The Aftermath

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: MAIN POWER BAY

“Don’t touch that switch!”

“Ow!”

His father’s shouted warning made Theo Zacharias jerk upright. He banged his head painfully on the steel shelf that jutted out over the power bus recess set into the floor plates of the cramped compartment.

“You could trip all the breakers on the power bus,” Victor Zacharias admonished his son. “The whole damned ship would go dark.”

Fifteen-year-old Theo sat there surrounded by relays and circuit breakers, his knees poking up from the recess like a pair of folded ladders. He rubbed his throbbing head with one hand and glowered sullenly at his father.

“How many times do I have to tell you to be careful?” Victor demanded. “Do you have any idea of how many megavolts are in those circuits?”

“Twenty-two point six,” Theo muttered. “You’ve told me often enough.”

Victor offered a hand to his son and helped to pull him out of the recess. “I’ll handle it,” he said, climbing down to where the teenager had been.

“Yeah. Right,” said Theo, thinking he knew what his father had left unsaid: Never send a boy to do a man’s job.

Nearly an hour later Victor clambered out of the recess and hunched beneath the low overhead alongside Theo.

“That ought to hold until we get back to Ceres,” he said. “Come on, Thee, help me put the deck plates back in place.”

Theo skinned his knuckles wrestling with the heavy deck plates, but he avoided mashing his fingers, as he’d done once before. The fingernail on his left ring finger was still black from that one. They finished and crabbed out into the passageway, where they could at last stand erect. Theo stretched to his full height, several centimeters taller than his father. While Victor was thickset and bullnecked, his once-trim midsection had spread, stretching the fabric of his coveralls. Theo was tall and slender, but youthfully awkward, all gangling arms and legs. Victor’s hair was jet black and thickly curled; Theo’s was a light sandy brown, like his mother’s.

“How’s your head?” Victor asked gruffly as they started back toward the living quarters.

Theo rubbed the spot he had whacked. “No lump,” he said. He flexed the fingers where he’d skinned his knuckles; the hand stung, but not badly.

“This old vessel needs a lot of tender loving care,” Victor said, more to himself than to his son. “We’ve got to nurse her along until we put in at Ceres for a major overhaul.”

Theo started to reply, but his mouth went dry. He knew what he wanted to say, but found that it wasn’t easy to speak the words. At last, working up his courage, he tried, “Dad, when we get to Ceres…” But the words dried up in his throat.

His father’s expression turned hard. “What about when we get back to Ceres?”

Theo blurted, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life taking care of this rust bucket.”

“Neither do I, son. I thought we’d spend a year or two out here in the Belt and then cash in. But it hasn’t worked out that way. The years just seem to slip past.”

Theo had heard the sad story many times before. “I don’t want to be a rock rat all my life,” he said.

“You don’t want to be like me, is that it?” Victor asked, his voice suddenly sharp.

Feeling miserable, Theo replied, “It’s not that, Dad. It’s… jeeze, there’s got to be more to life than running around the Belt picking up ores and delivering them to Ceres, for cripes sake.”

“Don’t let your mother hear that kind of language. She expects you to be a gentleman.”

“Yeah, I know,” Theo sighed.

More softly Victor said, “Theo, this ship is our home. It’s our whole life—”

“Your life,” Theo muttered. “I want something more.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’m getting good grades in my science classes.”

“High school classes over the ednet are a far cry from real science, Thee.”

“The guidance program says my test scores are good enough for a scholarship.”

“Scholarships pay tuition. Who’s going to pay all the other expenses?”

“I can work, support myself. Selene University scholarships include transportation, at least.”

“Selene?” Victor stopped in the middle of the passageway, forcing Theo to stop and turn to face him. “You want to go to the Moon?”

“Just long enough to get a degree in biology.”

“And then what?”

“Maybe I could go to the research station at Jupiter. They need biologists to study the life forms there.”

“Jupiter,” Victor murmured, shaking his head. He clutched at his son’s arm hard enough almost to hurt. “A biologist. At the Jupiter station.”

“If I’m good enough to make it.”

“You’ll have to be pretty damned good,” Victor told his son. Then he chuckled and added, “If you don’t kill yourself first trying to keep this ship going.”

Theo did not laugh.

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: GALLEY

“Let’s face it, Mom,” Theo mumbled into his bowl of yogurt and honey, “Dad doesn’t trust me. He thinks I’m still a kid.”

His mother, Pauline, stood at the one microwave oven that was still functioning and smiled understandingly at her son.

“I don’t think that’s true, Theo,” she said gently.

“I’m fifteen!” Theo burst. “Almost sixteen! And he still doesn’t trust me with anything.”

“Your father has an awful lot of responsibility on his shoulders,” Pauline replied. “This ship, our lives… there’s a war going on out there, you know.”

“And he doesn’t trust me.”

Pauline sighed, wondering if the microwave was functioning properly. Syracuse was an old, creaking bucket of an ore carrier. The family spent most of their time on maintenance and repairs, just trying to keep the vessel going on its lonely circuit through the Asteroid Belt. The galley was a tight little compartment, its bulkheads and deck scuffed and dulled from long years of use.

Theo sat hunched over his bowl, muttering unhappily into his unfinished breakfast. His sister Angela, sitting across the galley’s narrow table from Theo, was slightly more than two years older; she was still carrying more weight than she should, still wearing an extra layer of teenage fat. Theo taunted her about it. She responded by calling her lanky, gawky brother “the giraffe.”

When Pauline looked at her daughter she could see a darkhaired, dark-eyed beauty waiting to blossom. We’ll have to be careful about her once we put in at Ceres, she reminded herself. There’ll be plenty of young men chasing after her.

“Dad’s got enough to worry about, Thee,” Angie said, in the authoritative voice of an older sister.

“I could help him if he’d let me,” Theo grumbled.

“Like you fixed the leak in the fuel tank? Dad had to come down and—”

“Hydrogen’s tricky stuff!” he protested. “It seeps right through ordinary seals.”

“Never send a giraffe to do a man’s job.” Angela smirked.

“Like you’d do better, hippo?”

“Mom! He’s calling me names again!”

“You started it!”

“Both of you, stop this at once,” Pauline said firmly. “I won’t have you calling each other ugly names.”

The microwave dinged at last. As Pauline opened it and pulled out her own breakfast of steaming oatmeal, she said, “Let me talk to your father about this, Thee. Perhaps there’s something that we can do.”

Theo brightened a bit and sat up a little straighter. “I could pilot the ship into Ceres!”

“I don’t know…”

“Dad lets Angie pilot the ship sometimes.”

“I’m more mature than you,” Angela said loftily. “You have to be reliable, you know.”

But their mother smiled. “We’ll see.”

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: MASTER BEDROOM

Pauline Zacharias looked into the mirror as she sat at her dresser. I’m getting old, she realized, studying the fine lines that were beginning to spiderweb across her face.

She had never been a beauty, not in her own critical estimation. Her jaw was too long, she thought, her lips too thin.

Her gray eyes were large and Victor often called them luminous, the dear. But her hair. It was sorrowful. Dirty blonde. Victor called it sandy. It never behaved. Pauline had cropped it short, close to the skull, and still it stuck out all around in a sea of cowlicks. She tried to consider her good points: she was tall and her figure still slimly elegant. She had always strived to carry herself proudly, chin up, shoulders back, head erect. Now she was beginning to wonder if it was worth the effort.

Victor stepped into the bedroom and slid the door shut. The lock didn’t catch at first; he had to jiggle it a few times.

“This whole tub is breaking down around our ears,” Victor Zacharias muttered.

He was right, Pauline knew. Glancing around their bedroom she saw that the dresser and cabinets were badly in need of upgrading. Even the wall screens had developed an annoying little flicker. But the bed, she would never replace their bed. Victor had ripped out the compartment’s built-in bunk when they’d first leased Syracuse, and he’d built a handsome oversized bed with his own hands. Painted the plastic paneling to resemble real wood. Made a mattress out of discarded elastic water bags. Their one luxury, their bed.

“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.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Before the shooting starts.”

“Chrysalis is unarmed,” Theo said. “They don’t have any weapons. Everybody knows that.”

“We don’t have any weapons either,” said his father.

“But they wouldn’t shoot at an unarmed ship. That doesn’t make sense.”

“You hope.” Victor’s fingers were flicking across the controls.

Turning a massively laden ore ship is neither a simple nor a quick maneuver. It takes time and lots of space. Theo glanced at the control screens and saw that Syracuse was slowly, painfully slowly, coming about.

Something flashed on the main screen.

“He’s fired on her!” Victor shouted.

Theo saw a red-hot slash cut through the thin metal hull of one of Chrysalis’s modules. A glittering cloud puffed out and immediately dissipated. Air, Theo realized. The module seemed to explode, shards of metal spinning out dizzily. And other shapes came tumbling, flailing into the airless emptiness of space. Bodies, Theo saw, his heart suddenly thundering, his guts clenching. Those are people! He’s killing them!

“Stop!” screamed a voice from the habitat’s comm center. “Stop or you’ll kill—”

The voice cut off. Theo watched with bulging eyes as invisible laser beams from the attack ship methodically sliced one module of the habitat after another, slashing, destroying, killing. A cloud of spinning debris and twisted bodies spread outward like ripples of death.

“You’ve got to do something!” Theo shouted.

“I am,” his father replied. “I’m getting us the hell away from here.”

“Something to help them!”

“What can we do? You want to join them?”

As Syracuse slowly, ponderously turned away from its approach to Ceres, its telescopic cameras maintained their focus on the slaughter of the Chrysalis habitat. Module after module exploded soundlessly, corpses and wreckage flung into space.

Tears in his eyes, Theo leaned over his father’s broad shoulder and shouted into his face, “You can’t just leave them there!”

His eyes fastened on the carnage displayed on the main screen, Victor told his son, “The hell I can’t! I’ve got to protect you and your sister and mother.”

“You’re running away!”

Victor nodded bleakly. “Just as fast as I can get this ore bucket to fly.”

Theo glanced up at the main screen once more, then down again to his father’s grimly determined face. He saw beads of perspiration on his father’s brow; his knuckles were white as he gripped the chair’s armrests.

“But there must be something we can do!”

The bearded man’s image appeared again on the main screen, sharp and steady. “Ore ship Syracuse,” he said, “just where do you think you’re going?”

Theo’s blood froze in his veins.

BATTLE FRENZY

Are you harboring the fugitive Lars Fuchs?” asked the stranger, his voice dagger-cold.

Victor replied evenly, “We’re inbound from the deeper Belt, carrying fourteen thousand tons of ore.” Then he added, “No passengers.”

“How do I know that’s the truth?”

“You’re welcome to come aboard and see for yourself.”

The dark stranger lapsed into silence, apparently deep in thought. Theo thought his eyes looked strange, their pupils dilated wider than he had ever seen before.

“Damn!” Victor growled. “The intercom’s down again.”

“We just fixed it yesterday,” Theo said.

“Not well enough.” Victor leaned on the comm console’s mute button and whispered urgently to his son, “Get down to the habitation module and get your mother and sister into suits. You suit up too.”

“What about you?”

“Do it!”

Theo scrambled out of the control pod, nearly banging his head on the rim of the hatch, and clambered up the rungs set into the tubular passageway that ran the length of the three-kilometer-long buckyball tube. With each rung the feeling of weight lessened, until he let his soft-booted feet rise off the rungs and started scampering along the ladderway like a racing greyhound, his fingers barely flicking on the rungs. The closer he got to the ship’s center of rotation the less g force he felt: soon he was literally flying through the narrow tube.

Meanwhile Victor sat alone in the control pod, his mind working in overdrive. He’s a killer. He’s wiped out the habitat, must have killed more than a thousand people, for god’s sake. The nearest help is days away, weeks. Hell, it takes more than half an hour just to get a message to Earth. We’re alone out here. Alone.

The stranger aboard the attack vessel seemed to stir to life. “Well? Where is Fuchs?” he demanded.

“Who am I speaking to?” Victor asked, stalling for time. “You know who I am but I don’t know who you are.”

The man almost smiled. “I am your death unless you surrender Fuchs to me.”

His fingers racing across the control keyboard like a pianist attempting a mad cadenza, Victor Zacharias answered, “Lars Fuchs isn’t aboard this ship. Send an inspection party if you want to. I assure you—”

Syracuse shuddered. We’ve been hit! Victor realized. The bastard’s shooting at us!

A bank of red lights flared angrily on the control panel. The main antennas. He’s silenced us. And the fuel tanks below the antennas; he’s ripped them open! With a swift check of his other diagnostics, Victor hesitated a heartbeat, then punched the key that released the ship’s cargo. Syracuse lurched heavily as fourteen thousand tons of asteroidal rock were suddenly freed from their magnetic grips and went spinning into space between the ore carrier and the attack vessel.

That’s the best shielding I can provide, Victor said to himself as he punched up Syracuse’s propulsion controls and goosed the main fusion engine to maximum acceleration. In the main display screen above his curved control panel he saw glints of laser light splashing off the rocks that now floated between him and the attack ship. Come on, he silently urged the fusion engine. Get us out of here!

“You can’t run away,” came the voice from the attack ship, sounding more amused than angry.

I can try, Victor replied silently.

