“Not a lot, really. My job here is more or less finished. I was hired to protect a couple of young people from you and yours, becoming very fond of them in the process, and I figured that the best way to help them, at this point, is to come along with you and make sure you don’t get into any more trouble—at least any trouble that involves them.”
“Llyra Ngu and Jasmeen Khalidov—or Wilson Ngu. I should have known.”
“No point denying it,” he shrugged. “It’s been one of my most interesting cases, and one of the most educational, what with all the figure skating and asteroid hunting. A person should never stop learning.”
“It’s an outrage, that’s what it is! Why, they’re nothing but parasites! Spoiled, wealthy children of privilege—they’re just plain bad luck!”
“For you, maybe, but what does that make your backers, and their centuries and generations of ill-gotten plunder? Say, we’re about to have company again. Why don’t you get to work now and put us on a new heading?”
“Why should I—oh, that’s right. Because you have the guns. What heading?”
Aaron looked thoughtful and smiled. “How about Mars?”
“Mars?” Crenicichla was shocked. “But if I do that—”
“We’ll be destroyed when the planet is? You know, somehow I doubt it, Johnnie. My guess is that we’re being fired on by a little group—probably working with Llyra’s brother Wilson—who are also doing something about the City of Newark right now. Those are asteroid hunters out there, my young friend, and they’re accustomed to dragging large celestial objects traveling at absurdly high velocities, off course.”
“But the Cause! All of my plans—” Suddenly he felt grateful to his mysterious and mercenary correspondent. Maybe he hadn’t spent all that money in vain.
“They’ll board that space liner, get her engines shut down, and if anybody they care for has been injured, let alone killed, then they’ll track you down like some kind of animal, Johnnie, pull your intestines out through a hole in your navel, tenderly roast them over a slow fire while you watch, and feed them to you an inch at a time. What do you think of that for a plan? You’d be better off on Mars even if it does explode.”
Hardly able to function for the icy terror pumping through his veins—he couldn’t remember ever being more frightened than this—Crenicichla let the computer tell him how to get to Mars from where he was, and—just as Marko and his three friends passed again, spitting fire and metal—ducked under on a new heading to the formerly Red Planet.
CHAPTER FORTY: SURVIVORS
Catastrophe is a peculiar thing. It might take an individual who has been a complete failure in life and turn him into a hero who, once the emergency is over with, slides comfortably back into failure again. That’s a fairly common chain of events. Or it can take a competent, successful individual and turn him into a blubbering weakling. I’ve seen that happen, too.
The thing is, you can never predict exactly how it’ll turn out. You can only watch—and laugh or weep—as it happens. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
It was cold in here.
Wilson could tell that in several ways. Among them, the little microscopic scrubbers inside his helmet were having difficulty keeping up with the frost that wanted to form on the inside of his faceplate. He tried hard breathing downward, away from the faceplate, but it didn’t work very well.
He, himself, was warm enough. This was an exceptionally good envirosuit his grandmother had insisted on, and these were considerably milder conditions than it had been manufactured for. He paid close attention, however, to his toes and fingers, and had his suit monitoring their temperature.
When he had crawled the full length of the escape tunnel—an easier job than he had expected it would be—he ran into a circular door at the top. Featureless, it didn’t yield to pressure, nor could he fit a finger into the crack that divided the two halves, to pull it open.
He hadn’t thought to bring a tool belt along—a major failure in his estimation. So much for the great rescuer. He had a caliper that would have worked perfectly. He considered using one of his guns, but suddenly realized that he didn’t know what the conditions were on the other side of the door. In the tunnel, it was a hundred and ten below zero, and while there was plenty of nitrogen and traces of rare gases, the carbon dioxide had frozen out—he could look back at the trail he’d made in the dry ice frost—and the oxygen fraction was all but gone.
He opened the control panel on his left arm and pulled out one of many thermocouples that informed his suit of conditions outside of its protection. He gently teased it out, without yanking hard on the fine wires connecting it. He pulled out his field knife, a heavy nine-inch titanium alloy blade recommended specifically for use in space, formed into the shape that knifesmiths and their clients often refer to as a “sharpened prybar”.
