Table Of ContentBOOK III
THREE YEARS LATER
Eternal process moving on,
From state to state the spirit walks;
And these are but the shatter’d stalks,
Or ruin’d chrysalis of one.
SMELTER SHIP HUNTER:
BRIDGE
T
hey made an unlikely pair.
Although Elverda Apacheta was near the end of her long life, she was still a
regally tall, slim woman with the carriage of an empress. Yet her once haughty
eyes of sparkling jet now looked out at the world with a weariness that grew
heavier each passing day. Her high flaring cheekbones and imperious nose spoke
of her Andean background, but her long colorfully woven robe hung loosely on
her emaciated body and her dead-white hair was disheveled, chopped unevenly,
as if she no longer cared who saw her.
Her only companion on Hunter had already died once, or tried to. When he had
been a mercenary soldier he had pressed a minigrenade to his chest and set it off.
Now he was as much machine as man, a cyborg whose face was half metal
etched with swirling hair-thin lines. He wore the threadbare remains of a military
uniform, all insignias and signs of rank rudely ripped off its fabric. He called
himself Dorn and said he was a priest. He and Elverda Apacheta had been on
this lonely, interminable, thankless mission for more than two years.
She had once been a worlds-renowned sculptress, the woman who carved The
Rememberer out of a two-kilometer-long asteroid. The magnificent sculpture
rode in a high orbit around Earth, a work of art that attracted tourists from the
Earth, the Moon, and the man-made habitats in space between the two.
Now she and Dorn searched for the dead, out in the silent darkness of the
Asteroid Belt. And fled from the mercenaries who had been hired to kill them.
Hunter was a massive ship, much too large for just the two of them. It had
originally been built to smelt asteroidal ores on the way from the Belt inward to
the Earth/Moon vicinity. But the advent of nanotechnology made such bulk
smelters obsolete. Virus-sized nanomachines separated pure elements out of the
asteroidal rocks. Hunter went on the market at a bargain price. Dorn had use for
the smelter, so Elverda Apacheta had emptied her retirement accounts to buy the
vessel.
For all its size and mass, Hunter was capable of bursts of high acceleration when
they needed to flee an intruding vessel. They had not seen another ship, though,
in several months.
“We’re approaching the coordinates you plugged into the navigation computer,”
said Elverda into the ship’s intercom microphone. She was sitting in the
command chair on the ship’s compact bridge; Dorn was somewhere in the
bowels of Hunter’s equipment bay.
“I will come to the bridge,” his deep, heavy voice replied. She always wondered
what his voice had been like before his shattered body had been turned into a
cybernetic organism.
“No hurry,” she said. “It will be an hour before we reach the exact spot.”
DOSSIER:
DORN
H
e was born Dorik Harbin in a Balkan village that was swept up in one of the
bloody frenzies of ethnic cleansing that swept that region of Earth every few
generations.
Shortly before his twelfth birthday, the militia from the next valley descended on
his village, raping, killing, burning everything in their fervent zeal. Dorik Harbin
saw his mother nailed to a cross, naked, bleeding, dying. The young boy ran
away, lived like an animal in the hills until he was caught pilfering an apple from
the kitchen tent of a different militia band. Brought before the group’s
commander, he was given the choice of joining the militia or being shot.
He learned to kill. Remembering what had been done to his mother, his sisters
and brothers and father, he marched into other villages and killed everything
living in them, down to the livestock and household pets. Carrying an assault
rifle that was almost as big as he was, he became an adept killer.
But his sleep was haunted by terrible dreams. He saw those he killed, heard the
pleas for mercy that he never listened to in waking life. Sometimes, in his
dreams, he killed his own mother. That was when he began taking the drugs that
were freely available among the roving militia bands. The narcotics helped him
to sleep, helped him to keep on killing despite his nightmares.
Peacekeepers from the newly reorganized United Nations finally suppressed the
militias and established an uneasy peace in the region. The dead were buried, the
fires extinguished, the acrid smoke that hung over the region finally cleared
away.
Dorik Harbin was sixteen by then. The Peacekeepers recruited him into their
forces and tried to train him to enforce the peace with a minimum of killing. It
was nonsense, and young Dorik knew it, but he allowed his superior officers to
believe that he had been rehabilitated. They smiled at his progress as a model
Peacekeeper and turned a blind eye to his growing dependency on what they
termed “pharmaceuticals.”
He was among the Peacekeeper troops who were sent to the Moon in the UN’s
ill-fated attempt to wrest control of Moonbase from its rebellious citizens. After
that fiasco, once Moonbase became recognized as the independent nation of
Selene, Dorik Harbin quit the Peacekeepers and joined the private security forces
of Humphries Space Systems, Inc.
In a short time he was killing again, this time as commander of spacecraft that
attacked other spacecraft in the dark emptiness of the Asteroid Belt. His prowess
came to the attention of Martin Humphries himself, who personally assigned
Harbin to the task of tracking down and killing his archenemy, Lars Fuchs.
