Hole In The Wall
by Kevin J. Anderson
It wasn’t that Elias Sandoval hated people; he just didn’t understand them, didn’t comprehend the confusing niceties of social interaction, didn’t know what to say or do. So, he felt he was better left alone.
Even though he was fifty years old, he had little practice with people—intentionally so. He preferred his own company, millions of miles from the nearest neighbor, far out in an asteroid belt. And based on his previous interactions, he knew that most people preferred for him to keep his own company, too.
The best possible solution for everybody was for him to live by himself inside his own private uncharted asteroid on the far fringes of the Portnoy Belt. He could be alone with his own thoughts, entertain himself, and contemplate big ideas.
He named the asteroid Serendipity, and it truly was the perfect home for him. His brothers and cousins had helped provide the resources and equipment for him to turn the asteroid’s cracks, caverns, and tunnels into a cozy domicile. Elias had done all the work himself.
The tumbling rock was in an erratic orbit, not part of the overall asteroid belt, just traveling with the traffic for the time being. In composition, Serendipity was stone mixed with ices, but in some previous passage close to Portnoy’s sun, the ice and gases had boiled out, leaving the asteroid honeycombed with a warren of voids and habitable passageways.
And something else.
The walls and ceilings, the cracks and crannies sparkled with wonder unlike anything he had ever seen—and Elias had seen some of the most spectacular beauty the Spiral Arm had to offer.
Through a strange combination of mineral deposits, energy, and—as the asteroid’s name suggested—sheer serendipity, every interior rock surface was studded with branched snowflake crystals, translucent white growths of angled prisms, more precious than diamonds, because diamonds were found on many worlds. As far as Elias could tell, these Serendipity crystals had been found nowhere else, not in the most isolated or rigorous Roamer settlement, not in any of the Terran Hanseatic League colonies, nor even in the alien Ildiran Empire. Serendipity crystals were delicate, fragile, and extremely valuable. And only Elias knew where to find them.
Every day, he strolled along the crystal-encrusted passages. In the five years Serendipity had been his private sanctuary, Elias had explored the winding passages, but there was always mystery and always wonder. Though the asteroid was only ten kilometers on its long axis, he estimated there were hundreds of kilometers of cracks, tunnels, and fissures to explore, at his leisure, and he intended to spend the rest of his life doing it.
Now he walked along with his bright handlight extended in front of him, and the crystal facets reflected and flared, ricocheting the light in all directions. The ice-mineral crystals branched out in thin fingers like spiderwebs of diamond, which signified that the asteroid must be remarkably stable. A good place to make a home.
Elias hummed to himself, not caring whether or not he could carry a tune because he had a highly uncritical audience. He followed the bright crystals, tracing them deep into the asteroid’s interior, where the main crystals were stubbier, smaller. He reached a section of newborn crystals, which had grown in only the past few months. Elias knew this because he had watched it happen.
He had found the proteus spark that created the Serendipity crystals. Seeing that moving flicker always gave him a chill, and each day he traced its movement. Part of him—the long-suppressed social human part—wanted to share this marvel with someone, but Elias knew he had to keep it to himself.
At the end of the tunnel the crystal growths petered out, leaving the rock walls bare. The spark hadn’t completed its work here yet, nevertheless the proteus had covered more than a foot in the past day.
The essential spark was like a bright, throbbing ember no larger than his thumbnail, as if someone had plucked one of the brightest stars in the universe and simply hidden it away in a dark corner. The proteus was alive somehow, a glow that fed on the minerals or drew latent energy from the rock. It burned along the tunnels like a spark traveling the length of a fuse.
Elias had tried to do research in his databases but had found nothing like this phenomenon. As a child of the Roamer clans, he was a crack engineer and problem solver. He knew how to fix things, how to make machinery work under impossible situations, but he was no theoretician.
He didn’t dare bring the enigma to any of the Roamer clans at Rendezvous, or even to his own brothers and cousins, because one curious person would ask too many questions. Then there would be other questions, other consultations, and Elias Sandoval would lose his privacy. Serendipity would be overrun.
He could live with not knowing all the answers.
The proteus spark crept along the passage like a solitary luminescent snail, leaving newborn crystals behind. Considering the extent of the marvelous growths, Elias imagined this had been occurring for centuries, if not millennia.
