The Aftermath

“Something’s spooked her,” said the scavenger sitting at the navigation console.

“Maybe,” Valker conceded. “Or maybe they’re just being careful.”

“Should we hail them?” Nicco asked.

Valker thought it over for a moment. “No. I don’t want them to know we’re here. Let them think Syracuse is alone and needs their help.”

“But they’ll see us when they get closer.”

“If they get closer,” Kirk growled. “They’re moving away from us now.”

“But they’re slowing down,” Valker pointed out. “Strange behavior.”

“What the hell are they up to?”

“Wait and see,” said Valker. “Wait and—”

The communications screen lit up to show an image of Elverda Apacheta’s arid, withered face. Nicco immediately put it on the main screen.

“Attention Syracuse,” the old woman said. “This is Hunter. We have been diverted temporarily. We estimate rendezvous with you in approximately five hours.”

“Diverted?”

“By what?”

Valker fought down an impulse to reply and ask the woman why they changed course. Instead, he made a soothing motion with both hands and said, “Calm down, boys, calm down. She’ll be here in five hours.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Kirk, go to the boys at the airlock and tell them they can stand easy for another four hours and more. We won’t be boarding Hunter until then.”

He got out of the big padded chair, stretched his arms up to brush the overhead, then started for the hatch.

“And where’re you going?” Kirk demanded.

Valker grinned. “Back to Syracuse, to keep the ladies happy.”

“How about taking us with you?” Nicco said.

“Not yet. You maniacs would scare that woman out of her skull. I need her to produce the daughter first. Then we’ll have them both.”

“We can find the daughter without the mother’s help.”

“You stay right here and keep an eye on Hunter. That’s our prize. The two women are just icing on our cake.”

“Yeah,” Kirk sneered. “Looks like you’re going over there to lick the icing.”

“You’ll get yours soon enough,” Valker said, grinning. Then he ducked through the hatch while the other crewmen snickered behind his back.

* * *

Theo was coughing so hard his eyes watered. Not much oxy left to breathe, he knew. But the ship was edging closer, close enough for him to make out the glassteel windowed bulge of what must be her bridge, and ports and other pods along her curving flanks. Airlock hatches, too. Through his tear-filled eyes Theo saw several of them as the ship rotated ponderously, drawing ever closer.

“Come on,” he muttered, but the effort started a new fit of coughing. I’m breathing my own fumes, he realized. It’s only a matter of minutes until I choke to death.

His vision was blurring badly, but he thought he saw one of the airlock hatches slide open. He could see the figure of a man standing at the lip of the hatch, outlined against the dim red lights of the hatch’s interior.

He knew he couldn’t call to them; his suit’s radio was gone. But he waved both his arms frantically. He felt hot, beads of sweat trickling down his face, along his ribs. Coughing again. Can’t catch my breath!

It all went gray, foggy. Don’t pass out! Theo commanded himself. Stay awake!

But you need oxygen to stay awake, he said to himself. ’Sfunny, he’s so close, he can almost reach out his arm and grab me, but I’m gonna be dead by the time he gets his hands on me.

Everything slid into blackness.

* * *

Sheathed in a nanofabric suit, Dorn stood at the lip of the open airlock hatch, his eyes riveted on the space- suited body spiraling out there in the emptiness. Its arms had been pumping until a few heartbeats ago, proving that the person inside the suit was still alive. But now the arms had stopped, slumped, extended motionless from the figure’s shoulders in a weightless crouch, like a drowned man floating facedown in the water.

Dorn checked the control pad of the propulsion pack on his back. “I’m going out after him,” he told Elverda.

“Are you tethered?” she asked.

“He’s too far for a tether to reach,” Dorn said, stepping off the hatch’s rim and into nothingness. “This is a free-flight mission.”

She said nothing, but Dorn could sense her apprehension. Squeezing the control rod, he felt a sudden thrust push at the small of his back. He jetted the few hundred meters to the inert body, wrapped his prosthetic arm around it, and looked into the transparent bubble helmet.

“It’s a man,” he called to Elverda. “Very young. He seems unconscious.”

“Or dead?”

“We’ll see.” With his human arm Dorn fumbled with the oxygen hose from his own life support pack. He found the emergency port on the unconscious man’s suit and pumped fresh oxygen into it.

The youngster coughed, shuddered spasmodically, banged his nose against the glassteel bubble of his helmet.

But his eyes opened. “Wha… who are you?” The lad’s voice was rasping, painfully dry.

“You’re all right now,” Dorn said. “I’ll bring you aboard our ship.”

“My mother! My sis—” Coughing overtook him.

Dorn said, “I’m taking you to our ship. Don’t try to talk.”

Jetting back to the airlock, Dorn stood the youngster on his booted feet and turned to close the hatch. But his prosthetic arm would not move. It was frozen.

* * *

Valker floated into the zero-g hub of Syracuse and started “downhill” along the tube tunnel that led to the backup control pod, where he’d left Pauline. The going was easy at first: he merely had to flick his fingers against the rungs built into the tube’s curving side. But as the feeling of weight grew he grabbed onto a rung, turned himself around, and started clambering down the rungs with the lithe agility of a circus acrobat.

Voices! Valker stopped for a moment, listening. Yes, there were voices echoing up the tube. Two women. Pauline and her pretty young daughter. Valker licked his lips and began descending the rungs even faster than before. But silently.

* * *

“I was afraid of this,” Dorn said sorrowfully as he eased himself into one of the galley chairs. His prosthetic arm was still jutting out from the shoulder, bent at the elbow, as if a cast had been wrapped around it.

Theo couldn’t help staring at the cyborg. The old woman had introduced herself as Elverda Apacheta; the name meant nothing to Theo. But this half-man with one side of his face formed by etched metal, one eye an unblinking camera, one arm and one leg built of alloys and plastics and filled with bioelectronic circuitry—Theo couldn’t take his eyes off Dorn.