The Aftermath

allowed to visit the asteroid. The news media had been totally stonewalled, to the point where it was widely believed that the reports of an alien artifact were nothing more than a legend concocted by some of the UFO crackpots among the rock rats.

Elverda Apacheta knew how powerful the artifact was. It had changed Dorn from a murderous mercenary soldier into a priest intent on atoning for his former life. It had shaken her own soul more profoundly than any experience in her long life. Before she had seen the artifact she had been ready for death, weary of the trials and disappointments of living, convinced that her talent had shriveled within her disenchanted soul. But once she looked upon that mystical, amorphous, shifting work of wonder she was overwhelmed with new purpose. Before the artifact she had regarded Dorn with a distaste that was almost loathing; after the artifact she realized that Dorn was the child she had never borne, the tortured soul who needed her solace, the man whom she would help and guide and protect even at the cost of her own existence.

The artifact had changed Martin Humphries, of course. His swaggering, self-confident ego had been shredded into a whimpering, pathetic figure huddled into a fetal ball, pleading for escape. But the effect had been only temporary; Humphries recovered. Now the wealthiest man in the solar system was determined to erase the two witnesses of his moment of weakness.

Staring at the sensor in his metallic hand, Elverda asked Dorn, “What do you want to do?”

Slowly, Dorn crushed the miniaturized sensor. It crunched like a crisp wafer. Then he answered, “Find the dead. Treat them with respect, if not honor.”

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: COMMUNICATIONS CENTER

Thoroughly bored, Kao Yuan curled his lip at the image on his comm screen. Not that the woman who was speaking to him would see his expression. This was a one-way transmission: the latest orders from Humphries Space Systems headquarters on the Moon to Yuan and his three-ship formation. Besides, he was certain that the image he was watching was a computer-generated persona; Martin Humphries might not deign to speak to him personally, but he didn’t want any additional people to know about this mission he’d sent Yuan on, either.

“Mr. Humphries is pleased with your idea of seeding the battle sites with sensors,” the image was saying, “but he wonders if all the battle sites are recorded. Dorik Harbin did a lot more than attack the Chrysalis habitat, of course.”

“Of course,” Yuan murmured, feeling slightly bemused to be talking to a pile of computer chips. At least the woman’s image was voluptuously beautiful. Humphries has an eye for buxom young women, he thought.

“Mr. Humphries stressed once again that this matter must be handled very discreetly. The fugitive Dorik Harbin is not alone in his ship. There is at least one accomplice with him. Both of them—and anyone else with them—must be eliminated. They must disappear and never be found. There must be no way for anyone to discover that Mr. Humphries has ordered their executions. That must be clearly understood.”

Yuan’s bored smile grew slightly less tolerant. “I understand,” he said to the unhearing image on his screen. “My crew understands. The crews of the other two vessels also understand. Clearly.”

He had received these same instructions, or closely similar ones, from this computer persona at least twice a month for the past eight months. Humphries wants Harbin or Dorn or whatever he’s calling himself killed. And his accomplices with him. But he doesn’t want anyone to know about it. They must simply disappear out here deep in the Asteroid Belt. All of them. No sweat, Yuan thought. All I have to do is find them.

A strange mission, Yuan thought. Track down a mass murderer and his accomplices, but do it in secrecy. Why doesn’t Humphries want the credit for executing the man responsible for the Chrysalis massacre? And what’s Harbin doing out in the Belt, anyway? They claim he’s trying to recover the bodies of the mercenaries killed in battles. That sounds flaky. Maybe it’s just a hallucination that HHS intelligence dreamed up. Maybe the intel flunkies are popping the wrong pills.

Yuan had been hunting for the renegade for nearly eight months now, without success. He had planted sensors at most of the old battle sites where HSS intelligence had told him that Harbin/Dorn was likely to visit. Now he simply waited for the fugitive to show himself.

“It’s only a matter of time,” he said to the screen as the image prattled on. “If your brain trust is right about him traveling to the old battle sites.”

Growing impatient, Yuan got to his feet, left the soundproofed booth that served as Viking’s communications center and stepped back onto the bridge. He was an imposing figure, even in his unadorned coveralls, nearly two meters tall in his softboots, broad of shoulder and narrow of waist. His inky black hair was brushed straight back from his forehead; it was long enough almost to touch his collar. No military buzz cut for him: Yuan preferred to look casually dashing. A dark little tuft of a Vandyke decorated his chin. He had deep brown eyes and a crooked little grin that he thought—no, he knew— that women found enticing.

Yuan had never intended to be a mercenary warrior. His father had been a chef in his native Jiangsu province; his restaurant was recognized as the finest in the region. And the gambling room in back was always filled with fools who thought they might beat the forbidden computer games the old man had smuggled past the government’s censors. “All this will be yours one day,” his father had told him so often that Yuan actually began to believe it. By the time he was ten, Yuan was not only a decent cook, he was the best computer gamer in the province. People signed in from as far away as Shanghai to play against the child prodigy. He let them win only often enough to assure that they’d return and spend more of their money.

But when the greenhouse warming shifted the rains and the province’s rice paddies turned to dust, his father’s restaurant was closed by the government and Yuan was drafted into the “volunteer” army that took possession of Vietnam and its invaluable rice bowl in the well-watered Mekong delta. Then the greenhouse floods swept over the delta and he was lucky to escape alive.

The strangest turn in his life, Yuan thought, was when the government sent him to the Chinese base on the Moon to help build the hydroponics farms there. He hated living underground. Trying to feed several thousand workers from the meager crops grown in the long hydroponics trays was a challenge, but not an enjoyable one. Better was the fact that he could jigger the base’s computers to run gambling games; better still, most of the women at Base Mao found him more attractive than the stolid soldiers and technicians who made up the base’s male population.

Yuan dreamed of returning to Earth once his tour of duty in the army was finished. But once he realized that the government back home would press an unemployed former cook into service wherever they wanted him to work, he signed up with Humphries Space Systems and became a mercenary soldier. Mercenaries had to eat, and Yuan was ready to feed them. HSS pay was far better than the army’s, the uniforms were smarter, and the selection of women was more diverse.

What he hadn’t expected was that he’d be forced to fight. And kill. Aboard the stripped-down attack vessels that battled for control of the Belt, even a cook had to take his turn at the weapons console. During the bitter years of the Second Asteroid War, Kao Yuan found that he was good at the cat-and-mouse chases in the dark emptiness of space. He had always been a winner at computer games; now he maneuvered a real ship and fired real lasers. The enemy vessels were little more than blips on a screen or distant clots in an observation port. They twisted and dodged but he always—almost—caught up with them and won the game. His youthful skills earned him rapid promotion from cook to captain.

This mission to find the renegade and whatever accomplices riding with him was strange, though. For some reason Martin Humphries himself wanted them erased. The war was over; this mission was a personal quest, an exercise in vengeance. God knows what they did to make Humphries so determined to kill them, Yuan thought. He had not the slightest interest in finding out what it was. I don’t want that powerful egomaniac after me, he told himself.

As he looked over the three crew members sitting at their posts on the bridge, Yuan thought, Find the renegades, destroy them, and earn the bonus Humphries has promised. Then you can go back to what’s left of Shanghai and open the best restaurant they’ve ever seen.

His goal was to own the best of restaurants. With a gaming room in back, a gaming room from which he