“Move the searchers down to Silver,” he ordered. “And start bringing the women and children onto Gold.”
“Aye, sir,” Slater said.
It was going to be a tight fit, Paul knew. The life-support systems were already on their last legs. Putting so many people on Gold Deck might tip the systems over the edge, condemning hundreds of women and children to death.
He turned to look at Jeanette. “Any word from the spider team?”
Jeanette looked over disapprovingly. She’d already made her dislike of the word spider clear.
“They’ve got the ship moving away, as planned,” Jeanette said. “She’ll be close to one of the other vessels when she blows.”
“Let’s hope there’s antimatter on that ship too,” Paul said. There was no way to know. “Recall the team once they’ve stabilized the ship.”
“Aye, sir.”
Paul turned back to the makeshift chart. He missed his ship’s displays. He even missed the security sensors and telltales, even though he’d always had his doubts about their value. Now Supreme was practically terra incognita. Two-thirds of her hull were effectively out of his control, yet he couldn’t seal those areas off from the rest of the starship.
And a number of passengers are unaccounted for, he thought numbly. We can’t even do a headcount.
He looked at the timer. Ten hours, hopefully, before they could try to open a gateway. And then . . .
Get out of the lobster pot first, he told himself firmly. Worry about the next step afterwards.
“We’ve got a fight on Bronze Deck,” Slater reported. “Some fathers don’t want to leave their children.”
Paul didn’t blame them. He hadn’t told the passengers the entire truth; they knew too much already, but clearly something was terribly wrong. Rumors would start . . . and spread . . . and grow in the telling until they were unrecognizable. And there was nothing he could do. The poor bastards probably believed that the hull was starting to leak atmosphere.
“Tell them that they don’t have a choice,” he said stiffly. “The children have to be protected.”
He rubbed his forehead. Men were generally more aggressive than women. That was a simple fact, no matter how intellectuals tried to avoid it. Putting so many men so close to the bridge was a risk he was not prepared to take. There was no way to guarantee that the mutineers didn’t have friends or allies who hadn’t yet revealed themselves. Slipping them sedatives was technically illegal and dangerous as the drugs weren’t behaving normally, but Paul had no choice. He’d answer for his orders back home . . .
If we ever do get back home, he thought.
He told that part of himself to shut up. They had a plan. They would get out of the lobster pot. And then . . .
I’ll worry about that afterwards, he thought again. There are too many other things to worry about.
“What’s going on?”
Matt winced as he saw Maris and Susan Simpson. They both looked terrified as they made their way through the hatch. He didn’t think they were used to seeing armed guards on the decks, even now. He’d witnessed armed soldiers on the streets of Tyre during the war, but that had been different. This time, everyone was a potential threat.
“We’re moving the women and children up to Gold Deck,” he said. “Carla will have to pat you down first, just to be sure.”
Maris eyed him. “Just to be sure of what?”
Matt opened his mouth to issue a sharp rebuke, then closed it again. Maris was right on the brink of collapse. She was trapped in an alien graveyard—it might as well be hell—and her daughter was trapped too. And the voices were growing louder . . . Matt could hear them, whispering at the back of his mind, mocking him with indecipherable words.
“The security situation has deteriorated,” he said. “We’re trying to keep you safe.”
“By herding us all onto a single deck?” Maris asked. “Is that a good idea?”
“I don’t know,” Matt said. “But the captain thinks so.”
Maris sniffed but made no protest as Carla patted her down quickly. She didn’t seem to be carrying anything dangerous, thankfully. Matt had been told that a number of guests had picked up makeshift weapons and complained, loudly, when they were told they couldn’t keep them. He didn’t blame the passengers, not now. Finley’s attack on Angela and a whole string of smaller incidents proved that the starship’s society was breaking down. People had been molested, attacked . . .
We’re all going mad here, Matt thought as he watched Maris and Susan head up the stairs to Gold Deck. And if this goes on, we’ll all die too.
Carla nudged him. “We’ll have to start sweeping the rest of the ship after this,” she pointed out. “Won’t that be fun?”
“No,” Matt said. “I never wanted to be a soldier.”
“And no one wanted to wind up here,” Carla said. She gave him a completely sweet, completely fake smile. “Just remember, you’re fighting for Angela now.”
“You’re not helping,” Matt said.
“That’s the right section,” Engineering Tech Hannah Holliston said. She adjusted her helmet flashlight as she inspected the bulkhead markings, silently thanking all the gods in the known universe that she’d had her brown hair trimmed to the scalp before boarding Supreme. Her friends had mocked her, but she’d had the last laugh. Wearing the helmet no one had expected to need was easy. “You got the screwdriver?”
“And a batch of testing tools,” Engineering Tech Colin Havelock said. His teeth flashed in the semidarkness as he looked at the hatch. “We should be able to strip the entire section out without problems.”
