by Rick Cook
The pilot snorted.
“Precisely. We need to be in on the rescue.”
Iron Alice did a quick mental calculation. “They’re damn near on the other side of the sun. We could get there in four or five months if we don’t worry about fuel reserve.”
“No good. What we need is some way to get there fast.”
Iron Alice pressed her lips together even more tightly. “Wishing doesn’t make the impossible happen.”
“No, but thinking about it may. Let’s see what we can come up with.
PART VII: GOTE
Lulu Pine stood before the table. Her dark hair was stringy and her potato face was sullen. Her mouth clamped shut tight.
Captain Peter Jenkins, sitting in front of her, pressed his mouth into a grim line.
“You have heard the evidence. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
Lulu said nothing. Her eyes were fixed off in the far distance, as if staring at a goal she could never reach.
“Very well then.” He shifted slightly and began to read. “Whereas the defendant, Lulu Pine, did, on or about the twenty-third day of August, 2092, willfully commit murder, to wit, the murder of Dr. Luke Albers and Dr. James Wadsworth.”
He licked his lips and went on. “And whereas, the defendant having been tried by a duly constituted captain’s court has been found guilty of the said murders, she is hereby sentenced to death.”
There was a ripple in the conference room being used as a courtroom, but Lulu Pine gave no sign of noticing. “Execution to be by lethal injection no later than seventy-two hours from now.”
Lulu said nothing. She glared at Jenkins.
“Remove the prisoner,” Captain Jenkins said firmly. DeRosa took Lulu by the elbow and steered her out the door.
As Jenkins gathered up the papers on the table, the spectators drifted out after the prisoner until only Jenkins and C.D. MacNamara were left.
“This is quite improper you know,” MacNamara said to Jenkins.
Jenkins looked at him coldly. “The captain is responsible for administering justice on board a ship underway.”
“Yes, but she is a civilian.”
“Doctor, the law makes no distinction between civilian or Space Force.”
“But at least a panel of co-judges . . .”
“Doctor, justice is my responsibility just as the safety of the ship is my responsibility. I cannot pass either off to anyone else.”
When Jenkins got back to the bridge there was a vacuum jack waiting to see him.
“Captain, my name is William Jewett and I have to talk to you. Privately.”
“Jewett? Oh, you’re the man who controlled the fire in Shuttle Bay One. Come into my office.” The vacuum jack followed as he led him to the cubicle.
“That was good work, Jewett,” Jenkins said as he sat behind his desk.
“Thank you, sir.” Jewett didn’t look pleased. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” The man licked his lips. “Sir, I know who planted those bombs in the shuttle bays.”
Jenkins looked hard at him. “Well, who?”
“I did, sir,” Jewett said miserably.
Jenkins touched his screen. “Commander DeRosa, come to my office immediately. I need a witness.”
“. . . and that’s the story. Sir, I swear to you I didn’t know what those things were. Splicer told me they were communication devices.”
“And it never occurred to you that planting communication devices might help the Colonists learn more than we wanted them to know?” the captain rapped out.
“Well, I . . . no sir, it didn’t. I was in trouble already and the way Splicer explained it to me it wouldn’t hurt anything.”
“This Splicer sounds like quite a smooth talker.”
“Yessir. Later, I mean after the attack, I got to thinking about it. I think he was a spy of some sort.”
“Mr. Jewett, you have a genius for the obvious—when it’s too late.”
Jewett wilted. “Yessir.”
“Since the gold has already been confiscated you haven’t gained anything from your actions.”
“I wish I had never seen that gold, sir,” Jewett said miserably.
“So do I, Mr. Jewett. But that’s past. The question now is what to do with you.”
“Yessir.”
“You realize you very nearly destroyed the ship.”
“Yessir,” Jewett said, bracing himself.
“As captain, I have the authority to impose very severe penalties in a case like this.”
“Yessir,” Jewett said, thinking of Lulu Pine. Behind him, Iron Alice DeRosa rested her hand lightly on the butt of her pistol.
“But I can also be lenient if I choose and right now I’m inclined to so choose. Mr. Jewett, none of this will ever go beyond this cabin, if, if,” he waggled a finger for emphasis, “you have nothing more to do with the Colonists.”
“Yes sir!” Jewett said fervently.
“One other thing. I want you to keep your eyes open. If you suspect anyone is still talking to the Colonists, you are to tell me. Is that clear?”
The vacuum jack shifted apprehensively. “Yes, sir.”
“Just contact with the Colonists. I don’t care about vacuum stills and crap games. But if you think anyone is still dealing with the Colonists in any way, I want to know about it.
“Very well,” Jenkins said, leaning back, “as far as the record is concerned, none of this happened. Don’t give me cause to change that, Mr. Jewett. Now get out of here.”
“Yessir!” The man rose and swam out the door.
“Lenient, aren’t we?” Iron Alice said after Jewett had left.
Jenkins sighed. “Al, half the crew and two-thirds of the passengers are guilty of dealing with the Colonists.”
“Most of them didn’t come close to wrecking the ship.”
