The Aftermath

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: BRIDGE

“There’s something strange here,” Elverda called as she sat in Hunters command chair, eyes riveted on the main screen.

Dorn replied over the intercom, “Strange? In what way?”

“I’m getting a radar image of Syracuse” she replied. “It’s rather fuzzy at this range, but it doesn’t look right.”

“I’ll come to the bridge.”

He was in the workshop again, she knew. Elverda worried about him; his mechanical systems needed maintenance, a thorough overhaul, much more detailed than the two of them could provide aboard the ship.

Dorn stepped through the hatch and stood behind her.

“It looks like a double image,” Elverda said. “Could there be something wrong with the radar’s resolution?”

He glanced at the console settings, then said, “Perhaps there’s another ship mated to Syracuse.”

“Another ship? But they didn’t say—”

The radio speaker came to life. “This is Syracuse, testing its communications system. Testing, testing, one, two, three.”

“Nothing about another ship,” Elverda said.

“Why would they be testing their comm system?” Dorn mused. Pointing to the radar image on the screen, “Look. They’re emitting a tracking beacon and telemetry now.”

“Maybe their comm system was down?”

“That is a second ship mated to them, but it’s not emitting any signals.”

“Curious.”

Dorn turned Elverda’s chair so he could see her face. “It might be dangerous,” he said.

“Dangerous? How?”

“Remember that scavenger ship, Vogeltod, and its captain?”

“Valker,” Elverda murmured.

“Suppose someone like them is using Syracuse as bait for a trap, to lure us to them. Then they could seize this ship and…”

“And kill us,” Elverda finished for him.

Dorn nodded solemnly, but then his eye caught a small blip on the radar screen hurtling away from the image of the doubled ship.

“That’s a body!” Dorn said, with absolute certainty.

Valker was at Syracuse’s backup command pod, frowning unhappily as he talked to Pauline through the locked hatch.

“It wasn’t my doing,” he said earnestly. “They did it on their own.”

“You murdered my son,” Pauline said. Her voice was muffled by the hatch, but he could hear the anger and hatred in her voice.

“They murdered your son. Not me.”

“They’re part of your crew.”

Valker bit back a nasty reply, took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “All right. They boy’s gone and there’s nothing that either one of us can do about that.”

“Go away. Leave us alone.”

“I can’t do that, Pauline. And you’ve got your daughter to think about now.”

No response from beyond the blank hatch.

“They know she’s aboard the ship. They’ll turn your ship upside down searching for her. And when they find her…” He let the thought dangle.

After a few heartbeats, Pauline said, “You can’t let them hurt her.”

“I might not be able to stop them,” Volker said.

“We’ve got to protect Angela.”

“I can try,” he said, “if you’ll cooperate with me.”

“Cooperate.” Pauline pronounced the word as if it were a death sentence.

A smile easing across his attractive features, Volker coaxed, “Look, my crew of lowlifes are all back in Vogeltod, getting ready for Hunter’s arrival. You and me and Angela are the only ones here aboard Syracuse. If we’re quick enough we can get Angela out of wherever she’s hiding and bring her to you, here at the command pod.”

“Then what?” Pauline asked.

“Then while my crew’s taking over Hunter, you can disengage from my ship and take off for Ceres. You and Angela. You’ll be safe there.”

Another silence, longer. Valker counted off the seconds. She’s no fool, he told himself, but she might be desperate enough to go for it. After all, what other choice does she have?

“You’ll let us go to Ceres?”

“Sure! It’s not that far, you’ll be able to make it there in a few weeks. My guys’ll be busy taking over Hunter. It’s a fine ship, intact. It’ll bring a good price when we take her in to Ceres. They’ll forget about you and your daughter. Once we get to Ceres with Hunter to auction off, they’ll have their pick of the women there.”

Valker nodded, pleased with his logic. It almost made sense to him. As long as she doesn’t remember that she’s got no propulsion fuel.

“But we don’t have any time to waste,” he added sternly. “We’ve got to get your daughter out of hiding and set up your command console so you’ll be able to disengage from my ship at the touch of a keypad.”

Pauline was shaking like a palsied woman as she sat in the command chair, listening to Valker’s honeyed words, frantically trying to decide what she should do. She heard Valker’s voice, muffled by the locked hatch, heard the earnestness in his tone, the urgency in his last few words.

Why would he let us go? she asked herself. His men killed Theo. He knows I’ll report that once we get to Ceres. Why is he so willing to help Angie and me?

The memory of his naked body pressing against hers sprang into her mind. Don’t be an idiot! she warned herself. He’s not in love with you. He’s not even infatuated with you. He’s nothing but a smooth-talking murderer who’ll end up killing you and Angie both. After he and his crew have had their fun with us.

She tried to think of some other option, some alternative that she could turn to. There was nothing. Except…

With an effort of iron will she suppressed her trembling. She rose to her feet and went to the hatch. She touched the keypad on the bulkhead and the hatch slid open.

Valker stood there, an expectant smile on his face. Handsome face, she thought. Dangerous face.

“I’ll reconfigure the control console,” she said, without preamble. “You return to Vogeltod and deal with this approaching ship. I’ll bring Angela to me once you’re off this vessel.”

His brows rose slightly. “You don’t trust me?”

“Not entirely.”

Valker shrugged good-naturedly. “Can’t say I blame you.”

He stepped into the pod and went straight to the command chair.

“What are you doing?” Pauline demanded.

“Punching in the command code to disconnect the access tunnel. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“There’s a price, you know,” he said, without looking up at her.

“I expected there would be.”

Valker straightened up and turned toward Pauline. “When we all get back to Ceres I’m going to quit this crazy scavenging business. It’s coming to an end anyway; the rock rats are seeing to that.”

“And what will you do?” Pauline asked mechanically.

“With my share of what we make from selling off Hunter I can set myself up in business. Nothing grand. Maybe selling jewelry or other luxury items imported from Earth.”

“And a little smuggling on the side?”

Valker laughed. “No, I’d be strictly legitimate. But I’d want you with me, at my side. We’d make a good team, together.”

This is his price for Angie’s safety, she realized. Aloud, she replied, “I’ll… I’ll have to think about it.”

“I want your promise, Pauline. Now.”

“I still have a husband,” she insisted.

“He’s dead and we both know it.” He looked at her intently, his face totally serious. “I want you, Pauline. For keeps.”

“I can’t—”

“I’ll protect your daughter. I’ll protect you both. But I want your promise, right here and now.”

Pauline closed her eyes and heard herself murmur, “Very well, I promise. As long as you protect my daughter.”

Victor paced restlessly about Pleiades’s bridge, debating inwardly about whether he should send out a call to Pauline or not.

She’s out there, he told himself. I’ve got a good fix on her tracking beacon and I’m homing in on it. I’ll be with her in two days, max.

I should call her, tell her I’m coming.

Yet something made him hesitate. He remembered his brief encounter with that scavenger ship, Vogeltod. What if he’s out there with Pauline and the kids? Theo couldn’t repair the antennas without help, we didn’t have the stores on board to do the job. If he had, he would’ve done it years ago, right after we were first attacked, right after I left them.

No, Victor said to himself. Theo had to have help from somebody, and whoever that somebody is he’s not emitting a tracking beacon. He’s running silent. Why?

His train of logic frightened him. Because he’s holding Pauline and the kids prisoners, using them to lure other ships to him so he can capture them and sell them as salvage.

But what’s he doing with Pauline and the children? Victor’s blood ran cold as he imagined the possible scenarios. He replayed Pauline’s short test broadcast. She sounded all right, he told himself: calm, under control.

But what if… what if…

When he finally stretched out on his bunk and closed his eyes to sleep, the “what ifs” filled his mind.

ALONE

Theo knew he had less than an hour left to live. Pinwheeling through space, he tried to ignore the stars swirling dizzyingly around him and concentrate on the condition of his suit. The diagnostics displays splashed on the inner surface of his helmet confirmed his worst fears. Kirk had punctured his main oxy tank; the oxygen jetting from the puncture had acted as a miniature rocket, thrusting him away from Syracuse, away from Mom and Angie, away from any possibility of help.

His radio was gone; there was no way he could call for help. Big spitting deal, he thought: the nearest help is out at Jupiter.

The suit’s auxiliary oxygen tank held a half-hour supply. In half an hour I’ll die, Theo knew. No, he corrected himself, less time than that. A lot less.

He tried to look back toward Syracuse but the ship was already too far away from him to see. Besides, his spinning motion made it almost impossible to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. It made his stomach queasy to watch the universe whirling around him.

They’ve got Mom and Angie, he realized. Valker and his bastard crew have Mom and Angie and there’s no way I can do a thing about it.

Squeezing his eyes shut, he muttered to himself, “You might as well die. You’re not good for anything else.”

Dorn sat in Hunter’s command chair as tensely as a bird dog that’s spotted a partridge.

“That’s a body,” he repeated.

Elverda strained her eyes, but saw only a featureless blip on the radar screen. “How can you be certain…?”

But Dorn was already tapping on the navigation keyboard, maneuvering Hunter toward the radar contact. Elverda felt the soft nudge of the maneuvering jets. Minutes passed and the radar blip grew larger, sharper, better defined. Sure enough, Elverda could make out arms and legs.

“Matching velocity vectors,” Dorn muttered, bent over the keyboard as he called up the propulsion program. “Setting up a rendezvous trajectory.”

Hunter glided after the figure. Elverda could see that it was tumbling, spinning slowly as it coasted through space. She thought she saw the arms moving but knew it must be her imagination.

“Was there a battle here?” she asked Dorn.

“None that I know of.”

“Then what’s a body doing out here?”

He shook his head slowly. “Maybe we’ll find some evidence on the corpse to tell us what happened to it.”

“Can we get close enough?” she asked.

Dorn got up from the command chair. “I’ll get into a suit and go outside for him. You take the con.”

She nodded as she slid into the chair, warm from his body. “Couldn’t we use the grapples? Then you wouldn’t have to go outside.”

“That would be tricky,” Dorn replied. “I can try, but I’d still better be suited up, so I can go out if I have to.”

Elverda understood that standard safety procedures called for her to suit up, too, so she could serve as a backup, if necessary. But she knew she’d be no good at it: too old, too slow, too tired to be of any use. Dorn didn’t mention the subject and neither did she.

Pauline went with Valker down the tube tunnel to the ship’s zero-g hub, where the scavengers had set up the flexible connector to link Syracuse with Vogeltod.

“I mean it about Ceres,” Valker said, his face utterly serious. “I want to start a new life with you.”

She nodded. “As long as you protect my daughter.”

“Of course,” he said. Then he grasped her by the shoulders and kissed her, hard.

Taken by surprise, Pauline closed her eyes as he pressed against her lips. Then he let her go, grinned, and headed lightly along the spongy tube. At the hatch on the Vogeltod end he turned and waved, beaming a bright smile. Pauline made herself smile back at him.

As soon as the hatch at the far end of the tube closed behind Valker, Pauline slammed shut the hatch on Syracuse and punched the intercom console on the bulkhead alongside it.

“Angela!” she said sharply. “Angela!”

“Mom?”

Pauline felt a grateful sigh gust out of her. For once the intercom was working.

“Get out of there and meet me at the hub. Right away. It’s urgent.”

“But Theo said—”

“Never mind what Theo said! Get here at once, do you hear me?”

“Yes. I’m coming.”

“Quickly!”

Elverda wished she were a better pilot. Dorn had set up a rendezvous plot on the navigation program, but a really sharp pilot would be able to edge Hunter much closer to the body that was spinning out there.

They were close enough to use the cameras now, in addition to the radar. The image on her main screen was clear and sharp: a human body encased in one of the old-fashioned hard-shell space suits.

Best not to touch anything, she told herself as she scanned the control board. We won’t get close enough to use the grapples; he’ll have to go out and retrieve the corpse. He’s done it before, hundreds of times. He knows what he’s doing.

Still, she wished she could help, wished he didn’t have to leave the ship.

Then she sat up straight in the command chair. “It moved!” Elverda said aloud. It moved both its arms!

“Dorn!” she called into the intercom. “I think it’s alive.”

For a moment he didn’t answer. Then, “Alive? How can that be?”

“It moved its arms.”

“I don’t believe—”

“There! The arms moved again!” She pointed to the image on the main screen.

“That’s impossible,” said Dorn.

“It’s not a dead body,” Elverda insisted. “At least, it’s not dead yet.”

At first Theo thought he was hallucinating. Oxygen deprivation, he told himself. The brain’s starting to break down. He seemed to see a ship spiraling out there, a big wheel-shaped vessel. And it was drawing closer to him. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, took a deep breath of what precious little was left of his oxygen. When he opened his eyes again the ship was still there, swinging around against the background of stars as he pinwheeled. Could it be real?

“Hey!” he yelled. “I’m here! Come and get me!” Then he realized how foolish it was. Kirk had ripped the radio out of his backpack. Theo began to wave at the oncoming ship, swinging both his arms frantically.

Pauline hovered in the zero-g hub of Syracuse, alongside the closed hatch of the connector tube. Valker could come back through that hatch at any second, she knew. Where is Angie? Why is she taking so long to—

“Mom! Here I come!”

Angie’s voice! Pauline pushed herself to the opening of the tube tunnel that led from the storm cellar and saw Angie diving toward her headfirst, arms flat by her sides, hurtling like a sleek dark-haired torpedo.

“Look out, Mom!” Angie yelled, reaching out to the ladder rungs set into the tube’s sides.

Pauline watched aghast as Angela neatly slowed her rush, tucked into a compact ball, and landed lightly on her softbooted feet at her side.

“You told me to be quick,” she said before Pauline could open her mouth to speak.

“You… you could have broken every bone in your body,” Pauline said, once she found her voice.

Angie laughed lightly. “Tunnel diving. Theo showed me how to do it. It’s easy when you’re going upwards, weightless. Gets trickier when you’re going downhill, down to the rim.”

Pauline nudged her daughter toward the tube that led to the backup command pod. “Come along, we don’t have any time to lose.”

Grabbing one of the tunnel’s projecting rungs, Angie pulled herself lightly along. “Where’s that Captain Valker? And the other men? Where’s Theo?”

Following behind her daughter, Pauline said, “Theo’s dead. Valker’s men killed him.”

“Dead?” Angie’s wail echoed off the tube walls. “Theo’s dead?”

Pauline swatted her daughter’s behind lightly. “Keep moving. We’ll be dead too if we don’t get to the pod before those murderers get back here.”

“But what happened?” Angie asked as she resumed clambering along the rungs. “What’s going on?”

“We’re going to do just what your father did,” Pauline said grimly. “We’re going into the pod and blast ourselves out of here before Valker and his crew can get their hands on us.”

CAPTURE

“She’s veered off,” said Nicco, scowling at the main screen on Vogeltod’s bridge.

“I can see that,” Valker snapped from the command chair.

“Something’s spooked her,” said the scavenger sitting at the navigation console.

“Maybe,” Valker conceded. “Or maybe they’re just being careful.”

“Should we hail them?” Nicco asked.

Valker thought it over for a moment. “No. I don’t want them to know we’re here. Let them think Syracuse is alone and needs their help.”

“But they’ll see us when they get closer.”

“If they get closer,” Kirk growled. “They’re moving away from us now.”

“But they’re slowing down,” Valker pointed out. “Strange behavior.”