Theo banged painfully against the rungs protruding from the central passageway’s curving bulkhead. Dad’s accelerating the ship, he thought. Trying to get away. He grabbed a ladder rung and pulled himself along the tube. Within seconds he was no longer weightless but falling toward the habitation module, where his mother and sister were. Careful now, he told himself, remembering how he’d broken his arm a few years earlier in a stupid fall down the tube. He jackknifed in midair, banging his knee painfully against the rungs, and turned around so that he was falling feet first.

He heard a hatch creak open down at the end of the tube and, glancing down, saw his sister Angie starting to climb upward toward him.

“Go back!” he yelled at her. “Get into a suit! Mom too!”

“What’s happening?” Angie shouted back, her voice echoing off the tube’s curving bulkhead. “The intercom isn’t working.” She sounded more annoyed than frightened.

“We’re being attacked!” Theo hollered, scrambling toward her as fast as he dared. “Get into suits, you and Mom!”

“Attacked? By who? What for?”

The lights flickered and went out. The dim emergency lights came on.

“Get into the goddamned suits!” Theo roared.

Angie began backing toward the hatch. “No need to swear, Theo.”

“The hell there isn’t,” he muttered to himself.

He clambered down the rungs and dropped the final couple of meters through the open hatch and onto the bare metal deck of the auxiliary airlock. Long habit—backed by his father’s stern discipline—made him reach overhead to close the hatch and make certain it was properly sealed. Then he pushed through the inner hatch and entered the family’s living quarters.

The accommodations were spare, almost spartan, but they were all the home that Theo remembered. A small communications center, crammed with electronics equipment; its deck was polished plastic tiles, its overhead decorated with a fanciful ancient star map that showed the constellations as the beasts and legendary heroes of old. When he was a little kid Theo loved to sneak in here at night and gaze at the glow of the fluorescent figures.

No time for stargazing now. The next hatch led into the main living area, with its wide glassteel port that looked out into the depths of space. Well-worn comfortable sofas and cushioned chairs. Through the port Theo saw a jumble of rocks spinning off into the distance, flashes of light glinting off them.

Dad’s jettisoned our cargo, he realized. And that bastard’s shooting at us, whoever he is.

The lighting was normal here. Theo hurried through the living area and into the equipment bay that fronted the main airlock. His mother was helping Angie into her space suit, sliding the hard-shell torso over his sister’s head and upraised arms. Angie’s head popped out of the collar ring; she looked as if she’d been swallowed by a robotic monster.

Angie glared at Theo, more nettled than scared, he thought. She thinks this is all my fault, as usual, he said to himself.

It was hard to tell if his mother was worried or frightened. Pauline Zacharias seemed calm, unruffled. Theo couldn’t imagine anything that would rattle his mother. She knows Dad wouldn’t tell us to get into the suits unless we were in deep spit, but she seems totally in control of herself.

Angela was tucking her thick dark hair inside her suit’s collar, looking thoroughly annoyed. Funny, Theo thought, how Angie got Dad’s height and coloring and I got Mom’s light hair and long legs. Genes can be peculiar.

His mother reached for the gloves resting on the locker shelf beside Angie’s helmet.

“You can put these on yourself,” she said in a low, cool voice. “Quickly now. I’ve got to help Theo.”

Angie took the gloves, her eyes still on Theo. “You sure that Dad wants us in the suits, Thee, or is this just one of your little stunts?”

“Didn’t you feel the ship lurch?” he answered hotly. “We’re being attacked, for god’s sake!”

“That’s stupid,” Angie said as she tugged on her gloves. “This old boat is always shaking and groaning. Besides, who’d want to attack us?” But she sealed her gloves to the cuffs of her suit’s arms and reached for her helmet.

“Who’s attacking us?” his mother asked. “And why?”

Pauline was a handsome woman with the steady gray eyes and firm jaw of someone who had weathered her share of troubles. She was slightly taller than Theo; he had always measured his height against her, not his stubby father. She wore her sandy blonde hair cropped short, not the stylish shoulder length that she allowed her daughter to flaunt.

“I don’t know who’s attacking us,” Theo said, “but he’s smashed up Chrysalis pretty awful.”

“But Ceres is neutral territory!”

“Not anymore.”

Pauline opened her son’s suit locker.

“Mom,” Theo said, stretching the truth only slightly, “Dad said I should help you with your suit before I get into mine.”

“What about me?” Angie snapped.

Theo smirked at her. “He knew Mom would have his precious little chubbo all suited up by the time I got here.”

“Mom!” she yowled.

Pauline sat down on the bench that ran in front of the lockers. “Don’t you two start,” she warned. “This is no time for bickering.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Theo. But he saw Angie stick her tongue out at him behind their mother’s back. As he pulled his mother’s suit torso from its rack he thought that his sister might be two years older than he, but she was still nothing more than a bratty girl.

Dad had spoken more than once about buying new nanofabric space suits for them, the kind you could pull on like plastic coveralls and be suited up in a minute or less. But they cost too much. All they had aboard Syracuse were these old-fashioned cumbersome hard-shell suits, with their big ungainly boots and heavy backpacks and glassteel bubble helmets. At least the suits ran on oxygen at normal air pressure; you didn’t have to spend an hour prebreathing low-pressure oxy like the earliest astronauts did.

They said little as they donned their suits. The ship shuddered and jolted a few times, whether from being hit by the attacker’s laser beams or from Dad jinking to get away, Theo had no way of knowing. Dull booming noises echoed distantly. Angie’s eyes widened with every thud and shake; their mother looked grim.

Leaving the visors of their helmets up, the three of them inspected each other’s suits, making certain all the connections were in place and the seals tight. Theo noticed that his hands were trembling slightly.

“What do we do now?” Angie asked. Theo thought her voice sounded shaky. She’s scared now, he realized. I am too, but I can’t let them see it. I’ve got to be the man here.

Pauline said, “Now we wait. If the ship is badly punctured we can live inside the suits until we repair the damage.”

Theo pressed the stud on his left cuff. “Dad, we’re suited up. Waiting for your orders.”

No answer.

“I told you the intercom wasn’t working, chimpbrain,” Angie said.

“The suit radios are on a different frequency, dumbbutt,” Theo told her. “Dad, we’re in our suits. What’s your situation?”

Nothing but silence. Not even the crackle of the radio’s carrier wave.

“Dad!” Theo shouted.

Angie’s face went ashen. “Do you think…”

Theo turned from his sister to his mother. For the first time in his life she looked fearful.

VICTOR SULEIMAN ZACHARIAS

He was born in one of the tent cities strung along the craggy ridges of eastern Kentucky ; his parents were refugees from the greenhouse flooding that had inundated most of Chicago. Victor’s father had once owned a restaurant in the part of that city called Greek Town. His mother was a Palestinian exile who had barely managed to escape the nuclear devastation of Israel and Lebanon. Victor was their only child; his father refused to bring another baby into a world ravaged by the savagery of nature and the cruelty of men.

At sixteen his mother died and Victor ran away from the tattered city of tents to join the army. He was short, underweight and underage but the recruiters asked few questions. After four years of guarding food warehouses and putting down riots, he won a scholarship to study—of all things—architecture at Syracuse University in the middle of New York state. He graduated just as the earthquakes in the Midwest brought on a new wave of flooding, and the Gulf of Mexico washed halfway up the Mississippi valley. Returning home, he found that his father had drowned while doing forced labor on a press gang building levees.

There was plenty of work for builders, but little for young architects who wanted to create something more than barracks for flood victims or cookie-cutter new cities for refugees. Victor was attracted to the lunar nation of Selene, far from the miseries and despair of Earth: he heard there were plans afoot to build an astronomy complex on the Moon’s farside.

He won a job over several other aspiring young architects and went to the Moon, spending the next four years of his life shuttling between the underground city of Selene and the complex of astronomical observatories and housing units being built on the farside. There he met Pauline Osgood, a Selenite by birth who had never been to Earth. They returned once, to get married, and stayed for the funerals of Pauline’s parents, victims of a food riot in Denver.

Back on the Moon, Victor settled in to work on the slow but steady expansion of Selene’s underground accommodations. For more than a year he helped to design the resort complex at Hell Crater, then signed up with Astro Manufacturing when they began their new manufacturing base at the Malapert Mountains, near the lunar south pole. He’d become the father of a baby girl by then, and while still working on the Malapert designs Pauline became pregnant once more, this time with the son that he so badly wanted.

Victor was dragged into the Asteroid Wars almost by accident. Pancho Lane herself, CEO of Astro Manufacturing, asked him to head a small design team working on a space habitat that could serve as Astros military headquarters. Flattered, Victor completed the design within three months. He was aboard the unfinished habitat in its L-2 libration point site when it was attacked by ships of Humphries Space Systems. Victor was not injured, but seeing his construction project slagged into twisted structural beams and shattered living compartments angered him beyond words.

The Asteroid Wars had started as a personal feud between Martin Humphries and Lars Fuchs. An uneven battle: Humphries was the wealthiest man in the solar system, founder and master of Humphries Space Systems. Lars Fuchs was a lone individual, too proudly stubborn to bow down to Humphries. He had taken to piracy out in the dark depths of the Asteroid Belt as his only means of survival. The First Asteroid War ended in the only way it could, with Humphries triumphant and Fuchs exiled from the rock rats’ habitat at Ceres.

With peace came unemployment. Astro Corporation was not building any new facilities and Selene’s expansion had been halted for no one knew how long. Victor cashed in his modest savings, borrowed a lot more, and leased an aged ore vessel from Astro, which he dubbed Syracuse. With his young family he headed out to the Belt.

He became a rock rat, content to ply the Belt buying ores from the miners who worked the asteroids and transporting them to ships waiting at Ceres to carry the raw materials to the Earth/Moon system. While billions of international dollars changed hands, very-little profit remained for Victor Zacharias’s pockets. Yet he was contented. His children were growing, his wife was happy. Life was serene.

Until the Second Asteroid War broke out. This time there was no pretense: the war was a struggle for control of the Belt and its enormous resources, a struggle between Humphries Space Systems and Astro Corporation. Lars Fuchs was nothing more than an excuse for the two giant corporations to go to war.

Now Victor Zacharias sat hunched in Syracuse’s control pod, sweating hard as he desperately tried to maneuver the lumbering ore ship out of range of the attacker’s fire.

The attacking ship, much more agile, was swinging clear of the jumble of rocks that Victor had released. In another few minutes, he saw, the attacker would have a clean shot at Syracuse ; then it would be merely a matter of time before the ship was utterly destroyed and everyone aboard killed. Pauline, he thought. Angela. Theo.

He couldn’t even call his attacker and surrender, Victor realized. The bastard’s knocked out my antennas. We’re mute. And deaf. He could be singing Christmas carols to me and I’d never hear him.

“The intercom link with the ship’s living quarters was down, too. He saw the sullen red lights glaring at him from the control panel.

How can I…?

A desperate idea popped into his head. Looking up at the display screen again he saw that the attacking ship was at the edge of the swirling, tumbling cluster of rocks he’d released. It was only a matter of seconds now.

His pulse hammering in his ears, Victor lifted the safety covers over the escape system’s dual butter yellow buttons.

“Goodbye, Pauline,” he murmured. Then he pressed his stubby fingers against the twin buttons.

Explosive bolts blew away the connectors holding the command pod to Syracuse’s main body. The pod’s internal rocket engine lit automatically; Victor felt himself pressed deep into the command chair’s padding. The control panel’s lights flickered madly, then winked out.

He stared fixedly at the main screen. The camera view jerked violently, then swung its focus back on the attack vessel. Just as Victor had hoped, just as he’d prayed, the attacker swerved to follow him.

They both left Syracuse far behind, dwindling into an invisible speck against the starry black of space.

He thinks I’m carrying Fuchs with me, Victor thought gratefully. He thinks I’m trying to help Fuchs escape. He’s following me and leaving Pauline and the kids alone. I’ve saved them. I’ve saved them.

ABANDONED

Dad’s going to be boiled at me if he ever finds out, Theo thought as he hesitated at the lip of the auxiliary air lock hatch. He was fully suited up, with his helmet visor down and sealed. Standing on the ladder leading up to the hatch set in the ceiling, his head and shoulders above the hatch’s edge, Theo saw the long tube leading from the family’s living quarters to the control pod stretching above him, a narrow dimly lit tunnel of buckyball filament, stronger than steel, lighter than plastic.

So he boils, Theo said to himself. This is an emergency. And he started climbing up the rungs set into the tube’s circular interior. It was laborious work in the cumbersome space suit. The emergency hatches were closed tight, he saw. Every hundred meters the tunnel was divided by double hatches that served as mini-airlocks. Usually they were kept open, but if a part of the tunnel was punctured, the hatches automatically sealed shut to prevent all the air from escaping into space. Now they were closed.

Not a good sign, Theo told himself. The tunnel’s been punctured somewhere.

Gravity melted away as he climbed; soon he was taking the rungs three, four, five at a time. As he approached the tunnel’s midpoint, where the g force was effectively zero, his booted feet weren’t touching the rungs at all.

Once past the ship’s center, he allowed himself to fall, slowly at first, then with increasing speed as he neared the end of the tunnel. But the closed hatches of the airlocks stopped him from dropping all the way. He had to stop and manually open each hatch, then proceed to the next one. No tunnel diving, they way he used to when he was just a kid, eight or nine years old. Just drop from the midpoint to the end of the tunnel, let yourself fall like a stone. When his father had found out, the old man had exploded with fearful anger.

“You could kill yourself falling against the rungs!” Victor had roared. “Tear your arms out of their sockets when you try to stop! Break every bone in your empty head!”

