by Joe Pace
“Gonna be fun to do this in front of the old man,” growled Lamb, panting, and he resumed his pawing at her.
“Lamb, stand down,” Pearce said in the same even and measured voice he might have used to order the helm to change course, and Quintal punched him in the mouth. Somehow, the captain didn’t go down, but just staggered. “Where is Fletcher?” he asked thickly.
“Here,” said a voice from behind him.
It was Christine Fletcher, and she was neither bound nor escorted. She walked forward, in her full duty uniform, a laser pistol pointed at Dr. Adina Reyes. The xenobotanist looked, for the first time Worth could remember, unkempt and scared, her usually pale features even whiter, those shrewd eyes darting about in wide terror, edging closer to panic. Fletcher pushed Reyes toward the other prisoners and marched forward, pointing a laser pistol at the chest of William Pearce.
“Enough,” Fletcher said to Quintal, and then, louder, to Lamb. “Stop! I don’t want them harmed!”
For the first time, Lamb seemed to notice her. He laughed.
“Harm? You’re the one holding the gun. No harm here. Just good times. Ain’t that right, Hope?” Worth struggled harder, though to no better effect.
“No harm? Peckover’s dead. Ask Yancy about harm.”
Fletcher moved away from the captain and toward Lamb and Worth. She was wild-eyed, her hair unbound and spilling crazily about her face and shoulders.
“I said enough!”
Lamb did not listen. There were a couple of shouts of encouragement from Quintal and Churchill, a sob of impotent rage from Hall. Without another word, Fletcher aimed her sidearm and shot Lamb in the head.
The silence that followed was sudden and all-encompassing. The body of able starman Saul Lamb, minus the upper two-thirds of his head, slumped into a heap on the deck. Stunned, Hope Worth scrambled away from the smoking ruin, toward the spot where Hall lay under the boot and rifle of Peggy Briggs. No one made any motion to stop her, and even Briggs took a step backward, as the two young lovers reunited in a battered embrace.
We’re already dead, she thought. And this is Hell.
****
Christine Fletcher had been in Hell for weeks.
The deck swam around her, and she fought to keep her balance. What am I doing? She couldn’t answer, any more than she could put a stop to the events she had set in motion. She was at war against herself, split in half down the middle, bone and muscle and soul splintering asunder. She wanted to scream, to rage, to give free rein to the agony she felt, but instead she turned away from the ruin that had been Saul Lamb, pointing her weapon back at her captain, her friend, her prisoner. She had already made her choice.
“Fletcher, stop this madness.” A trickle of blood seeped from the corner of Pearce’s mouth, a streak of red on the white-and-black of his new stubble. Fletcher could not remember seeing him unshaven before. “Stop it now,” the captain said, in a bizarrely calm voice. “If you all stand down and return to your stations, there will be no charges. We will all return home and forget this whole affair.”
“It is too late for that,” Fletcher replied angrily, and some of her was genuinely sad, the parts not consumed by fury and pain. “It is too late for reasonable, Bill! Where was reasonable on Cygnus?” She was shouting now, one hand pressing against her eyes, trying desperately and ineffectually to wake up from the nightmare of these last weeks. “I am in Hell!” she spat, her inner torment boiling out of her.
“You don’t need to be…” Pearce began, and he was so sane, so in control, that Fletcher hated him for it.
“Shut up,” she cried. “You shut your mouth!” She grasped one lapel of his jacket and shoved the barrel of her weapon into his neck.
“Kill him,” urged Briggs. “Kill the lot of them, Fletcher, the way you did Saul.”
“No,” she said, slow and quiet. “No, I’m done with killing.” She threw the pistol to the deck, where it clattered echoingly until Hadley swiftly scooped it up, and she released her grip on the captain.
“What then?” asked Churchill, trembling, though with excitement or anxiety, Fletcher couldn’t tell. “We can’t take them back to Cygnus with us.”
“Quiet!” hissed Quintal, the suave tenor gone from his voice. “Damned fool, you’ll have the whole Fleet turning up out there looking for us.” Fletcher raised a hand, and Quintal subsided. She balled her fingers into fists and then loosed them, once, twice, breathing.
