The Outcasts of Heaven Belt

Ranger (Discan space) + 0 seconds

“Pappy, are they still closing?”

“Still closing, Betha.” Clewell Welkin bent forward as new readings appeared at the bottom of the screen. “But the rate’s holding steady. They must be cutting power; they couldn’t do ten gees forever. Christ, don’t let them hit us again…”

Betha struck the intercom button again with her fist, “It’s going to be all right. No one else will get near us.” Her voice shook, someone else’s voice, not Betha Torgussen’s, and no one answered, “Come on, somebody, answer me. Eric! Eric! Switch on—”

“Betha.” Clewell leaned out across the padded seat arm, caught her shoulder.

“Pappy, they don’t answer.”

“Betha, one of those ships, it’s not falling back! It’s—”

She brushed away his hand, searching the readouts on the screen. “Look at it! They want to take us. They must; it’s burning chemical fuel, and they can’t afford to waste that much.” She held her breath, knuckles whitening on the cold metal panel. “They’re getting too close. Show them our tail, Pappy.”

Pale eyes flickered in his seamed face. “Are you—?”

She half-rose, pushed back from the panel, down into the seat again. “Clewell, they tried to kill us!

They’re armed, they want to take our ship and they will, and that’s the only way to stop them… Let them cross our tail, Navigator.”

“Yes, Captain.” He turned away from her toward the panel, and began to punch in the course change that would end their pursuit.

At the final moment Betha switched the screen from simulation to outside scan, picked out the amber fleck of the pursuing ship thirty kilometers behind them—watched it fleetingly made golden by the alchemy of supercharged particles from her ship’s exhaust. And watched its gold darken again into the greater darkness shot with stars. She shuddered, not feeling it, and cut power.

“What—what do we do now?” Clewell drifted up off the seat, against the restraining belt, as the ship’s acceleration ceased. The white fringe of his hair stood out from his head like frost.

Before her on the screen the rings of Discus edged into view, eclipsing the night: the plate of striated silver, twenty separate bands of utter blackness and moon-white, the setting for the rippling red jewel of gas that was the central planet. Her hand was on the selector dial, her eyes burned with the brightness, paralyzing her will. She shut her eyes, and turned the dial.

The intercom was broken. They still sat at the table, Erie and Sean and Nikolai, Lara and Claire; they looked up at her, laughing, breathing again, looked out through the dome at the glory of Discus on the empty night … She opened her eyes. And saw empty night Oh, God, she thought. The room was empty; they were gone. Oh, God. Only stars, gaping beyond the shattered plastic of the dome, crowding the blackness that had swallowed them all… She didn’t scream, lost in the soundless void.

“They’re all—gone. All of them. That warhead… it shattered the dome.”

She turned to see Clewell, his face bloodless and empty; saw their lives, with everything suddenly gone. Thinking, frightened, He looks so old… She released her seatbelt mindlessly, pushed herself along the panel to his side and took his hands. They held each other close, in silence.

A squirming softness batted against her head; she jerked upright as claws like tiny needles caught a foothold in the flesh of her shoulder. “Rusty!” She reached up to pull the cat loose, began to drift and hooked a foot under the rung along the panel base. Golden eyes peered at her from a round brindled face, above a nose half black and half orange; mottled whiskers twitched as the mouth formed a meow?

like an unoiled gate hinge. Betha’s hands tightened over an urge to fling the cat across the room. What right does an animal have to be alive, when five human beings are dead? She turned her face away as Rusty stretched a patchwork paw to touch her, mrring consolation for an imcomprehensible grief. Betha cradled her, kissed the furred forehead, comforted by the soft knot of her warmth.

Clewell caught Rusty’s drifting tail, bloodied at the tip. “She barely got out.”

Betha nodded.

“Why did we ever come to Heaven?” His voice shook.

She looked up. “You know why we came!” She stopped, forcing control. “I don’t know… I mean… I mean, I thought I knew…” Four years ago, as they left Morningside, she had been sure of everything: her destination, her happiness, her marriage, her life. And now, suddenly, incredibly, only life remained. Why?

Because the people of Morningside, the bleak innermost world of a pitiless red dwarf star, had a dream of Heaven. Heaven: A G-type sun system without an Earthlike planet, but with an asteroid belt rich in accessible metals. And with Discus, a gas giant ringed in littered splendor by frozen water, methane, and ammonia—the elemental keys to life. The ore-rich Belt and the frozen gases had made it feasible—almost easy—to build up a colony entirely self-sufficient in its richness; heaven in every sense of the word to colonists from Sol’s asteroid belt, who had always been dependent on Earth for basic survival needs. And it had become a dream for another colony, Morningside, hungry now for something more than survival: the dream that they could establish contact with the Heaven Belt, and negotiate a share in its overflowing bounty.

The dream that had carried the starship Ranger across three light-years; that had been shattered with the shattered dayroom, by the reality of sudden death. The desolation burned again across her eyes; her mind saw the Ranger’s one-hundred-meter spindle form, every line as familiar as her own face, every centimeter blueprinted on her memory… saw it flawed by one tiny, terrible wound; saw five faces, lost to her now in darkness, endlessly falling…

Clewell said softly, “What now?”

“We go on—go on as planned.”

“You want to go on trying to make contact with these…” His hand pointed at the ruin on the screen. “Do you want to lead them home by the hand, to murder all of Morningside? Isn’t it enough—”

Betha shook her head, clinging to the arms of her seat. “We don’t have any choice! You know that. We don’t have enough hydrogen on board to get the ship back to ramscoop speeds. We have to refuel somewhere in Heaven, or we’ll never get home.” A vision of home stunned her: firelight on dark beams, on the night before their departure—a little boy’s face bright with tears, buried against her shirt. Mommy… I dreamed you had to die to go to Heaven. Remembering her child’s sobs waking out of nightmare, her own eyes filled with tears and the endless darkness. She bit her lip. Goddamn it, I’m not a child, I’m thirty-five years old!

“Pappy, don’t start acting like an old man.” She frowned, and watched his irritation strip ten years from his face. Without looking, she reached out to blank the viewscreen. “We don’t have any choice now. We have to go on with it.” We have to pay them back, her eyes flickered, hard edges of sapphire glinting. She tossed Rusty carefully away, watched her cat-paddle uselessly as she drifted out into the room. “We have enough fuel left to get us around the system… but who do we trust? Why did they attack us?

And those ships, chemical rockets—they shouldn’t have anything like that outside of a museum! It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe they were pirates, renegades. There’s nothing else that fits.” Clewell’s hand hung in the air, uncertain.

“Maybe.” She sighed, knowing that renegades had no place in Heaven. Having no choice except to believe it, she forgot that the angry, mindless face that had cursed her on their screen had called her pirate. “We’ll go on in to the main Belt, to the capital at Lansing, as planned, then. And then… we’ll find a way to get what we need.”