Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #226 (13 page)

The habitat was staked to one flank of (217496) 2078 hj3. It was a large inflatable module, designed to be stowed or simply towed from location to location. In place, it was a big floppy tent with outstretched arms. Their team's rockhopper was parked nearby, also staked down to the larger mass of the asteroid, providing power and comm support for the habitat.

Lappet warily approached the hatch at the end of one arm. The pinlights for the controls were live. At least Alain hadn't dumped the power, then. It actually looked like all systems were hot. Had they been testing something? He hadn't dumped the life support either, otherwise there would be frost everywhere outside the habitat, and it wouldn't have the same whaleback curve of atmospheric pressure within.

Maybe Tanielu had responded to her alarm. For the first time since Malibu died, Lappet found herself intensely concerned about the fate of her fellow rockheads.

She didn't want to face what was down in the void alone.

Her code opened the hatch. Lappet was mildly surprised. There were two skinsuits on the other side of the airlock—Tanielu and Alain, their names stenciled on their chests and helmets. Malibu's had been lost with its owner, the suit bracket standing as empty as a promise ever since.

No one had gone for a walk, then. Or rather, if they had, they hadn't gotten far.

Lappet stripped down and wiped off the gunk that always accumulated during a shift outside. She tugged her blue yukata over her shoulders, belted it, and keyed her way into the habitat's core.

Tanielu and Alain were at the table, drinking tea. A third sippie sat waiting for her.

"Hey, Lappet,” Alain said. He was small, dark-skinned, grandparents from Haiti. Tanielu, a first-generation Samoan easily twice Alain's size, nodded. He looked exhausted.

But then he should
, she thought. Tanielu'd had less than three hours to sleep between the last time she'd spoken to him over comm and when she'd sent him the alarm. “You boys alright?"

"Might be,” growled Tanielu. “Depends on your problem."

She took her seat. “If you were so worried about me, why didn't you ask?"

"Didn't hear no emergency declared."

Alain nodded agreement.

Something was going on here. Lappet could feel it. The two of them were very nearly cross-eyed with tension. This was more than Alain's ongoing odyssey of disintegration.

The thought came in a rush of paranoid fear:
They knew what she'd found.

Her quiet conscience whispered back:
Of course they did.
Everything any of them did on company time, with company equipment, was metered and miked and imaged. Just because she didn't snoop the boys’ suit cams or instrument readings when they were out in hard vacuum didn't mean they weren't snooping her.

"No,” she said slowly, aware she'd taken too long to answer. “No emergency declared.” It was tank-switching time. Go for broke. “You know what I found."

Tanielu answered first. “No, actually we don't.” He and Alain didn't even look at each other. A sure sign of collusion.

"Something's down inside this rock. Something someone made, once."

"Ever read the company man page on artifacts?” Alain asked. His voice was too bright, strangely shiny.

"Mmm...no.” Lappet didn't know anyone who had.

"There's a standing bounty of one billion tai kong yuan for the discovery of a non-human artifact."

Fans whirred. A piece of equipment whined faintly. She understood their silence now. One billion TKY was fifty times a miner's likely
lifetime
earnings, barring a lucky strike bonus. Whoever could claim that would immediately be very, very wealthy, in that special way that only created more money for lifetimes to come. There were any number of people in the company's management chain who would be more than pleased to hide three bodies on their way to claim the bounty. Or simply ignore the protests of three lonely, deluded miners.

"Do they know yet?” she whispered. Lappet could hardly imagine a worse fate than being bound by wealth to these two. Being dead was one, though.

"Your data's on a batch send anyway, so no one knows so far,” Tanielu said. “I cut our upstream comm feed right after you found it. We're on an unscheduled maintenance window now as far as the company's concerned. We've got about two more hours before the routine status queries begin.” He leaned forward, clutching his tea sippie close. “If you didn't know about the money, what the hell scared you so much, Ms Houston-we-have-a-problem?"

"Just...just what it
means
. What people will think. There was someone else here once. Maybe back when Marduk was a planet and not just an orbiting rockyard. We are not alone. We aren't even the first people here in the solar system.” She spread her hands in appeal. “Use your
imagination
. Think what this means to the human race."