“No,” she repeated. “No, we won’t kill them, but we won’t take them with us, either.”
“What then?” Briggs asked the question, but any of them could have done so, even Pearce, still erect and still defiant.
“The shuttle,” Fletcher said, glancing at the nearer of the two small craft. “We’ll put them on the shuttle.”
“No!” Churchill shouted. “They’ll follow us!”
“I doubt it very much,” Fletcher said. She smiled. “Hadley, board this shuttle and disable its NavWork system, its main propulsion system, its weapons array, and the nutrition dispensers.” Hadley hustled to comply.
“Might as well kill us,” muttered Pott, barely audible.
“It’s murder,” Pearce put plainly. “Mutiny and murder, Fletcher.”
“If the universe kills you, Bill Pearce, so be it. I guess you aren’t the navigator you always claimed to be.”
“Not just us, damn you!” Pearce bellowed. Inside him a battle raged between the confidentiality of his orders and the end, not just of all his hopes, but those of Banks and Exeter and the future of humanity. The struggle was brief and one sided, and his devotion to the letter of his duty capitulated. I should have taken Green’s advice sooner.
“You don’t understand! The plants we gathered, they’re not for a garden for the King! They’re to save us all. The food supply back home is…” he groped for the right words to convey the situation in a way they would understand and would compel them to reconsider. “…it’s going bad. We need these plants, these seeds, to save everyone!”
A slow, singular, sarcastic applause filled the shuttle bay. Xiang was clapping, that crooked smile wider than ever.
“Nice story,” he said. “Bullshit, of course.”
“No!” croaked Green, trying to rise. “It’s true, every word!”
“And?” Briggs yelled. “So what if it is? What has humanity ever done for us that we should save it?”
“You have your duty.” Pearce’s voice was low, but it echoed in the bay. “You are starmen in His Royal Navy.”
“Not anymore,” Fletcher said, and Pearce knew it was over.
Then Hadley emerged from the launch with a fistful of wires and control chips.
“Done,” she said.
“And so are we. The shuttle, now,” Fletcher said, and there was no animus in her words, only a feverish severity, echoed by the leers and laughter of the mutineers arrayed about the shuttle bay. Pearce, his eyes blazing with impotent fire, nodded once, sharply.
“You’re mutinous scoundrels, all of you,” he cursed, the twin embers of his eyes focused on Fletcher. A tiny, sad part of her screamed out silently for some reconciliation, some other way, but it was too late, much too late. Pearce beckoned to the officers. “Into the launch.”
Frozen in a tableau of hesitation and history, no one moved; each side unwilling to be the first to make those ultimate steps that would cement this unknowable future. Fletcher did not waver, even as her mind flirted with those parts of herself she had walled off, thoughts of her home in St. Kitts, which she would never see again, and of her grandfather. Papi! her heart cried, but it was pale, pathetic stuff next to her towering passion for Jairo, and the thought that she would soon return to him. She knew the shame her grandfather would feel when he learned of her actions here tonight, how it would seem to justify all of his worst assumptions about her worst nature.
He may never hear of it, she thought with a ragged surge of hope. Put to naked space in a steel coffin with no navigation sys
tems, little propulsion, and less food, Pearce and his companions would most likely be swallowed up by the universe. Maybe, thought Fletcher with stray morbid grief, her Papi would be dead as well before any word reached Earth, and so would die without knowing what his granddaughter had become.
There was a sudden movement at the edge of her vision, and she turned her head just enough to see Hope Worth walking toward the shuttle and Bill Pearce, staggering just a bit, her eyes bright with tears. Fletcher had liked the girl, had seen some of the iron emerging in her, and was saddened to condemn her life to a likely end before it had truly begun. But that dismay was a tiny ripple in the tempest of her despair, and faded as swiftly and scarcely noticed as it had come. The girl made it across the deck, all eyes on her, and reached the captain in the tiny portal of the shuttle.