“What the hell are they up to?”

“Wait and see,” said Valker. “Wait and—”

The communications screen lit up to show an image of Elverda Apacheta’s arid, withered face. Nicco immediately put it on the main screen.

“Attention Syracuse,” the old woman said. “This is Hunter. We have been diverted temporarily. We estimate rendezvous with you in approximately five hours.”

“Diverted?”

“By what?”

Valker fought down an impulse to reply and ask the woman why they changed course. Instead, he made a soothing motion with both hands and said, “Calm down, boys, calm down. She’ll be here in five hours.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Kirk, go to the boys at the airlock and tell them they can stand easy for another four hours and more. We won’t be boarding Hunter until then.”

He got out of the big padded chair, stretched his arms up to brush the overhead, then started for the hatch.

“And where’re you going?” Kirk demanded.

Valker grinned. “Back to Syracuse, to keep the ladies happy.”

“How about taking us with you?” Nicco said.

“Not yet. You maniacs would scare that woman out of her skull. I need her to produce the daughter first. Then we’ll have them both.”

“We can find the daughter without the mother’s help.”

“You stay right here and keep an eye on Hunter. That’s our prize. The two women are just icing on our cake.”

“Yeah,” Kirk sneered. “Looks like you’re going over there to lick the icing.”

“You’ll get yours soon enough,” Valker said, grinning. Then he ducked through the hatch while the other crewmen snickered behind his back.

Theo was coughing so hard his eyes watered. Not much oxy left to breathe, he knew. But the ship was edging closer, close enough for him to make out the glassteel windowed bulge of what must be her bridge, and ports and other pods along her curving flanks. Airlock hatches, too. Through his tear-filled eyes Theo saw several of them as the ship rotated ponderously, drawing ever closer.

“Come on,” he muttered, but the effort started a new fit of coughing. I’m breathing my own fumes, he realized. It’s only a matter of minutes until I choke to death.

His vision was blurring badly, but he thought he saw one of the airlock hatches slide open. He could see the figure of a man standing at the lip of the hatch, outlined against the dim red lights of the hatch’s interior.

He knew he couldn’t call to them; his suit’s radio was gone. But he waved both his arms frantically. He felt hot, beads of sweat trickling down his face, along his ribs. Coughing again. Can’t catch my breath!

It all went gray, foggy. Don’t pass out! Theo commanded himself. Stay awake!

But you need oxygen to stay awake, he said to himself. ’Sfunny, he’s so close, he can almost reach out his arm and grab me, but I’m gonna be dead by the time he gets his hands on me.

Everything slid into blackness.

Sheathed in a nanofabric suit, Dorn stood at the lip of the open airlock hatch, his eyes riveted on the space-suited body spiraling out there in the emptiness. Its arms had been pumping until a few heartbeats ago, proving that the person inside the suit was still alive. But now the arms had stopped, slumped, extended motionless from the figure’s shoulders in a weightless crouch, like a drowned man floating facedown in the water.

Dorn checked the control pad of the propulsion pack on his back. “I’m going out after him,” he told Elverda.

“Are you tethered?” she asked.

“He’s too far for a tether to reach,” Dorn said, stepping off the hatch’s rim and into nothingness. “This is a free-flight mission.”

She said nothing, but Dorn could sense her apprehension. Squeezing the control rod, he felt a sudden thrust push at the small of his back. He jetted the few hundred meters to the inert body, wrapped his prosthetic arm around it, and looked into the transparent bubble helmet.

“It’s a man,” he called to Elverda. “Very young. He seems unconscious.”

“Or dead?”

“We’ll see.” With his human arm Dorn fumbled with the oxygen hose from his own life support pack. He found the emergency port on the unconscious man’s suit and pumped fresh oxygen into it.

The youngster coughed, shuddered spasmodically, banged his nose against the glassteel bubble of his helmet.

But his eyes opened. “Wha… who are you?” The lad’s voice was rasping, painfully dry.

“You’re all right now,” Dorn said. “I’ll bring you aboard our ship.”

“My mother! My sis—” Coughing overtook him.

Dorn said, “I’m taking you to our ship. Don’t try to talk.”

Jetting back to the airlock, Dorn stood the youngster on his booted feet and turned to close the hatch. But his prosthetic arm would not move. It was frozen.

Valker floated into the zero-g hub of Syracuse and started “downhill” along the tube tunnel that led to the backup control pod, where he’d left Pauline. The going was easy at first: he merely had to flick his fingers against the rungs built into the tube’s curving side. But as the feeling of weight grew he grabbed onto a rung, turned himself around, and started clambering down the rungs with the lithe agility of a circus acrobat.

Voices! Valker stopped for a moment, listening. Yes, there were voices echoing up the tube. Two women. Pauline and her pretty young daughter. Valker licked his lips and began descending the rungs even faster than before. But silently.

“I was afraid of this,” Dorn said sorrowfully as he eased himself into one of the galley chairs. His prosthetic arm was still jutting out from the shoulder, bent at the elbow, as if a cast had been wrapped around it.

Theo couldn’t help staring at the cyborg. The old woman had introduced herself as Elverda Apacheta; the name meant nothing to Theo. But this half-man with one side of his face formed by etched metal, one eye an unblinking camera, one arm and one leg built of alloys and plastics and filled with bioelectronic circuitry—Theo couldn’t take his eyes off Dorn.

“You need major maintenance,” Elverda said as she sank wearily into the chair on the opposite side of the galley table.

Dorn puffed out a grunt. “That is an understatement.”

Theo took the chair at the end of the narrow table. “I need to get back to Syracuse,” he said. “My mother and sister are in danger there.”

“Danger?” Elverda turned toward him.

“A gang of scavengers has attached themselves to my ship,” Theo explained. “I hate to think of what they’ll do to my mother and sister if we don’t get there fast.”

Dorn’s human eye closed briefly. Then he said, “Their ship is named Vogeltod?”

“You know them?”

“We know them. They’re undoubtedly waiting for us to rendezvous with your ship so that they can board us and take over this vessel.”

“We should get away,” Elverda said, “as quickly as possible.”

“But my mother!” Theo protested. “My sister!”

“What good could we do?” Elverda asked.

“We can’t just leave them in the hands of those bastards!”

Dorn said, “He’s right. We must to do what we can.”

“With one hand?” Elverda scoffed.

“I can help you repair the arm,” Theo offered. “While we’re on our way to Syracuse.”

Dorn contemplated him for a silent moment. Then, “What do you know about bioelectronic circuitry? Micromechanical systems?”

“Some,” Theo replied. “Not much, I admit. But if you’ve got manuals, instruction vids, I can learn while we’re on our way back to my ship. At least…” He stopped himself from going on.

Dorn almost smiled. “At least you have two working hands. I understand.”

Pacing the narrow confines of Pleiades’s bridge Victor saw that Hunter was heading for Syracuse. Good, he said to himself. Then he recalled that the half-machine creature on Hunter had wanted him to head back to Ceres and turn himself in. Screw that, he thought.

They heard Pauline’s signal, Victor knew. They’ll get to her before I do. He nodded to himself. Good. Fine. The sooner Pauline gets help the better.

Then his comm screen showed the seamed, aged face of the old woman. “Attention Syracuse,” she said. “This is Hunter. We have been diverted temporarily. We estimate rendezvous with you in approximately five hours.”

Five hours, Victor thought. He returned to the command chair and pecked out his navigation program. At the rate I’m moving I’ll be there in a little more than six hours.

For the first time in months, Victor smiled.

ORE SHIP SYRACUSE: BACKUP COMMAND POD

Valker stopped his descent and, clinging to the rungs in the shadows of the dimly lit tube tunnel, he listened to Pauline and her daughter. He could clearly hear their voices echoing up the tube, even though the two women were speaking in hushed whispers.

“Fire off the pod?” the daughter asked. “But—”

“We’ve got to get away from those men,” Pauline said urgently. “We can escape in the pod and let the people in Hunter pick us up.”

“But what good would that do?” the daughter demanded. “They’ll just come after us, whether we’re in Hunter or here.”

Impatiently, Pauline answered, “We’re alone here. Alone against ten of them. At least aboard Hunter we’ll have a better chance.”

Valker could make them out, down at the end of the tube. Pauline was working the bulkhead-mounted pad that controlled the hatch into the command pod.

“That Captain Valker isn’t so bad,” the daughter was saying. “He wouldn’t let them hurt us.”

“Angela, for god’s sake!” Pauline snapped. “Don’t be a fool.”

“But—”

“We can’t trust him.”

Valker sighed philosophically. The woman’s right. Even if I want to protect her and her daughter, the roughnecks behind me won’t leave them alone. Too bad. I might have changed my whole life with a woman like Pauline at my side. Too bad.

As soon as the hatch slid open Valker called to them. “Hello ladies! Good to see you’ve recovered, Angela.”

Staring up at him, they looked up like a pair of guilty waifs suddenly caught in a police spotlight.

Pauline pushed her daughter through the hatch and started into the command pod herself. Valker clambered down the rungs as swiftly as a monkey, then dropped the final few meters and slammed his palm against the hatch’s control panel, stopping Pauline from shutting it.

“You weren’t thinking of leaving, were you?” he asked, stepping into the cramped little pod.

Pauline backed away from him until her hip bumped against the control board. Angela stood off to one side, half smiling at him.

“Please don’t go,” Valker said, with exaggerated courtliness. “The fun is just beginning.”

“This is weird,” Theo muttered as he lifted Dorn’s prosthetic arm out of its shoulder socket.

The cyborg was sitting stolidly on a stool by the workbench. An interactive maintenance vid was running on the wall screen of the workshop. The arm felt heavy in Theo’s hands; he put it down carefully on the workbench’s top, littered with tools.

“Can you feel any of this?” Theo asked.

Dorn nodded slightly. “It isn’t pain, but the sensation isn’t pleasant, either.”

Jabbing a thumb toward the wall screen, Theo said, “According to the vid, this shoulder joint should be self-lubricating.”

“Pressurized air lubrication, I know,” said Dorn. “But the shoulder seizes up. The lubrication fails.”

Theo asked the voice-activated program for a list of possible failure modes.

“Air leakage,” he said, studying the list. “That must be it.”

“Or erosion of the bearings.”

“I can test the bearings,” Theo said. Pointing, he asked, “That’s an electron microscope, isn’t it?”

“The maintenance program should have a subroutine for testing the bearings.”

“Right.”

Half an hour later, as he was replacing the bearings in the shoulder ring of Dom’s arm, Theo said, “The bearings are all well within specification.”

“Then it must be a pinpoint leak in the air lubrication,” said Dorn. “We don’t have the equipment to find a microscopic hole in the seal.”

Theo thought a moment. “Maybe we can—”

Elverda’s voice on the intercom interrupted him. “The navigation program estimates rendezvous with Syracuse within one hour. I can see another ship mated with her.”

“That’s the scavengers,” Theo said.

“They’ll want this ship,” said Dorn.

“They’ll want to kill us all, including my mother and sister.”

Dorn gestured with his human arm. “We’d better get me back together, then, and hope the arm doesn’t freeze up again.”

Lifting the arm in both hands and working its end into Dorn’s prosthetic shoulder, Theo said, “Maybe we can use a quick and dirty fix.”

“Quick and dirty?”

“Yeah.” The arm clicked into the shoulder socket. As Theo reached for the air hose attached to the workbench’s side, he explained, “We replenish the air in the bearings, get it up to the right pressure, then we spray a plastic sealant around the joint, so the plastic covers whatever pinhole might be in there.”

Dorn thought a moment. “Like spraying sealant on a leaking tire.”

“Right. It ought to hold, at least for a while.”

Dorn nodded. “It’s better than nothing.”

Valker disabled the circuit that fired the explosive bolts that would separate the backup command pod from the main body of Syracuse, talking to Pauline and Angela nonstop as he bent over the console.

“My crew’s drooling with anticipation over you two,” he said, his usual smile replaced by a tight-lipped, unhappy frown. “It’s not going to be easy to keep you out of their hands.”

“Then let us get away from here,” Pauline urged.

Valker shook his head. “No. That won’t work. They’ll go chasing after you. And when they catch up with you, nothing will stop them. Not even me.”

“Then what are you going to do?” Angela asked, her voice trembling.

“They’ll be busy taking Hunter once it gets here. But after they’ve got her, they’ll want to celebrate.”

“Leave my daughter alone,” Pauline said. “Give me to them.”

“Mother!”

“That might work,” Valker said, “for a while. But only for a while.”

Pauline swept the cramped pod with her eyes, looking for a tool, a weapon, something, anything.

Valker straightened up, the disconnected firing keys to the separation bolts in his hands. “Ladies, I’m afraid you’re in for a rough time.”

CARGO SHIP PLEIADES: BRIDGE

Victor called up the nav program for the eighth time in the past half-hour. “Estimate rendezvous with Syracuse in ninety-three minutes,” he read aloud from the screen. “Ninety-three minutes. I’ll see Pauline and the kids again in a little more than an hour and a half.”

Punching up the radar image, he saw the wheel shape of Syracuse clearly enough, although there seemed to be a strange sort of bulge on one side of the vessel’s hub. And there was the blip of Hunter, also heading toward Pauline. His fingers worked the keyboard and the screen showed that Hunter would arrive at Syracuse’s position in less than an hour.

They’re thirty-some minutes ahead of me, Victor thought. I’ll get there half an hour after they do.

He checked the comm program. No messages from Syracuse since Pauline’s call. Why not? Victor asked himself. You’d think they’d be beaming out a steady call for help. Why aren’t they?

He sagged back in the command chair, unwilling to believe what logic was telling him. That one message was their last gasp. They’re dead now. All of them. Pauline. Theo. My little Angel.

He pounded both his fists on the chair’s armrests. To come this close! And still be too late. Victor bowed his head. He wanted to weep.

But instead he raised his chin and glared at the radar image on the main screen. No. I won’t give up. Not until there’s not a shred of a chance that they’re still living. Not until I see their dead bodies with my own eyes. Not until then. Not until then.

Valker’s communicator buzzed in his tunic pocket. His eyes still on Pauline and Angela, he fished it out of his pocket and held it up to his ear.

“What?”

Nicco’s voice answered, “Radar shows another ship heading this way. Running silent.”

Valker’s brows knit. “Running silent?”

“And heading this way like a bullet, about half an hour behind Hunter.”

Breaking into a broad grin, Valker said into his comm unit, “What did I tell you, boys? This Syracuse is our good luck charm. She’s like a magnet, drawing ships to us. Now we’ve got two vessels we can salvage.”

“I don’t like it,” said Nicco. “Why’s she running silent? Who is she?”

“Maybe another band of salvage operators, just like us,” Valker mused.

“That could be trouble.”

“Not if we’re ready for ’em and they’re not ready for us.”

Nicco said nothing.

“I’m coming over to Vogeltod,” Valker said. “We’ve got to take Hunter fast and be ready for this other ship when it gets here.”

“An old woman and a priest,” Nicco replied. “Shouldn’t be much trouble.”

“Right. Let’s nail them quick and clean.” He clicked the communicator shut and said to Pauline, “I’ve got to attend to business back on my ship. Don’t do anything foolish while I’m gone.”

Pauline glared at him.

As Valker started up the tube ladder toward the ship’s hub, Angela asked her mother, “What can we do?”

