The Stardance Trilogy (57 page)

We ate together without awkwardness, talking little but making each other smile often. After the meal, Ben kissed me, Robert kissed Kirra, and Robert and I went off to my studio together, while Kirra and Ben headed for Le Puis. They were asleep in Kirra’s sleepsack when we got back: we slid into mine and were asleep almost at once.

Glenn was murdered the next day.

We had all been weaned from our umbilicals by that point, and were spending that class touring the exterior of Top Step. Most of the interesting stuff was down by the docking area. We were able to watch the docking of a Lunar robot freighter, carrying precious water from the ice mines. We should not have been able to: that freighter was not scheduled to arrive for another four hours, or Sulke would not have had us down there. Vessels are almost always punctual in space—the moment the initial acceleration shuts down, ETA can be predicted to the second. But while this can was on its way, the Lunar traffic control computer apparently detected a small pressure leak from the hold, and applied additional acceleration and deceleration to minimize transit time. Sulke was angry when the word came over the ops channel.

Oh, we were safe enough: we were at least half a kilometer from the docks. Sulke’s gripe was that the event constituted an unplanned distraction from our curriculum—but we were all so eager to watch the docking that, after consultation with Reb, she reluctantly conceded that it would be instructive, and suspended lessons until it was over. I was pleased, since events had prevented me from watching my own docking five weeks earlier.

Long before we could see the freighter itself, we saw the tongue of fire it stuck out at us as it decelerated. Then the torch shut off, and we could see a spherical-looking object the size of a pea held at arm’s length. It grew slowly to baseball size, then soccer ball, and by then it was recognizable as a cylinder seen end-on. It grew still larger, and began to visibly move relative to the stars behind it as it approached Top Step. Now it could be seen to be as large as the Symbiote mass I’d seen the day before, tiny in comparison to Top Step but huge in comparison with a human. From one side a thin plume of steam came spraying out of the hull to boil and fume in vacuum; on the opposite side you could just make out the less visible trail of the maneuvering jet that was balancing the pressure leak, keeping it from deforming the freighter’s course to one side.

The ship was coming in about twice as fast as normal. But that’s not very fast; dockings are usually glacial. Sulke had run out of educational things to point out long before the ship had approached close enough for final maneuvers. Since our first day EVA she’d generally kept us too busy to stargaze or chatter, but now we had time to rubberneck at the cosmos and ask questions.

“What’s that, Sulke?” Soon Li asked, pointing to a far distant object in a higher orbit than our own.

Sulke followed her pointing arm. “Oh. That’s Mir.”

“Oh.” Silence. Then: “I think someone ought to…I don’t know, tear it down or blow it up or something.”

“Would you want
your
grave disturbed?” Dmitri asked.

More silence.

“What are those people doing?” Dmitri wanted to know.

We looked where he was pointing, at the docking area itself. At first I saw nothing: those docks are
huge,
designed to accommodate earth-to-orbit vehicles, orbit-to-orbit barges or taxis, and Lunar shuttles like the one we were watching—as many as two of each at one time. But then I saw the two p-suited figures Dmitri meant, just emerging from a personnel lock between the two biggest docking collars.

“Those are wranglers,” Sulke said. “As soon as that bucket docks, they’ll hook up power feeds and refueling hoses and so on. If there’s a nesting problem, they’ve got enough thruster mass to do some shoehorning too.”

“What’s wrong with that star?” Glenn asked, pointing in the direction of the slowly approaching freighters. She happened to be closest of us to it.

“Which one?” Sulke replied.

“That big one, a little Three-ish of the ship.”

I spotted the one she meant. Indeed, there were three things odd about it. It was just slightly bigger than a star ought to be, and it was the only one in the Universe that was twinkling, the way stars appear to on Earth, and it had a little round black dot right smack in the center of it. That certainly was odd. It grew perceptibly as I watched; could it be a supernova? What luck, to happen to see one with the naked eye…

“Jesus Christ!” Sulke cried out. “Reb—”

“I see it,” he said calmly. “Everyone, listen carefully: I want you to follow me at maximum acceleration, right now.” He spun and blasted directly away from the docking freighter, all four thrusters flaring.

