View from Ararat (2 page)

PART ONE

THE SINS OF THE FATHERS . . .

Is there no balm in Gilead?

Is there no physician there?

Why grows not new flesh over the wound?

Jeremiah xii. 22

No doubt but ye are the people,

and wisdom shall die with you . . .

Job xii. 2

1

Child's Play

JMMC Ore-Shuttle
lo Trader

in elliptical orbit around Jupiter

December 31, 2331
ad

MAC

‘This is it, boys and girls. Paydirt . . .' McEwan Porter wipes the visor of his helmet with a gloved hand and moves carefully forward towards the disabled airlock of the doomed ship.

For the better part of a month they have been homing in on the weak and intermittent distress signal of the
lo Trader
, a large ore-carrier, missing, presumed lost, for twenty or so Earth years, somewhere in the vicinity of Jupiter's notorious ‘garbage belt'.

The miracle is not that the signal beacon is still working after two decades, but rather that Cindy managed to detect it against the white noise of the radio static streaming outwards from the Red Spot, the huge, eternal storm rotating in the atmosphere of the giant planet, only a few hundred thousand kilometres away.

It is little wonder the dead ship has remained undiscovered for so long. If they had missed its faint receding whisper, the
lo Trader
could have spent the rest of eternity orbiting the king of planets. Just another piece of flotsam in the garbage belt. A mystery, buried deep in the archives of the Company – an entry of unfortunate proportions in the debit column of some accountant's twenty-year-old profit-and-loss schedule.

Turning awkwardly in the airlock entry, he looks back towards the
Ganymede Horizon
and waves. Then he pauses, before making his way inside.

A month of painstaking pursuit, chasing echoes and faint traces of the radio-beacon's signature transmission. A month of living for this moment. He runs his gloved hand across the metal of the hull, possessively, almost lovingly.

After a near-fruitless tour of duty on the storm-lashed equator of Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter's moons, the discovery of the ghostly signal on a now rarely used bandwidth was like providence for the crew of the mining drone.

Salvage rights on the ore-shuttle's cargo of heavy metals will make the whole frustrating trip worthwhile, after all. The company pays thirty per cent for the recovery of lost cargo. Thirty-five, if any of the crew are saved.

Thirty for the cargo, five for the crew . . .

Porter shivers slightly inside his temperature-controlled pressure suit.

The hulk of the
lo Trader
has been drifting among the debris of the garbage belt for longer than half his crew has been alive. And judging by the size of the hole in the primary starboard bulkhead, it has almost certainly been a ghost-ship for all that time.

Two or three metres across, the jagged tear in the metal of the ship's skin looks like the path torn by a giant fist, punching through from the inside out.

Explosive decompression. The space-traveller's most vivid terror. The nightmare that most ore-jockeys live with constantly. The one that wakes them, cold and sweating and screaming silently in the vacuum of their fears, on more nights than they would ever admit to anyone.

One small fragment of rock, probably no bigger than a baseball, perhaps even smaller. One tiny, insignificant, suddenly lethal fragment moving through all the infinite vastness of the universe, following its own preordained trajectory. Keeping its own counsel on the cataclysmic events that gave it birth and fatal momentum.

Just one small fragment.

But one is all it takes. In almost four hundred years of manned space-flight, no solution has been found to the deadly inevitability of basic physics. No construction material known can withstand the force of anything much larger than a grain of sand, when it is travelling at a velocity of thousands of kilometres per second. And once breached, the strongest alloys are as useless as tissue paper, for inside the vessel the air pressure is a little over one atmosphere, while outside the vacuum waits, hungry to be filled. And the outrush of the air tears apart the film of metal skin, peeling it outwards, until in seconds the vacuum has claimed everything within.

Mac Porter sets the charge on the inner door of the airlock and moves carefully outside. He is tethered to one of the rings once used by the maintenance crew when they worked on the outside of the ship, and he swings himself out of the direct line of the blast, before depressing the button on the remote which hangs around his neck like a medallion.

