Guardsmen of Tomorrow (16 page)

They were the sons of Leda, and are usually represented as being gods, the
special protectors of sailors, saviors of swift-going ships when the storm winds
rage over the ruthless sea.

They were also powerful to save in battle…

-from
Mythology
by Edith Hamilton.

A first, it was only a pinpoint of light, lost among the others dimly visible through the Marsglow in the sky over Phobos-but it was different. Its light came not from any burning starfires within itself, but from that reflected from the butterscotch-colored dayside of Mars. And it moved, growing infinitesimally larger until it resolved itself into a helmeted head and suit-encased arms and legs.

It was a human, out here where no human could possibly be.

“Elb! Dino!” called the Marsman in command of Phobos Base, nestled in a crater of the little moon zipping around the main planet in less than eight hours, only some four thousand miles above its surface-a natural outpost. His shout echoed through all six chambers of the pressurized fortification. Two pairs of military boots, their adhesive soles tearing free of the treated floor with each running step, answered him.

Then they saw it, too.

The figure had moved close enough for the flickers of its jetpack to show, as it began its descent toward the pitted surface of the Martian moon. Descending-here!

“He handles that pack like one of those belters,” Elb said in a voice that was almost a whisper. “You know?”

“Couldn’t be!” said Dino. “We got them all. And occupied their asteroid mining hutches without Earth even knowing. The Earthworms still don’t know. And if a lone belter did manage to survive, there’s no way he could make it all the way here in just a spacesuit and jetpack!”

“Then you tell me who it is.”

The intruder had drifted to the cratered surface now, and began a half-walking, half-sliding movement toward the Martian station. To the three armed men inside, the approach of the clearly-weaponless newcomer still seemed menacing, although none of them could say why-perhaps because no planet-reared human should have been able to compensate for the negligible gravity of Phobos so easily.

The first Marsman, the one in charge of the three-man squad, broke the silence.

“Suit up, both of you. Let’s bring him in.”

The newcomer offered no resistance when they closed in on him a few minutes later.

Twice, he even paused to wait patiently as one or another of the less acclimated Mars-men bounced around awkwardly. Once back inside, they shed their vacuum suits so their boots adhered to the artificial flooring once more.

Their prisoner did the same without being told, and seemed oblivious to the angry buzzing of the hummers that two of the Marsmen pointed at him. It took a few seconds for those sidearms, powered by the rare Martian crystals in their handles, to power up. That was why Martian troops also carried the deadly short swords that had become their symbol, to be able to fight instantly if necessary. But once a hummer was ready, it could cut through the hardest metal like a laser-or better, since those native crystals had proved more efficient at stimulating coherent light than Earth rubies had ever been. They might be slow to start, but-once ready-they were frighteningly effective.

The man gazed calmly at his captors. His face seemed young, beneath tousled blond hair, but there was a coldness like that of space itself in his blue eyes. He was tall and slender, but had a hardness about him, too, even while standing with his open hands held calmly at his sides.

Elb gripped his hummer more tightly. “Gemini,” he breathed.

“You know him?”

“Yes. He
is
from the belt.”

“The belters are dead!”

“But I remember him. I was part of the honor guard, back when Roderick was negotiating with the belters to supply us with minerals, the way they do Earth-or did.

I saw him out there, when Roderick and Vaida made their visit…”

At the mention of Valda, Elb thought he saw the ice thaw slightly in the prisoner’s eyes. “He was the kid who took on Bardo, in a free-fall fight. Watch him. he’s quick.”

As though the warning had been a signal, the figure sprang past the two armed Marsmen and pushed the third aside. He seemed to fly to the dome’s highest point and hung there like some silent bird of prey, glaring down at the three.

“Get back here!” ordered the ranking Marsman. The prisoner continued floating across the roof over their heads. “All right, then. Dino-Elb. Nail him. Very carefully.”

The two hummers lined up on their youthful target. Whoever he was, the Marsman thought, he must be counting on a reluctance to fire inside the pressurized outpost.

Obviously he had no idea how precisely a Marsman could gauge his hummer fire.