“Wait,” Pauline said, in a hushed voice.

“Wait for them to come and get us?”

“Wait until that smiling ape gets back aboard his own ship. Then we go over to the main airlock as fast as we can and get into our suits.”

“The space suits? Why?”

“We’re getting off this ship.”

“But you heard him,” Angela objected. “They’re going to take the ship that’s approaching us. It wouldn’t do us any good to—”

“We’re not staying on this ship with that gang of rapists waiting to get their hands on us,” Pauline said. “I don’t care if we die of asphyxiation in the suits, we’re getting away from here!”

On Hunter’s bridge, Theo slid into the communications chair. “We’re close enough for a tight laser beam transmission,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.

“You want to speak to your mother and sister?” asked Elverda.

Theo nodded. “I want to let them know I’m alive, without that Valker or his crew hearing me.” Silently he added, But I don’t know how long I’m going to stay alive. The two of us—Dorn and me—against ten of them.

Dorn was standing behind Elverda, in the command chair, moving his prosthetic arm in a circle, testing its bearings.

“Do you know how to activate the laser?” Elverda asked Theo.

“Yes ma’am,” he replied, his fingers playing across the console’s keyboard. Looking up at the comm screen he saw the battered hulk of Syracuse looming close enough almost to touch. A tiny red dot showed where the laser was aimed. Theo played the controls, marching that red dot across the vessel’s curving hull until it locked onto the optical receiver built into the backup control pod. The dot suddenly changed to green and Theo pressed the key that opened the communications link to the receiver.

Okay, he said to himself. Nobody hears this except Mom, on the receiving end of the laser beam.

“Mom, Angie,” he called. “It’s me, Theo. I’m on Hunter. They picked me up after Valker’s thugs tried to kill me. I’m okay. I’m coming back to help you.”

No response. Theo pressed the repeat key, but still there was no answer from Syracuse.

“They’re not in the control pod, I guess,” Theo said, as much to himself as to Elverda and Dorn. “But the intercom should relay the message.”

Victor was weighing the possibilities. That’s definitely another ship attached to Syracuse, he told himself. On his main display screen he could see the smaller vessel linked to Syracuse like a lamprey eel that’s attached itself to a hapless fish.

And there’s Hunter, heading in.

He couldn’t be patient any longer. He got up from the bridge’s command chair and went to the communications console.

“Attention Syracuse,” he said, his voice brittle with tension. “This is Pleiades. I heard your call and I’ll rendezvous with you in…” He glanced at the digital clock readout on the screen. “… in seventy-eight minutes.”

Pauline was in the locker area just outside Syracuse’s main airlock, checking the seals and connections of Angela’s suit, when the intercom speaker in the overhead announced, “incoming message.” She ignored the statement. Getting Angie suited up and ready to escape the ship was more important.

“Another message,” Angela said. “That makes two.”

Satisfied at last that her daughter’s suit was spaceworthy, Pauline reached for the leggings of her own suit and sat on the bench that ran in front of the lockers.

“Never mind the messages,” she said. “The important thing is to get off this ship before Valker comes back.”

Angela stood stiffly in the cermet suit, the visor of her bubble helmet raised.

“But aren’t you going to check the messages?” she asked.

“They’re probably for Valker, from his crew.”

“But—”

“There’s nobody out there to send messages to us, Angie,” Pauline said, grunting with the effort of tugging on her heavy boots.

“Maybe it’s from that other ship heading toward us,” Angie insisted.

Pauline almost smiled. She’s still young enough to hope for a miracle.

“That’s the Hunter. The only people aboard her are an old woman and a priest. I’m hoping that we can get to them before Valker seizes their ship. Maybe we can get away on their ship, if we’re lucky.”

Angela gave her mother her stubborn scowl and clomped to the comm panel mounted on the bulkhead. “It wouldn’t hurt to hear what they’re saying,” she said, holding her gloved hand up to the panel.

She’s right, Pauline realized. Shrugging, she said, “Go ahead, then.”

Angela pressed the comm unit’s on button and said, “Play first message, please.”

They heard, “Mom, Angie. It’s me, Theo. I’m on Hunter. They picked me up after Valker’s thugs tried to kill me. I’m okay. I’m coming back to help you.”

“Theo!” both women cried in unison.

“He’s alive!”

“He’s coming back!”

Pauline redoubled her efforts to get into her suit. “We’ve got to get to him before Valker’s crew takes over that ship,” she said.

“We should send him a message,” said Angela. “Warn him.”

“No, we can’t do that,” Pauline countered. “Valker and his people would hear any message we sent, unless we used the laser unit and that’s back in the pod.”

“Besides, we need Hunter close enough for us to get to,” Angela agreed.

“That’s right.” Pauline added silently, But not so close that Valker and his scavengers get to her first. She slipped into the hardshell torso and Angela came away from the comm panel to help her seal it to the leggings.

Back on Vogeltod’s bridge, Valker listened to Victor Zacharias’s message.

“Pleiades!” he exulted. “That’s a fine ship. And there’s only one man aboard her, a thief, at that.”

“Unless he’s picked up a crew,” Kirk muttered.

“Good point,” said Valker. “Let’s break out the weapons.”

Like everything else aboard Vogeltod, the weapons supply was a hodgepodge of pieces stolen, scavenged, or bartered from other ships. There were four genuine laser pistols, complete with compact power packs attached to their belts. There were two cumbersome laser welders that could cut metal and easily slice flesh, although it took two men to carry each one of them and their bulky power packs. There were a variety of tools such as cordless drills and wrenches that could be used as knives or bludgeons. There was even an old-fashioned air pistol that fired tranquilizing darts, although Valker wondered if the tranquilizer was still potent after all the years the darts had lain unused. Finally, there was a belt of minigrenades, powerful enough to blow down an airlock hatch.

Valker looked over his grinning crew, each of them now carrying sidearms or tools-turned-weapons strapped to their hips. Two of the men hefted one of the bulky laser welders and its power pack between them. Valker himself had taken a laser pistol and flung the belt of minigrenades across his broad shoulder.

“You look like a band of real fierce pirates,” he said, laughing.

“We’re ready for anything,” said Kirk, brandishing a power drill whose bit was almost as long as his forearm.

“Yeah!” Nicco agreed. “And after we’ve taken these two ships, we get the two babes. Right?”

Valker had to force his smile, but he said, “Right.”

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: AIRLOCK

Standing at the lip of the open airlock hatch, Theo saw clearly the curving flank of Syracuse, the long ugly gash in one of the fuel tank sections, the stumps that had once held the missing command pod, the new antennas he had painted on the adjoining portion of the hull, the backup command pod.

They were approaching the ship from its top, the side opposite the place where Vogeltod hung mated to Syracuse by the flexible connector tube.

Theo was in his hard-shell space suit with a new backpack that Dorn had provided; the cyborg stood beside him in a nanofabric suit.

“The living quarters are on the other side of the pod,” Theo told the cyborg, pointing with an outstretched arm. “The main airlock is—”

He saw that the airlock hatch was open, subdued red light glowing from it.

“Is Valker using our airlock?” he wondered aloud.

“I doubt it,” said Dorn.

“Then who…?” Theo saw two space suited figures outlined against the airlock’s dim red lighting.

“Mom?” he called over the suit-to-suit frequency. “Angie?”

“Theo! We’re coming over to you.”

“Okay! Great! Make it quick!”

Theo turned to Dorn. “Tell Ms. Apacheta to goose the fusion drive as soon as we get them aboard. Maybe we can take them in and get away from here before Valker’s crew can board us.”

Dorn shook his head inside the inflated bubble hood of the nanosuit.

“Too late,” he said, pointing.

Haifa dozen nanosuited men were jetting up from between the spokes of Syracuse and heading straight for them.

Standing at Vogeltod’s main airlock in his nanofabric space suit, Valker heard Theo’s call to his mother and sister.

“The kid’s still alive,” he growled.

“And the women are trying to jump over to Hunter,” Kirk said.

“Let ’em,” Valker snapped. “We’ll get there first. Come on.”

He squeezed the knob that controlled his suit’s propulsion unit and jetted out of the airlock. Five of his men followed him. He had left Nicco and three others behind to take over Syracuse.

As they maneuvered through the spokes of the big wheel-shaped Syracuse, Kirk laughed maliciously. “Nicco’s gonna crap himself when he finds the sugarpots ain’t on the ship.”

“So what?” said Valker. “Once we take over Hunter we’ve got the women, too.”

He could see Hunter hanging in the emptiness, rotating slowly. There’s the airlock, Valker said to himself. And two people standing in it.

“Hey, there’s the women,” one of his crew called out.

Turning slightly, Valker made out a pair of figures in hard suits jetting toward Hunter’s open airlock hatch.

“Good,” he said. “Let ’em get to the airlock first. We’ll hit ’em while they’re all crammed in there together.”

“What about hitting one of the auxiliary locks, too?” Kirk asked.

“They’ll be sealed tight. Why blow a locked hatch when we’ve got one wide open and waiting for us?”

Then Valker thought a moment. Turning to the two men handling the big welding laser, he said, “Slice a chunk out of the main thruster cone. I don’t want them lighting off their fusion engine and getting away from us.”

“Elverda,” Dorn was saying into his suit microphone, “as soon as I give the command you must push the main engine to full thrust.”

“I understand.” Her voice sounded tense in his earphones.

The two women were a scant hundred meters from the airlock hatch and coming on fast. But the half-dozen scavengers were not far behind them.

“Crank the command chair to the full reclining position,” Dorn told her. “You’ll be able to take the acceleration better that way.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she replied immediately.

But Dorn did worry. She can’t take a full g’s acceleration, he thought. Even with the stem cell therapy she received, her heart can’t take the strain. But if we don’t get out of here before those men come aboard…

“I’m programming the propulsion system for a one-g acceleration,” Elverda was saying, her voice tight but calm. “Tell me when.”

“Crank the chair down,” he repeated.

“Yes. Certainly.”

Theo nudged him with an elbow. “Here they come!”

In their space suits, it was impossible for Dorn to tell who was the mother and who the daughter.

Close behind them six other figures were speeding toward them: the scavengers from Vogeltod.

“Hurry!” Theo urged.

Dorn saw two of the scavengers peel off, away from the others. They were carrying some kind of bulky equipment. A weapon? he wondered.

“I’m ready to light off the fusion drive,” Elverda’s voice reported.

Theo was attaching a tether to one of the cleats on the hull just outside the airlock hatch. Before Dorn could ask him why the youngster jumped out into the vacuum and reached for the nearer of the two women. He pushed her toward the airlock, then stretched his arms out toward the other one.

Dorn grabbed at the woman as she coasted into the airlock and helped stop her headlong rush. “You’re safe now,” he said.

He could see the frightened expression on her face through her glassteel helmet. “For how long?” Pauline asked.

Theo clutched at his sister’s outstretched hand and tugged her toward the airlock.

“Thee! Look out!” Angela screamed.

One of the scavengers was speeding toward them. Theo pushed Angela toward the airlock hatch and turned to face the approaching man. He could see Kirk’s face through the bubble of his nanofabric suit, lips pulled back in a savage grin. He was brandishing a long, deadly looking power drill.

“I’m gonna finish you once and for all, kid.”

Theo jetted up and away from the scavenger, but the tether reached its limit and stopped him with an abrupt jerk that pulled Theo upside down. Kirk swung around, fiddled with his propulsion unit’s controls, and came swooping after him.

Theo dived toward Kirk, holding his end of the buckyball tether in both hands, and flicked it like a whip. Kirk flew into it, and Theo spun around him, wrapping the tether around Kirk’s middle, trapping one of his arms against his torso. Screaming curses, Kirk flailed at the tether with the drill, but the buckyball material was too tough even to scratch.

Theo raced back to the airlock hatch, where Dorn, his mother and sister were standing. A burst of light splashed off the airlock hatch. They’re firing lasers at us! Theo realized.

Theo planted his boots on the airlock deck just as a blast of energy slammed into his back. He staggered into his mother and sister.

“Thee?”

“I’m all right. They hit my backpack.”

“They’ve also hit the hatch control,” said Dorn. “We can’t close the outer hatch.”

“They’re almost here!” Angela said, and Theo saw the scavengers racing toward them, with Valker in the lead, a laser pistol in his hand.

“Fire the engine,” Dorn shouted.

“Firing,” said Elverda.

Hunter shuddered as if it had been hit by a bomb. But it did not move away from the men approaching the airlock.

CARGO SHIP PLEIADES: BRIDGE

Victor was close enough to hear the suit-to-suit chatter from the other ships. He recognized Theo’s voice, and his wife’s. Then there were others, men’s voices, cursing, yelling. It sounded as if some sort of struggle was going on. A fight.

He stared at his main screen as if he could get himself there by sheer willpower. Still fifteen minutes away, he saw from the numbers on the nav program.

What’s happening? he asked himself. What’s going on there?

He could see Syracuse gleaming sharply in sunlight against the starry background of infinity. There was another ship linked to it. And Hunter had arrived and matched their velocity vector.

A burst of flame from Hunter’s main thruster! Victor saw the ship shudder. A half-dozen figures were flitting around the vessel, most of them clustered at the main airlock.

Fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. Victor knew he had to do something. But what?

Standing in the crowded airlock, pistol in his hand, Valker smiled at his prisoners.

“No sense fighting,” he said amiably. “Your ship is crippled and you’re not going anywhere.”

Theo could see the other scavengers crowding around the airlock hatch. Kirk glowered at him murderously.

“Let’s go inside,” Valker said, motioning with his pistol. “It’s not polite to leave your visitors hanging outside your door.”

Besides, Theo said to himself, the air in your suits must be running low. He saw red lights splashed across the inside of his own bubble helmet. That laser shot’s smashed up my life support pack, he realized.

Dorn said slowly, “You’ve destroyed the control for the outer hatch. If I open the inner hatch the air in this entire section of the ship will blow away into vacuum.”

“Tell whoever’s at your bridge to seal the airtight emergency hatches,” Valker said. “That way only one small section will go to vacuum and you can pump air into it again once the inner airlock hatch is closed again.”

“Yes, that is the answer,” Dorn said. He called Elverda. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” her voice answered. “But the engine … it failed.”

“Our guests,” Dorn’s voice dripped irony, “disabled the thruster.”

“Tell her to close the emergency hatches,” Valker reminded.

“Now,” Kirk stressed.

“Close all the emergency hatches,” Dorn said. “We’re going to use the section next to the main airlock as an extension of the lock.”

“Why…?”

“Please do it,” Dorn urged. “We have visitors among us.”

Within minutes all ten of them were crowded into the locker area, with the inner airlock hatch safely sealed and the section of the ship refilled with air.

“Take off your helmet, lad,” Valker said to Theo. “Let’s see if the air pressure’s okay.”

Burning with anger, Theo lifted his helmet off his head.

“The air’s fine,” he said.

“You two, please,” Valker said to Pauline and Angela, gesturing with his pistol. Turning to Dorn, he added, “And you.”

The two women lifted off their helmets. Dorn deflated the hood of his nanosuit and pulled it back off his head.

Valker peered at him. “You’re the priest?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a cyborg,” Kirk said, as he pulled his own hood off his face. “A fuckin’ freak.”

“Very observant of you,” Dorn replied.

As they all wormed out of their space suits, Elverda’s voice came from the overhead speaker: “We have a message from the approaching vessel.”

