MARYA AND THE PIRATE

by Geoffrey A. Landis

* * * *

After two years as the Ronald McNair visiting professor of astronautics at MIT, Geoffrey Landis is back at NASA, working on advanced space missions. One such, the Solar Probe Plus, is a mission to send a probe to the outer corona of the Sun. After too long an absence, we are pleased that our resident rocket scientist has found the time to fashion a riveting adventure story about “Marya and the Pirate.” More information about Geoff can be found on his website, www.geoffreylandis.com.

The best-kept secret in the solar system, a sheet of glass nine meters in diameter, was coasting at about twenty kilometers per second on an unpowered trajectory between Venus and Earth. The sheet of glass was unremarkable except that, despite being only a few centimeters thick, it was unusually flat. A thin layer of aluminum vacuum-coated onto the surface made it a nearly perfect mirror.

Domingo Bonaventura, in a small pod barely larger than a coffin, coasted along silently in the shadow of the mirror. He had been coasting for thirty days, periodically making small corrections in the angle of the mirror to insure that it shielded the pod from view from the Earth, and from the many stations and habitats in the cis-Earth space, and likewise that the mirror hid the pod from the view of a precisely calculated point in space. From the viewpoint of an observer anywhere in the Earth-moon system, if any such had happened to point a telescope in his direction, the mirror would reflect only an image of empty space. The infrared emission of the mirror was negligible, and only a phenomenally sensitive detector would show anything other than empty space. Radar, too—if anybody were probing space with radar—would be reflected into empty space.

He had his antennas out, listening for radar, and for radio emissions. There was some modest radio chatter originating from the point of space he was coasting toward: navigation beacons, primarily, and occasional data, most likely engineering-systems status updates. No voice, so far, and he was getting close enough that he would very likely be hearing spillover from a narrow-beam, if there were one. That was good.

Domingo made a tiny adjustment in the mirror angle, checked it, checked it again, and then checked it once more. A little over two hours to go. There was nothing to do, but Domingo had been living in space for two decades: he understood waiting. He folded his legs, placed his hands on his knees, palms up, and, floating freely, cleared his mind of all conscious thought.

For all practical purposes, Domingo Bonaventura was invisible. Which was precisely what he had intended all along.

* * * *

Domingo Bonaventura was a tall man, lean, his eyes dark and intense. He was clean shaven, except for a small and neat mustache, but that was not unusual for people who lived and worked in space; any more facial hair would interfere with the seal of an emergency oxygen mask. His one extravagance was his long hair, which floated in tendrils around his head, waving slightly like the arms of an anemone in the faint currents from the air recirculator. The air itself was stale; he had been far too long in quarters far too small, and the entire living area, small as it was, smelled of him. But he was long past noticing, or caring. He floated silent except for his regular breathing, and waited as the laws of physics brought him to his destination.

Two hours later, Domingo opened his eyes. It was time. With slow, economical motions he checked the radio spectrum. No changes in radio signature from the quarry, and no radar pings. Good, and good. As far as he was able to determine, he was still invisible.

He risked a visual, periscoping a camera lens out from behind the shielding effects of the mirror. His target was a glistening white sphere, twenty-five meters in diameter. Zooming the view, he saw attached to it were much smaller aluminum spheres—fuel tanks—and below that, a habitation module.

The hab module was also spherical, with four portholes spaced evenly around the equator, and thermal radiators deployed outward like fins, one to either side. It was a design he was familiar with. There would be blind spots at either end of the module, and also where the radiators blocked the view.

It was the cargo, not the habitat module, that he was interested in. Ten thousand tons of cometary water being shipped to the Earth-orbital colonies using a Venus fly-by. The cargo ship itself had only a small engine, adequate when it was empty, but far too small to accelerate at more than milligees with the full load of load. It could not flee even if it had been warned. Except for fine trajectory correction; it was on a precisely aimed orbit that would take it to the Earth orbital whip, a hundred-kilometer-long rotating orbital station. The whip was little more than a smart rope, but one rotating fast enough that its end would match the speed of the incoming spacecraft, grab it, and swing it in a precisely defined arc that would end up with the cargo in a perfect Earth orbit, and the energy from the ship’s original speed banked into the whip’s orbital energy, where it would be used to toss the next cargo toward the outer belt. Ten thousand tons of water was a significant treasure. At its intended destination of the inner colonies, it would be used for luxuries and for life support, to grow plants in greenhouse modules and to be electrolyzed into fuel. In the out and out, even a fraction of that much water could be the difference between survival of a colony and starvation.

The distance was closing rapidly. He made a few brief bursts of thruster firings, using cold-exhaust thrusters calculated to have almost no infrared signature. This adjusted his trajectory to bring his course closer to the target and also brought him in along a path where the bulk of the cargo would block any view of his pod from the habitat module.

And it was time. With a swift motion, Domingo hit the controls that blew the three struts that held the mirror to his pod, and fired a short blast on a braking thruster to separate them. The mirror coasted silently on, disappearing into space. Its trajectory was known precisely, and some time months later one of his people would chase it down and pick it up, so it could be used for another job. But for now it had done its work of keeping him invisible, and was unnecessary. He watched it disappear with no particular emotion.

He was committed.

With gentle taps on the pod’s braking thrusters, he slowed his course relative to his quarry until his relative motion was only a few centimeters per second. When he was done, the pod coasted to a bump against a cargo-support truss, and a final blast of the thruster brought it to a full stop. An external glue-gun extruded a bolus of vacuum-solidifying adhesive to tack the pod firmly to the strut; a quick shot of solvent would release it in an instant, if he needed it, but for the moment it would be docked firmly enough to stay in place even if the quarry made an unexpected attitude-adjustment burn.

Domingo suited up, working methodically but with swift practiced motions, checking each seal three times, and counting out the suit drill checklist aloud, even though there was no one to listen. He had already been breathing pure oxygen, so there was no decompression prebreathing time needed, and as soon as he checked his helmet seal, he punched for hatch opening. Pumps compressed the air from the cabin into tanks, saving it not so much for reuse (although reuse was reflexive where Domingo came from, as much a religion as a habit), but mostly to keep the hatch opening from releasing a cloud of oxygen that might signal to hypothetical telescopes that something was amiss. When the cabin pressure dropped to under a torr, he judged that the residual gas would be indistinguishable from normal outgassing of the quarry, and cracked the hatch. He took his tools and pushed off.

The white thermal blankets that kept the cargo cool were brilliant in the sunlight, and the LCD visor of his suit darkened to compensate. Towing his tools, he floated around the spacecraft.

He came around from the polar direction, away from view of the portholes, and aimed his infrared sensor at the closest of the fins to get a reading on how much waste heat was being rejected: 370 Kelvin.