But tunnel diving was too much fun to ignore. Theo had even gotten Angie to dive with him. Of course she banged herself up, broke an arm, and loudly wailed Theo’s guilt. Dad had confined Theo to his sleeping compartment for a week, with nothing to do but watch old vids.

Now, encased in the hard-shell suit, he worked his way down the tunnel from one sealed hatch to the next. Finally he planted his boots against the last hatch, the one that opened into the command pod. Theo let out a gust of breath. The journey had been hard work instead of fun.

No time for complaints, though. At his feet was the airtight hatch that opened into the command pod. Dad’s in there, Theo said to himself. Maybe his comm system’s been shot away. Maybe he’s hurt, wounded.

He had to carefully, painfully turn himself around so he could see the hatch’s control panel. Its status light glared bright red. Vacuum on the other side of the hatch! Gripes, did Dad have enough time to get into his suit? The pod must be punctured!

Theo was literally standing on his head, clinging to the ladder’s rung with one gloved hand. He reached for the hatch’s control panel, but stopped his shaking hand just in time. If I open the hatch to vacuum it’ll suck all the air out of the tunnel. But the tunnel’s already been punctured and the emergency hatches are shut. Whatever air we’re gonna lose we’ve already lost. Still he hesitated. Be better to conserve the air we’ve still got, he thought. We might be out here for who knows how long. Chrysalis is all torn up; there’s no help back at Ceres for us.

Standing on a ladder rung, he punched at the suit radio’s keyboard on the wrist of his suit.

“Mom?” he called.

She answered immediately, “Yes, Theo.”

“I need you to pump the air out of the tunnel.”

He heard her sharp intake of breath. “There’s vacuum on the other side of the hatch?”

Sharp, Mom, he thought. “That’s what the hatch pad says. And the tunnel’s been punctured someplace; all the emergency airlocks are closed. Pump out the air and store it in the standby tanks.”

Pauline said, “All right. Can you talk with your father?”

Theo hadn’t even tried that. “I’ll see.” He called over the suit radio. No answer. He pounded a gloved fist against the hatch. No response.

“He … he doesn’t answer,” he said at last.

Again his mother hesitated before replying, “The tunnel’s evacuated.”

“Right.”

It took Theo two tries to peck out the combination that opened the hatch, his hand was shaking so much. When it finally did slide noiselessly open, his heart clutched in his chest.

There was nothing there! The entire control pod was gone! Gasping, wide-eyed, Theo slowly climbed three more rungs until his head and shoulders were through the open hatchway.

He was in empty space. Hard pinpoints of stars stared down at him from the black depths of infinity. The ship that had attacked them was nowhere in sight. Their cargo of ore was a distant cloud of rocks, spinning farther away every heartbeat. The wheel-shaped structure of the ore ship curved away on either side of him but there was no trace of the control pod. Theo saw the severed stumps of the struts that had held the pod in place, blackened by the blast of their explosive bolts.

Gone. Dad’s gone. He’s left us.

“Theo?” his mother’s voice called in his helmet earphones. “Is your father hurt? Or…”

“He’s gone,” Theo said, feeling a deadly cold numbness creeping over him. “He’s abandoned us, Mom.”

ADRIFT

“Your father did not abandon us,” Pauline Zacharias said firmly.

Theo thought she looked angry. At me. She’s boiled at me because Dad took off and left us. She’s not mad at Dad, she’s spitting mad at me.

He was sitting tensely on the sofa in the family living room, feeling tired and angry and scared. Angie sat on the armchair at one end of the sofa, rigid and staring hard-eyed at him, as if he’d done something wrong. Mother was pacing slowly across the room, past the family portrait they’d taken years ago, when Theo was barely ten.

“He didn’t abandon us,” Pauline repeated.

“He blew the explosive bolts and took off in the control pod,” Theo said, his voice low, stubborn. “He left us here drifting.”

His mother stopped pacing and looked directly at him. “What your father did,” she said in a hard, cold voice, “was to draw that attack ship away from us.”

“Yeah,” Theo retorted. “And he left us without controls, without the navigation computer, without communications. The main tunnel’s been punctured, spit knows what other damage the ship’s taken.”

Pauline stared at her son for a long moment, then sank into the nearest chair, her face frozen in a mask of doubt and worry.

Angie broke the silence. “But we’ll be okay. Won’t we? I mean, we can get back to Ceres and—”

“There’s nothing left at Ceres!” Theo snapped. “He killed them all! And we’re heading outward, deeper into the Belt, toward Jupiter!”

For an instant Angie looked as if she would burst into tears. But Pauline reached across the space between them and grasped her arm.

“It’s not that bad,” she said calmly. “We have plenty of food and water. We have the main engine—”

“Which we can’t control.”

“Can’t control?” Angie’s eyes went wide.

“The command pod’s gone. All the controls’re gone.”

Pauline fixed her son with a stern look. “There’s the backup command pod.”

“If it works,” Theo said sourly. “Nobody’s even been in there for more’n a year.”

“It will work,” Pauline said flatly. “That’s your responsibility, Theo. Yours and Angela’s. Get to the backup command pod and get it up and running. We can’t let ourselves continue to drift outward; we’ve got to get control of this vessel back in our hands.”

“Yeah, sure,” he groused.

“Yes, certainly,” Pauline said, with iron in her voice. “We’re not going to sit on our hands and do nothing. If we’re going to be saved, we’ve got to save ourselves.”

“Can we…?” Angie murmured.

“Of course we can,” said Pauline. “And as soon as you get into the backup pod you set up a tracking beacon so your father can home in on it and get back to us.”

Theo started to answer that his father had run away from them and wouldn’t be likely to come back, but he held his tongue. Some things you just don’t say to your mother, even if they’re true, he thought.

Turning to Angie, Pauline said, “I want the two of you to work together. No bickering. Do you understand?”

Angela nodded. “I will if he will.”

“I’ll be all right,” Theo said to his sister. Then he added, “As long as you don’t try to lord it over me.”

“Lord it over you? When did I ever—”

“You’re always pulling that older sister stuff, like you know it all.”

“That’s not true!”

“Yes it is, dammit!”

“Stop it!” Pauline shouted. “Stop it this instant! Theo, I won’t have you using such language. And Angela, you will treat your brother with respect. Is that clear? Both of you?”

Angela nodded, her lips pressed into a thin bloodless line.

“Theo?” his mother demanded.

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry about the language.”

“You should be. If your vocabulary is so limited you should study your dictionary.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he mumbled again. It was Mom’s old line, about the dictionary. He looked over at Angie; she glared back at him.

“You two have to work together,” their mother insisted. “We don’t have time for your little spats and name-calling. You both have to start behaving like adults.”

Angie behave like an adult? Theo grumbled silently. When the universe stops expanding, maybe.

Pauline stood up. “Now then, if we all work together we can get through this. It’ll be quite an adventure to tell your children about!”

“Your grandchildren,” Angie said, with a faint smile.

Theo shook his head. Busywork, he said to himself. Mom just wants to keep us busy so we won’t have time to think about the fix Dad’s left us in. But she’s right; nobody’s going to help us, so we’ll have to help ourselves. Or die.

“Theo, we need the backup command center up and functioning. The sooner the better.”

“Right,” he said, thinking, Maybe she’s right. Maybe, if I can get the backup command pod on line, maybe we can patch up this bucket and steer it back to civilization. There’s nothing left at Ceres; we’ll have to get back to the Earth/Moon vicinity. Or maybe the exploration base at Mars. Where is Mars now? On our side of its orbit or all the way over on the other side of the Sun? I’ll have to check that once I get the nav system running.

Or maybe, he thought, we could make contact with the research station around Jupiter. We’re heading in that direction anyway.

His mother clapped her hands lightly, interrupting his thoughts. “Very well, then. On your feet, both of you! We all have work to do.”

Theo started toward the auxiliary airlock, but his mother stopped him. “Thee, you’ll have to get into your suit.”

“I know.”

“And before you do, I want you to take a shower and put on clean clothes. You don’t smell very good, you know.”

“Aw, jeezus—”

Pauline leveled a stern finger at him. “Language, young man!” Then, despite herself, the beginnings of a smile curled the corners of her lips. “You’re not so big that I can’t wash out your mouth with detergent.”

“Why should I take a shower now?” Theo protested. “I’m just gonna get sweated up again inside the suit.”

“Then you can take another shower when you get back.”

Angie smirked at him. But Pauline went on, “Angela, you’ll have to suit up and check the damage to the tunnels.”

“All right.”

“I’ll try to save some hot water for you, Angel face,” Theo said, grinning maliciously at his sister.

“He’s going to use up all the hot water on purpose, Mom,” Angela accused.

Pauline shook her head. Some things never change, no matter what, she thought. Then she added, Thank god.

I’ve got to be strong, she told herself. For both of them. They’re only children and they’re frightened. I’ve got to get them working, get them to repair the damage to the ship and put us on a trajectory that will take us back to civilization. It’s up to me. There’s no one else until Victor returns to us. I’ve got to make them feel that they’re contributing to our salvation, make them understand that they can save themselves—and me.

After a lightning-quick shower, Theo went alone to the main airlock and started pulling on his suit leggings. Mom’s being a pain in the butt, he said to himself. Shower first. Shower afterward. You’d think I smell like a garbage dump, the way she talks. And Angie just sits there and sneers at me, the dumb hippopotamus. As he wormed his feet into the insulated boots he thought, What if the backup pod’s been hit? Maybe that bastard took it out on purpose.

Theo looked up at the blank, scuffed metal bulkhead. Jeezus, if the backup pod’s out we’re not just up the creek without a surfboard. We’re dead.

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: BACKUP COMMAND POD

Theo wormed into the leggings of his space suit, then pulled on the thick-soled boots. As he hefted the suit’s torso over his head and slid his arms into its sleeves he thought about turtles back on Earth with their shells. Born on the Moon, Theo had never been to Earth, had never faced a full Earthly g, although his parents had always insisted that he and Angie spend hour after pointless hour in the cramped little centrifuge in Syracuse’s gym.

“Your body’s genetically equipped to handle a full g,” Dad repeated endlessly, “but you’ve got to make sure that your muscles are trained up to their full potential.”

Yeah, right, Dad, Theo thought as he worked his arms into the straps of the suit’s cumbersome backpack. Make sure we’re ready for any emergency. And when it happens, you split out of here as fast as you jackrabbit can.

Theo felt angry. And betrayed. And guilty that he should feel this way about his own father.

He was locking the helmet into the suit’s collar ring when his mother came into the equipment bay, her face tight, tense.

“I’ll check you out,” Pauline said.

“Where’s Angie?”

“She’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“Maybe I should check the tunnels,” he said.

“No. Let your sister do it. There’s more than enough to keep you both busy.”

And separated, Theo realized. Mom’s pretty sharp.

“You be careful. Thee,” said Pauline. “Make certain the pod’s safe before you do anything else.”

He nodded inside the helmet. “I’ll be okay, Mom.”

“I know you will. I just fret.”

“Yeah.”

“Theo… your father did not abandon us. I don’t want you thinking that he did. He’ll come back, you’ll see.”

Theo couldn’t answer. He knew that if he spoke he’d say something that would hurt his mother.

But she could see the anger in his face. “He did not abandon us,” she repeated.

“Yeah.” He slid the visor down, hoping it would keep his mother from seeing his expression, and clumped in the heavy boots toward the equipment bay hatch.

Up the central tunnel he climbed, the g load getting lighter with every step, and through the mini-airlocks that had automatically shut. When he came to the cross tunnel he floated weightlessly through the hatch and started downhill, toward the backup control pod. He was always surprised at how much effort it took to move himself in zero-g. You’d think it’d be like floating on a cloud, he thought as he clambered along the tunnel’s protruding rungs. Instead, you had to consciously exert your muscles all the time. If you relaxed you curled up into an apelike crouch with your arms dangling chest-high.

The cross tunnel was filled with air at normal pressure, according to the sensors on the right wrist of his suit. Theo stayed buttoned up inside the suit anyway, just to be on the safe side. When he finally arrived at the end of the tunnel, the telltales on the hatch’s control panel were all in the green. He puffed out a sigh of relief. The backup pod hasn’t been punctured, he said to himself. Then he added, if I can believe the sensors.

He tapped out the code on the hatch’s panel and the hatch slid open with a slight grating sound. Hasn’t been used in a while, Theo realized. Dust gets into everything sooner or later.

Cautiously he pushed himself through the hatch and climbed to his feet inside the pod. It was a near-duplicate of the main control center: curving panel of instruments and sensors; electronic keyboards right, left and center; display screens arrayed above the panel; command chair fastened to the deck by its short rails. But the screens were all blank, the instruments and sensors dark.

Theo took a deep double lungful of canned air, noticing for the first time how flat and metallic it tasted. His suit’s sensors told him the air in the pod was perfectly fine. Cautiously, he cracked his helmet visor a millimeter or two and sucked in an experimental breath.

“Nothing wrong with that,” he said aloud.

He raised the visor all the way, made a full turn, and decided to take off the helmet altogether.

First, though, he called his mother. “I’m in the pod. It’s undamaged.”

“Good.” He heard a world of relief in his mother’s solitary syllable. She must be using one of the suit radios, he realized. The intercom’s still out.

“Now to get all the systems up and working,” he said.

“Don’t take off your suit,” she cautioned. “Even if you’re breathing ship’s air.”

“Right.” But as soon as he clicked off the suit radio he unlatched his helmet and lifted it off his head. Easier to see and work without the helmet in my way, he reasoned.

