The Aftermath

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: BRIDGE

They made an unlikely pair.

Although Elverda Apacheta was near the end of her long life, she was still a regally tall, slim woman with the carriage of an empress. Yet her once haughty eyes of sparkling jet now looked out at the world with a weariness that grew heavier each passing day. Her high flaring cheekbones and imperious nose spoke of her Andean background, but her long colorfully woven robe hung loosely on her emaciated body and her dead-white hair was disheveled, chopped unevenly, as if she no longer cared who saw her.

Her only companion on Hunter had already died once, or tried to. When he had been a mercenary soldier he had pressed a mini-grenade to his chest and set it off. Now he was as much machine as man, a cyborg whose face was half metal etched with swirling hair-thin lines. He wore the threadbare remains of a military uniform, all insignias and signs of rank rudely ripped off its fabric. He called himself Dorn and said he was a priest. He and Elverda Apacheta had been on this lonely, interminable, thankless mission for more than two years.

She had once been a worlds-renowned sculptress, the woman who carved The Rememberer out of a two-kilometer-long asteroid. The magnificent sculpture rode in a high orbit around Earth, a work of art that attracted tourists from the Earth, the Moon, and the man-made habitats in space between the two.

Now she and Dorn searched for the dead, out in the silent darkness of the Asteroid Belt. And fled from the mercenaries who had been hired to kill them.

Hunter was a massive ship, much too large for just the two of them. It had originally been built to smelt asteroidal ores on the way from the Belt inward to the Earth/Moon vicinity. But the advent of nanotechnology made such bulk smelters obsolete. Virus-sized nanomachines separated pure elements out of the asteroidal rocks. Hunter went on the market at a bargain price. Dorn had use for the smelter, so Elverda Apacheta had emptied her retirement accounts to buy the vessel.

For all its size and mass, Hunter was capable of bursts of high acceleration when they needed to flee an intruding vessel. They had not seen another ship, though, in several months.

“We’re approaching the coordinates you plugged into the navigation computer,” said Elverda into the ship’s intercom microphone. She was sitting in the command chair on the ship’s compact bridge; Dorn was somewhere in the bowels of Hunter’s equipment bay.

“I will come to the bridge,” his deep, heavy voice replied. She always wondered what his voice had been like before his shattered body had been turned into a cybernetic organism.

“No hurry,” she said. “It will be an hour before we reach the exact spot.”

DOSSIER: DORN

He was born Dorik Harbin in a Balkan village that was swept up in one of the bloody frenzies of ethnic cleansing that swept that region of Earth every few generations.

Shortly before his twelfth birthday, the militia from the next valley descended on his village, raping, killing, burning everything in their fervent zeal. Dorik Harbin saw his mother nailed to a cross, naked, bleeding, dying. The young boy ran away, lived like an animal in the hills until he was caught pilfering an apple from the kitchen tent of a different militia band. Brought before the group’s commander, he was given the choice of joining the militia or being shot.

He learned to kill. Remembering what had been done to his mother, his sisters and brothers and father, he marched into other villages and killed everything living in them, down to the livestock and household pets. Carrying an assault rifle that was almost as big as he was, he became an adept killer.

But his sleep was haunted by terrible dreams. He saw those he killed, heard the pleas for mercy that he never listened to in waking life. Sometimes, in his dreams, he killed his own mother. That was when he began taking the drugs that were freely available among the roving militia bands. The narcotics helped him to sleep, helped him to keep on killing despite his nightmares.

Peacekeepers from the newly reorganized United Nations finally suppressed the militias and established an uneasy peace in the region. The dead were buried, the fires extinguished, the acrid smoke that hung over the region finally cleared away.

Dorik Harbin was sixteen by then. The Peacekeepers recruited him into their forces and tried to train him to enforce the peace with a minimum of killing. It was nonsense, and young Dorik knew it, but he allowed his superior officers to believe that he had been rehabilitated. They smiled at his progress as a model Peacekeeper and turned a blind eye to his growing dependency on what they termed “pharmaceuticals.”

He was among the Peacekeeper troops who were sent to the Moon in the UN’s ill-fated attempt to wrest control of Moonbase from its rebellious citizens. After that fiasco, once Moonbase became recognized as the independent nation of Selene, Dorik Harbin quit the Peacekeepers and joined the private security forces of Humphries Space Systems, Inc.

In a short time he was killing again, this time as commander of spacecraft that attacked other spacecraft in the dark emptiness of the Asteroid Belt. His prowess came to the attention of Martin Humphries himself, who personally assigned Harbin to the task of tracking down and killing his archenemy, Lars Fuchs.

Humphries also saw to it that Harbin had an adequate supply of specialized drugs, pharmaceuticals that enhanced his battle prowess, that made him sharper, faster, drugs that fed his inner rage.

It was in such a drug-enhanced fury that he methodically destroyed the rock rats’ habitat, Chrysalis, killing all of the one thousand seventeen men, women and children aboard. Attacking the ore ship Syracuse was merely a minor skirmish in the immediate aftermath of that slaughter.

Once his mind cleared and he realized what he had done, Dorik Harbin held a minigrenade to his chest and detonated it. He knew of no other way to end the horror that obsessed his sleep.

But the corporation that literally owned his body would not let him die. Their medical specialists tested their own skills and theories and turned him into a cyborg, half machine, half human. And sent him back to his duties as a mercenary soldier in the employ of Humphries Space Systems, Inc.

The Asteroid Wars were over by then, forced to an end by the shock of the Chrysalis massacre. Dorik Harbin took no credit for the unexpected result of his atrocity. Humphries Space Systems saw to it that no one learned that the cyborg was the mass murderer. Dorik Harbin went about his unexciting duties as mechanically as if he were entirely a machine. But still he dreamed.

Then he was assigned to head the security detail for a small asteroid that the corporation had quietly bought from a rock rat family, deep in the Belt. Martin Humphries himself was coming from his home on the Moon to inspect the asteroid. There was something inside the rock, something artificial, something staggeringly unusual, something that was perhaps not made by human hands.

As part of his duties Dorik Harbin inspected the artifact buried deep inside the asteroid. The experience shattered him. He saw his life, all the pain and horror, all the grief and remorse that filled his dreams.

Every day he stood before the artifact. Every day the deeds of his life were peeled away, moment by moment, murder by murder. It was if he were being flayed alive, one layer of skin after another stripped from his bleeding, quaking flesh.

At last there was nothing left. The personality that he had built for himself since he’d been twelve had been stripped bare and a new persona, one that had been hidden deep inside his old one, at last came forth.

He tore all the insignias of rank from his uniform, turning it into the tattered gray costume of a penitent. Dorik Harbin ceased to exist. Out of the warrior came a priest named Dorn, as single-minded in his quest for atonement as he had once been in his missions of murder.

He still dreamed when he slept, but now his dreams were of mercy and justice.

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: BRIDGE

Elverda saw a glint reflected in the bridge’s main display screen. It was Dorn stepping through the hatch, silent as a wraith, the metal half of his face catching the light from the overhead lamps.

Touching a keypad with a long, slim finger, Elverda superimposed a navigation grid on the scene their forward camera showed.

“There,” she said, tapping the screen with her fingernail. “That’s the spot.”

She sensed Dorn nodding as he leaned over her shoulder.

“It’s empty,” she said, turning her head slightly. The human half of his face was so close she could feel its warmth, hear his slow, steady breathing.

“It wasn’t empty five years ago,” said Dorn. “We destroyed a dozen Astro warships here. Led them into a trap and ran a swarm of pebbles into them.”

“A dozen ships? How many…” She caught herself and choked off her question.

But Dorn understood. “There must have been at least ten mercenaries in each ship. Probably more. I’ve tried to get the exact number from Astro Corporation but they refuse to release such information.”

“A hundred and twenty men and women.”

“At least.”

Elverda knew what came next. They would fly a search spiral expanding outward from this site, probing with radar and telescopes for the bodies of the dead that had been drifting in space since the battle that had killed them. It would take weeks, perhaps months, to find them all.

If they lived that long.

With his prosthetic hand Dorn tapped out a command on the keyboard. The image on the screen changed subtly.

“Ultraviolet?” she asked, slightly puzzled.

“Lyman alpha,” he replied. “Ionized hydrogen.”

“Why are you looking for ionized hydrogen?”

“Exhaust trail.” With the cool metal fingers of his left hand Dorn worked the keyboard.

Even after knowing him for more than two years Elverda shuddered at the sight of the mechanical hand. She looked up at the main screen and saw that he was panning the cameras three hundred and sixty degrees, then up and down doing a complete global sweep around their ship.

“Nothing,” she said.

Dorn did not reply. The screen’s view climbed up, then swung downward.

“We’re alone.”

“Are we?” he countered. “Humphries’s people know that a battle was fought here. They know that we will come here to seek the dead and give them proper rites.”

She gestured toward the screen, empty except for the unblinking stars, so distant and aloof. “There are no ships out there.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But there is a small asteroid that does not appear on the nav charts.”

Almost feeling annoyed at his wariness, Elverda said, “Asteroid orbits change constantly. The charts are never up to date.”

“True enough,” he said. “But let’s check out that rock before we proceed further.”

“It’s barely twenty meters across,” Elverda objected. “It can’t be a camouflaged vessel.”

“I know.”

Elverda stared at him for a long, disquieting moment. Dorn looked back at her, his electro-optical eye unblinking, the overhead lights glinting on the etched metal of his skullcap. With a sigh that was half exasperation she punched in the commands that would bring Hunter to within fifty meters of the tiny asteroid.

They shared a modest lunch in the galley while Hunter cruised at minimum thrust and established itself in co-orbit near the asteroid. When they returned to the bridge, they saw that the object outside was a jagged chunk of debris, a shard torn from what had once been a spacecraft, probably an attack vessel. They trooped down to the main airlock, where she helped Dorn into a nanofabric space suit. When she had first met Dorn she’d been surprised at how agile he was: the metal half of his body was lithe and supple, not at all like a cumbersome clanking machine. Now, though, more than two years later, he seemed slower, more careful, as if his mechanical half were developing the robotic analog of arthritis.

At last she returned to the bridge to monitor his EVA. Within half an hour he was back from the airlock, a small black object in the palm of his prosthetic hand.

Elverda peered at it.

“A sensor,” said Dorn. “It was attached to the piece of debris out there. It must be programmed to detect the arrival of a ship in this area and send a message back to whoever planted it here.”

“They’ve been waiting for us?”

He nodded minimally. “I imagine they have planted such sensors at every site where there was a battle.”

“Humphries wants to find us.”

“He wants to kill us.”

Elverda knew it was true, yet she still found it hard to accept the idea in her heart, emotionally. The concept that someone wanted to kill her was so bizarre, so alien to her outlook, to her entire life, it was like being told that the world was flat.

Martin Humphries wants to kill us, she told herself. He wants to kill me. She had only known Humphries for the few weeks it had taken to fly to the asteroid where the alien artifact had been found. Where Dorn had transformed himself from a cyborg mercenary soldier to a cyborg priest. Where Humphries had gone insane with fear and guilt once he’d seen the artifact.

And now that he’s recovered, now that he knows we saw him in his terror and his shame, he wants to erase all memory of his collapse. He wants to eliminate the witnesses. He wants to kill us.

Under the pretense of preserving the artifact for scientific study, Humphries’s corporate minions had thrown a protective guard of ships and mercenary troops around the asteroid and sealed off the artifact itself—burrowed deep inside the rock—from all visitors. Not even scientists from the International Consortium of Universities were allowed to visit the asteroid. The news media had been totally stonewalled, to the point where it was widely believed that the reports of an alien artifact were nothing more than a legend concocted by some of the UFO crackpots among the rock rats.

Elverda Apacheta knew how powerful the artifact was. It had changed Dorn from a murderous mercenary soldier into a priest intent on atoning for his former life. It had shaken her own soul more profoundly than any experience in her long life. Before she had seen the artifact she had been ready for death, weary of the trials and disappointments of living, convinced that her talent had shriveled within her disenchanted soul. But once she looked upon that mystical, amorphous, shifting work of wonder she was overwhelmed with new purpose. Before the artifact she had regarded Dorn with a distaste that was almost loathing; after the artifact she realized that Dorn was the child she had never borne, the tortured soul who needed her solace, the man whom she would help and guide and protect even at the cost of her own existence.

The artifact had changed Martin Humphries, of course. His swaggering, self-confident ego had been shredded into a whimpering, pathetic figure huddled into a fetal ball, pleading for escape. But the effect had been only temporary; Humphries recovered. Now the wealthiest man in the solar system was determined to erase the two witnesses of his moment of weakness.

Staring at the sensor in his metallic hand, Elverda asked Dorn, “What do you want to do?”

Slowly, Dorn crushed the miniaturized sensor. It crunched like a crisp wafer. Then he answered, “Find the dead. Treat them with respect, if not honor.”

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: COMMUNICATIONS CENTER

Thoroughly bored, Kao Yuan curled his lip at the image on his comm screen. Not that the woman who was speaking to him would see his expression. This was a one-way transmission: the latest orders from Humphries Space Systems headquarters on the Moon to Yuan and his three-ship formation. Besides, he was certain that the image he was watching was a computer-generated persona; Martin Humphries might not deign to speak to him personally, but he didn’t want any additional people to know about this mission he’d sent Yuan on, either.

“Mr. Humphries is pleased with your idea of seeding the battle sites with sensors,” the image was saying, “but he wonders if all the battle sites are recorded. Dorik Harbin did a lot more than attack the Chrysalis habitat, of course.”

“Of course,” Yuan murmured, feeling slightly bemused to be talking to a pile of computer chips. At least the woman’s image was voluptuously beautiful. Humphries has an eye for buxom young women, he thought.

“Mr. Humphries stressed once again that this matter must be handled very discreetly. The fugitive Dorik Harbin is not alone in his ship. There is at least one accomplice with him. Both of them—and anyone else with them—must be eliminated. They must disappear and never be found. There must be no way for anyone to discover that Mr. Humphries has ordered their executions. That must be clearly understood.”

Yuan’s bored smile grew slightly less tolerant. “I understand,” he said to the unhearing image on his screen. “My crew understands. The crews of the other two vessels also understand. Clearly.”

He had received these same instructions, or closely similar ones, from this computer persona at least twice a month for the past eight months. Humphries wants Harbin or Dorn or whatever he’s calling himself killed. And his accomplices with him. But he doesn’t want anyone to know about it. They must simply disappear out here deep in the Asteroid Belt. All of them. No sweat, Yuan thought. All I have to do is find them.

A strange mission, Yuan thought. Track down a mass murderer and his accomplices, but do it in secrecy. Why doesn’t Humphries want the credit for executing the man responsible for the Chrysalis massacre? And what’s Harbin doing out in the Belt, anyway? They claim he’s trying to recover the bodies of the mercenaries killed in battles. That sounds flaky. Maybe it’s just a hallucination that HHS intelligence dreamed up. Maybe the intel flunkies are popping the wrong pills.

Yuan had been hunting for the renegade for nearly eight months now, without success. He had planted sensors at most of the old battle sites where HSS intelligence had told him that Harbin/Dorn was likely to visit. Now he simply waited for the fugitive to show himself.

“It’s only a matter of time,” he said to the screen as the image prattled on. “If your brain trust is right about him traveling to the old battle sites.”

Growing impatient, Yuan got to his feet, left the soundproofed booth that served as Viking’s communications center and stepped back onto the bridge. He was an imposing figure, even in his unadorned coveralls, nearly two meters tall in his softboots, broad of shoulder and narrow of waist. His inky black hair was brushed straight back from his forehead; it was long enough almost to touch his collar. No military buzz cut for him: Yuan preferred to look casually dashing. A dark little tuft of a Vandyke decorated his chin. He had deep brown eyes and a crooked little grin that he thought—no, he knew—that women found enticing.

Yuan had never intended to be a mercenary warrior. His father had been a chef in his native Jiangsu province; his restaurant was recognized as the finest in the region. And the gambling room in back was always filled with fools who thought they might beat the forbidden computer games the old man had smuggled past the government’s censors. “All this will be yours one day,” his father had told him so often that Yuan actually began to believe it. By the time he was ten, Yuan was not only a decent cook, he was the best computer gamer in the province. People signed in from as far away as Shanghai to play against the child prodigy. He let them win only often enough to assure that they’d return and spend more of their money.

But when the greenhouse warming shifted the rains and the province’s rice paddies turned to dust, his father’s restaurant was closed by the government and Yuan was drafted into the “volunteer” army that took possession of Vietnam and its invaluable rice bowl in the well-watered Mekong delta. Then the greenhouse floods swept over the delta and he was lucky to escape alive.

The strangest turn in his life, Yuan thought, was when the government sent him to the Chinese base on the Moon to help build the hydroponics farms there. He hated living underground. Trying to feed several thousand workers from the meager crops grown in the long hydroponics trays was a challenge, but not an enjoyable one. Better was the fact that he could jigger the base’s computers to run gambling games; better still, most of the women at Base Mao found him more attractive than the stolid soldiers and technicians who made up the base’s male population.

Yuan dreamed of returning to Earth once his tour of duty in the army was finished. But once he realized that the government back home would press an unemployed former cook into service wherever they wanted him to work, he signed up with Humphries Space Systems and became a mercenary soldier. Mercenaries had to eat, and Yuan was ready to feed them. HSS pay was far better than the army’s, the uniforms were smarter, and the selection of women was more diverse.

What he hadn’t expected was that he’d be forced to fight. And kill. Aboard the stripped-down attack vessels that battled for control of the Belt, even a cook had to take his turn at the weapons console. During the bitter years of the Second Asteroid War, Kao Yuan found that he was good at the cat-and-mouse chases in the dark emptiness of space. He had always been a winner at computer games; now he maneuvered a real ship and fired real lasers. The enemy vessels were little more than blips on a screen or distant clots in an observation port. They twisted and dodged but he always—almost—caught up with them and won the game. His youthful skills earned him rapid promotion from cook to captain.

This mission to find the renegade and whatever accomplices riding with him was strange, though. For some reason Martin Humphries himself wanted them erased. The war was over; this mission was a personal quest, an exercise in vengeance. God knows what they did to make Humphries so determined to kill them, Yuan thought. He had not the slightest interest in finding out what it was. I don’t want that powerful egomaniac after me, he told himself.

As he looked over the three crew members sitting at their posts on the bridge, Yuan thought, Find the renegades, destroy them, and earn the bonus Humphries has promised. Then you can go back to what’s left of Shanghai and open the best restaurant they’ve ever seen.

His goal was to own the best of restaurants. With a gaming room in back, a gaming room from which he could challenge the best gamers in the world. Maybe even play against the slickwillies of Selene, them and their smug airs of superiority to any flatlander on Earth. That was his goal. The means to reach it was murder in the depths of space.

Kao Yuan was quite content to have things this way.

His communications officer glanced up at him as he closed the soundproof door of the comm booth and went to his command chair.

“Sir,” she said, brushing a long lock of hair from her almond eyes, “the message from headquarters is still running.”

Yuan favored her with a grin. “Keep recording it. I’ll listen to the rest of it when I’ve got nothing better to do.”

The comm officer smiled back at him. “I mean, sir, that other messages are piling up in storage.”

“Other messages?” Yuan asked, surprised. “Who’s calling us out here?”

She glanced at her screen, pushing that stubborn tress from her face again. “A call for assistance from a miner whose propulsion system has malfunctioned.”

“Not our problem,” Yuan murmured. Viking was running silent, not emitting either a tracking bacon or telemetry. The vessel was built to return as small a radar profile as possible. Viking was virtually invisible and Yuan intended to remain that way.

“A medical emergency on another rock rat ship.”

Yuan shook his head. “I’m not interested in general chatter. Is there anything specifically for us?”

“One of the snoops reported a vessel in its area. Then it went dead.”

“What?” Suddenly alert, Yuan stepped to her comm console and bent over her to peer at the screen. “Where?”

The comm officer displayed the coordinates on her screen. Yuan couldn’t help noticing the subtle intoxication of her perfume. With the touch of a keypad, she had the computer pull up data on the sensor’s location.

“That’s where he wiped out Gormley’s fleet!” Yuan said, excited. He called to the man at the navigation console, “Set a course for these coordinates, top acceleration.”

Yuan didn’t believe that the renegade was visiting the sites of his old battles to recover dead bodies, despite what Headquarters claimed. But he didn’t press for more information, either. My job is not to know why, he told himself. My job is merely to find him and kill him. And whoever is with him.

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: BRIDGE

Out of the corner of her eye Elverda watched Dorn as he sat next to her in the ship’s bridge. He had been staring at the crushed remains of the round black sensor, still in the palm of his artificial hand.

She glanced at the screens and instrument readouts displayed on the panels curving around them and saw that the ship was functioning normally.

“What do you want to do?” she asked.

Dorn turned slowly toward her, his human eye looking sad, the other emotionless.

“Find the dead,” he answered.

“But they’ll be coming to find us.”

The human eye closed briefly. Then, “They are probably already on their way here.”

“Shouldn’t we get away, then? There are other sites, other locations where battles took place.”

“They’ll have planted sensors there, too.” Dorn’s voice sounded heavy with resignation.

“Then what should we do?” she repeated.

“I should speed you back to Earth at maximum acceleration. You would be safe there. Not even Martin Humphries would dare to harm you where you are surrounded by friends and admirers.”

“And you?”

“I will return to the Belt and try to complete my mission. As much of it as I can.”

“I could tell the news media about this. That might protect you.”

Dorn’s lips ticked, as close to a smile as he could come. “You would tell them that you are trying to protect the monster who is responsible for the Chrysalis massacre? If the general public knew that Humphries was hunting me down they would give him an award.”

“I can’t let him murder you.”

“There is no way that you can stop it.”

Elverda felt as if she were locked in a closet with the walls closing in on her. “There must be something—”

Dorn shook his head slightly, a ponderous swiveling of that half-metal, half-flesh construction. “Besides, I will die anyway, soon enough.”

“Die? What are you talking about?”

“My systems are failing.” He raised his right arm slowly. “The power pack needs replacement. Joints need lubrication. I have the mechanical analog of old age.”

“We can go to Selene and get you overhauled, rejuvenated.”

“The monster responsible for Chrysalis? Who would even think of helping me?”

