Victor clenched his jaw so hard that pain shot through his head.
“The people of this habitat?” he snapped. “The original people of this habitat were slaughtered by the same madman who attacked my ship.”
“There are plenty of newbies streamin’ in. We need
“My family’s out in the Belt,” Victor insisted. “I’ve got to find them!”
“Your family’s dead, Vic. Admit it. It’ll simplify your life.” Every impulse in his body was urging Victor to leap over the desk between them and squeeze George’s windpipe until his eyes popped out. But his rational mind told him that the giant redhead would pull him loose like a gorilla flicking off a flea. And then where would I be? he asked himself.
George leaned forward, resting his beefy arms on the desktop. “Look, Vic, I’m not bein’ unreasonable. Another six months, a year at the most, and you’ll be free to go wherever you want.”
“The habitat will be finished in six months,” Victor muttered. “Seven, at most.”
“There y’are,” said George. “Then you’re free as a bird.”
“Unless you decide to start enlarging the place.”
George shrugged massively.
His innards trembling with rage, Victor slowly rose to his feet. “As soon as the habitat’s finished I’m leaving.”
“You’ll need a ship, of course.”
“I’ll get a ship.” Mentally he added, One way or the other.
George got to his feet, too, like a ruddy jagged mountain rising out of a geological fault. He stuck out his hand. “Till the habitat’s finished.”
Victor kept his hands at his sides, balled into fists. “Until my sentence is served out.”
He turned his back to George and went to the door.
“Don’t go gettin’ any ideas about skippin’ outta here,” George warned. “I’m puttin’ security on notice. Nobody’s gonna allow you anywhere near a dockin’ port.”
His back still to George, Victor nodded. “So be it,” he muttered.
Elverda pushed up her goggles with one hand and clicked off the handheld laser welder with the other. The work was not going very well, she thought.
For three weeks Dorn had been recovering bodies left drifting in space, and bringing back scraps of metal and plastic, the twisted remains of spacecraft that had been shattered in battle.
The trouble is, she said to herself, that you have no clear vision of what you want this monument to be. She glared critically at the coiling column that was growing from the deck plates of her makeshift workshop. The compartment had once been the ship’s loading bay, where asteroidal ores were brought aboard before being fed into the smelter. Now it was a grimy, empty, low-vaulted echoing chamber of gray metal, darkly shadowed except for the brilliant pool of light that Dorn had rigged for her. Broken chunks of metal lay scattered on the deck around her and her unfinished construct, looking hopelessly useless.
The column itself seemed just as utterly pointless to Elverda. It’s going nowhere, she told herself. It says nothing. Your talent has left you, long years ago. There’s nothing remaining: no imagination, no inspiration, no soul.
“Do you need more material?”
Dorn’s voice startled her. She hadn’t heard him enter the capacious bay.
Turning, she saw that he was eying the misbegotten sculpture intently.
“I need more ideas,” Elverda said unhappily. “I need more talent.”
Dorn shook his head slowly, a ponderous shift from side to side. “No,” he said. “You need more time.”
She placed the hand laser carefully down on the deck. “I’ve put enough time into it today.”
“Are you ready for dinner, then?”
“I’m not hungry.”
He seemed to smile. It was sometimes difficult for her to tell. “Will you join me, though? It’s depressing to eat alone.”
She grinned at him, widely. “You’re trying to psych me into eating, aren’t you?”
“A little broth,” he coaxed. “It will do you good.”
Once in the galley she sipped at the broth, then forked down the slivers of pseudomeat that he put on the table in front of her.
“Do you feel better now?” Dorn asked as he took their dishes to the sink.
“I feel full,” she admitted. “How about you?”
“I feel puzzled.”
“Puzzled? About what?”
He returned to the table and sat down heavily. “The ship that is tracking us…”
“We haven’t seen a ship.”
“No, but there is one following us. Perhaps more than one.”
Elverda nodded. Yes, she thought, Humphries must have sent someone to track us down.
“It hasn’t approached us.”
“They haven’t found us yet,” she said.
“Why not? They must know the locations of the old battles just as well as we do. They know what we are doing. Why haven’t they reached us?”
Elverda said, “We’ve been retrieving bodies. That takes us on an erratic course. It makes us harder to find.”
He seemed to think about that for several moments. At last he muttered, “Perhaps.”
“Or perhaps,” she suggested, “we’ve been wrong all along and Humphries isn’t trying to find us.”
Again Dom fell silent. Then he asked, “Do you really believe that?”
“No,” she admitted. “He wants to silence us. I’m certain of that.”
“Yet his ships are not pursuing us.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve spent much of the day scanning the region as deeply as our equipment allows. No radar blips, no ion trails, nothing.”
“Have they given up?”
“More likely they’ve returned to Ceres or Vesta to refuel and resupply.”
Nodding, Elverda said, “That could be it.”
“No matter,” said Dorn. “Our work here is finished. We’ve recovered all the bodies in the area. Now we move on to the next site.”
“How far is it?”
“A week, at one-half g.”
Elverda knew that he kept the acceleration gentle to accommodate her; she had spent most of her life in low-g environments.
“And how many sites after that?” she asked.
He puffed out a sigh. “At least two, that I know of. There must be more, but we’ll need more information from Humphries or Astro to confirm that.”
At least two more sites, she thought. And what will be waiting for us when we get to them?
HABITAT
CONTROL CENTER
It took almost a month for Victor Zacharias to prepare for his escape. He thought of it as an escape. He was