“Play it,” Valker commanded.

They heard, “This is Pleiades. Estimate arrival at your position in nine minutes. Will match your velocity vector.”

Standing before the bench in front of the lockers, his bubble helmet in his gloved hands, Theo felt a jolt of electricity surge through him. That’s Dad’s voice! he said to himself. He glanced at his mother; she recognized the voice, too. So did Angie.

Valker grinned his widest. “Here comes our profit, boys,” he said. “Walking right into our laps.”

“If he’s alone on that ship,” Kirk cautioned.

“Even if he isn’t,” said Valker. “I’m going up to the bridge and guide our pigeon to us. You boys stay here by the airlock. When he comes in, you grab him.”

He turned to Dorn. “Come on, cyborg. Lead us to the bridge.”

Elverda got up from the padded command chair and went to the communications console. She activated the laser comm system, hoping that it would lock onto the optical receiver of the oncoming ship.

As soon as the screen’s ready light flashed green, Elverda said urgently, “Pleiades, this is Hunter. We have been boarded by scavengers who intend to take our ship and yours. We have three people from Syracuse with us. We need help. They’re going to kill us all unless we can find a way to stop them.”

Victor heard the fear in Elverda’s trembling voice, saw the anxiety in her worn face.

“How many men do the scavengers have?”

“I don’t know. Four or five, I think, maybe more.”

“Where are they?”

“Down at the main airlock, but I think their leader is coming to the bridge.”

Victor thought swiftly. “Do you have an airlock near the bridge?” he asked.

“Yes, immediately adjacent.”

“Please open it. I’ll board your vessel through it.”

“Very well. Please hurry.”

“I will.” He scanned the control board, saw that the nav and propulsion programs were set to match the velocity vectors of the other ships. Then he got up from the command chair and headed for the equipment bay where tools were stored. I’m going to need some kind of a weapon, he told himself. Something to make the fight more even.

As they walked along the slightly sloping passageway that ran along Hunter’s inner rim, Valker kept his pistol in his right hand, although he allowed his arm to relax naturally by his side. The kid and the two women were a few steps ahead of them, trudging reluctantly, grudgingly toward the ship’s bridge; the cyborg paced along beside him, matching him stride for stride.

“What’s it like,” Valker asked, “being half machine?”

Dorn’s half-metal face turned slowly toward him. “What’s it like, being entirely animal?”

Valker laughed. “I mean, does your machine half feel pain? Is it stronger than normal human flesh?”

“Lifting his prosthetic arm slightly, Dorn said, “This hand could crush that pistol you’re carrying.”

Instinctively, Valker twitched the gun away from the cyborg.

“Not to worry,” said Dorn, quite solemnly, “I’m a priest, not a warrior.”

“You’re not a fighter, then?”

“Not normally.” Dorn raised his left arm higher, then let it fall to his side. “Besides, this arm is prone to a mechanical version of arthritis, now and then.”

Valker asked, “You’ve always been a priest?”

“No, not always. Once I was a soldier. A mercenary. I’ve seen battle. I’ve… killed people.”

“But not anymore.”

“Not unless I’m provoked,” said Dorn, with a slight nod to the two women and the young man walking ahead of them.

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: BRIDGE

Her fingers moving swiftly on the electronic keyboard, Elverda opened the emergency airlock next to the bridge as she watched in the main screen the lone figure of a man jetting across the gap between Pleiades and Hunter. Glancing at the control board’s telltale lights, she saw that he entered the airlock and cycled it.

Through the open hatch of the bridge she heard voices approaching; Dorn’s deep, slow tones and the lighter, faster patter of another man: Valker. As she got up from the command chair two women stepped through the hatch, followed by the same young man Dorn had brought aboard earlier, then Dorn himself and the tall, broad-shouldered, smiling Valker, who was still chattering blithely away. And holding a pistol in his right hand.

He had to duck slightly to get through the hatch. Then his eye caught Elverda’s and he beamed a bright smile at her.

“Hello again, Ms. Apacheta,” he said.

Elverda smiled back tentatively.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said, putting more wattage into the smile.

Drawing herself up to her full height, Elverda said, “We meet under unusual circumstances, Captain Valker.”

Valker raised the pistol and glanced at it as if he hadn’t realized it had been in his hand. “This? Well, this is business, dear lady. I’m afraid we’re going to have to take your ship, and the one that’s just made rendezvous with us.”

“Like hell you will!”

A scruffy, stubby, dark-bearded man in a rumpled short-sleeved tunic and shorts stepped through the hatch, a laser spot welder in one hand. His bare arms and legs were knotted with muscle, his onyx eyes blazed fury.

Valker whirled around at the sound of his voice, leveling the pistol in his hand. Dorn wrapped both his arms around Valker’s body, and young Theo punched the scavenger solidly in the jaw. Valker’s legs buckled, his head lolled back on his shoulders.

“Victor!” The older woman rushed into the arms of the fiercely bearded man. The younger followed her by a half-step. They both broke into sobs.

Dorn let Valker’s unconscious body slip to the deck. Theo bent down and took the pistol from his hand. Dorn slipped the belt of minigrenades off his shoulder, stared at them for a long wordless moment, then with a growl flung them across the bridge.

It took a few minutes, but Elverda got it sorted out despite the blubbering. Even young Theo Zacharias—who turned out to be the bearded man’s son—had tears in his eyes.

“This is a helluva family reunion,” said Victor Zacharias, his arms around his wife and daughter, a happy grin on his face.

Dorn brought them all back to reality. “There are nine other scavengers: six aboard this vessel and three on Syracuse.”

“Hunting for Mom and Angie,” Theo said grimly.

Victor’s dark eyes flashed. “They didn’t—”

“Angie’s fine,” Pauline said immediately. “They didn’t touch her.”

Elverda stared at the woman, then turned to the main screen, above the control panel, and pointed. “Look. Four men are crossing over to your ship, Pleiades.”

“It’ll take them a little while to realize I’m not aboard her,” said Victor.

“Then what?” Theo asked.

“How many are still on this ship?” Victor asked.

Elverda worked the electronic keyboard. The main screen broke into a dozen smaller views, each showing a section of Hunter’s interior. Only two scavengers were visible, both by the main airlock.

“We’ve got to get them before the others come back,” Theo said.

Victor stepped closer to the multi-eyed screen. “They’re both armed.”

Valker groaned and pushed himself up to a sitting position. He looked up at Theo, rubbing his jaw. “Nice punch, kid. Try it again sometime when my arms are free.”

Theo started toward him, but Dorn blocked him with his prosthetic arm. “Perhaps we won’t have to fight the others.” Pointing to Valker, “We have a hostage here.”

Valker laughed bitterly. “Some hostage. You think those cockroaches would give up taking two whole ships, just for me?”

“We’d better get those two before the others come back,” Victor said.

“Defeat them in detail,” Dorn muttered.

Victor looked at him. “You talk like a soldier.”

“I was a soldier, once.”

Hefting the pistol he’d taken from Valker, Theo said to his father, “Let’s go for them, then.”

Victor looked into his son’s eyes, then nodded. Turning to Dorn, “Can you lock him up someplace?”

“One of the storage bays,” Dorn replied. “It’s on the way to the main airlock.”

“All right,” Victor said. “Pauline, you and Angie stay here on the bridge with Ms. Apacheta. Keep all the airlock hatches sealed.”

“We can’t close the main airlock’s outer hatch,” Elverda said.

“That’s all right. Just don’t open any others.” Victor waved the squat gray cylinder of his spot welder in Valker’s direction. “Get moving.”

Valker climbed to his feet and went without protest, his usual smile gone, replaced by a glum resignation. But just as he was about to step over the hatch’s sill, he looked back at Pauline for just the flash of an instant. Elverda saw her cheeks redden.

Dorn locked Valker in the nearly empty storage bay, then hurried to catch up with Victor and his son.

“They tried to kill me,” Theo was telling his father. “Punctured my suit’s main air tank and pushed me off into space.”

Dorn could see Victor’s fists tightening. “But your mother, Angela, they haven’t hurt them, have they?”

Theo shook his head. “Not that they didn’t want to. We hid Angie in the storm shelter.”

“And your mother?”

Theo hesitated a heartbeat before answering, “Nobody attacked her.”

They strode down Hunter’s curving main passageway in silence for several moments. Then Victor turned to Dorn, “We’ll have to find a weapon for you.”

“No,” said Dorn. “I’m a priest, not a warrior.”

Theo began to object, “But we’re going to need—”

“I will fight to protect my companion,” Dorn said to Victor, “or you and your family. But I will not willingly kill anyone.”

Victor stared at him for several paces along the passageway. At last he said, “Don’t get in our way, then.”

As they approached the main airlock, Victor said to Theo, “This spot welder puts out a stream of high-energy pulses. Doesn’t carry very far, though. That pistol you’re holding is more powerful.”

Theo glanced at the pistol. It bore the imprint of Astro Corporation. Valker must’ve taken this from a ship he captured, he thought.

“Both those men are in space suits,” Victor went on. “Puncture the suits. Rip them open so they can’t get off the ship.”

“Right,” Theo agreed.

Dorn said, “Wouldn’t it be better to let them get off this ship? Let them have Pleiades and leave us in peace.”

“So they can steal other ships and kill their crews?” Victor snapped, almost snarling. “No. There’s no law out here. It’s up to us.”

“Vengeance is not justice,” Dorn murmured.

Victor glared at him, then answered, “This isn’t vengeance. This is extermination. You heard what Valker called them: cockroaches. You don’t let cockroaches go free. You kill them.”

Dorn stopped walking. “I can’t help you do that.”

“Then go back to the bridge,” Victor said.

“I could take those two men for you. Without killing them.”

Victor stared at the cyborg.

“If I succeed, you will have them without risk to yourself or your son. If I fail, then you can attack them your way.”

Theo tapped Dorn’s prosthetic shoulder. “Is your arm working okay?”

Dorn lifted the arm, turned it in a full circle. “Your maintenance work is holding fine.”

“Let him try it, Dad,” Theo urged. “What do we have to lose?”

Victor looked from his son to the cyborg and back again. At last he reluctantly murmured, “All right.”

CARGO SHIP PLEIADES: BRIDGE

Suspicion smoldering in his mind, Kirk flicked through Pleiades’s internal camera views. Every section of the ship seemed empty, abandoned.

“There’s nobody here,” said the scavenger at his elbow. “This’s a ghost ship.”

“Your great-grandmother’s a ghost ship,” Kirk growled. “He’s aboard somewhere. He’s hiding.”

One of the other crewmen piped up. “He sure don’t have a crew with him. He musta been alone.”

“He’s in here someplace,” Kirk insisted, watching each camera view intently for a few moments, then skipping to the next. “We’ve gotta find him.”

“It’s a big ship, Kirk. There’s only the four of us. It’ll take a day or two to search every compartment.”

“So it takes a day or two!”

“Yeah, but while we’re playin’ hide-and-seek with the bastard, Valker and the other guys got the women.”

Kirk glared at the crewman. Gritting his teeth in indecision, he finally admitted, “Maybe you’re right.”

“Least we can call Valker and tell him the bum’s hiding out someplace.”

“Yeah. Let’s call Valker.” The others all agreed.

Kirk tried his suit radio. No answer. Grimacing with anger, he turned to Pleiades’s comm console.

“Valker, this is Kirk.”

No reply.

“Valker, this is Kirk. We can’t find anybody on Pleiades. We’re coming back.”

Still nothing but the hiss of the comm signal’s carrier wave.

Kirk snatched up the power drill he’d lain on the control board. “Something’s wrong. Let’s get back to Hunter.”

Nicco, meanwhile, was feeling equally frustrated aboard Syracuse. He and the two scavengers with him had searched the living quarters, the command pod, and even the storm cellar. No sign of the two women.

“They ain’t here,” Nicco said as he stepped out of the radiation shelter’s cramped womblike interior.

“They’ve gone?”

“Looks like it.”

The other crewman said, “This is a pretty big ship. We’ve only searched a quarter of it.”

“The rest is in vacuum,” Nicco told him. “No air. All shut down. They can’t be in there.”

“Not unless they’re in suits.”

“Suits only hold a few hours’ air; they can’t stay in ’em for long.”

“Maybe they can hold their breaths for a couple hours,” said the first crewman. “I bet they both got big lungs.”

Nicco did not laugh. Frowning with frustration, he said, “C’mon, we better get back to Valker. Maybe he can figure this out.”

Dorn stopped a good fifty meters before the airlock area.

“You two wait here,” he whispered. “Give me three minutes, then come ahead.”

Victor nodded. Theo licked his lips, thinking, If this cyborg can’t handle those two scavengers I’ll kill them both. I’ll cut them up with this laser. I’ll chop them into pieces.

Then he saw the look on the human half of Dorn’s face and remembered the priest’s words: Vengeance is not justice.

Dorn walked slowly, deliberately, toward the main airlock. The two scavengers that Valker had left were lounging at the inner airlock hatch, which was sealed shut. They stiffened at the sight of the approaching cyborg, gripped their weapons in their hands. One had a cordless power drill, the other an elaborately wicked-looking knife with a serrated blade.

“What’re you doin’ here?” asked the taller of the two, the one with the drill.

“Captain Valker sent me,” Dorn replied, shifting his steps slightly so that the one with the knife was on his prosthetic side.

“Valker? What for?”

“Why di’n’t he come himself?”

“Or call us on the intercom?”

Dorn was within arm’s reach of the pair of them. They seemed wary, distrustful. They both edged half a step backward as Dorn approached them.

The one with the knife lifted its blade so that its point was level with Dorn’s prosthetic eye.

“Why don’t I just carve you up here and now, ’stead of waitin’?”

Praying that his arm would work properly, Dorn grabbed the blade in his metal hand and twisted. The blade bent and the man holding it yowled in sudden pain. His partner, jaw dropped wide, fumbled for the power button on his drill as he backed away from Dorn.

Yanking the knife out of the first one’s hand, Dorn growled to the other, “Drop that toy before I shove it up your colon.”

For an instant both men stood frozen in shocked silence. Then Dorn heard Zacharias and his son running up the passageway. Seeing the weapons in their hands, the scavenger dropped his power drill to the deck with a dull clunk. The would-be knife wielder raised his hands over his head.

“Good work,” Victor said to Dorn. “That’s two of them.”

“There are seven more,” said Dorn.

Sitting in the bridge’s command chair, Elverda heard Kirk’s call from Pleiades, saw the angry irritation in his chiseled features. “Should we reply to him?” Pauline asked.

“No,” said Elverda. “Not until the men return.”

Angela stared at the frozen image of Kirk on the screen, but said nothing.

Elverda cut off the message and pulled up a view of the passageway where Dorn, Victor and Theo were leading the two scavengers back from the main airlock.

With Pauline standing on one side of her and Angela on the other, Elverda asked softly, “The men did not harm you?”

“No,” Angela said.

Turning to Pauline, Elverda dropped her voice to a near-whisper and asked, “Will you tell your husband?”

Pauline glanced at her daughter, then replied, “I suppose I will, sooner or later.”

“He’ll want to kill Valker.”

“Mother!” Angela blurted. “He raped you?”

Pauline pressed her lips together, then replied, “No, he didn’t rape me.”

“But…” Angela’s eyes went wide as she realized what her mother implied. “You mean… willingly?”

