Ben Bova - The Aftermath

Has he gone back to find Syracuse? The thought frightened Victor. No, he told himself. Syracuse is accelerating toward the outer edge of the Belt. He won’t follow them that far. I hope. If I were religious I’d pray. Then he realized, Even if he is going after them there’s nothing I can do about it now. Not a goddamned thing.

No time for remorse, Victor said to himself. I’ve got to figure out where I am, where I’m heading.

They call it the Asteroid Belt, but the region is actually just as empty as a vacuum can be, almost. The asteroids sprinkled through the area are rare and small, most of them the size of dust grains. Ceres, the largest of them, is barely a thousand kilometers across. Put all the millions of asteroids together and they wouldn’t amount to a body as large as Earth’s Moon, Victor knew. Some “belt,” he thought. More like an enormous football stadium with only a few dozen people scattered among the seats.

“No time for philosophy,” Victor told himself sternly. “See where you are and how quick you can get back to the ship.”

He began running through the navigational computer’s data. The pod’s thruster had fired him off roughly in the direction of Ceres, while Syracuse— with Pauline and the kids in it—had been accelerating in the opposite direction, toward the Belt’s outer fringes. Not good, he thought. Not good at all.

The pod had no real propulsion system, only the rocket thruster that had hurled it clear of the ship once he’d fired the explosive bolts to separate from Syracuse. He had small cold-gas jets for fine maneuvering, but no engine that could turn him around and head him back to the ore carrier.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Then where am I heading?”

Again, the news was not good. The pod was on a trajectory that would miss Ceres by several thousand kilometers. Not that there was anything or anybody left at Ceres who could help him. Chrysalis was destroyed, and its rock rat inhabitants slaughtered. The few ore carriers and smelter ships that had been in orbit around Ceres must have lit off and fled out of there as fast as they could.

“Besides,” he said aloud, “I don’t have any communications that could reach them. I’m deaf and mute.”

No sense moaning, he told himself. Find out where in hell you are and where you’re heading.

He ran through the navigation program twice, then a third time. The numbers did not change. The control pod was coasting through space sunward. It would miss Ceres by exactly seventeen point nine thousand kilometers and continue sailing inward, past the orbit of Mars—which was all the way over on the other side of the Sun now—then past the orbits of Earth, Venus and Mercury. It looked as if he would miss running into the Sun and instead would swing around it and start heading outward again. If he didn’t broil first as he approached the Sun’s searing brilliance.

His outbound course would bring him back almost to the exact spot where he’d separated the pod from Syracuse— in roughly four and a half years.

Victor didn’t bother to calculate the perturbations on his course that the gravitational fields of the inner planets would cause. Why bother? Long before he reached even Mars’s orbit he’d be dead of starvation. Of course, if the pod’s cranky air recycler crapped out, he could die of asphyxiation long before that.

In Syracuse ’s backup command pod, Theo felt like screaming or pounding his gloved fists against the control board. He had carefully switched on the pod’s electrical power, then booted up the control instruments and sensors one at a time, to make certain he didn’t overload the system and trip any circuits.

Now he stared at the red lights glaring at him from one end of the panel to the other. Propulsion fuel tanks. Air reserve tanks. Structural integrity. All in the red. The fusion reactor and main engine were undamaged, apparently, but the level of hydrogen fuel left in the battered tanks was dangerously, critically low. The fusion reactor generated the ship’s electrical energy and powered the main engine. At the rate the engine was roaring along now, the tanks would be totally dry in hours.

Theo shut down the main engine. We’re going to need that aitch-two for electrical power, he thought. We can coast for the time being: Dad had us going like a bat out of Hades to get away from that murdering son of a female dog.

He began to use the cameras on the ship’s tiny maintenance robots to assess the damage to the ship’s structure.

“God, she’s falling apart,” he whispered to himself. When the attacker slagged the antennas his laser beams sliced through the hull of that section of the wheel, gutting their main propulsion fuel tanks. Penetrated to the tunnels, too, Theo saw. That’s how we lost the air in there.

Sitting in the command chair, Theo realized that Syracuse was badly damaged and heading deeper into the Belt, away from Ceres, away from any chance of help. The antennas are gone, our fuel is down to a couple of days’ worth, we’re going to lose electrical power and die.

For the first time since he’d been a baby Theo wanted to cry. He wanted to curl up into a fetal ball and let his fate overtake him. But that would mean Mom and Angie would die too.

He lifted his chin a notch. It’s up to me, he told himself. I’ve got to repair this damage. Angie can’t do it, not by herself anyways. I’ve got to get this ship back in operating condition and heading toward civilization. I’ve got to keep Mom and Angie alive.

He thought that his father would know what to do and how to do it. But Dad’s gone. There’s nobody here but me.

“It’s up to me now,” he said aloud.

Angela stepped out of the shower stall vigorously rubbing a towel over her body. As she tucked it around her and wrapped a second towel over her wet hair she muttered something.

Pauline was at the sink brushing her teeth. The mirror was fogging from the steam of her daughter’s shower. She rubbed a clear spot with a hand towel as Angela finished drying herself.

“It’s not fair,” Angela muttered again.

Pauline rinsed her mouth, then asked, “What’s not fair?”

“Theo’s got a lav all to himself while we’re bumping into each other in here.”

“Theo shared the other lav with your father when he was here,” Pauline said.

“Still, it’s not fair. He ought to—”

Pauline silenced her daughter with a stern glance. “Angela, you’ve got to stop fighting with your brother.”

“Me?” She seemed genuinely shocked. “ He’s the one who’s always calling me names, yelling that I boss him around. I’m the older one, he ought to be taking orders from me.”

“Young lady,” Pauline said, the way she always did when she was about to tell her daughter something Angela didn’t want to hear, “I will say this only once more. I want you to stop arguing with Theo. He’s had an enormous burden of responsibility dumped on his shoulders.”

“Me too!”

“Yes, I know, but Theo’s a male and he automatically assumes he’s got to take charge.”

“That’s dumb.”

“Maybe it is, but you and I will have to deal with it. Thee would welcome help from you if only you’d be pleasant about it and stop calling him names.”

“I don’t—”

“Angela, you’re the older sibling. It’s up to you to set the tone between you and your brother. I will not have you two bickering over every little thing that comes up. We’re in enough danger here, we all need to work together if we’re going to survive.”

Angela sagged back onto the edge of the sink. “Are we really in that much trouble?”