"It means a billion tai kong yuan,” said Tanielu.

"It means Malibu is still dead,” said Alain. “Unless your aliens can bring him back."

"It means everything changes,” whispered Lappet.

Tanielu shook his head. “Our lives still aren't worth a plugged jiao. Especially."

What else is new?
thought Lappet. In that moment she hated them both for being so petty, so worried, so
right
. “Fine. We send some kind of broadcast, tell the world what we found."

"How?” Tanielu again. “Our navcomm systems are completely self-contained. They lock on a company repeater, traffic goes back to Ceres. Unless we go outside and string up wires, we've got no way to reach anyone that isn't within hailing distance."

That was less than 10,000 kilometers, depending on the amount of local dust. No one was that close to them, not here in the Belt.

Lappet's mind scrabbled. “Can we message the guild? Or do a send-to-all?"

"Everything's in the oversight queue back on Ceres.” Also standard procedure.

Alain stirred. “I say we wipe her data feed and destroy that thing she found."

"I'll lose my berth if I'm found destroying data!” Lappet was shocked. They were all indentured to the company, but that service could be relatively rewarding—such as being a rockhead—or it could be a lifetime of negative accrual cleaning sludge filters on Ceres.

"You could be dead.” Alain's eyes narrowed. “Maybe you should try it."

"Malibu's death was an acc—"

He came over the table after her, screaming incoherently. Tanielu grabbed at Alain as Lappet jumped back. She moved so quickly her slippers missed their hold and sent her rolling into the air. Tanielu and Alain followed her, still wrestling as their combined velocity pushed them past her position on a vector for the upper wall of the habitat module.

Lappet hurled her cup upward to gain downward momentum. It wasn't much, but she didn't have far to go. Outside in hard vac she'd have a line gun. In here...in here people weren't supposed to be this stupid.

She made the floor as the boys were descending on their rebound from the habitat skin. Her slippers found their plane and gave her back her artificial down. She eyed the arms locker briefly, but escalating the confrontation didn't seem to be in her interests. Tanielu was far meaner than she was, capable of almost anything. Alain was capable of anything through sheer hopeless desperation.

For a billion tai kong yuan, a whole lot of other people could be killing mean as well.

They were right. They were both right. Damn them. She wasn't smart enough to see a way out of this that didn't have her taking a hit. The best she could do was minimize the damage.

"Tanielu, wipe the stupid data,” Lappet said as the other two found their footing. “We're running out of time, and time is our safety valve. I'm going to head back out into hard vac and chisel that thing free. Nothing happens without that, no billion tai kong yuan, no losing that thing. If one of us thinks of a way to cash it in, fine. We'll all three be millionaires till long after we're dead. If I decide to fire it into an eccentric solar orbit, Tanielu can give me an infraction notice the size of Bellona-on-Mars. I'll go back to Ceres to dig sludge and we all live to be miserable another day."

"You're going to throw away a billion tai kong yuan?” asked Alain.

Tanielu turned on him with a fist cocked for a blow which the big man seemed to barely hold back. “Haven't you been listening, even to
yourself?
?"

"I always listened to M-Malibu.” Alain's voice thickened. “Before Lappet killed him."

"Dumb luck,” Lappet said, almost the same instant as Tanielu said, “Human error.” His grin was deeply feral.

It was a frayed safety cable
, she thought desperately. They'd both been out in hard vac. Lappet had been slipping a bad charge cylinder out of Malibu's line gun when the cable snapped. He already had velocity due to the stone burner in his hands. In Malibu's panic the burner had flared. Or maybe the switch had stuck—that's why he was working with it on the surface in the first place. His suit's attitude jets had fired wildly, sending him into a spin, but they didn't have nearly enough power to bring him home again. The rockhopper had been cold parked, at the wrong end of a four-hour launch cycle, so Tanielu hadn't been able to scramble after Malibu.

The whole incident was increasingly muddy in Lappet's mind. All she knew was that she was holding the line gun the dead man should have had on his belt. When Lappet desperately went to fire it upward in contravention to regs and common sense alike, there was no shot due to the missing charge cylinder.

