Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (3 page)

Eventually I felt the rumbling of a terrible cry struggle up in my chest. Once it broke the surface, I howled for many minutes, snot and tears and blood caking my face and hands. By the time I went silent I was so spent physically and emotionally, I could only muster a few last sniffles, and then I was back to simply feeling nothing much at all.

Hours passed. I didn't move until my bowels complained, and I used the small LCD in the armrest of the couch to read the emergency instructions. The decompression shield had snapped taut as a balloon, affording me some elbow room. So I unlatched myself from the harness and, per direction, pulled the seat cushion up to reveal the orifice for an emergency zero-gee toilet, which I used. Then I simply sat and stared out the shield's window, watching the blackness of space and the stars beyond roll slowly past.

I figured I'd been blown free of the wreck during the decompression, or the couch was designed to eject in an emergency. It didn't matter, really. Irenka had died five meters from me, and all I'd been able to do was watch.

I'd failed Irenka. And I'd failed Papa, who'd told me to take care of her.

I wished very much that I could cease to exist.

Another cry rumbled, but I didn't have anything left for it.

I fell back asleep.

I came awake with a start.

The decompression shield was slowly deflating around me.

I hurriedly punched at the LCD on the armrest, wondering why the system hadn't sounded an emergency alarm, only to find the decompression shield lifting back up into the headrest on its motors.

I flinched for an instant, expecting the vacuum of space, but instead found the illuminated, metal-ribbed interior of . . . another ship?

There were no people present in the high-ceilinged, rectangular space. It dwarfed the passenger cabin of the ship Irenka and I had originally escaped on.

Irenka
. A wave of sudden depression washed over me and I brought my useless knees to my chest, burying my face. The repeating images of her frantic death began to replay across my mind, and I slowly beat my forehead on my kneecaps, unable to make the horror stop. Would it be like this forever? Always seeing Irenka, dying a million deaths, with me unable to help her?

There was a clanking sound from across the large compartment, and I snapped my head up. I saw a circular hatch swing open.

My heart began to beat rapidly in my chest. I stayed put on the couch, watching a small figure in white, flowing, pajama-like clothes float through and attach to the deck with grip shoes.

To my surprise, it was an old woman.

Her skin was wrinkled and coal-black, and her eyes were wide with dark irises.

She looked at me, unblinking. Then she quickly walked
rip-rip-rip
across the deck.

"Boy's a mess, Howard," the old woman said, but not to me. Her speech was American English, but heavily accented in a way I'd never heard except on television. When she drew near I noticed the tiny device in her ear—a headset. I just looked at her while she knelt down slowly near the couch and examined my face, the dried blood on my shirt, and the way my balled fists gently trembled while I hugged them over my knees.

"You got a name, son?"

"Miroslaw," I said, the dried mucus and blood in my nostrils making it sound as if I had a bad cold.

"That's . . . Russian?"

"Polish."

"Well, you can thank the Lord that your little lifeboat here crossed our path, Miroslaw from Poland. The killsats didn't leave much when they hit Jupiter. Howard and I kept the observatory dark until the killsats moved on. Then we did a slingshot burn, and now we're away."

"What does that mean?"

"Everything has gone on automatic. The military doesn't exist anymore, but their machines do. To the killsats,
everyone
has become a target. So Howard and I decided it would be best to cut loose and go."

"Where?"

"The Kuiper Belt, boy. Only place left. We're going to find the Outbound."

Outbound
. There had been stories about them in school: privately-funded deep space missions that had been sent to determine if the space beyond Neptune provided fertile ground for colonization. None of them had ever sent back any data, once they passed the orbit of Pluto. Common sense said the Outbound had perished.

But had they really?

As long as Irenka's death was foremost in my mind, the Outbound didn't matter to me. I kept hugging my knees and stared past the old woman, looking at nothing.

"I'm Tabitha," the old woman said, sticking out her hand.

"Thank you for finding me," I said, weakly shaking it.

