I blinked my eyes open. My dizziness increased. The stairway swam around me, and I had trouble focusing. Joe Munroe held me easily in one huge hand. In the other he had something, a hazy pink outline. It gradually became clearer.
"Yes." The grip on my neck was so tight I could hardly work my vocal cords. "That's—that's it."
Joe Munroe was holding Mel's strange flashlight, the one that produced a beam from its empty middle.
"I knew it!" he snorted. " 'Crew member' be damned. You might have Shaker taken in, he's going soft. But you don't fool Joe Munroe. It's the way I said it would be. Treasure finds, and you tried to keep them for yourself." He shook me again, and new pain jolted through my head. "Well, you're going to lose the lot. Come on. Before you're done you're going to show me where you've hid every blessed one of 'em."
He didn't ask me to walk, but towed me along behind him. My elbows and knees banged painfully against the sides of the stairway and the corridor. In my general misery it was a while before I realized where he was taking me.
To my own quarters. To where Mel was hidden. He was going—with my forced assistance—to search the whole place for objects taken from Paddy's Fortune.
I couldn't let that happen. I clenched my teeth, closed my eyes, and thrust my hand into my right-hand pocket. Walter Hamilton's gun was there, as it should be. Loaded.
I knew what had to be done. I had to bring the pistol out, thumb away the safety guard, and shoot.
I couldn't miss. The gun was fully charged, it could rapid-fire over a hundred super-dense pellets, each smaller than a pea. They would expand and explode on impact, any one of them enough to kill.
I tried to bring my hand out of my pocket. And couldn't do it. I had never fired a gun in my life, but that wasn't the problem. I was too afraid of Joe Munroe, too afraid of what he would do to me if I tried to hurt him—and failed.
And then my best chance was gone. We had reached the door of my quarters. Munroe changed his grip, twisting my arm so it came out of my pocket and went up behind my back. He forced it higher, until I thought my shoulder would rip out of its socket.
"Unlock it." His breath was wheezing at the back of my neck. "Quick."
"My arm . . ."
"You've got two." He gave another jerk and twist. "Use the other one. Do it!"
I pawed at the combination left-handed, the ciphers blurring in front of my eyes. As I was working, Munroe every second or two lifted my pinned arm an agonizing fraction of an inch higher. When the door finally opened, I felt more relief than worry. Mel might be waiting inside, but at least he was easing his grip.
She wasn't there. The living-room was empty. I had a sudden wild hope that she had done what she wasn't supposed to do—gone roaming.
Joe Munroe didn't waste time. He slammed the door shut, took one quick look at the room's simple layout, and swung me around to face him. "All right. Where's the stuff?"
"There isn't any." My voice cracked in mid-phrase when I saw his glaring eyes. But before that I must have glanced over to the door of the bedroom, because he grunted and gave me a backhand swat across the side of the head. It was hard enough to send me face-first into the metal frame of a swivel chair.
"There better had be. Or you'll breathe vacuum." He went to the inner door and yanked it open.
I could hardly bear to watch. Even if Mel crouched down by the bunks there was no way to hide from a searcher for more than a few seconds.
She didn't even try. Whatever Joe Munroe was expecting, it wasn't what he got. Mel must have realized there was big trouble on the way when she heard his voice. She came diving out of the door as it opened, and her head rammed Munroe square in the belly. He gave a whoosh and doubled over. Mel followed it up with both fists swung hard into his face.
She was doing a hell of a lot better than I had, but it wasn't enough. Munroe was three times her mass, as tough as all the spacers seemed to be, and used to both free-fall and rough-housing.
As her fists came away from his face he grabbed her wrists, crushing both of them in his left hand. She gasped in pain, raised her legs, and bent her back. Then she used the extra leverage of his grip to straighten and kick him in the belly. He didn't make a sound—maybe he had no air left in him—but he let go of her wrists. As she tried to pull away his right hand snapped forward to fix on her shoulder, turning her so she could not kick again.
Mel twisted. Cloth ripped. She broke free, leaving part of her shirt in Joe Munroe's paw. The force of her movement carried her back against the wall.
