10000 Light Years From Home Part 26

Running out of rock for their metabolite to work on. Gollem ha.s.sled them about that every time he pa.s.sed.

"Where are your rock nudgers?" he asked now when the squatterchief came on his screen.

"Soon, soon, 'Spector Gollem." The squatterchief was a slender skinhead with a biotuner glued to one ear.

"The Company will cancel, Juki. Coronis Mutual won't carry you on policyholder status if you don't maintain insurable life-support."

Juki smiled, manipulated the green blob. They were abandoning the rocks all right, drifting off into symbiotic s.p.a.celife. Behind Juki he saw a couple of the older chiefs.

"You can't afford to cut the services the Company provides," he told them angrily. n.o.body knew better than Gollem how minimal those services were, but without them, what? "Get some rock."

He couldn't use any more time here. As he pulled away he noticed one of the loose bubbles was a sick purple. Not his concern and not enough time.

Cursing, he eased alongside and cautiously slid his lock probes into the monomolecular bubbleskin.

When the lock opened a stink came in. He grabbed his breather and kicked into the foul bubble. Six or seven bodies were floating together in the middle like a tangle of yellow wires.

He jerked one out, squirted oxy at its face. It was a gutbag kid, a born null-gee. When his eyes fanned open Gollem pushed him at the rotting metabolite core.

"You were feeding it phage." He slapped the boy. "Thought it would replicate, didn't you? You poisoned it."The boy's eyes crossed, then straightened. Probably didn't get a word, the dialect of Fourteen was drifting fast. Maybe some of them truly were starting to communicate symbiotically. Vegetable ESP.

He pushed the boy back into the raft and knocked the dead metabolite through the waster. The starved molly-bubble wall was pitted with necrosis, barely holding. He flushed his CO2 tank over it and crawled back to his boat for a spare metabolite core. When he got back the quasi-living cytoplasm of the bubbleskin was already starting to clear. It would regenerate itself if they didn't poison it again with a CO2-binding mutant. That was the way men built their s.p.a.cehomes now, soft heterocatalytic films that ran on starlight, breathed human wastes.

Gollem rummaged through the stirring bodies until he found a bag of phage between a woman and her baby. She whimpered when he jerked it loose. He carried it back to his boat and pulled carefully away, releasing a flow of nutrient gel to seal his probe-hole. The mollybubble would heal itself.

At last he was clear for Ragnarok.

He punched course for Twelve and then deftly patched in the log bypa.s.s and set his true trajectory.

The log would feed from his cache of duplicates, another item n.o.body had better find. Then he logged in the expendables he'd just used, padding it a piece as always. Embezzlement. His stomach groaned.

He tuned up a rock storm to soothe it. There was an old poem about a man with a dead bird tied around his neck. Truly he had his dead bird. All the good things were dead, the free wild human things.

He felt like a specter, believe it. A dead one hanging in from the days when men rode machines to the stars and the algae stayed in pans. Before they cooked up all the metabolizing Martian macromolecules that quote, tamed s.p.a.ce, unquote. Tame men, women and kids breathing through 'em, feeding off 'em, navigating and computing and making music with 'em-mating with them, maybe!

Steppenwolf growled, worried the biomonitor. His metal-finder squealed.

Ragnarok!

Time shivered and the past blazed on his screens. He let himself have one quick look.

The great gold-skinned hull floated in the starlight, edged with diamonds against the tiny sun. The last Argo, the lonesomest Conestoga of them all. Ragnarok. Huge, proud, ungainly star machine, blazoned with the symbols of the crude technology that had blasted man to s.p.a.ce. Ragnarok that opened the way to Saturn and beyond. A human fist to the G.o.ds. Drifting now a dead hulk, lost in the sea she'd conquered. Lost and forgotten to all but Gollem the 'specter.

No time now to suit up and prowl over and around her, to pry and tinker with her archaic fitments.

The pile inside her was long dead and cold. He dared not even try to start it, a thing like that would set off every field-sounder in the zone. Quine's stolen power in her batteries was all that warmed her now.

Inside her also was his dead bird.

He coasted into the main lock, which he had adapted to his probe. Just as he hit he thought he glimpsed a new bubble firming up in the storage cl.u.s.ter he had hung on Ragnarok's freightlock. What had Topanga been up to?