The new crystals were only nubs, but they carried that protean sparkle. The larger growths along the main passageways were milky and beautiful, but they were just artifacts, fossils. The new crystals were still alive, and the parent glow would continue its aimless wandering down one passage or another…
Although he didn’t need human company or conversation, he did require air, water, food, spare parts. Serendipity was not, and would never be, self-sufficient, and twice a year he needed to make a journey beyond the Portnoy Asteroid Belt and off to the distant Roamer complex. Out in the wider Terran Hanseatic League, the nomadic independent spacefarers were often frowned upon or viewed with suspicion. But Rendezvous was different. It was a place where all clan members could feel at home.
Though he didn’t like to leave his sanctuary, Elias knew he had to go, despite his unease. He’d been keeping a list for months, and some of his reservoirs were getting critically low. He couldn’t put it off any longer. He could buy everything he needed. Money was never an issue.
Elias spent the next day with a rock hammer in the outer tunnels, chipping away specimen after specimen of the Serendipity crystals and packing them in a cargo container. He had a contact at Rendezvous who would sell them, for a substantial cut.
He packed what he needed, suited up, and boarded his battered private ship, checked the fuel levels, and left his private asteroid, confident that no one could ever find it.
* * *
The Roamer central complex of Rendezvous was a true wonder. Innumerable asteroids of varying sizes, some even smaller than Serendipity, had been rounded up and maneuvered into a cluster, hollowed out for habitation, and linked together with structural girders and connecting tubes. It was a remarkable waystation, a handful of rocks wired together and orbiting a dim red sun called Meyer. It was an unlikely place for a government and trading center, but the Roamers made do. They always did.
As human colonization spread into the Spiral Arm, the scattered clans had learned to be tough and resourceful. Their critics compared them to cockroaches, but the Roamers took pride in filling any available niche. The Terran Hanseatic League, or Hansa, had no idea where to find the clans to tax them or include them in a census.
After crossing interstellar space, Elias brought his ship toward Rendezvous while transmitting his ID codes, although any Roamer observer seeing the motley configuration would know he was a Roamer. Clan Sandoval dismantled and repurposed components for their numerous vessels, and Elias’s father had given him this ship as a gift when the young man wanted to go out on his own—not to be a black sheep, but to be independent. His spacecraft might not look pretty, but its engines, hull, and electronics were superb and reliable.
After he docked and passed through the transit points into the asteroid hub, he was swallowed up in a bustle of conversation, noises, smells, and deafening colors. Every day inside Serendipity, Elias would hear nothing more than a whisper, but the exuberant bazaar of Rendezvous drowned him in sensory overload. He winced and stood a moment, like a man facing a fierce headwind, but forced himself forward. He guided the heavy cargo box of Serendipity crystals with its antigrav handle.
Families moved together, wearing jumpsuits with clan insignia embroidered on their breasts. Someone clapped him on the shoulder and laughed with a loud welcome, then strode on. Elias was sure he had never met the man before, although his old drab garments still bore the Sandoval clan insignia. Maybe that was enough.
He walked past food vendors who prepared heavily spiced noodles and mushrooms, strips of charred vat meat, and fresh fruits out of greenhouse domes. It was far more expensive for Roamers to produce their own food inside enclosed habitats, but the clans refused to be dependent on the moods of the Hansa.
Elias indulged himself and bought a cluster of grapes and two ripe oranges. He took the fruit to an out-of-the-way alcove, where he ate one of the juicy oranges, licking every last drop of sticky liquid from his fingertips. He saved the grapes for later, admitting to himself that Rendezvous did have certain advantages, so long as he visited only infrequently. With this trip, he would load his ship with packaged food, fresh produce, meat, and tank-cultured seafood.
“Quality of life,” he muttered to himself.
Down one corridor, a makeshift band played raucous music and a crowd sang along, although they didn’t seem to know the words. Elias pulled his cargo case toward the trading chambers, where he would meet with Skalec the Scar.
Skalec was a loquacious and congenial vendor with a burn scar on his left cheek; he had adopted the name because he wanted to sound fearsome, but he fooled no one. When Elias entered with the cargo case, Skalec’s eyes lit up. “By the Guiding Star, I sold out three weeks ago, Sandoval! Been waiting for you.”
“Would have put it off longer, if I could.”
Skalec muscled forward and cleared a table with a sweep of his forearm. “Let’s see what you have.”
Elias set down his case, switched off the antigrav handle, and the heavy load settled with a groan. Skalec opened the case and reached inside, marveling at the delicate gleaming crystals. “They’re in such high demand, I’ll take as many as you want to bring.”