Humphries also saw to it that Harbin had an adequate supply of specialized
drugs, pharmaceuticals that enhanced his battle prowess, that made him sharper,
faster, drugs that fed his inner rage.
It was in such a drug-enhanced fury that he methodically destroyed the rock rats’
habitat, Chrysalis, killing all of the one thousand seventeen men, women and
children aboard. Attacking the ore ship Syracuse was merely a minor skirmish in
the immediate aftermath of that slaughter.
Once his mind cleared and he realized what he had done, Dorik Harbin held a
minigrenade to his chest and detonated it. He knew of no other way to end the
horror that obsessed his sleep.
But the corporation that literally owned his body would not let him die. Their
medical specialists tested their own skills and theories and turned him into a
cyborg, half machine, half human. And sent him back to his duties as a
mercenary soldier in the employ of Humphries Space Systems, Inc.
The Asteroid Wars were over by then, forced to an end by the shock of the
Chrysalis massacre. Dorik Harbin took no credit for the unexpected result of his
atrocity. Humphries Space Systems saw to it that no one learned that the cyborg
was the mass murderer. Dorik Harbin went about his unexciting duties as
mechanically as if he were entirely a machine. But still he dreamed.
Then he was assigned to head the security detail for a small asteroid that the
corporation had quietly bought from a rock rat family, deep in the Belt. Martin
Humphries himself was coming from his home on the Moon to inspect the
asteroid. There was something inside the rock, something artificial, something
staggeringly unusual, something that was perhaps not made by human hands.
As part of his duties Dorik Harbin inspected the artifact buried deep inside the
asteroid. The experience shattered him. He saw his life, all the pain and horror,
all the grief and remorse that filled his dreams.
Every day he stood before the artifact. Every day the deeds of his life were
peeled away, moment by moment, murder by murder. It was if he were being
flayed alive, one layer of skin after another stripped from his bleeding, quaking
flesh.
At last there was nothing left. The personality that he had built for himself since
he’d been twelve had been stripped bare and a new persona, one that had been
hidden deep inside his old one, at last came forth.
He tore all the insignias of rank from his uniform, turning it into the tattered gray
costume of a penitent. Dorik Harbin ceased to exist. Out of the warrior came a
priest named Dorn, as single-minded in his quest for atonement as he had once
been in his missions of murder.
He still dreamed when he slept, but now his dreams were of mercy and justice.
SMELTER SHIP HUNTER:
BRIDGE
E
lverda saw a glint reflected in the bridge’s main display screen. It was Dorn
stepping through the hatch, silent as a wraith, the metal half of his face catching
the light from the overhead lamps.
Touching a keypad with a long, slim finger, Elverda superimposed a navigation
grid on the scene their forward camera showed.
“There,” she said, tapping the screen with her fingernail. “That’s the spot.”
She sensed Dorn nodding as he leaned over her shoulder.
“It’s empty,” she said, turning her head slightly. The human half of his face was
so close she could feel its warmth, hear his slow, steady breathing.
“It wasn’t empty five years ago,” said Dorn. “We destroyed a dozen Astro
warships here. Led them into a trap and ran a swarm of pebbles into them.”
“A dozen ships? How many . . .” She caught herself and choked off her question.
But Dorn understood. “There must have been at least ten mercenaries in each
ship. Probably more. I’ve tried to get the exact number from Astro Corporation
but they refuse to release such information.”
“A hundred and twenty men and women.”
“At least.”
Elverda knew what came next. They would fly a search spiral expanding
outward from this site, probing with radar and telescopes for the bodies of the
dead that had been drifting in space since the battle that had killed them. It
would take weeks, perhaps months, to find them all.
If they lived that long.
With his prosthetic hand Dorn tapped out a command on the keyboard. The
image on the screen changed subtly.
“Ultraviolet?” she asked, slightly puzzled.
“Lyman alpha,” he replied. “Ionized hydrogen.”
“Why are you looking for ionized hydrogen?”
“Exhaust trail.” With the cool metal fingers of his left hand Dorn worked the
keyboard.
Even after knowing him for more than two years Elverda shuddered at the sight
of the mechanical hand. She looked up at the main screen and saw that he was
panning the cameras three hundred and sixty degrees, then up and down doing a
complete global sweep around their ship.
“Nothing,” she said.
Dorn did not reply. The screen’s view climbed up, then swung downward.
“We’re alone.”
“Are we?” he countered. “Humphries’s people know that a battle was fought
here. They know that we will come here to seek the dead and give them proper
rites.”
She gestured toward the screen, empty except for the unblinking stars, so distant
and aloof. “There are no ships out there.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But there is a small asteroid that does not appear on the nav
charts.”
