Spin the Sky (3 page)

Asia and me set a new speed record as we slam the ship’s doors shut and pull away from the orbital. We don’t stop for breath until we are well away from there. Then I start scanning and I see Captain’s remote flick back on. So I pull the video feed onto the main vidscreen, hoping we can figure out what is going on in there. It’s weirdly distorted but I can make out Captain sitting up in a medibox in a room that is full of them.

They look like normal mediboxes, except they have wires trailing out to large computer interfaces. There are several of the gray colonists hovering like harpies over a medibox on the far side of the room.

Captain spies Mike in the middle of them and utters a hoarse cry. Mike is yanking tubes out of his arm and throwing punches. Luckily, they both downed hypermet tablets on the ship against the odds that someone tried drugging the food. So they were only out for a few minutes instead of hours. We’d been around the block enough times to be paranoid like that. Voctoire’s colonists certainly weren’t expecting it.

Captain bursts out of the medibox with a cry of pain tearing through him before hurling himself into the colonists around Mike like a fury. I could tell by the angry red puckered lines crisscrossing his stomach and back that surgical lasers had been working on him.

I look him over later, but we never figure out exactly what they did to him in that medibox. Didn’t seem to slow him down, whatever it was. The gray colonists scatter, bleeding and shrieking. Mike is also in working order, if covered in blood and raging, cussing up a storm.

Then they find Alex, Mingo, and Fishtrap. It’s bad.

It’s worse when they realize the poor bastards are still alive. Mike retches at the sight while Captain methodically puts his three men out of their misery, one shot to the temple apiece. Captain always had that old pistol with him. He kept it loaded with flechettes, the kind that don’t pierce a ship’s hull. I swear he slept with it strapped to his privates. There are many occasions for a reliable pistol on a tinker ship.

Then they run for the ship, Captain screaming orders into his comm and Mike just screaming. On the way, they find the dining hall from before. Captain snatches up the half empty absinthe bottle without breaking stride.

“What was in there, anyway? Some kind of toxin or drug to slow them down?” Mike gasps, taking stairs three at a time.

Captain laughs, “Just some damn fine absinthe. I figured it never hurts to be neighborly.”

They almost make it.

When they reach the docking platform, Dr. Voctoire and a crew of heavily armed colonists are waiting for them. Mike and Captain have their guns at the ready.

“Your ship escaped, but you will not, clever Mr. Captain,” laughs Voctoire cruelly.

I guess he’s feeling pretty confident on account of Mike and Captain have at least four lasers apiece pointed at them. It’s like high noon in an Ether drama.

“I’d rather stay here and kill you monsters, anyway,” Captain replies grimly.

“You will not damage any more of us.” Dr. Voctoire chuckles. “But please, it will help our experiments to know who we are vivisecting. Tell us your name and we may at least send your ashes home.”

Captain stands like stone. “My name is Cesar Vaquero.”

The laughter and jeering stop suddenly. Even Mike gives him a startled glance, though his gun never wavers. I can hear Asia gasp next to me so I know she’s listening too.

Dr. Voctoire begins to laugh again. This time, it has a more hysterical edge to it.

“Cesar the Scorcher? The Butcher of Mexico? You call me a monster for conducting important experiments on a few useless nothings? How many did you kill when you dropped that nuclear starship on Mexico City?”

It didn’t occur to him that Captain gave him a false name. No one would pretend to be Cesar Vaquero.

Captain’s face remains completely expressionless.

“Millions. I killed millions,” he says flatly as he cocks his pistol. “I ended the war. Billions would have died if the fighting continued. How many of you do you think I can kill?”

That’s when all the power goes out. Because Asia and me aren’t just sitting out there, twiddling our thumbs. We have a plan. We smash an electromagnetic pulse bomb against their hull with the power cranked up as high as we can get it. If any of their fancy electronics work after that, I’d guess they don’t work too well.

I can hear the sound of clicking triggers as the colonists fire their weapons reflexively, but it’s too late. The lasers are just so much useless junk by then. Some of them scream and claw at their computers, without power for the first time in decades apparently.