Okay. As expected, the habitat module was live.

Somebody inside was about to have a very bad day.

He clipped his safety tether to a handhold just below the hatch to keep himself from floating away, and inspected it. The hatch was held in with six electromechanical dogs. Explosives would make short work of the hatch, but there was no point in destroying perfectly good hardware. Still staying out of the view of the portholes, and being careful not to make even the slightest jar against the habitat, he found the right spot and cut through the outer skin with a micro-torch, revealing color-coded wiring below. It was a standard design that he knew well. He shorted the two outermost wires, disabling the automated interlocks, and then clipped the next pair, bypassing the computer control.

There was no point in conserving oxygen at this point. He had to just hope no distant observers were looking in this precise direction at this precise instant. He checked his tether, and then selected two guns out of his tool pack. One he slung around his shoulders where it would be in easy reach, and the other, a glue-tipped harpoon gun, he held in his left hand. In his right hand he gripped a body-bag.

Domingo positioned himself out of the way, feet hooked against an edge of the thermal radiator. He counted silently down from five to calm his mind, and on zero he put forty volts across the two innermost wires: release.

The hatch blew.

The atmosphere expanded out in a silent spray, flashing instantly into ice crystals that glittered in the sun. Loose papers, hand tools, and some unidentifiable containers and other bits of debris flew by him, spinning into space. He ignored them, watching intently for a body entrained in the outrushing atmosphere.

Within a second, the outrush of atmosphere was complete. A few final bits of debris floated out of the hatch.

No body.

Time was critical. He pushed off from the habitat, hard, relying on the tether line to swing him around and then letting his momentum carry him through the open hatch without slowing. As he entered into the habitat his eyes searched left, right, upward, downward, seeking the body that had to be there, probably already unconscious from the shock of explosive depressurization.

No body.

In a single motion he flipped over and checked his motion, simultaneously releasing the body bag and unslinging the second gun. There were two suits racked in a niche to the side of the open hatch, one bright blue, one crimson. The suit to the right, the crimson one, was empty. On the blue suit to the left, however, although he could not see a face in the helmet, the indicator lights on the status display at the collar were green, green, green.

He raised both guns. In his earphones, he could hear the almost inaudible sounds of electronic handshaking as the microprocessor in his suit negotiated frequency. And then, very slowly, the arms of the blue spacesuit raised above its head. In his earphones, a soft voice: “Don’t shoot. I surrender.”

A girl’s voice.

He brought the gun to bear, and fired two short bursts, one into the faceplate of the helmet, the second into the suit. It was the right gun, the glue harpoon, and he had it set in the glue-only mode. The streamer of glue congealed almost instantly in vacuum, obscuring the faceplate and restricting the figure’s freedom of movement. Domingo tapped his receiver off before he could hear any protests from the captive. Two more short bursts tacked down the captive’s hands, just in case there was a weapon within reach.

According to the timer in his display, elapsed time from the moment he had blown the exterior hatch was just under four seconds.

The tangle of glue held the space-suited figure blind and immobile, the suit arms spread-eagled awkwardly and glued to the bulkhead. Domingo kept a small portion of his attention on the captive as he reset the hatch electronics, closed the hatch and reset the interlocks, and brought the habitat back up to full atmosphere. It took five minutes before his gauges all showed green, and in that time he did a quick check of the systems, verifying that everything was nominal, and that no messages had been received suggesting that anybody outside had seen something unusual. He paused for a moment, considering, and then removed his helmet and pulled off his gloves. It felt good to be breathing unconfined air again. The cabin air had the cold and dry tank-air feel of recent repressurization, with almost a metallic smell.

With the cabin back to pressure, it was time for him to deal with his captive. He examined the suit. The glue held it firmly immobile, and a large spatter of dark gray glue covered the visor of the helmet. A neatly block-lettered label, written in dark marker on the suit’s hardshell carapace, said “May.” His captive’s name, presumably. First or last?

He had already put the glue harpoon down. He kept the other gun in his left hand, a little railgun that shot a tiny loop of wire at hypersonic velocity. It had almost no recoil—an important feature for a gun used in microgravity—and while the wireloop projectile would easily shred flesh, it wouldn’t penetrate pressure walls.

He found the solvent spray in his tool pack, brought it out, and sprayed it over the glob of glue covering over his captive’s helmet. He popped the quick-release flanges and gave it a quarter twist, still one-handed, and pulled the helmet away.

“Thanks,” she said. She shook her head, dirty blonde hair swinging left and right, and then sneezed once.

This was the first look he’d gotten at her face. Buddha. How old was she, eighteen? Certainly no more than twenty, at the maximum.

She looked down at the gun he still held in his left hand, and then up again at his face. Was she actually smiling? “You don’t need that,” she said. “I already told you; I surrender. I’m ready to do whatever you tell me to. I won’t go back on my word.”

She wasn’t about to do anything just then; both her hands and her torso were still glued to the walls. He looked at her, and then lowered the gun, not letting it go, but at least aiming away to the side.

“So you said,” he said. “But should I trust you?”

She looked at him. Her gaze was disconcertingly direct. “I don’t know,” she said. “Should you?”

He laughed, without actual humor. “No,” he said. “I don’t think I should.”

He paused, and then said, “You were suited up when I blew the hatch. Why?”

“I felt a jar in the spacecraft,” she said. “Indicators didn’t show anything, but I thought some of the cargo might be venting, thought I’d take a look.” She paused, and said, “That must have been you docking, I take it.”

Domingo considered. That was plausible, although she must have been extremely sensitive to notice the tiny bump as he docked against the much larger cargo ship, since large spacecraft sometimes shudder erratically from thermal expansion waves created when parts move into or out of sunlight. It was hard to believe that a girl as young as she was could have enough experience in space to be able to tell the slight bump of his docking from normal quivering of the ship. And she was fast—it had been less than five minutes from his docking to blowing the hatch. On the other hand, the Venus to Earth transfer was long and boring, and she very likely had been hoping for something, anything, to do, to break the monotony.

“And what about you?” she said. “You blew the hatch, just like that? Not ever worrying about who might be inside? No warning at all? I know that pirates aren’t supposed to be very nice, but killing people without warning is a little extreme.”

“I don’t think you’re in much of a position to ask questions,” he said.

She shrugged, or did as much of a shrug as her limited range of motion allowed. “So, if you’re planning to shoot me, you would have done it already.”

He laughed, this time with real amusement. “Point,” he said. He jerked his head at the body-bag, an emergency-orange sack now floating unattended near the pilot’s console. “If there was somebody, I was ready to bag and repressurize them.”

