“We’ll see soon enough,” Maris said. “Meanwhile, let’s get busy, gentlemen.”
Bruno glanced at her. “I do believe you have a plan,” he said.
“It’s not much of one, but hear me out.”
By the time Ty and Maris had hauled Barrett’s body to the shuttle, his sled had docked with the motor section of the Symbiosis ship. They tethered the body to the tank where Alice had slept out three hundred days, and tethered the weapon to the utility belt of its p-suit. Maris dragged some of the plastic insulation out of the tank’s hatch for dramatic effect, fired a couple of shots into the tangle of bags and tubes inside, then scooted back to look at her work. The tank looked like something had hatched from it in a hurry; Barrett’s body, with its mask of lumpy foam, hung half-folded like a grotesque unstrung puppet, its yellow p-suit vivid against the black film of the vacuum organism.
“It looks kind of cheesy,” Ty said doubtfully, over their patch cord link.
“If you have a better idea,” Maris said, “let me know.”
“Maybe it’s because I don’t think he would have had the sense to tether his weapon.”
“He found where Alice was hiding,” Maris said, “and opened up the tank. There was a struggle. She killed him and took his sled. The weapon is necessary. It shows he meant her harm. If we don’t tether it to him, it’ll drift off somewhere and no one will find it. So let’s pretend that in his last moments he was overcome with common sense.”
“Yeah, well, none of that will matter if the crew knew where he was going in the first place.”
“We’ve been over that already. Barrett wouldn’t have told them where he was going because he wanted what Alice had for himself. Otherwise, you can bet that he would have come with plenty of back-up, or sat tight in the safety of his ship and let the Symbiosis cops take care of it.”
Ty looked as though he was ready to argue the point, but before he could say anything, Bruno broke in on the common channel. “Heads up,” he said. “The Symbiosis ship just broke apart. It would seem that the cable linking the two halves has been severed.”
Maris called up her suit’s navigation menu, and after a couple of moments, it confirmed Bruno’s guess. With the cable cut, the lifesystem and motor section of the ship had shot away in opposite directions. The lifesystem, tumbling badly, was heading into a slightly higher orbit; the motor section was accelerating toward Saturn, its exhaust a steady, brilliant star beyond the ragged sphere of wrecked ships. Maris’s com system lit up: the distress signal of the Symbiosis ship’s lifesystem; messages from the other two wrecking gangs; Dione’s traffic control.
“A perfect burn,” Bruno said, with professional admiration. “It is too early to judge exactly, but if I had to make a guess, I would say that it is heading toward the rings.”
“Let’s get packed up,” Maris told Ty, over the patch cord. “The cops will be here pretty soon.”
“She’ll be all right, won’t she?”
“I think she knew what she was doing all along.”
Back at the hab-module, Maris and Ty stripped off their suits and grabbed tubes of coffee while Bruno flipped through a babble of voices on the radio channels. Two tugs were chasing the Symbiosis ship’s lifesystem, but as yet no one was pursuing the motor section. Bruno had worked up a trajectory, and showed Maris and Ty that it would graze the outer edge of the B ring.
“One hears many wild stories of rebels and refugees hiding inside the minor bodies of the rings,” he remarked. “Perhaps some of them are true.”
Maris said, “She’s going home.”
A small, happy thought to cling to, in the cold certainty of days of inquiries, investigations, accusations. Wherever Alice was going, Wrecking Gang #3 was headed rockside, their contracts terminated.
“We’ll have to let Somerset go,” she said.
“I still think we should make it take the big step,” Ty said. “Anyone seen my TV? Maybe the news channels will tell us what’s going down.”
“Somerset is a fool,” Bruno said, “but it is also one of us.”
Maris said, “I can’t help wondering if Somerset was right. That we were manipulated by Alice. She killed Barrett and ran off, and left us to deal with the consequences.”
“She could have taken Barrett’s shuttle as soon as she killed him,” Bruno said. “Instead, she took a very big risk, alerting us with that radio squeal, waiting for us to get back. She wanted us to know she was innocent. And she wanted to give us a chance to get our story straight.”
Maris nodded. “It’s a pretty thought, but we’ll never know for sure.”
Ty suddenly kicked back from his locker, waving something as he tumbled backward down the long axis of the living quarters. It was his TV, rolled up in a neat scroll. “Will you look at this,” he said.
The scroll was tied with a length of blue wire. The wire Alice had regurgitated. The cargo she had guarded all this time.
The consequences of Barrett’s murder and the sabotage of the Symbiosis ship took a couple of dozen days to settle. Maris and the rest of Wrecking Gang #3 spent some of that time in jail, but were eventually released without trial.
Before the cops came for them, they agreed to take equal shares of Alice’s gift. At first, Ty didn’t want to give Somerset anything, and Somerset refused to take its share of the wire.
“I have agreed to lie about what happened. I have agreed to tell the police that my injury was caused by an accident. I do not need payment for this; I do it to make amends to you all.”
“It isn’t payment,” Maris said. “It’s a gift. You take it, Somerset. What you do with it is up to you.”
Maris hid the wire by splicing it into the control cable of her p-suit’s thruster pack. It turned out to be an unnecessary precaution; Symbiosis believed that the passenger had taken the missing vacuum organism spores with her, after she had killed Barrett and hijacked the engine section of his ship, and the police’s search of the hab-module was cursory. After they were released, the members of Wrecking Gang #3 met just once, to divide the spore-laden spool of wire into four equal lengths. They never saw each other again.
Somerset and Bruno sold their portions on the grey market. Somerset donated the money to his temple’s refugee center; Bruno bought a ticket on a Pacific Community liner to the Jupiter System. Maris became a farmer. With an advance on the license fees for the two novel varieties of vacuum organism that her length of wire yielded, she and her family set up an agribusiness on Iapetus, ten thousand square kilometers of the black, carbonaceous-rich plains of Cassini Regio. The farm prospered: the population of the Outer System was expanding rapidly as the economy recovered and migrants poured in from Earth. Maris married the technician who had helped type her vacuum organisms. He was ten years younger than her, and eager to start a family. The dangerous idea of exploring the ruins of the domed crater where Alice’s family had lived was an itch that soon dissolved in the ordinary clamor of everyday life.
A few years later, on a business trip to Tethys, Maris paid a spur-of-the-moment visit to the hearth-home of Ty’s clan. She learned that he’d given them his length of wire and set off on a Wanderjahr. His last message had been sent from a hotel in Camelot, the only city on Mimas, the small, icy moon whose orbit lay between Saturn’s G and E rings. It seemed that Ty had taken a sled on a trip to the central peak of Hershel, the huge crater smashed into the leading edge of Mimas, and had not returned. The sled had been found, but his body had never been recovered.
Maris believed that she knew what grail Ty might have been searching for under the geometric glory of Saturn’s rings, but she kept her thoughts to herself. Tales of feral communities, fiddler’s greens, pirate cities, rebel hideouts, edens, posthuman clades, and other wonders hidden in the millions of moonlets of Saturn’s rings were by now the mundane stuff of sagas, psychodramas, and the generic fictions broadcast on illicit TV. Maris knew better than most that a few of these stories had been grown from grains of truth, but by now there were so many that it was impossible even for her to tell fact from fable.