Elias raised his eyebrows. “That means I can charge you more.”
The trader’s waxy scar rippled as he scowled. “If I have to. An additional ten percent.”
Elias smiled. “That’ll do. I’m not much for haggling. Let’s just get this over with.”
Skalec shook his head and reverently unloaded the crystals, removing the shards one at a time and placing them on a soft, dark fabric. At the shop doorway, customers were already looking in, curious.
Skalec paid him. “Come back sooner next time. And bring two cases.”
“I don’t need the money,” Elias said. “Just want to buy supplies.”
The trader scratched his scar. “You make no sense to me, Elias Sandoval.”
“A lot of things don’t make sense to me either.”
Skalec the Scar hesitated and then added another bonus. “Maybe you’ll think about an increased shipment next time.”
“I’ll think about it,” Elias said, “but it likely won’t happen.”
He bought all the supplies he could think of, and even used the bonus for a few luxury items that tempted him, as well as a full tank of ekti for his stardrive. Soon enough, the people, crowds, smells, and noises were just too much. Serendipity called to him.
With the cargo loaded, he sealed the ship, detached from the docking zone, and flew away from the Rendezvous cluster. He just wanted to get home to solitude, where he could wash away the closeness and the conversation.
He flew away from the asteroids on a random vector into empty space. Once he got far enough away, he recalibrated his course, input the coordinates to the obscure Portnoy System, and made his way to one particular speck of rock drifting among the scattered asteroids in the belt.
When he arrived back at Serendipity, Elias was astonished to find two large ships already there, landed on the cratered surface of his home.
* * *
The sight of the unfamiliar ships was so incongruous that Elias didn’t know how to react. The strangers had landed side by side between the asteroid’s two largest craters, which he’d named Martha and Beatrice after a pair of large-boned aunts he remembered from clan gatherings. The vessels were sleek, new models, too large to be scout vessels, not of military design, nor were they cargo ships.
As he entered his final approach, he ran the scans again, increased magnification. Each ship bore the insignia of the Terran Hanseatic League.
Before Elias could figure out what to do, they spotted him and opened the line of communication.
“Unidentified ship, please respond.” It was a woman’s voice, stern as a schoolteacher.
“Unidentified?” Elias replied. “Who the hell are you? You’re trespassing!” He did not alter his course. He was going home, and he couldn’t think of anywhere else to turn. Just seeing these other ships made him feel violated.
None of the other asteroids in the Portnoy Belt were close enough to be more than bright lights in the sky, nearly indistinguishable from stars. His asteroid was all alone, and so was he.
Until now.
As his ship cruised closer, he could see three exosuited figures walking with fluid, low gravity grace across the dusty surface. No one besides him had ever set foot on Serendipity, as far as he knew, and now these strangers were leaving footprints over the pristine ground.
The comm screen flickered and a woman’s face appeared. She had short, dark brown hair that looked as if she cut it herself, and her skin had a dusky cast. “Excuse me? What is your name and how is this your rock?”
“You first.” Elias realized he sounded gruff and threatening. He felt out of his league when it came time to make use of diplomatic skills. “I’m Elias Sandoval of Clan Sandoval, and I’ve lived here for years. Serendipity is my property by right of possession. My ship is heavily armed—consider yourself warned.”
“No need for your aggressive posture, Mr. Sandoval,” said the captain. “I am Mariah Oko of the Hansa’s Portnoy threat assessment expedition.”
A round-faced man with grizzled whiskers leaned into view. “We’re the nudge-and-budge clean-up crew, and we’re here to move your rock out of the way so we can protect the colonists on Portnoy’s World.”
“I don’t care about Portnoy’s World,” Elias said. The only Terra-compatible planet in the system was far away and he had never bothered to go there. “What does that have to do with me?”
“Nothing to do with you, Mr. Sandoval,” said Oko. “We had no idea you were here, but this asteroid popped up on our potential hazard list. We have to take care of it.”
“You leave my home alone. I’m warning you. I’ve got weapons.”
“No, he doesn’t,” sneered the man with the unshaven jowls.
“We can see your wreck of a ship, sir.” Oko sounded as if she had strapped on plate armor of patience. “I don’t doubt that Roamer vessels have defenses, but you don’t want to get into a shooting war with us. We’re just here doing our job.”