He adjusted the microphones outside his suit to the maximum, and began working the knife, slowly and deliberately, into the fine line that separated the halves of the circular door. He heard no hissing or rushing noise, which meant that the atmospheric pressure levels on each side of the door were more or less equal. When he could see a tiny glimmer of light through the space he’d made, he inserted the thermocouple into it along the unsharpened back edge of the heavy knife.
Brrrrr! The same miserable hundred and ten degrees. He reclaimed his thermocouple, tucked it away, and began prying in earnest at the door halves. At some point, the electronics in the door must have decided that somebody had caught something important in the gasketing while trying to get away, and it opened, surprising Wilson, releasing his knife, and nearly spilling him back down the tunnel, the way he’d come.
Hanging on by his elbows, he thrust himself up into the control area, put his knife away in the scabbard built into his suit, and pushed a labeled button that reclosed the door. To his left, he saw a human form still sitting in the pilot’s chair. Expecting the worst, he approached the seated body, turned the chair, and looked down at a lifeless face. She had been blond, almost pretty, and wore an East American Space Lines uniform. But she hadn’t died of cold or anoxia. Her head hung on her chest in a manner suggesting that her neck had been broken. It would have been easy to prove if she hadn’t been frozen solid.
The navigation computer in front of her had been ripped loose of its system of sensors and servos, and was probably worthless. He wondered if she’d done it—a forensic inspection would tell, he supposed. He found a panel that gave him views of various areas throughout the ship, which seemed, except for this young woman, to be deserted.
Then he began finding bodies here and there, an inordinate number of young men wearing identical gray suits, almost like a uniform, and an ununiformed individual here and there. They were all dead and covered with frost.
Finally, he found a view of the service core. At the very bottom, nearest the engines, he saw a sight that nearly made him collapse in despair. Dozens, maybe hundreds of bodies were huddled together in the failing warmth, probably having breathed their last breaths of decent air. Green cylinders were scatted everywhere. It looked like they’d collected and exhausted every canister of emergency oxygen in the ship.
There was more than one camera in the service core, but, try as he might, he couldn’t see his sister or Jasmeen. That was probably a good thing.
He spoke. “Scotty, do you hear me?”
“Indeed, I do, Commodore. We’re aft in the engineering spaces, Pharch and me. These pirates, or whatever they were, really knew how to screw up beautiful machinery. All six engines are at full throttle, producing one third of a gee, but there doesn’t seem to be any easy way left to control them.”
Wilson said, “Well, whatever you do, don’t open the service core yet. There are hundreds of bodies in there, hundreds, just forward of where you are. They’re all almost certainly dead—” It had been extremely difficult to say that. “—but I don’t want to take a chance. Think about how we can access them without killing them, will you?”
“
Aye, aye, Commodore. “Did you see—”
“No, I didn’t. Shorty and Merton, did you copy that? Don’t enter the—”
“I may have a solution for you, Wilson.” It was Merton, who was turning out to be surprisingly resourceful. “It looks like there’s some kind of emergency refuge on the cargo deck where they normally carry heavy machinery. It’s someplace they could go if a Caterpillar tractor got loose and went out through the hull. I’m looking at it now—it’s tiny—but it seems to have an inner hatch connecting to the service core.”
“It wasn’t in the blueprints,” Scotty added. He had a memory for engineering.
Merton replied, “It has the look of a retrofit, and a fairly clumsy one.”
“You want us to go in?” asked Shorty.
“No, no,” said Wilson. “Wait for me. We’ll all go in at the same time.”
“I’ll stay below,” Pharch volunteered. “And keep an eye on the engines.”
***
Conditions in the cargo hold were much the same as everywhere else aboard the City of Newark, with slightly higher concentrations of oxygen than on the upper decks—the organisms that consumed it were further away—but not quite enough to sustain life. It was abysmally cold.