“Most of them didn’t have the opportunity. And if he nearly wrecked us, he also saved us. Besides, I keep thinking about what Father Simon said about temptation. The Colonists are experts at it. It’s a wonder they didn’t get us all.
“I don’t need convictions,” he made a face, “and I sure as hell don’t need more executions. What I need now is loyalty. I think that man is going to be loyal come hell or high water.”
“If he isn’t you’ve got him by the short and curlies,” DeRosa said.
“That too, but I don’t think that’s what’s going to motivate him.” He made another face. “There’s one thing about guilt. It’s a great driving force.”
And when was the last time you heard a vacuum jack call anyone in the Space Force “sir”? DeRosa thought as she left the captain’s office.
The small ship bucked and roared as it entered the atmosphere. Even strapped in as they were, the prisoners were bounced about as the vessel shuddered and pitched.
Considering the shape of the ship, there was no way the ride could have been completely smooth. Considering how little practice Colonial pilots got in atmospheric reentry, it was remarkably smooth. But the prisoners didn’t know any of that. To them it was one more indignity to be borne as best they could.
Then the rockets kicked in again, slamming them back into their couches, bruising them cruelly against shapes never designed to support a human being.
And then with a thump and a final roar, it was quiet again. Sharon moved her arm to the extent the restraints allowed and realized they were under gravity, perhaps one-third of a G.
“Well, we’re here,” Father Simon said.
Wherever here is, Sharon Dolan thought.
“It’s as good as it’s going to get,” Clancy said irritably. He had managed perhaps four hours of sleep in the last forty-eight and he was in no mood for perfectionism.
Kirchoff continued tracing over the diagram on the screen, punching up the status of each part of the system in turn.
“This still isn’t right.”
“You want right, you get us back to Luna Yards,” the older man replied. “It’s the best
we can do. It will hold.” I hope.
Kirchoff ran his finger over the diagram once more. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it then.” He reached for the comm unit.
“Stand by for spin up. Spin up in five minutes. Stand by for spin up.”
The Maxwell had been ready for hours. All over the ship last-minute checks were run, but gear was long since stowed and everything had been checked and rechecked. Everyone on board had been anticipating the word.
Slowly and carefully, Kirchoff fed power to the spin motors.
As energy flowed into the motors, electromagnetic currents grabbed at the central shaft. There were three motors less than there should have been and the remaining ones heated rapidly. Clancy kept his eye on the temperature gauges, watching them climb to normal temperature and above. In the motor rooms improvised fans blasted off air onto the motors, cooling them somewhat. Clancy watched the temperature readings climb and kept his hand over the cutoff switch.
Ponderously, imperceptibly, the Spin section began to move.
With his attention fixed on the readouts, Kirchoff kept inching up the power. In response, Spin picked up speed gradually. It took twice as long as normal, but all over the spun section, people and things began to float gently toward the decks. It wasn’t the smooth, easy spin up of normal conditions, but Spin was moving again. With the load in motion, the motor temperatures leveled off, then began to drop.
Kirchoff brought the speed up to a little more than two RPM and held it there. The process took nearly four hours with both Kirchoff and Clancy babying the system all the way.
Two RPM gave slightly more than one-quarter G at the rim. Not ideal, but it would be enough. Between the patch in the rim and the missing motors, neither engineer wanted to try to restore a full half-G.
Finally, Kirchoff took one last look at the board. The forces on the bearings were within acceptable levels, the motor temperatures had dropped back into the normal range and everything else seemed to be working as well as expected.
“See, I told you it would hold,” Clancy said tiredly.
“We’ll need to patch the control system to keep a special eye on the temperature of those motors,” Kirchoff said.
“Toyoda’s already working on that,” the older man told him. “Me, I’m going to work on getting some sleep.”
“Sounds good to me. You got time for a drink?”
“Nah, I’ll take a raincheck.”
Side by side, the two engineers glided off down the corridor.
The humans were hustled down the corridor, stumbling on the slightly rough floor in the dim reddish light. Where the corridor joined another at right angles they were herded off to the left and up an incline.
For the most part the corridors were deserted. There were no windows and very few doors or cross corridors. Only occasionally would they glimpse a space higher or wider than the corridor.
Here and there were small groups of other Colonists dressed in shapeless ragged smocks. Mixed with them in ones and twos were Colonists in pressure suits with the terrible flexible truncheons the humans had come to know so well dangling from their belts or carried loosely in their hands.
A prison! Sharon Dolan realized. This place is a prison.
The others would be pressed back against the wall by their guards as the humans were rushed by. They regarded the strange prisoners with unblinking yellow eyes, showing neither interest nor surprise.
Bleak. Bleak and blasted as no place on Earth ever was. A gray-blue landscape set against gray-blue hills rolling off into the gray-blue distance with a blue-black sky pressing down upon them like a lid.
And deadly. Sharon did not have to be told that beyond the clear viewport lay death. The surface was so cold that carbon dioxide was a fine powdering of frost in the shady side of the rocks. The frail wind which stirred the finer particles was a toxic mixture of nitrogen and noble gases. The atmospheric pressure was less than one percent of Earth’s.
