting moment. Dorn looked back at her, his electro-optical eye unblinking, the overhead lights glinting on the etched metal of his skullcap. With a sigh that was half exasperation she punched in the commands that would bring Hunter to within fifty meters of the tiny asteroid.

They shared a modest lunch in the galley while Hunter cruised at minimum thrust and established itself in co-orbit near the asteroid. When they returned to the bridge, they saw that the object outside was a jagged chunk of debris, a shard torn from what had once been a spacecraft, probably an attack vessel. They trooped down to the main airlock, where she helped Dorn into a nanofabric space suit. When she had first met Dorn she’d been surprised at how agile he was: the metal half of his body was lithe and supple, not at all like a cumbersome clanking machine. Now, though, more than two years later, he seemed slower, more careful, as if his mechanical half were developing the robotic analog of arthritis.

At last she returned to the bridge to monitor his EVA. Within half an hour he was back from the airlock, a small black object in the palm of his prosthetic hand.

Elverda peered at it.

“A sensor,” said Dorn. “It was attached to the piece of debris out there. It must be programmed to detect the arrival of a ship in this area and send a message back to whoever planted it here.”

“They’ve been waiting for us?”

He nodded minimally. “I imagine they have planted such sensors at every site where there was a battle.”

“Humphries wants to find us.”

“He wants to kill us.”

Elverda knew it was true, yet she still found it hard to accept the idea in her heart, emotionally. The concept that someone wanted to kill her was so bizarre, so alien to her outlook, to her entire life, it was like being told that the world was flat.

Martin Humphries wants to kill us, she told herself. He wants to kill me. She had only known Humphries for the few weeks it had taken to fly to the asteroid where the alien artifact had been found. Where Dorn had transformed himself from a cyborg mercenary soldier to a cyborg priest. Where Humphries had gone insane with fear and guilt once he’d seen the artifact.

And now that he’s recovered, now that he knows we saw him in his terror and his shame, he wants to erase all memory of his collapse. He wants to eliminate the witnesses. He wants to kill us.

Under the pretense of preserving the artifact for scientific study, Humphries’s corporate minions had thrown a protective guard of ships and mercenary troops around the asteroid and sealed off the artifact itself—burrowed deep inside the rock—from all visitors. Not even scientists from the International Consortium of Universities were