Wilson joined his friends at the makeshift airlock, having moved Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend to a closer mooring. Everything inside the hold was covered with a thin layer of carbon dioxide snow. On this deck, it seemed to be mostly heavy construction equipment, bound, he guessed, for Mars, or perhaps even for transshipment to the Jupiter project, or Ceres. Some of it looked like machinery that his father had argued about with the Curringer Corporation and had planned to order.
“Gentlemen,” Wilson told his friends, reaching for the airlock door, “I’ll be going in first. After all, it’s my kid sister in there.”
And Jasmeen.
Nobody wanted to challenge Wilson on that point. He opened the outer door, squeezed into the small amount of space available inside—the airlock had been hastily constructed from common sandwich panels, relatively thin titanium alloy on the outsides, half an inch of foamed aluminum on the inside, the panels welded together into a box with ragged edges and corners that could tear an envirosuit if its wearer happened to be careless—and told the others, “Okay, who else is coming? There may be room for one more in here, as long as they’re pretty small.”
“As much as it pains me to admit it … ” Shorty didn’t finish the sentence, but managed to squeeze in beside Wilson. The door swung closed.
Wilson looked at Scotty through a porthole inset in the door. “Why don’t you and Merton stay out here and watch our ships—unless we call you? It’s probably not going to be a very pleasant sight in there.”
Scotty nodded. “We’ll just be sitting here, all alone by the telephone.”
“No,” Merton said. “I’ll be back at my ship, collecting oxy canisters, just in case.”
“Good thinking. Check mine, too. Here we go.” Wilson opened the inner door and stepped onto a tiny steel platform. A ladder beside it ran the length of the core, a little over a thousand feet.
“Whoa!” Shorty had nearly missed the platform and fallen into the core. They both knew that a fall like that, even at one third gee, was fatal.
Down at the bottom, they could just make out the huddled bodies, looking a bit like they were lightly covered with snow. Wilson was tempted to use the magnifying feature of his faceplate, but he decided against it.
Instead, he swung around so that his hands were on the outer uprights of the long ladder, his feet clamped around them the same way.
“You okay, Shorty?” In a way, he was asking himself the same question.
“Sure, Commodore. I’ll be right behind you.” The tough-guy from Lost Angeles sounded a little scared.
Wilson loosened his grip on the ladder just a little, and began to slide down toward the two or three hundred human bodies lying at the bottom of the core. Shorty was directly above him. It didn’t take long until they reached the last of the platforms, just inside its access door. This would be another cargo level, forward of the engineering spaces.
There were people lying everywhere, close together, some of them bloodied, some of them not. There were green emergency oxygen bottles everywhere, as well, a few of them still hissing. It looked to Wilson as if the passengers had all covered themselves with table linen from the restaurant. His suit gauges told him it was twenty-five degrees in here—above zero—and that there was only enough oxygen remaining for—
Suddenly, an old man lying directly at Wilson’s feet shivered and pulled the tablecloth over his face, settling deeper into the huddle. His movement stirred those around him, and a wave of motion slowly made its way out across the mass of bodies lying on the floor below Wilson.
“Holy crap, Commodore, looks like they’re alive! Well, most of ‘em, anyway!” He didn’t know what he was feeling, but Wilson would surely remember this moment for the rest of his life, and so would Shorty.
Wilson shouted into his suit mike, “Scotty! Merton! Pharch! Get that spare oxygen down here right away!” To Scotty: “Later on, we can run a line from one of our ships if we have to. Hell, it looks like they’re all alive!”
“We’ll do it,” said Scotty. “But I’ll have to climb back into my envirosuit. I have life support back up! Air and heat. Believe it or not, there are auxiliary controls on every deck of this ship! And this cargo bay is at eighty degrees above. It’s actually starting to get hot!”
One of the forms below looked up at him. In some ways, it was like a scene out of Dante. “Wilson, is it really you? I knew you’d come, somehow!”
