star-hot oven the corpse was quickly vaporized, flesh boiled into gases. Finally Dorn shut down the smelter and pressed the buttons that exhausted its gases out of the ship, into the interplanetary void.
“It is finished,” he said.
As if in counterpoint, the ship’s synthesized computer voice announced, “Radar contact.”
They both hurried to the bridge.
ATTACK SHIP
BRIDGE
“Sir, there’s nobody inside this suit.”
Kao Yuan’s brows knitted as he stared at the main display screen. The three other officers on the bridge were also focusing their attention on the view of two crewmen outside the ship in nanofabric space suits grasping an empty hardshell suit. They had unfastened the suit’s helmet as they floated in the vacuum: one of the crewmen had tucked it under his arm, like a severed head.
We’ve been tracking an empty suit, Yuan said to himself. He’s damned clever, this Dorik Harbin or whatever he calls himself now. Send out the suit as a decoy to lead us on a wild goose chase.
“Bring it inside,” he commanded. To his navigation officer he asked, “Can you backtrack the suit’s trajectory? I want to know where his ship is.”
The woman looked uncertain. “I can try, sir.”
“Do so.” Turning to his propulsion officer, Yuan said, “Minimum power. Communications, I want a full sweep at all frequencies. That ship of his can’t be too far away from here.”
But a nagging voice in his head countered, Yes it can. He could have released that suit days ago. He got you to chase after it while he’s heading off in a different direction altogether.
Where would he be heading? According to the intelligence from HHS headquarters he’s on some fanatical mission to recover the bodies of all those killed in the war’s battles. That’s most likely dope smoke, but he was at this site, I’ve got to admit. We’ve got the other battle sites pinpointed, but the bodies hurled out of exploding ships could fly fifty, a hundred thousand kilometers over the years since the battles were fought. Farther, even. And they won’t all be near the ecliptic, either; some of those bodies might have gotten flung out at high inclinations.
Lips pressed together in a troubled, almost angry line, Yuan realized, Crap! I might have to spend years chasing after this nutcase.
Then he realized that the other officers on the bridge were all watching him, waiting for his next orders. He straightened up in his command chair and put on a careless grin.
“We’ll find him,” he said. “We’ll find him.” Suddenly a new realization popped into his mind. Cheerfully he told them, “And I know how to do it!”
The radar contact turned out to be a shard of metal, a fragment of a ship destroyed long ago.
Dorn leaned over Elverda’s shoulder as she sat in
“A body here,” his flesh-and-bone finger tapped the screen, “and a fragment of a ship here. We must be approaching a cloud of debris.”
“And bodies?” she asked.
“And bodies,” he confirmed. “Yes, there will be bodies.”
Elverda pursed her lips, then heard herself ask, “Would it be possible to retrieve some of the debris?”
She could see no expression on the metal side of his face, but she heard the puzzlement in his voice. “You want to pick up pieces of debris?”
“Nothing too large,” she said.
For several heartbeats Dorn said nothing. Then, “You wish to create a sculpture.”
“I didn’t realize it until just now. Yes, a sculpture. Nothing grand. Just a small monument that we can leave drifting through the Belt.”
He made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “I should have expected it.”
“Me too,” she said.
Dorn turned like a machine pivoting and went to the hatch. “I’ll suit up.”
“You don’t have to take this piece. Later, when you’re going out anyway for the bodies. There’ll be scraps of metal there, won’t there?”
“Very likely,” he said, his prosthetic leg already through the hatch. “But we might as well take this one. It will give you something to start with.”
Yuan said to his navigation officer, “Plot a course for the next nearest battle site.”
“Sir?” she asked, uncertainty in her voice, her face.
Smiling patiently, Yuan said, “Break off the pursuit course we’ve been on and get us to the next nearest battle site.”
His first mate, a chunky dour Hawaiian sitting at the propulsion console, said, “Captain, he’s not at that site. He’s—”
“I know he’s not there yet,” Yuan said, still smiling but with an edge of steel in his voice. “But he will be. And when he gets there we’ll be waiting for him.”
All three officers were clearly unhappy with their captain’s order.
Yuan asked, “How many hard-shell space suits are we carrying?”
“We haven’t used the cermet suits since we were issued the nano—”
“I didn’t ask that,” Yuan snapped. “How many of the old suits are still in storage?”
His first mate tapped into the logistics program. “Six, sir,” he said grudgingly.
“Check with the other two ships and see how many they’re carrying.”
Plainly perplexed, the first mate asked, “Sir, why do you want—”
His smile turning smug, Yuan said, “Our quarry used an empty suit to lure us away from him. Well, two can play at that game. Only, we’ll use empty suits to lure him
HABITAT
GEORGE AMBROSE’S OFFICE
“No,” said Big George. “Not until the fookin’ construction job’s finished.”
Sitting in front of George’s desk, Victor tried to hold on to his temper. “All the design work is done. There’s nothing more for me to do but supervise the work crews. You don’t need me for that.”
It was difficult to tell George’s expression beneath all that flaming red hair, but Victor heard the inflexible tone of his voice. “Look, Vic, gettin’ the habitat finished isn’t the most important thing. It’s the
“That’s my reward for helping you for more than three years?”
“Listen, mate: You’re alive because we picked you up and saved your bloody butt. You’d be floatin’ into the Sun, already dead, if it weren’t for me. You owe your life to me and the people of this habitat, what’s left of ’em.”
