Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (10 page)

Henrietta watched as Jimmy’s face grew red, though not from drink. He swallowed hard a few times, took another sip from the bulb, and kept looking up at the Earth.

“By the time my son was 16, he was getting into all kinds of trouble. At school. With his friends. With the law. I tried to rein him in, but by then he acted like he hated me. The cops eventually busted him for drugs, and when the judge threatened to throw the book at Cart, I offered to put Cart into the best rehab program money could buy. He was a good kid, or so I swore before the bench. So they turned him over to me with a threat that if Cart wasn’t signed into the program within 24 hours, he was doing to detox in the county jail. I took him home with me and he promised he’d lay low. No trouble. That night after I went to sleep, he took my keys and went for a joy ride. They found my truck wrapped around a tree. Cart was thrown from the vehicle. Guess who Darcy blamed when we lowered Cart’s casket into the ground?”

At this point, little blobs of salty liquid had beaded along the rims of Jimmy’s eyes. He suddenly looked much older and more tired than he ever had since his arrival. Henrietta fetched a handkerchief—fresh and clean this time—from a pocket, and handed it to the man.

Jimmy took it gratefully and wiped his face, then blew his nose.

“Anyway,” he said, “that was a couple of years ago. Water under the bridge, like my dad would have said. But there’s not a day that doesn’t go by when I don’t remember that boy when he was five years old, running up into my arms and yelling, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’”

Jimmy let the bulb float away and put a hand up to his eyes, his back shaking silently.

Henrietta found herself placing her hand gently on the man’s shoulder. His pain was palpable through her palm. Every spasm threatened to re-spark the tears that had so recently flooded from Henrietta’s eyes. But somehow, seeing this man bare his heart, had strengthened hers. She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath.

“Damio was unexpected,” Henrietta said, her voice quavering just slightly. Words and memories she’d tried to banish for so long, were actively parading through her consciousness. There wouldn’t be any going back or turning away now.

“The company medical people said my birth control was fool-proof, but there’s no such thing as one-hundred-percent. I found out I was pregnant just 12 months into the trip.”

“And you never told ground about the pregnancy?”

“No. My idea. I was worried that they’d want me to abort. I had pills for that, just in case. But I couldn’t bring myself to use them. I figured if we arrived back where we started and there just happened to be a junior crewmember, who would it hurt? Easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. We did worry that the baby wouldn’t develop normally without Earth gravity, but he came out just fine. Everything was good.”

“But …”

“But, two weeks after Damio’s third birthday, he started having seizures. Terrible ones. They were so bad that his father began demanding that we return to Earth immediately.”

Jimmy’s lips moved as he did some mental back-of-the-envelope calculations.

“You’d have theoretically gotten back within two years, if you’d had the thruster-pushers running in time.”

“Shavro didn’t think Damio had two years. He wanted to go back in
six months.
Weld extra fuel tanks to the return stage, take off with only Damio and himself aboard, and burn for Earth at best possible speed.”

“What about the other two?”

“George and Ross? Former military. Pilots. Very by-the-book. They grudgingly went along with the idea of me having the baby, because they were good men. But when Shavro got it into his head that using the return stage was the only option for Damio, George and Ross insisted there was no way we could throw the mission plan out the window, nor the return stage for that matter, without repercussions. And as much as it hurt me to admit it, I thought they were right. Trying to fly the return stage all the way back to Earth—on a wing and a prayer, as you might say—was folly. It would likely have gotten Shavro and Damio both killed. Better to do what could be done on the original timetable, get the thrusters working, and hope for the best.”

“Obviously Shavro disagreed,” Jimmy said.

“We argued about it for a week. We got so bad Damio would cry when we raised our voices, then he’d go into fits, and we’d spend the rest of the day trying to get Damio stabilized.”

“So when did Shavro take off?”

“He didn’t. Our former military men stood in my husband’s way. Literally. I don’t know how George got a pistol onboard this mission, but he pulled it on my husband when Shavro wouldn’t back down. There was …”

Henrietta close her eyes, remembering the blood.