We wasted precious seconds reacting, and Sulke roared,
“Run for your fucking lives!”
That did it: we all took to our heels, slowly but with growing speed. I cannoned into someone and nearly tumbled, but managed to save myself and continue; so did the other.

“Operations—Mayday, Mayday!” Reb was saying. “Incoming ASAT, ETA five seconds. Wranglers—” He broke off. There was nothing to be said to the wranglers.

The antique antisatellite hunter-killer slammed into the freighter at that instant. There was no sound or concussion, of course. I caught reflected glare from the flash off Top Step in my peripheral vision, and tried to crane my neck around to look behind me, but I couldn’t do it and stay on course, so I gave up. I’m almost sorry about that; it must have been something to see.

The water-ship was torn apart by the blast, transformed instantly into an expanding sphere of incandescent plasma, shrapnel and boiling water. It killed Ronald Frayn and Sirikit Pibulsonggram, the two wranglers, instantly. A half-second later it killed a Third-Monther named Arthur Von Brandenstein who had been meditating around the other side of Top Step, and had come to watch the docking like us, but had approached closer than Sulke would let us.

And a second later it caught up to our hindmost straggler, Glenn.

I’ll remember the sound of her death until my dying day, because there was so little to it. It was a sound that would mean nothing to a groundhog, meant nothing to me then, and that every spacer dreads to hear: a short high whistle, with an undertone of crashing surf, lasting for no more than a second and ending with a curious croaking. It is the sound of a p-suit losing its integrity, and its inhabitant’s final exhalation blowing past the radio microphone.

Later examination of tapes showed that the first thing to hit her was a hunk of shrapnel with sharp edges; it took both legs off above the knees, and that might well have sufficed to kill her, emptying her suit of air instantly. But you can live longer in a vacuum than most groundhogs would suspect, and it is just barely possible that we might have been able to get her inboard alive. But a split second later a mass of superheated steam struck her around the head and shoulders. P-suits were never designed to take that kind of punishment: the hood and most of the shoulders simply vanished, and the steam washed across her bare face—just as she was trying desperately to inhale air that was no longer there. When Sulke had us decelerate and regroup, she kept on going, spinning like a top. A couple of people started off after her, but Sulke called them back.

No one else died, but there were more than a dozen minor injuries. The most seriously injured was Soon Li, who lost two fingers from her left hand; she would have died, but while she was gawking at her fountaining glove, Sulke slapped sealant over it and dragged her to the nearest airlock. She suffered some tissue damage from exposure to vacuum, but not enough to cost her the rest of the hand. Antonio Gonella managed to crash into Top Step in his panicked flight, acquiring a spectacular bruise on his shoulder and a mild concussion. Two people collided more decisively than I had, and broke unimportant bones.

But the casualty that meant the most to
me
was Robert.

Once is happenstance;

twice is coincidence;

three times is enemy action.

—Ian Fleming

A
SMALL PIECE
of shrapnel, the size and shape of a stylus, was blown right through his left foot from bottom to top. It was a clean wound, and his p-suit was able to self-seal around the two pinhole punctures. If he cried out, it was drowned out by the white noise of dozens of others shouting at once, and when Sulke called for casualty reports, he kept silent. I didn’t know he’d been hurt until we were approaching the airlock, several minutes after the explosion, and I saw that the left foot of his p-suit had turned red. My first crazy thought was that some Symbiote had gotten into his p-suit somehow; when I realized it was blood I came damned near to fainting.

Cameras caught the entire incident—there are always cameras rolling around the docks—and replay established conclusively that Robert was following me, keeping me in his blast shadow, when he was hit. Or else that shrapnel might have hit me.

The explosion had shocked me, and Glenn’s ghastly death had stunned me, but learning of Robert’s comparatively minor injury just about unhinged me. I think if Reb had not been present I would have thrown a screaming fit…but his simple presence, rather than anything he said, kept me from losing control. He got us all inside, kept us organized and quiet, did triage on the wounded and had them all prioritized by the time the medics arrived. Sulke was the last one in, but when she did emerge from the airlock she paused only long enough to inventory us all by eye, and then went sailing off to goddammit get some answers.