“Not willingly. I had no choice,” Pauline said, her voice flat and cold.

Angela’s mouth hung open but no words came out.

“Your husband will kill Valker,” Elverda repeated, “once he knows.”

Pauline said nothing.

“Look!” cried one of the scavengers. “That’s Nicco and the others comin’ over from Syracuse.”

Kirk and the three crewmen with him were jetting back to Hunter. He twisted in the emptiness and saw the three sunlit figures heading toward him.

“What’s goin’ on with you?” Kirk asked over his suit radio.

“Damn ship’s empty,” Nicco’s voice answered. “The women are gone.”

“They must be hiding.”

“They’re gone. And Valker ain’t answering us.”

Kirk nodded grimly inside his inflated helmet. “We can’t raise Valker either. Something’s gone wrong.”

The two groups of scavengers came together like gliding vultures, shifting clumsily in their flight.

“You think they got Valker?” Nicco asked.

“Don’t see how,” Kirk replied. “He had a pistol. The priest and the kid were unarmed.”

“The women musta gone aboard Hunter.”

“Or drifted into space.”

“What about the guy from Pleiades?” one of the crewmen asked. “Where’d he go?”

They coasted toward Hunter’s main airlock. Kirk saw that the hatch was open; the dimly lit airlock chamber looked empty.

“All right, hold it,” Kirk said as they glided to Hunter’s curving hull. “We gotta take stock before we go in.”

“Take stock of what?”

“The situation.”

“There’s seven of us against a priest, a kid, and an old lady.”

“And maybe the two other women.”

“And maybe the guy from Pleiades, too.”

“We got weapons and they don’t.”

Kirk sneered at them. “Weapons? You got a coupla power tools and some wrenches.”

“I’ve got a pistol,” Nicco pointed out.

“Yeah, and they prob’ly got Valker’s pistol. And the grenades he was carrying.”

That quieted them.

“Where’d you leave the heavy welder?” Kirk asked the two men who had disabled Hunters main thruster.

“We put it on a tether after we were done with it.”

“Go get it,” Kirk said. “We might need it to burn through some hatches.”

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: BRIDGE

“So that’s how they disabled our fusion engine,” Dorn said, looking at Elverda.

She was still sitting in the command chair as they listened to the suit-to-suit talk between Kirk and the other scavengers.

“Maybe we can retrieve that heavy laser before they do,” Theo suggested.

“No.” Victor shook his head. “They’re already outside, suited up. They’ll get to it long before we can.”

“I’m still in my suit,” Theo pointed out. “So’re Mom and Angie. Angie and I could—”

“No,” Victor repeated firmly.

“Then what do we do?” Pauline asked.

More to Dorn than the others, Victor said, “Once they get that heavy laser they’ll be able to burn through any of the hatches we try to keep locked against them.”

“Yes,” said Dorn.

“They’ll punch their way from the main airlock right up here to the bridge,” Victor muttered.

“And free Valker on their way,” Theo added. “All we have is this one laser pistol.”

“And those grenades,” Theo said, pointing to the belt that lay on the far side of the deck.

“Stay in your suits,” Kirk told his men as they came through the inner hatch of the main airlock. “They might try somethin’ cute, like cutting off the air in this section of the ship.”

Nicco glanced over his shoulder at the two men lugging the heavy welder and its power pack. “You guys oughtta be up front,” he said.

“Why do we hafta lug this clunker?” one of the men complained. “How ’bout you takin’ it for a turn?”

“Whatsamatter, girls?” Nicco asked, laughing. “‘Fraid you’re gonna break a fingernail or somethin’?”

The men glared at him but shuffled up to the front of the line, where Kirk stood peering down the passageway, left and right. He stepped to the wall screen and tapped its directory.

“Okay,” he said, tracing a path on the main display. “The bridge is this direction.”

They started along the passageway, Kirk in the lead, the two men with the welder grumbling right behind him, then the rest, with Nicco bringing up the rear.

Kirk tried to raise Valker on his suit radio, again to no avail.

“They musta killed him,” he mused aloud.

“Then we’re gonna hafta elect a new captain,” said one of the men toting the laser welder.

Kirk grinned toothily. “I nominate me.”

From up the passageway they heard Valker’s sneering voice, “Over my dead body!”

“It’s the skipper!”

The passageway ran along the rim of the ship’s wheel, so that although it felt flat as long as the wheel was turning, it curved up and out of sight in both directions. Valker came striding toward them, smiling grimly. The two men Dorn had disarmed came into sight behind him.

“Where’ve you been?” Kirk demanded.

“They ganged up on me, that half-robot priest, the kid, and some other guy—he must be from Pleiades.”

Grinning at the bruise on Valker’s jaw, Kirk said, “Only three of ’em?”

“They caught me by surprise. Then they locked me in a storage bay. Then they brought in Gig and Kelso, here.”

Nicco came pushing through the group. “How’d you get out, skipper?”

Valker gave him a sour look. “Accordion-fold door. They thought locking it would keep me inside. One kick is all it took.”

“So the guy from Pleiades is aboard?” Kirk asked.

Nodding, Valker added, “And the two women from Syracuse. They’re all up in the bridge, one tidy little package.”

Raising the power drill he was carrying, Kirk shouted, “So let’s go get ’em!”

Victor and the others watched the scavengers’ impromptu reunion in the main passageway. Turning from the bridge’s screen, Victor muttered, “We’ve got to stop them.”

“Yes,” agreed Dorn. “But how? There are ten of them.”

“Close all the emergency hatches.”

“They’ll burn through them with that big laser.”

“I know. But that will take them time.”

“So what good will that do?”

“Theo,” Victor said, pointing to the belt lying on the deck, “get those grenades and come with me. You,” he said to Elverda, “seal all the hatches. Now.”

As Elverda called up the life support program, Victor and Theo headed for the hatch.

Pauline reached for his shoulder. “Victor, what are you going to do?”

“Stop them,” he said.

Dorn watched the two of them go, then, after a moment of indecision, followed after them.

The hatch up the passageway swung shut with a sharp clang. Turning, Valker saw the hatch behind them bang shut. They could hear more thumps in the distance.

“The bastards’re sealing all the hatches,” Kirk growled.

Valker grinned at him. “What else can they do? They’re just postponing the inevitable.”

“They might try to pump out the air.”

“So we stay in our suits,” Valker said, pulling up his hood and inflating it.

He motioned to the two men carrying the heavy laser welder. “Now ain’tcha glad we brought this beauty along with us?”

Nicco laughed. “We’ll burn right through the hatches.”

“No need to,” Valker said, pointing to the control keypad on the bulkhead beside the sealed hatch. “Just burn out the pad and get to the manual override. Won’t take more’n a minute.”

“For each hatch,” Kirk said.

“So what?” Valker snapped. “They’re not going anywhere. And we’re not going away.”

Following his father’s example, Theo peeled back the plastic sheeting that covered the passageway’s structural tubing and wedged the pebble-sized grenades into the exposed metal framework in a complete circle, from the deck to the overhead and then back down to the deck on the other side.

Dorn stood in the middle of the passageway, arms folded against his chest. “I see what you intend to do. But blowing away this section of the wheel won’t stop them. They’re already in space suits. They’ll merely jet through the open area to the next hatch.”

“Not if they’re in the section that we blow away,” Victor said.

“No, they’ll still be able to jet back to us,” Dorn countered. “Unless they’re killed or injured by the blast.”

“That’s the general idea,” said Victor.

“I can’t be a party to that.”

“You don’t have to be. Just stay out of my way.”

Theo spoke up. “You can show us how to fuze the grenades so we can set them off from the bridge.”

Dorn did not reply.

Victor strode down the passageway to where Dorn was standing. “Now listen. These scavengers would kill you and your friend without blinking an eye. They’d kill my son and me. They’d rape my wife and daughter and then kill them, too. You expect me to let them do that?”

For several heartbeats Dorn did not reply. At last he said, “I spent a lifetime killing. My soul is drenched in blood. I can’t help you to commit murder.”

And he walked away, past Theo, back toward the bridge.

Victor glowered at his back. “Finish the job, Thee,” he said to his son. “I’m going to the bridge.”

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: MAIN PASSAGEWAY

“Ow!” Nicco yelped, wringing his hand. “That’s hot!”

Valker laughed. “What do you expect? The circuit’s been melted by a laser beam. Put your gloves back on.”

Nicco scowled at the blackened hole in the bulkhead where the hatch’s control pad had been. Kirk pushed past him, wiggled his nanogloved fingers in the air, then reached in and found the manual switch.

The hatch popped open a crack. Kirk kicked it all the way open, then made an exaggerated bow. “This way, gentlemen.”

”That’s three,” Nicco said, still wringing his burned hand as the scavengers trooped through the open hatch. “How many more?”

Valker turned to the wall screen display of the ship’s layout, “Four… five… and then the galley and finally the hatch to the bridge itself. Six more to go, men.”

“And then we’ve got ’em!” one of the crewmen exulted, waving the laser pistol he carried in the air.

“And then we get the women!” shouted Kirk.

Back on the bridge, Theo saw his father’s jaw clench as he watched the main screen’s camera view of the scavengers advancing along the passageway. And then we get the women, Theo repeated silently. He’s one of the dog turds that tried to murder me. Dad’s perfectly right: Kill them or they’ll kill us.

Dorn still stood with his arms locked across his chest, immobile as a statue, except that his head swiveled back and forth from watching the main screen to staring at Victor. What’s going through his mind? Theo wondered. He said he’d killed a lot of people and now he doesn’t want us to kill these scum. But what else can we do?

Suddenly the cyborg let his arms drop to his sides and started toward the closed hatch.

“Where are you going?” Victor demanded.

“To them.”

“What? What do you think—”

“You’re going to kill them. Kill me, too.”

Before he realized what he was saying, Theo blurted, “That’s crazy! You’re not one of them!”

“I was, once. Just like them. Worse. I’ll die with them.” Dorn reached the hatch and started to tap out the command code with his prosthetic hand.

Victor said, “You’re going to warn them?”

“No,” Dorn replied. “I’ll simply join in their fate.”

Elverda protested, “They’ll kill you as soon as they see you!”

“What difference does that make?”

Pushing herself up from the command chair, Elverda crossed the bridge to Dorn’s side. “I can’t let you kill yourself.”

“I’m going to die anyway,” he said softly. “We all will, sooner or later. Why prolong the misery?”

“Because I need you,” Elverda answered. “If you die, I’ll die too. I’ll have no reason to go on living.”

Theo stared at them. The cyborg with his death wish. The old woman trying to save him from himself. His mother and sister, frozen speechless. And his father in that fierce beard he’d grown, looking as implacable as death itself.

Turning to the main screen, Theo said loudly, “They’re through the third hatch. They’ll be entering the section we mined next.”

Everyone turned to the screen.

Theo went to the command chair. “Might be a good idea to pump the air out of the passageway before we blow the grenades,” he said, leaning over the control panel.

Valker himself was now taking a turn at lugging the laser welder. Trotting up the passageway behind him, Nicco toted the power pack.

“How’re we doing on juice?” Valker asked over his shoulder.

Nicco peered at the colored bar of the indicator. “ ’Bout halfway down. We can recharge off the ship’s current if we hafta.”

Valker said, “That’d take some time. I don’t want to keep those ladies waiting.”

Nicco laughed. Behind him, Kirk was leading the other seven men. They stopped at the closed hatch. Nicco lowered the power pack to the deck; Valker propped the bulky welder on one hip and aimed it at the control pad.

“Warning,” said a deep voice. The men all looked up at the intercom speaker set into the overhead. “Warning. This passageway will be evacuated to vacuum in thirty seconds. Air pressure will be reduced to zero.”

“Bastards!” Kirk snapped.

Valker was grinning inside the inflated hood of his nanosuit. “Seal up or breathe vacuum, boys,” he said, almost cheerfully.

“They think they can stop us?”

“They’re gettin’ scared.”

“Desperate.”

“They can’t think of anything else to do, I guess.”

Should be enough air in the suit tanks for an hour, at least, Valker thought. Plenty enough to get through the last of these hatches and into the bridge. I’ll let Kirk lead the charge: that guy with the beard took my pistol. Let Kirk go in first. He’s a hothead, he’ll charge right into the gun. Then we can cut the bearded one down and the kid and the cyborg, too.

“Everybody okay?” Valker asked. They heard him through their suit radios and nodded.

“Then let’s get through these frigging hatches!”

“The entire passageway is in vacuum,” Dorn announced, his eyes on the control board, his back to Victor.

“Why’d you warn them?” Angela asked.

Dorn glanced toward Elverda, but did not answer.

“They’re going into the section where we planted the grenades,” Theo said, feeling perspiration trickle down his ribs.

Dorn started toward the hatch again.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Victor demanded.

“Dorn!” Elverda said sharply. “No!”

“I have to,” the cyborg replied.

Victor stepped between Dorn and the hatch. “Stay here. You can’t stop this.”

For a long silent moment Dorn stood eye to eye with Victor, un-moving. Then he said, “I belong with them. Kill me too.”

“I don’t want to kill you,” Victor said.

“Yes you do. You simply don’t know it yet.”

“They’re entering the section we mined,” Theo said, turning from the main screen to the two men confronting one another. “If we’re going to blow those grenades we’ve got to do it now.”

Before Victor could reply, Dorn said, “I’m the man who attacked your ship. I am Dorik Harbin.”

“What?”

Theo felt his guts clench with shock. He saw his father reach for the pistol he’d tucked into his waistband.

“He was Dorik Harbin,” Elverda said, rushing to Dorn’s side. “But he’s changed, he’s—”

“I wiped out the Chrysalis habitat,” Dorn said, his voice flat, emotionless. “Then I attacked a ship named Syracuse.”

Victor stared at the cyborg. He couldn’t get a word out of his throat. But his right hand pulled the pistol from his waist.

“He’s not the same person!” Elverda pleaded. “He tried to kill himself. He’s spent his life atoning for his sins.”

Victor raised the pistol to the level of Dorn’s eyes. “You attacked my ship? You nearly killed my whole family!”

“So kill me,” Dorn said softly. “Release me from life.”

Theo stood frozen at the control panel and stared at his father. His father held the gun at arm’s length, unwavering, pointed at the cyborg’s face. His mother and sister were clutching each other, still in their space suits, their faces torn with fear and uncertainty.

“Please!” Elverda begged, pushing herself between Dorn and Theo’s father.

Dorn grasped the old woman by her shoulders and lifted her off her feet. Placing her down gently to one side, he turned back to Victor.

“So kill me,” he said.

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: BRIDGE

“You attacked our ship,” Victor said, the words barely struggling past his gritted teeth. “You tried to kill us.”

Dorn said nothing.

“But you survived,” Elverda reminded. “You lived through it.”

Victor grimaced. “No thanks to this… this… monster.”

“So kill me and get your revenge,” Dorn said.

Victor stared at the cyborg. Kill him! urged a savage voice within his mind. Kill him. He deserves to die. He wants to die.

Victor’s finger froze on the pistol’s trigger. He closed his eyes briefly, but when he opened them again Dorn still stood before him.

“No one will blame you,” Dorn said.

“Don’t do it!” Elverda pleaded.

“I can’t,” Victor groaned, dropping the pistol to his side. “By all the fiends of hell, I can’t do it.”