“Go on,” Jimmy said.

“There was a fight. Ross tried to separate them. Shavro and Ross both got shot, while Shavro brained George with a heavy wrench. Ross was the only one with in-depth medical training, and he was the first to bleed out. Then Shavro after him. George lingered for days, but his cranial injury was too severe. I had to watch all three of them die in front of me.”

“Damio?”

“Damio got worse every day for a month afterward. Then came the seizure that wouldn’t stop. His little eyes ultimately rolled up in his dead and he choked to death in my arms.”

At this point Henrietta could see Jimmy openly gaping at her.

“That’s horrible,” he said.

“You have no idea. Losing the others took me right to the edge. Losing Damio too? I went
over
the edge.”

“Is that why the thruster-pushers and mining robots were never deployed? You were completely out of it?”

“Yes.”

“Ground thought something catastrophic had happened.”

“Something catastrophic
did
happen.”

“I mean, a technical failure. An explosion. Something. One day the log updates and telemetry from 33 Riga just stopped coming. No explanation. No warning. It was like you all went to sleep. Or worse. For most of the way out here, I expected to find a disaster scene. And corpses. I am thankful that at least one person made it. But I’m curious, why is the ascent stage still missing if your husband never got to it?”

“I put the bodies in it,” Henrietta said, her face pale with vivid, terrible memory. “At first I tried to keep them outside, but even knowing they were there—little Damio especially—was insufferable. It made me even crazier than I think I already was. So I put them all in the ascent stage, programmed the ascent stage for a long-trajectory burn for the sun, and launched it. Doubtless they’ve long since burned up. I can deal with that better than I can deal with the idea of their corpses still being here. On the asteroid.”

“Another woman might have chosen to end her life,” Jimmy said.

“I almost did. Several times. But I couldn’t. Instead, I just kept everything turned off, used the onboard supplies and tools and equipment to set myself up for long-term habitation, and said goodbye to the rest of the human universe. I never wanted to see another person again. Something about holding Damio to my chest as he died … I don’t remember too much about the weeks that followed. Other than putting the bodies in the ascent stage. I remember that. Too well. Everything else …”

“PTSD,” Jimmy said. “My grandfather’s brother Mel came back with it when he was deployed with the Army. Grandpa said Mel never was the same after that. Though Mel didn’t go to counseling like the VA said he should. Mel was too proud. I hope when we get you back to civilization you’re not too proud.”

“I am not sure any counselor can help this,” Henrietta said. “The very idea of being around other human beings, at this point, fills me with terror.”

“You got over having
me
around,” Jimmy said, smiling slightly.

“There is always an exception to everything.”

“Yeah, I guess there is.”

The two of them remained quiet for several minutes while they stared at the Earth. The Moon was now clearly visible as a little white companion.

“You think you’ll be up for more work tomorrow? Getting that thruster-pusher up and running by myself was a royal pain. I really do need your help if we’re going to make this work.”

“I’ll give it my best,” Henrietta said.

“I think your best is better than most,” Jimmy said, retrieving his drinking bulb and raising it in Henrietta’s direction, before putting it to his mouth and taking a double-shot’s worth.

• • •

To Henrietta’s surprise, she didn’t have even a single episode throughout the entirety of the following day. Nor the day after that. Nor the day after that. Time once again began to spin by. Little by little, she and Jimmy brought the entire thruster-pusher array up to full strength, their fuel piped from electrolyzed wells deep in the rock.

And for the first time that Henrietta could remember, 33 Riga enjoyed gravity. If after a fashion. Everything in the house had to be rearranged for the sake of an up-down existence—where things
fell,
and you couldn’t just float your way around. But because the amount of constant thrust was relatively weak—ion engines only being capable of so much—the environment was forgiving. Such that the few times Henrietta did fall, she caught herself well before injury. And dropped items? They floated to the floor like feathers.

The Earth and the Moon grew larger.

