The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Maris flicked her empty paste and coffee tubes into the maw of the disposal. “No time for argument, gentlemen. Suit up and ship out. We have plenty of work to do.”

For a little while, absorbed in the hard, complicated job of dismounting the shuttle’s fusion plant, they all forgot their worries. Clambering about the narrow crawlspaces around the plant’s combustion chamber, they severed cables and pipes, sheared bolts and cut through supports, strung temporary tethers. They worked well; they worked as a team; they made good time. Maris was beginning to plan the complicated pattern of explosive charges that would pop the fusion plant out of its shaft when her radio shrieked, a piercing electronic squeal that cut off before she could access her suit’s com menu.

Everyone shot out of the access hatch, using their suit thrusters to turn toward the hab-module.

“Alice,” Ty said, his voice sounding hollow in the echo of the radio squeal. “She’s in trouble.”

Bruno, his p-suit painted, Jupiter-system style, with an elaborate abstract pattern, spun around and shot off toward the sled. Maris saw the black sphere of Barrett’s pressurized sled clinging like a blood-gorged tick to one of the hatches of the hab-module’s airlock, and chased after him.

Bruno took the helm of the sled, told them all to hang on, and punched out with a hard continuous burn. Directly ahead, the hab-module expanded with alarming speed.

“You’ll overshoot,” Somerset said calmly.

“Saint Isaac Newton, bless me now in my hour of need,” Bruno said. He flipped the sled with a nicely judged blip of its attitude jets, opened the throttle in a hard blast of deceleration that seemed to squeeze every drop of Maris’s blood into her boots, and fired off tethers whose sticky pads slapped against the airlock and jerked the sled to a halt.

Maris signed for radio silence. They fanned out, peering through view-ports into the red-lit interiors of the two cylinders. Somerset’s orange-suited figure, at the far end of the workspace, raised a hand, pointed down. The others clustered around him.

Alice stared up at them through the little disc of scratched, triple-layered plastic. After a moment, she smiled.

They opened the airlock’s secondary hatch and cycled through, the four of them crowding each other in the little spherical space as they shucked helmets and gloves. Alice was waiting placidly in the center of the cluttered workroom, floating as usual in midair, hands hooked under her knees.

“Oh my,” Maris said in dismay.

Still in its yellow p-suit, Symbiosis’s sunburst-in-a-green-circle logo on its chest-plate, Barrett’s body was strung against the bulkhead behind Alice. Its arms were bound to its sides by a whipcord tether; a wormy knot of patch sealant filled the broken visor of its helmet. The end of Barrett’s braided beard stuck out of the hard white foam like a mountaineer’s flag on a snowy peak. Maris didn’t need Bruno’s pronouncement to know that the supervisor was dead.

It took Ty ten minutes to get the story from Alice. He asked questions; she answered by nods or shakes. Apparently, Barrett had come looking for her after his AI had decrypted and audited Somerset’s infonet usage records; he’d boasted about his cleverness. He had been friendly at first, but when Alice had refused to answer his questions, he had threatened to kill her. That was when she had immobilized him with the tether and suffocated him with the sealant.

Somerset found Barrett’s weapon. It had fetched up against one of the air-conditioning outlets.

Ty asked Alice, “Did he threaten to kill you, honey?”

A quick nod.

“Why did he want to kill you? Was he scared of you?”

Alice nodded, then shook her head.

“Okay, he was scared of you, but that wasn’t why he wanted to kill you.”

A nod.

“He wanted something from you.”

A nod.

“He probably wanted Alice,” Bruno said. “She has been gengineered by Avernus. Her genome, it must be very valuable.”

Alice shook her head.

Ty said, “What did he want, honey?”

Alice put a finger to her lips, assumed a sudden look of inward concentration, and started, very delicately, to choke. She shook her head when Ty reached for her, coughed, and started to pull something from her mouth.

Blue plastic wire, over two meters of it.

Maris’s parents had owned a vacuum organism farm before the war; she knew at once what the wire was. “That’s how vacuum organism spores are packaged.”

Alice smiled and nodded.

Maris said, “Does it contain spores of the vacuum organism growing on the shuttle?”

Alice nodded again, then held up her right hand, opened and closed it half a dozen times.

Ty said, “It contains all kinds of spores?”

Bruno said, “This is why you were a passenger. You were carrying it all the time.”

“Symbiosis knew about it,” Maris said. “They must have had the complete cargo inventory. When they didn’t find it in the cargo pods, they searched the lifesystem for the only passenger. And Barrett knew about it too, or found out about it. That’s why he sent drones to watch us as we stripped out the lifesystem.”