Victor Zacharias sat in his sweatshirt and shorts, staring into the emptiness displayed on the pod’s central screen.

“He’s gone,” Victor muttered to himself. He made the cameras do a full global scan of space around the pod, but there was no sign of the vessel that had attacked him. Nothing out there but dark emptiness and the cold, distant stars watching him like the eyes of ancient gods.

“He’s gone,” Victor repeated. He wiped out Chrysalis, smashed our ship, and now he’s gone off somewhere. Looking for Lars Fuchs, he said. The man must be insane, a total barbarian. Unable to believe that the attacker would just peel away, Victor scanned the area again. Nothing to be seen but dark emptiness and the distant unblinking stars.

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.

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: LAVATORY

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?”

“Yes, we are.”

She stared down at her bare toes for several moments. Then, in a low voice, “Do you think Dad really ran away?”

“Not for a picosecond,” Pauline said firmly. “He lured that attacker away from us. He saved our lives.”

“Do you think he’s… he got killed?”

Pauline had to pull in a breath before she could reply, “No.”

“Really, Ma? Really and truly?”

“Really and truly, my little angel. He’s not dead. I know it in my bones. He’s out there somewhere trying to find us, trying to save us.”

Angela threw her arms around her mother’s neck. “I’ll be good, Ma, I promise,” she said tearfully. “I’ll treat Theo better, you’ll see.”

“I know,” Pauline said, holding her daughter in her arms. “I know.”

That night, as she slipped into her oversized bed alone, Pauline thought that she should have a talk with Theo, as well. It takes two to make a fight; Angela’s not the only one who needs to improve her behavior.

She turned out the lights and lay back on her pillow. The bed seemed empty, lonely without Victor beside her. He’s not dead, Pauline told herself. He left us to decoy that attacker away from us, to save us from being destroyed. He got away, I know he did. I’d know if he were dead. I’d feel it, somehow.

Pauline Osgood Zacharias was made of strong fiber. Born in Selene while her astronomer parents were teaching at the university there, she had grown up in the sunless corridors and confined living quarters of that underground city. To Pauline, the “outdoors” meant strolling along the winding pathways of Selene’s Grand Plaza, beneath its arching concrete dome, admiring the miniature trees and shrubbery that the lunar citizens so lovingly tended.

She was fifteen before her parents allowed her to go without them out onto the surface of the giant crater Alphonsus. Selene was dug into the crater’s ringwall mountains, and the area out on the flat was dotted with solar-cell farms, factories that took advantage of the Moon’s airlessness, and the Armstrong Spaceport, where ships took off for Earth or other worlds deeper in the solar system.

She studied astronomy, just as her parents had. But by the time she was ready to graduate, a family crisis arose. Her parents were preparing to return to Earth. Despite the greenhouse floods and the devastation of so many cities—or perhaps because of that—her parents felt they had to go back to the homeworld, back to their roots in Colorado. Pauline desperately wanted to stay on the Moon. She was working as a teaching assistant at the new astronomy complex being built at Farside. She had met Victor Zacharias and fallen in love with him.

Her parents left for Earth, with Pauline’s promise that she and Victor would come to visit them as soon as they could. But by the time Pauline and her newly married husband reached Denver it was too late: both her parents had been killed in a food riot.

She clung to Victor then, returned to the Moon, bore him two children, and went with him when he decided to become a rock rat, to live aboard a rattletrap ship he had managed to lease, to ply through the Asteroid Belt collecting ores from the miners and selling them to the big corporations at Ceres. She raised her daughter and her son, content to make the tiny world of the ore carrier Syracuse her island of home, her whole universe.

When the occasional violence in the Belt flared into the Second Asteroid War, Victor told her, “Not to worry. We don’t belong to either corporation. Nobody’s going to attack the independents; that would stop the flow of resources from the Belt and neither Humphries nor Astro wants that.”

She believed her husband. Until that moment when their ship was nearly destroyed by an anonymous attacker.

Now she tried to sleep, alone in her bed, desperately afraid that she would never see Victor again, almost frantic with the fear that she kept stifled all day, each day, every waking moment. She couldn’t let her children see her fear. But alone in the dark, it threatened to overwhelm her.

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: GALLEY

Theo eyed the steaming roast on his plate.

“Eat up,” his mother urged. “This is the last feast we’re going to have for a long time. Tomorrow we start rationing our provisions. We’ve got to make them last.”

Theo was too tired to eat. For the past six days he had spent virtually every waking moment trying to repair the ship, directing the tiny-brained maintenance., robots to weld patches where the wheel and the tunnels had been punctured, worming his way into the narrow access tubes to reconnect wiring, digging through the logistics storage bays to find the spare parts that he needed for the repairs. Most of his evenings he spent in the backup command pod, bringing systems back on line. He saw through eyes bleary with fatigue that one by one the red lights on the display panels were turning to green or at least amber. Mostly amber, but that was the best he could accomplish.

The fuel supply for the fusion reactor worried him most. Without the reactor the ship’s electrical power systems would go down. When that happened, the lights, the air and water recyclers, the food refrigerators and microwave cookers would go down too.

The navigation program told him that they were coasting deeper into the Belt, away from help, away from the rest of the human race. He knew the ship didn’t have enough fuel to change their course significantly. For a while he hoped that they might drift outward far enough to reach the research station orbiting Jupiter, but the navigation program showed that would be impossible unless they added a major jolt of thrust to their velocity vector, and there wasn’t enough hydrogen left in the tanks for anything like that.

They were going to die aboard Syracuse, Theo realized: probably of asphyxiation, certainly of starvation. All his brave thoughts and hard work could not change that.

“Theo,” his mother said gently. “I know you’re tired. But you’ve got to eat to keep up your strength.”

He focused on her face smiling encouragingly from across the narrow galley table.

“Right, Mom,” he mumbled, digging a fork into his dinner.

Angie’s appetite seemed normal, even better than normal, he thought. His sister was chewing on a slab of roast pseudomeat: artificial protein created by cellular biologists and marketed to the rock rats and other spacefarers as Faux Beef (or pork, or veal, or even pheasant).

“So our food stores are okay,” he muttered, pushing the meat around his plate listlessly.

“Enough for years, if we’re careful,” his mother said guardedly as she got up and went to the galley’s stainless steel sink.

Theo glanced at Angie, munching away. Dieting will do her good, he thought. But he didn’t say it. Instead, he told his mother, “We’re going to need enough for years.”

Angie looked up at him, startled. “For years?”

“Looks that way.”

“But you said the fusion engine was okay, didn’t you?”

He gave his sister a bleak look. “The engine’s fine, Angie. But when that freaking illegitimate slagged our antennas he ripped up the fuel tanks as well. They’re just about dry. Only two cells out of twenty have any hydrogen left in them.”

He saw his mother’s hands clench on the sink’s edge; her knuckles went white.

“I’ve shut down the engine until I can figure out some way to get us turned around and headed back to civilization. We’re coasting now.”

Pauline made a brittle little smile. “Then I suppose we’ll just have to coast for a while.”

“For how long?” Angie asked, looking suspicious, as if this was some kind of trick Theo was playing on her.

He pursed his lips, then replied, “Right now we’re on a trajectory that takes us halfway to Jupiter before we curve back and start toward the inner Belt again.”

“How long?” Angie repeated.

He had memorized the numbers. “Three thousand, one hundred and thirty-seven days,” Theo said.

“Three thousand—”

“That’s eight years, seven months and four days.”

“Eight years? I’ll be twenty-six years old!”

“That’s to get us back to Ceres,” Theo explained, “where we were when we were attacked, more or less.”

Pauline went to her daughter and laid a calming hand on Angie’s shoulder. “We have enough food to last that long,” she said. “If we’re careful. And we recycle our water and air, so life support shouldn’t be an issue.”

If all the equipment keeps on working, Theo countered silently.

“Can’t you do something, Thee?” Angie asked, her face agonized. “I mean, eight years!”

“I’m working on it,” he said. “Maybe we can use what little fuel we have left to cut the time down. But I’ve got to be real careful. I don’t want to make things worse than they are now.”

“How could they get worse?” Angie grumbled.

“Is there any chance of repairing the antennas?” Pauline asked. “Then we could call for help.”

Theo nodded. “That’s my next priority. There must be some ships in this region of the Belt. Miners, other rock rats.”

“Sure!” said Angie, brightening a little.

“Trouble is,” Theo went on, “we’ve been busting along at a pretty high delta vee. Dad goosed the main engines before he split.”

“So we’re accelerating too much for another ore ship or a miner to reach us?” Pauline asked.

“I’ve shut down the main engine,” Theo repeated. “We’re not accelerating anymore, just coasting. But still, we’re spitting along damn fast. I don’t know if one of the rock rats could catch up to us, even if they wanted to.”

His mother didn’t flinch at his minor vulgarity. She’s just as scared as Angie, Theo thought, but she hides it better.

“Eight years,” Angie repeated, in a whisper.

Theo nodded. He knew their hydrogen fuel wouldn’t last anywhere near that long. The reactor would shut down and the ship would lose all its electrical power well before then. They’d freeze and choke to death when the heaters and air recyclers shut down.

“Well then,” their mother said, as brightly as she could manage, “once the antennas are working again we can call for assistance. With Chrysalis gone, there must be a lot of rock rats stranded out here in the Belt calling back toward Earth for help.”

“Guess so,” Theo said.

“So fixing the antennas is our first priority,” Pauline continued. “Thee, what can we do to help you?”

He glanced at Angie and thought, Keep out of my way. But to his mother he said, “I don’t know yet. I’ve got some studying to do.”

For the next two days Theo stayed mostly in his own compartment studying the tutorials and maintenance videos about the antennas. He saw that he would have to go outside to assess the damage that the attacker’s laser beams did. The maintenance robots could be helpful, but only if he could program them with exact instructions.

He was stretched out on his bunk, so intent on the maintenance video that he didn’t hear the scratching on his privacy partition.

“Thee? You in there?” Angie’s voice.

He yanked the plug out of his ear and looked up. His sister inched the accordion-fold partition back a sliver. “Can I come in?”

“May I come in,” he corrected.

Angie pushed the partition wide open. “May I. All right. Satisfied?”

“Come on in,” he said, swinging his stockinged feet to the tiled deck. He clicked the remote and the instruction vid disappeared from the screen built into the bulkhead at the foot of his bunk.

Angie sat in the spindly little desk chair, her fists clenched on her knees.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“Okay. I’m learning a lot about how the antennas work. I’ll have to go outside and check the damage. Prob’ly tomorrow.”

“You want me to go with you? You know, like backup?”

He started to say that she’d be more trouble than help, but bit back the reply and answered instead, “You could be a big help by monitoring me from the control pod.”

Angie’s eyes widened eagerly. “I could do that,” she said.

“Okay. Good. I’ll tell Mom.”

“Thee?”

“What?”

“She cries.”

“Who? Mom?” A blast of something close to panic jolted through him.

Nodding, fighting back tears herself, Angie said, “At night. After we go to bed. I can hear her in her compartment. She tries to muffle it but I can hear her crying.”

Theo couldn’t believe his mother was afraid of anything. “It’s about Dad, I bet. She’s crying about Dad.”

“You don’t really think he ran away from us, do you?”

“What else? We’re here and he’s not.”

“But Mom says he did it to protect us. To draw the attack ship away from us.”

A thousand thoughts raced through Theo’s mind, all jumbled up, blurring together.

“Thee, you don’t really think he abandoned us, do you?”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what I think. Dad’s prob’ly dead.”

“No!”

“Most likely. But we’re alive, and I intend to keep us that way.”

Victor Zacharias was alive, but starving.

The pod in which he was coasting sunward carried only a minifridge’s worth of packaged food: mostly sandwiches and preserved fruits. He had been living on one sandwich and one piece of fruit per twenty-four hours. His stomach rumbled hollowly.

As the pod sailed silently through the dark emptiness he had plenty of time to think. And plan.

The pod had an emergency transponder that could beam out a distress signal. But it was a notoriously weak signal, Victor knew, and bound to be swamped by the comm chatter that would be sweeping over the area where Chrysalis once orbited Ceres. It was bitterly ironic, he thought: There must be whole fleets of rescue and salvage ships heading for Ceres, a regular armada of vessels and people. But they wouldn’t be looking for a small, weak-voiced pod hurtling inward from the Belt, thousands of kilometers from the asteroid.

How can I get them to notice me? Victor asked himself. He pondered that question through the long, lonely hours he spent in the command chair, staring at his useless instruments and sensors. He dreamed about it when he cranked the reclining chair back and willed himself to sleep. He worried that the nanobatteries powering the pod’s systems would run dry, but then he realized he’d starve to death long before that happened.

At first he thought his hunger would be a sharp prod that would make him think. After a week he realized that starvation dulled the mind. No brilliant ideas surfaced; all he could think of was food.

He wished he had the mental discipline of a Buddhist monk, capable of submerging himself into deep meditation. Victor’s mind was not so trained. He wanted an idea, a plan, a scheme. He wanted action, not the oblivion of Nirvana.

He wanted, above all, to get back to Pauline and the children. With a shake of his head he reminded himself, they’re not children anymore. Angela’s ready for marriage. Theo is a man in every way except experience.

And still the pod drifted, like a leaf caught in a tide, like a man-made asteroid sweeping along in its mindless orbit.

