View from Ararat Read Free

sudden that there was no time for the computer to react and activate the airtight doors. Which was probably a disguised blessing for the doomed crew, because before they were really aware of the danger they were already dead.
    There are worse ways of buying it.
    He allows the thought to form, before he realises where it is heading.
    Like having just enough time to clamber into a pressure suit, then waiting among the dead for the air to slowly run out . . .
    A quick death. A blessing for the crew, but a waking nightmare for the poor jerk who lands the job of finally discovering them – which is the reason he has chosen to come alone onto the crew-deck of the ore-shuttle.
    For all their bravado and all their hard-won experience, apart from Cox and Avram the crew of the Ganymede Horizon is young. Deep-space mining is a young person’s sport. Few last at it beyond thirty, if they survive that long.
    They are young, and none of them has seen what happens to a human body when you introduce it to the vacuum and absolute cold of deep space, totally unprotected.
    How every individual cell in that body disintegrates, as the pressure inside ruptures the delicate membranes. How blood and fluids explode from the distorted mass in a red cloud that freezes instantly into minute floating crystals, spreading gradually to fill the surrounding space. Crystals that stick to the static field of your pressure suit and to the visor of your helmet, until you stare at the horror through a shimmering, red haze. While you wait for the end to creep up on you . . .
    None of them has seen it, but Mac Porter has.
    And it is the memory of that long-suppressed horror which turns his stomach as he floats across the airless cabin among the grotesque remains of the lo Trader ’s crew.
    JMMC Mining-Drone Ganymede Horizon
    in elliptical orbit around Jupiter
    December 31, 2331 ad
    CINDY’S STORY
    â€˜Face it, Cind, when it’s your time, it’s your time . . .’
    Elroy Cox leaned back philosophically in his gravity couch and sipped his drink, holding my gaze like one of the tutors at the Institute. I noticed a few drops had dribbled from the end of the straw. They hung unmoving in the air in front of his bearded face.
    â€˜When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ Avram shot back, mimicking. ‘And did you work that one out all by yourself, Einstein?’
    The trip had been too long, and the mutual dislike the two older miners had shown in the first weeks had grown into a constant game of one-upmanship.
    I had kind of a soft spot for Cox. In spite of his ‘act’, he wasn’t half as tough as he made out. I’d hacked into the confidential personnel files on the third day out from Earth, before we went into stasis for the sub-light acceleration. Cox’s wife was dead, and he was supporting four kids and an old mother. Which explained why someone his age was still out in the Jovian sector jockeying ore when he should have been riding a desk – on Earth or on Lunar.
    Avram, I couldn’t stand. He was bitter and sarcastic, and sexist, and all he was supporting was a massive gambling habit, which ate all his earnings, and then some. But far worse – at least from the point of view of the crew – he could be bone-lazy if the mood took him, which it did, far too often.
    â€˜I was just saying . . .’ I persevered, in another attempt to ride over their constant interruptions. As the ‘rookie’, I was still fighting to finish a sentence, even after the best part of a year. ‘I was pointing out that it was just such incredible bad luck. Half a second difference in trajectory in either direction and the meteor would have missed them completely. It hit them almost head-on, ruptured the hull in the forward starboard quadrant, and travelled on through the bulkheads, the cabin and the sleeping quarters. But look at the computer mock-up. No exit hole. The decompression ripped the ship