“They wouldn’t know. No one knows that—”

“Humphries knows. Returning to Selene would be a death warrant for both of us.”

Elverda stared at him for a long, silent moment. What can we do? she kept asking herself. What can we do?

Dorn broke the silence. “The bodies from this battle have spiraled outward from this site for hundreds of thousands of kilometers. We should find as many of them as we can and give them proper rites before Humphries’s assassins find us.”

“And then what?”

“And then we die, I suppose.”

She stared into his impassive face. When I met him, Elverda thought, I was ready for death. I thought my life was over, that I’d outlived my purpose. Now I don’t want to die! This man—this half-machine—has given me a reason for living.

He reached out with his human hand and touched her arm. “It’s all right. I’ll escort you back to Ceres. The rock rats are almost finished building their new habitat—”

“Chrysalis II,” Elverda murmured.

“Yes,” said Dorn. “You’ll be safe there, and you can find passage back to Earth or Selene. Without me.”

“You’ll return here,” she said.

He gave no answer. None was required; she knew his need.

Abruptly, Elverda turned in the command chair and began to peck at the communications console.

“What are you doing?” Dorn asked.

“I’m calling the news media. There’s a woman in Selene, Douglas Stavenger’s wife, she’s a famous news anchor.”

“No,” said Dorn.

“Why not? Once the world knows what we’re trying to accomplish, not even Martin Humphries would dare to harm us.”

“You’d tell them you’re with Dorik Harbin, the monster?”

“I’ll tell them I’m with Dorn, the priest, the man who has dedicated his life to recovering the bodies of those killed in the wars.”

“Humphries knows who I am,” said Dorn. “He has whole battalions of public relations experts. Your story will be swamped by his. Vigilantes will come out here to find me. The hunt will become a news event. Our deaths will be called executions.”

She took her hand away from the keyboard. “You want to die, don’t you?”

“I deserve to die,” he said.

“I need a ship,” said Victor Zacharias.

Big George Ambrose leaned back in his swivel chair and nodded resignedly. “You’ve been tellin’ me that for nearly three fookin’ years now.”

The two men were sitting in Big George’s office in the half-finished Chrysalis II habitat. It was hardly an imposing room, no larger than most of the office spaces aboard the habitat. George’s massive desk and intimidating figure made it seem even smaller. The walls were blank at the moment: smart screens that could display anything in the habitat’s computer files or show views of the outside, where teams of engineers and robots were working to complete the structure.

Victor’s jet black ringlets were neatly trimmed, but in the three years of his enforced stay at Ceres he had grown a thickly curled beard. He wore the maroon coveralls that identified him as a member of the habitat’s technical staff. Big George still looked like a shaggy mountain man with his untamed mane of brick red hair and wild beard. His coveralls were light blue, rumpled, frayed at the cuffs from long wear.

With the icy calmness of a man who was trying hard to control his anger, Victor said, “My family is out there somewhere and I’ve got to find them.”

George shook his bushy head. “Look, Vic, you’ve gotta face facts. They’re dead by now.”

“No,” Victor insisted. “The ship had plenty of provisions and—”

“Why haven’t we heard from them, then? In all this time? It’s been more’n three years, hasn’t it?”

Victor glared at his boss. With that dark beard, he would have looked fiercely intimidating to anyone else. But George Ambrose knew better. By the time the task of finding all the bodies from the massacre of the original Chrysalis was finished, Big George had learned that Victor Zacharias had been an architect, a builder. As head of the rock rats’ governing council, George had persuaded the International Astronautical Authority to fund the building of a new habitat in orbit around Ceres. The IAA got support for the project from Selene and the major corporations involved in space industries.

The new habitat—Chrysalis II—would not be a ramshackle Tinkertoy assemblage of old and disused spacecraft. George Ambrose wanted a structure that was designed and constructed specifically to be a home for the rock rats. And he wanted Victor Zacharias to head the team that built it.

Victor reluctantly agreed to do the job, but only if Big George would provide him with a ship afterward.

“Face it, Vic,” George said from behind his desk. “They’re gone.”

“You promised me a ship,” Victor said again, relentless.

“When the job’s done. It’s only half finished.”

“The design is complete,” Victor insisted. “The major structural work is finished. You don’t need me for the rest of it. A couple of trained chimpanzees could finish the job.”

“Nearest trained chimps are Earthside, Vic. But you’re here and you’re gonna stay here until the fookin’ job’s finished. And that’s it.” George slapped his heavy hands on the desktop and rose to his feet, an imposing red-bearded giant of a man who would brook no further discussion.

Victor got out of his chair, his eyes smoldering. But he said nothing further. He knew that this conversation was finished. Silently he walked to the door.

“By th’ way,” Big George called to him, “Pleiades is due in later t’day. Cheena Madagascar’ll be lookin’ you up.”

Over his shoulder, Victor grumbled, “Thanks for the good news.”

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS

It’s good to be the captain, Kao Yuan thought as he lay stretched out in his double-sized bunk. His communications officer, the lissome young brunette with sloe eyes and surprising athletic abilities, was in his shower stall, singing to herself. Off-key, Yuan realized. But what the hell. She’s got other talents.

Tamara, he pronounced silently, rolling her name around in his mind. Tamara Vishinsky. In bed, she had told Yuan that she’d studied for ballet as a child. The training serves her well, he thought.

HSS headquarters had added her to his crew at the last moment, flying her all the way out from the Moon to reach Viking before Yuan started his hunt for the renegade. She came with high qualifications in communications systems. And in sexual gymnastics, Yuan thought, grinning inwardly.

He badly wanted to turn over and sleep for another hour. I deserve the rest, he told himself. But Viking and its accompanying two ships were fast approaching the area where the sensor had reported Dorik Harbin’s vessel to be. We could be in battle today, he knew.

Reluctantly, Yuan rolled out of bed and padded to the steamy shower stall. Opening the door, he said sternly, “This is your captain speaking. Now hear this.”

The comm officer reached out with both arms and pulled him into the hot, sudsy stall. He slid his arms around her and pressed close. We’ve got plenty of time, he thought. Plenty of time.

Elverda paced the short passageway between Hunter’s bridge and the hatch that led into the main airlock. Despite all the rejuvenation therapies, you are still an old, old woman, she reminded herself. You must exercise your legs. After a lifetime in low-gravity environments the ship’s acceleration was punishing her, even though Dorn kept it well below one g.

He was up in the bridge, sitting in the command chair as impassively as a sculpture of steel. Is he fleeing from the assassins coming after us, Elverda wondered, or rushing to find the bodies of the slain? Some of both, she concluded. We seldom do anything for merely one reason.

And you, she asked herself, what are you fleeing from? What are you rushing to?

Death, she answered. The answer to both questions is the same.

Her creative career had been finished many long years ago. Decades ago. She was going through the motions of teaching at Selene University when Martin Humphries swept her out to the Asteroid Belt, agog to see the artifact that a rock rat family had accidentally discovered.

It has to be the work of alien intelligence, Elverda told herself. No human could have made it. Yet it related to humans in a way that stirred the soul, viscerally, beyond the five senses. The artwork—for Elverda was convinced it was a work of superhuman artistry—bored directly into one’s mind, into the depths of the unconscious intellect that lay hidden and disguised beneath the conscious personality.

When Elverda had seen the artifact she had been ready for death, eager to end the pain and loneliness of her life. Then she had looked into its glowing depths and saw herself, saw the mother who had loved her so completely, saw the baby she had never borne, the path of her life from its beginning and through all the twists of fate and pride and remorse.

She was ready to face life again after seeing the artifact. She had the strength to stand next to Dorn, the self-mutilated ex-mercenary who had tried to atone for the thousands he had slaughtered, and failed.

Martin Humphries had seen the artifact and it nearly killed him. She saw in her mind’s eye once again how Humphries staggered out of the crypt that housed the artifact: his handsome face twisted and sweating, his eyes wild with fear; how he curled into a fetal ball, crying, spittle dribbling from his lips, babbling frantically, helplessly.

It must have shown him his own life, Elverda thought, shown him how despicable he’s been, shown him all the people he’s destroyed. Now Humphries has sent assassins to kill us, because we saw him in his moment of pain and weakness. He has learned nothing from the artifact. Nothing.

She wondered what had happened to the artifact. There had never been a report about it in the news media: Humphries had prevented that. But the rumor floated through the cold emptiness of the Belt; not even Martin Humphries could keep the news of an alien artifact completely suppressed. The tale spread to the Moon and to Earth, she was certain, where most people took it as gossip from the rock rats, a fable from the frontier, a legend without basis in fact.

Strange that the scientists of the IAA and the universities haven’t spoken out, Elverda thought. Has Humphries silenced them? Money can buy almost anything, she knew, but would all the scientists in the solar system remain silent?

Then a new thought struck her. Perhaps he’s destroyed the artifact! Blown up the little asteroid in which it was found, wiped it out of existence. That would be just like Humphries: destroy what he feels is threatening him. Just as he is determined to destroy us.

“Radar contact.” Dorn’s voice issued from the intercom speaker set into the passage’s overhead, as flatly unemotional as a computer’s synthesized announcement.

He’s human, Elverda reminded herself. Despite the machinery that keeps him alive, he’s a human being. He has feelings, emotions, just as I do. We wouldn’t be out here trying to recover the dead if he didn’t.

Yet that machinery is failing. One day he’ll be as dead as the corpses we’re trying to retrieve.

She hurried along the passageway to see what he’d found.

Freshly showered and dressed in a set of coveralls that bore his captain’s stripes on its cuffs, Kao Yuan slid into the command chair and nodded to the man sitting at the communications console.

“Give me a channel for all three ships,” he commanded.

A green light in his chair’s armrest winked on.

“This is the captain speaking,” Yuan said, trying to make his voice firm, authoritative.

“We are about to enter battle against an experienced and ruthless opponent. I have every confidence that if each of us performs his assigned task properly we will destroy our adversary.

“The Asteroid Wars have been over for some years now,” Yuan went on, “but the mission we’re on is a piece of unfinished business. The enemy we seek is the man who wiped out the Chrysalis habitat. He slaughtered more than a thousand defenseless men, women and children. Our mission is to bring justice to him and anyone aboard his ship assisting him. Our goal is to avenge those thousand people he murdered.”

The others on the bridge were staring at him. Keeping his face solemn, Yuan added, “We have been sent on this mission by Mr. Martin Humphries himself. He has a personal interest in seeing that the last remnant of the old wars is erased once and for all. Once we’ve fulfilled our mission and returned to Earth, each of us will receive a very generous bonus—but our real reward will be the knowledge that we have paid a rightful and fitting retribution to the mass murderer, Dorik Harbin.”

Yuan looked around the bridge. All his officers’ eyes were on him. He half expected applause but they simply gazed at him, waiting for his next words.

So he said, “All ships, battle stations.”

HABITAT CHRYSALIS II: OBSERVATION BLISTER

Victor Zacharias stood alone in the observation blister and looked out at the distant, uncaring pinpoints of light. The stars gazed back at him, cold and silent. Jupiter glowed in the darkness; Victor thought he could make out two sparks of moons near its ruddy, flattened disk. Off to his left a blue light gleamed: Earth.

Curving away on either side of the glassteel blister was the massive wheel shape of the unfinished habitat. Victor knew every girder, every panel, every weld. To one side of him the wheel was nothing more than unfinished ribs of metal, like the fossil bones of a giant dinosaur. He saw flashes of welders’ lasers flickering in the darkness out there. Construction crews worked twenty-four/seven under the booming roar of Big George’s demands.

But the construction of Chrysalis II was not urgent to Victor. His family was, and he chafed under the inflexible restraints that Ambrose had bound upon him. It’s not Big George, Victor told himself. It’s the war, it’s that murdering sonofabitch who wiped out the original Chrysalis, it’s the laws of physics, it’s fate. Victor felt the weight of the universe trying to bow him down, bend his knees.

He squared his shoulders and stood straighter. “I’ll find you,” he muttered. “Through hell and time and space I’ll find you out there.”

Ceres was a pitted ball of rock, close enough, it seemed, to reach out and touch. None of the other asteroids were bright enough to be seen but Victor knew they were swinging in their ever-shifting orbits out there in the cold darkness. And among them was a ship, his ship, Syracuse, and the family he wanted to save.

Are they already dead? He asked himself for the thousandth time. And he found the same answer as always: No. They’re alive. The ship may be crippled but they’re alive. They have provisions enough to last for years. Pauline will keep them going. She’s strong, brave, resourceful.

It all depends on Theo, he realized. He’s the one with the technical smarts and know-how. But he’s only fifteen! Then Victor realized, no, he must be nearly nineteen by now. A young man, with the responsibility of keeping the ship’s systems functioning. Pauline can help him, but Theo’s the one I was training to run the ship.

And Angela, my little angel. What of her? She should be here at Ceres finding a husband, starting her own family, starting her own life. Instead she’s marooned on a crippled ship drifting through the Belt.

I’ve got to find them, Victor told himself again. I’ve got to get a ship, one way or the other, and find them.

He heard the soft hiss of the hatch sliding open, a tinkle of bracelets clinking together.

“I thought you’d be here.”

Pulled out of his thoughts, Victor turned to see the darkly clad figure of Cheena Madagascar step through the hatch into the dimly lit glassteel blister.

“It’s like standing in empty space, isn’t it,” she half-whispered once the hatch slid shut behind her and the lights dimmed again. “Like a god walking among the stars.”

He snorted disdainfully. “Take a good look at Ceres, pitted and cracked and ugly as sin.”

Cheena chuckled in the shadows. “Very romantic, Victor.”

“I hate this place.”

She came up and stood beside him. He could see her gold-flecked eyes shining in the shadows of the diffused lighting.

“I like the beard,” she said. “Makes you look… dangerous.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he merely shrugged his shoulders.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said softly.

Despite himself, he smiled at her. “It’s best to avoid temptation.”

“Really? You didn’t avoid me when you were on Pleiades.”

“You were the ship’s captain. I had to follow orders.”

“You seemed to enjoy the duty.”

He shrugged. “I’m only flesh and blood.”

“What a compliment.”

“Cheena, please, what happened aboard Pleiades was very good, but—”

“No buts,” she whispered, sliding her arms around his neck.

“This isn’t right, Cheena. I have a wife. She’s alive, I know she is.”

“Even if she is, my reluctant lover, she’s far, far away and I’m right here, in your arms.”

He hadn’t realized that he’d wrapped his arms around her waist. She was pressing close to him. He could smell the clean tang of her shampoo, feel her breathing, the beating of her heart.

“Life belongs to the living, Victor,” Cheena murmured.

“She’s not dead,” he insisted, in a whisper.

“I’ll make you a deal,” she said, with a teasing smile in her voice. “I’ll let you use my ship for six months. If we haven’t found them in six months you’ll give it up and stay with me.”

“Six months…”

“You’ll be mine until we find them. If we don’t, it wouldn’t be so terrible to stay with me, would it?”

Before he could decide rationally he was clasping her to him in a fiercely passionate kiss. Six months, said a voice in his mind. Six months. You can search for them. You can find them.

Then the voice added, If you can get away from Big George.

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: MAIN AIRLOCK

“It’s definitely a body,” Dorn said. He tugged on his nanofabric space suit and began sealing its front.

Elverda nodded as he pulled up the hood and inflated it into a bubble of a helmet. She had never gone outside the ship, never taken a space walk. What did the technical people call it? She asked herself. EVA. Extravehicular activity. How pretentious! How bloodless! Spacewalk is much more descriptive.

They had flown more than eighty thousand kilometers from the coordinates where the old battle had been fought, radars probing in every direction. Twice they had found chunks of debris. This was the first corpse they had located.

Elverda remembered the other bodies they had found from other battles. Desiccated, like ancient mummies. Hollow-eyed, shriveled, skin blackened by the hard ultraviolet radiation of space. Many of the dead were in space suits: they had gone into battle as fully protected as possible. Still it did them no good. They died when their ships were destroyed. Elverda shuddered at the thought of drifting through space alive, knowing that there would be no rescue, knowing that within hours or days or perhaps weeks the air in the suit would give out or you would starve or die groaning of thirst.

Worse were the poor devils who had been blown out of their ships without a space suit. Their lungs exploded in showers of blood. Their eyes burst out of their sockets. Elverda vomited the first time Dorn had brought such a corpse aboard.

“Where there is one body,” Dorn said as he clumped to the airlock’s hatch, “there must be others. They’ve scattered, but they’re out there waiting to be found.”

“Be careful,” she said as she always did.

With the swipe of his human fingers, Dorn sealed the helmet to the collar of his suit. She saw him nod. “Of course,” he said.

Then he stepped over the hatch’s sill and touched the control button that slid it shut. He raised his other gloved hand in what might have been a hesitant wave.

Elverda watched the lights on the airlock panel cycle from green through amber to red as the lock pumped down to vacuum and the outer hatch opened. Nodding to herself, she hurried along the passageway to the bridge to monitor Dorn’s EVA.

He had been a soldier all his life, from childhood. This she knew from what little he had told her about himself. Most of his revelations were confessions. As calmly as if he were talking about someone else, he told her that while in a drug-heightened rage of jealousy he had murdered a woman who claimed she loved him. Later, his mind again boiling in drugs that his employer distributed freely to enhance the mercenaries’ battle prowess, he methodically wiped out the habitat Chrysalis. And attacked another ship, Syracuse, immediately afterward.

Now he lived a life of atonement, searching for the dead who’d been left to drift through the Asteroid Belt after the war’s battles. But Elverda knew that it was more than atonement that Dorn sought: he was waiting for death. He had tried to kill himself and been prevented from succeeding at that. Now he waited for death’s hand to reach him.

And it was coming, Elverda knew. Martin Humphries’s assassins were tracking through the Belt searching for them. His own cyborg body was beginning to break down, as was her human one.

How can I save him? she wondered. How can I protect him? How can I heal him?

“Its gone, sir.”

Kao Yuan planted his fists on his hips as he loomed before the two crewmen who’d gone out to find the tiny chunk of debris on which they had planted the sensor many months earlier.

“Gone?”

They stood in the compartment just outside the ship’s main airlock, where the suit lockers stood in a silent row. The two crewmen were peeling off their nanofabric space suits as they reported to their captain.

“Gone, sir. He must have found the sensor on it.”

Yuan nodded. “That explains why it stopped transmitting its signal.”

He turned abruptly and strode back toward the bridge. The renegade found my sensor. He knows he’s being tracked. What will he do now? Which way will the mouse jump?

By the time he reached the bridge and slid into his command chair he’d made up his mind. “Navigator, program a search spiral course. He can’t be far from here.”

The navigator said, “Search spiral. Aye, sir.”

Yuan grinned inwardly. It still gave him a special pleasure to realize that he was actually captain of this ship. This isn’t a computer game, he told himself. It’s real! I’m captain of an actual attack ship. I’ve got two other ships under my command.

And once I’ve destroyed the renegade, I’ll have enough money to go back to Shanghai and open the best restaurant the city’s ever seen.

Life is good, thought Kao Yuan. Life is good.

The body was in an old-fashioned hard-shell space suit. Thank god, Elverda thought gratefully. Until Dorn slid its helmet visor open and she saw the agonized expression on its shriveled, wrinkled face. Lips pulled back over its teeth in terror, eyes wide and staring as if to ask, “Why me? Why is this happening to me?”

Dorn stared into those blank, dead eyes. “I wonder what I will look like when death reaches me.”

Elverda had no answer for him.

Working together, they laboriously removed the space suit from the stiffened corpse. Dorn put the suit together again and tossed it back into the airlock, then popped it out into space again.

“Maybe our pursuers will follow it,” he said, “and give us a little more time to continue our work.”

Elverda smiled weakly.

Then Dorn tenderly lifted the corpse in his strong arms and carried it to the cremation chamber. He had personally built this oven, modified from the ship’s standard smelting furnace, the kind that the rock rats had once used to refine the ores they pried out of metallic asteroids. Elverda always felt uneasy in this part of the ship, as if she were trespassing in a haunted house. The spirits of the dead hover around us here, she thought. This is a chamber of desolation.

Yet Dorn seemed to smile as he carefully placed the desiccated body in the exact center of the oven. He had to stoop inside the low-ceilinged chamber; when he stepped back outside it and stood beside her his face looked satisfied, at ease, almost happy.

“Your atoms will rejoin the cosmic dust,” he intoned as he swung the metal door shut and primed the heaters. “The substance of your body will someday help to build a new star, new worlds.”

Elverda knew it was Dorn’s desperate attempt at salvation, his belief that the universe recycles constantly, that nothing is ever wasted, not even the tiniest atom.

The smelter furnace roared to life. Elverda felt its heat, welcomed it warmth on her aged bones. Inside the star-hot oven the corpse was quickly vaporized, flesh boiled into gases. Finally Dorn shut down the smelter and pressed the buttons that exhausted its gases out of the ship, into the interplanetary void.

“It is finished,” he said.

As if in counterpoint, the ship’s synthesized computer voice announced, “Radar contact.”

They both hurried to the bridge.

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: BRIDGE

“Sir, there’s nobody inside this suit.”

Kao Yuan’s brows knitted as he stared at the main display screen. The three other officers on the bridge were also focusing their attention on the view of two crewmen outside the ship in nanofabric space suits grasping an empty hardshell suit. They had unfastened the suit’s helmet as they floated in the vacuum: one of the crewmen had tucked it under his arm, like a severed head.

We’ve been tracking an empty suit, Yuan said to himself. He’s damned clever, this Dorik Harbin or whatever he calls himself now. Send out the suit as a decoy to lead us on a wild goose chase.

“Bring it inside,” he commanded. To his navigation officer he asked, “Can you backtrack the suit’s trajectory? I want to know where his ship is.”

The woman looked uncertain. “I can try, sir.”

“Do so.” Turning to his propulsion officer, Yuan said, “Minimum power. Communications, I want a full sweep at all frequencies. That ship of his can’t be too far away from here.”

But a nagging voice in his head countered, Yes it can. He could have released that suit days ago. He got you to chase after it while he’s heading off in a different direction altogether.

