E-mail Matt Jarpe at m.jarpe@comcast.net
Web design & programming by David Louis Edelman.
By Matthew Jarpe
Originally published July 2000 by Asimov's Science Fiction. Copyright © 2000 by Matthew Jarpe.
Thirteen hours in the jar would be enough to break the will of any man. The jar was small for a space habitat, measuring somewhere between a coffin and an elevator. It wasn't as comfortable as a coffin, or as entertaining as an elevator. Outside was the eager embrace of vacuum. Inside, there wasn't much more than that.
Thirteen hours in the jar would have had the most hard-bitten space captain begging to give up the self-destruct codes to his ship. But for Emilio Vasquez the jar wasn't a torture imposed by some brutal interrogators. It was his job.
Vasquez made most of his money by scooping up junk in orbit around Venus in a wire mesh net attached to the front end of his orbiter, the Chomper. On most planets you could make a bit of money doing this, but Venus was young, barely developed, and the junk that orbited this planet was pretty meager. Fixing satellites, on the other hand, could be very profitable, and Vasquez could fix a satellite. So he had this new business idea. He would set the Chomper on an orbit around the planet, hoovering up junk as usual, with no one on board. Then Vasquez would go extravehicular in this military surplus repair module, the jar, and fix satellites until the Chomper came back around. It was a sweet idea. Only one problem: the jar transformed itself from a vaguely unpleasant and uninteresting can of air into a hellish prison of the mind sometime around hour seven. Had Vasquez known this, he never would have bought the dammed thing. But he was in hock now, so he had to stick with it.
He had a contract to repair the guidance system on a particle beam generator, and he was rushing to finish in time to satisfy a number of time limits that were about to collapse in on him. First, he had to finish in time to rendezvous with the Chomper. The rendezvous was two hours away, and he couldn't be late or the jar would run out of battery power waiting for the ship to swing around on the next fifteen hour orbit.
The second time limit was somebody else's screw up, but that didn't make it any less real or any less of a pain in the ass for Vasquez. The particle beam generator, used to speed up or slow down big ore haulers, was off course and swinging dangerously close to the orbit of the Ticonderoga, the warship that policed Venus orbit. If it got too close the trigger happy rent-a-cops on the Tike would freak out and might even open fire. Then Vasquez would lose the satellite repair contract and probably his whole business.
The third time limit was just Vasquez's personal hang-up. He was working about five meters from the unshielded isotope battery that powered the particle beam generator's guidance system. He was watching the dosimeter clipped to the front of his shirt pretty carefully. He had clicked over five rems since he started, which wasn't too bad for an acute exposure. He might lose a little hair the next couple of days, or find some blood in his stool, if he cared to look for it. He didn't think too much about the chronic dose. He already had in excess of 200 rems on it, which was pretty normal for a spacer. Good for a significant cancer risk, almost a guarantee that any child he fathered would have some serious mutation, but he'd gathered that dose over years and he'd had time to get used to the idea. He knew he'd be feeling it in the morning if he caught more than ten rems in one shot, so that was another good reasong to hurry it up.
Vasquez paused the waldo in the process of resetting an unseated chip. He pulled his fingers out of the thimbles one by one, then twisted his wrist out of the bracelet, and then wrenched his elbow out of the cup. Finally, he used his free hand to scratch madly at his crotch. The vacuum diaper was riding up on him again. He'd be glad to get back to the relative luxury of the Chomper. He readjusted the nylon harness that kept him from floating around inside the jar, then reversed the process to get his arm back into the waldo rig.
Like most military surplus items, the jar was not exactly right for this job. It had been made to fit some other purpose and Vasquez was still working on refitting it for his own needs. The engineers who'd designed the thing had given it just four hours of life support, reasoning that not even an idiot would agree to more than four hours in such a confined space. When Vasquez had bought it, he'd immediately refitted the life support for twenty-four hours, to suit his own needs. He didn't care what the engineers thought. He needed something that would keep him alive during an entire orbit, at every level, even up in the high country. That way he could set the Chomper on a rich vein of junk while he fixed a satellite in a cleared orbit. He had it all figured out, except for the psychological factor. It turned out the engineers were right on that calculation.