Robert was pale, and his jaw trembled slightly, but he seemed otherwise okay. The sight of his torn foot, oozing balls of blood, made me feel dizzy, but I forced myself to hold it between my palms to cut off the bleeding. It felt icy cold, and I remembered that was a classic sign of shock. But his breathing was neither shallow nor rapid, and his eyes were not dull. He seemed lucid, responded reassuringly to questioning; I relaxed a little.

The medical team was headed by Doctor Kolchar, the doctor I’d seen briefly during my first minutes at Top Step. He was a dark-skinned Hindu with the white hair, moustache and glowering eyebrows of Mark Twain, dressed as I remembered him in loud Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts. He handed off Nicole to Doctor Thomas, the resident specialist in vacuum exposure, and came over to look at Robert. He checked pulse, blood pressure and pupils before turning his attention to the damaged foot.

“You’re a lucky young man,” he said at last. “You couldn’t have picked a better place to drill a hole through a human foot. No arterial or major muscle damage, the small bone destroyed isn’t crucial, most of what you lost was meat and cartilage. Even for a terrestrial this would not be a serious injury. Do you want nerve block?”

“Yes,” Robert said quietly but emphatically. Doctor Kolchar touched an instrument to Robert’s ankle, accepted its advice on placement, and thumbed the injector. Robert’s face relaxed at once; he took a great deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“Don’t mention it. That block is good for twelve hours; when it wears off, come see me for another. Don’t bother to set your watch, you’ll know when it’s time. Meanwhile, drink plenty of fluids—and try to stay off your feet as much as possible.” He started to jaunt away to his next patient.

I was in no mood for bad jokes. “Wait a minute! Are you crazy? You haven’t even dressed his foot. What about infection?”

He decelerated to a stop and turned back to me. “Madam, whatever punctured his foot was the size and shape of a pen. There’s nothing like that in a cargo hold, and that’s the only place I can imagine a bug harmful to humans living on a spacecraft. And you know, or should know, that Top Step is a sterile environment. His bleeding has stopped, and there was a little coagulant in what I gave him. If it makes you happy to dress his foot, here.” He tossed me a roll of bandage. “But I’m a little busy just now.” He turned his back again and moved away. I looked down at the bandage and opened my mouth to start yelling.

“It’s all right, Morgan,” Robert said. “Believe me, I won’t bang it into anything.” He smiled weakly in an attempt to cheer me up.

My rage vanished. “Oh, darling, I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”

“Nerve block is a wonderful thing. That hurt like fury!”

I pulled his head against my chest and hugged him fiercely. “Oh, Robert, my God—poor Glenn! What a horrible thing.”

He stiffened in my arms. “Yes. Horrible.”

A thought struck me. “Her body! Somebody’s got to go and retrieve it! Teena, is anyone retrieving Glenn’s body?”

“No, Morgan.” Her voice was in robot mode; she must have been conducting many conversations at once.

“But someone has to!” Why? “Uh, her family might want her remains sent home. They can still track her, can’t they?”

“Her suit transponder is still active,” Teena said. “But in her contract with the Foundation she specified the ‘cremation in atmosphere’ option for disposition in the event of her death.”

“Oh. Wait a minute—her last vector was a deceleration with respect to Top Step. She was slowing down in orbit—so she’ll go into a
higher
orbit, right? I did the same thing myself yesterday. The atmosphere won’t get her, she’ll just…go on forever…” Oh God, without her legs, boiled and burst and dessicated! Much better to burn cleanly from air friction in the upper atmosphere, and fall as ashes to Earth—

“Your conclusion is erroneous, Morgan,” Teena said. “She is presently in a higher orbit, yes—but she does not have the mass to sustain it, as Top Step does. In a short time her orbit will decay, and she will have her final wish.”

“Oh.” I felt inexpressible sadness. “Robert, let’s go home. You need rest. And I don’t care what the doctor says, I’m going to bandage your foot.”

“I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers,” he said grimly. “I want to know who shot at us!”

Somehow I had not given that question a conscious thought—but as he said the words I felt a surge of anger. No, more than anger—bloodlust. “Look, there’s Dorothy. Let’s ask her, maybe she’ll know something.”