The Aftermath (2 page)

“We'll do an overhaul when we get to Ceres, won't we?” she asked.

“I was just talking to Ceres,” he said, walking across the little compartment and kissing her absently on the crown of her head. “Three more ore ships have been hit, so prices are up.”

“Three ships?” she asked, alarmed.

“Corporation ships, Pauline. Nobody's attacking the few independents, like us. Not even the mercenaries.”

“Still…”

Ignoring her unspoken fears, Victor mused, “If we can get this cargo of ore to the market before prices dip again, we'll make a nice profit. Then we can overhaul the ship good and proper.”

“Will we be able to afford a rejuve therapy, too?” Pauline blurted.

“Rejuvenation?” Victor looked genuinely shocked. “You? Why?”

She loved him, not least because her husband always seemed to see her through adoring eyes. He was short, barrel-chested, starting to get potbellied. That hardly mattered to her. His real strength, Pauline knew, was in his character. Victor Zacharias had pride, yes, but more than that he had intelligence. When she'd first met him, Victor had been strong enough to bend steel rods with his bare hands. What really impressed her, though, was that he was sharp enough to talk his way out of confrontations, clever enough to win fights without violence.

And he had that beautiful, thick, curly, midnight black hair. Pauline envied her husband's luxuriant dark ringlets. This many months out in the Belt, he had allowed his hair to grow down to his collar.

“I think it's time for a treatment,” Pauline said. “I'm not getting any younger.”

“Pah!” He dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “People back at Ceres think you and Angie are sisters.”

“That's not true, Vic, and you know it.”

“It
is
true,” he insisted. “You just don't notice it.”

“Nonsense.” But she smiled.

He sat beside her, just one hip on the corner of the dresser's little padded bench, and put an arm around her slender waist.

“You're gorgeous, Pauline,” he said into the mirror.

“Not as gorgeous as I used to be.”

He raised his dark brows, then took a breath. “I think it's gilding the lily, but if you want a rejuve treatment when we get back to Ceres, go ahead and do it.”

“We'll be able to afford it?”

He nodded. She leaned her head on his shoulder and he curled around and kissed her.

And slid off the bench, plopping onto the threadbare carpet. They laughed together.

Later, as they lay in their handsome waterbed together, Pauline said into the shadows, “Victor, Theo thinks you don't trust him.”

“What?”

She turned toward him, sending a gentle wave through the bed. In the darkened room she could make out the curve of his bulky shoulder, the outline of those raven ringlets.

“He wants more responsibility, darling. He's almost sixteen now—”

“And he's a terrible klutz,” Victor said, chuckling. “All arms and legs, no coordination.”

Pauline smiled, too. She remembered Theo's disastrous attempt to repair one of the galley's faulty microwave ovens. It was functioning poorly when Theo started tinkering with it. It was a complete loss by the time he gave up.

But she coaxed, “You could let him relieve you in the command pod now and then, couldn't you? Like you let Angie sit in. After all, the ship's cruising on automatic, isn't it?”

“We're on course for Ceres, yes.”

“Couldn't Thee watch the panels for an hour or two? It would free you up to work on repairs. And it would mean so much to him.”

“As long as he doesn't touch anything,” Victor muttered.

“Maybe he could even work with you on more of the maintenance chores,” Pauline suggested.

“I'm not sure I have the patience for that,” he said.

“But you'll give him a chance?”

She sensed him smiling.

“He wants to go to Selene University and study biology,” he said.

“Leave us?” She felt startled by the thought.

“Sooner or later,” said Victor. “I can't keep him on this ship against his will. Not for long.”

“But he's not even sixteen.”

“He will be.” Victor fell silent for a moment. Then, “I wonder what kind of a man he'll turn out to be. I've tried to teach him.…”

“Give him a chance,” Pauline urged. “Show him that you trust him.”

“I suppose you're right,” he said softly. “I'll have to give him a try.”