“Llyra!” Then he checked to see if he’d switched on the speakers mounted on the outside of his suit. He had, but how was he going to get down to his baby sister without stepping on somebody with his heavy boots? How cold was the outside of his suit? He didn’t want to give her frostbite, or anybody else. Where was Jasmeen? Why weren’t the damned nanobots taking care of the condensation that was suddenly blurring his vision? “Yes, yes, it’s me! I’m coming. I’ll be right there!”
Somehow, he managed to make his way down to her. Instead of trying to embrace him, which would have been difficult, considering his suit, she simply wrapped both of her small arms around one of his. When she sat up, she lifted the cloth. He saw Jasmeen beside her, her eyes on his own, sparkling and beautiful. With his free hand, he took one of hers.
“Oh, Wilson,” Llyra told him, “I’m so happy we’re not going to die!”
“Me, too, kid.” He was having more of that faceplate problem. “Me, too!”
***
He is not little boy any more, Jasmeen thought, looking across Llyra at Wilson. Has not been for long time. He is full grown man, for all that he is two years younger than I am. He appears to be natural-born leader, natural-born hero of variety my mother and father once told me about. He is space pilot, asteroid hunter, gunfighter, businessman, and, oh yes, he is father—or will be in another few weeks.
He is Llyra’s brother, for Allah’s sake!
Wilson had ordered the survivors all taken, a few at a time in the elevators, to the forward observation lounge. There was plenty of room there for rest and treatment, and he hadn’t wanted them to have to see the dining room again, with its smashed furniture and bloodsoaked carpet.
It looked like somebody had been decapitated down there. Probably the someone on the passenger lock.
Scotty had managed to shut the engines down from an auxiliary control space by cutting off their reaction mass—East American Space Lines used Lunar granite dust—then pulling the catalytic palladium rods from the fusion reactors. They weren’t floating all over the ship because she was now under tow by four asteroid hunters, including Wilson’s, at about one tenth of a gee.
For some reason, Pimble Pharch couldn’t be found. His ship. Lilac Waffle, was gone, as well.
Just now, Wilson didn’t give a damn about Pharch. He was sitting with Jasmeen and his
sister on a huge, deep, comfortable sofa. The girls were wrapped in a warm blanket together, sipping hot chocolated coffee. He’d taken off his helmet and gloves. Merton and Shorty had gotten the kitchen restarted somehow, and had plenty of hot food and drink for anyone who needed them.
At present, they had lots of customers. Two-hundred eighty-five individuals had taken refuge in the service core, not counting a small handful of thoroughly dead bodies that the passengers all swore were part of the hijackers’ gang. Some had broken necks, others had been stabbed or simply shot. Wilson believed that someone here had killed them.
And for some reason, was keeping quiet about it.
His phone rang. “Talk to me.”
It was Scotty. “I believe we can do it, Commodore. I’ve got the course calculated and ready to send and found all the good attachment points.”
“Let me talk with the Captain,” Wilson told him, “I’ll get back to you.”
He stood up and looked down at Llyra and Jasmeen. Their color was beginning to come back. “We’re about to turn this ship over and get her decelerating, but I need to confer with Captain West. It won’t be too rough, but it won’t be unnoticeable like it was meant to be. When the time comes, both of you find something that’s bolted down and hang on.”
Jasmeen cast her half of the blanket aside and stood up, fully recovered—or giving that impression, anyway. Somehow Wilson had forgotten how appealing her tight little body was, half athletic, half voluptuous. It was even possible that he’d never really noticed until now.
Llyra rose with her. “You confer with Captain,” Jasmeen said. She’d pronounced it “Keptin”, which he found irresistibly appealing for some reason. “We will help everybody else find bolts to hang on.” Llyra seized her brother’s hand, and before he knew it, her coach had taken the other. “Thank you for saving lives,” the older of the two girls said. Was that a tear in her eye? “Some cultures would say that you own them now.”
He swallowed. “Neither of you owes me thanks. You’re my family. You have no idea what it was like to find you two alive, after what I’d …” He turned and walked away, wondering exactly what had just happened.