Only Mike and Captain remain calm. I switch the video to night vision just in time to see the Captain smile. It’s not a nice smile.

Captain knows immediately what Asia and I are up to. He cheerfully says to Voctoire, “I trust you ogres had the sense to run your vital systems off vacuum tubes like everyone else. No? Well isn’t that terrible? Perhaps if you are quick, you won’t lose the whole colony.”

There is the sound of scrabbling in the dark.

Our captain, Cesar Vaquero, calls out, “I hope you will all notice that our guns are not electronic. And neither are the bullets we are about to fire at you.”

It only takes a few minutes for the colonists to scatter, blind and toothless without their computers and lasers. Mike and Cesar fire a few rounds of flechettes to spur the exodus. And then I will be damned if Captain and Mike down race off into darkness after them. I thought for sure that’s the last time I’d ever see those two, but they popped back onto the docking platform with what was left of Mingo, Fishtrap, and Alex. Those poor bastards.

We have the ship docked and the doors open in no time. Before we took off, we rigged the orbital’s door to open manually. Sparing a minute to retrieve the bomb and store it for later use, we blaze away from that hellhole as fast as we can.

Only when we are sure they are not sending anything nasty after us do we stop to think about the man sitting next to us on the deck.

Cesar Vaquero, the Scorcher of Mexico, our Captain. Can you believe it? A war hero to Spacers, a genocidal maniac to the Earthers, a legend long thought dead and we’d been listening to his crazy stories and making him coffee for months. We watch him with horror and awe, but no one says a thing except for Asia. She only has one question.

“Are you sorry?” she asks.

Captain looks at his hands for a minute, and then slowly lifts his head to meet her eyes.

“The dirt-lovers were going to hit my home next. They had a bomb that could take out our whole colony with one hit. My parents, my wife, my son.” His voice breaks over that last word. “I killed eighty million people to stop a war. Truth is, I would kill billions to keep my family safe.”

He turns away from her and sets the coordinates for our next adventure.

No offense, kid, but your dad was… Well, he was your dad, wasn’t he? The Scorcher of Mexico. Everybody’s parents are crazy, but yours was always in a league of his own.

As if that weren’t strange enough, when he turns away, I see a new shock of white in his vivid red hair. It’d never been there before. Over the next few weeks, his hair turns snow white and stays that way.

We wondered what had been done to him in that medibox. That is, until the next crisis drives it out of our mind. Maybe you think I made the whole story up, but I swear I’m not smart enough to think of something as weird as that insane little world. Stay away from heliosynchronous orbitals, kid. That’s my advice.

I piloted that tinker for another few months for your dad. He was the best Captain I ever had, but then I met my man here on New Siberia and decided to settle down. Last I saw of him, your dad was headed for the Hathor Mining Colony with a ship full of drills to trade. I guess he never quite got there.

You tell your mom she’s in all our prayers. I hope they find the bastards that are giving you people so much trouble lately.

CHAPTER ONE

I
ronically, it was the most fanatic tree-hugging environmentalists who first went to live in space. They didn’t go far. In the orbital colonies, they could preserve the sanctity of their enclosed piece of Earth while keeping a disapproving eye on those who stayed behind.

These little worlds offered a haven from the high tech, instant-access Earth. Many were there because of the lucrative opportunities space provided, but the sky was also the new frontier for all those who couldn’t or wouldn’t share with the billions of the Earth. Of course, that was before the Spacer War.

Fifteen years after the Spacer War started, the most expensive spaceship of the day still doesn’t spin up to full gravity, but it docks like a dream. Cesar Vaquero stands tall on its docking deck. He is the very picture of weather-beaten cowboy straight from the American Wild West, though no Earther cowboy could ever afford Cesar’s real leather pants or cotton shirt in this day and age.

Cesar’s clothes are well worn and lovingly repaired. His boots are hand-stitched but cracked, with heels almost worn through. Time and fate have not been kind to him. The leather pants hold countless zippered pockets, each full of interesting treasures. His knapsack is made of good quality bioplastic, if torn and patched.