Feeling weaker each day, Victor forced himself to check and recheck every item of equipment in the pod. Every piece of hardware, every computer program, every system. There’s got to be something here that I can use as a tool, something that I can use to get noticed, to get rescued.

Again and again he checked his inventory. There was a communications laser built into the pod’s outer hull, but lasers were strictly for line-of-sight communications. Radio waves spread out like ripples on a pond, but the tight beam of a laser was good for communications only if it was pointed directly at the ship you wanted to communicate with.

I could make the laser swing around in a circle, Victor thought. That might catch some ship someplace. But he knew that was a tactic of desperation. The chances of his pencil-thin laser beam reaching another ship’s receiving sensor were little better than the chances of being struck by lightning out here in the middle of empty space.

Yet that night he dreamed of a star shining in the soft night sky of Earth. The star pulsated. Shepherds gathered in the desert and marveled at it.

When he woke he thought he must be getting irrational. “Next thing you know you’ll be dreaming about Santa Claus,” he growled at himself.

He fought off sleep but eventually it overpowered him. And he dreamed again of the star blinking in the cloudless sky of a desert on Earth. Blinking. Blinking.

Victor awoke with a new sense of purpose. The first thing I’ve got to do is modify the laser, he told himself. Get its pulses down into the petasecond range. The shorter the pulses, the more power in each pulse. Each pulse will carry megawatts worth of power, plenty bright enough to see on Earth. There must be thousands of astronomers looking at the stars each night. They’ll have to notice me!

But first I’ve got to modify the laser.

Theo was soaking in a hot shower after long hours in his space suit, working outside on the slagged antennas. Whoever their attacker was, he had done a thorough job of destroying the antennas: long ugly gashes sliced through the metallic monolayer that had been sprayed along Syracuse’s curving outer hull and gutted the fusion engine’s propellant tanks beneath them.

He let the steaming water relax his cramped and aching muscles. Neither Mom nor Angie tried to hurry him out of the shower. What the hell, he rationalized, the water’s recycled. We’re not losing any of it: it just goes into the purifiers and back to the holding tank. He remembered when he was a kid, maybe seven years old, and he’d taken a pair of welder’s goggles into the shower with him and pretended he was swimming underwater on Earth, like the vids he’d seen. After three-quarters of an hour Dad got sore, he recalled, but Mom laughed when Dad told her about it.

I can repair the antennas, Theo told himself. I know what to do and how to go about it. The maintenance robots can do most of the outside work, all I’ve got to do is program them and feed them the right materials. Tomorrow I’ll go through the logistics files and find what I need.

But the next morning he found that the monomolecular spray that made up the antennas was not listed in the logistics files. Theo spent the next two days searching through the stores in the ship’s storage bays. No antenna spray.

Spit in my hat, he groused to himself, I’m gonna have to make it up from scratch.

By dinner time of the second day he was thoroughly angry.

“How could Dad let us sail out here without the proper materials to repair the antennas?” he grumbled into his bowl of soup.

“Are you sure—” Angie began.

“I’m sure!” Theo snapped. “The stuff isn’t there. Never was. He let us cruise through the Belt without the material we need to repair the antennas. Our main antennas, for crying out loud!”

Pauline kept her face from showing any emotion. “You’ll have to produce the antenna spray from the materials we have on board, then, Theo. That’s what your father would do, I suppose.”

He glared at her. “No. Dad would just wave a magic wand and the antennas would fix themselves.”

“Theo.”

“Or more likely the antennas wouldn’t dare get damaged long’s Dad’s in charge.”

His mother drew in a long breath. Then she said, “Theo, the antennas did get damaged while your father was on board. Now it’s up to you to repair them.”

He stared down into his unfinished soup. “Yeah. It’s up to me.”

COLUMBUS, OHIO. COSETI HEADQUARTERS

Even after more than three quarters of a century, the headquarters of the Columbus Optical Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence was hardly imposing. It consisted of a lovingly preserved but unpretentious wooden frame house, a much newer brick two-story building for offices and workshops, and the Kingsley Observatory, which housed beneath its metal dome a sturdy two-meter Schmidt reflector telescope.

The homes adjacent to COSETI headquarters had long been demolished after being inundated time and again by the Scioto River, which had overflowed much of Columbus in the greenhouse floods. Now the headquarters grounds were surrounded by a low earthen levee, almost like the long mysterious mounds that the original Native Americans had built in the region a thousand years earlier.

Jillian Hatcher was bubbling with excitement. She bent over the desk of the observatory’s director, a small, slim blonde woman filled with the energy and exhilaration of discovery.

“It’s real!” she shouted, tapping the computer screen on her boss’s desk. “I found it! I found it!”

She practically danced around the small, cluttered office. Dwight Franklin smiled at her. Although he contained his excitement as best as he could, he too felt a thrill shuddering along his spine. “After all these years,” he murmured.

Franklin had a square, chunky build. His thinning hair was combed straight back from his high forehead. Sitting behind his desk in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, he looked more like a clerk or an accountant than a world-renowned astronomer.

“The pulses are regular!” Jillian said, dancing back to his desk. “It’s a message! A message from an extraterrestrial civilization!”

“Looks intriguing, I’ve got to admit,” said Franklin. “Where in the sky—”

“The region of Sagittarius!” she crowed. “The heart of the Milky Way!”

“And it’s fixed in its position? It’s not a satellite or a spacecraft?”

Jillian’s beaming face faded a little. “I haven’t tracked it yet.”

Franklin got up from his creaking desk chair. “Let’s see if we can get a firm fix on it.”

She sank into silence and followed him out into the chill November night. Clouds were building up along the western horizon but most of the sky was clear as crystal. Orion and the Bull sparkled above them. Jillian picked out the Pleiades cluster and bright Aldebaran.

The observatory was freezing cold with the dome open but they walked past the silent framework of the Schmidt telescope and into the tiny control room. It was heated, and Jillian was grateful for that.

Half an hour later her excitement had evaporated like a shallow pan of water over a hot fire.

Franklin looked up from the computer screen, a fatherly look of sympathy on his face.

“It’s a spacecraft, I’m afraid.”

“Are you sure?” Jillian asked, desperate. “Positive?”

He gestured toward the display. “See for yourself. It’s out in the Asteroid Belt, and it’s definitely moving.”

“It’s not a star.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Not a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.”

“No.”

Jillian felt like crying. But then a new thought popped into her head. “So why is a spacecraft out in the Belt sending pulsed laser messages toward Earth? What’s he trying to say?”

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: THE WORKSHOP

The workshop smelled of machine oil and dust. The overhead lamps bathed the big chamber in glareless, shadowless light. Theo sat at a long workbench in one corner where shelves of chemical compounds were stacked high on both sides of him. He was bent over an ordinary optical microscope, feeling frustrated and cranky, when his sister came through the open hatch that led back to the family’s living quarters.

He didn’t hear her enter, nor the soft footfalls of her slippered feet as she approached his workbench. He was studying the jiggling Brownian motion of the metallic chips that he had mixed into a sample of liquid plastic. Although the instructions in the maintenance videos had been quite specific, Theo found that the supplies his father had stored were far short of what he needed to repair the ship’s antennas. He was trying to make do with what was available in the storage bays. And it wasn’t going well.

“Thee?” Angie called timidly.

Her voice startled him. He jerked up straight on the stool he was sitting on.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Angie said.

“I’m not scared,” he snapped. “You just surprised me, that’s all.”

“You didn’t come in for lunch,” his sister said. “And now it’s almost dinner time.”

“Okay. Okay. Tell Mom I’ll be there.” But he turned back to the microscope.

“How’s it going?” Angie asked.

“Lousy.”

“Really?”

He looked up at her. “Really. Lousy. I don’t have the electrolyte I need. And the polymer filler is so old and goddamn gooey I don’t think it’ll be workable.”

“Theo, I really—”

“Go tell Mom about the language.”

“It’s not that.” Angie took a breath, then went on, “Is it really going to take eight years for us to get back to Ceres?”

He heard the stress in her voice. “Unless I can figure out a way to shorten it.”

“Eight years?” she whimpered.

Trying to fight down the anger rising inside him, Theo said, “Yes. Eight years, seven months and four clays.”

“You don’t have to be so happy about it!”

“I’m not happy, Angie.”

“You’re gloating! You don’t care how long it takes. You don’t care about me at all!”

“I told you I’m trying to figure out a way to shorten it,” Theo protested. “What more can I do, for Christopher Columbus’s sake?”

She plopped herself down on the bench beside him. “Eight years! I’ll be an old woman by the time we get back.”

“If we get back,” he said. He knew he shouldn’t have said it but there it was.

“If?”

“There’s a good chance we’ll die on this bucket. The recyclers might wear out, the fusion reactor could fail, our hydrogen fuel is going to run out—”

Angie clapped her hands to her ears. “I don’t want to hear it! You’re just being spiteful!”

“It’s the truth, Angie.”

“No,” she said. “We’ll live. We’re not going to die here. If something breaks down we’ll fix it.”

“If we can.”

“And you’ll find a way to get us back to Ceres quicker, too, won’t you? You’re just teasing me, trying to make me cry.”

“Angie, I’m just telling you the facts.”

“I can’t sit here for eight years, Theo! I’ll be twenty-six years old by then! Twenty-six! All the guys my age will already be married.”

Suddenly Theo understood what was really bothering her.

“Angie,” he asked, “that bozo you dated when we were docked at Chrysalis last year—”

“He’s not a bozo! His name is Leif Haldeman.”

“How serious are you about him?”

She blinked several times before murmuring, “I love him, Theo.”

“Have you been to bed with him?”

Her cheeks flamed. “That’s none of your business!”

“Does Mom know? Or Dad?”

“There’s nothing for them to know. I love Leif and he loves me. We were going to tell Mom and Dad about it when we got back to Ceres.”

“He was living on Chrysalis?”

“He was looking for a job with one of the rock rats. He’s a mining engineer.”

Feeling totally miserable, Theo said softly, “Angie, if he was still on Chrysalis when we were approaching Ceres…”

Angie’s eyes went wide as she realized what her brother was trying to tell her. “You think he was killed?”

“I don’t think anybody aboard Chrysalis survived, Angie.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “He probably found a berth on one of the mining ships. He was probably out in the Belt somewhere when Chrysalis was attacked.”

“I hope so,” said Theo.

“He had to be!”

“I hope so,” he repeated.

Victor was roused from a troubled sleep by a beeping noise. Any sound at all aboard the cramped little pod was alarming. The muted hum of the air fans and the constant buzz of the electronics had long since faded into an unnoticed background. But a new sound—a ping, a beep, a creak—meant danger.

Instantly awake, Victor swiftly scanned the control board. No red lights, all systems functioning nominally.

The beeping sounded again, and Victor saw a yellow light flashing in a corner of the control panel.

The comm laser, he realized. What’s wrong— His breath caught in his throat. That’s the message light! Wiping sleep from his eyes with the heel of one hand, he punched up the communications system on his main screen.

TORCH SHIP ELSINORE. The yellow letters blazed on the otherwise dark screen. His mind raced. Elsinore was one of the vessels in orbit around Ceres when the attack started.

Victor pounded on the comm key. “Elsinore, this is Syracuse. What’s left of it, anyway.”

A woman’s voice replied, “We have you in sight. Will rendezvous with you in twenty minutes. Be prepared to come aboard.”

Victor wanted to kiss her, whoever she was. But then he remembered, “I don’t have a suit. I can’t go EVA.”

Several heartbeats’ silence. Then a man’s voice answered, “Very well, we will send a shuttlecraft and mate to your airlock.”

“Thank you,” Victor said fervently. He had never felt so grateful in his life. “Thank you. Thank you.”

After dinner Theo was so tired that all he wanted was to crawl into his bunk and sleep. But as he got up from the galley’s narrow table, Angie said, “Thee, isn’t there anything I can do to help you?”

He looked down at his sister. Was she asking out of a sense of duty, or because their mother had told her to? She looked sincere.

“I mean,” Angie went on, “I just sit around here all day with nothing to do but keep the kitchen appliances in working order.”

“You’re helping me work out our diets,” Pauline said, from the sink where she was scraping dishes and putting them into the microwave dishwasher. Instead of using precious water, the dishwasher blasted everything clean with pulses of high-power microwaves. Theo wondered if it wouldn’t be better to wash the dishes with recycled water than use the fusion reactor’s dwindling fuel supply to power the microwave cleaner.

“Mom, that’s nothing more than busywork,” Angie said. “I want to do something useful.”

Theo was impressed. Angie had never shown a desire to be useful before. Their parents had always raised Angie to be a little queen, he thought, lording it over him while Mom pampered her. Maybe her telling me about her boyfriend is bringing us closer together, he thought. But then a different voice in his head sneered, Or maybe she just wants to stay close to you to make sure you don’t tell Mom about her love life.

“Don’t look so surprised, Thee!” Angie demanded. “What can I do to help you?”

He blinked, then grinned. “Well…” he started, drawing out the word, “most of what I’m doing in the workshop is dogwork chemistry: mixing things and seeing if the mixtures have the conductivity I need for repainting the antennas…”

“I could help you do that, couldn’t I?” Angie asked. “I mean, you could tell me what to do and I could do it.”

Slowly he nodded. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“Good!” Angela seemed genuinely pleased. “Tomorrow morning I’ll go to the workshop with you.”