The locks meshed with a soul-satisfying clang of metal and he cycled through, eye to eye with the two old monster suits that hung in Ragnarok's lock. Unbelievable, so c.u.mbersome. How ever had they done it? He kicked up through dimness to the bridge.

For one moment his girl was there.

The wide ports were a wheeling maze of starlight and fire-studded shadows. She sat in the command couch, gazing out. He saw her pure, fierce profile, the hint of girl-body in the shadows.

Star-hungry eyes.

Then the eyes slid around and the lights came up. His star girl vanished into the thing that had killed her.

Time.

Topanga was an old, sick, silly woman in a derelict driveship.She smiled at him from the wreckage of her face. "Golly? I was remembering-" What an instrument it was still, that husky voice in the star haze. The tales it had spun for him over the years. She had not always been like this. When he had first found her, adrift and ill-she had still been Topanga then. The last one left.

"You were using the caller. Topanga, I warned you they were too close. Now they've picked you up."

"I wasn't sending, Golly." Eerie blue, the wide old eyes reminded him of a place he had never seen.

He began to check the telltales he had hung on her console leads. Hard to believe those antiques were still operational. Completely inorganic, a ton of solid-state circuitry. Topanga claimed she couldn't activate it, but when she had had her first crazy fit he had found out otherwise. He'd had her parked in Four then, in a clutch of s.p.a.ce-junk. She started blasting the bands with docking signals to men twenty years dead. Company salvage had nearly blown her out of s.p.a.ce before he got there-he'd had to fake a collision to satisfy Quine.

A telltale was hot.

"Topanga. Listen to me. West Hem Chemicals are sending a hunter out to find you. You were jamming their miners. Don't you know what they'll do to you? The best -the very best you'll get is a geriatric ward. Needles. Tubes. Doctors ordering you around, treating you like a thing. They'll grab Ragnarok for a s.p.a.ce trophy. Unless they blast you first."

Her face crumpled crazily.

"I can take care of myself. I'll turn the lasers on 'em."

"You'd never see them." He glared at the defiant ghost. He could do anything he wanted here, what was stopping him? "Topanga, I'm going to kill that caller. It's for your own good."

She stuck up her ruined chin, the wattles waving.

"I'm not afraid of them."

"You have to be afraid of a jerry ward. You want to end as a mess of tubing, under the gees? I'm going to dismantle it."

"No, Golly, no!" Her stick arms drummed in panic, trailing skin. "I won't touch it, I'll remember.

Don't leave me helpless. Oh, please don't."

Her voice broke and so did his stomach. He couldn't look at it, this creature that had eaten his girl.

Topanga inside there somewhere, begging for freedom, for danger. Safe, helpless, gagged? No.

"If I nudge you out of West Hem's range you'll be in three others. Topanga, baby, I can't save you one more time."

She had gone limp now, shrouded in the Martian oxyblanket he had brought her. He caught a blue gleam under the shadows and his stomach squirted bile. Let go, witch. Die before you kill me too.

He began to code in the gee-sum unit he had set up here. It was totally inadequate for Ragnarok's ma.s.s but he could overload it for a nudge. He would stabilize her on his next pa.s.s-by, if only he could find her without wasting too much power.

From behind him came a husky whisper. "Strange to be old-" Ghost of a rich girl's laugh. "Did I ever tell you about the time the field shifted, on Tethys?"

"You told me."

Ragnarok was stirring.

"Stars," she said dreamily. "Hart Crane was the first s.p.a.ce poet. Listen. Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas, the gleaming cantos of unvanquished s.p.a.ce. O silver sinewy-"

Gollem heard the hull clang.

Someone was trying to sneak out of Ragnarok.

He launched himself down-shaft to the freightlock, found it cycling and jacknifed back to get outthrough his boat at the main lock. Too late. As he sprang into his cabin the screens showed a strange pod taking off from behind that new bubble.

Dummy, dummy- He suited up and scrambled out across Ragnarok's hull. The new bubble was still soft, mostly nutri-gel. Pushing his face into it he cracked his breather.

He came back to Topanga in a blue rage.

"You are letting a phage-runner park on Ragnarok."

"Oh, was that Leo?" She laughed vaguely. "He's a courier from the next zone-Themis, isn't it? He calls by sometimes. He's been beautiful to me, Golly."

"He is a stinking phage-runner and you know it. You were covering for him." Gollem was sick. The old Topanga would have put "Leo" out the trash hole. "Not phage. Not phage on top of everything, Topanga."