Hannah nodded. She wasn’t sure if Conrad Roeder was a genius or simply insane—trying to splice together a power relay network out of scavenged and repurposed components was asking for an explosion—but she had to admit that she didn’t have any better ideas. The laws of physics, as she understood them, seemed to be breaking down in the lobster pot. She’d conducted a handful of tests as best as she could to determine what laws actually did function, but most of the results had been downright erratic. Either the speed of sound and the speed of light were variables in this universe or her testing methodology was flawed. For the sake of her sanity, she hoped it was the latter.
She pulled open the hatch, bracing herself for the darkness within. It should have been lit up with blinking lights, but they were dead. She tested the power-distribution node anyway, making sure it was truly depowered. In theory, no danger should arise when she tried to remove it; in practice, she wasn’t so sure she cared to trust the safeties. Too many systems with multiple redundancies and backups had failed when Supreme had fallen into the lobster pot.
“Depowered,” she said finally. “Check it.”
Havelock leaned forward, pushing his tools against the sensors. “It looks dead,” he said. “Do you want to do the honors, or shall I?”
“You’re the one with your head in there,” Hannah said. She passed him the screwdriver. “Be very careful when you take it out.”
“Of course,” Havelock said. He paused as he dug into the tiny compartment. “Hey, you know this could be the last day of our lives?”
“And so we should spend it in bed together?” Hannah asked. “Dream on.”
Havelock chuckled. It sounded odd in the half-light. “I don’t think regulations apply to us any longer,” he said. “We’re not going to get out of here.”
He stepped back, tugging at the power relay. Hannah joined him, pulling at the heavy box until it slid out of its place and came forward. Carefully, very carefully, they lowered it to the deck so they could run an additional set of checks. The device was still usable if it was depowered, but if something else was wrong . . .
“Regulations aren’t the point,” she said firmly. A flicker danced past her eye as she checked the power relay. “The point is that we have to get out of here.”
Havelock closed the hatch with a loud bang and latched it in place. “Unless someone comes up with a mir
acle, we’re not going to get out of here,” he said. “We should be spending our last few hours entangled instead of—”
“Tell that to the chief,” Hannah said. She’d worked hard for her position. She’d earned the respect of her colleagues. She was damned if she was giving up as long as there was the slightest hope of escape. “And after he’s beaten you to within an inch of your life, you’ll have to go back on duty.”
“I hate you,” Havelock said, without heat. He walked back to the power relay and bent over the access panel, studying it. “I think—”
He tumbled forward, landing on the deck. Hannah stared in disbelief. A slight man was standing behind him, holding a club in one hand and a knife in the other. He looked ordinary, terrifyingly ordinary. And the smile on his face chilled Hannah to the bone.
She reached for her wristcom, but he was on her faster than she could blink. He was strong, stronger than she’d realized. Fear gripped her mind as she fell backward, hitting the deck hard enough to knock the wind out of her. His knife pressed against her throat . . .
. . . and the darkness rose up and claimed her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“They are calling to us,” Brother John said. “It is our time!”
Finley knelt in the compartment and nodded in time with every word. He didn’t know what the compartment had been before they’d arrived in the realm of the gods, and he didn’t much care. The rage overpowered him, making it impossible to think. He just knew that he had to fight for the cause. Hundreds of thousands of people were with him, their voices murmuring together . . .
He knew, on some level, that it wasn’t right. But he didn’t care.
“We will take the ship,” Brother John added. “And then we will wait to meet our gods!”
The voices hummed with approval. Finley watched as the Brethren began to pass out weapons, ranging from a handful of guns and knives to clubs and tools. He took a baseball bat and held it up, imagining blood dripping from the wood. Blood was dripping from the wood . . . he thought. Or was he hallucinating? He found it hard to care about that too.
The Brethren assembled, moving in silence. Finley recognized a couple of faces, but the others were strangers to him. Servants, perhaps, or merely passengers from the lower decks, the kind of people he would never have deigned to notice. And yet they were united in their cause. The voices grew louder, urging them to move. Finley started for the hatch, holding his baseball bat at the ready before he quite realized he was moving. Everything felt like a dream or a drunken haze.
“You have your targets,” Brother John said. “They will reward us for this.”
Finley strode through the doors, visions of blood and slaughter and unspeakable horrors dancing at the back of his mind. He wanted Angela. He wanted to break her. And he wanted to do horrific things to her family and her lover. The voices hummed in his ears, promising him everything as long as he served them faithfully. He no longer knew or cared if he was imagining the voices or if he trusted them to keep their word. All that mattered was that Angela was within his reach.
The darkened corridors seemed nightmarish as the Brethren made their way towards the companionway and access hatches. Finley watched the shadows grow and lengthen, hatches open and close . . . things moving in the darkness before vanishing into nothingness. Nothing seemed to quite make sense any longer, as if the very structure of reality itself were breaking down. The darkness should have felt oppressive. And yet he felt as though he were part of it. Or perhaps it was part of him.
He reached the companionway and began his climb. Supreme was huge, yet most of the ship was unimportant. Brother John had told him that again and again. And the voices agreed, driving him on. They wanted something, desperately. They would reward anyone who served them well. Finley clung to their promise as the companionway shifted beneath his feet, the shadows reaching up to swallow him. He wasn’t alarmed, even though he knew, on some level, that he should be. It all felt like a dream.
