The Aftermath

Yuan couldn’t take his eyes off the corpse. He’d never seen a dead body before. All his kills had been at a distance, clean, impersonal.

“You didn’t have a gun with you. How did you…?”

Tamara flicked her right wrist and a wire-thin blade slid into her hand. “With this,” she said. “Close up and personal.”

Then she added, “There are four other crew members down in the galley. And one of our people. The crew tried to make a fight of it.”

“They’re all dead?” Yuan asked, his voice squeaking, his insides quaking.

With a quick nod Tamara replied, “Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Yuan wanted to throw up.

“Now get the woman and her cyborg friend over here. We’re going down to the asteroid.”

THE ARTIFACT

“You’re making a mistake,” Dorn warned.

The four of them—Tamara, Yuan, Elverda and Dorn— were walking down the sloping tunnel inside the asteroid that led to the chamber where the artifact was housed. Tamara had placed Koop and a crewman at the tunnel’s opening, up on the surface, inside the glassteel dome that protected the hatch.

“Don’t be stupid,” Tamara shot back, walking beside Dorn. “You can’t change my mind.”

“The artifact won’t give you control over Humphries,” Dorn insisted. “You have no idea—”

“Shut up!” she snapped.

He walked in silence for several paces, then turned to Elverda and asked in a lower voice, “Do you want to see it again?”

“Yes,” she said, with only a little trepidation. “And you?”

“I see it every night in my dreams.”

Bringing up the rear of the little group, Yuan felt a mix of anticipation and dread. This asteroid was weird: it was one of the rocky type, but it seemed to be honeycombed with burrows that were apparently natural. Less than a kilometer in length, still the gravity here inside this tunnel was at least half an Earthly g: definitely not natural. And it was warm down in this tunnel, too; something, someplace was heating the area. Overheating, Yuan thought, feeling slightly uncomfortable.

What if this alien contraption actually does give us power over Humphries? Yuan wondered. The cyborg says it won’t but what if it does? We’ll be in control of the richest, most powerful man in the solar system! But then he thought, Humphries isn’t a man to be fooled with. If he finds out what we’re doing he’ll have us all killed. If we can’t control him, what we’re doing here is writing our own death warrants.

I’ve played plenty of computer games, he said to himself, but nothing like this. Tamara’s a real gambler. She’s willing to risk all of our lives for this. His throat felt dry, his insides fluttery.

Still, he followed Tamara along the downward sloping tunnel. The rock walls narrowed; the ceiling got so low that Yuan began to stoop slightly. The old woman had slowed down so that she now walked beside him, her eyes bright and eager in her aged, withered face. Up ahead, the cyborg matched Tamara stride for stride.

Tamara. She killed Bolestos, he reminded himself. She stood right next to the man and stabbed him in the heart. She’s a murderer, a cold-blooded killer. Yuan realized that she’d been in charge of this mission all along. I only thought I was the captain; she pulled my strings and reported my every move back to Humphries himself. Now she’s rebelling, gambling for the chance to seize all of Humphries’s power. And I’m being towed along; she hasn’t even asked me what I want to do. She’s in charge and there’s nothing I can do about it.

The tunnel ended abruptly at a blank stainless steel wall.

“Open it,” Tamara said to Dorn.

“It slides open by itself,” Dorn told them.

“When?”

“On its own schedule. When the artifact was first discovered I was in command of the security detail Humphries sent here. I knew the gate’s timing down to the second. But I’ve been away so long that its schedule may have changed.”

“We’ll have to wait, then,” said Elverda.

“It might take days,” Dorn said.

“We could blast the door down,” Tamara said.

“No,” said Dorn. “You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“The gate is protected by some sort of energy field,” he replied. “Besides, an explosion might damage the artifact, if it was powerful enough to blast the gate open.”

“All right,” Tamara decided. “We’ll wait.”

Elverda took the colorful shawl from her shoulders, folded it into a makeshift pad, and sat on the stone floor. Dorn stood beside her like a protective guard.

Tamara turned to Yuan, her face shining with anticipation.

“We could still turn back,” he said. “It’s not too late to forget this whole scheme.”

“Never!” she snapped. “This is the biggest opportunity of them all and I’m playing it out, all the way.”

Yuan nodded. He knew she’d say something like that. Still, he wished he were a trillion kilometers away from here.

“Whatever happened,” Elverda asked no one in particular, “to the scientists who were studying the artifact?”

“Humphries never allowed the universities to send scientists here,” Tamara replied. “The IAA was furious, but Humphries had a legal claim to utilization of the asteroid’s resources, and that gave him the right to restrict visitors. He moved the ’roid out of its original orbit just to make it more difficult for anyone to reach it.”

Dorn said, “I would have thought he would destroy it.”

“He wanted to,” Tamara said. “He still might, if we give him the chance.”

“That’s too much power for one man to have,” Elverda said.

Tamara smirked at her. Yuan could read the expression on her face: soon one woman will have all that power.

* * *

At the other end of the tunnel, inside the glassteel dome built on the asteroid’s surface, Koop’s communicator buzzed. He flicked it open and saw the face of a security guard in one of the ships orbiting the asteroid. The woman looked upset, apprehensive.

“We just received a message from headquarters. They want to know what your ship, Viking, is doing at this location.”

Koop frowned back at the guard. “How’s headquarters know Viking’s out here? Who told ’em?”

“There’s an automated identification system planted on the ’roid’s surface. It reports any vessel that comes within our perimeter back to headquarters.”

Koop grunted. Headquarters was on the Moon, he knew, which meant that messages took half an hour or more to go one way.

“I’ll relay the message to Commander Vishinsky,” he said. “She’s inside the rock right now, out of range of my handheld.”

“Headquarters sounded pretty antsy,” the comm officer said. “And they also want to know who put Vishinsky in command,”

“Whatcha tell them?”

“Same thing she told me: Commander Bolestos died and she took over for him.”

Koop thought it over for a second or two. “Good enough,” he said. “For now.”