There is no sound in the vacuum, of course, but the metal of the hull vibrates beneath the soles of his magnetic boots, as the lock of the inner door is blown apart by the tiny charge. A small stream of metal particles shoots out of the disabled airlock, shimmering in the light of the distant sun, and spreading out in a tiny cloud, each particle following its own path into eternity . . .

Into eternity . . .

He looks out into the vast emptiness, and feels its seductive call. Again . . .

It would be so easy.

He tests the coupling that tethers him to the ship.

Get a grip, man . . .

He closes his eyes and breathes deeply, concentrating on the faint hiss of the respirator, shutting out the siren-whisper of the distant stars.

Finally the feeling passes, but still he feels the memory of it deep in his gut.

The echo of the explosion has stopped vibrating in the hull beneath his feet, and he forces himself to focus on the job at hand. He swings himself around and enters the airlock again. This time he can see into the main cabin through the neat hole that the charge has blown in the inner door.

And what he sees brings the bile rushing into his throat.

With an effort he forces it down and slides the door open. It moves with surprisingly little resistance.

‘Mac?' The voice in his headset is Cindy's.

She is young. It is her first trip, and despite the hardships they have shared over the past year she hasn't yet developed the hard shell that characterises the rest of the
Ganymede Horizon
's experienced crew. ‘You OK, Boss?'

‘Fine, Cindy.' He smiles to himself. A half-smile. ‘Just fine . . .'

The meteor struck without warning, of course, and the decompression was so sudden that there was no time for the computer to react and activate the airtight doors. Which was probably a disguised blessing for the doomed crew, because before they were really aware of the danger they were already dead.

There are worse ways of buying it.

He allows the thought to form, before he realises where it is heading.

Like having just enough time to clamber into a pressure suit, then waiting among the dead for the air to slowly run out . . .

A quick death. A blessing for the crew, but a waking nightmare for the poor jerk who lands the job of finally discovering them – which is the reason he has chosen to come alone onto the crew-deck of the ore-shuttle.

For all their bravado and all their hard-won experience, apart from Cox and Avram the crew of the
Ganymede Horizon
is young. Deep-space mining is a young person's sport. Few last at it beyond thirty, if they survive that long.

They are young, and none of them has seen what happens to a human body when you introduce it to the vacuum and absolute cold of deep space, totally unprotected.

How every individual cell in that body disintegrates, as the pressure inside ruptures the delicate membranes. How blood and fluids explode from the distorted mass in a red cloud that freezes instantly into minute floating crystals, spreading gradually to fill the surrounding space. Crystals that stick to the static field of your pressure suit and to the visor of your helmet, until you stare at the horror through a shimmering, red haze. While you wait for the end to creep up on you . . .

None of them has seen it, but Mac Porter has.

And it is the memory of that long-suppressed horror which turns his stomach as he floats across the airless cabin among the grotesque remains of the
lo Trader
's crew.

JMMC Mining-Drone
Ganymede Horizon

in elliptical orbit around Jupiter

December 31, 2331
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CINDY'S STORY

‘Face it, Cind, when it's your time, it's your time . . .'

Elroy Cox leaned back philosophically in his gravity couch and sipped his drink, holding my gaze like one of the tutors at the Institute. I noticed a few drops had dribbled from the end of the straw. They hung unmoving in the air in front of his bearded face.

‘When it's your time, it's your time,' Avram shot back, mimicking. ‘And did you work that one out all by yourself, Einstein?'

The trip had been too long, and the mutual dislike the two older miners had shown in the first weeks had grown into a constant game of one-upmanship.

I had kind of a soft spot for Cox. In spite of his ‘act', he wasn't half as tough as he made out. I'd hacked into the confidential personnel files on the third day out from Earth, before we went into stasis for the sub-light acceleration. Cox's wife was dead, and he was supporting four kids and an old mother. Which explained why someone his age was still out in the Jovian sector jockeying ore when he should have been riding a desk – on Earth or on Lunar.

Avram, I couldn't stand. He was bitter and sarcastic, and sexist, and all he was supporting was a massive gambling habit, which ate all his earnings, and then some. But far worse – at least from the point of view of the crew – he could be bone-lazy if the mood took him, which it did, far too often.