“And I’m just trying to go home,” Elias said. “If you’d bothered to run a scan as you approached, you would have found my hangar dock, my air, fuel, and water silos, and the access hatch to the interior. Prior habitation clearly established, per Hansa law. You have no claim here.”
His thoughts raced and he wondered if somehow these people, these pirates from the Terran Hanseatic League, had learned about his Serendipity crystals. He was sure they would exploit them all, strip the tunnels bare, and rob him blind.
Mariah Oko struggled to keep her anger in check. “We did not know anyone had claimed this uncatalogued asteroid. We apologize for any inconvenience, but we have work to do. Perhaps if you land and meet us in our main ship, we can discuss this.”
“You’re not coming inside my asteroid,” said Elias.
“Didn’t ask to,” said the gruff man, but Captain Oko shushed him.
“Please come aboard my ship, Mr. Sandoval. According to Hansa records, this is an unclaimed asteroid.” Her eyes met his on the screen. “But we will listen to your claim and try to minimize the inconvenience.”
The encounter had already been a tremendous inconvenience, and the very idea rattled him to his core. Elias struggled to find words as he realized he had never filed paperwork with the Hansa, because that would have flagged Serendipity so anyone could find him—which entirely defeated the purpose. After dealing with the noise, crowds, and smells at Rendezvous, he just wanted to hole up and be by himself, to regain his own peace and calm.
Now, though, he felt shattered. Elias did not like to do business face-to-face, but now he realized it might be necessary. The sooner he could get these intruders off Serendipity, the better.
“All right. I’ll land my ship next to yours and come over.”
“We guarantee your safety, sir,” Oko said. “This is just a discussion. We will explain our presence here, and once you understand, you’ll agree with the necessity.”
“Even if I agree with the necessity, you still have to leave.”
The other captain pressed her lips together. “We will leave as soon as we’re finished.”
“I’m coming armed,” he said, bristling but terrified. He thought he had a weapon somewhere, although it hadn’t been used, or even touched, in as long as he could remember.
“Bring all the weapons you want. We’re not worried,” said the gruff man, grinning. “We’ve got nukes.”
* * *
When Elias had constructed his home on Serendipity, he hadn’t bothered to consider camouflage or security. His greatest defense was obscurity.
But somehow these Hansa scouts and engineers had found him—or, more accurately, found this asteroid. He was surprised the Hansa ships hadn’t spotted his fueling depot or the main docking entrance into the tunnels, but Captain Oko and her team had not even looked. They had just come in uninvited, ready to do whatever they wanted. Elias felt intimidated, but he was also pissed off.
After he landed on the near edge of Martha crater, he placed a multitool in his exosuit pocket, the closest thing to a weapon he could actually find; he hoped the bulge would look threatening enough.
Emerging from his ship, he stared across the stark landscape, felt the midnight vault of stars above. The two modern Hansa craft made his own ship look like a junk heap by comparison. No wonder they hadn’t believed his empty threat of possessing superior weapons.
Nukes? By the Guiding Star, why would they bring nukes out to his little asteroid?
Five exosuited Hansa workers now swarmed across the surface, taking measurements, drilling cores, running seismic scans. Offended, Elias activated his comm. “Stop what you’re doing! You have no right to be here.” None of them answered, or even looked up. “Why don’t you respond? Take that equipment back to your ships.” Maybe they worked on a different comm frequency. He felt completely impotent.
Mariah Oko’s voice came over his earphones. “Mr. Sandoval, they need to complete their stability survey and find proper anchor points. Please come into my lead ship so we can debrief you on the situation. You’ll understand as soon as you see our projections.”
“What if I don’t want to see your projections?” Elias said. “I want you to go. Stop messing with my asteroid.”
The larger of the Hansa ships had an open exterior airlock, and he trudged toward it, stewing. If they had performed density surveys and structural mapping, they would have found the numerous fissures and passages that honeycombed the tumbling rock. Did they intend to drill mining shafts, rip open Serendipity’s crust so they could strip mine the delicate crystals? They had no right!
When he entered Oko’s airlock, he imagined he was walking into the mouth of a shark and trusting the jaws not to chomp down. He sealed the exterior door, waited for the pressure to cycle, and then entered. He stood stiff, his arms at his sides as if ready for a barroom brawl. He didn’t like this. Not at all.