There was a long, still moment. Mel was panting. Munroe was doubled over in the middle of the room, hands across his belly. I crouched useless by the door, just as I had been since they began to fight. After a moment Munroe grunted, straightened, and glared across at Mel.
He seemed ready to come at her again when his face changed. I could see why. With a shirt on and her cropped hair, Mel might pass for a boy. But with arms, shoulder, and one budding breast laid bare, deception was impossible.
"Well, now," Joe Munroe said in a stupefied voice. He was staring at Mel's pink nipple, oblivious to everything else. "Well, now. Here's a surprise. Black Paddy was right after all."
He was easing forward toward Mel, wary of any sign of attack from her. Mel didn't try to fight. I couldn't see his expression, but she crouched with her back to the wall and crossed her arms over her body. Munroe reached out, snagged the top of her pants with two thick fingers, and ripped them down. He reached out to grab Mel.
And I, finally, was able to move. I reached into my pocket and dragged out Walter Hamilton's gun. My fingers trembled as I brought my other hand across and thumbed away the safety guard.
I could not shoot—not with Joe Munroe and Mel right in line with each other. I pushed myself off to one side and braced against the door. She was out of the line of fire and I had a clear view of his left side and chest.
And then, I guess—though I don't remember doing it—I fired.
I had the gun on single clip. A stream of eight pellets released one after another but so closely spaced that they sounded like one shot, hit Munroe. They expanded on impact and left coin-sized round holes in his shoulder, arm, and back.
The momentum pushed him back. He turned around and stared at me, a strange expression of surprise in his eyes. I thought for a moment that he was going to come at me, because he didn't crumple or drop. Then I realized that he wouldn't, not in free-fall. And a moment later I knew that Joe Munroe was dead or dying. He was drifting gaping-mouthed off the floor while drops of his blood floated around the cabin, marking whatever they touched.
That was when I ruined the free-fall record of which I had been so proud. With Mel looking on wide-eyed and panting, and Joe Munroe's body no more than a few feet away, I curled up in midair. I closed my eyes. And I vomited every scrap of food that lay within my uneasy stomach.
CHAPTER 24
"Call me in an emergency," Doctor Eileen had said.
This was an emergency if anything ever could be. I sent a Priority Service message to the cleaning system and hit the line to Level One. She was, thank Heaven, in her quarters.
"It's me," I blurted out when she answered. "I've killed Joseph Munroe." Compared with that, nothing else was important.
"Jay?" Eileen Xavier's voice was sharp. "No good going into hysterics. Calm down."
"I can't. Can you come?"
"I'm on my way. Right now."
The line went dead. I wondered if Danny Shaker, busy with the drive unit at the other end of the ship, was monitoring calls from me to Doctor Eileen. It didn't much matter, because there was no way to keep from him what had happened. I might claim self-defense, but Joe Munroe hadn't been attacking me when I shot him. And I couldn't say I had been defending Mel, because if I did the crew would learn that I had been hiding her.
Considering her narrow escape, the latest arrival on the Cuchulain was far calmer than me. Mel had put her torn clothing back into place as best she could, and now she was stu
dying the little cleaning machines as they flew about the cabin, pursuing and absorbing horrible globs of blood and vomit.
"How do they know?" she said. "I mean, how do they know to clean up the mess, but they don't clean up him?" She pointed to Joe Munroe's body.
I stared at her in disbelief. Mel must have understood what Joe Munroe planned to do to her, and my performance before I shot him can't have given her much confidence that I'd have been any help at all. But she showed no signs of fear—and not even of disgust.
"Same way they don't try to clean us up," I said. It was good to think about something abstract. "Template matching. Shape recognition programs. Thermal signatures. They have programs for those."
"But how about when the body cools off? How long before they'd know he was really just dead meat?"
I was rescued from Mel's morbid line of thought by the arrival of Doctor Eileen. She glanced at me, gave Mel one startled stare, and hurried over to Joseph Munroe. Her examination of him didn't take more than five seconds.
She swore, and said, "Long gone," and then to me, "You did this?"
I nodded.
"Well, you'd better have an explanation, or you'll face murder charges. Most of these shots are in his back."