Standing still the way he is, you don’t notice the hitch in his gait. His thick white beard almost covers the jagged scar that stretches from his right ear to his lip. There are crinkles around the eyes that speak of many tragedies and, in spite of them, a willingness to smile.

There is the telltale clicking of a ship docking on an orbital. Cesar shifts from foot to foot impatiently.

You are a right fool,
he tells himself.
To wait fifteen years to come home and then feel like you’re going to die if you have to wait another fifteen seconds.

He shakes himself slightly, but still watches the door like a hawk. Earlier, Cesar tried watching on the observation deck as the ship approached the orbital, but gave up in disgust and came down to wait by the door when he realized that he didn’t recognize Ithaca at all.

Cesar spent the first twenty years of his life inside that orbital, before he took off without a single backward glance, swearing he’d never come back. Sad to say, if his life depended on identifying his home from the outside, he’d have died long ago.

Ithaca seemed to be doing well without him. It wasn’t as elegant as some of the other orbitals—the wheeling tori or globular colonies that stretch out across the sky like dew on a spider web. This one basically looks like a huge spinning beer can. It’s a large cylinder, miles in diameter and length.

When he was standing on the observation deck earlier, Cesar listened to a man on the deck explain to his small son that Ithaca contains three levels with sectionals that seal off instantly if there is a problem, like most orbitals.

The outermost level spins at slightly higher than Earth gravity. That level contains a complicated interlocking ecosystem of plants and animals to support the inhabitants. Ithaca produces some of the best cheese and meat in the system.

The second level houses the ten thousand residents who call this orbital home. This level is also for the manufacturing plants that make almost everything the colonists need from bacterial cultures in huge vats. These bacterial manuvats are coaxed to produce anything from bac-wood for furniture to bioplastic for shoes.

The last, innermost level holds the docking station, storage bays, and freefall recreational facilities. Although Earthers always expect the orbital colonies to be dark and dank, the agriculture and habitation levels are engineered with ceilings higher than most Earth skyscrapers and a system of mirrors and windows that make the orbital more sunny and warm than most of the Earth below it gets.

Cesar listens to the man lecture his son while spotting new solar panels, large debris nets and window polarization that all seemed in good repair. Cesar didn’t see the burns and dents on the outer hull that where from pirate attack, asteroid hit or some other calamity. He’d heard Ithaca was having mysterious problems lately. It’s what finally made him get up the courage to come home.

He also saw that the communications dish was still smashed. Cesar smiled, remembering the day he did that. It didn’t look like anybody had tried to repair it in the last sixteen years, but a small short wave antenna was installed next to it. That meant Ithacans only talked to their neighboring orbitals and got only Spacer Ether. They didn’t communicate with the Earth directly.

Interesting.

Cesar is happy to see Ithaca looking so prosperous. He smiles at the merchant carriers tethered to the orbital, waiting for their turn to dock like whales on a leash. He also sees quite a few shiny personal transports docked. That he does not like at all. It means the rumors are true. The richer colonies are circling Ithaca like vultures.

Cesar is past speculating whether coming home was a mistake. He is worn out and beyond anything but the dull aching need to see his family. He tells himself that whatever he finds, he will at least have found it. At the very least, that will stop the nagging questions in his mind.

Will his ranch even be there at all?

“
The
ranch,” he corrects himself. “Certainly isn’t
my
ranch anymore.”

And not like he had a right to it, since he hasn’t laid eyes on the place in more than fifteen years. Cesar wonders, as he did thousands of times over the years, what he will find when he gets there.

Did his family leave the ranch to strangers and make their way in the spheres? Will he find it abandoned with sad little graves marking him as the last lonely member of his clan? Will he find it prosperous and happy? Run down and penniless?

Cesar curses the years he spent refusing to even look for news from home. At first, he told himself it was better not to know what his family was doing, but lately he’d realized that was just cowardice. He didn’t ask for news about his family because it hurt too much to think of them. Right now, he’d happily listen to a rambling story about his old dad’s bunions if that meant the rotten old bird is still alive.