Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

I sighed, and let my sigh be really audible. “I’m not going to be scared, Jack, I really am not. Did you tell these stories to my father? Was he scared?”

There was something like a short bark of laughter, and then, “I didn’t have to tell your father anything. He knew it already. There was this time, out in the belt—”

And then his voice died away, and a triumphant “aha!” came back, and there was a clang, and Jack came out, looking like he’d been crawling around in someone’s chimney, soot on his hair, soot marking his white eyebrows. He threw a wrench on the floor of the main cabin, and retreated to the fresher in the corner, with its vibro-clean.

I picked up the wrench and set it in the tool cabinet. When I’d come into the Gone Done It , there had been tools everywhere, and bits and pieces of material used for repairs. I’d tagged, organized it, put it away, and kept it put away, with no help from Jack. No wonder, I thought, the man dreamed of monsters hiding in dark and cluttered places. He’d been living in a dark and cluttered place when I’d got here.

That night we ate some dried fish, and a bit of hard bread. Food for asteroid miners was about as good as food had been for mariners. At least we didn’t have to drink grog, though given the Gone Done It ’s ancient purification arrangements, it didn’t do to dwell too long on where the water we drank came from. And we didn’t.

We ate, and then we went to bed. The beds let down from the wall, each with a thin mattress and an ancient blanket that smelled as much of oil and soot as the rags that Jack used in the engine room.

We were in bed, one on either side of the cabin, when Jack said, “There was this one time, out in the belt—”

He sounded thoughtful, reminiscent, not at all like he’d sounded when he’d oh so obviously been trying to scare me. “Your father was standing guard—”

I didn’t say anything. It was one of those things. I knew Jack and Dad had taken some trips together. It was part of the reason that Jack had given me this chance at a trip, even though I was completely inexperienced. But the father I remembered was the man who came home with substantial funds for our account, the man who sat quietly, reading. The man who made Mother smile, and who never raised his voice to me.

I’d been torn, since I’d come on the ship with Jack, afraid of what he’d say. It sounds stupid and cowardly, but I wasn’t sure I was prepared to hear the man who was so neat at home had left tools and wrenches all over in the Gone Done It . It would be like looking at a side of him that my father had kept quiet, like peeking into someone who had been part of my father, but not the part Mother and I knew.

So I stayed quiet, and Jack was quiet a long time, and it seemed to me that he’d fallen asleep, but then he went on as though he’d been talking all alone, as though he spoke out of a deeper silence, as though I were remembering or seeing the same things he was remembering and seeing, and all he needed to do was give me a few words to remind me. “If he hadn’t been so fast on the uptake, Pete, the truth is, neither the Gone Done It nor I would be here. But it was all the work of a moment. By the time I came in, he’d chopped off the part of the thing that was inside the engine room, and he’d stopped the leak, and the only thing to say something odd had happened was that tentacle . . . It was the oddest thing, Pete . . . writhing and alive, but not flesh at all. It was as if it were made of darkness, built of shadow and gathered fear.

“When I turned the lights on, it vanished, but it left an icy feel in the air. An icy feel.”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure he wasn’t asleep and talking out of a nightmare. Surely what he was talking about was a nightmare. My father—

If my father had seen something that fantastic, he would have spoken. When I talked of going to the stars, he would have warned me. Surely—

There was no time to dwell on it, and in the morning I woke to Jack shaking me. He’d fixed the sensors, and we’d located an asteroid that was all platinum and some rare isotopes, and he wanted my help with the robots, to do the mining.

Asteroid mining is not a physical occupation, not even when humans go out as miners. You don’t put on your spacesuit and step out, and grunt and sweat with your pickax, to extract minerals from the wandering space junk. No, you use the sensors to detect the ore or the minerals or the rare Earths. And then you send out a probe that brings the stuff in to be analyzed and confirm your find. And finally you send little robots out, an army of ant-shaped homunculi who crawled all over the asteroid and cleaned it of anything that might be valuable on Earth.

I was better at controlling the harvesting robots than Jack was. Visual acuity and hand-eye coordination get worse with age. It fell to me to spend three days in front of the screen, manipulating the buttons and the pad, working to get those robots to harvest every last particle of saleable stuff, and to store it in our holds.

It was a small asteroid—maybe twenty feet across. But ours was a small ship. Once I was done, exhausted, my eyes burning from strain, my hands shaking from the days and days of close in work, the holds were full. And all I wanted was to sleep.

Jack had rested, and slept and played solitary while I harvested, and now he took over, as I crawled into my bed and fell into a sleep full of images of robots moving across the uncertain, flickering screen of the Gone Done it , my hand still reflexively moving, in my sleep, trying to gather more wealth into the hold, trying—

Jack meanwhile woke, and got on the controls. The last thing he said to me was, “I’ll take her home now, Pete. I’ll take us home now, son.”

I don’t know how long I slept. I thought it might have been hours, but it could as well be days. I hadn’t slept at all while harvesting, because we didn’t have the tech to hold onto the asteroid, and we had to harvest while we could, while we could follow its orbit, and before a smaller asteroid—or larger—hit against our relatively fragile side. Asteroid hits were always a danger in the asteroid belt, and probably the reason why the profession was considered hazardous, the one reason beyond the radiation why so few miners made old bones.

You couldn’t harden these small mining ships enough while keeping them light enough to carry ore and valuables back to Earth in quantity enough to justify the trip. Instead, every ship was provided with quick patches and fast-fix-it for the walls, and you hoped the meteor that hit you wouldn’t be big enough to take the ship out, and that it wouldn’t hit anyone on the way through the ship.

The Gone Done It had so many quick patches on her walls that there might be more of them than of the original walls. I knew no one had ever died in it. Which meant, I guess, it was better to be lucky than good.

I slept—I rocked in an ocean of deep and dark slumber, in a dream full of small asteroids zooming and dancing around the Gone Done It , slowly metamorphosing into dragons and ants and things with claws, dancing, safe, in the dark of space.

I don’t know how long.

I know I woke. I woke startled and shocked, from deep, dark sleep to wide awake, sitting on my bed, heart hammering, eyes open, trying to see into darkness.

There had been a sound. A clang.

An asteroid strike. It had to be an asteroid strike. I called into the darkness, “Jack?” but there was no sound. No. I lie. There was a sound. The sound was a whoosh, as though every wind on Earth had gathered there, to blow into the ship. No. To blow out of the ship.

Before the pressure and air alarm sounded its first jangling peep, I was up, and halfway in the space suit.