Theo glanced at his mother, still by the sink. She was smiling. Did Mom get Angie to do this? he wondered. With a mental shrug, he said to himself, doesn’t matter. Maybe Mom talked Angie into it, or maybe Angie’s growing up and trying to take some responsibilities. Or maybe she just wants to keep an eye on me now that I know about her boyfriend. Whichever, it’s okay.

If my spoiled brat sister actually lets me tell her what to do in the workshop, he added.

TORCH SHIP ELSINORE

It’s a freaking floating palace, Victor thought as the two uniformed crew members—one man and one woman—led him through the carpeted corridors and spacious lounges of the Elsinore.

The lounges were empty and quiet, the corridors nearly so. The crew seemed to far outnumber the passengers.

The same two crew members had flown a shuttlecraft and plucked Victor from the command pod that had been his home for nearly two weeks. They had delivered him to Elsinore’s small but well-stocked infirmary, where a pair of medics—again, one woman and one man—checked him thoroughly and pronounced him physically fit, except for slight dehydration.

Now they walked him through the ship.

“Where are we going?” Victor asked at last, as they climbed a carpeted staircase.

“To meet the man who diverted our ship to pick you up,” said the crewman walking on Victor’s right side.

“The captain? I’d certainly like to thank him.”

“Not the captain,” replied the woman on his left.

“Who then?”

They reached the top of the stairs. Another lounge, with fabric-covered walls and muted music purring softly from overhead speakers. Two people were sitting at one of the little round tables; the lounge was otherwise empty except for the human bartender standing behind the bar. The man at the table rose to his feet like the Sun climbing above the horizon: a huge mountain of a man with wild red shaggy hair and beard and a mug of what had to be beer in one ham-sized hand.

Victor recognized him immediately: George Ambrose, chairman of the ruling council at Ceres. Big George, the rock rats’ leader. A brightly attractive woman was sitting at the table with George. She too looked familiar to Victor but he couldn’t quite place her. She appeared to be young, with bountiful blonde hair framing her pretty, smiling, cheerleader’s face.

“You’re Victor Zacharias?” Big George asked in a surprisingly sweet tenor voice. He was not smiling, however. If anything, he looked grimly angry.

Victor extended his hand and Big George engulfed it in his massive paw.

“We’ve met before,” Victor said, “but it was in a crowd at a party aboard Chrysalis; I don’t suppose you remember me.”

“Chrysalis,” George muttered, plunking himself down on his chair; it groaned beneath his weight.

Victor turned to the woman.

“I’m Edith Elgin,” she said, still smiling as she raised her hand toward him.

“Edie Elgin. The news anchor,” Victor said, recognizing her at last. “But I thought you lived in Selene.”

“I came out here to do a story on the war in the Belt,” she said, her smile fading.

“And walked into a fookin’ massacre,” Big George growled.

A moment of awkward silence. Then George hollered over to the bartender, “We’ve got a thirsty man here!” Turning to Victor he added, “I guess maybe you want a drink, too, eh?”

Despite himself, Victor grinned. He asked the barman for a glass of red wine. Edith Elgin shook her head when the barman offered to refill her glass of soda.

“I want to thank you for picking me up,” Victor said. “I didn’t think anybody—”

“Got a message from some astronomers Earthside,” George interrupted. “They saw your laser signal. Thought they’d found fookin’ little green men, at first. Big disappointment to them.”

“I’m not disappointed,” Victor said. He picked up his stemmed wine glass and took a long, slow, delicious sip. “You weren’t aboard Chrysalis” he asked Big George, “when… when it happened?”

George swung his red-maned head. “I was here on Elsinore, chattin’ up our visitor.”

“What happened to you?” Edith Elgin asked Victor. “How did you get into this mess?”

Victor began to speak, but the words caught in his throat. “My family… they’re still out there…”

“Where?”

“I don’t know!” Victor groaned. “The ship was heading outward…”

“Syracuse?” she asked.

For the first time in his adult life Victor had to struggle to hold back tears. He nodded at the two of them and managed to choke out, “He attacked us. For no reason! I separated the pod, drew him away. My wife… two children… they’re out there, drifting outward.”

Edith Elgin looked up at George Ambrose. “We’ve got to find them.”

Big George sat unmoving, like an implacable mountain. At last he said, “How can we find ’em when we don’t know where they are?”

“They’re drifting outward,” Victor said.

“Yes, but what’s their track? We can’t go traipsin’ all over the Belt to search for them. There’s too much to do here and too little to do it with.”

“Can’t you scan the area with radar?” Edith Elgin asked. “They have those huge radar arrays back Earthside. They can pick out a thumbtack a million kilometers away.”

George slowly shook his shaggy head. “They can pick up a beacon from a spacecraft, that’s what they do.”

Edith turned back to Victor. “Your ship’s sending out a beacon, isn’t it? A tracking beacon?”

Victor felt totally hollowed out. “He destroyed our antennas. Syracuse can’t send out any kind of signal.”

George took another huge gulp of beer, then placed his mug firmly on the tiny table.

“Face it, mate,” he said to Victor. “Your family’s gone and there’s nothin’ we can do for ’em.”

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: THEO’S COMPARTMENT

Theo was stretched out on the bunk of his tight little compartment, VR goggles over his eyes and sensor gloves on his hands, deeply immersed in the virtual reality program. He knew he should be studying the navigation program, but he’d spent all day staring at graphs and lists and numbers. Now he was trying to relax with an entertainment VR he had smuggled past his parents’ watchful eyes.

I’m old enough to have adult VRs, he said to himself. Old enough to really experience what these women are doing. Full sensory input: sight, sound, touch…

He heard a faint tapping and then the squeak of his accordion-pleated door starting to slide open. With a sudden twitch of guilty-fear he yanked the goggles off his head and pulled off the gloves.

“May I come in, Theo?” his mother asked.

Shoving the goggles and gloves under his pillow, Theo sat up, swinging his long legs off the bunk.

“I knocked at your door, Thee,” said Pauline as she entered the compartment, “but I guess you didn’t hear me.”

Not over the panting and moaning of the scene you interrupted, Mom, he replied silently.

“Are you all right?” his mother asked, sitting in the compartment’s only chair, the spindly little plastic one that fit under the desk.

“Yeah. I’m fine, Mom.”

“You’ve been working terribly hard, I know.”

“I just can’t get the right mixture for repairing the antennas.

Nothing I’ve tried has the right electrical conductivity. I just can’t find the proper materials.”

“You’ll find the right mixture sooner or later.”

“I’ve been working on the nav program, too. Trying to find some way to cut our trajectory so we can get back to Ceres sooner.”

“Angela’s very anxious to get back to Ceres as soon as we can.”

“I… I know.”

His mother took a deep breath, then said, “The thing is, Theo … I want to know, in all honesty, what is your feeling about our chances of getting through this? Our chances of survival.”

He looked into her pearl gray eyes and saw that she expected the worst.

“I don’t know, Mom. If I can get the antennas working—even just one antenna—if we could send out a distress call, then we might have a chance of being picked up.”

“And if not?”

“Then we just keep on sailing out toward Jupiter until the reactor runs out of hydrogen. Or the recyclers start breaking down.”

“You could repair the recyclers, couldn’t you?”

“Maybe. I think so. Unless we run out of spares.”

Pauline seemed to put it all together in her mind. “Then it comes down to a question of how long our food will last.”

Theo nodded glumly, thinking, It’s really a question of how long the hydrogen lasts.

“All right then.” She got to her feet and Theo stood up to face her, almost eye to eye. “We’ll just all go on stricter diets and make the food last as long as we possibly can. It will do Angie good to slim down. Me too.”

“Mom, even if I can fix the antennas, even if we can send out a distress call…”

“I know. No one may answer. We may be too far away to be rescued. We may all die.”

He grasped both her wrists. “I won’t let that happen, Mom. I’ll take care of you. Angie too. We’ll get through this. I’ll get us back to safety.”

His mother smiled, but there was sadness in it. “I know you will, Theo. I have no doubts about that at all.”

He was glad she said it, even though he knew she didn’t really believe it.

“I won’t let you die, Mom.”

“Of course not. Besides, your father will come back for us, sooner or later. He’s probably searching for us right now.”

Theo didn’t reply to his mother. But to himself he said bitterly, Like hell he is.

CERES SECTOR: SIX MONTHS LATER

It was simple economics, brutally simple economics and nothing more. Victor needed a ship to search for his family, drifting somewhere in the outer region of the Belt aboard Syracuse. A ship cost money. He had none.

On the other hand, Big George Ambrose was in a frenzy to recover the bodies of Chrysalis’s slaughtered men, women and children.

“You can work with one of the recovery teams,” George had told Victor. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a command.

So for six months Victor Zacharias worked as a crewman aboard Pleiades, once a cargo vessel that ferried supplies to the research station orbiting Jupiter, now pressed into duty recovering the dead. The cargo bays that once held food and scientific equipment now held corpses as Pleiades wandered through the space around Ceres in an ever-widening spiral, seeking bodies wafting, tumbling, drifting through the silent dark mausoleum of space.

It was soul-killing work, following a blip on the ship’s radar screen, hoping that it actually was the remains of a human being, catching up to it only to find—in most cases—it was a fragment of one of Chrysalis’s exploded modules, or a chunk of rock, another uncharted minor asteroid. Or—worst of all—a bloody piece of a body that had been ripped apart.

Grisly work. The hell of it, though, was that Victor knew the pay he was receiving would never be enough to lease a spacecraft to search for his family. I’ll have to steal this ship, he told himself, just as soon as the opportunity comes up.

So, for day after gruesome day, week after hideous week, month after sickening month, Victor pulled on a nanofabric space suit and went out to investigate the dark blob that the radar had found. The bodies were mangled and caked with dried blood: the sudden decompression when they’d been hurled into the vacuum of space had literally exploded their lungs and blood vessels. Their skins had been burned black by the Sun’s harsh unfiltered ultraviolet radiation.

One day he found the bloody remains of a young woman clutching a baby to her chest with both arms; their eyeballs were gone, nothing but empty dark accusing sockets. Victor bullied the ship’s medic into giving him enough alcohol to get thoroughly drunk that night.

The ship’s captain was a steel-eyed woman with the unlikely name of Cheena Madagascar. She obviously didn’t like this corpse-seeking mission any more than he did. But Big George Ambrose had the ear of Selene’s governing board, which in turn had the International Astronautical Authority in the palm of its hand, so the IAA was paying for the rescue operation—at minimum rates. Selene agreed with George’s insistence that all the bodies had to be found and accounted for. All eleven hundred and seventeen of them.

Selene and the IAA faced the harsh necessities of simple economics, too. Selene and the research outposts scattered across the solar system needed the resources of the asteroids: the metals and minerals, the oxygen and water baked out of asteroidal rock or melted from icy ’roids. Big George made it abundantly clear that there would be no mining or smelting done until the rock rats could rebuild their habitat at Ceres—and the bloody war between Humphries Space Systems and Astro Corporation was brought to an end.

Douglas Stavenger, the power behind Selene’s governing council, hammered out a peace agreement between Martin Humphries and Astro’s CEO, Pancho Lane. Meanwhile, Victor Zacharias and the other crewmen of Pleiades hunted for the dead bodies drifting through the Belt.

The morning after his drunken oblivion Victor stayed in his bunk instead of reporting for duty. That earned him a visit from the ship’s medic. The young woman looked decidedly nervous as she entered Victor’s privacy cubicle unannounced.

His head still buzzing, Victor lay on his back and blinked blearily at her, tugging at the bedsheet that half covered him.

“I need a day to recover,” he told her before she could say anything.

Her lips were pressed into a thin line. She was slim, with long legs like a colt; her shoulder-length hair was dark, her cheekbones high, her deep brown eyes were flecked with gold.

“We’re both in trouble,” she said, in a near-whisper.

Victor’s brows rose.

“The captain wants to see us both. Immediately.”

He puffed out a breath. “I’ll have to get dressed, then.”

“Please hurry.” And she stepped outside his cubicle.

Sitting up was an exercise in teeth-gritting willpower. The tiny cubicle swam giddily for long moments. But at last Victor got to his feet—shakily—and pulled on his coveralls and softboots.

As he pushed his doorscreen open and stepped into the crew’s common area, he asked, “Do I have time to wash my face and do my teeth?”

The medic gave him a distressed look.

“Comb my hair, at least?”

“Be quick.”

Nine minutes later, Victor and the medic were standing before the sliding partition of the captain’s quarters. The medic rapped lightly on the⁵ bulkhead.

“Enter,” came the captain’s voice.

Her quarters were a surprise to Victor: very feminine, pale pink covers on the bunk, an ornate vase on the desk filled with colorful flowers. Artificial, of course, he thought.

Cheena Madagascar herself was a collection of contradictions. She wore a set of jet black coveralls with a bright pink scarf around her throat, its ends tucked into her unbuttoned collar. Soft doeskin boots and a wide black belt studded with asteroidal silver, midnight dark hair cropped military style close to her skull, but silver rings glittering with gems on seven of her fingers and silver earrings dangling from her lobes. She was no taller than Victor, almost as slim as the medic, but her tight coveralls showed ample bosom and hips. Cosmetic nanotherapy, he guessed.

Without preamble, she demanded of the medic, “You gave this man alcohol to drink?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did,” the medic whispered.

She turned to Victor and he saw that her eyes were the same gold-flecked brown as the medic’s. “You got yourself so plastered that you couldn’t report for duty?”

“That’s right,” Victor answered.

“Or maybe it was an excuse to take a day off?”

“No. Not that.”