“Then don’t kill those other men, either,” Dorn said softly.

Theo looked up at the screen again and saw that Valker and his crew were marching along the passageway to the next hatch.

“Dad!” he called.

Victor seemed in a daze. His father stared at the main screen but didn’t seem to understand what he was seeing. “Dad, now!” Theo called.

Dorn turned toward Theo. “Don’t murder them.”

Sudden rage boiled through Theo. They tried to murder me. They want to rape Mom and Angie.

Dorn repeated, “Don’t—”

“The hell I won’t!” Theo yelled, and he slammed his fist onto the control key that ignited the grenades.

In the airlessness of the passageway the detonations made no sound, but the scavengers were jolted off their feet as the bulkhead around the closed hatch in front of them was torn apart by sudden flashes of explosion.

Through his suit radio Valker heard his men shouting and swearing as he struggled to his knees. Weight seemed to be dwindling, as if he were suddenly floating. Kirk and others were sprawled in a heap, drifting up off the deck, arms and legs thrashing. The entire section of the passageway had been blasted loose, tearing itself out of the ship’s wheel-shaped structure and lumbering off into empty space.

Nicco was tangled beneath the laser welder, but in the sudden near-weightlessness he pushed it off with a grunt and a string of curses.

“They’ve torn this whole section out of the ship!” Kirk yelled, pushing himself to a standing position. The effort made him float off the deck altogether; his hooded head bounced off the overhead.

Hovering in a weightless crouch, Valker realized there was enough light to see by. The passageway sections must have individual battery-powered emergency lights, he reasoned.

“Anybody hurt?” he asked.

“Fuck that! We’re drifting away from the ship.”

“We’re headin’ for friggin’ Pluto or someplace!”

“Calm down,” Valker said, making a soothing motion with both hands. “Calm down. We ain’t dead yet.”

“Won’t be long, though.”

“Bullshit!” Valker snapped. “We’ve got more than an hour’s worth of air in our tanks and enough fuel in our jet packs to get back to the ship.”

“This time we blow a hole in their bridge first off,” Kirk snarled. “No more pussyfootin’ around.”

Victor dashed to the control board and clapped his son on the back. “You did it, Thee! Good work!”

Theo stared at the main screen. The outside cameras showed the torn section of Hunter’s hull spinning slowly away from the ship.

“Now let’s get ourselves out of here,” Victor said.

“We have no propulsion,” Elverda reminded him. “They disabled our fusion thruster.”

Theo jabbed a finger on the key that opened the suit-to-suit radio frequency.

“… got more than an hour’s worth of air in our tanks and enough fuel in our jet packs to get back to the ship.”

Valker’s voice, Theo recognized.

Then Kirk’s snarling, “This time we blow a hole in their bridge first off. No more pussyfootin’ around.”

Theo turned to his father. “They’re coming back!”

“But now they’re vulnerable,” Victor said. “They’re floating in vacuum, in space suits.” He brandished the laser pistol.

“You think the gun has enough charge to get them all?” Theo wondered.

“All we need to do is puncture their suits. A pinhole will do.”

“No,” Dorn said. “Please!”

Victor glared at him. “Listen. Just because I couldn’t shoot you in cold blood doesn’t mean that I’ll allow those cutthroats to get back to this ship.”

“Don’t murder them,” Dorn begged. “Choose life over death.”

“Tell that to them!” Victor snapped.

“There must be another way.”

Theo looked into the cyborg’s half-human face. “Maybe there is another way,” he said.

Pauline hardly recognized the fiercely bearded man who had come aboard Hunter as her gentle, thoughtful husband—until the moment he failed to kill Dorn. Victor, she thought. Despite everything, despite the years of anguish, he couldn’t kill the man who’s caused all our troubles. Not in cold blood. Not Victor. He couldn’t.

But she saw that Victor was perfectly ready to do whatever he had to in order to protect her and Angela. What would he do if he knew that I’ve slept with Valker? How will he feel about me?

She looked at Angela, standing beside her, and at the elderly woman who tried to save Dorn from his own guilt-ridden death wish. Angie knows about Valker now, Pauline told herself. But she won’t tell her father; she won’t breathe a word about it, not to Victor or even to Theo. It’s our secret. I’ll have to talk to her about it, explain what happened. Make her understand. If I can. If I can.

She realized Theo was asking something of Dorn. With an effort, she forced her thoughts aside and focused on the others on the bridge.

“Do you have suits for yourselves?” Theo was asking Dorn.

Elverda replied, “Nanosuits, yes. There are several in the locker by the main airlock.”

“Why should they need suits?” Victor demanded.

Theo jabbed a thumb at the main screen. The scavengers were floating out of the twisted wreckage of the severed hull section.

“They’re going to be coming here. We’d better get off this vessel and into Pleiades.”

Victor grinned with understanding. “Pleiades has propulsion. Her fusion engine works and she’s got enough fuel to get back to Ceres.”

“Right,” said Theo. “Let those dog turds have this ship. It can’t move. It’s a derelict, thanks to them.”

“And we’ll get away on Pleiades,” said Victor.

“But we’ve got to be quick,” Theo urged.

“Wait,” Pauline said.

The men turned toward her.

“They’ve got their own ship: Vogeltod. Its main engine works and they’ve got fuel for it in her tanks.”

“I know,” Theo said. “I’ll have to take care of that.”

Victor bent over the control panel. “We’ve got to put some distance between us and those scavengers.”

Dorn came up beside him. “With only the maneuvering jets, we can’t go far.”

Theo told him, “Move us toward Syracuse.”

“Syracuse?” his father demanded. “You mean Pleiades.”

“Syracuse,” Theo replied. “And their ship, Vogeltod.”

SPACE RACE

“Anybody hurt?” Valker asked again.

He was clinging by one hand to a cleat on the outer skin of the broken hull section, spinning slowly in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but the emptiness of the universe all around him. Along the curve of the section he could see his men pulling themselves out of the wreckage, slowly, still in shock from the explosion.

“Well?” he demanded. “All you huskies in one piece?”

“My hand still hurts,” Nicco complained.

“I twisted my leg.”

“My insides don’t feel so good.”

“That’s the zero-g,” Kirk’s scornful voice countered. “Don’t upchuck in your hood.”

A scattering of snickering laughs.

The broken hull section turned enough for Valker to see the rest of Hunter gleaming in the sunlight, one section of its wheel-shaped hull gone, the shattered ends blackened by the explosions.

“All right, all right. Pull yourselves together. We’ve got to get back to that ship and give those pissants what they deserve.”

Once they got to the auxiliary airlock, Theo saw how simple it was for Dorn and Ms. Apacheta to get into nanosuits. Just like pulling on a set of coveralls. He hefted the new backpack that Dorn had given him, feeling its weight settled on his shoulders, then went to his sister.

“I’ll check out your backpack,” Theo said to Angela.

“Let your mother do that,” Victor said. He was still in his nanofabric suit, its hood pushed back against his shoulders.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Victor asked as he checked Theo’s backpack.

“Yes, sir.”

“I ought to be doing this myself,” Victor muttered. “If anything goes wrong…”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong, Dad. It’s my idea; I’ll do it. You take care of Mom and Angie.”

Despite his father’s beard Theo could see the uncertainty, the anxiety in his face.

“I can do it, Dad,” he insisted. “You can trust me.”

Victor looked up into his son’s eyes, then clasped him on the shoulder of his bulky hard suit. “I know you can do it, son. It’s just that… if anything should go wrong—”

“Then you’ll be with Mom and Angie, protecting them.”

Theo lowered his bubble helmet over his head, sealed it to the suit’s collar, but left the visor open. Dorn had volunteered to stay aboard Hunter in Theo’s place, but neither Theo nor his father completely trusted the cyborg. He’s too fond of death, Theo said to himself. This job needs somebody who wants to live through it.

“It shouldn’t take long to wreck the controls,” Victor said.

“I know,” said Theo.

“They’ll come straight to the bridge as soon as they see you’re ramming Hunter into their ship.”

“If they’re smart they’ll jet back to their own ship and get out of here before Hunter smashes into them.”

“No, they’ll come after you. They’ll want to prevent the collision so they can keep Hunter for salvage.”

“I’ll zip out before they can get to me.”

Victor nodded minimally.

Theo could feel the eyes of his mother and sister on him. And the cyborg and the old woman, too. He remembered a word from his history lessons: kamikaze.

“Is it just my eyes, or is Hunter moving away from us?” Kirk asked.

The ten scavengers had floated free of the torn-out section of Hunter. Gripping their makeshift weapons, they were jetting back toward the vessel. Valker had appropriated the laser pistol that one of the men had carried.

“Hard to judge distance out here,” he muttered.

Then he saw three glittering puffs of gas from the maneuvering thrusters on one side of Hunter’s broken hull.

“They’re moving her!”

“Towards Syracuse]” Nicco bellowed, pointing at the distant wheel shape of the battered cargo ship.

“And Vogeltod!” Kirk snarled. “The bastards’re going to ram us!”

“Power up, boys,” Valker commanded. “We’ve got to stop Hunter before it hits our ship!”

“Look! They’re leavin’ Hunter!”

“Headin’ for Pleiades!”

“Let’s get them!”

“First things first, boys,” Valker said, his voice high with excitement. “We’ve gotta stop Hunter from plowing into our ship.”

“But they’ll get away on Pleiades!”

“Let ’em,” Valker insisted. “We’ve got to save our own ship first. Nicco, take Ross and Turk and get back to Vogeltod. Disconnect her from Syracuse and get her the hell out of the way. The rest of you come with me.”

We’ll take Hunter before she rams our ship, but we’ll lose our best prize, Valker admitted silently: Pleiades, an intact, first-rate ship. And the two women. He saw Pauline in his mind’s eye: beautiful and strong. With her I could become anything I want to be. But I’d have to get rid of these apes first. And even before that I’d have to take care of the people with her.

That includes her daughter, Valker realized. Or maybe I could take them both. He grinned, inside the bubble of his nanosuit hood. Both of them. Mother and daughter. Maybe I could…

He shook his head. Forget that. If you don’t move fast you’re going to lose your own ship and die like a chump out here.

Jetting between Angela and Victor, Pauline saw Pleiades looming larger as they approached.

“It’s working.” She heard Dorn’s heavy voice in her helmet earphones. “Some of them are racing back to their own ship.”

Victor said, “But the rest of them are reboarding Hunter.”

“Theo’s still on Hunter!” Pauline cried out. “Alone!”

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: BRIDGE

Sitting awkwardly in his hard suit on the bridge’s command chair, Theo heard the scavengers’ suit-to-suit radio chatter as he worked frantically to dismantle the navigation program and controls.

I’ve got maybe five minutes, he told himself as he feverishly pecked at the navigation keyboard.

“Navigation program cannot be erased,” said the computer’s maddeningly calm voice, “without authorization from the ship’s captain.”

“Erase it!” Theo shouted. “Emergency override!”

Coolly, the computer replied, “Voiceprint identification does not match the captain’s. Emergency command not valid.”

Theo was already out of the command chair before the computer’s stubborn refusal was finished. He rummaged through the tool bin built into the end of the control console. The best he could come up with was a hand-sized laser welder, similar to the one his father had brandished earlier, good for spot welds on electronics equipment and not much else.

“It’ll have to do,” Theo muttered to himself. On the main screen, above the control console, he saw Syracuse slowly, slowly growing larger as Hunter inched toward it. The scavenger’s ship was still attached to it. Good! Theo said to himself. Maybe I’ll get them both, after all. But he wished he could push Hunter faster.

Then, on one of the auxiliary screens that displayed views of the ship’s interior, he saw Valker and a half-dozen of his men pushing through the open airlock and sprinting up the passageway toward the bridge.

Knowing he had only moments, Theo used the butt end of the hand laser to smash the transparent covers on the navigation controls and then fired pulses of infrared energy to slag the circuitry.

“It’s not much,” he said, “but it’s the best I can do.”

He snapped his visor shut and clumped off the bridge toward the emergency airlock. He could hear the pounding footsteps of Valker and his crew approaching. Theo ducked into the airlock, fidgeted impatiently while it cycled down to vacuum, then stepped off the outer hatch’s rim into the nothingness of empty space.

Valker was the first of the scavengers to bolt into the bridge. He immediately saw that the key controls on the main console had been smashed, their circuits melted.

“Sonofabitch!” he snapped. “The little bastard’s screwed us, but good.”

Kirk came up beside him. “I can fix this. Rewire—”

“How long?” Valker asked.

“Huh?”

“How long would it take you?”

“Half an hour,” said Kirk. “Maybe a little longer.”

Valker sneered at him. “And just how long do you think it’s gonna take this clunker to smash into Syracuse?”

Kirk scowled back at him.

“I’d say it’d be a lot less than half an hour,” Valker answered his own question.

“Yeah. Guess so.”

Valker bent over the communications console and tapped on its keys. “Nicco! You uncouple the ship yet?”

A moment’s hesitation, then, “Got the access tunnel disconnected. Powering up the maneuvering jets right now.”

“Good. Get our ship the hell out of the way. This bucket’s going to ram right into Syracuse in another ten-fifteen minutes.”

“We’ll be outta the way, Skip.”

Nodding with satisfaction, Valker turned back to Kirk and the rest of his men.

“So whattawe do now?” Kirk asked.

“Get to Pleiades as fast as we can,” Valker replied. “She’s our prize. Her, and those women aboard her.”

Standing in Pleiades’s open main airlock in their nanofabric space suits, Victor and Dorn could see the lone figure of Theo in his hard-shell suit floating across the gulf that separated the ship from Hunter.

And behind him, seven nanosuited scavengers erupted from Hunter’s airlock.

“They’re not returning to their own ship,” Dorn said calmly.

“No,” Victor agreed. “They’re heading here.”

“Your son has a good lead on them.”

But Victor was thinking, Seven of them. And we’ve only got this one pistol. The hand welder’s useless in this kind of fight: its range is too short.

“Once Theo comes aboard,” he said to Dorn, “we’ve got to power up and get away from them.”

“You’d better go to the bridge, then,” Dorn replied.

“Not until Theo gets here.”

“That may be too late.”

“Wow,” said Angela, glancing around at the spacious, well-appointed bridge of Pleiades. “Talk about luxury.”

Pauline said, “Your father lived here alone for all those months.”

“How could he control such a large ship by himself?” Angela wondered aloud.

Elverda said, “Dorn reconfigured Hunter’s controls so that one person could handle it. Your father must have done the same here.”

With a small smile of appreciation, Pauline started to say, “I didn’t think Victor knew how—”

“Pauline!” her husband’s voice blared over the intercom. “We’ve got to power up the main drive and get away from here.”

She looked at Elverda. “Do you know how?”

The sculptress shook her head. “I could do it on Hunter, but these controls are strange to me.”

“Pauline, did you hear me?” Victor’s voice sounded strained with tension.

“Victor, I don’t know how to do it!” Pauline said.

Angela plunked herself down on the command chair. “Talk me through it, Dad,” she called out. “I’ll do it.”

“Talk you through it?” Victor shouted.

“I’m in the command chair,” Angela’s voice replied, bright and eager. “There’s an electronic keyboard in front of me.”

Theo was almost within arm’s reach; the scavengers close behind him and coming up fast. Victor closed his eyes momentarily, trying to visualize the command keyboard.