Captain Oko came to greet him, straight-backed and formal. She wore an engineer’s jumpsuit with the Hansa logo on the breast—printed, not meticulously embroidered like a Roamer clan would do. The rumpled-looking, round-faced man joined her. Despite his pudgy face, he had a surprisingly thin body, probably from a life spent in low gravity. Oko shook Elias’s hand and introduced her companion as Terris. In response, Terris pushed out his lower lip as if to emphasize his frown.
Elias did not feel like being warm and fuzzy. He spoke first. “I don’t understand what you’re doing here, Captain Oko. Why have Hansa ships landed on my asteroid?”
He understood the basic legal principles of habitation and right of salvage—every Roamer did—but he couldn’t quote specific chapter and verse. He also knew that the Terran Hanseatic League under the administration of the hardline Chairman Basil Wenceslas often broke treaties and rules whenever it was convenient for them.
Oko had mastered a little more patience. “As I said, sir, we had no inkling that this rock was inhabited.” She gestured toward a small conference chamber adjacent to the galley. “Have a seat so I can show you our projections. Would you like something to drink? I have fresh ground klee from Theroc, even a new shipment of Earth coffee, dark roast.”
Elias paused. “Earth coffee?”
Roamers had many beverages, some quite distinctive, including alternatives to coffee grown on Earth, but he’d only tasted the real stuff before. Seeing his reaction, Oko smiled. “Coffee it is, then. Terris, go dispense us each a cup.”
The other man scowled. “I don’t make coffee.”
“Read the fine print in your contract,” she snapped. “The last clause says, ‘other duties as assigned.’ I’m assigning you this other duty while Mr. Sandoval and I get to know each other.”
Terris went into the galley where he made altogether too much noise while brewing coffee.
Elias warily took a seat at the oval table, rested his elbows on the smooth surface, and looked at the captain. He let the silence stretch until Oko activated the tabletop, turning it into a projection screen. “This particular asteroid—1013X1—”
Elias interrupted her. “Serendipity.”
Oko continued as if she hadn’t heard. “—is currently traveling with the overall Portnoy Belt, but it’s what we call a cuckoo, like an egg laid in another bird’s nest. It doesn’t belong with the rest of these rocks, but rather came from outside the system. It’s on a highly elliptical trajectory, just about to pass aphelion, and before long it’ll hook around and start its steep plunge toward the inner system.”
The table screen displayed a map of the Portnoy System. The myriad asteroid orbits in the belt looked like a swarm of gnats, but one elongated ellipse, highlighted in red, clearly didn’t belong with the others. Serendipity.
“I’ve lived here for years and I’ve never had any trouble,” Elias said, defensive. He realized, though, that all the cracks and voids inside his asteroid had been left by sublimating ices and gases during previous close passages of the sun.
“My team tracks the asteroids in the Portnoy Belt. Most of them cause no trouble, but every once in a while there’s an outlier like 1013X1. Umm, I mean Serendipity.” She paused. “We call it a runaway.”
Terris delivered the cups of coffee, his expression as bitter as the brew. Elias took a sip, too upset to enjoy the rich taste. “What does that matter?” he asked. “I’m not driving the rock. I just live here.”
Captain Oko zoomed in, highlighted another orbit closer to the sun, a terrestrial planet. The image showed an atmosphere streaked with white clouds over blue oceans and brown and green continents.
“This is Portnoy, a well-established Hansa colony, been there almost thirty years, population two hundred thousand.” She overlaid the projected orbits, and the steep elliptical line of Serendipity’s path intersected Portnoy’s orbit. “We’ve run the projections again and again. When this asteroid heads into the inner system, there’s a sixty percent chance it will strike Portnoy.”
Terris said, “An impact like that would wipe out all life on the planet.”
Elias stared at the diagram, feeling cold inside. “Sixty percent chance… When?”
“About twenty-seven years from now.”
He blew out a sigh of relief. “Then you have plenty of time to evacuate the colonists. There’s no emergency.”
Oko scratched her short, dark hair and frowned at him in surprise. Terris’s mouth dropped open in disbelief. “Evacuate the colonists? That’s a beautiful, viable world. Think of all the people, their families! And in another quarter century years, the population could more than double.”
“Not my problem,” Elias said. “Plenty of time for you to figure something out.”
“You’re missing the point, Mr. Sandoval,” Oko said in a crisp voice. “The easiest solution is to alter the orbit of 1013X1 so there is no imminent impact, period. That’s why we’re here.”
“Hence the nukes,” said Terris, grinning.