The captain glared at him. “Not that, huh?”

“Not that,” he repeated.

She turned to the medic. “You may go.” Before the younger woman had a chance to turn around, the captain added, “And no more dispensing alcohol. To anyone. Understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Barely audible.

“Get out of here.”

The medic fled, leaving Victor alone with the captain.

“Do you have any excuse for your behavior?”

Victor thought of the mother and baby he had recovered. But he said, “Not really.”

“Not really, huh? I heard you picked up something really stomach-turning. Is that right?”

“A woman. With a baby in her arms.”

“Upsetting.”

Before he realized he was saying it, Victor revealed, “I have a wife and children somewhere out in the Belt…” He stopped himself.

The captain stared at him for a long moment. Then she said, more softly, “I have a family too. I keep them with me.”

He recognized the sculptured cheekbones, the gold-flecked eyes. “The medic?”

“One of my daughters. The other one’s an engineer with the flight crew.”

“Is your husband aboard too?” he asked.

“Never had one. Never wanted one. Cloning works fine.”

Victor’s insides felt hollow, his legs weak. “I don’t know where my family is now.”

She seemed to stiffen, and drew herself up to her full height, eye to eye with Victor. “Well, you’re aboard my ship now and you’ll do the work you’ve signed on to do. No more booze and no more days spent in your bunk. Understand me?”

“Yes, captain.”

“Report to the infirmary at once. I want you to take a full physical and psych exam. I want you detoxed; get that alcohol out of your bloodstream.”

“Yes, captain.” Victor turned to leave.

“At twenty hundred hours, report back here.”

He blinked with surprise. “Here?”

“To my quarters. Twenty hundred hours. Understand me?”

“Yes, captain.”

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: THE GALLEY

Pauline Zacharias wondered why they had these meetings in the galley. The family’s living quarters included a perfectly comfortable sitting room, but somehow whenever they had something to discuss the three of them always huddled together over the narrow table of the galley.

Like old-time families on Earth, she thought, coming together in the kitchen. Maybe it’s instinct. Gather where the food and warmth are centered, where the air smells of cooking and everybody feels at ease. But Syracuse’s galley didn’t smell of cooking, except for the brief moments when the cranky old microwave was opened and she was taking a sizzling hot prepackaged meal to the table. The galley wasn’t homey and warm; it had no fireplace, no cookpots simmering; its metal bulkheads and plastic deck tiles were cold and worn.

Still, Pauline thought, it’s the closest thing to a safe cave that the children know.

Children, she thought. They’re not children anymore. Angela’s old enough to start a family of her own. And Theo, he’s aged five years in the past six months, working night and day to keep this ship’s systems going, to keep us alive.

Theo was sitting at the head of the little table, Angela on his left. Pauline herself sat with her back to the row of freezers and microwave ovens. She had placed a meager bowl of thawed fruit on the table and a glass of reconstituted juice at each of their three places.

Theo was saying, “I’ve been working with the navigation program at night, trying to figure out some way to cut our trip time down and get us back to the Ceres area in less than eight years.”

“And seven months,” Angela muttered.

“And four days,” Theo added, grinning at her. Pauline realized that six months ago he would have lost his temper with his sister. Now he simply let her grumbles roll off his back. Theo’s growing up, she thought. All this responsibility is making a man of him.

Angela is maturing too, she realized. She’s become a real help to Theo; she can run the command pod’s systems just as well as he can. Pauline smiled to herself: The idea of Theo and Angela working together on repairing the ship’s antennas would have been preposterous six months ago; yet they’ve slaved away at it together without fighting, without calling each other names. Even when it became painfully clear that they wouldn’t be able to get the antennas functioning again, they didn’t blame each other.

Theo blames his father, though. He says Victor didn’t store the proper supplies for repairing the antennas. Maybe he’s right. None of us expected to be attacked. None of us expected the antennas to be so badly damaged.

That was her greatest worry. Not that they were drifting halfway to Jupiter, alone and unable to call for help. Not that they might run out of food or have the recyclers break down past the point where they could be repaired. Pauline’s greatest worry was that Theo blamed his father for this, blamed Victor for not supplying the ship adequately, blamed him for running away and abandoning them.

“We might be able to cut the trip time in half,” Theo was saying, “but it’s an awfully risky maneuver.”

With an effort of will, Pauline focused her attention on what her son was telling her.

“We put it all on a graph,” Theo said, fingering the palm-sized remote in his hand.

“We?” Pauline asked.

“Angie and me.” He hesitated, then admitted, “Angie’s a lot better at math than I am.”

A multicolored map appeared on the smart screen on the galley’s far bulkhead. Thin yellow lines looped across its gridwork background. Pauline realized that they were the orbits of major asteroids. A pulsing red dot was at its center.

“The red clot is us,” Theo explained. “And here’s our current trajectory…”

A blue curve arced outward. The view enlarged to show Syracuse’s trajectory soaring out the far side of the Asteroid Belt halfway to Jupiter before it finally swung back toward Ceres again.

“I’ve gone through all the numbers a dozen times—”

“We both did,” Angela said, without a hint of rancor.

He dipped his chin in acknowledgement of his sister. “And here’s what we might be able to do.”

A dotted blue curve appeared, much shorter than the solid one.

Theo explained, “The nav program shows that we can get back to Ceres in a little more than four years if we fire the main engine and decelerate the ship.”

“Four years, two months and sixteen days,” said Angela, looking almost happy about it. “Right, Thee?”

“Right. Give or take an uncertainty of five percent.”

“Couldn’t we make it less than that?” Pauline asked.

Theo grimaced, then answered, “We don’t have the fuel for a longer burn, Mom. This maneuver’s gonna use up our last drop of hydrogen.”

Pauline thought about that for a moment. “You don’t mean all our hydrogen?”

“All of it, Mom. Down to the last molecule.”

“But how will we generate electricity if we use all the fuel? The reactor needs hydrogen.”

“That’s the risky part.”

“We can’t run for four years without electricity! We couldn’t last four days.”

“I know. But we have water.”

“Drinking water,” Pauline said. “Which we need.”

“We recycle it,” said Angela.

“But what’s our drinking water got to do with hydrogen for the fusion reactor?” Pauline asked. She was fairly certain she knew the answer but she wanted to hear what Theo had come up with.

Theo gnawed on his lip for several heartbeats. With a glance at his sister, he explained, “Here’s what Angie and I have figured out. Water contains hydrogen. We electrolyze some of our water and feed the hydrogen to the reactor to keep it going.”

“We use the electricity that the reactor generates to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen,” Angela added.

Pauline felt confused. “Now wait a second. You use electricity from the reactor to produce hydrogen fuel for the reactor?”

They both nodded.

“It sounds…”

“It’s a bootstrap operation, I know,” said Theo. “But the numbers show that it could work.”

Angela said, “The hydrogen fusion produces a gajillion times more energy than it takes to split the water molecules.”

“Something about this doesn’t sound right to me,” Pauline insisted.

“Angela’s right, Mom,” Theo replied. “The fusion process produces a lot more energy than it takes to electrolyze the water. We’ll be on the happy side of the curve.”

“You’re certain of this?” Pauline asked.

Again Theo hesitated. Then he said, “That’s what the numbers show.”

“Then why can’t we produce enough hydrogen to feed the main engine and get us back to Ceres sooner?”

“Propulsion needs reaction mass, Mom. Our hydrogen doesn’t just generate electrical power; we use most of it to push through the engine’s jets and provide thrust.”

“That’s what most of the hydrogen in our tanks was for,” Angela chimed in. “Reaction mass. Only a fraction of it goes to generating electricity.”

To make sure she understood what they were telling her, Pauline said, “So you think you can generate electrical power for the ship even after you’ve used up all the hydrogen in the fuel tanks.”

“Yes.”

“And cut our trip time in half.”

“Just about.”

“And the risk is…?”

Angela said, “The risk is that we might use up too much of our drinking water to keep the reactor generating electricity.”

“The reactor doesn’t need all that much fuel to generate electricity,” Theo explained. “A glassful of water can produce enough electricity to keep the ship running for a month, just about.”

“Fusion’s a powerful thing, Mom,” said Angela. “It’s what powers the stars, y’know.”

Pauline looked from her daughter’s eager face to her son’s more somber expression. Theo looks so much like his father now, she thought.

“We can do it, Mom!” Angela urged. “We can get back to Ceres in four years!”

She’s so anxious to get back to civilization, Pauline thought. But what if we use up all our water before we get back?

“Theo,” she asked, “do you really think this will work?”

“That’s what the numbers show,” he repeated.

“But what do you think?”

“I think we can do it, but it’s not just up to me. We all have a vote in this.”

“Let’s do it!” Angela said.

Realizing she would be outnumbered if she decided to vote against the scheme, Pauline made herself smile at her children.

“All right,” she said slowly. “Let’s try it.”

CARGO SHIP PLIEADES: INFIRMARY

It was weird, knowing that the medic was the captain’s cloned daughter. Victor allowed her to put him through the scanners for a thorough physical, then sat in a soundproofed cubicle for more than an hour with the psych computer, answering questions while hooked up to blood pressure, voice analysis and other stress sensors. Finally he went through the thoroughly unpleasant experience of having his blood pumped out of his arm, through a detoxifying dialysis machine, and back into his arm again.

The medic said barely a word to him through the whole long procedure. At last she pulled the tubes from his arm and sealed his wounds with medicinal spray-on patches.

“You’re free to go now,” she said in her near-whisper.

Victor swung his legs off the gurney, got to his feet and took a deep, testing breath. He felt good, no shakes, no weakness.

“I’m sorry I got you into trouble,” he said to the medic.

“It was my own fault,” she replied, hardly looking at him. Then a tentative smile emerged on her face. “She doesn’t stay angry very long.”

“Your mother?”

The medic nodded. “The captain.”

“Well,” he said, “thanks for everything.”

Her eyes evaded his. “Good luck.”

It wasn’t until Victor had left the infirmary and was halfway along the passageway that led to the ship’s galley that it struck him that “Good luck” was a strange thing to say. What did she mean by that? he wondered.

The galley was jammed with crew members eating dinner. Victor had to squeeze in at a table already occupied by six of his mates.

“Took the day off, didja?” one of the men said, elbowing him in the ribs hard enough almost to make Victor slosh the coffee out of his mug as he edged his tray between the others already on the table.

“The easy life,” joked the woman sitting across the table from him, grinning widely at him.

“I wasn’t up to it today,” Victor said, turning his attention to the dinner tray before him.

One of the other women said, “We heard about what you picked up yesterday, Vic.”

The table fell silent.

Victor put his fork down and looked up and down the table. They were all staring at him.

With a shrug he said, “Let’s forget about it.”

“Yeah. Shit happens.”

“Not much you can do about it.”

They all started eating again.

Victor half-finished his meal, then hurried back to his own cubicle. A message was blinking on the wall screen above his bunk: REPORT TO CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS AT 2000 HOURS.

“Aye-aye, captain,” he muttered.

At precisely 2000 hours, dressed in fresh coveralls, Victor rapped smartly on the frame of the captain’s sliding doorscreen.

“Enter,” she called.

He slid the door back and stepped in. Captain Madagascar was still in her black uniform, sitting at her desk. She blanked the computer screen and got to her feet.

“Exactly on time. Good.”

“I went through the medical—”

“I know,” said Cheena Madagascar, jerking a thumb toward the dead display screen. “I reviewed your medical records. You’re in good condition, physically and psychologically.”

Victor nodded.

She slid a partition back and Victor saw a kitchenette laid out along the bulkhead: steel sink, minifridge and freezer, microwave, cabinets overhead.

“Had your dinner?” the captain asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I haven’t.” She pulled a prepackaged meal from the freezer. “Sit down, relax.”

The little round table in the middle of the room was already set for two, he saw. He pulled out one of the delicate little chairs and sat on it carefully.

“Want some wine?” the captain asked as she slid the dinner package into the microwave.

“You said I shouldn’t drink anything alcoholic.”

She broke into a wry grin. “I told my daughter I didn’t want her to give you any alcohol. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a glass of wine with me.”

Thinking of the detox dialysis, Victor said, “I’d better stay away from—”

Cheena Madagascar interrupted, “When the captain invites you to have a glass of wine, you say, ‘Thank you, captain. I’d be delighted.’ ”

Victor saw where this was heading. With a shrug he said, “Thank you, captain. I’d be delighted.”

He sipped at the chilled white wine slowly as she ate her dinner. The wine tasted like biting the cold steel blade of a knife.

“We’re almost finished with this body hunt, you know,” the captain told him as she chewed away. “There’s only a few dozen more to account for.”

“George Ambrose won’t be satisfied until every single one is found,” Victor said.

Madagascar nodded. “He’s got the clout to make ’em do what he wants.”

“Them?”

“The IAA. Selene. The university consortium that runs the research stations orbiting Jupiter and Venus. The big-ass corporations.”

“The powers that be,” Victor muttered.

“If they don’t do what Big George wants, the rock rats won’t supply resources.”

“What’s left of the rock rats.”

“There’s plenty of ’em left. The people on Chrysalis were mainly storekeepers and clerks. The miners and smeltery workers were on their own ships, scattered all across the Belt.”

“My family’s out there somewhere,” Victor said.

Madagascar took a healthy slug of wine. Putting the stemmed glass down on the tabletop, she said, “Face it, Zacharias: Your family’s most likely dead.”

“No,” he said.

