The Aftermath

Yeah, right, Dad, Theo thought as he worked his arms into the straps of the suit’s cumbersome backpack. Make sure we’re ready for any emergency. And when it happens, you split out of here as fast as you jackrabbit can.

Theo felt angry. And betrayed. And guilty that he should feel this way about his own father.

He was locking the helmet into the suit’s collar ring when his mother came into the equipment bay, her face tight, tense.

“I’ll check you out,” Pauline said.

“Where’s Angie?”

“She’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“Maybe I should check the tunnels,” he said.

“No. Let your sister do it. There’s more than enough to keep you both busy.”

And separated, Theo realized. Mom’s pretty sharp.

“You be careful. Thee,” said Pauline. “Make certain the pod’s safe before you do anything else.”

He nodded inside the helmet. “I’ll be okay, Mom.”

“I know you will. I just fret.”

“Yeah.”

“Theo… your father did not abandon us. I don’t want you thinking that he did. He’ll come back, you’ll see.”

Theo couldn’t answer. He knew that if he spoke he’d say something that would hurt his mother.

But she could see the anger in his face. “He did not abandon us,” she repeated.

“Yeah.” He slid the visor down, hoping it would keep his mother from seeing his expression, and clumped in the heavy boots toward the equipment bay hatch.

Up the central tunnel he climbed, the g load getting lighter with every step, and through the mini-airlocks that had automatically shut. When he came to the cross tunnel he floated weightlessly through the hatch and started downhill, toward the backup control pod. He was always surprised at how much effort it took to move himself in zero-g. You’d think it’d be like floating on a cloud, he thought as he clambered along the tunnel’s protruding rungs. Instead, you had to consciously exert your muscles all the time. If you relaxed you curled up into an apelike crouch with your arms dangling chest-high.

The cross tunnel was filled with air at normal pressure, according to the sensors on the right wrist of his suit. Theo stayed buttoned up inside the suit anyway, just to be on the safe side. When he finally arrived at the end of the tunnel, the telltales on the hatch’s control panel were all in the green. He puffed out a sigh of relief. The backup pod hasn’t been punctured, he said to himself. Then he added, if I can believe the sensors.

He tapped out the code on the hatch’s panel and the hatch slid open with a slight grating sound. Hasn’t been used in a while, Theo realized. Dust gets into everything sooner or later.

Cautiously he pushed himself through the hatch and climbed to his feet inside the pod. It was a near- duplicate of the main control center: curving panel of instruments and sensors; electronic keyboards right, left and center; display screens arrayed above the panel; command chair fastened to the deck by its short rails. But the screens were all blank, the instruments and sensors dark.

Theo took a deep double lungful of canned air, noticing for the first time how flat and metallic it tasted. His suit’s sensors told him the air in the pod was perfectly fine. Cautiously, he cracked his helmet visor a millimeter or two and sucked in an experimental breath.

“Nothing wrong with that,” he said aloud.

He raised the visor all the way, made a full turn, and decided to take off the helmet altogether.

First, though, he called his mother. “I’m in the pod. It’s undamaged.”

“Good.” He heard a world of relief in his mother’s solitary syllable. She must be using one of the suit radios, he realized. The intercom’s still out.

“Now to get all the systems up and working,” he said.

“Don’t take off your suit,” she cautioned. “Even if you’re breathing ship’s air.”

“Right.” But as soon as he clicked off the suit radio he unlatched his helmet and lifted it off his head. Easier to see and work without the helmet in my way, he reasoned.

* * *

Victor Zacharias sat in his sweatshirt and shorts, staring into the emptiness displayed on the pod’s central screen.

“He’s gone,” Victor muttered to himself. He made the cameras do a full global scan of space around the pod, but there was no sign of the vessel that had attacked him. Nothing out there but dark emptiness and the cold, distant stars watching him like the eyes of ancient gods.

“He’s gone,” Victor repeated. He wiped out Chrysalis, smashed our ship, and now he’s gone off somewhere. Looking for Lars Fuchs, he said. The man must be insane, a total barbarian. Unable to believe that the attacker would just peel away, Victor scanned the area again. Nothing to be seen but dark emptiness and the distant unblinking stars.

Has he gone back to find Syracuse? The thought frightened Victor. No, he told himself. Syracuse is accelerating toward the outer edge of the Belt. He won’t follow them that far. I hope. If I were religious I’d pray. Then he realized, Even if he is going after them there’s nothing I can do about it now. Not a goddamned thing.

No time for remorse, Victor said to himself. I’ve got to figure out where I am, where I’m heading.

They call it the Asteroid Belt, but the region is actually just as empty as a vacuum can be, almost. The asteroids sprinkled through the area are rare and small, most of them the size of dust grains. Ceres, the largest of them, is barely a thousand kilometers across. Put all the millions of asteroids together and they wouldn’t amount to a body as large as Earth’s Moon, Victor knew. Some “belt,” he thought. More like an enormous football stadium with only a few dozen people scattered among the seats.

“No time for philosophy,” Victor told himself sternly. “See where you are and how quick you can get back to the ship.”

He began running through the navigational computer’s data. The pod’s thruster had fired him off roughly in the direction of Ceres, while Syracuse—with Pauline and the kids in it—had been accelerating in the opposite direction, toward the Belt’s outer fringes. Not good, he thought. Not good at all.

The pod had no real propulsion system, only the rocket thruster that had hurled it clear of the ship once he’d fired the explosive bolts to separate from Syracuse. He had small cold-gas jets for fine maneuvering, but no engine that could turn him around and head him back to the ore carrier.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Then where am I heading?”

Again, the news was not good. The pod was on a trajectory that would miss Ceres by several thousand kilometers. Not that there was anything or anybody left at Ceres who could help him. Chrysalis was destroyed, and its rock rat inhabitants slaughtered. The few ore carriers and smelter ships that had been in orbit around Ceres must have lit off and fled out of there as fast as they could.

“Besides,” he said aloud, “I don’t have any communications that could reach them. I’m deaf and mute.”

No sense moaning, he told himself. Find out where in hell you are and where you’re heading.

He ran through the navigation program twice, then a third time. The numbers did not change. The control pod was coasting through space sunward. It would miss Ceres by exactly seventeen point nine thousand kilometers and continue sailing inward, past the orbit of Mars—which was all the way over on the other side of the Sun now— then past the orbits of Earth, Venus and Mercury. It looked as if he would miss running into the Sun and instead would swing around it and start heading outward again. If he didn’t broil first as he approached the Sun’s searing brilliance.

His outbound course would bring him back almost to the exact spot where he’d separated the pod from Syracuse—in roughly four and a half years.

Victor didn’t bother to calculate the perturbations on his course that the gravitational fields of the inner planets would cause. Why bother? Long before he reached even Mars’s orbit he’d be dead of starvation. Of course, if the pod’s cranky air recycler crapped out, he could die of asphyxiation long before that.