The buzzing rose in volume as two incandescent beams of light shot from the sidearms. But another sound came first-a faint, explosive pop, and the man called Gemini was simply not there anymore.

It was too late for the two Marsmen to stop the commands their brains had sent to their fingers. In seconds, both beams seared through the roof. Air erupted through the breach before any of them could even scream, much less grab a helmet or vacuum suit.

Soon, a deathly silence enveloped the interior. It was still silent hours later, when a new pinpoint of light appeared among the stars above the ruptured dome, gradually taking the form of a space-suited man. This time, there was no one on the dark little moon to see him coming…

It had been a belter named John Egan who first realized the secret that would one day give rise to the legend of Gemini.

Egan had been one of the few belters who did not return to Earth, and the accumulated pay that would make him wealthy for life, after completing a work tour in the asteroids. Earth no longer held any attraction for the griz-zled veteran belter and, out here, the loss of his legs in an accident preparing metallic rocks for transit to refining facilities in Earth orbit was no real disadvantage.

Now another of those all-too-frequent accidents had claimed Pol, his ward-not his ward in a legal sense, but in every sense that mattered. Pol had worked scores of asteroids, as had his brother, Cass, when Egan was not keeping them at their studies.

He had been determined that, although they were growing up in the belt, they would not lack the education that planet-bound youngsters got. Cass seemed the only one to take those studies seriously, but whenever Egan tested the two of them, their scores were identical. And by now they both knew their way around an asteroid better than any longtime belters. They had survived a pirate attack that had wiped out an entire cruise ship, and now Pol had been lost to a freakish collapsing drill shaft.

Of course, by rights, neither of the boys should ever have survived the destruction of the cruise ship
Gemini
, the first- and now, probably, the last-built by entrepreneurs back on Earth for very expensive and extended vacation tours in outer space.

Egan’s fingers in their mini-servo-powered gloves played over the jetpack controls at his belt, shamelessly wasting propellant as he circled the potato-shaped rock. Four other belters orbited farther back, knowing they could do nothing but also knowing how Egan felt about the kid, ever since he pulled the twins out of a lifeboat more than twelve Earth-years ago.

Egan was remembering, too, the pink, puckered faces of the newborn infants through the window of the capsule, with their mother who was more dead than alive-and who did die a few hours later, despite all that Doc Stroude and the medical team could do. The hospital units placed out here within the belt were state of the art, by necessity, but they couldn’t always perform miracles-at least, not for the mother. They did, however, for the babies.

Egan had never seen Siamese twins before. Their births during the
Gemini’s
three-year jaunt couldn’t have been planned; the pregnancy must have happened after the trip had gotten underway. There had been no other survivors among some two hundred passengers. No other lifeboats had been launched, from what the belters later determined in examining what little remained of the wreckage.

As best they could guess as to what happened, the prospective parents would have been in the ship’s sick bay near its center when the attack occurred. That would explain why their air supply lasted a little longer than in the outer hull, spinning to simulate gravity. The medical team may have gotten called away by the ship’s alarm, which would have left the parents with their newborn infants on their own when the compartment doors reacted to dropping air pressure by sealing them off. But someone, perhaps the father, got them launched somehow. And a couple of belters had picked up the lifeboat’s signal.

Egan had persuaded old Doc Stroude to operate, and at least save one of the twins.

To his own surprise, Stroude saved them both, but there was no way to send them to Earth until the next ship brought replacement workers for those whose tours were up-and there was no surviving record of who their families had been, anyway. Egan became their caretaker by default. It was he who named them Pollux and Castor, after the Gemini Twins of mythology.

Only Doc Stroude knew that Egan had left a couple of sons Earthside, with a wife who had not been patient enough to wait after he’d signed on for the belt to try and earn them a better life. As it turned out, Egan always had plenty of help in raising the twins. Belters volunteered to spend off-shifts tending the babies. Nobody squawked at the extra cleaning cycles necessary when diapers ran short. The shop workers never quibbled over fabricating additional undersized vacuum suits as the youngsters outgrew their earlier ones. Belters came and went, but all came to regard the boys as something like good luck charms.