Her ancient eyelids fell. "Let it be, Golly. I'm alone so long," she whispered. "You leave me for so long,"

Her withered paw groped out, seeking him. Brown-spotted, criss-crossed with reedy pulses.

k.n.o.bs, strings. Where were the hands of the girl who had held the camp on Tethys?

He looked up at the array of holographs over the port and saw her. The camera had caught her grinning up at black immensity, the wild light of Saturn's rings reflected in her red-gold hair....

"Topanga, old mother," he said painfully.

"Don't call me mother, you plastic s.p.a.cepig!" she blazed. Her carca.s.s jerked out of the pilot couch and he had to web her back, hating to touch her. A quarter-gee would break these sticks. "I should be dead," she mumbled. "It won't be long, you'll be rid of me."

Ragnarok was set now, he could go.

"Maintain, s.p.a.cer, maintain," he told her heartily. His stomach knew what lay ahead. None of it was any good.

As he left he heard her saying brightly, "Gimbals, check," to her dead computer.

He took off high-gain for Franchise Twelve and West Hem. Just as he had the log tied back into real time his caller bleeped. The screen stayed blank.

"Identify."

"Been waitin' on you, Gollem." A slurred tenor; Gollem's beard twitched.

"One freakin' fine ship." The voice chuckled. "Mainmouth by Co'onis truly flash that ship."

"Stay off Ragnarok if you want to keep your air," Gollem told the phage-runner.

The voice giggled again. "My pa'tners truly grieve on that, 'Spector." There was a click and he heard his own voice saying, "Topanga, baby, I can't save you one more time."

"Deal, 'Spector, deal. Why we flash on war?"

"Blow your clobbing tapes," Gollem said tiredly. "You can't run me like you run Hara.".

" 'Panga," the invisible Leo said reflectively. "Freakin' fine old fox. She tell I fix her wire fire?"

Gollem cut channel.

The phager must have made a circuit smoke to win her trust. Gollem's stomach wept acid. So vulnerable. An old sick eagle dead in s.p.a.ce and the rats have found her....

They wouldn't quit, either. Ragnarok had air, water, power. Transmitters. Maybe they were using her caller, maybe she'd been telling the truth. They could take over. Shove her out through the lock....

Gollem's hand hovered over his console.

If he turned back now his log would blow it all. And for what? No, he decided. They'll wait, they'll sniff around first. They want to take me too. They want to see how much squeeze they have. Pray theydon't find out.

He had to get some power somewhere and jump Ragnarok out. How, how? Like trying to hide Big Jup.

He noticed that he had punched the biomonitor into a sick yellow blob and hurled it across the cabin.... How much longer could he cool Coronis?

Right on cue, his company hotline blatted.

"Why aren't you at Franchise Two, Gollem?"

It was marnmouth Quine himself. Gollem took a deep breath and repeated his course reversal plan, watching Quine's little snout purse up.

"After this clear with me. Now hear this, Gollem," Quine leaned back in his bioflex, pink and plump.

Coronis was no hardship station. "I don't know what you think you're into with Franchise Three but I want it stopped. The miners are yelling and our Company won't tolerate it."

Gollem shook his s.h.a.ggy head like a dazed bull. Franchise Three? Oh yeah, the heavy metal-mining outfit.

"They're overloading their tractor beams for hot extraction," he told Quine. "It's in my report. If they keep it up they'll have one b.l.o.o.d.y hashup. And they won't be covered because their contract annex specifies the load limits."

Quine's jowls twitched ominously. "Gollem. Again I warn you. It is not your role to interpret the contract to the policyholder. If the miners choose to get their ore out faster by abrogating their contract that's their decision. Your job is to report the violation, not to annoy them with technicalities. Right now they are very angry with you. And I trust you don't imagine that our Company"-reverent pause-"appreciates your initiative?"

Gollem made an inarticulate noise in his throat. He should be used to this. Coronis wanted its piece quickly and it wanted to avoid paying compensation when the thing blew. The miners got paid by the shuttle load and most of them couldn't tell a contract annex from a flush valve. By the time they found out they'd be dead.

"Another item." Quine was watching him. "You may be getting some noise from Themis sector.

They seemed to be all sweated up about a bit of rock."

"You mean those Trojans?" Gollem was puzzled. "What's there?"