The body bags were standard pieces of emergency equipment, human-sized airtight fabric bags with a small cylinder of compressed oxygen. In the case of an explosive depressurization, an unsuited crewman could, in principle, crawl into one, seal it, pull the quick-tab to inflate it, and wait for rescue. Or a vacuum-suited comrade could snag non-suited personnel and jam them into a bag. They were last-gasp desperation equipment for serious emergencies—something that might save your life, not something you’d ever want to try out.

She looked at him. “You really think you could find somebody, stuff them into a bag, and get them repressurized inside of sixty seconds?”

He nodded. “Yep. In drills, I’m under fifteen seconds.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

“We practice,” he said. “We drill. A lot.”

“Yeah, but with real, living people, not dummies? I don’t think so.”

He looked at her steadily. “We practice with real people.”

She shuddered. “God. You guys really are crazy.”

Domingo looked at her. It was a tough universe out there. How could they not practice? “Maybe in the cozy, rich worlds you live in,” he said, speaking slowly and contemptuously, “maybe you didn’t practice decompression drills. Maybe you’re rich enough that you never have blowouts. I suppose everything’s triple-redundant in the habitats you live in. You don’t know what it’s like. I guess you’ve never seen a blowout, never seen metal walls rip like potato chips under the pressure of escaping atmosphere, never seen your friends and family exposed to vacuum and known that anybody that you can’t chase down and cram into a bag in sixty seconds or less is somebody you’ll never again see alive.”

He was getting angry now. “Well, girl, I’m not you. I don’t live in that world. I live in the out and out, where things don’t always work, where blowouts can happen any day, any night, and there’s nobody else to rely on. Damn right we practice. Damn right we practice with real people.

“You say you can’t get somebody into a bag inside of ten seconds flat, seal the bag, and be looking for the next one in fifteen? Girl, I wouldn’t even want you in the out and out. You’d die in a week, and I’d call it lucky if you didn’t take somebody with you when you go.”

“Oh,” she said, in a very small voice. “Okay. I believe you.”

His burst of rage had passed now, and he felt empty. And thinking about seeing his friends die—because, one time, there were too many to save—he had little inclination to add another body to the universe’s death toll. The universe was harsh enough. It might be acceptable if somebody died in the course of an operation; that was something you had to accept, but it was another thing to kill somebody in cold blood. “No, I probably shouldn’t trust you,” he said. “But I will.”

“Thank you,” she said, still in a small soft voice.

He raised the solvent to release the glue holding her, but she shook her head, and said, “It’s okay, I got it.”

She squirmed a little, and the tips of the fingers of one hand came poking out of her suit, under her chin. She must have silently worked the arm loose from the glove and sleeve, and pulled it into the torso of the suit while he was checking the ship, leaving the suit arm that he’d glued to the bulkhead only an empty shell. The suit was slightly large for her, and the neck flange had just enough extra room that she could twist around and snake her arm out through the neck. Once she had her arm out to the shoulder, she reached down and carefully unsnapped the side latches on the hardshell chest segment, popped it free, and wriggled out into the cabin.

Under the suit, she was wearing underwear and nothing else. He made his face rigid to hide a smile. She really had suited up in a hurry, he realized, skipping the suit liner and the entire thermal control subsystem fittings. No wonder she’d gotten the suit on so quickly.

She reached out one hand. “Solvent,” she said, apparently paying no attention to the fact that she was nearly naked, while he was bundled in a full vacuum suit, carrying a gun in one hand and a spray solvent can in the other.

He tossed her the solvent, momentarily wondering if she could possibly be daring enough to try to spray him in the eyes and hope to grab his gun, but she turned to spray at the glue holding her suit in small, neat squirts, the minimum amount of spray needed to peel away the glue. Her back to him, she did a quick inspection of the seals, carefully making sure that no errant glue blobs might interfere with any of the fit, and then put the suit in its place on the rack behind it and plugged the electrical cables and air line into it to recharge it for the next use.

He nodded to himself approvingly. With instincts like that, she might have some chance of survival in the out and out after all.

While she had her back turned, he took the opportunity to do a visual inspection. The little she was wearing made it pretty easy to see that she had no place to hide a weapon.

She turned back to him, catching him looking her over. “Now what?” she said, holding his gaze directly with hers.

He averted his eyes slightly away from her body. “Now, what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You have the upper hand; I expect that I’m going to do whatever you say I should do.”

“In that case, I’d say that right now you might want to put on some more clothes.”

Her eyebrows raised a tiny fraction of a millimeter, but she nodded and said, “Okay.”

Buddha, all this time had she been thinking he was planning to rape her? What kind of a barbarian did she think he was? His Anteros crew weren’t pirates because they liked to pillage and rape; they were pirates because they had no choice. Could she not know that?

She pushed off to coast across the cabin. The main cabin was partitioned off, with six niches spaced evenly around the circumference. Other than the one that held the spacesuits, two of these were apparently storage, and two others served as a small galley and a head. The one opposite, to which she was heading, was apparently fitted out as a sleeping cubby. He pushed off behind her, and she looked back and down at him. “You’re following me?” she said.

Buddha! Was she still thinking he was about to rape her? She caught herself on the wall rail outside the cubby’s door and stopped her motion; an instant later he braked himself to a spot next to her against the same rail.

“One moment, please,” he said, and slid past her. He looked back. “If you don’t mind, stay where I can see you.”

He kept one eye on her attuned to any unexpected motion, but the only movement she made was to occasionally touch a fingertip to the wall rail to keep herself from drifting. Domingo searched the sleeping cubby quickly but efficiently. It had a zippered mesh hammock tethered against the inner wall, and a number of cabinets, each of which he checked out. They were full of various pieces of loose-fitting one-piece ship’s wear, a little more colorful than what he’d been used to, a lot of it decorated with whimsical horses and other animals. The cubby and the clothing both had a distinct scent of girl, not an unpleasant odor, but rather something that reminded him of other times, other places. He checked through it all, moving from the neatly folded clothing to the dirty laundry and then to towels and bathroom supplies. He caught her slight grin when he found her supply of tampons, but he kept searching, trying to keep his inspection pointedly disinterested. Clearly she wasn’t using the drugs to suppress menarche, but her medical regimen was no business of his, and he was not so young as to be either shocked or titillated by indications of feminine biology. Here with her personal things would be a good place to hide a gun, if she had one, and he took extra care to make sure that he searched it thoroughly, without any loss of focus. After he finished, he floated out, saying “Okay. You can go in now.”

She gave him a look of disgust, and pulled herself in. He expected that she would have flounced, if there’d been any way to do so in microgravity. “You sure made a mess,” she said.

“No problem,” he said, and then, as she started to peel off her underwear, said, “you can go ahead and close the door if you like.”