Elias’s thoughts were deafened by his anger. “You’re not detonating atomic warheads on my asteroid.” He thought of the delicate crystals, the fragile snowflakes lining the tunnels and fissures. The shock wave would wreck them all.
Oko shook her head with exaggerated sadness. “I’m afraid there’s really no choice. The farther away we make our nudge, the more reliable will be the result. Way out here, it’ll take a much lower yield to alter the asteroid’s trajectory into a safe orbit.”
Elias felt nauseated. “You said there’s only a sixty percent chance. That’s practically like flipping a coin—I’d want to know for sure before you start blowing up my home.”
“Sixty percent. It’s a very prominent celestial threat, sir,” said Oko.
“I’ll take that chance,” he said.
But Terris made a raspberry sound. “It’s not your choice to make, mister. The Hansa won’t risk hundreds of thousands of colonists because some old fart won’t move to a different rock. If there was even a one percent chance, we’d still take action.”
Elias lurched to his feet and knocked his coffee off the table, spilling it onto the deck. “I don’t believe your orbital calculations.”
The captain remained seated despite his outburst. She folded her hands together, pushing them through the floating diagram above the tabletop. “The orbital calculations don’t care whether or not you believe in them, Mr. Sandoval. The science exists, regardless of your opinion.”
She projected a picture of Serendipity with specific red zones marked on its pockmarked surface. “We can deploy low-yield warheads here and here. The energy from those detonations will give the rock a gentle push. However, Serendipity is so riddled with voids and lower-density ices that precise calculations are difficult. We can’t take any chances with so many lives at stake.”
Elias remained fixated on his original argument. “But you can’t just come in here and do this. You have no right! The Roamer clans are independent.” He lifted his chin. “The Hansa always walks all over us.”
“This has nothing to do with Roamers or the Terran Hanseatic League,” Oko said. “It’s about gravity and orbits. It’s about saving all those people.”
“What about my needs? Serendipity is my home and you’re trespassing. I don’t grant you permission.”
Terris muttered, “Told you he’d be trouble.”
“You can’t just come here and do what you want,” Elias said. “I have my rights.”
“Society has a greater right, Mr. Sandoval. Your freedom cannot come at the cost of all those colonists. We have to come down on the side of the greater good.”
“It’s not my greater good,” Elias said. “What happened to my liberty?”
“Oh, get your head out of your ass,” Terris growled. “Your liberty does not erase your obligations to the rest of human society. If you recklessly endanger the lives of others, then you forfeit your right to liberty. Selfish prick.”
Elias’s nostrils flared as he drew in a deep breath wondering if this was going to come to blows.
Oko’s eyes widened. “Terris, no—not yet!”
Sensing danger, Elias saw that the other man had pulled out a stunner. “Don’t you—”
A wave of blue light smothered his thoughts and consciousness.
* * *
When he clawed himself back to awareness Elias felt sweaty and bedraggled, worse than the hangover he’d once suffered after being duped into buying a bottle of high-proof algae-based moonshine. His lips were swollen and his tongue was thick as he tried to speak. “What the—?”
When he lifted his hand, it came to an abrupt stop. A plastic restraint clipped his wrist to the side of a chair. “By the Guiding Star…” He looked around, but the world was still swimming.
Terris was there smiling at him. “Welll, good morning, sleepyhead. Don’t expect me to cook you breakfast.”
“Leave him be,” Captain Oko snapped. “We’re putting him through enough as it is.”
“His own damn fault.”
“No, it’s not his fault,” said Oko. “He picked the wrong rock to squat on—that’s not a crime. But you know what the old philosopher said…” She put her hands on her narrow hips and looked directly at Elias. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.”
“Must sound like a good justification to you,” Elias said. “Throughout history, powerful people make up excuses and emergencies so they can take whatever they damn well want. Eminent domain! My asteroid’s in the way. Just nuke it so it’s no longer your problem. Sorry for the inconvenience.” He felt nauseated.
“Inconvenience!” Terris was exasperated. “It’s a whole colony planet, a complete ecosystem, cities full of settlers!”
Interrupted, the captain touched the comm at her ear and acknowledged. She turned to them. “All set. The engineers have anchored and installed two warheads at the appropriate places. They surveyed weak zones and potential fracture points in the asteroid. Serendipity is like a cracked egg, there’s no telling whether or not it’ll hold together. We’re doing our best, Mr. Sandoval. Honest.”