Where would he be heading? According to the intelligence from HHS headquarters he’s on some fanatical mission to recover the bodies of all those killed in the war’s battles. That’s most likely dope smoke, but he was at this site, I’ve got to admit. We’ve got the other battle sites pinpointed, but the bodies hurled out of exploding ships could fly fifty, a hundred thousand kilometers over the years since the battles were fought. Farther, even. And they won’t all be near the ecliptic, either; some of those bodies might have gotten flung out at high inclinations.

Lips pressed together in a troubled, almost angry line, Yuan realized, Crap! I might have to spend years chasing after this nutcase.

Then he realized that the other officers on the bridge were all watching him, waiting for his next orders. He straightened up in his command chair and put on a careless grin.

“We’ll find him,” he said. “We’ll find him.” Suddenly a new realization popped into his mind. Cheerfully he told them, “And I know how to do it!”

The radar contact turned out to be a shard of metal, a fragment of a ship destroyed long ago.

Dorn leaned over Elverda’s shoulder as she sat in Hunter’s command chair and traced a finger along the navigation screen. She wished he were on her other side, with the human half of his face toward her. Even though she admired its workmanship, his metal half felt cold, heartless to her.

“A body here,” his flesh-and-bone finger tapped the screen, “and a fragment of a ship here. We must be approaching a cloud of debris.”

“And bodies?” she asked.

“And bodies,” he confirmed. “Yes, there will be bodies.”

Elverda pursed her lips, then heard herself ask, “Would it be possible to retrieve some of the debris?”

She could see no expression on the metal side of his face, but she heard the puzzlement in his voice. “You want to pick up pieces of debris?”

“Nothing too large,” she said.

For several heartbeats Dorn said nothing. Then, “You wish to create a sculpture.”

“I didn’t realize it until just now. Yes, a sculpture. Nothing grand. Just a small monument that we can leave drifting through the Belt.”

He made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “I should have expected it.”

“Me too,” she said.

Dorn turned like a machine pivoting and went to the hatch. “I’ll suit up.”

“You don’t have to take this piece. Later, when you’re going out anyway for the bodies. There’ll be scraps of metal there, won’t there?”

“Very likely,” he said, his prosthetic leg already through the hatch. “But we might as well take this one. It will give you something to start with.”

Yuan said to his navigation officer, “Plot a course for the next nearest battle site.”

“Sir?” she asked, uncertainty in her voice, her face.

Smiling patiently, Yuan said, “Break off the pursuit course we’ve been on and get us to the next nearest battle site.”

His first mate, a chunky dour Hawaiian sitting at the propulsion console, said, “Captain, he’s not at that site. He’s—”

“I know he’s not there yet,” Yuan said, still smiling but with an edge of steel in his voice. “But he will be. And when he gets there we’ll be waiting for him.”

All three officers were clearly unhappy with their captain’s order.

Yuan asked, “How many hard-shell space suits are we carrying?”

“We haven’t used the cermet suits since we were issued the nano—”

“I didn’t ask that,” Yuan snapped. “How many of the old suits are still in storage?”

His first mate tapped into the logistics program. “Six, sir,” he said grudgingly.

“Check with the other two ships and see how many they’re carrying.”

Plainly perplexed, the first mate asked, “Sir, why do you want—”

His smile turning smug, Yuan said, “Our quarry used an empty suit to lure us away from him. Well, two can play at that game. Only, we’ll use empty suits to lure him toward us. Like bait for our trap.”

HABITAT CHRYSALIS II: GEORGE AMBROSE’S OFFICE

“No,” said Big George. “Not until the fookin’ construction job’s finished.”

Sitting in front of George’s desk, Victor tried to hold on to his temper. “All the design work is done. There’s nothing more for me to do but supervise the work crews. You don’t need me for that.”

It was difficult to tell George’s expression beneath all that flaming red hair, but Victor heard the inflexible tone of his voice. “Look, Vic, gettin’ the habitat finished isn’t the most important thing. It’s the only thing! You’re not leavin’ Ceres until the last weld’s welded and the last pisser’s plumbing is workin’.”

“That’s my reward for helping you for more than three years?”

“Listen, mate: You’re alive because we picked you up and saved your bloody butt. You’d be floatin’ into the Sun, already dead, if it weren’t for me. You owe your life to me and the people of this habitat, what’s left of ’em.”

Victor clenched his jaw so hard that pain shot through his head.

“The people of this habitat?” he snapped. “The original people of this habitat were slaughtered by the same madman who attacked my ship.”

“There are plenty of newbies streamin’ in. We need Chrysalis II to house ’em. Prob’ly have to enlarge the fookin’ habitat before we even finish it.”

“My family’s out in the Belt,” Victor insisted. “I’ve got to find them!”

“Your family’s dead, Vic. Admit it. It’ll simplify your life.” Every impulse in his body was urging Victor to leap over the desk between them and squeeze George’s windpipe until his eyes popped out. But his rational mind told him that the giant redhead would pull him loose like a gorilla flicking off a flea. And then where would I be? he asked himself.

George leaned forward, resting his beefy arms on the desktop. “Look, Vic, I’m not bein’ unreasonable. Another six months, a year at the most, and you’ll be free to go wherever you want.”

“The habitat will be finished in six months,” Victor muttered. “Seven, at most.”

“There y’are,” said George. “Then you’re free as a bird.”

“Unless you decide to start enlarging the place.”

George shrugged massively.

His innards trembling with rage, Victor slowly rose to his feet. “As soon as the habitat’s finished I’m leaving.”

“You’ll need a ship, of course.”

“I’ll get a ship.” Mentally he added, One way or the other.

George got to his feet, too, like a ruddy jagged mountain rising out of a geological fault. He stuck out his hand. “Till the habitat’s finished.”

Victor kept his hands at his sides, balled into fists. “Until my sentence is served out.”

He turned his back to George and went to the door.

“Don’t go gettin’ any ideas about skippin’ outta here,” George warned. “I’m puttin’ security on notice. Nobody’s gonna allow you anywhere near a dockin’ port.”

His back still to George, Victor nodded. “So be it,” he muttered.

Elverda pushed up her goggles with one hand and clicked off the handheld laser welder with the other. The work was not going very well, she thought.

For three weeks Dorn had been recovering bodies left drifting in space, and bringing back scraps of metal and plastic, the twisted remains of spacecraft that had been shattered in battle.

The trouble is, she said to herself, that you have no clear vision of what you want this monument to be. She glared critically at the coiling column that was growing from the deck plates of her makeshift workshop. The compartment had once been the ship’s loading bay, where asteroidal ores were brought aboard before being fed into the smelter. Now it was a grimy, empty, low-vaulted echoing chamber of gray metal, darkly shadowed except for the brilliant pool of light that Dorn had rigged for her. Broken chunks of metal lay scattered on the deck around her and her unfinished construct, looking hopelessly useless.

The column itself seemed just as utterly pointless to Elverda. It’s going nowhere, she told herself. It says nothing. Your talent has left you, long years ago. There’s nothing remaining: no imagination, no inspiration, no soul.

“Do you need more material?”

Dorn’s voice startled her. She hadn’t heard him enter the capacious bay.

Turning, she saw that he was eying the misbegotten sculpture intently.

“I need more ideas,” Elverda said unhappily. “I need more talent.”

Dorn shook his head slowly, a ponderous shift from side to side. “No,” he said. “You need more time.”

She placed the hand laser carefully down on the deck. “I’ve put enough time into it today.”

“Are you ready for dinner, then?”

“I’m not hungry.”

He seemed to smile. It was sometimes difficult for her to tell. “Will you join me, though? It’s depressing to eat alone.”

She grinned at him, widely. “You’re trying to psych me into eating, aren’t you?”

“A little broth,” he coaxed. “It will do you good.”

Once in the galley she sipped at the broth, then forked down the slivers of pseudomeat that he put on the table in front of her.

“Do you feel better now?” Dorn asked as he took their dishes to the sink.

“I feel full,” she admitted. “How about you?”

“I feel puzzled.”

“Puzzled? About what?”

He returned to the table and sat down heavily. “The ship that is tracking us…”

“We haven’t seen a ship.”

“No, but there is one following us. Perhaps more than one.”

Elverda nodded. Yes, she thought, Humphries must have sent someone to track us down.

“It hasn’t approached us.”

“They haven’t found us yet,” she said.

“Why not? They must know the locations of the old battles just as well as we do. They know what we are doing. Why haven’t they reached us?”

Elverda said, “We’ve been retrieving bodies. That takes us on an erratic course. It makes us harder to find.”

He seemed to think about that for several moments. At last he muttered, “Perhaps.”

“Or perhaps,” she suggested, “we’ve been wrong all along and Humphries isn’t trying to find us.”

Again Dom fell silent. Then he asked, “Do you really believe that?”

“No,” she admitted. “He wants to silence us. I’m certain of that.”

“Yet his ships are not pursuing us.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve spent much of the day scanning the region as deeply as our equipment allows. No radar blips, no ion trails, nothing.”

“Have they given up?”

“More likely they’ve returned to Ceres or Vesta to refuel and resupply.”

Nodding, Elverda said, “That could be it.”

“No matter,” said Dorn. “Our work here is finished. We’ve recovered all the bodies in the area. Now we move on to the next site.”

“How far is it?”

“A week, at one-half g.”

Elverda knew that he kept the acceleration gentle to accommodate her; she had spent most of her life in low-g environments.

“And how many sites after that?” she asked.

He puffed out a sigh. “At least two, that I know of. There must be more, but we’ll need more information from Humphries or Astro to confirm that.”

At least two more sites, she thought. And what will be waiting for us when we get to them?

HABITAT CHRYSALIS II: CONTROL CENTER

It took almost a month for Victor Zacharias to prepare for his escape. He thought of it as an escape. He was going to flee not only George Ambrose and the construction task he had imposed; he was going to get away from Cheena Madagascar and her demands as well.

Not demands, he told himself. It’s not fair to call it that. You’re willing enough. Cheena’s a temptation, a siren that I’m not strong enough to resist. The only thing I can do is run away.

It wasn’t easy. Big George knew that Victor was thoroughly unhappy with his forced labor on the rock rats’ new habitat. Security personnel watched Victor: not obviously, not as if he were under guard. But Victor knew his every move was scrutinized by security cameras, night and day. Even when he spent the night with Cheena, he saw the unavoidable red eye of a surveillance camera in the passageway leading to her door, and it was still watching when he left the following morning.

Slowly and surely he drew his plans. Now, as he walked through the habitat’s control center, he was ready to set them in motion.

The control center was Chrysalis II’s brain. It hummed with constant activity, alive with the buzz of electrical circuitry and the muted talk of the men and women who observed every aspect of the habitat. Along one sweeping wall of the low-ceilinged chamber was a row of display screens, each set of six monitored by a human observer equipped with a communications set clipped to one ear. Walking slowly down the line behind them, Victor could watch every section of the habitat, oversee the construction teams working on the unfinished areas, check on the status of the life support systems, the electrical power supply, the water recyclers, everything.

On one set of screens he saw the docking ports where Pleiades and other ships were moored. A few screens down the row he could see an outside view of the maintenance robots installing new meteor bumpers on another ship’s hull.

Victor glanced up at the master clock on the wall above the screens. Its digits read 15:44. A little more than eight hours to go, he told himself.

At exactly 1600 hours he left the control center, as usual, and walked down the passageway to the main cafeteria, where he loaded a tray with his last meal aboard Chrysalis II. Or so he hoped. As he ate, an island of solitude at a small table in the midst of the bustling, noisy cafeteria, he thought that if his scheme didn’t work this might be the last meal of his life. Big George would probably be angry enough to kill him.

He ate for sustenance, chewing without tasting the food. In his mind he went over every facet of his plan. It should work, he thought. He could find nothing wrong with it. If they’re watching you night and day, you have to blind them. It’s that simple. And that dangerous.

As he left the cafeteria Victor wondered if he should visit Cheena Madagascar one last time. No, he told himself sternly. But her quarters are closer to the docking port than mine, he argued with himself. What of it? the other part of his mind answered. You’ve timed it all out. You’ll be able to get to the ship from your own quarters with minutes to spare.

He knew he should avoid the temptation. Still, it was a struggle. He went to his quarters, glanced up at the unblinking red light of the security camera at the end of the passageway, opened his door and stepped inside. Now you stay here until 12:01, he told himself.

The working shift in the control center changed at midnight. Usually the incoming crew began filtering in, in ones and twos, a few minutes before the hour.

As the relief crew started showing up at the control center, one of the observers at the security console frowned at a set of red lights that appeared suddenly on his board.

“Damn,” he said to the woman sitting next to him. “Cameras are down in sections fourteen and fifteen.”

“You’ve had trouble with them before, haven’t you?” she said.

“Last friggin’ week,” he replied, tapping at his keyboard. “Guess I’ll have to roust maintenance.”

“And security,” the woman reminded him. “There’s a special security watch in those sections.”

“Yeah, right.” He frowned. “They’re gonna love getting goosed at midnight.”

The woman shrugged. “You’ve gotta do it. Regulations. Can’t leave the surveillance cameras down.”

He gave her a sour look. “Like somebody’s gonna steal something while the cameras are down? Most people are sleepin’, this time of night.”

“It’s regulations,” she repeated.

He reached for the communications link to the maintenance department, grumbling, “If I don’t report it I’ll catch hell.”

The woman pushed her chair back and got to her feet. “Let the next shift call it in. Let them listen to the bitchin’.”

At that moment, his relief sauntered over to the console, grinning casually. “You going to stay for my shift? I’ll go back to bed, then.”

The man hopped to his feet. “Not bloody likely. I’m leaving. The cameras are down in fourteen and fifteen again.”

“Again?” said the relief observer, sliding into the warm chair. “We had trouble with them last week. You call maintenance?”

“Not yet. It’s all yours, pal.”

“Thanks a lot!”

“You gotta call security, too, y’know. Have fun.”

“Shit!”

It was a mistake, Victor thought, to try to keep the man in charge of building this habitat from getting away. I know all the systems and how to finagle around them.

The only question was timing. How long would it take the maintenance crew to bring the cameras back up? How quickly would security send a team to check on him? Victor hurried past the dead camera up on the ceiling of the passageway and made his way to the docking ports.

The security guard at the entrance to the ports was frowning at the blank screen on his desk.

“What’s the trouble?” Victor asked him.

“Dunno. Goddamn screen just went blank on me. I can’t get anything on it.”

“The system’s gone down before,” said Victor. “It usually comes up again in a few minutes.”

“Yeah,” the guard said, his voice thin with uncertainty.

Victor stepped around the desk to the seated guard’s side.

“Uh, Mr. Zacharias,” the guard said uncertainly, “You’re not supposed to be in this area, y’know.”

“I know. I just thought I could help you with your screen.”

“Why’d it hafta go blooey just when I start my shift?” the guard grumbled. “I can’t get any calls in or out.”

“Let me have a look at it…”

Victor took in a deep breath, then chopped at the back of the guard’s neck as hard as he could. The man slid out of his chair, banged his chin on the desk top, and slumped to the floor.

“Sorry,” Victor muttered. He dashed up the passageway that led to the docking ports. Undogging the hatch that led into Pleiades’s main airlock, he rushed straight to the ship’s bridge, slipped into the command chair, and began powering up the ship’s systems.

No alarms yet. Good, he thought. Even if maintenance gets the cameras back on, there’s nothing for them to see in the passageways. I’m okay until the guard comes to. So far so good.

Now comes the tricky part.

Victor had filed a departure plan for Pleiades with the habitat’s flight control computer several days earlier. The flight controllers normally were not in the same loop as the surveillance cameras or security guards. Normally they seldom talked to one another. Victor hoped this was a normal night.

He had made certain that all the maintenance and repair work on the ship had been completed. Cheena Madagascar had no intention of leaving Chrysalis II for another week, he knew. She had offered to take Victor with her, to search for his family. For six months. Victor knew it would take longer than that, and he didn’t want Cheena or any other distractions on the ship when he started out on his search.

So he had updated Cheena’s own departure plan, hoping that the human flight controllers wouldn’t ask the ship’s captain why she had changed her departure date.

Sitting in the command chair, Victor took a deep breath, swiftly reconfigured the electronic keyboard to handle the communications system, then pecked at the keys once they lit up.

“Chrysalis flight control, this is Pleiades,” he said. “Ready for departure.”

A wait that seemed endless, then, “Pleiades, you’re twelve seconds behind your schedule.”

“So sue me,” he growled.

The flight controller chuckled. “Okay. Lemme check you out. Right. Okay. You are cleared for undocking.”

“Undocking,” he said, tapping the controls. He felt the ship shudder as it was released from the grapples that held it to the habitat’s dock.

“Initiate separation maneuver,” said the flight controller.

“Initiating separation,” Victor confirmed. Jets of cold gas nudged Pleiades away from the dock.

“We need the captain to request final departure clearance,” the flight controller said.

Voiceprint identification, Victor knew. He tugged out the palm-sized digital recorder he had been carrying in his coverall pocket. It had taken him weeks of talking with Cheena and editing her words to get the message straight.

“Pleiades standing by for departure clearance,” said Cheena Madagascar’s voice. It sounded stilted to Victor, herky-jerky.

But the voiceprint identification computer was not programmed to analyze the cadence of speech, merely the frequency pattern of the voice that was speaking.

A wait that seemed endless. Then, “Pleiades, you are clear for departure,” said the flight controller.

“Pleiades on burn,” Victor said. He clicked off the communications link, lit the ship’s main fusion engine, then howled an utterly triumphant, “YAZOO!” as Pleiades headed out into the Belt.

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: WEAPONS BAY

Yuan studied his first mate’s beefy face as they checked the laser’s double row of capacitor banks. The man was clearly unhappy, troubled.

“What’s the matter, Koop?” The first mate’s name was Kahalu’u Kaupakulu’a. Everyone on the ship called him Koop. “Nothing,” he answered. He was almost as tall as Yuan, but much broader in girth, built like a fleshy brick. Before meeting Koop, Yuan had thought of Hawaiians as smiling, gracious souls, always relaxed and contented. Koop was just the opposite: moody, dark, always looking worried.

The weapons bay was narrow, its overhead so low that Yuan hunched over as he squeezed through the equipment that crammed the compartment. With the blocky Hawaiian in it, the bay seemed on the verge of bursting.

“Don’t try to con me,” Yuan said, keeping his tone light. “We’re alone in here, nobody’s going to hear you. What’s eating you?”

Koop wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t want you to think I’m trying to second-guess you,” he said. His voice was a soft, gentle tenor.

“You’re not after my job?” Yuan joked.

The Hawaiian’s eyes flashed wide. “No! Honest! I just…” His voice trailed off.

“You just what?” Yuan asked, trying to hide the irritation growing inside him. Do I have to drag it out of you? he wondered silently.

“This business of running away,” Koop said.

“Running away?”

“Well, maybe not running away, but… I mean, how’s it going to look back at headquarters? We were on his track and then we backed off.”

Yuan edged past the laser’s copper mirror mounting as he replied, “Why should we go chasing all over the Belt when we can make him come to us?”

“We were on his track.”

“And he spoofed us with an empty suit. So now we’re heading for a spot he’ll come to and we’re baiting a trap for him.”

“With empty suits.”

“That’s right. According to the crystal ball readers from headquarters, he’s out there picking up bodies from all the battles he fought in during the war. Must be crazy with guilt or something.”

“Or something,” Koop muttered.

“So we’ll give him some bodies to find.”

“Decoys,” said Koop.

“Bait.”

Koop shook his blocky head slowly. “I don’t know. Most of the crew thinks it’s a mistake.”

“You’ve been talking with the crew about this?”

“Some of them. You know how it is. They’ll tell me stuff they wouldn’t say to the captain.”

“And they think I’m making a mistake, do they?”

“Sort of. Tamara says—”

“Tamara?”

“Yeah. You know, Cap, if you’re worried about somebody being after your job, worry about her, not me.”

Yuan felt his brows rise. But he forced a smile. “Really?”

Koop nodded unhappily.

“Thanks for the input,” Yuan said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“You know, as comm officer she hasta make daily reports back to headquarters.”

“Strictly routine,” Yuan said, thinking of the microsecond bursts of laser messaging that she sent every day, his only contact with HHS headquarters back on the Moon.

“Maybe,” said Koop.

There was a world of meaning in those two syllables, Yuan realized. Koop’s telling me that I can’t trust Tamara, that she’s been sleeping with me just to keep me from suspecting… suspecting what? That she wants to take the captain’s post away from me? That she’s a spy from headquarters?

Looking into the Hawaiian’s dark, cheerless eyes, Yuan thought, Does Koop want Tamara for himself? Is that what’s going on here?

“Thanks for letting me know,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

“I’m loyal,” said Koop.

Meaning, Yuan decided, that Tamara isn’t.

Elverda felt tired. Even sitting in the padded command chair her body ached sullenly. It’s the acceleration, she told herself. Half a normal Earth gravity has become more than my old bones can accept.

Should I ask him to slow down? No, she decided, I shouldn’t. He wants to get to the next site, find the bodies left coasting through space after the battle, give them a decent death rite.

And what happens after we’ve found them? she asked herself. He’ll want to search for others. Already he’s talking about other battles, other sites to search. He’ll never stop. Not until someone stops him.

She looked up at the main display screen. It showed emptiness, cold dark vacuum lit only by the pitiless stars strewn through the endless black. So many stars! Elverda marveled. Why are there so many of them?

“Could you come down here to the workshop?” Dorn’s deep voice came through the intercom speaker. “I… I need your help, please.”

“Of course.” Elverda got out of the command chair, winced at the twinge of pain from her hip, and headed down the passageway that led to the workshop and, beyond it, to the fusion reactor and propulsion system, deep in the bowels of the ship.

The hatch to the workshop was open. She gasped as she stepped in and saw Dorn bent over his own left arm resting on the table. His left shoulder socket was empty; tiny telltale lights winked inside the open socket.

He heard her and turned slowly on the swivel stool he sat upon. The human side of his face twitched with what might have been an apologetic grin.

“I can’t get it back on again without help,” he said.

“What happened? How did—”

“The arm was malfunctioning. I couldn’t apply full power to my hand. It felt… weak, almost paralyzed.”

Standing beside him, she couldn’t take her eyes off the disembodied arm. “We should get you back to Selene,” Elverda said.