“Extreme right end,” he said. “The key’s labeled ‘propulsion.’ ”

“I see it,” Angela said. “Oh, good! The whole keyboard’s changed to the propulsion program.”

Dorn reached out with his prosthetic arm and helped Theo to remain standing as he glided into the airlock.

“Made it!” Theo said, exultant.

“But not soon enough,” said Dorn, pointing to the scavengers, barely a hundred meters away.

CARGO SHIP PLEIADES: MAIN AIRLOCK

Standing at the open airlock hatch, Victor watched the seven space-suited figures approaching Pleiades. They’re going to get here before we can get the fusion drive going, he realized, then added, If Angie can figure out how to do it.

Turning to Theo, he commanded, “Get up to the bridge and power up the fusion drive! Now!”

Without even lifting the visor of his helmet Theo banged the wall control that opened the airlock’s inner hatch. Alarms hooted and emergency hatches farther up the passageway slammed shut as Theo dashed out, heading for the bridge.

Victor looked down at the pistol in his hand. The indicator along its barrel showed it was fully charged.

“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” said Dorn.

“Don’t try to stop me,” Victor warned.

“You can prevent them from boarding this ship without killing them.”

“Can I now?” Victor’s voice echoed the scorn he felt.

“Warn them. Remind them of how vulnerable they are.”

“Men don’t always behave logically, especially when their lives are at risk.”

“Warn them,” Dorn insisted.

Victor stared at the cyborg for a long, silent moment. At last he said, “Words won’t stop them.”

Dorn reached out his prosthetic hand. “Let me have the pistol, then.”

“No!”

Patiently, Dorn explained, “I’m a good enough shot to hit that big laser welder they’re carrying. Perhaps a warning from you and a disabling shot from me will discourage them. In any event, you don’t want them to use the laser to ruin the fusion drive’s thruster, as they did to Hunter.”

Victor thought it over for half a second. Maybe all he wants is to get the gun away from me. He could probably crush it in his metal hand. Then we’d be totally defenseless.

“I don’t want them here any more than you do,” Dorn said, his metal hand still extended. “But we at least should warn them that we’ll defend ourselves if they don’t leave us.”

He could take the gun from me, Victor was thinking. And probably break every bone in my hand while he’s doing it.

“Killing should be our last resort,” Dorn said.

Reluctantly, Victor handed him the pistol. Then he clicked on the radio frequency that the scavengers were using.

“Don’t come any closer,” he said sternly. “We’re armed and we’ll defend ourselves.”

The seven approaching figures did not waver. They were close enough now to see the weapons they were brandishing.

Valker answered, “We’re armed too. And we outnumber you.”

Dorn raised his prosthetic arm and, holding the pistol in his human hand, cradled it in the metal one.

“You’re hanging out there like targets in a shooting gallery,” Victor said. “One puncture of your suit and you’re a dead man.”

The scavengers kept coming.

Using both hands, Dorn raised the pistol to eye level. He pressed its infrared finder with his thumb, walked the red spot in the IR scope center to the flank of the welder that Valker carried cradled in his arms. He squeezed the trigger.

The welder flared as the laser pulse punched a hole of molten metal into its side. Valker twitched and yelped and let go of the bulky tool. It floated weightlessly for a moment, then jerked as the cord connecting it to its power pack pulled it short. The smaller man carrying the power pack let go of it, and the two pieces floated away from him.

Victor heard the scavengers cursing and muttering.

“Go back to your ship,” Victor told them. “Leave us alone.”

Valker hung in emptiness, watching the laser welder and its power pack tumble slowly away. Kirk was beside him, an arm’s length away, the five other members of his crew hovering around them.

“Go back to your own ship while you can,” he heard Victor’s voice in his suit’s radio speaker. “You can have Hunter and Syracuse. Leave us alone.”

“You’re willing to give us two ships that are gonna mangle each other while you take the one that’s in perfect condition?” Valker shot back. “A sweet deal—for you.”

“Go back to your own ship,” Dorn said. “My next shot will kill you.”

Valker heard the cyborg’s threat, as calmly unemotional as an ocean wave surging onto the shore.

“I thought you were a priest,” he shot back.

“Don’t push me,” Dorn said. “The killer inside me can break through and cause havoc.”

The airlock of Pleiades was close enough for Valker to clearly make out the two men standing inside its open hatch. One of them—the cyborg, he guessed—was holding a pistol rock steady in both hands.

He’s pointing it straight at me, Valker realized. One puncture of this suit and I’m a dead man. The freak’s right: we’re exposed out here. He could kill four or five of us before we got to the hatch.

“All right,” he said, fingering his jetpack controls. “All right. You win. For now.”

Kirk growled, “You’re gonna let them go?”

Valker made a toothy grin for Kirk. “You want to go in and be a hero? Go right ahead. Be my guest.”

But Kirk had slowed down, too. All seven of the scavengers hovered in the emptiness, close enough to Pleiades almost to touch it, while Dorn stood inside the airlock with that one pistol locked in his unwavering hands.

“A whole fucking ship!” Kirk whined.

“You gotta know when to fold your tent, boys,” said Valker, “and silently steal away.”

With enormous reluctance, the scavengers started back toward Vogeltod, which now was separated from Syracuse and slowly edging farther away from it.

“We’ll get them,” Valker assured his men. “Once we’re back in Vogeltod, we’ll power up and—”

“And chase us all the way back to Ceres,” Victor’s voice cut in. “Good. Do that. I’m sure the rock rats will be glad to see you, after what we’ll tell them about you.”

Valker scowled and started to reply, “Oh yeah, well you just might—”

“Hey!” Kirk yelled. “They’re gonna hit!”

As Theo ducked through the hatch of Pleiades’s bridge, still awkward in the clumsy hard suit, he saw Angie—also in her hard shell—sitting at the command chair, his mother and the elderly sculptress on either side of her.

Lifting off his bubble helmet as he went to the command console, Theo said, “Dad wants me to—”

“I think I’ve got it all set up, Thee,” Angela said happily. “All I’ve got to do now is press this key, the one that says ‘ignition.’ ”

Theo swiftly scanned the electronic keyboard. “I think you’re right, Angie. I think you’ve done it.”

“So let’s light the fusion torch and get out of here,” Angela said.

Theo glanced up at the main screen. “Oh, for the love of god— they’re going to crash!”

They all stared at the screen as Hunter slowly, inexorably, plowed into Syracuse. In the vacuum of space there was no noise, but Theo saw the two ships smash together in a rending, pulverizing collision that tore both ships into mangled shards of metal.

That was our home, Theo realized. He saw Syracuse tear apart, whole sections of its wheel-shaped structure ripping loose, the tube-tunnels where he went diving as a kid breaking apart, pipes and pumps from the cranky old water recycler flung into space, a shape that looked like the old sofa from their living quarters spinning end over end.

“It’s gone,” Pauline whispered. “Our home… it’s gone.”

“Hunter, too,” said Elverda Apacheta, her voice almost reverent. “Dorn will never finish his quest now.”

“But we’re here,” Theo said. “We’re alive and we’re safe.”

“And we’re heading for Ceres,” Angela added, pressing her forefinger on the ignition key.

Pleiades surged into acceleration as its fusion torch drive lit up.

HABITAT CHRYSALIS II: COUNCIL CHAIRMAN’S OFFICE

Big George Ambrose sat behind his desk like a smoldering red-haired volcano. The unpretentious office seemed crowded to Theo, with his parents and sister, Dorn and the sculptress taking up every available chair.

“There’s nothing illegal with salvaging,” George said guardedly, after listening to their story.

Victor had shaved his beard and looked more normal, Theo thought. Grayer, his face thinner, but now he looked like the father Theo remembered.

“Nothing illegal with salvage,” Victor agreed. “But when you seize ships that are occupied by their rightful owners, that’s not salvage. It’s piracy. And murder.”

George frowned.

“They would have murdered my wife and daughter,” Victor continued. “After raping them.”

“They did try to kill me,” said Theo. “Dorn and Ms. Apacheta saved my life.”

“I guess we’ll have to go after ’em, then,” Big George muttered, clearly unhappy.

“They can’t have gone far,” Victor said. “They’ll have to stop for fuel sooner or later.”

“We don’t have a military force, y’know,” George grumbled. “Never needed a fookin’ army until that bastard wiped out the old habitat.”

Dorn slowly rose to his feet. “That bastard was me.”

George’s eyes went wide. “What?”

“I was Dorik Harbin. I attacked Chrysalis. I also attacked these people’s ship, Syracuse.”

“That was another person,” Elverda said quickly. “He’s not the same man.”

But George got up from his desk chair, seething. “You’re Dorik Harbin?”

“I was.”

“You wiped out Chrysalis? Killed more’n a thousand helpless people?”

“I did.”

Moving swiftly around the desk, George reached for Dorn. “I’ll break your fookin’ back!”

Everyone seemed frozen by Big George’s sudden rage. Except Theo, who pushed between George and Dorn and laid both his hands on George’s chest.

“Leave him alone!” Theo snapped. “He saved my life.”

George snorted like a dragon. Fire blazed from his eyes. He grabbed Theo by the front of his coveralls, lifted him off his feet with one hand and tossed him onto the desk top with a painful thud.

“Stop!” Victor shouted, going to his son. “You’ll be just as bad as he was.”

Dorn remained as unmoved as a rock. George wrapped his big hands around the cyborg’s neck. “You bastard!” he shouted. “You bloody bastard!”

Elverda pushed herself up from her chair and slapped at George’s beefy arm. “Don’t you dare!” she snapped. “You leave him alone!”

Big George blinked at her, his expression suddenly changing into a naughty little boy’s, confronted with an angry schoolteacher. His arms dropped to his sides.

Elverda waved a finger in George’s face. “He’s tried to atone for what he did. He’s a changed man. Don’t you dare hurt him.”

“Give him a fair trial, at least,” Theo said, getting off the desk, rubbing his bruised hip.

Dorn was still standing perfectly motionless, unmoved, like a statue, like a man awaiting execution.

George took a step back, sagged onto the edge of his desk. “Dorik Harbin,” he muttered, his chest heaving.

“Go ahead and kill me,” Dorn said. “I deserve it.”

“That’d be just as bad as he was,” Theo repeated.

“We’ll have a fookin’ trial, all right,” George said darkly. Going back to his chair and thumping heavily into it, he called to his desktop communicator, “Security. Send a squad to my office to take a prisoner into custody.”

Only then did anyone notice that Elverda had sunk back into her chair, her face gray, gasping for breath.

Elverda opened her eyes. She saw that she was in a hospital cubical. The lights were turned down low; the compartment smelled clean, brand new, as if it had just been opened for her. A faint beeping sound made her turn her head toward the bank of monitoring sensors lining the wall to her left.

I must have fainted, she realized. The pain was less now. Almost gone. But she could still feel it throbbing deep inside her like a lurking demon.

She tried to sit up and the bed automatically lifted behind her. She saw a shadowy figure in the compartment’s only chair.

“Dorn?” she whispered.

The cyborg stirred out of sleep. His human eye opened; the other one glowed red in the dimly lit chamber.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

Elverda considered the question for a moment. “Not bad,” she said, then added with a sardonic smile, “considering the condition I’m in.”

“You haven’t lost your sense of humor.” Dorn reached for a remote control wand on the bedside table and the lights came up a little.

The sullen pain in her chest notched up a bit, and the sensors’ beeping quickened.

“The doctors say you need to go to Selene for a full rebuilding of your heart,” Dorn told her.

I’d never survive the trip, Elverda said to herself. Aloud, though, she asked Dorn, “I thought you were under arrest.”

He nodded. “There are two armed guards outside your door. I go on trial tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Elverda felt a pang of alarm. The monitors beside her bed changed their tone slightly. “How long have I been unconscious?”

“Not quite thirty-six hours. The rock rats move swiftly. George Ambrose wants the trial held right away.”

“I’ll speak for your defense.”

“No need. I don’t want a defense. They have every right to execute me.”

“No!” she snapped. And the monitors’ beeping pitched still higher. “They may have a right to execute Dorik Harbin, but he’s already dead.”

Dorn almost smiled. “Not dead enough,” he muttered.

THE TRIAL

It took less than forty-eight hours for Big George to arrange for the trial of Dorik Harbin.

Dorn stood alone in a darkened video studio, bathed in a pool of light. In the shadows armed security guards ringed the cyborg while communications technicians operated a trio of video cameras, all focused on Dorn. The technicians’ monitors showed that every citizen of Chrysalis II could watch the trial by television from their quarters.

The etched metal of the prosthetic half of his face glinted in the pitiless glare of the overhead lights. From his office, Big George read the charge against Dorik Harbin: one thousand, one hundred seventeen counts of murder.

“Do you admit that you deliberately killed the inhabitants of the original Chrysalis?” George’s disembodied voice rumbled in the TV studio like an approaching thunderstorm, seething with barely repressed fury.

“I do,” said Dorn.

“What d’you have to say in your defense?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Nothing at all?”

“Nothing,” Dorn repeated.

Suddenly there was a hubbub in the darkness beyond the pool of light in which Dorn stood. A door swung open and Elverda Apacheta rolled herself to his side, sitting in a powered wheelchair.

“I have something to say in the defense of this man,” she announced. Dorn saw that her pallor was still sickly gray; an oxygen tube was hooked to her nostrils; her eyes were rimmed with red.

Before Dorn could stop her, Elverda struggled to her feet and said, “This is not the same man who attacked your habitat. Dorik Harbin has been dead for many years now. This man, Dorn, has spent those years atoning for the sins of Dorik Harbin.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Big George’s voice spat. “The only question here is whether or not he murdered the people of Chrysalis. He admits that he did it. It’s time to vote on the verdict.”

Dorn and Elverda saw a screen light up on the wall before them. Numbers flickered, too fast to follow.

Finally the numbers stopped. Big George’s voice announced, “It’s almost unanimous. The verdict is guilty.”

“No!” Elverda gasped. Dorn rested his human hand on her frail shoulder.

“Now for the penalty,” George went on, sounding as implacable as an avalanche. “We’ve never executed anybody before, but if ever a man deserved the death sentence, this is the one. How do you vote—”

“Wait!” Elverda shouted. Dorn could feel her trembling beneath his hand. “You don’t need to kill him. You can exile him. You’ve done that before: permanent exile for criminals. Exile this man if you want to, but don’t kill him!”

“What he’s done deserves more than exile,” Big George’s voice boomed. “He should never have the chance to hurt anybody again. Death!”

“He’ll never return here,” Elverda promised, shuddering, almost breathless. “Exile him. Don’t stain your hands with his blood.”

For long moments there was no reply; only profound silence. At last, his voice a low growl, George responded, “All right then, we’ll vote on it. Execution or exile.”

Dorn slid his arm around Elverda’s bone-thin shoulders to support her as the electronic vote was swiftly tabulated on the wall screen. She slumped against him, her strength almost gone.

Once the numbers stopped scrolling across the screen, they read sixty-seven percent in favor of exile, thirty-one percent for execution, two percent abstaining.

At last the voice of Big George Ambrose came through the speakers, like a pronouncement from the heavens:

“The vote’s been verified. Dorik Harbin is hereby exiled from Chrysalis II for life.”

George sounded very disappointed.

The studio lights winked out. Elverda sagged against Dorn, her head lolling back on her shoulders. He grasped her in both his arms.