"You don't seem too happy about it, Miroslaw."

"Mirek. My sister called me Mirek. She's . . . She's . . ."

I couldn't say it, but it didn't seem like I needed to. Tabitha just put a gnarled old finger to my lips.

"Hush, child. You've survived the Devil's Day. Come on, let's get you cleaned up."

I let her grab my arm and pull me up off the couch. Using the grip shoes, she towed me back to the hatch she'd used to enter the large bay.

She noticed that my legs trailed behind me, and I used only my arms to maneuver through the hatch on its hand rails.

"Can't walk?" Tabitha asked.

I nodded. She immediately flipped me over to check for injury, but I pushed her hands away. "Not hurt. Paralyzed. Since I was born."

"Mercy," Tabitha breathed. "Well, Mirek, we'll just have to do the best we can, you and I."

"What about Howard?" I said.

"He's my husband. You'll meet him soon enough."

Howard and Tabitha Marshall were originally from Virginia. Assigned to one of Jupiter's six original Humason-series mobile space telescope platforms, they'd served as technicians when they were young, and moved up to take over their observatory when older.

We talked while Tabitha helped pull my shirt off and began washing my face.

"NASA told us the telescope was too old and ought to be decommissioned, but Howard and I liked it out here so much, where we could be close to God's quiet grandeur, when the astronomers and other staff packed up and left, we stayed. In protest at first, but eventually NASA gave up and let us keep working. We sent data back right up until the war."

Howard, I'd learned, had actually died a few years earlier, but they'd recorded him into the computer, and now he ran the observatory as its brain. I'd heard of that being done for some of the very long deep space missions, using volunteer pilots who'd grown too old or sick to fly. It was an experimental thing, and lots of people back on Earth still hadn't been too sure about it. Talking to Howard was a little like talking to an imaginary friend, since he seemed to exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

The observatory itself was a sprawling complex built into the side of a tiny piece of ore-rich rock that had been blasted off one of Jupiter's trailing Trojan asteroids. When the hunter-killer satellites from the inner system had reached and attacked the Jovian settlements, Howard had turned off every piece of active equipment he could, going "dark" in the hope that he and Tabitha wouldn't be detected.

Pure chance had sent my couch spinning across their path, and when Howard's passive sensors picked up my vital signs, Tabitha demanded that I be brought aboard, in spite of the risk.

I didn't know what to say, so I mostly kept quiet and let Tabitha—Tab, she insisted—do most of the talking.

She literally flowed with stories and spunk and an irrepressible good cheer, such that I almost forgot the depression that had sunk its teeth into my heart since Irenka had died. But the dual loss of my sister and my parents remained like a toothache—always there, and always painful.

We got me bathed and dressed in an oversized smock similar to the one Tab wore, and then she took me on a tour of the facility. Most of the compartments were sealed and cold, since the observatory's automation did most of the upkeep and Tab herself only needed a few rooms in which to work and live. She moved like a fish in water when she maneuvered in zero gee, and she showed me the spin room where she spent at least a couple of hours every day, doing exercise and letting her body experience centripetal gravity so that her muscles and bones didn't wither away.

"I know you can't use your legs, Mirek," Tab said, "but we'll find a routine for you. Meanwhile, we can open one of the other compartments and get you a room set up. You're going to be our guest for a while, I think."

I stopped.

"What if I don't want to?" I said.

Tab looked at me with a raised eyebrow, her steel-gray, close-cropped hair poking out in a mass of springy ringlets.

"Boy, you think you got any choice at this point?"

"Papa used to tell me there are always choices."

Tab opened her mouth to argue, then stopped and looked at me carefully.

"Fair enough, child. The Lord gave free will, and it's not mine to take away. We could put you into one of the observatory's dories. You could take your chances on your own."

I stared at my host. Staying here wouldn't make the pain go away, that was for sure. But then, I wasn't certain anything would.