“Not necessary,” he replied. “I found the faulty circuit and repaired it. But I can’t reattach the arm without your help.”

“Tell me what to do.”

He nodded gravely. “One final test, first.”

Dorn picked up an oblong metal box, about the size of a handheld remote control wand, and thumbed the keys on its face. The arm on the table top flexed slightly at the elbow. The fingers of the hand clutched and opened, clutched and opened. Elverda shuddered.

“The power readout is fine,” Dorn said, his voice flat and emotionless. Turning to Elverda, he put down the remote and said, “Now let’s see if we can get the arm back where it belongs.”

It was heavy, far heavier than she had expected it to be. Elverda could barely lift it. Dorn gripped it in his human right hand and held it steady for her.

“Put it flush against the shoulder socket,” he told her, “then rotate it until it clicks into place. Please.”

With hands sweaty from the exertion Elverda guided the arm into its socket and heard the clear mechanical snap as the connectors locked.

Handing her a pencil-shaped probe, he said, “Kindly check each of the connectors. They’re marked by blinking lights.”

Elverda worked the probe all the way around his shoulder. One by one the telltale lights winked out.

“Now for the acid test,” he said. Standing, he raised the arm over his head, then swung it in a full arc, flexing his fingers as he did so.

“It’s fine,” said Dorn. She thought she heard a note of relief in his voice. “Thank you very much.”

“De nada,” she murmured.

As they headed back toward the bridge Elverda asked, “When it isn’t working properly, do you feel… pain?”

“Something akin to pain,” he said. “The circuits send electrical signals to the biocomputer that’s linked to my brain. My conscious mind interprets those signals as…” he searched for a word,.”… as a sort of dull ache. A discomfort, not the same as a pain in the organic side of my body.”

Elverda nodded as they stepped into the bridge. “And the mechanical side is powered by a nuclear source?”

“It’s well shielded,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about radiation.”

“I was wondering how long it will last,” she said as she sank gratefully into the command chair.

“It’s only a small thermionic system,” said Dorn. “It will need to be replaced in a hundred years or so.”

Elverda laughed. Humor from Dorn was rare.

The radar pinged. Suddenly alert, Elverda called up its display on the main screen. A tiny pinpoint of a gleam, artificially colored bright red by the computer. Near it, a slightly larger blip, which the computer painted in blue. It appeared slightly oblong to Elverda, even at this distance.

“We have a radar contact,” she said.

“I see,” Dorn answered.

Working the keyboard, Elverda overlaid a gridwork of navigational lines atop the radar image. Numbers came up automatically. They were twelve hours away from the contact, fourteen hours from the second blip, the location of the battle that was their destination. While most of the old battle sites were empty spaces, this location was centered on a five-kilometer-long asteroid; the callout on the screen labeled it as 66-059.

The asteroid was registered in the IAA files, Elverda saw. She called up its file photo: an ungainly oblong of rock, its lumpy surface strewn with boulders and smaller stones, dented here and there with craterlets. Ugly, she decided, like a face marred by hideous scars and pimples. It had been claimed by Astro Corporation years earlier. A battle had been fought over it; men and women had died for it. Now it rode silently through the vacuum of the Belt, alone, forgotten, as it had coasted through space for all the billions of years since the solar system had been created.

Not forgotten, Elverda told herself. One of the warriors who fought here has remembered you. One of the mercenary soldiers who fought other mercenaries here has returned as a priest to pay final tribute to those he killed.

Dorn leaned in over her shoulder. Elverda saw his reflection in the main screen, his prosthetic eye gleaming red as he studied the chart and the radar image beneath it.

“Sixty-six oh five nine,” Dorn read the asteroid’s designation from the screen. “I remember this battle. We were outnumbered, but we won.”

“What do you make of the other image?” she asked.

“Too far away to tell,” Dorn replied, “although it must be fairly large to give a return at this distance.”

“Not a body, then?”

“Perhaps a cloud of debris.” He straightened up, then rubbed his chin of etched metal with his human fingers. “But I would expect that a debris cloud would have expanded much farther than that in the time that’s elapsed since the battle.”

“Could it be in orbit around the asteroid?” Elverda mused aloud. “Held there by the rock’s gravity?”

Dorn refused to speculate. “We’ll find out in twelve hours’ time. While we wait, let’s take a meal.”

Elverda smiled up at him. He’s like a little boy sometimes: when there’s nothing better to do, eat.

CARGO SHIP PLEIADES: BRIDGE

Like most of the deep-space vessels plying the Asteroid Belt, Pleiades was built on the circular plan of a wheel, so that its rotation could impart a feeling of gravity to its crew and passengers.

But on this flight, the vessel had no passengers and only one crew member. Victor Zacharias was flat on his back on the deck underneath the main control panel, cursing fluently, an electro-optical magnifier over one eye as he traced the microthin circuitry of the ship’s control systems through the labyrinthine innards of the command consoles. Access panels and electronic modules were strewn across the plastic tiles of the deck around him. He had banged his head at least a half-dozen times, his knuckles were skinned, and his temper was fraying badly.

It wasn’t enough to steal the ship; now he had to control it. By himself. So he was working, fuming, struggling to reconfigure the ship’s control systems, to automate as much of them as possible and bring the rest of them together so that one man could operate all the controls from one console on the bridge.

It wasn’t easy. Unlike his rickety old Syracuse, Pleiades had been designed to be operated by a crew of six. Cheena Madagascar could sit in her command chair like a queen and have her lackeys run the vessel while she did nothing more than utter commands. Victor didn’t have lackeys: only himself.

He found himself wishing that he had Theo here to help him; even the teenager’s clumsy efforts would have been some relief. That started him thinking about Pauline and Angela and the three of them alone on Syracuse drifting out to god knows where and … He squeezed his eyes shut. Stop it, he commanded himself. Stop it or you’ll drive yourself crazy.

Hunger finally made him crawl out from under the consoles and climb stiffly to his feet, scratching at his sweaty beard. Pleiades was racing outward from Ceres under a full g acceleration. The ship’s main wheel had ceased its rotation and all the compartments inside it had pivoted on their bearings to orient themselves properly to the acceleration. If Victor closed his eyes it felt as if he were standing on Earth.

“I’ll cut the acceleration in an hour or so,” Victor said aloud as he headed for the galley. He was certain that no one was chasing after him. Cheena Madagascar was probably sputtering with anger, Big George was undoubtedly volcanic, but there was really nothing much that they could do. Send a ship after him? They’d have to be willing to spend the money for a ship and crew, and even then Victor had such a good lead on any potential pursuer that a chase would be fruitless.

Besides, he was running silent, emitting neither a tracking beacon nor telemetry reports on his condition. He didn’t want to be found. Not yet.

It had been a tricky maneuver, hunkering down so close to the pitted, boulder-strewn surface of asteroid 66-059. Viking was almost as wide as the oblong, elongated rock’s breadth. The bridge was absolutely silent as Yuan piloted the wheel-shaped vessel to within a few meters of the asteroid’s grainy, dusty surface. It’s like a computer game, he told himself as he worked the fingertip controls on the armrests of his command chair with practiced delicacy. Easy does it. Easy.

“Close enough,” Yuan breathed as he cut the ship’s maneuvering jets. He saw that his officers had their eyes locked on him, then realized his face was beaded with perspiration.

“We’ll rotate with the rock,” he said. “If they probe with radar they won’t be able to distinguish us against the normal backscatter.”

“Their resolution will get better as they come closer,” Tamara countered, from her comm console.

“By then it’ll be too late for them,” Yuan snapped.

Koop nodded slowly, but the expression on his face said, I hope you’re right.

Yuan’s other two ships had dispersed to a distance of an hour’s flight, at one g acceleration, and gone silent. No communications now, Yuan told himself. Now we sit and wait, quiet as a tiger crouching in the reeds by a waterhole.

“Computer shows we’re drifting slightly,” the navigation officer said, almost in a whisper.

“Maybe we should grapple the rock,” Koop suggested.

Yuan shook his head. “No. I want to be able to jump out at an instant’s notice.” To the nav officer he asked, “How bad’s the drift?”

“One point four meters per minute. We can correct for it, captain.”

“Cold jets only. I don’t want to give them any signature that they can pick up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Better get yourselves a meal while we’re waiting,” Yuan said. Then he added, “One at a time. Fix a tray in the galley and bring it back here.”

Tamara got up from her comm console. “I’ll make a tray for you, captain.”

Yuan suppressed a pleased grin. “Do that,” he said.

The human half of Dorn’s face was frowning as he studied the image on Hunter’s main screen.

Sitting beside him on the bridge’s padded rolling chair, Elverda said, “It looks like bodies. Five… no, six bodies.”

“How could they still be so close to the asteroid?” Dorn asked. “The battle was more than four years ago. They should have dispersed far into space, like the others we’ve recovered.”

Elverda shrugged her frail shoulders. “Does it matter? The bodies are there.”

“Yes,” he murmured. Tapping on the keyboard before him, he called up the velocity vectors of the images on the screen.

“They all have the same velocity,” Elverda saw.

“Within a hair’s breadth.”

“Is that normal?”

“If they were all blasted into space at the same time, by the same explosion.”

Elverda felt a chill creeping along her spine. There is something eerie about this, she thought. We’ve never seen a group of bodies clustered together this way.

“If you multiply their velocities by the length of time since the battle was fought,” Dorn said, “they should be thousands of kilometers from the asteroid. Tens of thousands of kilometers.”

“But they’re not. They’re here.”

“Which means that they were placed here recently. Perhaps only a few days ago.”

“Could there have been another battle here?”

Dorn sank back in the command chair, his eyes never leaving the radar image on the screen with its superimposed vector numbers. Elverda looked at him, waiting for him to make a decision.

“I’ve sworn to recover all the bodies that have been left drifting through the Belt,” he said, as much to himself as to her.

“Humphries knows that,” she whispered.

“This could be a trap, then.”

“Do you think…?”

“There’s one way to find out,” Dorn said, tapping the keyboard to call up the propulsion program.

INTO THE TRAP

“He’s accelerating!” the nav officer shouted.

“I can see that,” Yuan said testily as he leaned forward in his command chair so hard that the meal tray slid off his lap and clattered to the deck.

“He’s turning away,” Koop said.

“Power up,” Yuan commanded. “Now!”

“He didn’t fall into your trap,” said Tamara. “He’s too smart for that.”

Feeling the surge of acceleration as Viking climbed away from the asteroid, Yuan said, “It doesn’t matter. He’s close enough for us to get him.”

Fingers flicking on the keyboards set into his armrests, Yuan called up the weapons display on the bridge’s main screen. “Comm, tell the other ships to power up and converge on the target’s vector.”

“Yessir,” Tamara said.

Yuan smiled as he peered at the main screen. The renegade’s ship was nothing but an electronic blip, accelerating away from him. But he knew how to play this game. His other two ships would close the trap while he moved in for the kill.

To his first mate he commanded, “Koop, activate the laser.”

The big Hawaiian pecked at his console’s keys. “Activating weapon system, sir.”

“I’ll handle the weapons officer duty,” Yuan said. “You’re my backup, Koop.”

“Backup. Right.”

Yuan couldn’t see Koop’s face, but he heard the resignation in his voice. Maybe it was resentment, he thought. The first mate was ordinarily the weapons officer in battle. But Yuan wanted that task for himself. That’s where the fun is. The chase and then the kill.

Dorn had swung Hunter into a wide turn away from the asteroid. Sitting beside him, Elverda watched the image of the asteroid as their ship’s cameras swiveled to keep it in view. Off in the distance behind the rock she could see the faint gleam of the cluster of bodies floating in the emptiness.

And then a ship rose up from behind the rock, a big vessel that radiated power, purpose, menace.

“I’ll have to increase our acceleration,” Dorn said, a tendril of concern in his voice. “You’d better get to your compartment and into your bunk.”

“I’ll stay here,” Elverda replied, “with you.”

He turned his head to look at her, but said nothing. His prosthetic hand pushed the throttle forward. Elverda sensed nothing at first, but then inexorably the thrust built up and she felt herself sinking into the chair’s liquid-filled cushions.

“We have a chance,” Dorn said, “if we can accelerate quickly enough. He’s starting from a standstill.”

“He was hiding behind the asteroid,” she said, puffing out the words.

“Clever. But we can outrun him.”

“If he’s alone.”

He turned toward her again. “Yes. If he’s alone.”

Yuan’s two other ships were designated Viking 2 and Viking 3. They were smaller than Viking itself, each crewed by only three people.

Yuan bared his teeth in a feral grin as his main screen showed their quarry’s vector racing away from the asteroid—and toward his other two ships, which were now accelerating to an intercept point on the renegade’s extended track.

The screen was showing a holographic view now, allowing Yuan to see the game in three dimensions. It’s not a game, he told himself. This is real. This is what Humphries is going to pay that bonus for. But he couldn’t help smiling grimly as he watched the three-dimensional view. It’s so simple. I played more complex games when I was a kid. This one’s easy.

“He’s increasing his distance from us,” the navigation officer said. Then she added, “Sir.”

“For the moment,” Yuan murmured. “We’ll catch up with him.”

Tamara said, “Two and three report they’re on course to intercept.

“I can see that,” said Yuan, without taking his eyes from the main screen.

“Do you have any further orders for them?”

Despite his focus on the screen, Yuan noted that Tamara did not address him properly.

“Officer Vishinsky,” he said. “You will use correct military respect when speaking to your captain. Is that understood?”

“Understood, captain,” she replied instantly.

“Good.” The whole crew knows we’re sleeping together, he said to himself. Can’t have them thinking that our sex life gives her any special privileges. Can’t allow discipline to get sloppy.

Glancing at her, he saw that Tamara was sitting rigidly at the comm console, looking neither right nor left. You don’t have to call me captain in bed, he said to her silently. Then he turned his attention back to the game that was unfolding on the main screen.

“We’re outrunning him,” Elverda said. It came out as a gasp, almost. The acceleration was weighing her down, making her bones ache, her chest almost too heavy to speak.

“Get into a suit,” Dorn said.

“Why? We’re pulling away—”

Dorn raised his arm and pointed. Two new radar images were gleaming on the main screen.

“He isn’t alone,” said Dorn.

“We’re trapped!”

“It looks that way.” But his fingers were playing on the console keys. “I’m cutting our acceleration. Get into a suit, please.”

“What about you?”

“You first.”

Elverda struggled to her feet. The acceleration made her feel heavy, as if her legs were made of lead. But lead wouldn’t hurt so much, she said to herself. She took three steps toward the hatch, then felt a red-hot searing pain flash through her chest. She turned back, groped for the chair and sank into it again.

“I can’t…” she panted.

“If I cut the acceleration much lower they’ll catch up to us in less than an hour.”

“Do what… you need … to do,” Elverda said through teeth gritted by pain.

“Strap in, then.”

She fumbled for the restraint straps from the seat’s back and buckled them across her chest and lap. The pain was getting worse, flaring down her arm now, even along her jaw. Her thoughts swimming, she wondered if the chair’s wheels were locked into their grooves on the deck. I should check that they’re locked. But she could barely move her head.

“They’ll be firing at us soon,” Dorn said. His voice was flat, as unemotional as ice.

Elverda could feel her heart clenching beneath her ribs. How many g’s are we pulling? she asked silently.

The ship rocked. Red warning lights sprang up on the console.

“Good shooting,” Dorn muttered.

Elverda’s vision was blurring. The radar images on the main screen looked like streaks to her, arrows hurtling toward her. It was all going gray and hazy.

Through the fog of agony she saw Dorn turn toward her, the human side of his face twisted with sudden alarm.

As if from a great distance she heard Dorn’s voice: “Cease firing. We have a sick woman on board. She needs immediate medical assistance. We surrender.”

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: BRIDGE

“A sick woman?” Yuan echoed, startled by Dorn’s plea, and shaken even more by the sight of the cyborg’s half-machine face on his main screen.

“It’s a ruse,” said Tamara.

Dorn’s voice, taut with stress, came through the speaker again. “I have Elverda Apacheta with me. I think she’s having a heart attack.”

“He’s slowing down,” the nav officer reported. “Two and three have him boxed in.”

“They’re requesting permission to fire,” Tamara reported.

“Permission denied,” Yuan snapped. “Who the hell is Elverda whatever-her-name? Sounds familiar, but—”

“The sculptress,” Koop said. “She’s famous.”

Radiating suspicion, Tamara protested, “What would a famous artist be doing on that killer’s ship? It’s a trick. It has to be a trick.”

Yuan’s mind was racing.

“Please!” Dorn urged. “She’s dying!”

“Let me see her,” Yuan said to the screen.

The view enlarged to show a half-unconscious woman sitting beside the cyborg. She looked very old. Her face was gray and sheened with perspiration, her eyes half closed, her mouth hanging open slackly.

“I’ve seen pictures of her,” Koop said, his voice rising eagerly. “That looks like Elverda Apacheta.”

“But what’s she doing—”

“You can’t just let her die,” Koop urged. “She’s famous! It’d start a shitstorm if anybody found out we let her die.”

If anybody found out, Yuan thought. Humphries’s orders are to kill the renegade quietly. No fuss. No news reports. He’s just to be erased, eliminated. And his accomplices with him.

But a worlds-famous artist? If we let her die how can it be kept a secret? Somebody must know she’s out here in the Belt.

Tamara said, “I can message headquarters for orders on how to proceed.”

“It’d take an hour or more to get a reply,” Yuan muttered, as much to himself as to his crew. “She’d be dead by then.”

With a slight lift of her shoulders, Tamara replied, “Then the problem would be solved, wouldn’t it?”

He glared at her.

“Sir,” she added belatedly.

Grimacing with a responsibility he never wanted, Yuan decided, “Take her on board.”

“Sir?” Tamara asked.

“Now,” he snapped. “Do it now.”

Koop smiled brightly, and jabbed a finger into the nav officer’s shoulder. She began pecking out a rendezvous course.

To the screen, Yuan said, “We’re going to rendezvous and give your companion immediate medical care. How many others are on your vessel?”

“Only the two of us,” said Dorn.

“Very well. Consider yourself my prisoner, then. No tricks or we’ll execute you both.”

“No tricks,” Dorn repeated. Then he added, “Thank you, captain.”

Yuan sat alone in his compartment peering at the flow of information about Elverda Apacheta that was scrolling down his screen. The half-dead woman they had taken aboard was indeed the famous sculptress: her face matched the computer file’s image and her DNA matched her medical record.

He called up images of The Rememberer, the asteroid that this woman had carved into a memorial to the history of her Andean people. He saw the ionospheric paintings she had produced, making artificial aurorae high in Earth’s atmosphere with electron guns to paint ephemeral pictures that glowed with delicate shimmering colors briefly at twilight, then faded as the Sun went below the horizon: the Virgin of the Andes, the serenely beautiful Heavenly Pastures, the Star Children.

What is she doing in a ship deep in the Belt with a mass murderer? Dorik Harbin had come aboard Viking peacefully and admitted that he was the man who had wiped out the Chrysalis habitat. Yuan’s crew stood in awe of the cyborg, their hands on their sidearms as they marched the half-machine to one of the ship’s empty storage bays and locked him in.

Yuan had sent a message to HSS headquarters on the Moon, informing them that he had captured Dorik Harbin and that the killer had been accompanied by Elverda Apacheta. Now, as he waited for their reply, he wondered all over again why Humphries wanted Harbin executed in the deep darkness of the Belt, rather than bringing him back to civilization and taking the credit for tracking down the criminal.

A gentle knock on his door startled Yuan out of his thoughts. He touched a key and his screen showed it was Tamara out in the passageway.

“Come in,” he said sharply, without getting up from his desk chair.

She slid the door back and stepped in to his compartment, a sheet of plastic flimsy in her hand, a self-satisfied little smile on her delicately boned face.

“Headquarters’ answer,” she said, handing the sheet to him. “It’s encrypted. For your eyes only.”

Yuan took the sheet and slid it into his scanner. Tamara turned to leave.

“Hold on a minute,” he said.

She turned and stood framed by the open doorway.

“Shut the door.”

She slid it closed and turned back to him, her smile a little more tentative now.

Without asking her to sit down, Yuan said, “You’ve been too informal with me on the bridge.”

“You told me so, in front of the others.”

“Discipline in small things is important. I can’t have the crew think I’m showing favoritism toward you.”

Her brows arched.

“What we do in the privacy of this compartment is one thing. On the bridge is another.”

“I see.”

“I hope you do.”

The scanner had finished its decrypting task; its yellow ready light was blinking. Yuan swiveled his chair to face the display screen. Tamara made no move to leave.

He looked up at her over his shoulder. “You already know what this says, don’t you?”

She didn’t reply, but she didn’t look surprised by his question, either.

“Headquarters assigned you to watch me?”

“Mr. Humphries assigned me to watch you. He considers this mission extremely important.”

“Humphries himself?”

“Yes. The message is from him, personally.”

Yuan was surprised that the news didn’t startle him. He realized that he’d half expected something like this. Wheels within wheels. A labyrinth for the lab rats to run through.

He told the screen, “Display message, please.”

The letters glowed bright red against a yellow background: ELIMINATE THEM BOTH IMMEDIATELY.

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: INFIRMARY

Elverda’s eyes fluttered open. A blank and featureless ceiling hung low over her, a pale cream color. She smelled the faint tang of disinfectant, heard a soft beeping sound. For long moments she lay still, trying to work up the courage to see if she could move her head. Slowly she realized that the pain was gone. Her entire body felt relaxed, languid.

Then she stiffened with the memory of her last waking moments. The agony flaming through her. And Dorn’s words, tense and urgent: “Cease firing. We have a sick woman on board. She needs immediate medical assistance. We surrender.”

He surrendered. He slowed the ship and surrendered to our pursuers because he wanted to save me. Have they already killed him? Are they going to kill me?

She turned her head and saw that she was in a hospital of some kind. More likely the infirmary aboard the ship that was chasing us. Her bed was surrounded on three sides by blank off-white partitions. The fourth side was a metal bulkhead, with a bank of sensors stacked against it; they were making the beeping sounds she heard.

Tentatively, Elverda tried to lift her head off the pillow. No pain. No dizziness. The beeping changed its tone slightly. She let her head sink back again into the softness of the pillows, too weak to even think about sitting up.