“Medic!” Dorn shouted, suddenly frantic. “She’s collapsed!”

A HIGHER LAW

The funeral service was brief and attended only by Dorn and the Zacharias family. And the security guards that followed Dorn everywhere. Big George would not willingly place himself in the same section of the habitat as Dorn; the people of Chrysalis II may have voted leniency for Dorik Harbin, but George would not be party to their decision.

The International Consortium of Universities had offered to send a representative to the solemnities, but Dorn decided not to wait. He went ahead with the funeral the day after Elverda died, her heart too frail to support her any longer, despite the stem cell therapy that had saved her life after her first heart attack. Her final words were to Dorn:

“It’s time for me to leave you. I’m too tired to go on.” He was kneeling at her bed in the habitat’s small hospital, like a grieving son at his mother’s bedside.

She stroked the etched metal of his skullcap with her skeletal, bloodless hand. “You must go on without me, Dorn. Can you find the strength to do that?” Her voice was a feather-light whisper.

He didn’t answer.

“There’s something that a very brave and wise man said, nearly two centuries ago,” Elverda rasped. “He said, ‘Life persists in the middle of destruction. Therefore there must be a higher law than that of destruction.’ ”

Dorn muttered, “A higher law.”

“Gandhi said that. Can you believe it? Can you follow its path?”

“Is that what you wish?”

“Yes,” she said, with all of the little strength left in her. “Follow the law of life. You have much to give. You have much to live for.”

“I wish I thought so.”

“Do it for me, then. My dying wish. Live! Turn your back on death. Make your life mean something.”

For long moments he was silent. At last Dorn said, “I’ll try. I promise you—I’ll try.”

But by then Elverda Apacheta was dead.

Dorn commandeered an equipment pod for her sarcophagus and, with all four of the Zacharias family helping him, placed it in one of the habitat’s airlocks and fired it out into space.

“She will become an asteroid, circling the Sun just as her Rememberer does.”

Theo thought he saw tears glimmering in Dorn’s human eye. He heard his mother and sister sobbing softly behind him.

Hours later, feeling utterly wretched, Theo returned to the quarters that the rock rats’ administrative council had granted them: a string of three adjoining living units, with connecting doors between them.

Bone tired, weary and discouraged, he looked around the spare little compartment. The message from Selene University still flickered on his desktop screen. Where do I go from here? he asked himself. Not to Selene: they’ve made that clear enough. The university doesn’t want me. They turned down my application.

He heard a snuffling sound from the compartment next door. Putting his ear to the connecting door he listened for a moment. Angle’s crying, he realized.

Theo tapped on the door and called, “Angie?”

The sobbing stopped. “Thee?”

“Are you all right?”

He slid the door back and saw that her eyes were puffy and red, her cheeks runneled with tears.

“What’s the matter?” Theo asked, stepping into her compartment.

“It’s Leif,” she said, and broke into sobs again.

“Leif? The guy you were seeing…?”

“Leif Haldeman,” Angela choked out, wiping at her eyes.

“He was on Chrysalis,” Theo realized. “He was one of the people Dorik Harbin killed.”

Angela’s red-rimmed eyes widened. “No! He was on a mining ship when the attack happened.”

“Then he’s alive?”

“He’s married,” Angela said, struggling to hold back another burst of tears.

Theo tried not to laugh, not even smile. “Oh,” he said.

“He’s a father.”

He put his arm around his sister’s shoulders and held her close. “Don’t worry Angie. There are lots of other guys in the world.”

“But I loved him!”

He lifted her chin and smiled down at her. “Come on. Fix your face and come with me.”

“Where?”

“To the nearest bar. We can drown our sorrows together.”

“Our… you’ve got sorrows too?”

He sighed. “Yep. Selene University doesn’t want me. No scholarship. It’s been too long since I first applied.”

“But that’s not fair!”

“No, I guess not. But we’ve lost more than four years, Angie. And there’s nothing we can do about that.”

There was only one restaurant in the habitat, the Shoo-Shoo, owned and operated by an Italian cook and his Japanese wife. Neither Angela nor Theo was in the mood for eating, but the hostess-owner took one look at the two downcast young siblings and presented them with a delicate sushi selection before she brought the wine they ordered.

Wisely, she sat them at the sushi bar instead of a table. It was mid-afternoon: most of the tables were empty but there were half a dozen customers along the curving bar, chatting amiably with the sushi chefs (both sons of the owners) and one another.

Angela took an experimental sip of the red wine that Theo had picked at random from the list displayed on the bartop screen.

“Ugh!” She put the stemmed glass down. “People actually drink this?”

Theo felt his mouth tingling. “I guess it must be an acquired taste.”

“Try the sake,” said the young man sitting on Angela’s other side.

“Or a beer,” suggested the guy sitting on the next stool over. “Straight from the brewery on Vesta.”

Before long Angela was deep in conversation with the two of them: mining engineers who began explaining how nanomachines took atoms of selected metals out of asteroids and bypassed the old smelting process. Theo watched as he sipped at his wine and realized that Angie would not be lovelorn for long. Men are attracted to her. She’s sort of beautiful, I guess. Not like me.

On his other side, a few chairs down, a pair of older men were discussing Dorn’s trial.

“I never saw Big George so worked up,” said one of them. “He wanted that cyborg executed. I thought maybe he’d do it himself.”

The other shook his head. “Just about everybody in the habitat is a newcomer. They didn’t see the massacre, like George did. It didn’t affect them personally.”

“I don’t know. I had a brother-in-law on the old Chrysalis. I voted to execute the bastard.”

Theo was about to tell them what he thought when a lithe, darkhaired young woman slid into the chair beside him.

“This seat isn’t taken, is it?” she asked, in a near-whisper.

Theo shook his head, immediately forgetting the other men’s conversation. She was really good-looking, he thought, with intriguing flecks of gold in her deep brown eyes. She wore a form-fitting dark zipsuit with insignias of rank on the cuffs and a stylized logo on her left breast. She must be a member of some ship’s crew, Theo guessed.

“Are you working on a ship?” he asked, knowing it sounded terribly awkward.

She nodded. “Hyades. Medical officer.”

“Oh.” Theo had run out of things to say.

One of the sushi chefs slid a small porcelain bottle of sake to the young woman, and a tiny cup.

“We make the run out to Jupiter station,” she said as she carefully poured some of the hot sake into the little cup.

“Jupiter station,” Theo muttered. “I wish I could go there.”

The young woman sipped at the sake, then said, “They’re looking for people.”

“Scientists. People with degrees.”

“Technicians, too. You don’t have to be a scientist.”

“You still need a degree.”

She focused those gold-flecked eyes on Theo, as if thinking over a problem. Then, “Their chief recruiter is here on the habitat. He’ll make the trip back with us on Hyades.”

Theo nodded glumly.

As if she’d made up her mind about the problem, she said, “I could introduce you to him. He’s looking for technicians.”

Theo didn’t know what to say.

“It couldn’t hurt,” coaxed the young woman, with a shy smile.

“I guess not,” Theo agreed.

She dug into a hip pocket and pulled out a communicator. “I… don’t know your name.”

“Oh! I’m Theo Zacharias.” He held out his hand.

“Zacharias?”

Theo nodded, wondering if he should spell it out for her.

She hesitated a moment, then took his hand in her own as she said softly, “Altai. Altai Madagascar.”

NEW LIVES

By the time Theo returned to the Shoo-Shoo restaurant from his meeting with the Jupiter station’s recruiter he was beaming with happiness. Until he saw his parents sitting at one of the restaurant’s tables, with Angela and Dorn.

Dad’s not going to like my news, he said to himself. Drawing in a deep breath, he headed for his family.

The restaurant was filling up. The customers at the other tables were casting uneasy glances toward the cyborg, but Theo ignored them as he hurried to join the group. He grabbed the empty chair between his father and sister, and started to say, “I’ve got news for—”

Victor Zacharias cut off his son’s words with a dark scowl. “Since when do you encourage your sister to drink wine? In the company of strangers, no less.”

Angela, across the table from Theo, tried to suppress a giggle. And failed.

Theo blinked at his father. “Dad, Angie’s an adult.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

Pauline laid a hand on her husband’s arm. “It’s all right, Victor. It’s nothing to get upset about.”

“I wasn’t drunk,” Angela said. Then she hiccupped.

Victor tried to frown at his daughter, but slowly a smile spread across his face. “Maybe I’m overly protective,” he admitted.

Angela nodded vigorously.

Turning to Theo, Pauline asked, “What’s your good news, Thee?”

He glanced at his father, then replied, “I’ve landed a position on the Jupiter station. It’s only—”

“Jupiter?” His father seemed startled.

“You’re going to leave us?” Pauline asked.

“I’m going to Jupiter, too,” said Dorn.

Ignoring the cyborg, Victor asked, “How in the world could you do this? Why didn’t you talk it over with your mother and me first?”

Because you’d say no, Theo replied silently. Their surprise and displeasure was about what he’d expected. “I met with their recruiter less than an hour ago. A girl I met here at the sushi bar introduced me. It’s only a menial position, really. I’ll be a junior-level technician. But I can take university courses electronically and work toward a science degree!”

“Jupiter,” Pauline murmured.

“The girl who introduced me is the medical officer on the ship that’ll take me to Jupiter,” Theo went on. “She’s really elegant.”

“They took you on?” Victor demanded, suspicious. “Just like that?”

“They need people, Dad. They’re having trouble getting qualified people.”

“I’m not surprised,” Victor grumbled. “That outpost is a long way from civilization.”

“They’ll train me on the job,” Theo went on enthusiastically. “It’s a great opportunity.”

“Jupiter,” Pauline repeated. “It’s such a long way off.”

Angela asked, “How long will you be there, Thee?”

“I’m contracted for two years.”

“You’ve signed a contract with them?” Victor asked darkly. “Without asking me? Without telling me?”

“I’m telling you now, Dad. The pay’s good, if that means anything to you.”

“Two years,” Pauline murmured.

“At least,” said Theo.

They fell silent, each thinking their own thoughts. Pauline looked at her husband. Victor knew what she was trying to tell him. Theo’s grown up. It’s time he went his own way. This was inevitable. But he saw the pain in his wife’s eyes. Leaving for Jupiter. Just like that. Spur of the moment. The boy has no common sense.

“I’m going to Jupiter, too,” Dorn said again.

“On the Hyades?” Theo asked.

“Yes.”

“We’ll be on the ship together, then.”

With the bare minimum of a nod, Dorn said, “Big George wants me off the habitat in two days.”

“But Hyades doesn’t shove off for a week,” said Theo.

“I’ve made arrangements to live on the ship, starting tomorrow. That will keep George’s blood pressure down to normal, almost.”

“What will you be doing at the Jupiter station?” Angela asked the cyborg.

Dorn made a one-shouldered shrug. “I think they want to study me. They’re making deep dives into the Jovian ocean, and a man who’s already half machine may be very useful to them.”

Pauline started to say, “You’ll be leaving in a—”

“So there you are!” called a voice from halfway across the quiet restaurant.

Heads turned. Cheena Madagascar threaded her way between tables, her eyes aimed at Victor. She was wearing a shiny black suit that fitted her like a second skin, polished knee-length boots, a flaming red scarf knotted around her throat.

Victor stumbled to his feet, his face flushed. Theo and Dorn rose, too.

Without being asked, Cheena took the unoccupied chair at the foot of the table.

Flustered, Victor introduced, “Cheena Madagascar, the owner and skipper of Pleiades.”

Cheena made a brittle smile. “Not anymore, Vic. You screwed me out of my ship.”

Victor sputtered as he resumed his seat. Theo almost laughed. He’d never seen his father looking so flummoxed. Then he realized: Madagascar; that’s Altai’s last name, too. And they look so much alike…

“I’m Pauline Zacharias,” said his mother, smiling steel-hard at Cheena.

Cheena nodded. “And you must be Angela. And Theo. And you’re the one we voted to exile.”

Before anyone else could speak, Victor said, “I’ve brought Pleiades back to you. I’m sorry I—”

“Can it, Vic. I don’t own Pleiades anymore. The insurance consortium owns it. They paid off on the bird when you stole it and I bought a new ship, Hyades.”

“Hyades?” Theo blurted. “Then Altai is your daughter?”

“Smart fella,” said Cheena. “Like your father.”

“So what do I do with Pleiades?” Victor asked.

“You don’t have to do a thing. Insurance agents are taking it over right at this instant. They’ll probably want your hide, but that’s not any of my business. Not anymore.”

With that, she got to her feet, blew Victor a kiss, and sauntered away from their table.

Victor ordered another bottle of wine.

It wasn’t until they were in bed that night that Pauline asked, “Just who was that woman?”

Glad that it was too dark for her to see his cheeks reddening, Victor cleared his throat before replying, “I told you, she owned Pleiades. I stole it from her.”

“And now her insurance carrier has repossessed the ship?”

He stared up at the shadowy ceiling of their bedroom. “Yes, and they want me to pay for damages—the difference between what they paid Cheena and what Pleiades is worth on the open market.”

Pauline fell silent and Victor was glad of it. He closed his eyes and tried to change the subject.

“Big George says he’ll hire me for the new construction program. There’s a lot of building going on here, and new projects in the planning stage.”

“Then we can stay at Ceres?” Pauline asked, sounding pleased at the prospect.

“For as long as they keep building. We won’t have to be rock rats anymore and I’ll be able to pay off the insurance debt, in time.”

“Angela wants to go to Selene, to the university.”

“The Moon? But how—”

“She says she’ll work her way through. She’ll take classes part-time and find a job.”

“Doing what?”

He sensed his wife’s amusement. “She learned a lot while we were on Syracuse without you. She’s got a good head for math.”

“Do you think she’ll be all right, on her own? She’s never—”

“Victor, dear, it’s time for Angie to go out on her own. We can’t keep her with us forever.”

He nodded reluctantly. “I suppose not. But with Angie going to Selene and Theo going to Jupiter—”

“It will be just you and me, Victor. The two of us, alone together.”

“The way it was in the beginning,” he said, reaching toward her.

Pauline melted into his arms, but asked softly, “Just how well did you know this Cheena woman?”

He froze. There it is, Victor said to himself. For the flash of an instant he thought about lying his way through, but he heard himself say, “When I was forced to work on her ship, we slept together.”

“That’s what I thought,” Pauline said, her voice gentle, far from accusative. “She had that possessive air about her.”

“I didn’t have much choice,” he tried to explain. “She was captain of the ship and—”

“And we’d been separated for years,” Pauline finished for him. “You didn’t even know if we were still alive.”

“I didn’t have much choice,” he repeated.

“Neither did I,” Pauline whispered.

It took a moment for Victor to understand what she’d said.

“You and Valker?”

He couldn’t see her face in the darkness, but he heard the remorse in her voice. “Once.”

“He forced you?”

“Not really. I was trying to protect Angie. He would’ve gone after her.”

“I should have killed the bastard when I had the chance.”

“It’s over and done with,” Pauline said. “Let Big George and his people take care of Valker.”

It took Victor several moments before he could reply, “Over and done with.”

“It’s time to start our life together again.”

“Time to start new,” he muttered, wondering if he could. “Fresh.”

She leaned into him and they kissed, neither of them knowing what the future would bring, each of them hoping for the best.