The tool kit on the outside of the jar had items he never thought he'd use, and lacked tools he needed. It had several sets of waldo hands, ranging in size from the delicate little centimeter wide pin hands for electronics work to the big, clumsy, and mostly useless meter wide meat hooks. The chemical engines had too much power, and there were way too many of the small compressed gas thrusters for him to keep track of. He knew what the fiberoptic scope was for, and the laser welding torch, but the green oval screen with the row of useless buttons on the inside wall was still a mystery. It would be a while before he had the jar set up just the way he wanted it.
It looked like he was finished. He powered up the guidance system and watched the start-up procedure. The self diagnostic showed green. The guidance system was back online and the satellite was already moving away from him, parking itself in its own orbit. Almost as if it knew the bastards on the Ticonderoga were notoriously jealous guardians of their orbital space. Vasquez got ready to boost the jar back into the path of the Chomper so it could snag him as it swept by. Then it was a hot shower, flip on the news and see how the commodities market was doing, and sort through some junk. Better by a damned sight than sweating away in the jar.
Before hitting the engines, Vasquez looked out the windows out of habit, making sure he wasn't boosting into the path of some projectile. The jar didn't have radar. Unless that was what that green screen was for. Up ahead was the bright spark of the Tike, coming on fast in opposing orbit. Down planet was the particle beam, still finding its own real estate. The Chomper was too small to see, even though it was closer than the Ticonderoga. And up in the high country...
Something. Vasquez wasn't sure, but he thought he saw Betelgeuse occluded for more than a second. Yes, there it was. It occluded the stars in the belt of Orion, Anilam first, then Mintaka and Alnitak at the same time. The stars stayed dark for well over a second, then all three reappeared at the same time. Something big, or close, or both, and moving fast. There was nothing in the high country that big.
It wasn't an ore hauler. They kept a pretty regular schedule. The resupply ship was a week out, he was quite sure of that. Nobody on Venus missed the arrival of the resupply ship. And it couldn't be a tourist. Venus was a pit. There was no reason anyone voluntarily came here. Vasquez was curious. He flipped on his radio to call traffic control on the space station.
"Unidentified vessel, this is Venus security aboard the Ticonderoga, please transmit your code and alter course." So, apparently the boys on the Tike had caught sight of the bogie and they sounded like they were shitting in their pants. "Unidentified vessel, you must alter course...Unidentified vessel, your current heading is in violation of Venus orbital priorities, alter course for high parking orbit and identify at once."
The voice on the radio changed. Someone had gotten the boss. "Unidentified vessel, this is Venus security. You are encroaching on protected Venus space. Alter course or prepare to be fired upon."
What happened next made Vasquez jerk back so he missed seeing it directly. A burst of static so intense it sounded like an explosion came over the radio. A burst of light streamed through the window. He pulled himself back to the window in time to see the glowing embers of what was left of the Ticonderoga spreading out in an asymmetrical cloud.
"Unidentified vessel, you dirty bastard," Vasquez whispered.
For the next few hours, Vasquez knew only stark terror. The unidentified never spoke over the radio, but Vasquez heard the crews of the ore haulers jabbering away until, one by one, they were blasted just like the Ticonderoga had been. He watched on in helpless horror as the space station, with a couple of hundred men, women, and even a few children, was blown up.
Then it was Chomper's turn. The little orbiter was running quiet, not jabbering away on the radio, not firing any boosters, just drifting in orbit and catching the occasional piece of garbage in its net. But it was sending out a transponder signal, and it was burning a little plutonium in its reactor. So the unidentified lit it up. Vasquez never saw the shot, whether it was a missile or an energy beam or just a depleted uranium slug. Whatever it was, it made short work of Chomper. Just a little static burp and a dim red cloud of debris, and that was the end.
Vasquez finally saw the enemy when it passed between him and the planet. It was a warship, of course. Much newer than the decommissioned Ticonderoga, wedge shaped, and dead black, to better radiate heat. And it moved like nothing he'd ever seen. It reversed directions so fast that everyone on board must have been in acceleration tanks filled with silica gel. The enemy ship went into a power dive and swung through two gut wrenching hyperbolic orbits, looking for more targets. It must be packing one of those magneto-warp engines he'd heard about. No mere reaction drive could move a ship like that.