Besides using his accumulated earnings to bring out education modules and the latest bone-building exercise devices on the rare supply ships, Egan saw that the boys got their calcium and other supplements from the start. When they were old enough, he began a constant workout regimen to make sure they would be fit for gravity if they ever decided to migrate to Earth. Again, it was Cass who worked hardest, while Pol sloughed off, arguing that he’d never want to live planetside, anyway.

And now he never would.

The asteroid had been a good one-high in iron ore, the usual concentrations of nickel and cobalt, and exceptionally high percentages of the more valuable trace minerals.

The metallurgical stations outside the orbit of Earth’s moon would boil off its components with mirrored solar beams and collect them for the space factories closer in.

All that was necessary was to move it from the belt to Earth orbit, which was the job of the belters. It was they who fitted the small fusion rockets into each chosen asteroid, computed the course to bring it to a Lagrangian point where it would be gravitationally trapped between the Earth and moon, and sent it to join the procession of mineral chunks that made up the cornerstone of Earth’s technology in the age of space.

But first you had to drill shafts to anchor the rockets, a dirty job and a ticklish one because each rock was a different little world, with its own idiosyncrasies and dangers. Even the metallic ones often lacked complete solidity. This one had seemed relatively tame, until Pol was deep inside the first shaft spraying it with the quick-forming lining to hold the rocket in place. The walls had given way and Pol was trapped inside, stuck until his air ran out if he hadn’t already been crushed. The rock had become a monstrous tombstone.

For the first time, Egan blamed himself for keeping the boys out here all these years.

They might have been crowded and orphaned back on Earth, but at least they both would have been alive. Frustrated at his helplessness, he almost collided with the small, suited figure who jetted past him toward the asteroid. For a second, he’d thought it was Pol, that somehow the lad had dug himself free. Then he realized it had to be Cass-but hadn’t Cass been working a repair shift at the current home base for this sector? How could he have known what was going on here?

“What are you waiting for?” Cass’ voice crackled through the receiver in Egan’s helmet. “Can’t you hear him?” Cass touched down on the asteroid and anchored himself with a tool from his belt. Only later did it occur to Egan that he’d landed exactly where the shaft had been drilled, even though its closure made the spot indistinguishable from the rest of the rock.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Egan said in a tight voice. “Even if he’s alive…”

“He
is
alive. He’s in a pocket down there. If we drill along the edge of it, he can climb right out.”

“Cass, it’s no good hoping…”

“What the hell, Egan?” came another voice he recognized as Joe Nieminski. “Let him try. What’s the difference?”

Three of the belters got the long white-coated drilling tube into position, aiming at a spot Cass marked. “Go in at thirty degrees,” the boy directed. “Twelve feet-no, he says ten. Ten feet.”

Egan shook his head. If Pol’s radio was still working, they would all have heard him.

But nobody else said anything, so he didn’t either. He squinted at the bright beam that began eating into the rock, vaporizing as it went. “Stop! That’s close enough,”

Cass said, stomping his boots onto the surface to anchor them at the edge of the circular opening. He started to remind Cass that the shaft would be too hot to enter at once, when he realized he was seeing not one but two small vacuum suits on its perimeter. The gasps on his receiver from the others told him he wasn’t hallucinating.

“Pol?” he whispered. “
Pol
?”

The Marsmen looked out of place within the hollowed-out asteroid, with their tight-fitting uniforms, shiny boots, and swords of all things. Even the supremely-confident Roderick, ruler of an entire planet, had to move gingerly in the negligible gravity. The belters, by contrast, lounged easily- some might have said insolently-on both sides and even above the line of visitors, and their functional garb seemed plain and worn compared to the crispness of the military-style clothing.

But it was Roderick’s daughter, Valda, who drew the appreciation of this mostly-male bastion. Pol, perched next to Egan on the front rank, and Cass, who had arrived late from a job and ended up farther back, only just managed to keep from gaping openly. None of the few female belters they had known had prepared them for this. She was tall and slim, with long auburn hair that trailed behind her in the negligible gravity like the blazing tail of a comet. She wore garb as formal as the dozen Marsmen in the delegation, but its severity stood no chance at all against the stunning form it covered.