They were in a partially buried complex on the surface of a planet. Sharon didn’t know for sure, but she thought it was the furthest out of the Martiform worlds. There seemed to be miles of corridors, some tunnels burrowed into the rock and some corridors covered with a thick layer of soil.
The humans were confined to a small section of a tunnel complex. They had two large central rooms like the one Sharon was in and a number of smaller rooms off them for sleeping. Crude human-type sanitary facilities had been installed in one of the smaller rooms and the light in here was brighter and yellower than elsewhere in the complex, but that didn’t make Sharon feel any more at home.
She looked out the port again and shivered. “It looks like Hell with the fires out.”
“Not Hell,” Father Simon corrected. “Purgatory.”
They had been there only a few hours and they had already explored their new home. Now the humans were settling in as best they could. Most of them had gone to sleep, or at least retired to their own rooms. Only she and Father Simon were left in the large room.
“So,” she turned away from the window and sighed, “what do we do now?”
“What all souls do in Purgatory. We wait. We endure.”
On the third day in their prison they were issued portable translators, boxes about the size of a shoebox with a strap to go over the shoulder. They were heavy, bulky and not as efficient as the ones used on the ship, but they sufficed.
“I wonder why they gave them to us at all,” Sharon said.
“Probably to keep track of what we say,” Father Simon replied, turning the alien device over in his hands. “Presumably the actual translating is done in a central computer and undoubtedly records are kept.” He smiled ruefully. “Prisoners deprived of normal means of communication are highly ingenious at inventing new ones. Presumably it is easier just to let us communicate and listen in on what we say.”
“You seem to know a lot about prisoners.”
The priest shrugged. “An aberration of my youth. In the meantime, we would be well advised to keep in mind that everything we say can probably be overheard.”
Within a few days, life had settled into a routine as dreary and gray as the landscape outside. In spite of the two guards posted constantly at the entrance to the humans’ section, they were not confined to their own area.
However, there was no incentive to wander. The other parts of the complex were colder and the light redder and gloomier. There was nothing to see except more tunnels and occasional knots of prisoners. Leaving the human section of the warren meant seeing aliens. The prisoners preferred to stay with their own kind and try to shut the Colonists out of their minds.
One of the worst things was there was nothing to do. Except for occasional drug interrogation sessions, the guards ignored the humans. The other prisoners were either kept away from them or kept away of their own accord.
Mostly the prisoners just slept. Sixteen hours a day was the norm and those who could manage spent twenty hours a day asleep.
Their food was mostly a porridge with no discernible texture and a sharp chemical aftertaste. The prisoners ate and ate, but still they were unsatisfied. The aliens seemed to be doing their best, but it was obvious that nutrients were missing from their diets. All the humans lost weight. Their hair grew thin and coarse and their skin became rough and scaly. Their energy level dropped even further until sometimes just staying alive was almost too much effort.
Father Simon took to walking through the tunnels for hours at a time. He didn’t go far because he didn’t want to get lost, but he would go for miles through the same circuit of the nearly empty corridors.
“Would any of the rest of you like to come with me?” he asked one day before he set out.
“I don’t want to see another Owlie,” Sharon said.
“The corridors are deserted,” Father Simon told them. “Aside from the two at the door we probably won’t see any Colonists at all.”
Sharon thought about it. “Well,” she said finally, “it sounds better than s
itting around here.” She stood up. “Anyone else want to come along?”
“Sure,” said a little vacuum jack named Diaz. A technician named Shaw stood up and moved to join them.
At first they saw no one. Just dim corridors that echoed to the pad and scuff of their feet. No one said anything and there really wasn’t much to see. There were almost no visible doors and the only breaks to the monotony came with the occasional branching of a corridor. Some of the corridors were faced with the native grayish rock and some were lined with a gray-blue paneling. There wasn’t quite enough light for humans and the red tinge made colors dark and dull. The air was chill and dry and soon the others were shivering in spite of the exercise.
The route Father Simon had chosen led to a larger, wider corridor that angled back toward their quarters. But this corridor wasn’t deserted. A few hundred meters along they met a small group of prisoners and four or five guards under an officer coming toward them.
The humans shrank to the side to let the Colonists pass. As the aliens drew alongside, one of the prisoners was falling behind. The guard at the rear roared at him and brandished his truncheon, but the prisoner replied weakly and continued to lag.
The guard came up to the prisoner and waved his club again. The corridor rang with the shrieks and roars of alien speech, too fast for the humans’ translators to decipher. Then the guard whipped his truncheon sideways across the muzzle of the prisoner and the prisoner’s head snapped to the side as if his neck was broken. He dropped limply to the stone floor. The guard stood over him and kept bellowing at the fallen Colonist. The prisoner shook his head and tried to rise on all fours but the guard hit him again and again across the back with his club.
Sharon turned her face to the wall and bit her lip to keep from screaming. The men stood wide-eyed and shocked, too horrified to turn away.
The prisoner made one more effort to rise and then crumpled and lay still. The guard stood over him, breathing heavily through his slightly open beak. Then he grunted explosively and turned away.