I gestured to Mel. "He was going to—to—" My voice cracked. "He was going to rape her."
Eileen Xavier turned her attention to Mel. "That's the next item on the agenda. Where the devil did you spring from, girl?"
Mel had her clothes back to normal, but there was no scrap of doubt in Doctor Eileen's voice. The odd thing was, I couldn't see how I had ever mistaken Mel for a boy. It wasn't just her growing hair. She was as clearly a girl as Duncan West or Pat O'Rourke were men.
Mel said nothing, and she looked at me for guidance. She had heard a lot about Eileen Xavier, in long evening talks about the very different lives that the two of us had led on Erin and on Paddy's Fortune. But it's not the same, hearing about someone and meeting them in person.
"This is Mel Fury," I said. "She lived on Paddy's Fortune—not on it, but inside it."
I assumed that Doctor Eileen would want to hear more about how anyone could live inside a worldlet, and I was ready to explain; but her worries were elsewhere.
"You brought her here to the Cuchulain, knowing what the crew is like? You're crazy. This long out of port, they're sex-starved to the last man. If somebody else on this ship ever finds out—"
"Somebody else already found out." The matter-of-fact voice from the doorway jerked us around to face that way. It was Danny Shaker. He came inside, closed the door, and carefully locked it. "Fortunately, that somebody is me—no thanks to you, Jay, leaving an unlocked door."
"The crew—"
"I know. You think they're all working below on the drive. And you happen to be right. But thinking and knowing are two different things."
He moved across to Joe Munroe and gave the body a brief inspection. "Your work?" he said to me.
I nodded. "I had to—"
"Save the explanation," Shaker turned to Doctor Eileen. "And you know about her, too. Well, this changes everything." He wandered over to one of the swivel chairs, sat down in it, and drummed the fingers of his right hand on the solid arm.
"This girl is in danger," Doctor Eileen said flatly. "Great danger."
"More than you realize." Shaker was staring absently at the control board, where lights winked their warnings about deteriorating drive condition. "And so are you, Doctor. My ability to control the crew grows less every time the engines lose another percent of power. My men regard this trip more and more as a disaster, and what happened here won't help at all." Shaker sighed. "All right, it's time for a change of plans. Joe's death will cause all sorts of uproar. These quarters will be at the center of it. She"—he jerked a thumb at Mel, without ever looking at her—"can't stay here any longer."
"Could she go back where she came from?" asked Doctor Eileen. "To Paddy's Fortune?"
"How?"
"The cargo beetles—they're suitable for free-space travel."
"Sure—up to a hundred thousand kilometers, maximum. We've been going slow enough to annoy everybody, but we're still a thousand times that far from Paddy's Fortune." Shaker turned at last from his inspection of the control board. "I see only one way to do this, Doctor. Mel Fury goes with you, and stays out of sight. That shouldn't be too hard. You're up on the highest level, and I can keep the men clear of it. But Jay will have to stay here and face a crew hearing."
I didn't like the sound of that. Nor apparently did Eileen Xavier, because she and I started to talk at once.
Shaker cut us off with a wave of his hand. "Doctor Xavier, I can and will discuss the logic of this with you further. But not here, and not now. If you want your guest to be as safe as possible"—he nodded at Mel. Your guest! But Doctor Eileen didn't react—"then you have to get out of here at once. The drive overhaul isn't going to take forever. The crew will be back." He stood up. "Mel Fury, collect whatever you need. I want you out of here in one minute."
Mel gave him a startled look, but she didn't haggle and hassle him endlessly, the way she did me. She flew through to the inner room and appeared half a minute later carrying her little backpack.
"The navaid, Jay," she said. "I've been finding some interesting things, new areas for analysis and calculation—"
"Keep it." The way I was feeling, I couldn't add two and two. "Better still, you ought to show it to Jim Swift. He'll—"
"No time for talk." Danny Shaker interrupted me. "If she doesn't get out of here at once, she'll be showing it to Robbie Doonan and Connor Bryan—and a lot of other things, too, if they see her."
"Doctor James Swift," I called after them, as Mel and Doctor Eileen made a dash for the door. "He'll be able to tell you everything that we've learned from the old records."