Next, they went after the particle beam generators, which of course could be used as weapons. That wasn't what they were designed for, but someone like Vasquez could have pointed one of them at the invader and let go with a barrage. He might even scratch the paint. He hadn't thought it was worth trying, but apparently the attacker was worried enough about the possibility to blow up all four of the generators.
As it turned out, it was a good thing that he was clear of the particle beam, because whatever they threw at it made for a hell of a light show. Vasquez felt a tingle that brought tears to his eyes, then a wave of heat as the temperature regulators overloaded, and finally his ears popped as the jar was compressed in the shock wave.
He hung in the center of the jar, trying to catch his breath and blinking the spots out of his eyes. He was alive. The particle beam generator had been over a kilometer away when it went off. He didn't see what had hit it any more than he had seen the weapon that had destroyed the Ticonderoga or the Chomper. But he was sure that whatever it was, it was swinging around to draw a bead on the jar next. He couldn't run, or hide, or fight back. He was still strapped into the harness of the waldo rig, so he couldn't even kiss his own ass goodbye. So he just waited.
And waited for ten minutes more. He heard the static burst of the explosions as the other three particle beam generators went off, then the enemy ship took up a position over the north pole of Venus and just sat there. Not orbiting, not moving. Just using its fancy new engines to hover, right over Cupid, the biggest mining base.
They hadn't seen the jar. It wasn't surprising, the jar was relatively small and didn't put out much radiation in any wavelength. If they had seen him, they would have opened fire, certainly. They'd killed almost everything else in orbit, everything that posed a threat. And, laughable as it was, Vasquez in his little jar with the little hydraulic arms could be considered a threat.
So they had spared the jar as an oversight and had gone right to attacking the planet. Vasquez could see these weapons. Bright sparks fell from the enemy ship towards the yellow cloud cover. Then he saw something he'd never seen before. Something he never thought he would see. He looked down on the unveiled face of Venus herself. Whatever those weapons had been, they were powerful enough to roll back the dense cloud cover over the pole, to expose the surface that hadn't seen direct sunlight in millions of years.
But powerful enough to crack Cupid? Probably not. The weapons would destroy everything on the surface, to be sure. Any miner unlucky enough to be out and about would surely have been crushed by the shock wave, which would carry a lot of force in 90 bars of CO2. But Cupid was buried underground, under tons of volcanic rock packed with heavy metals. It was the perfect bomb shelter. The mining base was already shielded against blast furnace heat, crushing pressure, acid, electrical storms and earthquakes. What weapon could damage them?
The answer was obvious as Vasquez waited for the barrage to continue. The weapon was time. The shock wave had destroyed the power receiving stations, which had to be up on the surface to catch energy from the power satellites. Without them, Cupid would no longer have the energy to pump heat out of the habitat. As their internal power supplies ran down, they would cook in there, and this little drama would slowly come to an end. Or they might opt for the escape pods and get picked off one by one as they launched themselves into orbit. Either way, Emilio Vasquez would be the only survivor of the attack. He'd have that distinction for just six more hours, because that was when his own batteries would quit, then shortly after that the air scrubber, then Vasquez himself.
If he lasted that long, that was. In order to make it to his date with asphyxiation he first had to orbit through the debris cloud of the Ticonderoga. When the attack had started, the jar and the Tike were in the same opposing orbit. Most of the debris followed the same path as the ship had been headed, and Vasquez dared not fire up his main engines to move the jar for fear of attracting attention. The cloud would be full of all sorts of nasty twisted metal, not to mention the remains of the rent-a-cops and a big chunk of fissionable material from the reactor. He didn't want to add a dangerous radiation exposure to the perils he already faced. Of course, he had probably already caught a few extra rems during the attack. Then he remembered the tingling sensation he had felt when the particle beam generator went off.
Vasquez grabbed the dosimeter clipped to the front of his shirt and brought it up in his shaking hand. He remembered getting the dosimeter on the first day he'd gone to work for his father's salvage operation in Martian orbit. They'd given him a lecture about the different kinds of ionizing radiation, and the acute and chronic effects of exposure. He'd only half listened at the time, but since then he'd picked up what he needed to know.