“And then what?” Elias said, yanking the restraint again. “You’re just going to hold me prisoner, force me to watch?”
Terris snorted. “You can look away if you want.”
Oko shot her partner an annoyed glance. “Because of the potential hazards, you will not be allowed to stay during the blast. We have to remove you to a safe distance, but you should be able to return here soon after the detonations. Salvage what you can—if that’s what you’d like to do.”
Elias felt deep anguish. Even if Serendipity didn’t break apart, the warhead explosions would be like swinging a bag of light bulbs mixed with rocks. The infinitely fragile crystals would be destroyed. “You’ll wreck everything. I refuse. I’m staying here. This is my home.” He swallowed. “I’ll take my chances.”
“Sorry, can’t allow you to do that,” she said.
“You have no authority over me! You can’t force me to—”
Her extra patience had finally run out. “It is your right to be stubborn and stupid, Mr. Sandoval, but I will not have your blood on my hands. My crew are good people and they’ve done their work like true professionals. The warheads will go off as scheduled. We will alter the course of asteroid 1013X1 and guarantee the future of the Portnoy colonists.”
“But this is my home,” he pleaded again. “Let me at least grab a few things.” Hope swelled within him. “Give me an hour, maybe two. Just a few personal items, things I can’t replace.”
Oko looked sympathetic, but Terris rolled his eyes. “Captain, he’s just going to barricade himself inside and then we’ll have a standoff situation, probably end up leaving him behind anyway.”
Oko turned a hard gaze toward Elias. “Is that what you’re going to do, Mr. Sandoval?”
The thought had not actually occurred to him. “No.”
“Or what if he takes his ship and does a kamikaze run on the site. It’s not a good idea, Captain,” Terris insisted.
“That’s not what I intend,” Elias said in a low voice.
The captain considered for a long moment and nodded. “You can have one hour, Mr. Sandoval. Pack up whatever you can take with you, but Terris is right—I’ll keep you away from the controls of your ship until the warheads have successfully detonated. You’ll ride here with me and my engineers. Terris can fly your craft to a safe distance. We will return it to you as soon as you’re allowed back in the vicinity.”
“I don’t want him flying my ship,” Elias said.
“You don’t want us to blow up the warheads either, but today isn’t your day.” Her reservoir of patience had completely run dry. “Go get what you need, sir. One hour.”
* * *
After Elias cycled through the airlock of his front entrance, he removed his helmet to inhale the dusty, metallic scent of his tunnels, his home. He felt impossibly weary and helpless. Yes, he could just seal the door and bury himself, become an indignant martyr when the collapsing walls buried him in a rain of diamondlike crystals.
Or maybe he would survive after all. He wondered if he had better than a 60 percent chance.
With trembling knees, feeling as if every moment was a held breath, he walked down corridors filled with treasures no one would ever know. He was surrounded by a blizzard of prisms, wondrous icicles of petrified light. With his rock hammer, he had time to collect only the best of them.
Elias Sandoval got to work.
* * *
Even with the antigrav handle, the large case had plenty of mass and momentum, and Elias wrestled it carefully out of his exit hatch and across the asteroid’s loose surface. He made his way to the main Hansa ship, where one of the exosuited surveyors helped him carry it onboard.
She grunted with the unwieldy mass. “Prized possessions? What are you taking with you? A neutron star or something?”
His heart felt heavier than the load. “Just some things I need—things I refuse to let your atomic blast destroy.”
“Sorry,” the surveyor said in a cowed voice. “There must be a thousand asteroids in the Portnoy Belt. Just damn bad luck you picked this one.”
When they were aboard with the hatch sealed, Elias made his way to the pilot deck. Captain Oko gave him a quick glance, then turned back to her preparations.
“Countdown’s started, Captain,” said one of the engineers.
The words filled Elias with both anger and despair. “There’s no stopping it.”
“Correct,” the Captain agreed. “But with any luck, the blast won’t damage your asteroid—just bump it out of the way. Look at those craters. Serendipity has shrugged off impacts before. You can go back home, do a little housecleaning, and everything will be back to normal before you know it.”
He still felt violated. He had never meant to get into a dispute, had done nothing that should have put him in the center of such turmoil. Elias wasn’t responsible for the colonists on Portnoy, didn’t want to think about them. But no one had asked for his opinion.