“Thanks,” she said, and did so. He took the time to do a quick search through the other compartments of the ship.

Through the door, she said, “Are you bringing the rest of your crew in? Or will they just wait in your ship?”

Ah—she thought he had a whole ship, and that he was just making excuses to be alone with her. “Oh, my ship,” he said. “No, they’re already gone. They, ah, dropped me off, and went on to the next target already.”

“Oh.” She paused. “I don’t understand. You’re not here to take the cargo?”

“Well, something like that, yes.” He was, in fact, intending to ride with the cargo, at least as far as the orbital whip. Once he got to the whip, though, he had other plans.

“So,” her voice came out to him, chatting just as lightly as if he were nothing more than another shipmate, “how did you manage to make your ship invisible, anyway?”

“Trade secret,” he said. “Sorry.”

He finished his quick search of the cabin. It was still possible that a weapon might be hidden deeper in the systems, under panels or inside electronics enclosures, but he judged it unlikely. If she had been tipped off about piracy, despite all his precautions, a weapon would have been out for ready use, not buried away deep. And if she hadn’t been tipped off, there would be no weapons at all; space ships were not normally armed.

He hadn’t expected anything, actually, but now that he had verified that nothing was in easy reach, he relaxed very slightly. The ship was still full of weapons, of course—in space, a thousand things ranging from oxygen cylinders to power lines would be deadly, if used right—but he knew what to watch for.

When she emerged from the sleep cubby, she was wearing a one-piece ship-suit, a thin jumper in an innocent light blue, tight enough to keep from having loose cloth snag on protrusions, but loose enough to hide most of her curves. He’d already seen her, though, and could easily enough visualize what was underneath.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you would be so good as to tell me your name.”

“May,” she said, and then, after a pause, “May Hamilton.”

“May,” he repeated. “You work for Hayes Minerals, I take it.”

“Of course,” she said. “And may I also ask who you are? Or is that a secret?”

“I am Domingo Bonaventura,” he said. “Of Anteros colony.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “Oh,” she said. It was likely that she’d already heard of his name. Lies, probably—stories got around, and were usually distorted and exaggerated in the telling—but he hoped that, at least, the stories she’d heard hadn’t made him seem too cruel.

Her eyes drifted down to the gun, which he’d stuck with Velcro to his thigh. It was still in easy reach, although no longer in his hand. He raised his eyebrows slightly.

“A projectile gun?” she said. “I don’t think you’d use it. Not inside a pressurized cabin.”

He smiled. “Think not? Think again. We’re not amateurs, you know. The weapon is carefully designed. It won’t penetrate a cabin. Shred flesh, yes indeed; you can bet that I would make a mess of anybody I shoot. But it won’t depressurize the cabin. Better not count on me hesitating. If I need to use it, I won’t.”

“Oh.”

Was she disappointed? He couldn’t say. For all he could tell, she was just making conversation.

“But I’ll offer you a deal,” he said. “You will promise not to try to hurt me, or try to escape or call for rescue or make any kind of secret signal. If I ask you to do something, you’ll do it. Fair?”

“A deal?” she said. “So, what’s your half of the deal? That you won’t kill me?”

“My half of the deal,” he said, “is that I will trust you.”

“You’ll trust me?” she said.

“To a limited extent. When I say I’ll trust you, that means I won’t tie you up with electrical cables, cover the whole bundle with glue until you can’t move a centimeter, and stuff you into a cargo hold until we reach a spot where I can put you and a locator beacon into a body bag and eject you in the general direction of somebody who might be able to pick you up. Which is what I will do if I decide I can’t trust you. Fair?”

“Sounds fair to me,” she said. “And when we get to the whip?”

“You’ll be free to go.”

“You’re going to subvert the whip,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Domingo smiled. He was really beginning to like her.

“You’re not planning to brake into Earth orbit,” she said. “Of course not, why would you? You’re going to ride the whip, but you’re going to use it to grab the cargo and toss it into another orbit, somewhere in the outer belt. You have a trajectory all planned, I bet you do. Your destination is the out and out. That’s why your ship didn’t stay; you don’t need a ship. You’re not just pirating a little bit of water, you’re taking the whole cargo.”

“You seem to be telling me my plan,” Domingo said. “Since you seem to know it all, please, go on.”

“So you’re not stopping at Earth orbit at all, are you? And what about me? You say you’ll let me go? So what do you mean by that?”

“I have a pod.”

“A pod. You’re going to drop me in a pod?”

“Crude,” Domingo said, “But I personally guarantee that it’s functional. Are you objecting to the deal?”

“No,” she said. “I understand. If a pod is what you’ve got, I’ll take it.” She paused for a moment, and then added, “Thanks.”

“In that case, if you’re done asking questions?” Domingo said. “As long as you ask me before you go near the communications console, please feel free to go about your life.”

“Thank you.”

He tilted his head ironically.

“No, really, I mean it,” she said. “The cargo’s insured. You could have—” she paused. “You could have been a lot worse.”

“So,” Domingo said. “You’re welcome.”

Domingo went to the control console and made a show of checking out systems, ostentatiously pretending to be paying no particular attention to her. He really did need to check out the ship and familiarize himself with its controls; when they got to the whip, he would need to do some rapid manual maneuvering. He had three days to become completely familiar with the control systems, and there would be no margin for error on maneuvers that would have to be done with perfect timing and no computer control. When he was done, he made sure that the ship was set to answer routine traffic control queries with an automatic “systems nominal” response.

She, for her part, kept well clear of him, drifting over to a spot near her sleep-cubby to read a book. He wondered if she was really reading, or if she were pretending just as much as he was.

He did trust her, to a limited extent, but he nevertheless remained wary. He wasn’t trusting enough to allow himself to fall asleep with her free in the cabin. He knew how to sleep in a spaceman’s cat nap, with part of his attention always aware, still listening for anomalies and ready to break into full consciousness in an instant, but he wasn’t quite willing to trust to his reflexes. He inspected the door to the sleep cubby, but it was little more than painted paper; there was no real way to lock anybody inside. After some thinking, when the evening came according to ship’s time, he had her get in her suit again, and he carefully glued it immobile. He left her visor up, so she could breathe ship’s air.

She seemed remarkably patient about the process, watching him with a slight grin on her face.

He finished up by gluing the helmet down to the hardshell carapace to make sure she wouldn’t be able to do her trick of sliding an arm out. Sleeping in the suit would be comfortable enough; he’d done it many times. In free-fall, she would be floating loose inside, and sleeping inside the suit would be no different than inside a mesh hammock.

“Everything okay?” he said. “Nothing binding?”

“No complaints,” she said.

“Sorry for the indignity,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t trust you.”