With the thrusters completed it was time to engage the mining ‘bots and the refinery. Things that could have been done in orbit, but since the original orders had said to spend the return trip to Earth doing as much advanced digging and smelting as possible, Jimmy was eager to complete the plan. So that 33 Riga would arrive in orbit with an abundance of valuable ores and minerals already accumulated.

“We’ll sell it at a deep discount—at first,” Jimmy said as he and Henrietta worked on a mining robot’s chassis. Even with the original four crew, robot assembly would have been slow. With just two now, and one of them not entirely familiar with the old system, the process was much slower.

“The Consortium won’t be making any profits that way,” Henrietta said, twisting a bolt with her ratchet wrench.

“Not to start,” Jimmy said, using his own ratchet wrench with an experienced and vigorous repetitive snap of the elbow. “But with 33 Riga secured and providing refined product in orbit—for a fraction of a fraction of what it would cost to lift the same product out of Earth’s gravity well—I don’t think it will be long before customers are lined up with their billfolds in their hands. And once that happens, ADC can launch bigger and better refinery equipment. Maybe even some milling and machining stations, the ones where you feed in three-dee models and the automated system spits out whatever shape you want. Eventually we’ll launch more missions to more NEOs, as was originally planned. With several captured asteroids all producing, manufacturing … there won’t be anything to hold us back. The moon colonies will be completed, and populated. Our mining and refining tech for the asteroids should be adaptable to the lunar environment. I tell you, Henrietta, once there are a few thousand people in space, the cork will be out of the bottle.
Everybody
will be wanting to come up. And this time, they’ll be able to afford it too.”

• • •

The mining robots went to work, grinding slowly but surely down through the silicates that layered the outer crust of 33 Riga. It wasn’t long before they began to hit pay dirt, bringing hunks of iron and copper ore back to the surface. These raw materials were cordoned off in separate piles on the surface of the asteroid—opposite the thruster-pushers, so as to take advantage of the thrust-induced gravity. Otherwise they’d have just floated away into space.

Once the refinery was on-line, the ore began to be fed into the hopper, with spools and bricks of the refined metal dispensed on the other end. Not in huge quantities. Like all else about the asteroid-capture project, the 33 Riga refinery was a pint-sized version of the big automated refineries already working on an industrial scale, back on Earth.

But as the months passed, the stacks and coils of iron, copper, aluminum, and even gold and silver, began to accumulate. Jimmy’s mood grew buoyant as a result. He’d be contacting ground soon, to relay not only the news of his successful operation of the refinery, but also to help fine-tune their insertion trajectory.

Come in too shallow and 33 Riga might be flung off into a wild orbit, taking it far out of humanity’s grasp. Come in too steep and 33 Riga might impact—the equivalent of a couple thousand megatons. Enough to wipe out a country, and induce apocalyptic tsunamis, to say nothing of the more long-lived environmental after-effects. A comet or asteroid not terribly bigger than 33 Riga was still presumed to have ended the epoch of the dinosaurs. Do it wrong, and ADC’s attempt to capture 33 Riga for humanity’s future, might end up spelling humanity’s doom.

Through it all, Jimmy and Henrietta kept talking. A bit here, and a bit there. As both schedule and energy allowed. By the time their first year had elapsed, Henrietta actually began to think of him as her friend. Something she’d not been able to say about another person for a long, long time.

Then came the day when they were standing together in the observation dome, and the Earth was no longer a marble, nor a golf ball, nor even a baseball, but a beach ball in the black sky.

Having shed velocity with a prolonged downthrust, 33 Riga was lined up almost perfectly with its entry corridor. Once they were in the “pipe” they’d put the thruster-pushers into overdrive and conduct a final, tremendous deceleration burn. Enough to push the local gravitational equivalent of the asteroid up to 25% Earth normal—which was really saying something, and would stress every system on the asteroid. Including the people.

Jimmy pointed up to the planet, at the large ice-capped island off the eastern coast of North America.

“I figure I can negotiate something with the government. Get you a nice bit of tundra all to yourself. Nothing to do but freeze your butt off.”

Henrietta stared at where he was pointing.

“I think … I may have changed my mind.”

Jimmy’s arm dropped and he did a double take.