One of the partitions slid back and a bulky, blocky man stepped in. Suddenly the area was overcrowded. He was dressed in light gray coveralls, with marks of rank on his cuffs. His face was square, heavy-set, his skin a light brown, almost golden. Polynesian? Elverda wondered.

“You’re awake,” he said, in a surprisingly light tenor.

“Yes.” Elverda realized that her throat was very dry, rasping.

“I’m Kahalu’u Kaupakulu’a,” he said, smiling gently. “Don’t bother to try to pronounce it. Just call me Koop. Everybody calls me Koop.”

“You must be the ship’s medical officer.”

“First mate,” he corrected. “We don’t carry a medic.”

“I see. Where’s Dorn?”

“Dorn?”

“The man who was with me. What—”

“He’s Dorik Harbin, isn’t he? We have his files. Even with half his body replaced by machinery he has the same DNA.”

“He was Dorik Harbin. Now he is Dorn.”

Koop shook his head. “Whatever he calls himself, he’s locked up, waiting for the captain to make up his mind about him.”

“Don’t hurt him! He’s been hurt enough already.”

“Not my call, Ms. Apacheta.”

“You know my name.”

“I’ve seen The Rememberer. When I was a teenager. It knocked me out.”

She decided it was a compliment. “Thank you.”

“We injected stem cell activation factor into your heart. It’s repairing the damage.”

“How did you know…?”

“Med program. We have an up-to-date diagnostic program in the computer, and a good stock of medical supplies.”

“I see.”

“It’s not a total fix, y’know. You oughtta see a specialist when you get back to Earth. Or Selene, whatever.”

Elverda nodded, knowing that it would be many months before she returned to the Moon, if ever, and she could never face the heavy gravity of Earth.

Glancing up at the sensors lining one side of her bed, Koop said, “Seems to be workin’. You should be able to get outta bed by tomorrow.”

“But Dorn? Dorik Harbin? What’s going to happen to him?”

Koop shrugged his heavy shoulders. “That’s for the captain to decide.”

Captain Kao Yuan stared at his prisoner. The crew had locked Dorik Harbin in an emptied storage locker. The man had come aboard Viking peacefully. Yuan had ordered a thorough search of his ship, Hunter. No one else was aboard. No weapons of any kind, just ordinary stocks of food and replacement parts. Nobody but him and the old woman.

Now Yuan stood in the open doorway of the storage locker. Two of his biggest crewmen stood out in the passageway, sidearms strapped to their hips. Dorik Harbin stood in one corner, looking back at him.

Yuan felt distinctly uneasy. This isn’t a man, his mind told him: he’s more machine than human. Half his face is metal, etched metal covers the top of his head like a skullcap, one arm is prosthetic, and one leg. Does he have balls? What are his insides like?

“You can come in,” said the half-machine. “I won’t attack you.” His voice was deep, calm. It made Yuan think of the huge lake he used to swim in when he was a child, before the greenhouse warming dried it out.

Yuan stepped fully inside the storage locker. It was small, meant to house medical supplies. The crew had emptied its shelves and moved the supplies to an unused bed space in the infirmary, where the old woman was being kept.

“You admit you are Dorik Harbin?” Yuan asked.

The lips on the half-face bent slightly. “I was Dorik Harbin. Now I am Dorn.”

“You are the man who destroyed the Chrysalis habitat?”

“I am the beast responsible for the Chrysalis slaughter, yes.”

Yuan licked his lips nervously. What more is there to ask? He admits it. My orders are to kill him.

“The woman who was with me,” the cyborg said slowly, as if he had to ponder each word. “She had nothing to do with Dorik Harbin’s crime. I did not meet her until years after that.”

“Why is she with you?”

“I wonder.”

“Is she really a famous artist?”

“She is Elverda Apacheta, yes.”

“What made her come out to the Belt with you? For that matter, what in the name of hell are you doing out here?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Don’t get smart with me! I’m the captain of this vessel. I can have you executed like that!” Yuan snapped his fingers.

“And I can kill you, too, if I choose.” Dorn’s prosthetic hand flashed through the air and grabbed one of the empty storage shelves, ripped it out of the bulkhead and crushed it in his metal fingers.

Yuan jumped back. The crewmen pulled their pistols from their holsters.

“Relax, gentlemen,” said Dorik Harbin, scorn dripping from his tone. “That was merely a demonstration. I can make threats too.”

Yuan wished he’d carried a gun with him.

“I have no intention of resisting whatever sentence you pass on me,” Dorik Harbin went on. “But I would like your assurance that Elverda Apacheta will not be harmed. She has not done anything to be punished for.”

“Then why’s she with you?” Yuan insisted.

The cyborg fell silent for several endless moments. Yuan felt its eyes boring into him: one human eye, dark, pained; the other an unblinking red, like a laser.

“I chose my words poorly a few seconds ago,” Dorik Harbin said. “It would be in your best interests not to know why she decided to accompany me.”

“My best interests?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to explain that.”

Again the cyborg hesitated before answering. “My mission is to retrieve the bodies of those who were killed in the war and left to drift alone, unwanted, uncared for.”

“Retrieve the dead bodies?”

“And give each of them a proper death rite.”

Yuan stared at him. “That’s what you’ve been doing?”

“Yes.”

It was impossible to read his half-metal face. Yuan started to ask, “But why—”

Dorik Harbin held up his human hand, stopping his question in mid-sentence. “Again, it would not be in your best interests to probe too deeply.”

And Yuan believed him.

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS

“You believed him?” Tamara asked. “You swallowed his ludicrous story? You let him get away with this mysterious tripe?”

Sitting on the edge of his double-sized bunk, Yuan nodded unhappily. “I didn’t want to believe him, but I really think he’s telling the truth.”

Tamara Vishinsky stood by the compartment’s closed door. She was in her off duty coveralls, with the front unzipped enough to show considerable cleavage. Ordinarily Yuan would have found this enticing, suggestive. Not now.

Planting her hands on her slim hips, Tamara scorned, “You actually believe that he’s wandering through the Belt looking for bodies of dead mercenaries? It’s a lie, and a pitiful one at that.”

Scratching his head, Yuan shot back, “What else could he be doing out here? Going from one battle site to the other?”

Tamara said, “What else indeed? Why don’t we find that out before we get rid of him? He might know things that would be valuable to us.”

“Us?” Yuan asked. “Us, meaning you and me? Us, meaning the crew of this task force? Or us, meaning you and Humphries?”

She started to answer, caught herself, then replied, “He’s searching for something out here in the Belt. I’d like to know what it is. Wouldn’t you?”

“What in the name of all the dragons in hell could be out here?”

“That’s what I want to find out.”

“My orders are to kill him. Immediately. You know that.”

“But we can interrogate him first.”

Yuan shook his head. “He won’t be easy to pry information out of.”

“Maybe the woman will be easier.”

“No!” Yuan snapped. “It’s bad enough we have to kill her.”

Tamara walked to the bed and sat down beside him, close enough for their shoulders to touch.

“They’re out here in the Belt searching for something,” she whispered in his ear. “It must be something valuable, or else why would they be doing it? It might be something that could make us rich.”

“Buried treasure?” Yuan sneered.

“Information is the basis of wealth,” Tamara purred. “Information that we can sell or trade or use to make us rich.”

Yuan smelled the faint perfume she wore. He knew the places on her body where she daubed her skin with the scent.

“He says he’s searching for bodies,” he muttered, “to give them proper last rites.”

“But what is he really doing?”

“Do you actually think he’s up to something else?”

“He’s got to be,” she said.

“I… I don’t know.”

“Let me interrogate him. We’re going to eliminate them both anyway. Let’s find out what they’ve been doing, first.”

“I don’t like it,” Yuan said.

“I’ll take care of it. You can question the woman and be as gentle as you like.”

“Let me talk to her first. Maybe I can get what we want out of her.”

Tamara got to her feet and headed for the door. “All right,” she said. “You do that.”

And she left Yuan sitting on his bunk, alone.

“Whatever did you do to Martin Humphries to make him want you dead?” Yuan asked.

He had invited Elverda to his quarters for dinner. And some questioning. She had come hesitantly, wondering how well her heart had been repaired. But aside from a slight breathlessness when she first got out of bed, she felt all right. She thought she’d felt her heart skip a beat or two when she’d first stood up, but she put that down to her imagination.

Elverda looked up from the salad taken from the hydroponic tank that Yuan had built for the crew.

“It might be better if you didn’t know,” she said softly.

Yuan studied the aged sculptress. Her face was seamed with years, her hair white and cut short: poorly, he thought. Yet there was strength in that imperious face, natural dignity in the firm set of her frail shoulders beneath the woven robe she wore.

“Mr. Humphries is a bad enemy,” Yuan said, trying to keep his tone casual. “He has a long reach.”

“And a longer memory,” said Elverda. Then she took a forkful of the salad. “Delicious. I missed fresh vegetables. We had nothing but prepackaged meals and supplement pills aboard Hunter.”

Yuan saw that she was trying to change the subject and decided to go along with her, for the moment.

“What were you doing on your ship?”

She looked at him from across the little table with onyx eyes of endless depths. “Didn’t Dorn tell you?”

“He said you were searching for dead bodies.”

She nodded. “Mercenaries killed in the war and left to drift through space.”

“This… person you call Dorn, his real name is Dorik Harbin.”

“His name once was Dorik Harbin,” Elverda conceded. “But he has changed his life, his entire personality. So he’s changed his name, as well.”

Yuan leaned back in his chair. “Do you expect me to believe that you were searching for bodies? Like a pair of ghouls?”

“That’s what we were doing,” Elverda replied. A small smile bent her thin lips slightly. “Not like ghouls, though. More like priests. Missionaries, perhaps.”

Feeling his brows knit in a frown that he didn’t want to display, Yuan said, “Mr. Humphries’s orders are to execute you both.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Which brings us back to my first question: What did you do to make him so angry with you?”

“He’s not angry. He’s afraid.”

“Of what?”

Elverda seemed to think about that question for a moment. Then she replied, “He’s afraid of himself, I believe.”

Yuan picked up his napkin, started to daub his lips, but instead threw it onto the table in frustration.

“This is getting us nowhere!”

Elverda said nothing.

“I want to know why Humphries is out to get you,” Yuan said, his voice rising. “If you won’t tell me, I’ll have to pry it out of Harbin.”

“Dorn.”

“Don’t play games with me, woman.”

She put down her fork. “Captain Yuan, have you considered the possibility that if you knew why Humphries wants to kill us, then he might want to kill you, too?”

Yuan blinked.

“In fact,” Elverda went on, “I would imagine that the chances are very good that once you do kill us, Humphries will have you murdered as well.”

Yuan’s jaw dropped open.

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: COMMUNICATIONS CENTER

Tamara Vishinsky decided that the soundproofed comm center was the best place to interrogate Dorik Harbin. The booth was small, but it was adjacent to the bridge, and once its door was shut no one could see or hear what was going on inside it. So she had Koop and the burliest of the crewmen strap Harbin firmly into the chair while she searched through the ship’s medical stores for the necessary drugs.

Now Harbin sat in the narrow booth facing her, his arms pinned tightly, his booted feet clamped to the deck. He had not struggled against being bound; he had not resisted in any way.

Standing in front of him, with a shelf full of hypodermic spray-guns at her side, Tamara eyed the cyborg. Harbin seemed impassive, the human half of his face as expressionless as the etched metal half.

“Now then,” she began coolly, “do you expect me to believe that you have been wandering through the Belt looking for the bodies of mercenaries killed in the wars?”

“That’s the truth,” said Harbin. His voice was a deep, flat and calm baritone.

“You call yourself Dorn. Why?”

“I am a different person from Dorik Harbin. Suicide and death are life-changing experiences.” His lips did not curve in the slightest; he gave no indication that he appreciated the irony in his statement.

“You tried to kill yourself.”

“And failed.”

“When did you decide to search for the dead?”

For the first time, he hesitated. “After another life-altering experience.”

“What was that?”

Harbin stared at her steadily. Tamara felt uneasy under the gaze of those eyes, one human, one artificial, both burning intently.

“It would be better if I didn’t tell you.”

“That’s what you said to Captain Yuan.”

“Yes, it is.”

She picked up one of the hyposprays. “I’m not satisfied with that answer.”

His shoulders surged slightly against the restraining straps. Tamara reflexively flinched back, banged her hip against the booth’s bulkhead. He can’t break those straps, she told herself. Besides, there’s an armed crewman outside and all three of the bridge officers on duty.

But Harbin seemed to relax. “I’m thinking of your welfare, not my own. What you want to know could put you in danger.”

“Danger? How?”

“Martin Humphries.”

“I work for Martin Humphries,” Tamara said. “I report to him personally.”

“I’ve met him. I’ve seen into his soul.”

Tamara slapped the flesh side of his face. “This mystic mumbo jumbo is getting us nowhere. What was the life-altering experience you mentioned? What do you know about Martin Humphries?”

“I know that he’s capable of murdering you and the entire crew of this ship if it suits his purposes.”

“Why would he do that?”

Harbin shook his head slightly, the barest movement from side to side.

“Very well,” Tamara said, holding the spraygun before his eyes. “If you won’t tell me voluntarily…”

“Psychotropic drugs may have unforeseen reactions with my body chemistry,” Harbin said calmly.

“You mean pain?”

“I mean… unforeseen. I warn you—”

“You warn me?” She began to push up the sleeve on his human arm.

Harbin grimaced as she held the spraygun against his bare biceps and pressed its activator button. There was a slight hiss.

“Now then,” she said, removing the emptied cylinder from the syringe, “we’ll wait a few moments for it to take effect. And if that dosage doesn’t work, we’ll go higher. Or try something stronger.”

Harbin’s metal chin sank to his chest. He muttered something almost too low for Tamara to understand: “Stay dead.”

He could close his human eye but with his arms bound behind him he couldn’t reach the prosthetic eye to dial it shut. Still, the scene before him began to swirl and shift. He saw the artifact again, glowing too brightly to look at directly. An alien construct, blazing brighter than a star, burning straight into his soul.

Tamara thought he’d passed out. She lifted his chin. The metal felt cold in her fingers. Harbin opened his eye and stared at her ferociously.

“Still defiant?” She turned for the shelf of medications.

“Don’t,” he warned.

She took his word as a plea for mercy.

“What was your second life-altering experience?” she demanded, picking up another hypospray.

If I tell her and Humphries learns of it…

“What made you come out here to search for dead bodies?” she demanded.

Dorn heard her voice, but it was distorted, echoing weirdly in his mind. He tried to say, “I don’t want to hurt you,” but his tongue was too swollen and dry to get the words out.

Tamara jammed the spraygun against his bare flesh and pressed it home. Harbin’s head snapped back; his whole body seemed to spasm, arching against the straps that held him pinned to the chair.

“Harbin,” she said sharply. “What happened that made you decide to search through the Belt? What are you really doing out here? You can’t expect me to believe—”

He saw the artifact, looked into its molten glowing heart and saw the faces of the dead. A woman screaming as she clutched her baby to her. A harmless old man, his face distorted with the sudden realization that he was about to die. Children. Men. Women. All the people of Chrysalis, staring at him in terror. Some of them pointed at him. Some of them pleaded with him. All of them died.

I killed them, Harbin knew. And before them, years and years before. The people of the village where he’d grown up. Burn their homes. Shoot them as they come running out, in flames. Kill them all. All.

Tamara saw that he was drifting into unconsciousness. She slapped him again, harder.

“What made you change your name?”

“The artifact.” His voice seemed to come from a million kilometers away.

“Artifact? What artifact?”

“Alien. Humphries saw it. Went insane.”

“Martin Humphries? Alien artifact?” She was suddenly breathless. “Where? When?”

He smiled: a strange, twisted, brutal smile. “Now I’ve killed you, too.”

“Talk sense, damn you!”

I am Dorik Harbin, he said to himself. I have killed thousands. I am death.

He growled like a feral beast, looking up at her, both eyes glaring. His mechanical arm yanked free of the restraints, popping the straps like ribbons of straw. Tamara backed away, hit the bulkhead, turned in blind panic and fumbled with the locked door.

Harbin rose to his feet, pulled his boots from the floor clamps and grabbed her by the hair with his human hand. She screamed uselessly in the soundproof chamber.

His face mere centimeters from hers, its human half twisted into a mask of fury, he snarled, “You’ve unleashed the monster.”

He threw her against the chair. With his prosthetic arm he smashed the door of the booth open, knocking the startled guard on the other side halfway across the bridge. Harbin stepped through the suddenly open doorway. The three officers on the bridge jumped to their feet. He grabbed the nearest one by the jaw and lifted him off his feet; bones snapped audibly and the man screeched in agony. Throwing him to the floor, Harbin saw the half-stunned guard on the deck groping for the pistol in his holster.

Harbin turned toward the guard, who pulled the laser pistol free and fired squarely at his chest. The laser pulse burned through Harbin’s shirt and splashed off the metal of his torso. The fabric of the shirt smoldered as Harbin leaped on the guard like a pouncing lion, ripped the gun from his hand and flung it across the bridge. He took a handful of the guard’s hair and bashed his head against the deck plates.

On his feet again, he pounded the control console. Metal bent, glass shattered. He reached for the woman standing frozen in shock, tossed her across the bridge, grabbed the next man by the shoulder and smashed his face into the control console. Blood spurted. He ripped the command chair out of its deck clasps and threw it against the main display screen. All in a blur of raging power.

Tamara staggered to the ruptured door of the comm booth, her eyes wide, her jaw slack.

“You!” Harbin shouted, pointing at her with his human arm. “You!”

She froze, hands gripping the doorway’s sides. For an instant no one moved, no one made a sound. Then Harbin turned and punched the wall panel that controlled the hatch that led off the bridge. The hatch slid smoothly open and he ducked through and lurched down the passageway, leaving the bridge in a shambles, its officers stunned and bleeding.

Kao Yuan had holed up in his quarters. He wanted no part of Tamara’s interrogation of their prisoner. My prisoner, he reminded himself. But she’s got the upper hand. She reports straight to Humphries himself. I’m just the captain of this ship, the commander of this little task force. She probably sleeps with Humphries when she’s back at headquarters.

He heard a muffled roar, then thumps and heavy banging and screams of agony. Yuan jumped out of his bunk and slid his door open just as Harbin came boiling up the passageway from the bridge.

He managed to say, “Hey!” before Harbin whacked him on the forehead with the heel of his human hand, knocking Yuan backwards to crash painfully into his bunk and slide to the deck.

His head spinning, Yuan pulled himself to his feet and stumbled to the bridge. It was a disaster area: consoles smashed, officers on their knees groaning and bleeding. He ripped my command chair out of the fucking deck! Yuan screamed silently.

“He’s gone amok!” Tamara gasped, staggering to him and collapsing into his arms.

Yuan couldn’t suppress a grim smile of satisfaction.

He helped her to one of the still functional chairs, then leaned on the intercom button. “General alert! General alert! Our prisoner is loose and extremely dangerous. Arm yourselves and hunt him down. Use whatever force necessary to subdue him. I repeat, he is extremely dangerous! Use whatever level of force necessary to subdue him, including lethal force.”

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: INFIRMARY

They had not bothered to assign Elverda quarters of her own; she was still housed in the infirmary. From her bed she heard the captain’s frantic warning over the ship’s intercom.

Their prisoner? she thought. He means Dorn!

“Lethal force is authorized,” the captain was repeating. “He’s a maniac! Don’t take any chances with him!”

Elverda got up from the bed. She had been drowsing but now she was entirely awake, alert, alarmed. They’ll kill him, she realized. God knows what’s happened.

Pulling her robe from the closet by the bed, Elverda rushed out into the passageway. It was empty and silent.

What’s happened? she wondered. What did they do to him?

The captain ought to know, she reasoned. He’d be up on the bridge, most likely. She headed toward the bridge, using the maps displayed on the wall screens along the passageways. Crewmen ran past her, strapping holsters to their hips, their faces strained with apprehension. They ignored her as they raced down the passageway.

When she got to the bridge, she found Captain Yuan standing in the midst of chaos. Equipment was smashed, crew members were writhing on the floor with others bending over them, spraying bandages on them. Koop was tenderly lifting one of the women officers to a sitting position, she saw.

“Captain,” Elverda called, stepping across shattered shards of glass and plastic toward him.

“Get back in the infirmary,” Yuan snapped. “We’ve got a madman on our hands.”

“Don’t hurt him,” Elverda pleaded.

“Don’t hurt him?” Yuan spread his arms in a broad, sweeping gesture. “Look what’s he’s done here!”

“What did you do to him?”

The captain glanced at a dark-haired woman sitting huddled on one of the serviceable chairs. She looked pale with shock.

“He’s hiding somewhere on my ship. We’ve got to catch him before he does more damage. Before he kills somebody.”

“Let me go to him,” Elverda said. “I can talk to him, calm him down.”

“He’s insane,” said the dark-haired woman. “A homicidal maniac.”

Elverda hated her instantaneously. “Did he kill anyone?”

“Not because he didn’t try.”

“He could have snapped your neck like a twig,” Elverda said. “You must have done something to set him off.”

“Those damned drugs,” Yuan muttered.

“Drugs? Madre de dios, you didn’t give him drugs, did you?”

Again Yuan looked toward the dark-haired woman. She would not meet his eyes.

“I’ve got to find him before one of your crew kills him,” she said, heading back toward the hatch.

“Or before he kills one of my crew, more likely,” Yuan shouted after her.

Dorn sat hunched on the deck plates next to the thrumming power generator, his head sunk in his hands.

How close to the surface lurks the beast, he was saying to himself, over and over. How close. How close.

Just beneath the surface lies the monster. You thought you’d buried him deep, but the drugs brought him back. One little dose and all your discipline cracked like an eggshell.

He looked up bleakly, seeing nothing but his own misery.

Was it really the drugs? Maybe that was just an excuse, a justification to allow the monster out of his cage.

It felt good to be free! He shuddered at the realization of it. It felt good to smash and rage and let the fury boil out. To scatter them. To break their bones. To see the terror on their faces.

He pounded both his fists on the metal deck plates. I’ll never be free of him! I’ll never be rid of the beast. He wanted to cry but he had no tears.

