chair’s padding. The control panel’s lights flickered madly, then winked out.
He stared fixedly at the main screen. The camera view jerked violently, then swung its focus back on the attack vessel. Just as Victor had hoped, just as he’d prayed, the attacker swerved to follow him.
They both left
He thinks I’m carrying Fuchs with me, Victor thought gratefully. He thinks I’m trying to help Fuchs escape. He’s following me and leaving Pauline and the kids alone. I’ve saved them. I’ve saved them.
ABANDONED
Dad’s going to be boiled at me if he ever finds out, Theo thought as he hesitated at the lip of the auxiliary air lock hatch. He was fully suited up, with his helmet visor down and sealed. Standing on the ladder leading up to the hatch set in the ceiling, his head and shoulders above the hatch’s edge, Theo saw the long tube leading from the family’s living quarters to the control pod stretching above him, a narrow dimly lit tunnel of buckyball filament, stronger than steel, lighter than plastic.
So he boils, Theo said to himself. This is an emergency. And he started climbing up the rungs set into the tube’s circular interior. It was laborious work in the cumbersome space suit. The emergency hatches were closed tight, he saw. Every hundred meters the tunnel was divided by double hatches that served as mini-airlocks. Usually they were kept open, but if a part of the tunnel was punctured, the hatches automatically sealed shut to prevent all the air from escaping into space. Now they were closed.
Not a good sign, Theo told himself. The tunnel’s been punctured somewhere.
Gravity melted away as he climbed; soon he was taking the rungs three, four, five at a time. As he approached the tunnel’s midpoint, where the g force was effectively zero, his booted feet weren’t touching the rungs at all.
Once past the ship’s center, he allowed himself to fall, slowly at first, then with increasing speed as he neared the end of the tunnel. But the closed hatches of the airlocks stopped him from dropping all the way. He had to stop and manually open each hatch, then proceed to the next one. No tunnel diving, they way he used to when he was just a kid, eight or nine years old. Just drop from the midpoint to the end of the tunnel, let yourself fall like a stone. When his father had found out, the old man had exploded with fearful anger.
“You could kill yourself falling against the rungs!” Victor had roared. “Tear your arms out of their sockets when you try to stop! Break every bone in your empty head!”
But tunnel diving was too much fun to ignore. Theo had even gotten Angie to dive with him. Of course she banged herself up, broke an arm, and loudly wailed Theo’s guilt. Dad had confined Theo to his sleeping compartment for a week, with nothing to do but watch old vids.
Now, encased in the hard-shell suit, he worked his way down the tunnel from one sealed hatch to the next. Finally he planted his boots against the last hatch, the one that opened into the command pod. Theo let out a gust of breath. The journey had been hard work instead of fun.
No time for complaints, though. At his feet was the airtight hatch that opened into the command pod. Dad’s in there, Theo said to himself. Maybe his comm system’s been shot away. Maybe he’s hurt, wounded.
He had to carefully, painfully turn himself around so he could see the hatch’s control panel. Its status light glared bright red. Vacuum on the other side of the hatch! Gripes, did Dad have enough time to get into his suit? The pod must be punctured!
Theo was literally standing on his head, clinging to the ladder’s rung with one gloved hand. He reached for the hatch’s control panel, but stopped his shaking hand just in time. If I open the hatch to vacuum it’ll suck all the air out of the tunnel. But the tunnel’s already been punctured and the emergency hatches are shut. Whatever air we’re gonna lose we’ve already lost. Still he hesitated. Be better to conserve the air we’ve still got, he thought. We might be out here for who knows how long.
Standing on a ladder rung, he punched at the suit radio’s keyboard on the wrist of his suit.
“Mom?” he called.
She answered immediately, “Yes, Theo.”
“I need you to pump the air out of the tunnel.”
He heard her sharp intake of breath. “There’s vacuum on the other side of the hatch?”
Sharp, Mom, he thought. “That’s what the hatch pad says. And the tunnel’s been punctured someplace; all the emergency airlocks are closed. Pump out the air and store it in the standby tanks.”
Pauline said, “All right. Can you talk with your father?”
Theo hadn’t even tried that. “I’ll see.” He called over the suit radio. No answer. He pounded a gloved fist against the hatch. No response.
“He … he doesn’t answer,” he said at last.
Again his mother hesitated before replying, “The tunnel’s evacuated.”
“Right.”
It took Theo two tries to peck out the combination that opened the hatch, his hand was shaking so much. When it finally did slide noiselessly open, his heart clutched in his chest.
There was nothing there! The entire control pod was gone! Gasping, wide-eyed, Theo slowly climbed three more rungs until his head and shoulders were through the open hatchway.
He was in empty space. Hard pinpoints of stars stared down at him from the black depths of infinity. The ship that had attacked them was nowhere in sight. Their cargo of ore was a distant cloud of rocks, spinning farther away every heartbeat. The wheel-shaped structure of the ore ship curved away on either side of him but there was no trace of the control pod. Theo saw the severed stumps of the struts that had held the pod in place, blackened by the blast of their explosive bolts.
Gone. Dad’s gone. He’s left us.
“Theo?” his mother’s voice called in his helmet earphones. “Is your father hurt? Or…”
“He’s gone,” Theo said, feeling a deadly cold numbness creeping over him. “He’s abandoned us, Mom.”
ADRIFT
“Your father did
Theo thought she looked angry. At me. She’s boiled at me because Dad took off and left us. She’s not mad at Dad, she’s spitting mad at me.
He was sitting tensely on the sofa in the family living room, feeling tired and angry and scared. Angie sat on the armchair at one end of the sofa, rigid and staring hard-eyed at him, as if he’d done something wrong. Mother was pacing slowly across the room, past the family portrait they’d taken years ago, when Theo was barely ten.
“He didn’t abandon us,” Pauline repeated.
“He blew the explosive bolts and took off in the control pod,” Theo said, his voice low, stubborn. “He left us here drifting.”
His mother stopped pacing and looked directly at him. “What your father did,” she said in a hard, cold voice, “was to draw that attack ship away from us.”
“Yeah,” Theo retorted. “And he left us without controls, without the navigation computer, without communications. The main tunnel’s been punctured, spit knows what other damage the ship’s taken.”
Pauline stared at her son for a long moment, then sank into the nearest chair, her face frozen in a mask of doubt and worry.
Angie broke the silence. “But we’ll be okay. Won’t we? I mean, we can get back to Ceres and—”
“There’s nothing left at Ceres!” Theo snapped. “He killed them all! And we’re heading outward, deeper into the Belt, toward Jupiter!”