“You know better than that,” she insisted. “If they’re not dead already they’re as good as dead, drifting out there in the Belt somewhere. Nobody’s going to find them.”

“I will.”

“You will? How?”

“I’ll need a ship.”

“Damned right you will.”

And then it hit him. “And I’ll need Big George’s clout.”

Captain Madagascar smiled like a lynx. “I could help you with Big George. And with this ship.”

Victor nodded. He knew what she wanted in return.

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: BACKUP COMMAND POD

The command pod was crowded with all three of them in there. Theo felt the body heat of his mother and sister, the tension of their anxieties, their expectations, their fears.

“Three minutes to go,” he said, trying to keep his voice firm and clear.

He was sitting in the command chair. Theo had configured the electronic keyboard to control the propulsion system program. Now his eyes were fixed on the main display screen. Almost everything in the green, so far. Angie was standing behind him on one side, his mother on the other.

Pauline placed her hand on his shoulder. He glanced up at her.

“Theo, I want you to remember that this was a family decision. We all agreed to do it.”

“I know, Mom.”

“If it doesn’t go right, I don’t want you to blame yourself. We’re all in this together.”

Angie said, “It’ll go right, Mom. Don’t worry.”

Theo thought that his sister’s voice sounded high and brittle. Angie’s worried too, he thought, but she doesn’t want to show it.

Theo focused his attention on the control board. He and Angie had checked the pumps that fed the main engine a dozen times. With their mother helping them, they had inspected every centimeter of the propulsion system’s piping and electrical wiring. The board showed no red lights, only a pair of ambers and they were minor backup circuits, not crucially important; everything else was in the green.

“Two minutes and counting,” the computer’s synthesized voice said. Theo realized the computer sounded almost exactly like his father’s voice. Naturally, he thought. Dad programmed it himself.

They heard a thump and a groaning rattle from deep in the bowels of the ship. Before Angie or his mother could say anything, Theo told them, “Main pump powering up.”

Angie was leaning over his shoulder now, squinting at the countdown checklist displayed on the screen to his right. “Open the hydrogen feed lines at T minus ninety seconds.”

He nodded and placed his finger on the proper key. It’s programmed to open automatically, but I’ll punch the manual command anyway, he said to himself.

“T minus ninety,” came the synthesized voice. “Hydrogen feed line open.”

A new green light winked on.

“Confirm feed line open,” Theo said, his own voice sounding slightly shaky in his ears.

“T minus sixty seconds. Automatic sequencer on.”

“Confirm automatic sequencer.”

New lights were springing up across the panel. All green, Theo saw. He could hear his mother’s rapid breathing. Something deep in the ship shuddered. Hydrogen’s flowing, Theo realized. Liquid hydrogen, at more than two hundred fifty degrees below zero. If anything’s going to go wrong, he thought, it’ll be now.

“T minus thirty seconds. Electric power activated. Magnetic field on.”

“Confirm mag field,” Theo said crisply. The liquid hydrogen seemed to be flowing smoothly: leakage rate minor, no damage to the insulated piping.

“Ten… nine… eight…”

Hydrogen was flowing from the propellant tank to the main engine’s thruster. The engine’s superconducting magnets were on at full strength. The ship’s fusion reactor was putting out its maximum power level.

“… three… two… one… engine thrusting.”

Theo pointed a finger at the central display screen. It showed a green line rising steadily. Thrust. The thrust they needed to slow the ship and get it looping back toward civilization eventually.

“It’s working!” Pauline exclaimed, clapping her hands together.

“I don’t feel anything,” said Angie, sounding disappointed.

“You won’t,” Theo said, feeling enormously relieved. “I told you, remember? You can’t blast this old bucket like some rocket ship in an adventure vid. We nudge her gently.”

Angie replied, “I know the thrust level’s real low, Thee, but I thought we’d feel something.”

He grinned up at her. “Watch yourself pouring liquids tonight. They’ll be skewed a little.”

“You did it, Theo,” his mother said, gripping his shoulder tighter. “You did it.”

“We did it,” he corrected. “Angie and me.”

His sister beamed at him.

It wasn’t until Theo tried to get up from the command chair that he realized he was soaked through with perspiration.

“You better take a shower, Thee,” Angie said, wrinkling her nose. “You smell pretty disgusting.”

Theo laughed. Back to normal, he said to himself.

That evening, while they were relaxing in the sitting room after a celebratory dinner of real frozen chicken, Theo mused, “If there was only some way to get the antennas working.”

“If there were only,” Angie corrected, sitting across the coffee table from him. “Subjunctive. Right, Ma?”

Pauline nodded. “After the conditional if.” She was on the sofa, to Theo’s right.

With a shrug, Theo said, “If we could get the antennas working we could call for help.”

“But you said we don’t have the materials you need to repair the antennas,” Angie pointed out.

“Yeah, that’s right. But I’m wondering if there isn’t some other way.”

“Like what?”

“Like … I don’t know.”

Before Angie could say anything, their mother asked, “Is there anything else on board that could be put to use as a beacon?”

“Or a comm system, so we could call for help.”

Theo shook his head. “We’ve got all the communications gear we need. It’s just that the godda… er, godforsaken antennas are gone. No antennas, no signals out. Or in.”

“Is there something else we can use for an antenna?” Angie asked.

“Not that I can figure out,” Theo answered. “I’ve looked all through every piece of equipment on the ship. Nothing usable.”

Pauline asked, “Don’t we have a radar system?”

“Collision avoidance radar,” said Theo. “That antenna’s a mess of melted goo, just like the rest.”

“You mean we’re flying blind?” Angie yipped. “We could run into an asteroid?”

“Yes, we’re flying blind. No, we won’t hit an asteroid big enough to do much damage. It’s empty out there, Angie.”

“For real?”

“For real. The chances of us getting hit by anything bigger than a dust flake are about the same as… well, it’s pretty blinking remote.”

Angela did not look relieved.

Pauline asked, “We are getting hit by micrometeoroids, though?”

“Yes’m. Every day. Nothing big enough to penetrate the hull, but sooner or later I’ll have to go out and replace some of the meteor bumpers.”

“Isn’t there anything we could use for an antenna, Thee?” Angie persisted. “I mean, we’ve got a whole ship’s worth of supplies. Can’t we jury-rig some wires or something?”

Theo didn’t answer for a long moment, his mind churning, his self-control tottering.

“I’ve tried,” he said at last. “I’ve really tried.”

“We know,” his mother said.

“I mean, I’ve gone through everything I can think of. I really have. I just don’t know enough. I’ve checked all the maintenance vids, all the logistics lists, everything. I can’t make it work. I just don’t know how to do it!”

They were both staring at him.

“I’ve failed,” Theo admitted, close to tears. “I can’t fix the antennas. I’ve tried and tried and tried and I can’t do it.”

“It’s all right, Thee,” Angie whispered.

His mother reached out and touched his shoulder. “You’ve done your best, Theo. No one can ask more than that.”

“I feel so damned stupid!” he blurted, banging the arm of his chair with his fist.

“You are not stupid,” said Pauline firmly. “No child of mine is stupid. You simply don’t have the materials you need to repair the antennas. That’s not your fault.”

“It’s not your fault, Thee,” Angie consoled. “It was the stupid designers. Why’d they have to put all the antennas on the same section of the hull? That was just plain stupid.”

“They weren’t designing a man-of-war,” Pauline said. “They never expected an ore carrier to be attacked.”

Fighting to hold back tears of frustration, Theo looked across the coffee table to his sister. “Maybe we could figure out some way to rig up an antenna, Angie.”

“You think so?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I can look through the maintenance vids again, I suppose.”

“Do you think there’s something in them?” Pauline asked softly.

“I’ll look. It’s better than doing nothing, I guess.”

“Good. That’s all we can ask of you.”

“I’ll go through the vids with you, Thee,” said Angie. “Two heads are better than one.”

Theo started to glare at her, but it melted into a grin. “Unless they’re on the same person,” he said tamely.

They all laughed together.

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: OUTSIDE

Theo’s nose twitched at the sharp tang of his own perspiration that pervaded his space suit. He was floating at the end of a buckyball tether, watching the squat little maintenance robots place a new section of meteor bumper atop the ship’s outer skin.

“Your suit temperature has risen five degrees in the past ten minutes, Thee,” Angie’s voice sounded in his helmet earphones. She didn’t seem worried about it; just doing her job of monitoring his EVA from the command pod.

“Turning up the suit fans,” Theo obediently replied, jabbing a gloved finger on the proper key in the control pad on his left wrist. He heard the pitch of the suit’s cooling fans rise slightly. His father had often said the fans sounded like the whine of mosquitoes on a summer night; Theo had never heard mosquitoes, never experienced a summer night on Earth.

“Ten more minutes on the timeline,” Angie called.

He nodded inside his bubble helmet. “We’re gonna run a little long. They haven’t got the bumper fastened in place yet.”

“We have an extra thirty minutes built into the timeline.”

“Right.” Theo knew his suit held enough air for another hour and more. No sweat, he told himself, then grimaced at the phrase. He was sweating plenty inside the heavily insulated suit. Funny, he thought, this far from the Sun you’d think it’d be freezing out here. But even the wan distant Sun was powerful enough to drench him with perspiration. The suit didn’t let heat out, he knew. Maybe I ought to build a radiator into the backpack for long excursions like this.

He had ventured out the main airlock four hours ago to direct the robots in their task of removing this section of pitted old meteoroid bumper and replacing it with a new section, straight from the storage bay. The robots, about the size of a snare drum with four many-jointed dexterous arms, were programmed for simple, repetitive maintenance tasks. Something as complicated as removing the old bumper and replacing it with the new one required constant commands from a human being.

Theo imagined himself to be some kind of wizard out of an old fantasy vid, commanding a squad of trolls or gnomes. He wondered if he could build voice synthesizers into the robots and have them say, “Yes, master,” to him.

At last the job was done. The shiny new bumper was in place and the robots had used their cutting lasers to slice up the pitted old one into sections small enough to feed into the ship’s miniature smelter, to be melted down into new raw material.

Theo pictured himself leading an army of laser-armed robots against the type of murdering bastard who had attacked their ship. Slice ’em to bloody ribbons, he told himself.

“What did you say?” Angie asked.

“Huh? Nothing.”

“You mumbled something.”

“Nothing important. I’m coming in now.”

Victor lay in bed, wide awake, beside Cheena Madagascar, who was snoring softly. I ought to feel guilty, he thought, sleeping with this woman instead of my wife. But life takes strange twists. If I want to use this ship to search for Pauline and the kids I’ve got to keep the captain happy.

Despite himself, he grinned into the shadows of the darkened bedroom. You’ve got to admit, he said to himself, that if this is what it takes to keep her happy, well… it’s better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.

Cheena was an accomplished lover, he’d found. At first he’d been surprised at her demand, thinking that a woman who’d prefer to have her children through cloning and avoid being tied to a man in marriage would probably not be all that interested in sex games. But he’d been wrong. Captain Madagascar was passionate in bed, demanding. He’d done his best to satisfy her, and apparently his best was good enough to please her.

According to her calculations, they were nearly finished with the grisly task of picking up the dead bodies from the Chrysalis massacre. Soon—perhaps as soon as the next few days—Captain Madagascar could report to Big George Ambrose that the job was completed.

Then what? Victor wanted this ship so he could go deeper into the Belt and find his family, drifting aboard what was left of Syracuse. For that, he’d need not only Cheena’s agreement, but Big George’s as well. They’ll tell me my family is dead by now, Victor thought. They’ll say searching for them would be a waste of time and effort.

He clenched his jaw in the darkness. And I’ll tell George that my family are victims of the Chrysalis massacre, too. We’ve got to find them even if they’re dead, like all the others.

But they won’t be dead, he told himself. They’re alive. Pauline is keeping them alive. Syracuse is keeping them alive. I’ll find them. If I have to steal this ship from Cheena, I’ll find them.

Then a new thought struck him. What if they agree? What if Cheena takes me out searching for Syracuse? And we find them? What happens when Pauline and Cheena meet?

“Theo?”

He opened his eyes, surprised to realize that he’d fallen asleep on the sofa. His mother was bending over him.

“I guess I nodded off,” he said, feeling slightly sheepish.

“You’ve been working very hard,” said Pauline.

“We all have.”

She sat on the sofa beside him.

“Angie’s gone to bed?” he asked.

“Yes. She was tired too.”

He nodded and pulled himself up to a sitting position. “She was really good today, monitoring my EVA. She sat there all suited up for nearly five hours, ready to go outside if I got into trouble.”

Pauline smiled faintly. “Angela’s growing up.”

“I guess she is.”

“You are too.”

“Think so?”

“I know so. You’ve taken charge of the ship, Theo. Six months ago you were complaining that your father didn’t trust you—”

“He always did everything himself. He never gave me a chance to learn, to show him what I can do.”

“Yes, I know,” Pauline said gently. “I understand. But I trust you, Theo. I know that you’ve put us on the right course to get back to Ceres and you’ll keep this ship running until we get there.”

Theo felt a warm glow inside. But he didn’t know what to say, how he should respond to his mother’s praise.

“Now don’t you think you’d better get some sleep?” Pauline suggested. “Tomorrow’s another day.”

“You’re right.” He swung his long legs off the sofa and got to his feet.

“Good-night, Theo,” said Pauline.

“Good-night, Mom.”

She’s right, he thought as he padded to his own cubicle. Tomorrow’s another day. With fifteen hundred and thirty-four more to go.