“—but you don’t trust me,” she said. “I understand. No problem. Good night.”

And she closed her eyes.

* * * *

After he had awakened in the morning and used the small head and then gone into the small freefall shower facility to clean up, she was still asleep. Domingo watched her face for a little while, soft and unlined, with wisps of hair straying out from the helmet, and then went to the galley, which was quite well appointed for its compact size. He was pleasantly surprised to see that it had a pressure-percolator to brew up coffee, something that was an expensive luxury in the belt. Hayes apparently thought a lot of their employees. Then he went back to her. He left the suit glued to the bulkhead, but unsealed the chest and the helmet, pulling them away as a single piece. Her eyes opened sleepily just as soon as he started unfastening the dogs.

“Good morning,” he said. “Arise, arise, a new day dawns.”

She tried to suppress a yawn. “So soon? What time is it?”

“Soon?” he said. “It’s been five hours. How long did you plan to sleep?”

“Longer than that,” she complained. “God. I’m going to need a nap.”

“As you like. There’s coffee, if you want some.”

“God yes,” she said.

Domingo had two cups squirted out of the brewer and waiting for her by the time she’d finished with the head. The cups were designed for use in either freefall or gravity, with a mesh latticework of ceramic that held the liquid in place by surface tension and yet allowed the coffee to be sipped slowly. He raised his cup to the small Buddha statue he’d installed on the bulkhead opposite, lowered his eyes for a moment, and then drank. Symbolically, raising the cup counted as making an offering to the Buddha. If the Buddha actually wanted to drink, he was free to come over and have a fresh cup squirted out for him; there was no point in actually wasting real coffee on symbolism.

May followed his eyes and noticed the Buddha statue. “God,” she said. “Or, I mean, Gods. You don’t actually believe in that stuff, do you?”

Domingo sipped his coffee and considered. “No, not exactly. The rituals instill a certain amount of discipline that I like to encourage my people to follow, and I observe the forms, so as to not give them any temptation to slack off. But if you mean, do I believe a three-thousand-year-old dead Indian guy is watching over us from the great beyond, I’ll reserve judgment on that until I see him.”

“Your people?” she said. “You mean, you have followers who believe whatever you tell them to?”

“We’re a pretty anarchic group,” he said, “but, yes, to some extent, my people tend to look at what I’m doing.”

She wrinkled her forehead. “So, pirates are Buddhist? I wouldn’t have believed it.”

“We don’t like to be called pirates, if you don’t mind,” he said.

“Really? So what do you call coming on board a cargo ship with a gun and hijacking the cargo to god-knows-where?”

“I would,” he said, “call it survival.”

* * * *

Over the next few days they fell into a routine. Space travel is boring, and there was only so much time that could be filled in by practicing with the control systems and making sure he was ready. He was accustomed to spending the long blank hours in space by sitting in meditation—floating in meditation, really—but, even though he’d more or less come to trust her, he didn’t want to give her a temptation to surprise him with something that would compel him to respond with force. He spent much of the time inspecting the ship, making some minor adjustments to fittings, verifying that back-up systems were operational and ready to use, cleaning the filters, and recalibrating a few instruments that had drifted slightly. It was busywork, mostly, but he liked to have a ship in which he knew every component by having worked with it.

“I’m not used to company,” he said, when he found her floating in the cabin, not really doing anything, just watching him as he took apart a fan motor to repack a bearing. The fan had been making a slight hum. “It’s a little disconcerting.”

“What about your crew?” she said.

“Crew?”

“Your ship.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “I misled you a little on that. No back-up. Just me.”

“Oh,” she said, working it out. “The pod. Of course. You didn’t even have a ship, did you? No wonder your ship could be invisible; it doesn’t even exist. A pod. All you ever had was a pod. You floated, God knows how far, all alone? Don’t you get lonely?”

“No.”

“Don’t you want companionship? Do you spend all your time like that, out in the deep, all alone?”

“Well, I’m not alone all the time. I was married at sixteen.” When she looked at him with what seemed to be surprise, he said, “In the out and out, we tend to get married early.”

“Oh,” she said. “So, is she nice, your wife?”

“The best. Competent, intelligent, hard as vanadium steel. The kind of person you want at your side prospecting.”

“You used to be a prospector?”

“Of course. We didn’t set out to be pirates, you know.”

After a pause, she said, “So, where is she now? Waiting for you back at Anteros?”

“She died.”

May waited for more, and when no more was forthcoming, she said “That’s it? She died? Nothing more?”

“Of course there’s more. I don’t think I’ll tell it.” Domingo paused, and then said, “If I started to tell you about her I expect I wouldn’t stop, not for a week and a day, and then maybe another week. And if we had a couple of liters of good distillation, and if we weren’t enemies, and if we weren’t on a spaceship, and if people weren’t depending on me, and if I didn’t have a hijacked cargo to fly to the right place at the right time, maybe you could talk me into telling it to you. But we don’t, and I won’t. And it’s not your business anyway.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

* * * *

One day out from Earth approach, and Domingo decided it was past time that he went out to inspect the cargo. He suited up, and had her suit up with him, partly because she knew the ship and would save him some time, and partly because he wasn’t ready to trust her alone in the cabin.

The cargo was, in essence, an enormous sack of water, and in the openings between the mesh the flexible material bulged out, like a balloon held in a fishnet. He did a fly-around to inspect it, verifying that there were no discontinuities in the webbing, checking the interior pressure and verifying that the temperature and pressure monitors were all well seated. At the temperatures of the Venus trajectory, the water was liquid, but the reflective thermal blanket kept it from heating up too much and building up a dangerous pressure.

The main part of his inspection was the high-strength cables that secured the bag. In freefall, they were under no stress, but when cargo would be grabbed by the orbital whip, the cables would be suddenly under tension. He wanted to verify that the cargo wouldn’t rip free.

“I already checked those,” May’s voice said, over the suit-to-suit. She was floating in her sky-blue suit about five meters away. He’d instructed her to stay clear of the cargo but to remain in sight; and he’d locked her suit radio so it would broadcast only on low-power mode, enough to communicate with him, but not to broadcast a distress signal.

“Good,” he said. “I’ll still check it myself, though, if you don’t mind.” He did his flyaround in silence for a few moments, and then added casually, almost as if talking to himself, “I saw an accident, once, where a sack of water worth seventy million ripped open into vacuum because the mining company shepherding it had been in a hurry, and skipped the cable inspection before they put their cargo under acceleration.”