‘I was just
saying
. . .' I persevered, in another attempt to ride over their constant interruptions. As the ‘rookie', I was still fighting to finish a sentence, even after the best part of a year. ‘I was pointing out that it was just such incredible bad luck. Half a second difference in trajectory in either direction and the meteor would have missed them completely. It hit them almost head-on, ruptured the hull in the forward starboard quadrant, and travelled on through the bulkheads, the cabin and the sleeping quarters. But look at the computer mock-up. No exit hole. The decompression ripped the ship apart at the point of entry, but there's no other damage to the hull. Which means—'

‘There's an extra piece of rock in the cargo hold,' Cox cut in. ‘Mind you, it probably disintegrated on impact. It wouldn't matter how fast it was travelling. Nothing that size has got the momentum to punch a hole through 10,000 tonnes of high-grade ore.'

‘Really high grade.' Without removing his gaze from the screen in front of him, Mac entered the conversation for the first time. As usual, he was running some kind of diagnostic on the ship's data frame.

He might have been a couple of hours into his ‘down time', but one thing you learned very early was that McEwan Porter was never really off duty.

His confidential psych-profile – which I'd also accessed – mentioned mildly compulsive tendencies, but that was a bit of typical bureaucratic psycho-babble. He was just a dedicated human being who took his work very seriously. OK, it wasn't exactly brain surgery, but let's face it, take away the work and he really didn't have anything else.

He'd been riding the ore-shuttles and the mining drones since he was eighteen – which by an amazing coincidence was how old I'd be turning on my next birthday – if I made it that far.

Personally, I couldn't see myself sticking at anything for that long. But impatience has always been part of my problem. You should see
my
confidential psych-profile.

Anyway, Mac pushed another button and the screen switched to a 3-D multicoloured bar-graph. ‘I've just finished the ore-sample analysis,' he went on. ‘These guys must have hit the mother lode. Big time.'

‘Yeah, and a lot of damned good it did them,' Avram unbuckled, and pushed himself across the cabin. ‘I'll be glad when we can get this tub moving again. Damned weightlessness gives me the shits. Literally.'

He pushed off the wall and headed down the corridor towards the head.

‘Tomorrow,' Mac called after him, ‘as soon as we can get the grapples connected properly. We don't want this baby slipping loose under acceleration, while we're in stasis—'

‘Just as a matter of interest, Boss,' Cox cut in. ‘What's the going rate on really high-grade ore, anyway? At last count . . .'

He was getting at something. There was a tone that crept into his voice whenever he was about to suggest something questionable.

‘About one-ten, maybe one-twenty credits a tonne. Give or take.' Mac played along, waiting to see where the conversation was headed. Although ‘boss' of the group, he had very little real authority.

Miners are naturally volatile creatures. The only way a team of them can function is with a loose kind of democracy. They're constitutionally unable to follow orders just for the sake of it, which I guess is why I fitted in so well.

Cox whistled. ‘So, that makes our little discovery worth . . .' He wrinkled his forehead as he did the calculation. An act, of course. ‘A million one, maybe a million two . . . That's a lot of creds.'

‘What are you getting at, Cox?'

‘About thirty per cent of that is . . .'

‘About three hundred thousand and change,' I obliged. I didn't really need to. No one on board was challenged in the IQ department. Not quite Funded Research calibre, maybe, but smart enough. A stupid miner was a dead miner. And so were the rest of his crew.

‘Three hundred thousand . . . and change,' Cox went on, ‘which, split between the ten of us, is—'

‘A pretty good year's wages,' Mac interrupted. He was trying to control the exchange before it got out of hand. ‘A
very
good year's wages.'

‘. . . somewhere around thirty thou,' Cox continued, as if Mac hadn't spoken. ‘Of course, if it wasn't salvage, if
we'd
hit the mother lode and mined it ourselves, we'd be on sixty per cent, which would be . . . Well, enough for this little black duck to book a one-way ticket to a new life – with plenty left to live on.'