Almost feeling annoyed at his wariness, Elverda said, “Asteroid orbits change
constantly. The charts are never up to date.”
“True enough,” he said. “But let’s check out that rock before we proceed
further.”
“It’s barely twenty meters across,” Elverda objected. “It can’t be a camouflaged
vessel.”
“I know.”
Elverda stared at him for a long, disquieting moment. Dorn looked back at her,
his electro-optical eye unblinking, the overhead lights glinting on the etched
metal of his skullcap. With a sigh that was half exasperation she punched in the
commands that would bring Hunter to within fifty meters of the tiny asteroid.
They shared a modest lunch in the galley while Hunter cruised at minimum
thrust and established itself in co-orbit near the asteroid. When they returned to
the bridge, they saw that the object outside was a jagged chunk of debris, a shard
torn from what had once been a spacecraft, probably an attack vessel. They
trooped down to the main airlock, where she helped Dorn into a nanofabric
space suit. When she had first met Dorn she’d been surprised at how agile he
was: the metal half of his body was lithe and supple, not at all like a
cumbersome clanking machine. Now, though, more than two years later, he
seemed slower, more careful, as if his mechanical half were developing the
robotic analog of arthritis.
At last she returned to the bridge to monitor his EVA. Within half an hour he
was back from the airlock, a small black object in the palm of his prosthetic
hand.
Elverda peered at it.
“A sensor,” said Dorn. “It was attached to the piece of debris out there. It must
be programmed to detect the arrival of a ship in this area and send a message
back to whoever planted it here.”
“They’ve been waiting for us?”
He nodded minimally. “I imagine they have planted such sensors at every site
where there was a battle.”
“Humphries wants to find us.”
“He wants to kill us.”
Elverda knew it was true, yet she still found it hard to accept the idea in her
heart, emotionally. The concept that someone wanted to kill her was so bizarre,
so alien to her outlook, to her entire life, it was like being told that the world was
flat.
Martin Humphries wants to kill us, she told herself. He wants to kill me. She had
only known Humphries for the few weeks it had taken to fly to the asteroid
where the alien artifact had been found. Where Dorn had transformed himself
from a cyborg mercenary soldier to a cyborg priest. Where Humphries had gone
insane with fear and guilt once he’d seen the artifact.
And now that he’s recovered, now that he knows we saw him in his terror and
his shame, he wants to erase all memory of his collapse. He wants to eliminate
the witnesses. He wants to kill us.
Under the pretense of preserving the artifact for scientific study, Humphries’s
corporate minions had thrown a protective guard of ships and mercenary troops
around the asteroid and sealed off the artifact itself—burrowed deep inside the
rock —from all visitors. Not even scientists from the International Consortium
of Universities were allowed to visit the asteroid. The news media had been
totally stonewalled, to the point where it was widely believed that the reports of
an alien artifact were nothing more than a legend concocted by some of the UFO
crackpots among the rock rats.
Elverda Apacheta knew how powerful the artifact was. It had changed Dorn
from a murderous mercenary soldier into a priest intent on atoning for his former
life. It had shaken her own soul more profoundly than any experience in her long
life. Before she had seen the artifact she had been ready for death, weary of the
trials and disappointments of living, convinced that her talent had shriveled
within her disenchanted soul. But once she looked upon that mystical,
amorphous, shifting work of wonder she was overwhelmed with new purpose.
Before the artifact she had regarded Dorn with a distaste that was almost
loathing; after the artifact she realized that Dorn was the child she had never
borne, the tortured soul who needed her solace, the man whom she would help
and guide and protect even at the cost of her own existence.
The artifact had changed Martin Humphries, of course. His swaggering, self-
confident ego had been shredded into a whimpering, pathetic figure huddled into
a fetal ball, pleading for escape. But the effect had been only temporary;
Humphries recovered. Now the wealthiest man in the solar system was
determined to erase the two witnesses of his moment of weakness.
Staring at the sensor in his metallic hand, Elverda asked Dorn, “What do you
want to do?”
Slowly, Dorn crushed the miniaturized sensor. It crunched like a crisp wafer.
Then he answered, “Find the dead. Treat them with respect, if not honor.”
ATTACK SHIP VIKING:
COMMUNICATIONS CENTER
T
horoughly bored, Kao Yuan curled his lip at the image on his comm screen. Not
that the woman who was speaking to him would see his expression. This was a
one-way transmission: the latest orders from Humphries Space Systems
headquarters on the Moon to Yuan and his three-ship formation. Besides, he was
certain that the image he was watching was a computer-generated persona;
Martin Humphries might not deign to speak to him personally, but he didn’t
want any additional people to know about this mission he’d sent Yuan on, either.
“Mr. Humphries is pleased with your idea of seeding the battle sites with
sensors,” the image was saying,
“but he wonders if all the battle sites are recorded. Dorik Harbin did a lot more
than attack the Chrysalis habitat, of course.”