He knew what he should do. Get to your feet, go out and meet them. Let them shoot you. Finish it, once and for all.

But something within him held him fast. A mocking voice in his head laughed bitterly. For all your talk of death, you cling to your miserable life. You know you deserve to die, but you’re not willing to face it. Not again. Once was enough for you. Beneath all the fury and violence is the ultimate cowardice.

I killed myself once, he said to the voice. I tried to atone. They wouldn’t let me die. They wouldn’t let me pay for my crimes. They want men like me. They need killers in their employ.

Unbidden, a quatrain of Khayyam came to his mind:

Human death and fate, he repeated silently. I could have killed them. That woman who questioned me. The stupid oafs on the bridge. I could have killed them all. Maybe I did kill one or two of them. But I tried not to. Despite it all, despite the rage of the monster inside, I kept myself from deliberately killing them.

That’s something, he told himself. Not enough to save your own pitiful life, but at least I tried to stay my hand from murder.

Slowly he clambered to his feet and, for the first time, took a good look at his surroundings. Power generator, he saw. It feeds off the hot plasma ejected from the fusion reactor. He smiled to himself. Even in a blood-red rage your rational mind led you here, where the crew will be afraid of firing lasers at you for fear of damaging their power equipment.

He saw that he was in a narrow aisle between man-tall bulkheads that housed machinery. They’d have to come at you one at a time, he said to himself. I could slaughter them like Samson against the Philistines. I wouldn’t even need the jawbone of an ass.

Turning, he saw that this narrow aisle widened into, a small chamber fitted with a diagnostics console. They could come at me from both sides, front and back. Unless they have to come through this aisle to get to the console station.

He heard footsteps approaching. They were trying to be stealthy, tiptoeing, but the scuff of boots on the deck plates was easy enough to hear, even over the steady hum of the generator.

He retreated with soft, lithe steps to the diagnostics chamber. There was a hatch at its far end. They’ll be able to come at me from both directions. It’s too roomy in here, he decided. Better to fight in the narrow aisle.

Why fight at all? he asked himself. Why not just surrender to them? Would they accept that? Or will they be so frightened of me that they’ll try to kill me straight off? It would be easier for them in the diagnostics chamber. But why should I make it easy for them? Or for myself?

“Dorn!”

Elverda’s voice. High, quavering with tension.

“Dorn, come out. Show yourself. They won’t harm you. I have the captain’s word.”

He grunted. The captain’s word. He’s under orders to kill us both, Harbin replied silently to the old woman.

“Dorn, come out. It will be all right, I promise you.”

She treats me as if I’m a child. Her little boy. Harbin thought back to his own mother, raped and crucified by the soldiers sent to cleanse his village.

They’ll kill us both, he thought. They’ll kill you, Elverda. They’ve got to.

Unless I can prevent it, he told himself.

That was a new thought. Can I prevent them from killing her? Can I save her life? Could saving her one life possibly balance the scales for all the lives I’ve snuffed out?

Could she be the path to my atonement, my final peace?

“Dorn!” she called again.

“I’m here,” he called back. “I’m coming out.”

CONFRONTATIONS

Koop was leading a squad of four crew members, two of them women, down the passageway that led to the power generator bay. The ship’s surveillance cameras showed Harbin huddled behind the generator itself, sitting on the deck plates with his knees pulled up in front of his face. He was unarmed, but Koop had seen what the freak could do with his bare hands.

Elverda Apacheta had insisted on coming with them. Now she stood beside Koop, calling out to Harbin. She called him Dorn.

He stopped his little team at the hatch that led into the generator bay. It was open. “Okay,” he told them, “we wait here until the captain signals.”

Yuan was leading the rest of the crew members who were able to walk, a total of five men and women, around the long way through the ship’s wheel to come up behind the generator bay. His plan was to trap Harbin between the two squads.

“I’ll go in and talk to him,” Elverda said.

Koop shook his beefy head. “Orders are to wait here. I don’t want you in the line of fire when the shooting starts.”

“I can make him come out without shooting,” she insisted.

“No,” said Koop. “You stay here with us.”

She tried to stare him down, but Koop grasped her bony wrist in his massive paw and said gently, “I don’t want you to get hurt. Stay here. Please.”

Elverda almost smiled. Instead she turned and shouted through the open hatch, “Dorn, come out. Show yourself. They won’t harm you. I have the captain’s word.”

No response. I can’t blame him, Elverda said to herself. He knows they want to kill him. Kill us both.

Koop checked the charge on his laser pistol. He had seen the carnage Harbin had unleashed on the bridge, watched the security camera’s playback of the mayhem. Gonzolez hit him square in the chest with a laser shot and all it did was burn a hole in his shirt.

“If we have to shoot,” he muttered to his crew, “go for his face, or his human arm. The metal half of him splashes laser beams like a stream of water.”

“You’ll kill him!” Elverda hissed.

“If I have to,” said Koop, as the others checked their pistols. He wished he had a more powerful weapon: a high-velocity rifle, maybe, or an armor-piercing missile.

Elverda cupped her hands to her mouth and called again, “Dorn!”

From somewhere in the generator bay he called back, “I’m here. I’m coming out.”

Koop’s team stiffened and gripped their guns tighter.

Yuan had led his team halfway around Viking’s wheel-shaped main body and then down the connecting tunnel that opened on the far side of the generator bay. He wished he had more crew members and heavier weapons, but these five officers and crew were all that were left unhurt. They all looked nervous, frightened, as they hefted their pistols in trembling hands.

Tamara Vishinsky had stayed on the bridge, at Yuan’s orders. Ostensibly, she had the ship’s con. In reality, Yuan didn’t want her anywhere near the renegade.

“I don’t want him to see you,” Yuan had told her. “It might set him off again.”

She hadn’t argued the point. In fact, she looked relieved. The three other members of the crew were in the infirmary, two with broken noses, the third heavily sedated, his jaw shattered.

Now Yuan raised his free hand to bring his little team to a halt. The hatch that opened onto the generator bay stood before them. It was shut. Holstering his pistol, Yuan pulled out his palmcomp. Its tiny screen showed the surveillance camera’s view of the bay from up in the overhead. He could see Harbin crouched behind the generator, his back to the hatch that was no more then five meters from Yuan and his squad. He was pulling a cover plate off the generator, using one finger of his prosthetic hand as a screwdriver.

Thumbing the palmcomp’s keyboard, Yuan called in a low voice, “Koop?”

A moment’s delay, then the first mate’s face filled the screen. “Sir?”

“We’re in position, ready to go in.”

“He says he’s willing to come out, captain.”

“He’ll surrender?”

“He wants us to guarantee we won’t hurt Ms. Apacheta.”

Yuan grunted like a man who’s just received news that could be both good and bad.

“I’ll have to talk to him,” he said.

Dorik Harbin—Dorn—realized that there must be surveillance cameras throughout the ship. Peering up into the shadows of the overhead support beams, he spotted the unwinking red eye of a camera. They can see me, he said to himself.

He got slowly to his feet and raised his hands above his head.

“I’ll come out,” he said to the open hatch in front of him. He could see Elverda standing there in her threadbare robe, and several members of the crew, all of them armed with pistols.

“I’ll come out,” he repeated, “under one condition. You must promise that you won’t hurt my companion.”

The big, burly Hawaiian stepped in front of Elverda. “That’s a decision that only the captain can make,” he said.

“Then I’ll stay here until the captain decides.”

It took several minutes and a flurry of chatter into handheld communicators. At last Koop told him, “The captain’s in the passageway behind you. He’s going to open the hatch so he can talk to you.”

“I understand,” said Dorn.

“Nobody’s going to come any closer than these hatches,” Koop assured him.

“I understand,” Dorn repeated, knowing that with laser pistols they could shoot him quite easily from the open hatches. The laser beams weren’t powerful enough to do more than singe his metal skin, but they would of course aim for his flesh.

The hatch behind him started to creak open, slowly. Dorn turned to face it.

“I’m willing to surrender to you, captain, if you’ll guarantee that no harm will come to Ms. Apacheta.”

Yuan frowned at Harbin. “You’re in no position to make demands.”

“True enough, but that’s what I want. Otherwise you’ll have to come in here and get me.”

“We’re prepared to do that,” Yuan said.

Harbin lifted the plate he had removed from the generator and held it before him like a shield. “Are you prepared for the casualties you’ll take?”

“Dorn!” Elverda shouted. “Stop this nonsense! Now!”

He turned and looked at her with the human side of his face. She pulled loose from Koop’s restraining hand and stepped through the hatch, toward him.

Harbin dropped his shield. It clattered to the deck.

“No more fighting,” Elverda said, her tone softer.

“No more fighting,” he agreed.

They marched the two of them to the galley, where Yuan offered them a meal. Elverda made herself a cup of tea. Harbin sat in brooding silence at the end of the table that ran the length of the narrow compartment.

“You know I’m under orders to execute you both,” Yuan said, almost casually, as he poured a mug of tea for himself.

“I understand,” said Harbin, “that Humphries wants us dead.”

“I don’t have any choice in the matter.” Yuan sat himself at the head of the table.

“None of us really do,” Harbin said.

Elverda clutched her mug in both hands, soaking up its warmth. “Could you at least wait until our mission is finished?” she asked.

Yuan turned toward her. “You mean picking up dead bodies? That could take years.”

‘Yes, but—”

Tamara Vishinsky stepped into the galley. Harbin tensed at the sight of her and she froze where she stood.

“There won’t be any more interrogations,” Yuan said hastily. “You can relax, both of you.”

Tamara went to the urn and took a mug. “For what it’s worth,” she said without looking at Harbin, “I’m sorry I pumped you. I didn’t know what your reaction would be.”

“I’m sorry also,” Harbin said. “The man with the fractured jaw…?

“Koop injected him with stem cells. The medical computer predicts he’ll be recovered in six days.”

“I regret injuring him.”

Yuan said, “The two of you are under a sentence of death. I don’t like it, but those are my orders.”

“And if you don’t carry them out, Humphries will send assassins after you,” Elverda said.

Nodding, the captain said, “He sure as hell will.”

A gloomy silence filled the galley. Yuan looked from Harbin to Apacheta to Tamara. He felt uneasy, almost sick to his stomach. It’s one thing to ping a ship, he thought. Like a computer game. Bang, he’s dead. But these are real, living people. Even Harbin : he’s half machine, but he’s a human being nonetheless. What am I supposed to do with them? Shoot them between the eyes? Give them lethal injections? Pop them out an airlock without suits?

Tamara broke the silence. “Tell me more about this alien artifact, Harbin.”

“His name is Dorn,” Elverda said.

“I want to know more about the artifact.”

“Artifact?” Yuan asked.

Dorn fixed Tamara with a gaze. “Humphries wants us killed because we saw the effect the artifact had on him.”

“You mean it’s real?” Yuan asked. “I’ve heard rumors, everybody has. Tales… but I thought—”

“It’s real,” said Elverda.

“It made Humphries crazy?” Tamara’s voice was brimming with anticipation.

“Temporarily,” Elverda said, placing a hand on Dorn’s human arm to keep him silent.

But Dorn added, “The artifact merely brought his underlying insanity into the open.”

“And you saw him crumble?”

“He won’t like finding out that you know what happened to him,” Elverda warned.

Undeterred, Tamara asked, “You both saw the artifact, too, didn’t you? And it affected you, too, didn’t it?”

“It did,” said Dorn.

“It changed your lives,” Tamara said, her eyes glittering.

“Yes,” Elverda admitted.

Leaning across the table toward Dorn, Tamara asked, “Where is this artifact?”

“It’s buried inside an asteroid.”

“Which asteroid?”

“IAA designation 67-046,” said Dorn mechanically.

“What are its coordinates? Could you pilot us back to the asteroid where the artifact is?”

CARGO SHIP PLEIADES: OUTSIDE

Victor Zacharias paused in his work and looked up at the stars. He had pulled on one of the ship’s nanofabric space suits to go outside and repair a malfunctioning maintenance robot, thinking to himself, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will watch the watchmen? Or, in this case, who will maintain the maintenance robots?

“I will,” he muttered from inside the inflated bubble that covered his head. “There’s nobody here to do it except me.”

It was a lot easier to work in the nanofabric suit than in the old hard shells. The nanofabric gloves were thin and flexible, not like the stiff cumbersome gloves of the older suits. Even with miniature servomotors on their backs, it was hard to move your fingers in the old gloves; it was like wearing boxing mitts, almost. Victor lifted a hand to eye level and flexed his fingers easily.

The stars dew his attention. Stars everywhere, spangled against the infinite blackness of space. Stars strewn so thickly that he could barely make out the constellations that he’d known as a child in the muted skies of Earth.

Earth itself was out there, he saw: a warm point of blue. He couldn’t find Mars but Jupiter was so big and bright he thought he could see the flatness of its disk.

And Pauline is out there, he told himself. Pauline and Angela and Theo. Somewhere out there.

He had only the roughest idea of where they might be. When he’d separated from Syracuse, in the midst of that madman’s attack, he hadn’t had time for a careful navigational fix. They were rocketing outward, he knew, on a trajectory that would swing completely out of the Belt and then loop back again toward Ceres.

So Victor piloted Pleiades across the sector that he guessed his family would return to, crisscrossing the region like a man groping blindly in a dark alley for a coin he had lost.

I’ll find them, he told himself, again and again. I’ll find them.

He had worked hard to upgrade Pleiades’s search radar so it could send a powerful probing pulse out into space. Syracuse was deaf and dumb, he knew. The attack had ruined the ship’s antennas. He could expect no call from his family, no signal to guide him to them.

Unless…

No, he said to himself. You can’t expect Theo to know enough to help you. He’s only a teenager. He can’t repair the antennas, they were too badly ripped up for repair. But is Theo smart enough to use the suit radios? Will he think of that?

The radios built into the ship’s space suits were low powered, barely strong enough for crew members to chatter back and forth. Their signals faded away into the background hiss of the stars at only a few kilometers’ distance.

But on Earth there are powerful radio telescopes, antennas that can pick out the microwatt signals from robot spacecraft way out in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Antennas that had been listening for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, until the religious fanatics that controlled most of Earth’s governments had shut down almost all of them.

But the antennas are still there, Victor thought, listening to the signals from the outposts orbiting around Venus and Jupiter and Saturn. Communicating with the power satellite project at Mercury. And some of those scientists were sneaking time to listen for ET signals, too, Victor was certain.

If Theo was smart enough to use the suit radios to call for help, or just to identify Syracuse’s position … If, Victor thought. If.

The timer on his wrist comm pinged, making him flinch with surprise. I’ve been out here two hours!

He lifted the diagnostic tool from its magnetic grip on the ship’s hull and ran it over the squat little robot he’d been repairing. Its lights blinked green. Nodding, satisfied, Victor activated the robot itself. It trundled off along its track, spindly arms unfolding, ready to repair any damage to the meteor bumper from impacts. Just as if it had never malfunctioned, Victor said to himself. No memory at all. Almost, he envied the simple little machine.

He clambered through the airlock hatch, unsealed the space suit and hung it up neatly in its rack, then went to the galley for a sandwich and a beer. Cheena set a good table, he thought. The galley’s well stocked.

Ducking into the bridge, Victor was startled to see that the ship’s sensor log showed that Pleiades had been pinged by a powerful radar pulse seventeen minutes earlier. And the yellow message light was blinking on the communications console.

“That can only be bad news,” he growled. He’d been running silent: no tracking beacon, no telemetry to identify himself. He hadn’t yet turned on the search radar he’d worked so hard to upgrade. He didn’t think Cheena Madagascar would be chasing him, but he was taking no chances.

“No harm in listening to it,” he mumbled. He sat down in the command chair, the mug of beer still in his left hand, and touched the replay key.

A handsome cheerful face smiled brightly from the display screen.

“Hailing unidentified vessel,” he said, in a crisply confident tone. “This is the salvage ship Vogeltod. If you are in need of help, we will assist you. If we receive no reply, we will assume you are a derelict. In that case we will board you and claim you as salvage.”

The image on the screen froze. Victor scowled at the man’s face. He had a thick mop of sandy blond hair, a strong jaw, big teeth. Broad shoulders beneath a nondescript tan shirt. His smile had a hint of the predator about it. Victor thought of a shark.

Salvage? Victor asked himself. Are there enough abandoned or wrecked ships out here to make a salvage operation profitable? There must be, he decided.

If I don’t answer him, he’ll board me. I’m just one man; he’s probably got a crew of least four or five people. Maybe more.

But if I do answer him he’ll figure out pretty quickly that I’ve stolen this ship. Then he can board me, take over and bring me back to Ceres. Back to Cheena. And Big George.

Victor glowered at the frozen image in his comm screen. Damned if I do and damned if I don’t.

Kao Yuan leveled a finger at Tamara. “Do you realize what you’re proposing to do?”

“Yes,” she said, delighted, enthusiastic. “We’re going to find that alien artifact.”

“If Humphries hasn’t destroyed it,” Dorn said.

“Destroyed it? He wouldn’t do that! He couldn’t! Why would he destroy it?”

“Because he hates it,” said Elverda, from across the galley table.

“Worse,” Dorn amended. “He fears it.”

Undeterred, Tamara said, “He hasn’t destroyed it, I’m certain of that.”

Yuan shook his head, more in wonder than contradiction.

Leaning slightly toward Dorn, Tamara said, “You know the asteroid’s coordinates, Harbin. You’re going to lead us to it.”

“And if I refuse?”

She gestured toward Elverda. “We’ll kill your friend.”

“Now wait!” Kuan said, brows knitting. “I’m the captain here, not you.”

Tamara smiled at him, coldly. “I report directly to Mr. Humphries. I outrank you, Kao.”

“Not on this ship.”

“Why do you want to see the artifact?” Elverda asked.

Her smile thinned. “Martin Humphries is the most powerful man in the solar system, right? Well, this artifact, whatever it is, can give me a lever on him. If I can control the artifact I can control Humphries! It’s that simple.”

“It may be a lot of things,” Yuan said, “but it’s not simple. All you’re going to accomplish is getting yourself killed. And me along with you.”

“Don’t be a chick, Yuan. We’re talking about real power here!”

“You’re crazy.”

Her smiled winked out. “Listen, captain,” she mocked, “I’d prefer to do this with you, but I can do it without if I have to. Koop can replace you easily enough.”

“You’re talking mutiny,” Yuan growled.

“Yes, I am,” said Tamara.

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: INFIRMARY

Yuan escorted Elverda and Dorn back to the infirmary, looking decidedly unhappy.

“You’ll be comfortable enough here,” he said, motioning them through the open hatch. “This ship isn’t built to accommodate passengers.”

Elverda thanked him and stepped through; Dorn followed her. Yuan closed the hatch and left them alone.

“She’s mad. Insane,” Elverda said as she went to her bed and sat on it. Three sides of the bed were partitioned off.

“Is she?” Dorn wondered, standing next to her. “She seems to understand how powerful the artifact can be.”

“But how can she hope to control Humphries through it? If he hasn’t already destroyed it he must have it heavily guarded, sealed off from the rest of the world.”

“Perhaps. But she’s a gambler, and she’s willing to play for the very highest stakes.”

“Our lives.”

“And her own. If she’s wrong about controlling Humphries, he’ll snuff her out like a candle flame.”

Elverda felt tired, bone weary. Yet… “Perhaps there’s some way we can use the artifact to bargain for our lives.”

“Your life,” he said. “I’m ready to die.”

“No!”

He looked away from her. In a voice so low she could barely hear it, he said, “Today I realized how brittle this facade is. I could have killed her—all of them.”

“That was the drugs.”

“In my body,” he retorted. “My brain. My mind. I could have killed them all. I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t.”

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t want to go through that again. I want to be released from all this… this… living.”

Elverda searched for something she could say to help him, to ease his pain, to bring him back from his despair. But she found nothing.

With the enormous reluctance of a man who knew he would regret his decision, Victor keyed his comm console.

“This is the cargo ship Pleiades,” he said, trying to keep his voice firm, unruffled. “We are not in trouble. I repeat, not in trouble. We do not require assistance. Thank you.”

Hardly a moment later the smiling young man’s face appeared on Victor’s comm screen.

“You’re not emitting a tracking beacon, Pleiades,” he said. “We thought you were abandoned.”

Victor could see a glint of sunlight off a ship’s hull on his main display screen. Vogeltod was still too far away for the cameras to show its shape.

“No, we’re not abandoned.”

“But you’re running silent, eh?”

“For the moment, yes.”

The man’s toothy grin widened. “My name is Valker. What’s yours?”

Thinking swiftly, Victor said, “Kaneaz.”

“Kaneaz?” Valker echoed. “What’s that, German?”

“Greek.”

“Ah! That’s why I didn’t understand it. It’s Greek to me!” Valker burst into a hearty laugh.”

Making himself smile back at the man, Victor said, “Well, thanks for your offer of assistance. I’ll be powering up soon and heading deeper into the Belt.”

Valker’s handsome face turned crafty. “Wait a minute. According to the IAA register on my screen, Pleiades is captained by Cheena Madagascar. Can I talk to her?”

“The captain gave orders she’s not to be disturbed.”

“Did she?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’d better wake her up, Greekie. We’re coming aboard.”

Victor’s main screen showed a flash of rocket exhaust against the starry background. He hesitated a bare fraction of a second, then punched his main propulsion controls. Pleiades lurched into acceleration.

Sinking back in the padded command chair, Victor said to himself, Now it’s a question of who’s faster. And better armed.

Kao Yuan went from the infirmary straight to the bridge. Koop was in the command chair, Tamara leaning over him in whispered conversation.

“Koop,” Yuan called. “Come with me.”

The big Hawaiian looked like a guilty little boy as he pulled himself to his feet.

“You too, Tamara,” he said.

It was crowded in the captain’s quarters with the three of them there, but Yuan slid his door shut and leaned against it for a moment, eying them. Tamara went directly to the double-sized bunk and sat on its edge. Koop looked at the flimsy desk chair, decided against it, and remained standing.

“Take the recliner,” Yuan said, pointing to the cushioned chair.

“It’s okay, captain,” Koop said. “I’ll stay on my feet.”

“We’ve got a command crisis here,” Yuan said, without moving from the door. “Tamara thinks she can give the orders aboard my ship.”