“Well done, Mister Worth,” Pearce said, and the growl in his voice conveyed shame on the other officers that this young woman, still so recently at Greenwich, had been first to master herself. She paused a heartbeat before passing Pearce into the guts of the shuttle, looking back over her shoulder, her eyes searching. Fletcher knew what – or rather, who – the girl was seeking out. A moment later Charlie Hall came, slowly, responding to the summons in Worth’s eyes, and the two of them disappeared together into the shuttle.
“Come now,” the captain said, raising his voice. “Better we few against the stars than to stay here with these damned pirates.”
“You heard the man,” roared Quintal, and, giving a wide berth to the motionless corpse of Saul Lamb, he strode to where the captured officers lay strewn against the bulkhead. “The sooner we get them off the ship, the better.” He seized Dr. Reyes by the elbow, and she briefly recoiled, but allowed herself to be led to the shuttle hatch, her eyes still unfocused. Pearce opened his mouth as if he were going to protest the rough handling of his civilian passenger, but then seemingly thought better of it and snapped his mouth shut, taking Reyes by the hand gently, and steering her inside the shuttle.
The rest followed: Pott under his own power, though shakily. Sir Green, his face a vague mask of disbelief, guided by a grim Musgrave. Early in the voyage, Fletcher had joked with the gunner about the Harvest’s armament over cups of grog in the officer’s mess. A toad with fingernails, Musgrave had said, and they had laughed. No one is laughing now. Fletcher felt she might never laugh again.
“Up, you,” Pratt said, nudging Crutchfield with the toe of his boot. The sergeant groaned. Szakonyi moved to the man’s side, crouching next to him on the deck.
“Three of his ribs are broken,” the doctor declared. “Probably a fractured skull as well. He should probably come to the Surgery with me.”
“No.”
It was Crutchfield himself who spoke, though the word was barely audible. He forced himself to his hands and knees, gasping with the pain and effort, and then slowly, excruciatingly, to his feet. With one hand he seized the doctor’s shoulder, steadying himself. He looked awful. Blood streaked across the entire front of his duty uniform, red on red, spattering the white trim, his face twisted in a contortion of agony, but he shuffled forward, leaning on the doctor, who seemed about to crumble under the big man’s weight. Pearce himself descended the two steps from the hatchway to help bring Crutchfield aboard. There was a whispered exchange between the two, and Pearce winced briefly, then nodded.
“The machrines,” he said.
“No,” replied Fletcher, stonily. With those robots, Pearce and his adherents could retake the ship, and she wasn’t about to go back in figurative irons. “I’m not a fool, and I don’t trust you.” She heard Pearce sigh, and saw him mouth a silent apology as Pott and Hall emerged, taking the sergeant under the armpits, and easing him into one of the eight seats on the shuttle.
“He may not survive,” Szakonyi said, and Pearce almost smiled.
“He will, Doctor. We all will. You have my promise as an Englishman and a sailor.” And the captain offered his hand.
“You’re full,” the doctor said, wryly.
“Never in life,” Pearce replied. “I’ll not leave a soul here with this rabble.” But Szakonyi shook his head.
“I’m too old, and would only be a burden to you. No, sir, I’ll stay here, and do what I can to protect them from themselves.”
Sly old bastard, thought Fletcher. He was hedging his bets, throwing in with the mutiny he had inspired while covering himself in case Pearce somehow made it back to civilization. She hardly cared. None of them in that shuttle bay were ever going to see Earth again.
Pearce’s mouth grew hard, then, his jaw working sideways. She knew it was eating at him inside, losing his ship, losing his command, losing control.
“Very well, Doctor. I’d wish you luck, but it’s a fool’s errand. I’ll be sure to tell the Admiralty you had no part in this crime.” His eyes left Szakonyi, and swept the bay, hard, fierce, alight. “As for the rest of you villains, I’ll see every one of you swing,” he vowed, the last words any of the mutineers heard from the deposed captain of the Harvest before he stepped back and the hatch closed with a harsh clang.