Hot tears began to well up in my eyes again, and I ferociously jabbed at them with the billowy sleeve of my smock.

I cursed in Polish.

Tab sighed, and lowered her floating self down until she was looking at me eye to eye. When she spoke, her Southern Black accent was especially thick.

"It's a damn shame any of this had to happen, Miroslaw. Your family. My family. All our people, gone. The Armageddon came, and it went, and we're still here. Which tells me the Lord still has work for us. It ain't an accident your couch came floatin' by Howard and me. That much I'm certain of. I don't know what else your papa ever told you, but let me tell you something my papa told me when I was your age. He told me that there was never any way of gettin' out of pain in this life. Adam and Eve saw to that. Because the Lord needs us to know pain. That's part of the test. So while I can't make your pain go away, I can tell you that we're all gonna be judged by how we bear that pain, and use it, and do the Lord's will because of it. Do you understand?"

I didn't. Mama and Papa had been physicists. Our family never went to church. Tab's talk sounded like something out of a history book about the days when people thought religion was more important than science. It was foreign in my ears and made me uncomfortable, but I couldn't deny the earnestness with which Tab had spoken. Nor could I deny the heartfelt kindness in her expression.

My tears flowed like a river, and I stopped trying to wipe them away.

Irenka would have liked Tab. It was a crime that Irenka wasn't here.

I blubbered something to that effect, and then I felt myself whisked up into Tab's arms, almost crushed by the woman's surprisingly strong embrace.

It was the first time anyone had held me—really held me—since Papa.

I bawled into Tab's shoulder, and she just kept holding me, singing a soft song under her breath that I would later learn was a hymn.

I chose to stay, of course.

And Tab and I talked about the Outbound.

"So where do we start?" I asked Tab. "We can't just search blindly."

"The largest group of Outbounders was said to have followed in the wake of Pioneer 10. Can we do the same, Howard?"

"Let me see if I have the file on that," Howard's voice spoke from the speakers in the ceiling. "Oh, here it is. Yes, I think we can do that. It's lucky for us we came out of the slingshot when we did, or we'd be going in the totally opposite direction. We'll have to wait a while longer before I can risk a second burn. We're not far enough away from Jupiter yet."

"No problem," Tab said. "I think time is the one item we're not going to run out of."

She wasn't kidding. Even with constant thrust, it took two months to cross the orbit of Pluto, and another eight to get as far as the inner limit of the Kuiper Belt. The observatory was well suited to long voyages. A plentiful fuel reserve, in the form of antimatter, provided power while a large hydroponics facility kept the air clean. Tab trained me to service the various automated and manual life systems of the observatory, and we inventoried and re-inventoried all the consumables and spare parts. With Howard's help we drew up graphs and charts to see just how far we could stretch our resources.

Barring damage to the observatory, and with regular burns for course correction, Tab and Howard estimated we could go twenty years before running out of anything important. Even if the main reactor failed, a backup radioactive decay generator could provide full internal power for another ten.

Shutting down everything but the bare minimums increased these time frames by a factor of three. Which meant all we had to do was keep the hydroponics farm healthy, and Tab and I would have enough food to eat and air to breathe for decades.

Decades
. My soul chilled at the thought of such a long, lonely voyage.

Howard stopped monitoring the inner solar system at sixteen months. There were no more human cries for help. All that remained were the automated signals of the few surviving death machines, each acting out its programmed orders regardless of the fact that the men and women who had given those orders were gone.

No other automated ship-to-ship communications were intercepted either, though if anyone else had survived and fled, they had likely done so in the same manner as us: deliberately silent.

Several times, Tab and I debated turning back.

But as the kilometers between Earth and the observatory grew, the very thought of going home became abstract. We were now well beyond the confines of the planetary system proper—the Sun having become just another pinpoint in the star-filled sky. What chance did we have, in going back? How would we look for anyone while avoiding the robot killers?

Better to forge on.

For my thirteenth birthday, Tab told me she would teach me to be an astronomer.