“I report directly—”

“To Humphries, I know,” said Yuan. “But I’m the captain of this ship. Like Ahab said, there’s one god in heaven and one captain of the Pequod.”

Koop’s chunky face screwed up in bewilderment. “Pequod?”

“You hold the balance of power here,” Yuan said to his first mate. “Whose orders are you going to follow, hers or mine?”

“Yours,” the Hawaiian answered without hesitation.

“You’re certain?”

“Sure, captain. You’re the captain and that’s it.”

“Even if she goes to bed with you?”

Koop’s face flamed red. Tamara actually smiled.

“We’ve already been in bed together,” she said, her smile turning into a self-satisfied smirk. “It was very enjoyable.”

“I see,” Yuan said tightly.

“That’s got nothin’ to do with who’s captain,” Koop said.

Yuan looked into his steady brown eyes. “This is important, Koop. I can’t have her going over my head.”

“You’ve made your point, captain,” Tamara said. “I’ll follow your orders without question.”

“No calling back to headquarters behind my back,” Yuan said.

Smiling again, she replied, “I won’t go over your head, or behind your back, or under your toes.”

“All right, then.”

“But we are going to find the artifact, aren’t we?” she added.

Yuan hesitated. He knew that she wouldn’t want to tell headquarters that she knew anything about the artifact. Humphries wants the renegade and the sculptress killed because they know about it. He’ll kill all of us if he knows that we know.

Impatient with his silence, Tamara went on, “We have Harbin and the artist. Our mission is completed once we eliminate them. But if we can get the artifact—”

“We could get ourselves killed,” Yuan snapped.

“Or be in control of the most powerful force in the solar system,” she purred.

CARGO SHIP PLEIADES: BRIDGE

Victor kept the fusion drive accelerating at one full g and watched Vogeltod dwindling in his wake. Nodding to himself, he thought, Scavengers like Valker aren’t looking for a long and difficult chase. They want easy pickings, and there must be lots of them scattered around the Belt: ships that were blasted in battle during the war, ships that are abandoned, or their crews killed.

It wasn’t until Vogeltod had disappeared altogether from his screen that the frightening thought hit him. What if a scavenger finds Syracuse before I do?

What if that bastard Valker follows me and finds Syracuse because I lead him to her?

No. He shook his head to clear the idea from his mind. It’ll take months, maybe years before I find Pauline and the kids. Valker won’t have that kind of patience. He’s looking for prey, he wants to feed himself and his crew, he can’t wait that long. His own crew would slit his throat first.

Still, Victor shut down the main engine and used the cold-gas maneuvering jets to shift Pleiades away from the outbound vector it had been following. He kicked Pleiades into a trajectory that climbed well above his original course. Most ships travel close to the ecliptic: that’s where the asteroids are. He might not think of looking up. Go silent again, don’t leave a trail for him to follow, he told himself. Don’t take any chances.

Once he had convinced himself that he had lost Vogeltod, he called up the navigation program and restudied his options.

I’ve got to stay farther away from the Ceres sector, he realized. Parasites like Valker must be combing the region, looking for derelicts to scavenge. But that means I’ll have to cover a wider arc to have any hope of intercepting Pauline and the kids.

He decided to cruise silently for at least three days before turning on the search radar. Then he decided to make it a week. He didn’t want to take any chances of giving Valker or anyone else a signal they could home in on.

Vogeltod’s bridge was a strange assortment of equipment, most of it taken from vessels that Valker and his crew had seized and retrofitted into the old bucket. Valker himself sat in a command chair that had once belonged to Admiral Gormley, the victim of a bloody ambush during the war.

Valker was a big man, almost two meters tall, broad in the shoulders, deep in the chest. He was almost always smiling, a bright devil-may-care smile that showed lots of teeth. Where another man might show tension, even fear, in a dangerous situation, Valker smiled and fought his way through. During the war he’d been a mercenary, first with Astro Corporation, then with Humphries Space Systems.

When the shooting stopped, most mercenaries were at a loss. For years there had been plenty of work for them, and good pay. Not that they fought all the time. Much of their work involved building bases or scouting through the cold emptiness of the Belt, looking for prey. They seldom engaged in battle against other mercenaries. No percentage in that. Instead, they swooped clown on hapless cargo ships and smelters, like hawks going after pigeons.

The official end of the war finished that. For the most part. Some mercenaries became outlaws, pirates, still attacking peaceful vessels. But they soon learned that no one would buy the cargoes they captured. Big George Ambrose and the other rock rats busily building their new habitat at Ceres had no time or money to hire a police force to go after the pirates. They simply saw to it that no one in the Belt bought stolen cargoes. The pirates soon realized there was little profit in their piracies. And there was always the risk that Big George’s people would execute you without delay.

Valker was smarter than that. When the Second Asteroid War broke out he had just graduated from the University of Pisa with a double degree in economics and marketing. He had been a star on the international soccer team he himself had helped to organize. His plan was to spend three years—perhaps as much as five—in the Belt, working as a prospector, locating asteroids rich in metals and minerals, claiming them as an independent corporation and then selling them to the highest bidder.

The Asteroid War made such ventures far too hazardous. Valker saw that either he joined one of the major corporations or he went back to Earth empty-handed. Or got himself killed. So he became a mercenary—until the war abruptly ended.

While most of the mercenaries found themselves out of work, and flooded back to the Earth/Moon region to look for jobs, Valker realized that there was an economic niche available in the Belt: salvage. There were plenty of vessels abandoned by their crews, drifting through the Belt, there for the taking. He could claim the vessels as salvage, then sell them back to the rock rats for a handsome profit.

He was a born salesman. With his rugged good looks and winning smile, he talked a banker into leasing him a small ship, Vogeltod. It wasn’t difficult to round up a crew: he picked nine men, all former mercenaries, all quite prepared to stretch the laws of salvage once they were out in the Belt and away from the prying eyes of Big George and the IAA.

They searched for abandoned vessels. Some were battered hulks, little more than junk. Most had equipment in them that could be scavenged. But the real money was in ships that were intact. Valker and his crewmates pounced on lonely vessels deep in the Belt, killed the crews and brought the ships back to Ceres for sale. There were always questions, raised eyebrows, lurking suspicions. Valker smiled his way through and sold the “abandoned” vessels to the highest bidder. There were always newcomers from Earth or the Moon with money in their accounts to invest in a new career in prospecting and mining.

Now Valker sat in Admiral Gormley’s old command chair and studied the data splashed on Vogeltod’s main screen. Pleiades was listed back at Ceres as stolen. Its captain and owner, Cheena Madagascar, had even posted a hefty reward for the ship’s return. Big George Ambrose had declared the thief, somebody named Victor Zacharias, to be an outlaw and placed a modest price on his head.

“Gesuto,” Valker said aloud, “we could take this ship and bring it back to Ceres and we’ll be heroes, no less.”

The other men on the bridge grinned at him.

“The rewards don’t add up to all that much,” he continued, “but the good will could be helpful.”

“He’s no fool, though,” said the man at the nav console. “He sprinted away and now he’s shut down his main engine.”

“Trying to be invisible,” Valker muttered.

“And doing a good job of it. Radar ain’t picking up anything.”

Valker nodded absently. “You’re right: he’s no fool.” He pecked out a command to the ship’s computer on the keyboard set into the armrest of his chair. Let’s see what Ceres has on file about this thief. Know your customer, he said to himself. That’s the first rule of marketing.

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: BRIDGE

Everything stopped as Koop brought the cyborg and the old woman onto the bridge. The two crewmen who were still working at repairs of the equipment Dorn had smashed glanced at him warily, as did the officers at their consoles, two of them with spraytape covering their broken noses. Elverda’s face was drawn tight with tension. It was impossible to read any expression on the cyborg’s half-metal face.

Tamara, at the comm console, half turned in her chair as Koop led them in. Yuan glared at her, a warning to keep her mouth shut. I’m the captain, he said silently to her, I’m in charge.

“Harbin,” he began, “I want—”

“My name is no longer Dorik Harbin. Please call me Dorn.”

Yuan grimaced. “All right. Dorn. I want you to give my navigation officer the coordinates for the asteroid where the artifact is located.”

Elverda saw that all of them were staring openly at Dorn now: the three bridge officers, the captain, the pair of technicians, even the strapping Hawaiian. For a long moment Dorn said nothing; the bridge was absolutely silent except for the hum of electrical power and the whisper of air from the ventilation ducts.

“It will be very dangerous to go there,” Dorn said at last.

Yuan waved a hand impatiently. “That’s for me to worry about, not you. Give my nav officer the coordinates.”

“He may have moved the asteroid to a different orbit, or even destroyed it completely.”

“Just give the coordinates to my nav officer,” Yuan insisted.

Again Dorn hesitated. Then, “I want your promise that Ms. Apacheta will not be harmed.”

“The coordinates, dammit!” Yuan shouted. “Now!”

“I don’t care what happens to me, but I want her to be safe.”

Tamara said, “Do you want us to start pulling her fingernails out?”

Clenching his metal fist, Dorn said, “The rest of this bridge will be destroyed if you try that. Some of you will die.” His voice was flat, unemotional, but the others on the bridge shot uneasy glances at one another.

Before anyone could reply, Yuan broke into a forced chuckle. “All right. All right. I won’t touch a hair of her head. Does that satisfy you?”

“No,” Dorn said calmly. “I want your guarantee that no harm will come to her, neither by you nor any other member of this ship’s crew.”

Elverda complained, “Stop talking about me as if I’m not here.”

Ignoring her, Dorn said to the captain, “You are under orders to kill us both. You can kill me, but let her go free.”

“And what happens when Mr. Humphries finds out I’ve let her go?”

Dorn smiled with the human side of his face. “Once I give you the coordinates you will go to the asteroid and try to gain control of Humphries through the alien artifact.”

Yuan glanced at Tamara, who nodded minutely.

“If you succeed in getting the upper hand with Humphries, then allowing Ms. Apacheta to go free will be of no consequence. If you fail we will all be killed.”

“Including you,” said Yuan.

“I will die one way or the other. That doesn’t matter. The life of this woman does matter. Very much. To me.”

Moving beside him, Elverda said softly, “Dorn, I can’t let you throw your life away—”

“If you finish the work we’ve started, if you find the other bodies and give them decent death rites, then my life doesn’t matter. It never did, except to cause agony and death. You can complete my atonement.”

“Atonement?” Tamara blurted. “Is that what you’re after?”

“Atonement,” Dorn repeated.

Yuan said, “All right. Ms. Apacheta won’t be harmed in any way. Now give the coordinates to my nav officer.”

Without another word, Dorn turned and stepped to the navigation officer’s console, then leaned over his shoulder and began pecking on his keyboard with both his hands.

Turning to Tamara, Yuan commanded, “Notify Viking Two and Three to proceed to Ceres immediately.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You don’t want them to go with us?”

“No,” he said. “Do you?”

She thought it over for all of two seconds. “No, you’re right. We do this by ourselves.”

Elverda, still standing next to the captain’s chair, asked, “What about our ship, the Hunter?”

“We don’t need it now. Let it drift.”

Valker whistled softly as he read Victor Zacharias’s dossier from the computer screen built into the bulkhead at the foot of his bunk.

He was sitting up with the pillows bunched behind his back. His quarters were small but as sumptuous as he could make them, crammed with furniture and fixtures scavenged from salvaged vessels: a massive desk of actual teak filled one corner of the compartment, elephants and monkeys carved into its flanks and front; colorful draperies hung from the overhead; the entire lavatory had been ripped out of a luxurious corporate torch ship and shoehorned into place, gold faucets and all; the rich dark faux leather recliner that had been rammed into the other corner of the compartment had been taken from a prospector’s ship, the one luxury its late owner had possessed.

Valker took all that for granted, including the fact that he had to maneuver carefully around his pilfered treasures to get across the jam-packed compartment. His attention was fully focused on Zacharias’s dossier. The man had a family—wife and two teenagers—but they’d been lost after being attacked by the same monster who’d wiped out the original Chrysalis habitat.

So what’s he doing in a stolen ship this deep in the Belt? Valker asked himself. Searching for his family? Valker shook his head. Can’t be. It’s three years and more since his family disappeared. They’re dead by now. Have to be. Only a fool or a madman would still be searching for them. Only an idiot would steal a ship, make himself an outlaw with the rock rats, to go searching through this wilderness for his wife and kids.

“Only a fool or a madman,” Valker repeated aloud, softly.

Why track after a madman? Even if you find him you’ll have to kill him; he won’t give up that ship without a fight. And even if we do take the ship, once we bring it back to Ceres its rightful owner will claim it. We’ll get the reward, but that’s peanuts compared to the price the ship would bring.

Why bother? Let him go searching for his family. Let him die out there. Sooner or later we’ll run across his ship and take it.

The message light beneath the display screen began to blink.

“Answer,” Valker called out.

His first mate’s bearded face filled the screen. “Contact, captain. Looks like a derelict. Seems intact, but there’s no beacon, no answer to our calls.”

“Identification?”

“Computer says its radar profile matches one of the ships in its files: Hunter. Some woman’s listed as the owner, Elverda Apacheta. Sounds like some Latina to me.”

Valker nodded and swung his legs off the bunk, careful not to bang his shins against the big recliner.

“I’m coming to the bridge,” he said.

A derelict, Valker thought as he tugged on his softboots. If she’s really intact she’ll bring top dollar back at Ceres.

He hurried to the bridge.

ATTACK SHIP VIKING: ONE MONTH LATER

“By god, there it is,” said Kao Yuan in a hushed, almost awed voice.

From the navigation console, Koop wondered aloud, “Are you sure?”

Yuan pointed to the main screen. “How many rocks out here have five—no, six ships patrolling around them?”

“APPROACHING VESSEL, IDENTIFY YOURSELF.” The voice coming through the comm speaker sounded like a computerized synthesizer.

It had taken a month for Yuan to track down asteroid 67-046. It hadn’t been at the coordinates Dorn had given. Sure enough, Humphries had moved the rock to a different orbit that swooped far below and then high above the ecliptic, out of the plane of the usual traffic through the Belt. For an entire month Viking followed trajectories that the navigation computer worked out, guesses based on the asteroid’s original orbit and the amount of energy it would take to move a rock of its mass.

During those frustrating weeks of searching the dark emptiness, Yuan asked Tamara again and again, “But what do we do when we find the ’roid? It’s bound to be protected. Humphries won’t let it just sit there without guarding it.”

Again and again Tamara would smile knowingly and say, “Leave that to me. I’ll get us past the guards.”

“You’ll get us killed,” Yuan groused.

He did not sleep with her anymore. He wanted to, but the realization that she’d been using him angered him too deeply. Instead he crooked his finger at one of the other crew members, a weapons specialist, young and slightly plump, but with silky dark hair and a willing smile. It’s good to be the captain, Yuan told himself. But he was certain that Tamara was sleeping with Koop now.

“APPROACHING VESSEL, IDENTIFY YOURSELF, THIS AREA IS PROPRIETARY TO HUMPHRIES SPACE SYSTEMS, INCORPORATED. NO UNAUTHORIZED VESSELS ARE PERMITTED HERE.”

Yuan looked at Tamara, who pressed the transmit key on her console and said crisply, “This is HSS vessel Viking. Authorization code delta four six nine.”

“ONE MOMENT. VERIFYING AUTHORIZATION CODE.”

Tamara glanced over her shoulder at Yuan, a self-satisfied smile curving her lips.

The main screen abruptly showed a square-jawed man with iron gray hair cropped close to his skull. He wore a pale blue tunic with a high choker collar.

“I am Commander Hugh Bolestos,” he said in a gravelly voice. “Your authorization code is out of date.”

“We’ve been on special duty in the Belt,” Tamara answered smoothly. “We haven’t updated our comm codes for several months.”

Commander Bolestos’s stern expression did not change by a millimeter. “I’ve had no word from headquarters to expect you.”

“As I told you, we’re on special duty. My name is Tamara Vishinsky. Check your personnel files.”

Bolestos’s eyes shifted away for a moment, widened noticeably, then returned to his main screen.

“Says here you report personally to Mr. Humphries himself.”

“Yes, I do,” said Tamara. “May I come aboard your vessel, please, commander?”

“Certainly, Ms. Vishinsky! Of course!”

Valker approached Hunter cautiously. The vessel certainly looked abandoned. No tracking beacon, no telemetry signals, no reply to his repeated calls.

Elverda Apacheta, he had discovered from a computer search, was a famous sculptress. But very old. She had bought Hunter on a whim, apparently, and disappeared into the depths of the Asteroid Belt several years earlier.

A dotty old lady, Valker concluded. Maybe she came out here to carve more statues out of asteroids.

“Vectors matched,” his navigation officer announced. “Close enough to board her.”

Valker nodded. “I’ll go aboard.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.” He pointed to two of the crewmen who had crowded into the bridge. “Nicco and Kirk, stand by to come aboard when I give the signal.”

The two crewmen went to the airlock with Valker, where they all pulled on nanofabric space suits that had been taken from the same luxury yacht that the captain’s oversized desk had come from.

“Wait here. If there’s trouble, I’ll holler.”

“Right,” they said in unison.

And if there isn’t trouble, Valker thought as he stepped into the airlock chamber, I want to look through that ship and see if there’s anything worth taking for myself.

Yuan was shocked at the ease with which Tamara disposed of the guards protecting the artifact’s asteroid.

She, Koop, and four crew members transferred to Commander Bolestos’s vessel. Less than an hour later her image appeared on Viking’s main screen, smiling smugly. “You can come aboard now. No need for weapons.”

Feeling puzzled, uneasy, Yuan went to the airlock and floated through the spongy plastic tunnel that connected Viking’s airlock with that of the security guards’ orbiting vessel.

On the bridge he found Koop sitting in the command chair with Tamara bending over him, spraying a bandage on his upper arm. A laser beam had burned through Koop’s sleeve and seared his flesh. Then Yuan saw Commander Bolestos and his guts heaved: the older man lay crumpled like a rag doll in a corner, his chest soaked with blood, his wide-eyed face looking very surprised.

“You killed him?” Yuan gasped.

“Change of command,” said Tamara. She pointed to the control panel that spanned one side of the bridge. “Now I’ve got all his authorization codes. I’m in charge of security for the artifact now. The grunts on the other ships are taking my orders, like good little corporate robots.”

Yuan understood her tone clearly. I’m under her command now, too.

“Bring the woman and the freak here,” Tamara said. “I want them to lead us down to the artifact.”

Yuan couldn’t take his eyes off the corpse. He’d never seen a dead body before. All his kills had been at a distance, clean, impersonal.

“You didn’t have a gun with you. How did you…?”

Tamara flicked her right wrist and a wire-thin blade slid into her hand. “With this,” she said. “Close up and personal.”

Then she added, “There are four other crew members down in the galley. And one of our people. The crew tried to make a fight of it.”

“They’re all dead?” Yuan asked, his voice squeaking, his insides quaking.

With a quick nod Tamara replied, “Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Yuan wanted to throw up.

“Now get the woman and her cyborg friend over here. We’re going down to the asteroid.”

THE ARTIFACT

“You’re making a mistake,” Dorn warned.

The four of them—Tamara, Yuan, Elverda and Dorn— were walking down the sloping tunnel inside the asteroid that led to the chamber where the artifact was housed. Tamara had placed Koop and a crewman at the tunnel’s opening, up on the surface, inside the glassteel dome that protected the hatch.

“Don’t be stupid,” Tamara shot back, walking beside Dorn. “You can’t change my mind.”

“The artifact won’t give you control over Humphries,” Dorn insisted. “You have no idea—”

“Shut up!” she snapped.

He walked in silence for several paces, then turned to Elverda and asked in a lower voice, “Do you want to see it again?”

“Yes,” she said, with only a little trepidation. “And you?”

“I see it every night in my dreams.”

Bringing up the rear of the little group, Yuan felt a mix of anticipation and dread. This asteroid was weird: it was one of the rocky type, but it seemed to be honeycombed with burrows that were apparently natural. Less than a kilometer in length, still the gravity here inside this tunnel was at least half an Earthly g: definitely not natural. And it was warm down in this tunnel, too; something, someplace was heating the area. Overheating, Yuan thought, feeling slightly uncomfortable.

What if this alien contraption actually does give us power over Humphries? Yuan wondered. The cyborg says it won’t but what if it does? We’ll be in control of the richest, most powerful man in the solar system! But then he thought, Humphries isn’t a man to be fooled with. If he finds out what we’re doing he’ll have us all killed. If we can’t control him, what we’re doing here is writing our own death warrants.

I’ve played plenty of computer games, he said to himself, but nothing like this. Tamara’s a real gambler. She’s willing to risk all of our lives for this. His throat felt dry, his insides fluttery.

Still, he followed Tamara along the downward sloping tunnel. The rock walls narrowed; the ceiling got so low that Yuan began to stoop slightly. The old woman had slowed down so that she now walked beside him, her eyes bright and eager in her aged, withered face. Up ahead, the cyborg matched Tamara stride for stride.

Tamara. She killed Bolestos, he reminded himself. She stood right next to the man and stabbed him in the heart. She’s a murderer, a cold-blooded killer. Yuan realized that she’d been in charge of this mission all along. I only thought I was the captain; she pulled my strings and reported my every move back to Humphries himself. Now she’s rebelling, gambling for the chance to seize all of Humphries’s power. And I’m being towed along; she hasn’t even asked me what I want to do. She’s in charge and there’s nothing I can do about it.

The tunnel ended abruptly at a blank stainless steel wall.

“Open it,” Tamara said to Dorn.

“It slides open by itself,” Dorn told them.

“When?”

“On its own schedule. When the artifact was first discovered I was in command of the security detail Humphries sent here. I knew the gate’s timing down to the second. But I’ve been away so long that its schedule may have changed.”

“We’ll have to wait, then,” said Elverda.

“It might take days,” Dorn said.

“We could blast the door down,” Tamara said.

“No,” said Dorn. “You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“The gate is protected by some sort of energy field,” he replied. “Besides, an explosion might damage the artifact, if it was powerful enough to blast the gate open.”

“All right,” Tamara decided. “We’ll wait.”

Elverda took the colorful shawl from her shoulders, folded it into a makeshift pad, and sat on the stone floor. Dorn stood beside her like a protective guard.