That was back before Anteros went rogue, when they were still working on contract, still trying to scratch out a hard living on the far edge of the sky. The blowout had sprayed glistening snowflakes across the black, the water evaporating and also freezing at the same time. The ship Domingo had been in was coated with snow to a thickness of several meters on the side that had faced the blowout. In the parts of the ship that were in shadow, the snow had persisted for almost a week before slowly sublimating away. Although the accident had claimed no lives, it had still been a disaster for the mining company, which had been too deeply in debt to be able to survive the loss of cargo. It had been one more failure in the long slow chain of events that brought the Anteros colony to the brink of bankruptcy.

When Domingo finished inspecting the cargo retention cables, which (just as she had said) had no evident flaws, he went over to where he’d glued his pod to a truss. He gave it a visual inspection, no problems, and then did a remote systems boot. Everything checked out as normal, so he unglued it and moved it around to a position near the hatch of the hab module.

“You crossed over to here in that?” May’s voice said. “Kind of small, isn’t it?”

“Sufficient for the job,” he said.

“How long were you in that?”

“Sorry; trade secret.”

“Must have been at least a couple of weeks, I’d reckon,” she said. “Some kind of ship must have dropped you into the transfer orbit, but if anything had ever been nearby, I should have seen it.”

“You can make that assumption, if you like,” he said.

* * * *

When they returned to the ship, there was an incoming message waiting.

“Venus cargo, this is Interplanetary control, come in please. We have an off-nominal here. Venus cargo, come in please.”

All of Domingo’s senses ratcheted up to full alert. He was, in fact, slightly off the expected trajectory, but in a deviation that had been carefully calibrated to be not far enough off the nominal path to rate a query from traffic control. He looked at May. She seemed as surprised as he was; she looked back at him, and shook her head slightly. He shrugged and sent out a response.

“Traffic control, this is Cargo Hayes VE-seven. What’s up?”

After the light-delay pause, he heard, “Listen, seven, we have a problem on this end. Hohmann whip is down. Repeat, Hohmann whip is down. Do you copy?”

May whistled softly, and floated over toward the other console. Domingo cursed under his breath. The whip out of business! “Roger, we copy,” he said. “Negative on the whip. Can you list us the abort modes?”

After the delay, the voice said, “Hold on, seven. Things are pretty confused around here. I think you’re on your own, though.” The voice was a young man’s. He seemed somewhat rattled.

It must be bad out there. “What happened?”

“Not sure yet. There was a major structural failure near the 70 percent mark; several cables broken, a lot of people lost. We think we must have had an impact, don’t know yet by what.”

“How extensive is the damage?” Domingo held his breath, waiting for the response.

“It’s bad. We’re definitely off-line. Some people got flung into orbit. We’re trying to organize chase parties to get them before they hit the atmosphere. Listen, can we chat later? There’s a lot going on here, and we don’t have time to waste. Information should be coming your way over the datanet. I just thought you ought to hear about this as soon as possible.”

“Roger,” he said

“Traffic out.”

May was already at the copilot’s station, reading through the datastream that was coming in. Domingo scrolled down through menu screens to bring up the external sensors. They were closing in on final approach now, well inside the moon’s orbit, close enough that the external cameras should be able to make out the hundred-kilometer whip.

It wasn’t there.

He looked harder, brightening the image until the disk of the Earth was almost completely washed out, and zeroed in on the little asteroid that served as the counterweight to the whip. By enhancing gamma factor and the contrast, he could see a tiny stub protruding out of it.

The whip was gone.

Around the asteroid and the little stub of the whip, there was a fog of white speckles. Debris, he realized. Something pretty bad had happened there. Some of those specks were space-suited figures—at least, he hoped they were suited—flung off into eccentric orbits by the disaster.

This was going to be a problem.

He jerked his head up, suddenly worried that that he’d let his attention drift. He saw that May was scrolling through trajectory documents with a frown.

She looked up at him. “We’re intercepting atmosphere.”

“What?”

“My ship. My cargo. We need that catch. We’re on a trajectory that takes us into atmosphere.”

It took him a moment to think what she was talking about. He hadn’t yet extrapolated their path past the whip. He pictured it in his head. She was right. He’d made some trajectory modifications to position him for a later maneuver. Small adjustments, well within the error bands, but now, without the catch, the trajectory would intercept the Earth.

“The whip is down,” he said. “We’re not getting the catch. We’ll need a main-engine burn to avoid entry.”

She looked at him, her eyes cold. “Not possible,” she said.

“I know, not enough delta-V. We’ll have to vent cargo, to lower our mass. Sorry about the cargo, girl, but we don’t have a lot of choices here.”

“We don’t have any choices here. We have no main engine.”

“Of course you have a main engine,” he said. “I know this model.”

“We don’t need a main engine for Hohmann transfers; the whips and the tugs do all the heavy delta-V. All we need is the trajectory control.”

“You’re flying a Hohmann trajectory without an engine?”

“Why not?” she said. “You checked everything else. Twice. It never occurred to you to check the main engine?”

“You don’t have an engine?” he repeated. “Why don’t you have an engine?”

In a very small voice, she said, “I can’t afford the fuel. I can’t afford the overhaul. I can’t even afford this trip, really, except that it’s all done with borrowed money.”

“You’ve got to be crazy—I mean, Hayes mining has to be crazy. You can’t fly without a main engine. That’s a single-point failure mode.”

She answered him very slowly. “We’re flat broke. We’re deep in debt just mining this cargo in the first place. And this was supposed to be a simple toss-and-catch. How the hell could I know that the whip was going to be down?”

“Girl, you have to plan for problems. That’s how you survive.” He looked at her. “I think I want to look at those trajectories again.”

They both examined the trajectories. They were now so deep into the Earth’s gravity well that it was going to take some significant delta-V to make any noticeable change in their path. Their trajectory would just miss the planet, but the heating from entering the atmosphere at a speed of twelve kilometers per second would be catastrophic.

In just nine hours, the ship would make a spectacular fireball.

They were going to need help. Domingo picked up the microphone to broadcast a distress call, and then hesitated. Any rescue would put him in a rather tricky situation—his whole plan had assumed he would flee to the out and out, to the region of space where the near-Earth laws didn’t reach. But he didn’t seem to have much choice about it. He’d have to deal with the situation as it played out. He keyed the mike.

“This is Cargo Hayes VE-seven,” Domingo said. “We are declaring a spacecraft emergency. This is Hayes VE-seven, en route from Venus to the Hohmann whip, we have an emergency. We are,” he paused, and then said, “out of fuel. We are requesting help. Repeat, Hayes VE-seven requesting help. Anybody out there?”

Over the next half hour, responses trickled in, first from traffic control, a curt acknowledgment of the distress call with no promises of aid, and then from other cis-lunar ships and habitats. But, no matter how desperate the situation, there were simply no ships near enough in orbital space that even a full burn could get to them before they hit atmosphere.

