Read Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 for Free Online

stopped worrying about me. Though she still insists that when it's her time, nothing will stop her."
    "Does she really believe she'll go to Jesus?"
    "You know she does, Mirek."
    "How about you? Do you really believe it?"
    Pause.
    "I want to believe, Mirek. Whether or not that counts . . . I dunno."
     
    Disaster came suddenly, almost fifteen years after leaving Jupiter.
    A micrometeoroid storm, composed of dark carbons so black and so thinly diffused we never saw them on the telescope, or the radar. One moment I was helping Tab get dressed and get her room cleaned up, the next the observatory was trembling and a sound like hard rain echoed through the corridor outside.
    "Howard, what's happening?" Tab shouted.
    When no reply came, Tab and I both looked at one another in alarm and rushed to the door to look out. Sparks lit from the ceiling and tiny rays lanced down and into the floor. The cosmic dust—moving at several tens of thousands of kilometers a minute, relative to us—was penetrating through many centimeters of steel and polycarbonate plate. Tab gripped me as we stood in the doorway, not daring to move, while the eerie light show continued for several minutes, until finally it ended, and I was able to rush out to the nearest computer access panel and bring up a status report on the station.
    It was grim. Half the observatory was either off-line or red-lined. Worse yet, the workstation was operating on local software only—cut off from Howard's direct control. We were also gradually losing air pressure, though the level had not yet dropped enough to be dangerous.
    Tab and I floated frantically down several hundred meters of corridor until we reached the access hatch for the main computers buried down in the basement. I noted that the hatch had numerous almost-too-tiny-to-see holes in it, then dropped legs-first into the bowels of the main computer core, where Howard's mind—and perhaps his spirit—had dwelled for over two decades.
    The databanks were a mess. Whole arrays were dead. The computer center had been hardened against cosmic radiation and solar flares, but never something like this. I worked frantically to trace the logic paths of the fail-safes while Tab gripped a handrail and sobbed uncontrollably, saying, "Howard . . . Oh, Howard . . ."
    It was no good. Too many arrays were damaged or down. Even if I could load backups, the constant synergy between the databanks that was necessary for Howard Marshall to exist, as a person, had been disrupted. If we got something back, it probably wouldn't be Howard.
    Tab needed no one to tell her the reality of what had happened.
    She simply stared at the arrays, many of them blinking red warning lights, and kept repeating her husband's name.
    She took to her bed later that day, not seeming to care about the thousands of microscopic punctures that were leaking our air away into space. Nor did she care about the other damaged equipment—repairs to which were now going to be near-impossible without Howard's help. I had not realized how totally dependent Tab and I were on the man until he was gone.
    In a frenzy, I booted up as many of the dummy programs as I could, running them on local workstations or servers so that life support and other vitals didn't close down. Then I spent the next three days securing the hydroponics farms and the cycler machinery and the other life necessities, without which death was certain.
    Not that it mattered much for Tab.
    Every time I checked on her, she'd gotten worse.
    The final time I looked in on her, she was curled—floating—near her bed. An old framed photo of her and Howard from when they were young was pressed tightly to her chest. The same hymn she'd once sung to me, when I was breaking down, drifted from her lips.
    I almost had to shout at her to get her to pay attention to me.
    "It doesn't matter anymore, Mirek. The Lord has taken Howard, and it's time for me to go now too."
    "You can't just quit!" I screamed. "You told me once