Voices. Real voices, ahead of him. For a moment, he hesitated. The human voices were real, and the other voices were not. Weren’t they? He clutched the bat tightly, trying to organize his thoughts. And then the voices grew louder, urging him on. The brief moment of resistance faded and was lost. He rounded the corner and came face-to-face with a handful of crewmen. They did not belong to the gods.
Screaming, Finley charged.
“Four hours,” Paul said.
“Yes, sir,” Jeanette said. “Unless Conrad manages to pull a miracle out of his ass.”
Paul sighed, feeling the tiredness grow stronger. He’d ordered the crew to take stimulants, but he knew that it wouldn’t be long before they started seeing things. Or more things. A handful of crewmen had already reported hallucinations, everything from the bulkheads caving in to airlock hatches lying open. Whatever the flickers were doing, he had to admit it was effective. His crew wouldn’t be in any state to offer further resistance if they didn’t manage to escape soon.
“Tell him to do his best,” he said, fighting down a yawn. Everything had to be tested . . . but it was growing harder to care about testing. “Do we have any updates from Silver Deck?”
“At least a hundred passengers remain unaccounted for,” Jeanette said. She consulted her notebook. “The remainder are having an uncomfortable sleep.”
Paul wasn’t surprised. They’d had to mix the sedatives into water, just to make sure there was enough to go around. The crew had no way to judge dosage, let alone anything else. If they got home, he’d be in deep shit . . . he shook his head. It probably didn’t matter. If they got home, Corporate was going to have some problems trying to decide precisely what they’d put on the termination papers. And then the Commonwealth Spaceflight Agency would have the same problem trying to decide what charges to file against him. God knew he’d broken enough regulations governing interstellar spaceflight to ensure he never got a job again.
His lips twitched. After this voyage, he never wanted a job again.
“Let’s hope they stay out of it long enough to go home,” he said finally. Supreme had done very well, under the circumstances, but she was finally coming apart at the seams. “Or not to feel anything when we die.”
“Yes, sir,” Jeanette said.
Her wristcom buzzed. “The search parties have cleared D Deck,” she said. “Chief Slater has them moving to E Deck now.”
“Remind them to make sure that all the hatches are locked down,” Paul ordered. “I don’t want any of them sneaking up and into the secure area.”
“The hatches are already under guard,” Jeanette reminded him. “Chief Slater is fairly sure the fugitives went lower into the ship.”
Paul knew better than to take that for granted. Supreme was just too large to be searched effectively, at least with the manpower he had on hand. If they managed to get home, he’d disembark the passengers and bring in marines to search the ship from top to bottom, or simply evacuate the crew and vent the entire ship. It was a vindictive thought, but he was way past caring. In hindsight, he should have just spaced Roman Bryon and the Brethren along with anyone stupid enough to agree with them.
The voices buzzed in his ear. A flash darted past his eyes. He glared after it, then sat down in the command chair. The consoles were dead—a couple had been cannibalized to replace burned-out components elsewhere on the ship—but the chair still felt like where he belonged. His bridge was a wreck, yet it was his bridge. He looked at his command crew, feeling concerned. He had no idea how long they’d hold up. Too many of them had been badly shocked by the whole affair.
He cleared his throat. “Lieutenant Jackson, are you ready to jump us out?”
Rani twitched. She had her back to him, but he could still see her tension. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’ve programmed the vortex generator for a blind jump. It should get us somewhere . . .”
But where? Paul finished silently. We might end up inside a star or a planet or . . .
He shook his head. Right now, h
e’d settle for getting back to realspace. Just being able to restart one of the fusion cores would provide enough power to save what was left of his broken ship. And then . . . the drive system did seem to be intact, merely powerless. They might have to spend years in transit at sublight speeds before they reached a populated star system, but they could do it.
You will never get out, the voices whispered. You are ours.
Paul started. The voices had been so loud, just for a second, that he thought someone was standing right behind him. But there was no one.
A sense of unease overcame him, a sense that something was wrong . . . more wrong. He looked at his crew, wondering just how far they could be trusted. There had been only one recorded mutiny on a Commonwealth starship—HMS Uncanny—and Paul had never doubted the loyalty of his crew, but they were trapped in a totally alien environment. The voices might wear them down until they surrendered completely. And then . . .
There was a mutiny on Gladys, he thought. What might happen here?
The paranoia was almost overwhelming. Could Jeanette be trusted? She wanted a command for herself, didn’t she? Or Slater? Perhaps he’d deliberately allowed the Brethren to escape, putting the entire ship at risk to please his new masters. Or Tidal or Rani or any of the younger officers . . . he reached for his pistol, then stopped himself with an effort. The voices were getting to him too. Their quiet urgings were boring into his very soul.
He wanted to gun down his own crew.
Damn them, he thought. We are all damned.
Yes, the voices agreed.
He couldn’t tell if they were real or if they were coming from his imagination. And yet . . . there was an undertone of gloating malice in the voices that he hoped didn’t come from him.
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