Their speed was increasing, slowly but mathematically, as they approached the Earth.

“Okay,” May said. “Suppose we drill a hole in the side of the cargo. The water will come spraying out. Not much thrust, I know, but maybe enough to avoid hitting the atmosphere?”

Domingo shook his head. “Not enough pressure,” he said. “You won’t get significant thrust.” He paused, and then said, “But don’t rely on me. Check it out, see if I’m not wrong.”

In ten minutes of checking calculations and looking up values for the thermal constants of water, May said, “Damn. Any way I do it, looks like you’re right. Adiabatic expansion cools the water too much.” Domingo looked up. “At best we might get a few meters a second, but that’s not nearly enough. But, wait, what if we cut away the thermal blanket? Let the cargo heat up in the sun, and build up pressure?

Domingo shook his head. “Too much thermal mass. It won’t heat enough in the time we have. Not even close, I’m afraid.”

“Damn.”

They looked at each other. “We’re in bad trouble,” May said. “What do we do?”

Domingo had only one asset left, the pod. It only had a tiny amount of delta-V. Not enough to save them both, but if there were only one person in it, it might be just enough to let him get away. But he would have to leave quickly; the sooner he left, the more of a chance he’d have.

He had no reason to stay. It was her bad luck, not his.

He looked at her. She was looking back at him, her face open and vulnerable. “We have nine hours,” he said, and smiled. “We’d better enjoy them.”

She looked at him, her stare intense and direct, and ran her eyes along his body, from his head to his toes. “You have the gun,” she said, “and I gave you my word that I’d do whatever you asked me. Well, looks like I lied to you. I’m not,” she said, “going to go to bed with a man who’s holding a gun on me. You can damn well shoot me first.”

He glanced down to where the gun was still velcroed to his thigh. He had never forgotten it was there, of course, but he hadn’t really thought about it much; it was just part of his clothing. He pulled it free, looked at it, and opened his hand and pushed it away from him. They both watched it. It drifted slowly across the cabin, bounced gently off an air-circulation diffuser on the opposite bulkhead, and then floated in place, spinning slightly.

She raised one hand to the back of her head, rubbing her neck and fanning her hair out in all directions, and then she pushed off from the deck, coasting across the few meters between them, and braked her motion with a hand on his chest.

It was the first time she’d touched him. She stabilized herself in place with one hand grasping the cloth on the front of his jumpsuit, rotated herself until she was oriented with her head pointing the same direction as his head, her toes the same direction as his toes, and looked him directly in the eyes.

With the other hand, she slapped him, hard.

“That’s for wrecking my ship,” she said. “And stealing my cargo.”

He released his hold on the railing, and brought up one hand to rub his cheek. The motion set them drifting slightly, away from the piloting console and toward the center of the plenum. She could have shoved away from him, but she remained holding his jumpsuit, breathing hard, staring at him as if daring him to hit her back.

“Sorry,” he said.

“And you didn’t have to glue me into the spacesuit at night, either,” she said. “That was demeaning.”

“Sorry,” he said again, unable to think of anything else to say.

“That was mean.” She reached out to grab his hair with her free hand, and pulled herself up to bring her face right up against his, nose to nose, staring unblinkingly into his eyes. “And you treat me like a kid.”

Her eyes were hazel, he noticed, almost green.

“I’m not a kid,” she said.

“I know,” he said. He could feel the puffs of her shallow breaths on his face.

“Well, you shouldn’t treat me like one,” she said.

They were floating freely in the center of the plenum now, and he could feel the electrical tension of her body. Her face was inches away from his. Very slowly, not sure how she was going to react, he reached his arms out and wrapped them around her. The muscles of her shoulders were tense.

She pulled his face to her and kissed him. Her kiss was as unexpected and as forceful as her slap had been.

“Nine hours?” she said.

“More like eight, now,” he said.

He took his time undressing her. Her body was as he remembered it, but this time he did not pretend to look away. Her pubic hair was a delicate light brown, the color of Martian quartz.

He led her into the sleeping cubby, so they could use the mesh hammock to hold them together, to counter the tendency for any action to push them apart. The first time he entered her, he was rough and rather hasty. She held him tightly to her, matching each of his motions, matching his urgency with an urgency of her own.

When he was done, she explored his body with her fingertips, running her hands over a set of scars from an old mining accident, another set of scars that marked where he’d been shot with a railgun.

The second time he went slowly, taking his time.

* * * *

Somewhat later, he was floating languidly in the sleeping hammock, mulling the properties of water in microgravity. He opened his eyes when she disentangled herself from the sleeping hammock, and from him. She didn’t bother to put on clothes, but kicked off across the cabin.

He watched her, admiring the play of her muscles as her nude form coasted across the empty space, flipped over and expertly checked her motion, and watched her as she retrieved his gun from where it was floating. He wondered what she was thinking.

“You might want to check it,” he said, “before you make any threats.”

She looked at the gun, and in a moment found the release that opened the chamber holding the wireloop projectiles. It was empty. So was the gun’s battery compartment. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “All this time, you’ve been carrying an empty gun?”

“I took the ammunition and the battery out after the first day, when I decided to trust you.” He looked at her. “Was I wrong?”

She looked at him steadily, and then sighed. “No. I was just checking it.”

“Then, get ready to suit up,” he said.

“Put on clothes?” she said. “Why? I think you’ve seen what there is to see already.”

“No,” he said. “Not clothes. Suits. We had our fun, and now, I regret, it’s time we get serious. We have work to do. We have seven hours. Just enough time left to save our lives.”

* * * *

When they exited the hatch, the Earth was a blue half-sphere, looming in the sky. It seemed to be growing even as he watched, but he knew that this had to be an optical illusion. Around it he could see a cloud of glittering specks of dust—Earth’s coterie of orbital habitats and captive asteroids. Only the largest and the closest of these showed as more than pinpricks of light; most of them were too small to resolve. The asteroid with the stub of the broken whip was out of sight, well around the edge of the planet.

But they had no time to sightsee. He tore his gaze away and brought it down to the cargo.

“We need to find the pressure release valve,” he said. “We need to direct the spray directly onto the habitat module.”

It was a delicate operation. When they opened the pressure valve, the water in the cargo sphere burst out in a exuberant spray, instantly flashing into vapor, an expanding cloud of glittering white. It was hard to collimate the stream and direct it onto the habitat. The water boiled, cooling as it released energy, and froze as it boiled and cooled. They played the stream of boiling ice onto the habitat’s surface. At first nothing would stick; the walls of the habitat module were warmed by the sun, and the ice sublimated away as fast as they could spray it on. They worked in a transient fog of vapor, the habitat module visible only as a dim shape. But after a minute, the exterior walls began to cool down, and a thin layer of ice started to form. It was tedious work. The ice fog tended to blow some of the ice toward their helmets, and they had to clear the ice from their own suit visors every few minutes.