That was the story Lappet told herself every sleep shift in her dreams, when Malibu came visiting, accompanied by the clicking sound of his suit jets dry-firing after their compressed gas had run out. Sometimes she could hear Alain crying. His sobs became the dead man's breath, returned to torment Lappet.

They'd listened to Malibu screaming on the comm until his suit had passed out of range. Hearing his lover's long, slow death was what had stripped Alain of his sanity.

"I'm suiting up,” Lappet said through a throat that felt as if it were closing too tight to breathe. “Delete the logs, and keep them turned off until I'm done out there. Whatever the hell I decide to do."

Outside the vacuum displayed the same knife-edged beauty it had always held for her. The deep dark was an eternity of sterile consistency. Lappet followed her safety line around the short, irregular horizon of their rock to her digging. It was blessedly out of sight of the habitat.

Spoil marked the edges of her hole, like some terrestrial rabbit burrow. Despite her fatalistic sense of hurry, Lappet stopped and did her safety checks—life support, power systems, comm. Everything worked. Unlike Malibu, she even had her line gun.

She headed down her twisting tunnel with its gaping vein of harvested pyrochlore. Even through the rock Lappet knew exactly where the artifact was. It took her almost fifteen minutes of very careful movement to reach the last void.

The artifact still sat where she'd left it. It was wedged into a crack in the far side of the void, as if perhaps it had been pushed in from the other direction. Lappet drifted close, the attitude jets in her suit keeping her station while she studied. Not embedded in the rock, so it wasn't as old as the igneous processes which had formed this chunk of carbonatite.

She reached out her hand. Whatever this was, whoever had made it, this artifact had come across far more time to meet her here than the human race had come to send her to this meeting.

It was just a solid thing under her touch. There was no squirming, no lighting up, no tiny, toothed alien larvae leaping out. The thing didn't come at her tug, either, but Lappet had expected that. She broke out her 0, 00 and 000 picks and set to work freeing it from the stone.

The bindings of time slipped free one grain of rock after another.

The artifact wasn't quite as hard to maneuver as the stone burner, though it was damned near that heavy. Forty kilos of mass, at least, which meant it was dense as all get out. She pushed it ahead of her, careful not to knock it against any stony edges and thus leave a betraying trace. Lappet promised herself she would return and use the stone burner to slag the artifact's resting place back in the void.

As she emerged from her hole, something struck her hard on the shoulder. Lappet lost her hold on the safety line and bounced off the spoil pile. She used that momentum to swing herself around the dead mass of artifact trying to bring it before her as a shield.

One of the boys was spinning away from her. He had a long-arm wrench in his hands, which he was now flailing to push off the surface of their little asteroid as his attitude jets puffed. Lappet twisted her head, trying to read the name on the suit.

She felt a cold stab of pain. The stencil read malibu.

Malibu regained control and warped himself along a safety line.

Lappet kicked away from the surface to escape her attacker. It couldn't be, it wasn't possible But the
suit
. She looked down. Malibu was firing his line gun into the asteroid, propelling himself upward like a missile with the kinetic reaction.

It can't be Malibu
, her inner voice whispered in answer to her fears.
You saw him die.

She tongued her comm as the dead man began to overtake her. “Rock control, where is hard vac four?"

Tanielu's response was prompt. “In his quarters, hard vac three."

"Could you...ah...check that for me?"

Alain's voice broke in. “I'm right
heeeere
."

Lappet didn't have a weapon. Not that that mattered much. The way things were going, they might as well all kill each other out here and save the company the trouble. She drew her line gun and spun along her axis, seeking a good vector to get back out of the fight and think clearly.

She was aiming her shot when Malibu slammed into her. The line gun tumbled out of her hand, shooting into a low orbit around (217496) 2078 hj3. Malibu's helmet cracked into hers.

Alain leered through the faceplate. This close, she could see the stencils were just an overlay. She could have smacked him silly for that stupid stunt. Still, she would be damned before she'd kill more of her own crew.