"Which, when you get down to it, are useless." Shaker did not bother to close the door after them. "Theories are fine, but we've learned more on this one trip than the whole of Erin found out in two hundred years. Come on. There's one thing more we have to do before anyone else gets here."
He went over and made another and closer examination of Joe Munroe's body. "Just as I feared. The gun, Jay. Where is it? I assume you're arguing self-defense."
I moved across and handed the weapon to him. "It really wasn't. I was stopping him doing it to Mel. Joe Munroe knew she was a girl. He was going to . . ."
"I'm sure he was. But the crew's not to know about that, and your problem is that these wounds are in his back. Oh, well. This can't do Joe any harm. Stand clear."
He thumbed off the gun's safety catch and set it for multiple clips. While I watched, he pumped forty to fifty shots into Joe Munroe's chest and side. The lifeless body shook and twitched as though it was filled with dreadful new life. It slowly turned under the impact.
Shaker paused, waited, and fired one more clip. He examined the result like an artist studying his creation. "That's a lot better," he said. "Know why I did that, Jay? Because of what you'll have to say to the others. You had to defend yourself, see, and you had the gun on full automatic. He started coming straight for you, and he was facing you, but the force of the shots turned him away as you fired. So the last clip went into his side and back. Understand?"
He stared at me. "What's the problem? Squeamish?"
"No." Yes—but I wouldn't admit it to Danny Shaker. "I'm wondering why you're not furious with me. I mean, you were short-handed already because of Sean Wilgus, and now I've killed another crewman."
"I hate to lose any member of the crew. But Joe was certainly asking for it. He left the drive area without permission, and came hunting around up here for whatever he could find. You may even have done me a favor. There's a point where any asset can become a liability, and the hardest part, if you're a hold-on-to-things sort of person—and I'm that, if I'm anything, it's either my strength or my weakness—anyway, the hardest part is to know you've got something more trouble than it's worth, and let go. Maybe I was a
t that point with Joe. I'm not surprised he did something wild—he had been out looking for trouble all this trip." Shaker came across, handed me Walter Hamilton's gun, and slapped me on the shoulder. "What I am surprised by, Jay, is you. I told you when I gave you that gun, I wasn't sure you'd find it in you to use it. I was wrong."
He studied me for a few more seconds, while I stood there uncomfortable. And then, oddly enough, he came out with just about the same words that Duncan West had used in the corridor. "You're changing, Jay, and changing fast. You don't look like the lad who came aboard on Erin—and you don't sound like him, either. You're living like a man now."
And maybe dying like one, I thought, already imagining the sound of boots outside. I was going to be subjected to a crew hearing for killing Joe Munroe. The more I thought about it, the more a "hearing" sounded like a trial. Knowing what I did about this crew—and what they knew about me—I couldn't imagine any penalty but death for a guilty verdict.
* * *
Danny Shaker made the rules clear to me before he went back to see how work was going on the drive.
"This is a crew matter," he said. "When one crew member offends another—and to a spacer, death is just another offense—the matter is settled by a crew hearing. You are crew now, we took you on."
"What will you do?"
"Well, I'll be there, of course, and in principle I can override any decision for the good of the ship. But I'm telling you now, I won't do a thing. You'll have to defend yourself, as much as you did against Joe Munroe."
"You just sit and watch?"
"Unless there's no agreement. Then I become involved." He glanced around the cabin. "I have to go. I'll tell the crew what happened as soon as I get with them. Better make this place look the way you'd like it to look, before they come for you. Hide anything that should be hidden."
As soon as he was gone I went across to Joe Munroe's body. Mel's pink flashlight bulged in his pocket, but I didn't see any way to dispose of it. Even the thought of touching the bloody, battered flesh and clothing made me feel nauseated all over again. I sat in a chair and stared mindlessly at the pale, floating corpse. After a few minutes the ship's drive went on and the body slammed to the floor. I went over to it, thinking to straighten the twisted limbs, and found I still couldn't bring myself to touch him. I was standing by the body when Tom Toole came to take me away. He gave Joe Munroe one curious glance and nodded to me. "Come on."
Godspeed Page 24