ORE SHIP
SYRACUSE
: APPROACHING CERES

Syracuse
was shaped like a giant wheel, with two long intersecting spokes bracing the rim: a pair of three-kilometer-long buckyball tubes running perpendicular to each other. The ship's control center was nothing more than a pod attached to the rim at the end of one of the spokes: The ship spun slowly through space, producing a sense of almost a full Earth gravity along the rim of the wheel.

“Now remember,” Victor said to his son, “watch everything, touch nothing.”

Sitting in the control pod's command chair with his father standing at his shoulder, Theo nodded unhappily.

“This is a big responsibility, son. I'm going to leave you in charge for a couple of hours.”

To Theo, his father's heavy-browed, dark-haired face looked somehow menacing. Victor looked like a solid, sawed-off stump of a tree, his torso thick and powerful. He wore faded gray shorts and a sweatshirt, the sleeves cut off to show his hairy, muscular arms. Theo kept his own skinny arms hidden inside long sleeves.

The command chair in which Theo sat was wedged into a curving bank of screens that displayed every aspect of
Syracuse
's systems: propulsion, navigation, life support, logistics supplies, communications, emergency equipment, and the fourteen thousand tons of asteroidal ores held in magnetic grips at the center of the slowly turning buckyball tubes.

“We're on the approach course for Ceres. The controls are locked in, so you don't have to worry about navigation. Are you sure you can handle the responsibility of being in command?” Victor asked anxiously.

That's a laugh and a half, Theo said to himself. The ship's on automatic and I'm in command of nobody. Plus I'm not supposed to touch anything. Some responsibility.

Misunderstanding his son's silence, Victor said, “It's a dangerous world out there, Thee. There's a war going on.”

“I know,” Theo muttered.

“Ships have been attacked, destroyed. People killed.”

“Dad, the war's between the big corporations. Nobody's bothered independent ships, like us.”

“True enough,” Victor admitted, “but there are mercenaries roaming around out there and out-and-out pirates like Lars Fuchs—”

“You told me Fuchs only attacks corporate ships,” Theo said. “You said he's never bothered an independent.”

Victor nodded gravely. “I know. But I want you to keep your wits about you. If anything unusual happens—anything at all—you call me at once. Understand?”

“Sure.”

“At once,” Victor emphasized.

Theo looked up at his father. “Okay, okay.”

With a million doubts showing clearly on his face, Victor reluctantly went to the command pod's hatch. He hesitated, as if he wanted to say something more to his son, then shrugged and left the pod.

Theo resisted the impulse to throw a sarcastic two-fingered salute at the old man.

At least, he thought, it's a beginning. I'll just sit here and let him take over once we've entered Ceres-controlled space. It's a beginning. At least Mom got him to let me babysit the instruments.

Slightly more than an hour later, Theo sat in the command chair, his brows knitted in puzzlement at the fuzzy image displayed on the ship's main communications screen.

Syracuse
was still more than an hour away from orbital insertion at Ceres. But something strange was happening. Theo stared at the crackling, flickering image of a darkly bearded man who seemed to be making threats to the communications technician aboard the habitat
Chrysalis,
in orbit around Ceres, where the rock rats made their home. The image on the display screen was grainy, the voices broken up by interference. The stranger was aiming his message at
Chrysalis:
Theo had picked up the fringe of his comm signal as the ore ship coasted toward the asteroid.

“Please identify yourself,” said a calm, flat woman's voice: the comm tech at
Chrysalis,
Theo figured. “We're not getting any telemetry data from you.”

The dark-bearded man replied, “You don't need it. We're looking for Lars Fuchs. Surrender him to us and we'll leave you in peace.”

Lars Fuchs? Theo thought. The pirate. The guy who attacks ships out here in the Belt.

“Fuchs?” The woman's voice sounded genuinely puzzled. “He's not here. He's in exile. We wouldn't—”

“No lies,” the man snapped. “We know Fuchs is heading for your habitat. We want him.”

