“The captain of the Alhambra asked for me? Me, specifically?”
“That he did.”
“Why on Earth would he do that?” Bracknell wondered.
“You’re not on Earth, mate. Take the job and be glad of it. You got no choice.”
THE BELT
At first Bracknell half-thought, half-feared, that he’d been brought to the Alhambra to become a husband for the captain’s daughter. His first day aboard the ship disabused him of that notion.
Bracknell was taken from the habitat by one of the coral-uniformed guards to an airlock, where he retraced his steps of a few days earlier and returned to the Alhambra. The captain was standing at the other end of the connector tunnel with his hands clasped behind his back, waiting for him with a sour expression on his lean, pallid face.
“I’m taking you on against my better judgment,” said the captain as he walked with Bracknell toward the ship’s bridge. Bracknell saw that he gripped a stun wand in his right hand. “Only the fact that my third man jumped his contract and took off for Earthside has made me desperate enough to do this.”
Bracknell began, “I appreciate—”
“You will address me as Sir or Captain,” the captain interrupted. “The computers do most of the brainwork aboard ship, but you will still have to learn astrogation, logistics, communications, propulsion, and life support. If you goof off or prove too stupid to master these subjects I’ll sell you off to the first work gang on the first rock we rendezvous with. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear,” said Bracknell. Then, seeing the captain’s eyes flare, he hastily added, “Sir.”
Captain Farad stopped at a door in the corridor. “This is your quarters. You will maintain it in shipshape condition at all times. You’ll find clothing in there. It should fit you; if it doesn’t, alter it. I’ll expect you on the bridge, ready to begin your duties, in half an hour.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bracknell.
Alhambra departed Ceres that day, heading deeper into the Belt to begin picking up metals and minerals from mining crews at various asteroids. For the next several weeks Bracknell studied the computer’s files on all he was supposed to learn, and took regular stints of duty on the bridge, always under the sternly watchful eyes of Captain Farad. He saw nothing of the captain’s daughter.
He spent virtually all of his spare time learning about the ship and its systems. Like most deep-space vessels, Alhambra consisted of two modules balanced on either side of a five-kilometer-long buckyball tether, rotating to produce an artificial gravity inside them. One module held the crew’s quarters and the cargo hold that was often used to hold convicts outward bound to the Belt. The other module contained supplies and what had once been a smelter facility. The smelter had become useless since the introduction of nanomachines to reduce asteroids to purified metals and minerals.
The captain assigned Bracknell to the communications console at first. It was highly automated; all Bracknell had to do was watch the screens and make certain that there was always a steaming mug of coffee in the receptacle built into the left arm of the captain’s command chair.
Through the round ports set into the bridge’s bulkhead Bracknell could see outside: nothing but dark emptiness out there. The deeply tinted quartz windows cut out all but the brightest stars. There were plenty of them to see, but somehow they seemed to accentuate the cold darkness out there rather than alleviate it. No Moon in that empty sky. No warmth or comfort. For days on end he didn’t even see an asteroid, despite being in the thick of the so-called Belt.
Bracknell didn’t see the captain’s daughter either until the day one of the crew’s family got injured.
He was gazing morosely through the port at the endless emptiness out there when an alarm started hooting, startling him like a sudden electric shock.
“What’s going on there, Number Three?” the captain growled.
Bracknell saw that one of the keys on his console was blinking red. He leaned a thumb on it and his center screen showed two women kneeling beside the unconscious body of what appeared to be a teenaged boy. His face was covered with blood.
“We’ve had an accident!” one of the women was shouting, looking up into the camera set far above her. “Emergency! We need help down here!”
“What the hell’s going on over there?” the captain growled. Pointing at Bracknell, he commanded, “Get into a suit and go across to them.”
“Me?” he piped.
“No, Jesus Christ and the twelve apostles. You, dammit! Get moving! Take a medical kit and a VR rig. Addie will handle whatever medical aid the kid needs.”
That was how Bracknell learned the name of the captain’s daughter: Addie.
He jumped from his comm console chair and loped to the main airlock. It took several minutes for him to wriggle into one of the nanofabric spacesuits stored in the lockers there, and minutes more for him to locate the medical kit and virtual reality rig stored nearby. Through the ship’s intercom the captain swore and yelled at him every microsecond of the time.
“The kid could bleed to death by the time you get your dumb ass there!”
It was scary riding the trolley along the five-kilometer-long tether that connected the ship’s two rotating units. The trolley was nothing more than a platform with a minuscule electric motor propelling it. With nothing protecting him except the flimsy nanofiber suit, Bracknell felt like a turkey wrapped in a plastic bag inside a microwave oven. He knew that high-energy radiation was sleeting down on him from the pale, distant Sun and the still-more-distant stars. He hoped that the suit’s radiation protection was as good as its manufacturer claimed.
At last he reached the smelter unit and clambered through its airlock hatch. He felt much safer inside.
Despite its being unused for several years, the smelter bay was still gritty and smeared with dark swaths of sooty dust. As Bracknell pulled down the hood of his monomolecular-thin suit, a heavy, pungent odor filled his nostrils. The boy was semiconscious by the time Bracknell reached him. The two women were still kneeling by him. They had cleaned most of the blood from his face.
Clamping the VR rig around his head so that its camera was positioned just above his eyes, Bracknell asked, “What happened?”
One of the women pointed to the catwalk that circled high above the smelting ovens. “He fell.”
“How in the world could he fall from up there?”
The woman snapped, “He’s a teenaged boy. He was playing a game with his brother.”
“Thank the Lord we’re running at one-sixth g,” said the other woman.
Then Bracknell heard the captain’s daughter’s voice in his earplug. “The bleeding seems stopped. We must test to see if he has a concussion.”
For the better part of an hour Bracknell followed Addie’s instructions. The boy had a concussion, all right, and a bad laceration on his scalp. Probably not a fractured skull, but they would X-ray him once they had him safely in the infirmary. No other bones seemed to be broken, although his right knee was badly swollen.
At Addie’s direction he sprayed a bandage over the laceration and inflated a temporary splint onto the leg. With the women’s help he got the still-groggy kid into a nanosuit. All three of them carried him to the airlock and strapped him onto the trolley.
Clinging to the trolley by a handhold, Bracknell again rode the length of the ship’s connecting tether, surrounded by swarms of stars that gazed unblinkingly down at him. And invisible radiation that could kill him in an instant if his suit’s protection failed. He tried not to think about that. He gazed at the stars and wished he could appreciate their beauty. One of them was Earth, he knew, but he couldn’t tell which one it was.