It’s done, thought Fletcher, as the electrostatic engines of the shuttle whirred to life. As the tiny craft lifted off the deck and began to slowly reverse out of the bay, her mind drifted back to that day in Basseterre when Bill Pearce had come to her grandfather’s house, and they had talked for hours of adventure, promotion, and friendship. The shuttle pierced the energy membrane at the mouth of the bay, slid seamlessly through it and out into the void beyond. Fletcher watched, unable to turn away, heedless of the shouts and cries of triumph from her co-conspirators, as it diminished in the distance, until it disappeared among the other specks of white.
They’re gone.
Christine Fletcher turned her back on them, and faced the future she had chosen.
****
They all sat, except for William Pearce, who stood absolutely still, one hand on midshipman Charles Hall’s shoulder as he piloted the small launch. Watching the hijacked HMSS Harvest grow ever smaller in the forward view screen, his other hand unconsciously balled itself into a tight fist that pressed so hard against his own mouth that his teeth cut into his knuckles. In the turmoil, he wasn’t even aware of the pain or the metallic taste of blood. Any minute now, his brain shrieked silently, any minute now I’ll wake up and be in my cabin, or home on Earth with Mary, or out somewhere on the Britannia before all this mess began. But of course he didn’t, because this was true, this was real.
“What the hell is that?” Pott asked. He was seated in the second forward chair, alongside Hall, and he was pointing at a bizarre trail of jetsam emerging from the Harvest’s underside.
“The seedlings,” Pearce growled, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper. “They’re jettisoning the plants.” One last show of defiance….or a crew out of control? It hardly mattered. It was thousands of kilometers away, going on millions, and it was the end of everything.
Only if you let it be.
Pearce touched the breast pocket of his jacket. Within, he could feel the model of the HMSS Drake his son had sent with him, a touchstone he had taken to carrying with him as a constant reminder of the importance of this mission, now in such utter shambles. Alongside the toy there was one other thing, something he had forgotten about since the day on Cygnus when Sir Eustace Green had given it to him. It was a tiny packet of seeds, a sampling of the corn, wheat, and rice species that they had come so far to acquire.
Would it be enough? Pearce let his gaze sweep the tiny compartment of the shuttle, from Charles Hall and John Pott up front, dazed and aching but gamely manning the controls, to the battered man-mountain of Orpheus Crutchfield, being tended to by the resourceful and dependable Hope Worth, despite her own injuries. Heywood Musgrave, lost in his own thoughts, and Dr. Adina Reyes, still stunned and pallid, sat silent and still. At the last, his eyes found Sir Green. He withdrew the small packet and showed it to the gardener.
“Is it enoug
h?” Pearce asked.
“We’ll never know,” he replied, weary, old, defeated. “We’ll never get back to Earth.”
“There’ll be none of that!” Pearce covered the distance from prow to stern in three steps, thrusting the packet into Green’s trembling hands. “I will get us safely home. That is up to me. That,” he pointed at the seed packet, “is up to you.”
Without another word, he turned back to the viewscreen. The Harvest was gone, lost. Pearce touched the bulge of the Drake again, and thought of another promise he had made.
I’m coming, James, he thought, even if I have to cross the universe in an open rowboat.
I’m coming.
Epilogue
Whitehall Tower
2188 AD
“Months, now, with no word.”
Banks spoke in a hoarse whisper, scarcely loud enough for the ponderous Star Lord to hear as he stood close at his elbow, listening intently while trying to appear not to be. They were in a shallow corner of the Privy Council Chamber, engaged in the usual pre-session minuet of political chatter, salacious gossip, and last-minute lobbying, not the most private of meeting places. The Duke’s face was a mask of worry and age, his beard now more white than black. We’re getting old, Banks thought inanely. Though soon that may be the least of our problems. Exeter frowned.
“None at all. If I had any, you would know.” The message had been so joyously received by them both, a seeming age before: Cargo aboard, homeward bound. It had been slightly more complicated than that, Pearce’s report inferring some discipline issues and his own violation of some regulations, but both Banks and Exeter had been prepared to forgive almost anything in exchange for success, and it seemed at hand. Then, nothing.