He suddenly remembered the day when he had threatened to quit his father's business, join the military, work on the amazing space ships he'd only read about. He remembered his father laughing at him, pointing to the badge.
"You think the military's going to take you with an exposure like that? You're dreaming, kid. They don't want to get stuck with the medical bills, getting you a new set of stem cells."
He'd been right, of course. Ben Vasquez wasn't always right, but he was not wrong so often that you'd notice it. They'd said he was crazy to buy the salvage rights to Venus, long before there was any salvage orbiting Venus. That the claim had become worth something only after Ben Vasquez was dead was only affirmation of his foresight. He had made a gamble that had payed off for his son, and he'd managed to control Emilio's destiny through his inheritance.
Emilio Vasquez slowly unclenched his fist and looked at the readout on the dosimeter. This morning it had read 213,452 mrem. This afternoon, the badge read 999,999 mrem. It was off scale. He'd received at least 787 rem in a single burst.
Probably a lethal dose. Without medical treatment, he might live twenty-four hours, not much longer. With that hit of radiation, every cell in his body would commit suicide, one by one, in an effort to save the whole body from the possibility of a cancerous mutation. The good news was there was a cure for acute radiation exposure. The bad news was that the jar's first aid kit contained only adhesive tape and a mild analgesic.
Vasquez felt the panic rise in him. A lethal dose. His mind simply could not wrap itself around this piece of information. He looked at his watch to guess how long he had. Then he remembered that it was time to enter the debris cloud of the Ticonderoga. The thought of tons of twisted metal hurtling toward him had the strange effect of clearing his mind, calming him down. This was a problem he could deal with. And then he had the battery power to worry about. The two problems together took his mind off the numbers on his badge. Time enough to worry about that later.
Floating through the debris field was like entering a three dimensional graveyard. The security forces that had manned the Ticonderoga were everywhere, in various states of dismemberment. He didn't have any friends on the Ticonderoga, and a few of these corpses belonged to people he would have called enemies. They were officious pricks who'd obstructed him in the course of running his honest business. But he'd never have wished this end on them.
Around them was some great junk. The next salvage operation around this planet was going to find a gold mine in this orbit. A junk man's wet dream. Vasquez had his eye out for something in particular, though. He was in the waldo rig, scanning the cloud through the scope with the arms ready to reach out and push aside anything dangerous, or grab anything useful. The jar needed lithium batteries to extend the lifetime of the air scrubbers. The Ticonderoga would have been carrying lots of them. They'd be found on any equipment that needed an uninterruptible power supply. Vital computers, failsafes for the reactor, things like that.
A winking green light caught his eye. Something in this cloud had power. He gave the foot pedal a nudge, releasing just a little bit of compressed gas to push him closer, making a snap decision with no time to guess what it was. The jar drifted over to the winking light. With a hair trigger reflex born of desperation, Vasquez made the grab. The feedback mechanism told him he had something. He looked through the scope at the thing in his surrogate hands.
It was a pretty complex chunk of electronics. He rolled it over and found a charge meter. The lithium batteries were still pretty full. Whatever was attached to the battery, it wasn't using much juice. By the minor miracle of empty space and chance, he'd hit the one thing he wanted and missed everything else.
On the far side of the cloud, safe for now, Vasquez looked over his prize more carefully. He thought he might be able to pull the batteries out and simply swap them for his own as they ran out. But another possibility presented itself. There was a connector on one side of the piece of debris he held that had a distinctive shape. He knew the jar had the opposite connector on the end he thought of as the bottom. It might work to just plug these two connectors together, and then he wouldn't have to worry about losing power while he fumbled around with batteries. But then again, he had no idea what that connector was really for.
He decided to try it. If it started doing something funky, he'd be ready to pull out the plug right away. The arms just reached the bottom of the jar. He'd been right about the plug, it fit perfectly. Next, he checked the power levels on the life support module. No change. The connector may fit perfectly, but it didn't feed any battery power to the jar. He got ready to pull it back out again, when he noticed the green screen. Lines of code were marching down the screen, some kind of boot up sequence.