Tamara turned to Yuan, her face shining with anticipation.

“We could still turn back,” he said. “It’s not too late to forget this whole scheme.”

“Never!” she snapped. “This is the biggest opportunity of them all and I’m playing it out, all the way.”

Yuan nodded. He knew she’d say something like that. Still, he wished he were a trillion kilometers away from here.

“Whatever happened,” Elverda asked no one in particular, “to the scientists who were studying the artifact?”

“Humphries never allowed the universities to send scientists here,” Tamara replied. “The IAA was furious, but Humphries had a legal claim to utilization of the asteroid’s resources, and that gave him the right to restrict visitors. He moved the ’roid out of its original orbit just to make it more difficult for anyone to reach it.”

Dorn said, “I would have thought he would destroy it.”

“He wanted to,” Tamara said. “He still might, if we give him the chance.”

“That’s too much power for one man to have,” Elverda said.

Tamara smirked at her. Yuan could read the expression on her face: soon one woman will have all that power.

At the other end of the tunnel, inside the glassteel dome built on the asteroid’s surface, Koop’s communicator buzzed. He flicked it open and saw the face of a security guard in one of the ships orbiting the asteroid. The woman looked upset, apprehensive.

“We just received a message from headquarters. They want to know what your ship, Viking, is doing at this location.”

Koop frowned back at the guard. “How’s headquarters know Viking’s out here? Who told ’em?”

“There’s an automated identification system planted on the ’roid’s surface. It reports any vessel that comes within our perimeter back to headquarters.”

Koop grunted. Headquarters was on the Moon, he knew, which meant that messages took half an hour or more to go one way.

“I’ll relay the message to Commander Vishinsky,” he said. “She’s inside the rock right now, out of range of my handheld.”

“Headquarters sounded pretty antsy,” the comm officer said. “And they also want to know who put Vishinsky in command,”

“Whatcha tell them?”

“Same thing she told me: Commander Bolestos died and she took over for him.”

Koop thought it over for a second or two. “Good enough,” he said. “For now.”

“It’s opening!” Tamara breathed.

Noiselessly, the metal gate was sliding upward.

Elverda began to clamber to her feet. Dorn lent her a supporting hand.

Yuan felt perspiration beading his lip. Once Tamara takes a step past the gateway we’re all in this for keeps, one way or another.

“You first,” he said to Tamara.

She hesitated. “No.” Turning to Elverda, “You go first.”

“Me?”

“You’ve seen it before. I want you to see if it’s the same as it was then.”

Yuan thought, Or if it causes the old woman harm.

Elverda nodded, looking slightly anxious. “Very well,” she said.

She handed her folded shawl to Dorn, then stepped firmly past the thin groove in the dusty floor that marked where the gate had rested.

Yuan saw a diffuse light coming from beyond the gateway. Elverda walked toward it, her frail figure erect, unbent. Then she turned a corner and disappeared from his view.

Dorn stood like a stolid figure carved from ironwood. Tamara was on tiptoes, her arms extended as if she were about to take flight. Yuan heard his pulse thumping in his ears.

No one spoke a word. The tunnel was absolutely silent.

Elverda stepped toward the light, her own pulse racing. The only other time she had seen the artifact it showed her a vision of her own life, of the mother who bore her and loved her, of the baby she had never had. It transformed her from a bitter old woman ready for death into a companion for the man-machine Dorn, willing to ply the cold emptiness of the Asteroid Belt to help him find his atonement.

Now she ducked into the grotto where the light glowed coolly. She stopped and stared into the radiance. Its brightness softened, and she saw vague shapes forming and dissolving over and over again, like waves lapping up on a beach, like clouds wafting through the summer sky. She wanted to see her mother again, wanted to hold her and tell her what she’d never been able to say in real life, that she’d always loved her.

But when the shapes coalesced it was not her mother who faced her: it was Dorn, half human, half machine, reaching toward her with both his arms. Like a helpless baby. Like a boy reaching toward his mother. Like a man who felt lost and despairing, desperate for a helping hand. And she knew that she had to sculpt this semi-human, make his heroic statue for all the world to see, make it out of metal and stone, etch every fine tracery on his metal side, make the stone glow like the living flesh of his other half. That was her task, her duty, her goal, to immortalize this man and make his final atonement a memorial to human conscience.

The figure faded, the light dimmed down to a soft pastel radiance. Elverda knew she was finished here. The artifact had opened her mind again and made her understand the path she must take.

With a heavy sigh that was part thanksgiving, part regret, she turned and walked back to the three who were waiting for her.

“Well?” Tamara asked, even before Elverda stepped over the line that the gate had made. “Is it the same?”

Elverda smiled at the woman. “Yes, the same. And different.”

“What does that mean?”

Gesturing toward the grotto, Elverda said, “See for yourself.”

Tamara licked her lips. Dorn remained unmoving. Yuan wondered what he would see—if he worked up the nerve to face the artifact. Better to let Tamara go in, see how it effects her first.

“All right,” Tamara said. “I will.”

She took a deep breath, like a fighter facing an unknown opponent, and strode past the open gateway.

And the gate began to slide shut behind her.

“Wait!” Yuan yelled, lurching toward the metal gate. He tried to hold it, but the impassive steel slipped past the palms of his hands and settled firmly on the stone floor.

“It’s never done that before,” Dorn said, his deep voice sounding puzzled.

“How long will it stay closed?” Yuan asked.

“I don’t know,” replied Dorn.

“She’s trapped inside there,” Elverda said, “with the artifact.”

Tamara heard the soft whisper of the gate sliding shut, heard Yuan’s startled, “Wait!”

Whirling about, she saw the gate coming down slowly, inexorably. It settled on the stone flooring, cutting her off from the others. For the flash of an instant she balled her fists to pound on the impassive metal, but she realized it would be futile.

Looking around, she saw that she was in a womblike grotto, a natural hollow in the rocky body of the asteroid. Or was it deliberately carved out by whoever created the artifact? she asked herself.

The artifact. Tamara saw a soft glow coming from around a bend in the grotto. It must be in there. She glanced back at the gate again, felt a pang of alarm that it had closed her in. But there’s air to breathe, she realized. It’s warm and snug in here. It’ll open again. The cyborg says it operates on its own schedule. I just happened to be on the inside when it automatically shut. It’ll open again. It hasn’t deliberately trapped me in here.

Summoning up her courage, she stepped softly, hesitantly, toward the light. It seemed to glare brighter as she approached it, pulsing like a living heart, blazing so intensely that she closed her eyes to mere slits and yet they still watered painfully. Tamara threw an arm over her brow. It was like staring into the Sun.

But there were shapes in the brilliance. Shifting, undulating shadows that seemed to beckon her closer, closer.

She saw a ten-year-old girl in leotards practicing at a barre before a ceiling-high mirror. Herself, at school in Novosibirsk. The day… that day. Tamara felt the strength ebb out of her legs. She wanted to sink to the floor. She wanted to cry. But she could do neither; she was frozen where she stood. Yes, there was the sour-faced school nurse coming to tell her. Your mother, Tamara Vishinsky. Your mother is dead. Car accident on the icy road.

Ten-year-old Tamara did not cry. She walked stiffly to her locker to change into her school uniform. But Tamara saw the expression on her own young face: the world had come to an end for her. She never danced again.

Her father. Drunk, almost always. Petting her when he wasn’t beating her. Tamara learned that it was better to be petted. She learned how to soothe her father’s drunken rages, how to warm his bed and take her mother’s role in his life. Daddy. She saw him in his coffin with the snow sifting down like frozen tears.

And he stirred to life and became Martin Humphries. Humphries, who bedded her the first day he saw her. Humphries, who commanded her. Humphries, whose half-insane anger reached across the solar system to bring death to those he feared.

And she understood how to soothe him, how to control him, how to turn his own wrath into a weapon to use against him.

Of course! It’s so simple! Tamara laughed despite the pain. She had known it all along: how to control a man, how to keep him from hurting you. But now she understood far more. How to use her innate power not merely to protect herself, but to control a man, to make him do what she wanted, to be in command of him. So simple. So primitive. So powerful.

Two deaths, perhaps three, and Martin Humphries would welcome her back to his bed. From there she could control the most powerful man in the solar system. From there she would wield the power. Humphries would do her bidding. Gladly.

But the pain. The searing, merciless pain that cut through her like a red-hot knife. The pain persisted. It would never go away.

ASTEROID 67-046

Koop stood uneasily at the lip of the hatch that led down to the artifact. He and the armed crewman with him were both in nanofabric space suits, despite being inside the pressurized and heated glassteel dome that Humphries Space Systems engineers had built on the surface of the asteroid.

Outside the dome’s airlock sat the squat, spindly shuttle-craft they had used to fly from Viking to the asteroid’s surface. A segmented access passageway connected the shuttle’s airlock to that of the dome. To Koop it looked like a giant earthworm.

“How long’ve they been down there?” the crewman asked, echoing Koop’s own nervousness.

Without bothering to look at his wrist, Koop answered, “Damn near three hours now.”

“Maybe I oughtta go down and see if they’re okay.”

“Naw,” said Koop. “If the captain wants us he’ll holler for us.”

The crewman nodded half-heartedly. Then he asked, “Is he still in charge?”

“Who? The captain?”

“Yeah. I mean, Vishinsky seems to be giving the orders now.”

“He’s still the captain.”

“You think so?”

“I’ll tell you when I don’t.”

“What’s she like in bed?”

Koop drew in a breath. He’d known it would come to this, sooner or later.

“None of your damn business,” he growled.

The crewman grinned at him.

Yuan’s voice came through the speaker set into Koop’s bubble helmet. “We’re coming up.”

“Okay,” said Koop, adding silently, Good.

Koop peered at them carefully as they climbed up through the hatch set into the dome’s floor. The four of them seemed unchanged by their experience with the artifact.

The cyborg was still as stolid and menacing as ever. The old woman was the same. Tamara was smiling, but there wasn’t any joy in it. Her smile was like a cobra’s. The captain—well, maybe he did look a little different. More serious. Quieter. Like he had a lot on his mind, a lot to think about.

“Isokuru,” said Yuan to the crewman, “go power up the shuttle.”

“Hai!” The crewman made a perfunctory bow and started through the airlock.

Koop edged over to the captain’s side. “Did you see it?” he asked in a near-whisper.

Yuan pressed his lips into a thin line and nodded. “I saw it.”

“What was it like?”

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t think I can describe it, Koop. I don’t have the words for it.”

Koop glanced at Tamara, then asked, “Do you think I—”

“It’s shut down now,” Yuan said. “We don’t know how long it’ll stay shut. It kept Tamara in there for more than an hour.”

Before Koop could say anything more, Tamara tapped Yuan on the shoulder.

When he turned toward her she gestured to Elverda and Dorn. “We’re not bringing these two back with us.”

Yuan felt his brows hike. “We’re not?”

“No. Kill them now. Let this be their final resting place.”

Perspiration trickled down Yuan’s ribs. “Why don’t we just leave them here? They wouldn’t last long.”

“Kill them. I want to bring absolute proof back to Martin that they’re both dead.”

“Oh, so he’s not Mr. Humphries anymore.”

Tamara gave him a pitying, almost disgusted look. “Kill them both. Now.”

Yuan’s hand slid to the sidearm at his hip. His hand was trembling, he realized. Elverda lifted her chin and stood before him at her full height like an Incan queen facing her doom regally. Dom stood beside her, impassive as a machine.

“I told you to kill them,” Tamara insisted.

This isn’t a computer game, Yuan was saying to himself. These are real people, real living human beings. Even if the cyborg is half machine, he’s still a man. In his mind’s eye he saw the blood splashed across the old commander’s chest, the startled look in his sightless eyes. It must have hurt when the blade went in, Yuan thought. It must have hurt like hell.

“Kao Yuan, you’re not fit to be captain of your ship,” Tamara snarled. “I’m taking over. You’re nothing but a gutless coward.”

Coward? Yuan’s inner voice echoed. Coward? Yuan saw again what the artifact had showed him. He saw himself at the end of his life, respected by everyone, surrounded by his devoted children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He saw warmth and safety and admiration. He saw love.

“Koop!” Tamara’s voice cut through the vision like a diamond-bladed saw. “Kill them both and leave this pathetic coward with their bodies.”

“Me?” Koop squeaked.

Yuan’s mind was racing. I’m not a coward, he said to himself. I’m on the wrong path and if I murder these two I’ll never be able to get off that track, never be able to reach the path that the artifact showed me.

“Stand down, Koop,” he said to the Hawaiian. “That’s an order.”

Koop looked relieved, Tamara furious.

“When Humphries hears about this—”

“Hears about what?” Yuan replied softly. “That I refused to murder two unarmed prisoners?”

“That you’ve disobeyed his orders,” she snapped. “He’ll kill you. He’ll have you roasted on a spit.”

Yuan laughed at her. “No, he won’t. I understand what my path has to be, Tamara. I’ve seen the end of my life. Humphries isn’t going to kill me. I’m going to live a long, long time—and raise a big family.”

“You’re crazy! The artifact’s unhinged your mind.”

“No. The artifact’s shown me how to live.”

Tamara uttered a guttural growl and flicked her right hand. The stiletto-slim blade snapped into her hand.

“No!” Yuan shouted, reaching toward her. She slashed his arm. Blood spurted. Koop remained rooted where he stood, eyes popping, mouth open but no sound coming from it. Yuan clapped his other hand over the slicing wound that pumped blood through his grasping fingers.

Tamara whirled and sank the bloody blade into Dorn’s human side. She felt it scrape along a rib, then sink deep into his chest. The cyborg grunted and tottered backward a step.

Yanking the blade free, Tamara turned to face Elverda. The old woman put out her arms defensively, but she was frail, her arms bone thin, no barrier at all to the knife.

Then Dorn’s mechanical arm flashed out. His metal hand closed on Tamara’s fingers. Bones snapped and she screamed in sudden agony. The blade dropped clattering to the floor as Tamara sank to her knees, her face white with pain and shock.

Dorn released her, then collapsed himself, his tunic darkening with blood. Yuan and Koop both rushed to him, leaving Tamara gasping and staring wild-eyed at her mangled right hand.

Elverda knelt beside her just before she fainted from the pain.

SALVAGE SHIP VOGELTOD: TWO MONTHS LATER

“Let me get this straight,” Valker said to Kao Yuan. “You want me to hand Hunter over to you?”

“To its rightful owner,” said Kao Yuan, nodding toward Elverda Apacheta, sitting on the front few centimeters of the big recliner in the middle of Valker’s compartment.

It had taken two months for Yuan to track down Hunter, which he had released after taking Dorn and Elverda aboard his own Viking. After seeing the artifact, Yuan realized that he had to return the sculptress and her cyborg companion to their own ship and let them find their own destinies among the asteroids.

Yuan still bore a scar from Tamara’s knifing; he refused to allow nanotherapy to remove the scar. Something to show my grandchildren, he thought. A reminder of the wrong path I was on.

Dorn recovered, albeit slowly, from his chest wound, thanks to stem cell therapy. Tamara’s crushed fingers had healed completely. Yuan made it clear to the crew that she was a prisoner; she had free rein of the ship, except for the bridge. She was not permitted to communicate with headquarters.

“When Humphries finds out what you’ve done,” she warned, time and again.

Yuan would simply shake his head, grinning. It doesn’t matter what Humphries threatens, he told himself. I’ve seen where my life leads. I’ll get through this, one way or another.

At last Yuan found Elverda’s ship under tow by Vogeltod, heading for Ceres. Vogeltod’s skipper, Valker, had graciously welcomed them aboard his vessel and brought them to his own quarters to discuss the situation.

Valker sat behind his oversized desk, smiling handsomely at his two visitors. Elverda smiled back, a little uncertainly, from her perch on the recliner. Yuan, wearing a crisply clean uniform with captain’s stripes on its cuffs, was sitting on the edge of Valker’s bunk, the only other available seat in the jam-packed compartment.

“You’re Elverda Apacheta,” Valker said, more of a statement than a question.

“Yes. I am the owner of the Hunter.”

“You’re a very famous woman,” Valker said, his smile going even brighter. “I looked you up. I’ve never met a sculptress before. I’m honored to have you aboard my ship.”

She smiled back at him. “You are very gracious.”

“No, not at all.” Valker’s smile turned almost shy. Then he suggested, “Why don’t we have some refreshments while we’re talking? It’s almost dinner time.”

“I’d like to get this settled as quickly as we can,” Yuan said.

“We have an injured man aboard Captain Yuan’s ship,” Elverda said. “I don’t want to leave him for very long.”

“I see,” said Valker. “Okay. Let’s talk business. When we found Hunter she was drifting and abandoned. That makes her a derelict, according to IAA regulations. We took claim of her and we’re bringing her back to Ceres.”

Elverda objected, “But she’s not salvage—”

“No, she’s not,” Valker agreed, stopping her with an upraised hand. “But she was a derelict and we have a legal right to sell her for the best price we can get.”

“I am her owner,” Elverda said.

“You were her owner, dear lady. Now she’s my property. Mine, and my crew’s.”

Yuan said, “I’m not sure the courts at Ceres would agree with you.”

With a laugh, Valker replied, “That’s what makes horse races. And why we have lawyers.”

“But I don’t want to travel all the way back to Ceres,” Elverda objected.

Valker said, “Then make me an offer.”

“An offer?”

“Right here and now. How much are you willing to pay for the ship?”

Elverda glanced at Yuan, then said, “But I have no money.”

“She’s worth at least half a bill,” said Valker.

“I have no money,” Elverda repeated.

Valker sighed. “Then I guess we’ll have to go to Ceres.”

Yuan gripped the edge of the bunk’s mattress, thinking hard. I could accept his decision and go back to Viking with Elverda. Or I could return to my ship and then blast this scavenger into a cloud of hot plasma and retake Hunter for her. I could. It would be easy. But what would the consequences be? You already have to deal with Tamara and probably Humphries. You’re already in deep trouble. How can you reach your proper path in life if you continue to live by violence?

The artifact had changed Yuan, profoundly altered his outlook on life by showing him a goal, a path, a tao that he yearned deeply to achieve. He thought about consequences now. He looked farther ahead in time than he had ever done before, and realized that until he had seen the artifact he had been merely zigzagging through life, bouncing from one event to the next, jittering like a dust mote being pushed and jostled by the forces around it, with neither control nor care about what happened next. Now he looked ahead, as far into the future as he could. He knew his life would end happily. But how to get to that destiny? That was his problem.

Valker saw the look on Yuan’s face. He had seen it before and knew what it meant: trouble, big time. The man was determined to help this old lady, and he had a fully armed attack ship at his command.

“Isn’t there some way…” Elverda began, but her plaintive question died in her throat before she could finish it.

“What were you using the ship for?” Valker asked. He had seen from the IAA registry that there was no crew listed, only one other person aboard the vessel, somebody named Dorn. A priest, according to the records. But there was no dossier on the man. His history was a complete blank.

“It’s a personal mission,” said Elverda, suddenly looking uncomfortable.

“Personal?” Valker’s smile turned doubtful. “You mean you don’t want to talk about it?”

Elverda seemed to struggle within herself for a few heartbeats. Then she said, “I am assisting Dorn.”

“The priest.”

“Yes. His objective is to find the bodies of those who were killed in the wars and left to drift through the Belt.”

Valker blinked at her. “Salvage dead bodies?”

“To give them proper funeral rites,” said Elverda. “I know it seems outlandish, but—”

Leaning back in his big desk chair, Valker said, “Not at all outlandish. I understand salvage. Families must be willing to pay handsomely to have the bodies of their dead returned to them.”

“It’s not for money,” Elverda said. “We never even thought of that. We simply give them final rites, as they deserve.”

With a low whistle, Valker steepled his fingers in front of his face, thinking hard. They’re two nutcases, this old woman and her priest. Wandering around the Belt picking up bodies. To give them funeral rites? That’s weird. She could be lying, of course. There could be something else in this.

“I see,” he said at last. Leaning forward, he placed both his big hands on the desktop. “Okay. You’re involved in something that’s… it’s religious, isn’t it?”

Elverda nodded slowly.

“Okay. I won’t stand in your way. You can have your ship.”

Elverda gasped. “I can?”

Yuan asked, “For how much?”

“Nothing. For free. A gift from Captain Valker and his crew.”

“Do you mean it?” Elverda seemed on the verge of tears.

“Of course I mean it,” Valker said, getting to his feet and coming around the massive desk. “Hunter is all yours. And maybe you can get your priest to say a prayer for me and my crew. Might do us some good.”

“Certainly! Of course!” Elverda rose, clasping her hands together in gratitude. “Bless you, Captain Valker.”

Yuan stood up too, his face showing more suspicion than appreciation.

Valker walked them from his compartment to the airlock, where Viking and Vogeltod were mated together. Elverda kept thanking him and he acted as if almost embarrassed by her gratitude. As he saw them through the airlock, Valker thought that it would be simple to hand over Hunter to them and then have all three ships go their separate ways. Once he was sure that Yuan’s Viking was safely out of the picture he could always track down Hunter and retake it. Without falling under the guns of Viking. The old woman and the priest were the only crew aboard Hunter. Kill them, Valker said to himself, and then their ship is yours again, free and clear.

He laughed as Elverda kissed him on both cheeks before leaving Vogeltod.

Tamara was lying on the bunk in her compartment, watching the wall screen. It showed Hunter disengaging from the little salvage vessel. Small puffs of cold gas jets pushed Hunter away from the smaller ship for a quarter of an hour. She listened to the radio chatter between the cyborg, who was apparently piloting Hunter, and Yuan, on Viking’s bridge.

“We’re ready to light the main engine,” came Dorn’s deep, methodical voice.

A moment’s pause, then Yuan said, “You’re clear for ignition.”

Tamara saw a flash of blue-hot ionized gas and Hunter seemed to leap out of her vision, hurtling deeper into the Belt.

She counted the seconds. It took Yuan only thirty-four of them to get to her compartment’s accordion door and rap on its frame.

“Come in,” she called.

He slid the door open and ducked one single step into her quarters. “I thought you’d want to know that we’re heading in now.”

“To Ceres,” she replied.

He grinned at her. “No. To Selene. Headquarters. Humphries wants to see us. Both of us.”