Theo realized that something ugly was shaping up. Much as he hated to relinquish command of
Syracuse
—even though his “command” was nothing more than monitoring the ship's automated systems—he reluctantly tapped the intercom keyboard.

“Dad, you'd better get up here,” he said, slowly and clearly. “Something really weird is going on.”

It took a moment, then Victor Zacharias replied testily, “What now? Can't you handle anything for yourself?” There was no video: voice only.

“You gotta see this, Dad.”

“See what?” He sounded really annoyed.

“I think we're sailing right into the middle of the war.”

“Ceres is neutral territory. Everybody knows that and respects it.”

“Maybe,” Theo said. “But maybe not.”

Grumbling, Victor said, “All right. I'm on my way.”

Only then did Theo notice that the blank display screen's indicator showed his father was in the master bedroom. He felt his cheeks redden. He and Mom … No wonder he's cheesed off.

ORE SHIP
SYRACUSE
: CONTROL POD

Theo sat in the command chair, watching and listening to the chatter between
Chrysalis
and the strangely menacing stranger.

His father stepped into the control pod, dark face scowling.

Theo swiveled the command chair and got to his feet, crouching slightly in the confined head space of the pod. Gangling, awkward Theo had his father's deep brown eyes, but the sandy hair and tall, slender build of his mother. There was the merest trace of a light stubble on his long, narrow jaw. His denims were decorated with decals and colorful patches. “What's got you spooked?” Victor asked in a heavy grumbling voice as he lowered himself gingerly into the command chair. He had injured his thigh months earlier while loading
Syracuse
's cargo of ores from one of the rock rat miners deeper in the Asteroid Belt. The leg still twinged; Victor had scheduled stem cell therapy when they arrived at the
Chrysalis
habitat.

Gesturing to the main display screen that covered half the curving bulkhead in front of them, Theo replied, “Take a look.”

But the menacing stranger had apparently cut his communications with
Chrysalis.
To Theo's dismay, the main screen showed nothing more than a standard view of the approaching asteroid and its environs. At this distance Ceres was a discernable gray spheroid against the star-spattered blackness of space. Circling in orbit about the asteroid, the habitat
Chrysalis
glittered light reflected from the distant Sun: a Tinkertoy assemblage of old spacecraft linked together into a ring to make a livable home for the rock rats. They had built the makeshift habitat to escape the dust-choked tunnels that honeycombed Ceres itself.

Radar displays superimposed on the screen showed the images of nearly a dozen ships, mostly ore carriers like
Syracuse
or massive factory smelters, in orbit around the asteroid; their names and registrations were printed out on the screen. Two other ships were visible, as well. One was labeled
Elsinore,
a passenger-carrying fusion torch ship from the lunar nation of Selene. The other had no name tag: no information about it at all was displayed on the screen. From the radar image it looked like a sleek, deadly dagger.

Victor Zacharias scratched absently at his stubbled chin as he muttered, “By god, that looks like a military vessel—an attack ship.”

“She's not emitting any telemetry or tracking beacons,” Theo pointed out.

“I can see that, son.”

“They were talking to
Chrysalis
before you came in,” Theo explained. “Sounded threatening.”

Victor's blunt-fingered hands played over the comm console. The main screen flickered, then the image of the bearded man came up.

“Attention
Chrysalis,
” he said in a heavy, guttural voice. “This is the attack vessel
Samarkand.
You are harboring the fugitive Lars Fuchs. You will turn him over to me in ten minutes or suffer the consequences of defiance.”

Theo said to his father, “Lars Fuchs the pirate!”

“The rock rats exiled him years ago,” Victor muttered, nodding.

The voice of
Chrysalis
's communications center said annoyedly, “Fuchs? God knows where he is.”

“I know where he is,”
Samarkand
replied coldly. “And if you don't surrender him to me I will destroy you.”

His image winked out, replaced by the telescope view of Ceres and the spacecraft hovering near the asteroid.

Victor began to peck intently on the propulsion keyboard set into the curving panel before him, muttering, “We've got to get ourselves the hell out of here.”