Intellectually, he could understand the obvious choice. He was just one old man who wanted to be left alone, but he had settled on a cannonball that was hurtling toward an inhabited world. Even if he somehow drove off the Hansa engineers, he still would have had to leave Serendipity in twenty-seven years or so… or he could have gambled on the 40 percent chance that there would be no impact at all.
He didn’t feel particularly lucky, though.
Adding to the insult, he watched his own ship launch from the pockmarked surface, guided by Terris. The man transmitted in a gruff voice from the piloting deck, “What a piece of junk! I hope I don’t have a hull breach.”
Elias retorted under his breath, “Just don’t leave any disease on my pilot controls.”
The two Hansa ships detached from their anchors and drifted away from Serendipity. Before long, they retreated far enough away that the asteroid looked like an oblong potato drifting in space.
“We’re at minimum safe distance, Captain,” said one of the engineers.
Oko nodded, staring out the windowport. “They’re low-yield devices. This is good enough so we can watch.”
Elias didn’t particularly want to watch, but he could not tear his eyes away as the countdown dwindled to zero.
Twin flares of intense white light blossomed from the long axis of Serendipity and the polarization film darkened the view. He winced, feeling physical pain as he imagined the sledgehammer blow to the crystal-encrusted labyrinth. He feared the entire fragile asteroid, with so many fractures, tunnels, and voids, would just break apart into rubble.
But when the glare died down, he heard Captain Oko sigh. “You’re in luck, Mr. Sandoval. Your home looks intact.” She added a relieved chuckle. “I was afraid we’d see a bunch of drifting gravel.” She wiped an imagined wrinkle from her jacket. “We’ll transfer you back to your ship. You can go home, and we’ll never bother you again.”
His eyes burned, and his vision was blurry. He could not find an appropriate answer for her. Instead, he kept staring at the rolling rock in space where the glow from the unleashed energy had dimmed to faint embers.
The two detonation spots would leave craters larger than Martha and Beatrice, permanent scars. But he was more worried about the scars and damage done internally.
“Just let me go home,” he said.
* * *
He felt exhausted, abused, and wrung out by the time he entered through the main hangar dock. After watching the two Hansa ships depart, paying no more attention to a pathetic old Roamer, he had limped back to Serendipity. Captain Oko and her survey engineers hadn’t bothered to look inside his asteroid.
The captain probably thought she had saved the world and done a good thing. The others had simply done their jobs. The Portnoy colonists would certainly applaud them, breathe a sigh of relief that the decades-distant problem was solved. They would never think about Elias Sandoval or his private asteroid again.
At least that was his hope.
His ship was still loaded with the supplies he had purchased at Rendezvous, even the fresh fruit in the supply bins. It seemed like years in the past. After leaving the Roamer complex, he had intended to go home and just live quiet and undisturbed.
If there was anything left for him there.
Moving with great trepidation, he entered his tunnels, his sanctuary. He thought of the cathedral of crystals, the shimmering snowflake growths in every cranny, starbeams captured in human tears.
The inside of Serendipity looked like a smashed hall of mirrors. The shock wave from the nuclear blasts had wrenched corridor after corridor, shattering the ethereal growths. The floor was littered with cracked prisms, broken spikes, sharp fragments. Detached crystals were piled knee deep, and he groaned to think of the months—years—of work it would take for him just to clear the debris.
He got the generator working and activated the heaters, life support, and oxygen generators. After a few hours the interior pressure had built up enough that he could remove his exosuit.
Weeping, he looked at the overwhelming wreckage and struggled to grasp hope rather than wallow in the loss. After clearing the rubble, he could sell even the broken Serendipity crystals for a fortune, enough to buy his own small planet, if he wanted.
But what he wanted was solitude, a place like Serendipity. And so he had to do it all himself. He could get the resources he needed. He had created this home in the first place, and he could do it again. After all, he had salvaged the most important, the rarest ingredient.
Finally, he opened his heavy, sealed cargo container, raised the lid, and looked inside, smiling with wonder.
In the one hour Captain Oko had given him, he’d excavated the one tiny proteus spark, carving out the rock around it, like digging out a shrub to be transplanted. Carefully preserved, the glowing blip looked like an ember nested in the glittering, sharp prongs of new crystals that had grown in only the past few hours. The spark was still alive—if it was actually alive at all.
Elias would place this rock at the end of an empty tunnel and let the proteus ember keep burning, keep laying down its trail of diamond growths, and he would be here to shepherd it along. Soon enough, the glitter would return.