Ever so slowly, the shell of ice built up over the habitat, at first only millimeters thick, and then centimeters, and then so thick that the habitat itself seemed to vanish inside a dirty snowball.

By the time the full cargo of water was exhausted, they had painstakingly built up a shell of ice several meters thick.

“You sure this will work?” May said.

“It’s crude, but it will have to do,” Domingo said.

The ship now had a long cometary tail, stretching out into space away from the sun, ionized to a faintly blue glow. Right now they must be the brightest thing in the sky of Earth, an unexpected comet.

The Earth was huge now, filling almost half the sky. It had narrowed to a crescent, and even as he watched, the crescent shrank as they slid across into the night. Below them, the darkness crackled with the flashes of equatorial lightning. Domingo almost imagined that he could feel the first brushes of atmosphere.

“Inside,” he said. “We don’t have much time.”

Once they had gotten inside, May began to remove her suit. He stopped her.

“We’d better stay in our suits,” he said. “Just in case.”

“If the entry heat burns through the ice, suits won’t do us much good,” she said.

“Nevertheless,” he said.

They could hear it now, a thin shriek, almost ultrasonic. Very slowly, things drifting in the cabin started to fall to one side. As they entered the thin outer wisps of atmosphere, they were beginning to decelerate.

Rapidly, it got worse. In a few minutes the deceleration reached a standard gee. They were spread-eagled against the bulkhead. May reached out one gloved hand to hold his. The acceleration kept on increasing. They were pinned to the wall, unable to move, as the ship was buffeted around. Domingo wished that spacesuits incorporated a bit more padding. He imagined pieces of ice breaking off. They must be leaving a trail a hundred miles long.

“Domingo,” May said.

“Yeah?”

“I want to say, it was good to know you,” she said. “I thought I’d say that.”

“You’re not angry that I hijacked your ship?”

“I am. But I’ve had other things on my mind lately. You’ve moved way down on the list.”

“Thanks,” he said, and then, “It was good to know you, too.”

The acceleration kept building, and the world narrowed down to a tunnel, bordered in purple, as Domingo began to black out. Maybe he did. It was almost a surprise when the acceleration began to let up. “I think that the worst is over,” he said, and just then, as if to spite him, a huge piece of ice broke away, and they jerked and tumbled. He could hear the aluminum of the walls groan as it twisted under unexpected strain. “Shit,” he said. “Hold together, baby. Just for a minute. Just a minute more. Hold together, god damn it!”

It held together.

Now the worst definitely was over. There was a leak somewhere; even through his helmet, he could hear the sound of escaping atmosphere. But the ship had held up.

“God damn,” he said. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”

“We’re alive,” May said.

* * * *

When they exited the atmosphere, and checked systems, they verified their orbit. Braking through the atmosphere had captured the ship into a long, highly elliptical orbit.

Most of the exterior cameras had failed, but from the few that were left, Domingo could see—somewhat to his surprise—that his little pod was still attached to the ship, still glued to its docking position next to the hatch. The hatch had been on the wake side, the side that had experienced the least heating in the turbulent entry, and as far as he could tell from a remote inspection, it seemed undamaged.

“I don’t know what it felt like in there,” traffic control told them, “but you sure put on an impressive show from here.”

The leak in the cabin came from a longitudinal weld seam that had separated as aerodynamic stresses attempted to flatten the sphere. The icy coating had held up, though. It was impossible to repair the seam from inside, and they would have to stay in their suits until rescue came.

Fortunately, though, according to traffic control, rescue would be quick enough. Now that they were captured into Earth orbit, a ship could get to them well before their long trajectory hit atmosphere again. “The tug Mississippi Constitution is on its way,” the guy at traffic control said. “You should see them in about an hour.”

“We’re glad to hear it,” Domingo said. “Don’t want to go through that again.”

Rescue, though, posed a bit of a problem for him. Even in the dubious case that May stayed silent about his hijacking the cargo, his face was too well known, and he was wanted for piracy in too many places. Near Earth orbit was a tangle of overlapping legal jurisdictions, and who he would be turned over to would depend on what flag Mississippi Constitution flew under, and what habitat they docked out of. It could be as severe as Libyan space code, which would mean the death penalty for hijacking, or as comparatively lenient as Ecuador, which would consider hijacking a civil offense, and would impose only civil penalties that would result in exile to Earth. But no matter who showed up to rescue them, for him, a rescue would mean the end of freedom.

The long elliptical orbit they were in would bring them back around to Earth. If he separated at apogee, the pod had enough delta-V for him to maneuver into the cloud of habitats and orbital factories. Somewhere in the cloud, he would be able to find friends, people who had friends or relatives among the pirate crews of Anteros, or were sympathetic to the Anteros cause. He had no reason to linger.

He waited until May was occupied, discussing their orbital parameters with traffic control to prepare for the rendezvous, and silently headed for the hatch. They were both already suited up, and there was no need to depressurize.

But by the time he had opened the hatch, May was there. She had both of his guns; the empty railgun attached to a clip at her belt, the glue harpoon in her right hand.

He turned to look at her, but didn’t say anything.

After a moment, she said, “You’re leaving without saying goodbye?”

“I’m not much of one for goodbyes,” he said.

“Wait,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.” She reached around behind her, and retrieved a small railgun. It was identical to the one he’d just given her. She aimed it just over his left shoulder, but didn’t pull the trigger. “This one is charged,” she said.

“You had that all along?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I searched.”

“It was hidden in my hair.”

“Oh.”

“I just wanted you to know.” She clipped her gun onto her belt. “I’m not helpless.” She paused for a second, and then said, “You should be more careful.” She handed him his two guns, first the railgun, and then the glue harpoon. “You left these.”

“Thanks.”

“You might need them sometime.”

He nodded. “Maybe.”

“I need to confess something. I lied to you, way back. I told you my name is May. My name is Marya. I’m Marya Hayes.”

He thought for a moment. “I see,” he said. “Hayes Mining. Your company?”

“Me.”

“I see.”

“Suppose—” she said, “Suppose maybe some day I might want to get in contact with a pirate. Could happen.”

He nodded.

“How would I get in touch with you?”

He thought for a moment, then named a frequency. “Leave a message, voice only, no data. Use the word ‘incandescent.’ We have people, run data-mining. Somebody will get back to you.”

“Okay,” she said. She floated forward, and reached her arms around him. Inside the hardshell suit, the embrace felt like two steel cans clinking together.

“Goodbye,” he said.

“See you later,” she said.

Copyright © Geoffrey A. Landis