“I’ll make you a deal,” she said, with a teasing smile in her voice. “I’ll let you use my ship for six months. If we haven’t found them in six months you’ll give it up and stay with me.”
“Six months…”
“You’ll be mine until we find them. If we don’t, it wouldn’t be so terrible to stay with me, would it?”
Before he could decide rationally he was clasping her to him in a fiercely passionate kiss. Six months, said a voice in his mind. Six months. You can search for them. You can find them.
Then the voice added, If you can get away from Big George.
SMELTER SHIP
MAIN AIRLOCK
“It’s definitely a body,” Dorn said. He tugged on his nanofabric space suit and began sealing its front.
Elverda nodded as he pulled up the hood and inflated it into a bubble of a helmet. She had never gone outside the ship, never taken a space walk. What did the technical people call it? She asked herself. EVA. Extravehicular activity. How pretentious! How bloodless! Spacewalk is much more descriptive.
They had flown more than eighty thousand kilometers from the coordinates where the old battle had been fought, radars probing in every direction. Twice they had found chunks of debris. This was the first corpse they had located.
Elverda remembered the other bodies they had found from other battles. Desiccated, like ancient mummies. Hollow-eyed, shriveled, skin blackened by the hard ultraviolet radiation of space. Many of the dead were in space suits: they had gone into battle as fully protected as possible. Still it did them no good. They died when their ships were destroyed. Elverda shuddered at the thought of drifting through space alive, knowing that there would be no rescue, knowing that within hours or days or perhaps weeks the air in the suit would give out or you would starve or die groaning of thirst.
Worse were the poor devils who had been blown out of their ships without a space suit. Their lungs exploded in showers of blood. Their eyes burst out of their sockets. Elverda vomited the first time Dorn had brought such a corpse aboard.
“Where there is one body,” Dorn said as he clumped to the airlock’s hatch, “there must be others. They’ve scattered, but they’re out there waiting to be found.”
“Be careful,” she said as she always did.
With the swipe of his human fingers, Dorn sealed the helmet to the collar of his suit. She saw him nod. “Of course,” he said.
Then he stepped over the hatch’s sill and touched the control button that slid it shut. He raised his other gloved hand in what might have been a hesitant wave.
Elverda watched the lights on the airlock panel cycle from green through amber to red as the lock pumped down to vacuum and the outer hatch opened. Nodding to herself, she hurried along the passageway to the bridge to monitor Dorn’s EVA.
He had been a soldier all his life, from childhood. This she knew from what little he had told her about himself. Most of his revelations were confessions. As calmly as if he were talking about someone else, he told her that while in a drug-heightened rage of jealousy he had murdered a woman who claimed she loved him. Later, his mind again boiling in drugs that his employer distributed freely to enhance the mercenaries’ battle prowess, he methodically wiped out the habitat
Now he lived a life of atonement, searching for the dead who’d been left to drift through the Asteroid Belt after the war’s battles. But Elverda knew that it was more than atonement that Dorn sought: he was waiting for death. He had tried to kill himself and been prevented from succeeding at that. Now he waited for death’s hand to reach him.
And it was coming, Elverda knew. Martin Humphries’s assassins were tracking through the Belt searching for them. His own cyborg body was beginning to break down, as was her human one.
How can I save him? she wondered. How can I protect him? How can I heal him?
“Its gone, sir.”
Kao Yuan planted his fists on his hips as he loomed before the two crewmen who’d gone out to find the tiny chunk of debris on which they had planted the sensor many months earlier.
“Gone?”
They stood in the compartment just outside the ship’s main airlock, where the suit lockers stood in a silent row. The two crewmen were peeling off their nanofabric space suits as they reported to their captain.
“Gone, sir. He must have found the sensor on it.”
Yuan nodded. “That explains why it stopped transmitting its signal.”
He turned abruptly and strode back toward the bridge. The renegade found my sensor. He knows he’s being tracked. What will he do now? Which way will the mouse jump?
By the time he reached the bridge and slid into his command chair he’d made up his mind. “Navigator, program a search spiral course. He can’t be far from here.”
The navigator said, “Search spiral. Aye, sir.”
Yuan grinned inwardly. It still gave him a special pleasure to realize that he was actually captain of this ship. This isn’t a computer game, he told himself. It’s real! I’m captain of an actual attack ship. I’ve got two other ships under my command.
And once I’ve destroyed the renegade, I’ll have enough money to go back to Shanghai and open the best restaurant the city’s ever seen.
Life is good, thought Kao Yuan. Life is good.
The body was in an old-fashioned hard-shell space suit. Thank god, Elverda thought gratefully. Until Dorn slid its helmet visor open and she saw the agonized expression on its shriveled, wrinkled face. Lips pulled back over its teeth in terror, eyes wide and staring as if to ask, “Why me? Why is this happening to me?”
Dorn stared into those blank, dead eyes. “I wonder what I will look like when death reaches me.”
Elverda had no answer for him.
Working together, they laboriously removed the space suit from the stiffened corpse. Dorn put the suit together again and tossed it back into the airlock, then popped it out into space again.
“Maybe our pursuers will follow it,” he said, “and give us a little more time to continue our work.”
Elverda smiled weakly.
Then Dorn tenderly lifted the corpse in his strong arms and carried it to the cremation chamber. He had personally built this oven, modified from the ship’s standard smelting furnace, the kind that the rock rats had once used to refine the ores they pried out of metallic asteroids. Elverda always felt uneasy in this part of the ship, as if she were trespassing in a haunted house. The spirits of the dead hover around us here, she thought. This is a chamber of desolation.
Yet Dorn seemed to smile as he carefully placed the desiccated body in the exact center of the oven. He had to stoop inside the low-ceilinged chamber; when he stepped back outside it and stood beside her his face looked satisfied, at ease, almost happy.
“Your atoms will rejoin the cosmic dust,” he intoned as he swung the metal door shut and primed the heaters. “The substance of your body will someday help to build a new star, new worlds.”
Elverda knew it was Dorn’s desperate attempt at salvation, his belief that the universe recycles constantly, that nothing is ever wasted, not even the tiniest atom.
The smelter furnace roared to life. Elverda felt its heat, welcomed it warmth on her aged bones. Inside the
