she told herself. Half a normal Earth gravity has become more than my old bones can accept.
Should I ask him to slow down? No, she decided, I shouldn’t. He wants to get to the next site, find the bodies left coasting through space after the battle, give them a decent death rite.
And what happens after we’ve found them? she asked herself. He’ll want to search for others. Already he’s talking about other battles, other sites to search. He’ll never stop. Not until someone stops him.
She looked up at the main display screen. It showed emptiness, cold dark vacuum lit only by the pitiless stars strewn through the endless black. So many stars! Elverda marveled. Why are there so many of them?
“Could you come down here to the workshop?” Dorn’s deep voice came through the intercom speaker. “I… I need your help, please.”
“Of course.” Elverda got out of the command chair, winced at the twinge of pain from her hip, and headed down the passageway that led to the workshop and, beyond it, to the fusion reactor and propulsion system, deep in the bowels of the ship.
The hatch to the workshop was open. She gasped as she stepped in and saw Dorn bent over his own left arm resting on the table. His left shoulder socket was empty; tiny telltale lights winked inside the open socket.
He heard her and turned slowly on the swivel stool he sat upon. The human side of his face twitched with what might have been an apologetic grin.
“I can’t get it back on again without help,” he said.
“What happened? How did—”
“The arm was malfunctioning. I couldn’t apply full power to my hand. It felt… weak, almost paralyzed.”
Standing beside him, she couldn’t take her eyes off the disembodied arm. “We should get you back to Selene,” Elverda said.
“Not necessary,” he replied. “I found the faulty circuit and repaired it. But I can’t reattach the arm without your help.”
“Tell me what to do.”
He nodded gravely. “One final test, first.”
Dorn picked up an oblong metal box, about the size of a handheld remote control wand, and thumbed the keys on its face. The arm on the table top flexed slightly at the elbow. The fingers of the hand clutched and opened, clutched and opened. Elverda shuddered.
“The power readout is fine,” Dorn said, his voice flat and emotionless. Turning to Elverda, he put down the remote and said, “Now let’s see if we can get the arm back where it belongs.”
It was heavy, far heavier than she had expected it to be. Elverda could barely lift it. Dorn gripped it in his human right hand and held it steady for her.
“Put it flush against the shoulder socket,” he told her, “then rotate it until it clicks into place. Please.”
With hands sweaty from the exertion Elverda guided the arm into its socket and heard the clear mechanical snap as the connectors locked.
Handing her a pencil-shaped probe, he said, “Kindly check each of the connectors. They’re marked by blinking lights.”
Elverda worked the probe all the way around his shoulder. One by one the telltale lights winked out.
“Now for the acid test,” he said. Standing, he raised the arm over his head, then swung it in a full arc, flexing his fingers as he did so.
“It’s fine,” said Dorn. She thought she heard a note of relief in his voice. “Thank you very much.”
“De nada,” she murmured.
As they headed back toward the bridge Elverda asked, “When it isn’t working properly, do you feel… pain?”
“Something akin to pain,” he said. “The circuits send electrical signals to the biocomputer that’s linked to my brain. My conscious mind interprets those signals as…” he searched for a word,.”… as a sort of dull ache. A discomfort, not the same as a pain in the organic side of my body.”
Elverda nodded as they stepped into the bridge. “And the mechanical side is powered by a nuclear source?”
“It’s well shielded,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about radiation.”
“I was wondering how long it will last,” she said as she sank gratefully into the command chair.
“It’s only a small thermionic system,” said Dorn. “It will need to be replaced in a hundred years or so.”
Elverda laughed. Humor from Dorn was rare.
The radar pinged. Suddenly alert, Elverda called up its display on the main screen. A tiny pinpoint of a gleam, artificially colored bright red by the computer. Near it, a slightly larger blip, which the computer painted in blue. It appeared slightly oblong to Elverda, even at this distance.
“We have a radar contact,” she said.
“I see,” Dorn answered.
Working the keyboard, Elverda overlaid a gridwork of navigational lines atop the radar image. Numbers came up automatically. They were twelve hours away from the contact, fourteen hours from the second blip, the location of the battle that was their destination. While most of the old battle sites were empty spaces, this location was centered on a five-kilometer-long asteroid; the callout on the screen labeled it as 66-059.
The asteroid was registered in the IAA files, Elverda saw. She called up its file photo: an ungainly oblong of rock, its lumpy surface strewn with boulders and smaller stones, dented here and there with craterlets. Ugly, she decided, like a face marred by hideous scars and pimples. It had been claimed by Astro Corporation years earlier. A battle had been fought over it; men and women had died for it. Now it rode silently through the vacuum of the Belt, alone, forgotten, as it had coasted through space for all the billions of years since the solar system had been created.
Not forgotten, Elverda told herself. One of the warriors who fought here has remembered you. One of the mercenary soldiers who fought other mercenaries here has returned as a priest to pay final tribute to those he killed.
Dorn leaned in over her shoulder. Elverda saw his reflection in the main screen, his prosthetic eye gleaming red as he studied the chart and the radar image beneath it.
“Sixty-six oh five nine,” Dorn read the asteroid’s designation from the screen. “I remember this battle. We were outnumbered, but we won.”
“What do you make of the other image?” she asked.
“Too far away to tell,” Dorn replied, “although it must be fairly large to give a return at this distance.”
“Not a body, then?”
“Perhaps a cloud of debris.” He straightened up, then rubbed his chin of etched metal with his human fingers. “But I would expect that a debris cloud would have expanded much farther than that in the time that’s elapsed since the battle.”
“Could it be in orbit around the asteroid?” Elverda mused aloud. “Held there by the rock’s gravity?”
Dorn refused to speculate. “We’ll find out in twelve hours’ time. While we wait, let’s take a meal.”
Elverda smiled up at him. He’s like a little boy sometimes: when there’s nothing better to do, eat.
CARGO SHIP
BRIDGE
Like most of the deep-space vessels plying the Asteroid Belt,
But on this flight, the vessel had no passengers and only one crew member. Victor Zacharias was flat on his back on the deck underneath the main control panel, cursing fluently, an electro-optical magnifier over one eye as he traced the microthin circuitry of the ship’s control systems through the labyrinthine innards of the command consoles. Access panels and electronic modules were strewn across the plastic tiles of the deck around him. He had banged his head at least a half-dozen times, his knuckles were skinned, and his temper was fraying badly.
It wasn’t enough to steal the ship; now he had to control it. By himself. So he was working, fuming, struggling to reconfigure the ship’s control systems, to automate as much of them as possible and bring the rest of
