The Aftermath

Angie looked up at him. “Trouble again?”

“No, but if I don’t look in on that glorified clanker every spitting day it springs leaks just to devil me.”

“Maybe it misses you. Maybe the recycler loves your company.”

“Sure. And maybe water falls out of the sky. But not here.”

* * *

Aboard Vogeltod Valker was facing a grumbling crew.

“You never shoulda let them go in the first place,” said Nicco. He was a short, swarthy man with a thick mop of curly black hair and the faint trace of a scar running from the corner of his mouth across his cheek.

Valker’s usual smile faded. If Nicco’s pissed at me, he thought, the rest of ’em must be ready for mutiny.

Behind him, the others of the crew—all eight of them— nodded and muttered agreement. They had all jammed into the galley for this showdown, leaving Vogeltod cruising on automatic. The compartment felt steamy from the press of their bodies. Valker smelled sweat—and anger.

“It’s been six goddamn months,” Kirk said, his voice almost breaking with pent-up resentment. “Six months with nothing in our pocket. Nothing!”

Valker put on his brightest smile for them. “Come on, guys, we’ve had dry spells before—”

“We had them and their ship in our hands,” Kirk insisted, pounding the palm of one hand with his other fist. “The captain of the Viking, too.”

“And you let them go!”

Sitting at the head of the galley’s narrow table, Valker leaned back, seemingly completely at ease.

“Now look,” he said. “That Viking was an attack ship. Do we want to tangle with a ship that can blow us away like that?” He snapped his fingers.

Nicco and several of the others shook their heads.

“Besides,” Valker went on, “it was a Humphries Space Systems ship. Even if we could’ve knocked it off we’d have HSS after us. You want that?”

“No…” Nicco said hesitantly.

“But what about the other one?” Kirk demanded. “Hunter? It wasn’t armed. Nobody aboard her but that old woman and the cyborg.”

“A whole ship, intact.”

“And you let them go.”

“That’s what we’re after,” Valker said. “That’s the one we’re looking for.”

“For six goddamn months.”

Spreading his arms, Valker said, “It’s been a lean six months, I know. If we’d run across something else we would’ve taken it. You know that. But this region’s been pretty damned empty.”

“Then we oughtta move to an area where there’s better pickin’s.”

“You’re right,” Valker said smoothly. “That’s just what I intend to do. I hate to give up on Hunter, though. She could have fetched a pretty penny for us at Ceres.”

“Six months is long enough.”

“Too long.”

“Okay. I hear you,” Valker said to them. “Just give me another few days. If we don’t find Hunter by then, we’ll move to another sector.”

“Not in a few days,” Kirk said, baring his teeth. “Now.”

Valker broadened his smile. “You’re not giving the orders on this ship, Kirk. I am.”

“Well maybe we oughtta change that.”

Slowly Valker got to his feet. He stood a good six centimeters taller than Kirk. “If you want to—”

“CONTACT,” boomed the computer’s synthesized voice over the intercom speakers in the galley’s overhead, “CONTACT WITH AN UNIDENTIFIED SHIP.”

Valker held up a clenched first. “There you are, guys! We’ve found her!”

CARGO SHIP PLEIADES: SOLAR STORM

Although Victor Zacharias cruised through the Asteroid Belt in silence, emitting no signals that another ship could detect except an occasional microsecond pulse of search radar, he still listened to whatever chatter Pleiades’s antennas could pick up. Sometimes he thought the only thing that kept him from outright madness as he sailed alone through the empty months was the inane entertainment broadcasts from Earth and the Moon.

He was leaner now, harder. His years of enforced labor on Chrysalis II had toughened not only his outlook but his body as well. His arms were hard ropes of muscle, his midsection flat and firm. The midnight black beard he had grown made him look satisfyingly menacing, he thought. I’ll shave it off when I find Pauline and the kids, he told himself.

He sat alone in the galley, his soffbooted feet propped up on one of the swivel chairs, and watched an educational vid from Selene. An earnest young scientist was walking the viewer through the new liquid mercury optical telescope at the Farside Observatory. With a pang of memory, Victor saw the original Farside facility that he had helped to design: the ten-kilometer-square spread of dipole antennas that made up the main radio telescope, the old twenty-meter reflector spun from lunar glass, the labs and workshops and dormitory facility for the Farside staff.

But the scientist-narrator was pretty much of a bore, Victor thought, droning on about details of the new telescope. He switched to an entertainment channel from Earth.

“And what did these Godless scientists bring us?” thundered a florid-faced man in a white suit. “Floods! Drought! Storms that drowned whole cities! Those were the fruits of the secularists who brought on the greenhouse warming and the biowars and all the other horrors of our age! They brought down the wrath of God upon us!”

The preacher marched back and forth across his stage as he went on, “It was only when the Faithful returned to their God, only when the people of this great nation accepted the Lord as their salvation, that some measure of peace and stability returned to the land.”

Victor flicked through a dozen more channels before stopping at an erotic film. Two women, three men, clad in nothing but glistening perspiration. I wonder where this is broadcast from? Victor asked himself. Certainly nowhere in the United States, not with the New Morality in control of the media.

The scene shifted to a dimly lit Asian temple. Four, no five naked women were making love together. Victor leaned back in his galley chair and thought about moving to the bunk in his compartment. But then I might miss something, he rationalized. Suddenly a squad of barbarian warriors burst into the temple. The women squealed daintily as the men cast off their furs and weapons and delved into them.

“WARNING,” the ship’s intercom blared emotionlessly. “THIS IS A WARNING FROM THE INTERNATIONAL ASTRONAUTICAL AUTHORITY’S SOLAR WATCH. A FORCE-FIVE SOLAR FLARE HAS ERUPTED IN THE LOWER LEFT QUADRANT OF THE CHROMOSPHERE. RADIATION FROM THIS EVENT WILL REACH LETHAL LEVELS FOR ALL UNPROTECTED PERSONS AND EQUIPMENT. FURTHER BULLETINS WILL BE BROADCAST AS THE SOLAR STORM DEVELOPS. TAKE ALL NECESSARY PRECAUTIONS AND STAY TUNED FOR NEW INFORMATION AS IT DEVELOPS.”

Switching to the IAA’s dedicated information channel, Victor saw that the deadly radiation cloud from the flare would miss Mercury, but envelop Venus and Earth within a few hours.

No word yet on how intense it’ll be when it reaches the Belt, he saw. The cloud of hard radiation belched out by a solar flare was guided through the solar system by the twists and kinks of the interplanetary magnetic field. A cloud that wreaks havoc on Earth’s telecommunications might not come within a hundred million klicks of Mars even when the two planets were at their closest.