We All Died at Breakaway Station

by Richard C. Meredith

  To say that a starship hung motionless in space is to speak meaningless words, if we are to believe Einstein and those who have followed him. All things in this space-time are relative to all other things. The tiny scout ship did not move in relationship to what?

  The galaxy still moved, rotated on its axis, and all the stars within it moved relative to one another, as the galaxy itself moved in relation to other galaxies, as the entire universe continued to swell, to expand, to fill the evergrowing nothingness, as matter and energy continued their endless, eternal transmutations, growth and decay.

  Yet, relative to this star or that star, the scout ship in which Hybeck and Naha dwelt was motionless. In relationship to the three surviving starships of Admiral Mothershed’s expedition, the scout ship grew more and more distant. And in relationship to a Jillie squadron, the scout ship grew nearer and nearer.

  Admiral Mothershed had not been able to convince himself that the Jillies had completely given up their chase. Never before had human warships penetrated so deeply into Jillie space, and the Jillies, as well as he could comprehend their thoughts, would never accept such a thing lightly. They might, perhaps, have some inkling of why the humans had pushed their ships in this far. They might have guessed the purposes behind this daring excursion, might have suspected that Mothershed’s ships were reconnoitering for a planned attack, evening the odds so that men would know where Jillies dwelt, as Jillies knew where the home of mankind lay.

  So, even though the San Juan’s scopes and scanners detected nothing in the depths of space behind them, the admiral was not totally convinced that they were not being followed. But he needed to know. How was there to know?

  Simple. Leave a scout ship behind. Let a single scout fall behind the remainder of the fleet, wait in space, and see. Meanwhile the San Juan, the Chicago, the Hastings would move toward the Paladine at maximum pseudospeed.

  The two nuclear missiles of the scout ship would be replaced with FTL probes. And should the scout ship sight Jillies following the fleet, it would launch a probe after the humans to inform them. Though a scout could never hope to catch up with the human ships, a probe which, robotically, could endure the warping of pseudospeeds far beyond the endurance of human flesh and bone and nerve tissue, could catch up, could inform Mothershed that he was still being followed.

  The scout itself, hanging “motionless” in interstellar space, without its drive firing, could probably escape the notice of the Jillies, could probably make its way back to the Paladine in comparative safety. The scout would be safe, though the tedium would be great for its two-man crew, and the trip back home long.

  So it was that Lieutenant Commander Hybeck and Lieutenant Hengelo lay in the scout, locked in embrace, in the euphoria of k’peck as the standard hours slipped by, and finally became standard days.

  For three standard days the survivors of the fleet had grown more distant from the scout, and time had begun to grow heavy on the hands of its two occupants.

  “The practice of lDuran’traiel concentration would relieve these anxieties from us,” Naha was saying, as Hybeck held the nearly empty flask of k’peck up to the light and wished that he had gotten two or three more of them from Robertson.

  “Maybe it would,” he said, shifting himself so that his arm was more comfortable around her naked hip, and told himself for the thousandth time that scout ship acceleration cots had never been designed for sex.

  “Of course it would, Hy,” Naha insisted. “Now if you’ll just let me explain to you how…”

  An alarm sprang to life, filling the ship’s small cabin with a shrill chattering. “What’s that?” Naha cried.

  “Scanners,” Hybeck said. “Sighted something.”

  Leaping up, Hybeck dashed to the scopes and peered at their screens. Five tiny blips appeared, glowing phosphorescently against the blackness of the scope’s face.

  “What is it, Hy?”

  “Jillies, baby.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Coming from that direction, they couldn’t be anything else.”

  “Oh, God,” Naha sighed.

  Hybeck turned, dashed to the rear of the cabin and began pulling his uniform from the ungraceful pile of clothing.

  “We’d better get dressed, baby,” he said, pulling his pants on. “I wouldn’t want to meet ’em naked.”

  “Hy, I’m scared.”

  “Me too,” he said. “Unless they change course, they’ll pass within a few kilometers of us.”

  “No!”

  “I’d better start getting one of the probes ready,” he said, and within him he felt the ugly, sinking feeling of fear. If they didn’t notice the scout, they certainly would notice the radiation of the probe’s drive‌—‌but what else was there that he could do? Mothershed had to know.

  24

  A standard week after the decision and the subsequent reception of orders from CDC HQ for the hospital convoy to remain at Breakaway, the attempted mutiny took place aboard the Pharsalus.

  Admiral Bracer, still unaccustomed to the new braid on his shoulders, was just leaving the bridge, thumbing the hatch open, when the voice of Comm Officer Cyanta called: “Admiral, there’s an emergency signal from Captain Davins.”

  “Put it on my console,” Bracer called back, spun around on the power treads of his body cylinder, and rolled back to the command console in the center of the starship’s bridge. When he reached it Davins’ image was already in the tank, the surviving portion of his face showing obvious agitation.

  “Admiral,” Davins said breathlessly, “may I borrow a squad of your marines?”

  “What is it, Chuck?” Bracer asked, his worst fears, or perhaps his second-worst fears, coming to the front of his mind.

  “I think it’s mutiny, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, sir. I think so.”

  “What do you mean, captain, you think?”

  “Well, it‌—‌” Davins’ face paled, then he turned away. For a moment all that Bracer could see in the tank was his back.

  “Davins?” Bracer yelled. “What in hell is going on over there?”

  Then he heard Davins’ voice: “What are you doing here? You’re all under…” The next sound was really two sounds in one, two frightening, disgusting sounds; the rasp of an energy pistol and a strangled groan. Davins’ back retreated from the tank, then vanished as the captain of the Pharsalus fell forward.

  For a moment Bracer could see across the deck of his sister ship, could see the handful of crewmen who stood in the open hatch, weapons in their hands, gesturing. One weapon, held in the prosthetic hand of a big man dressed in engineering uniform, still glowed from its recent discharge.

  “Over there!” the big engineer was saying. “Move. We’re taking over, and we’re going…”

  “Shut up, mister!”

  Bracer recognized the voice. It was that of Lena Bugioli, Pharsalus’ first officer. And there was anger and authority in it.

  “Miss Bugioli, I don’t want to hurt you,” the mutinous engineer said, “but, so help me God, I’ll cut you down if you try to stop us. I mean it.”

  “You’ll do no such thing, Hansey. You’ll put that gun down and surrender yourself to the master-at-arms at once.”

  First Officer Bugioli rolled into Bracer’s view, her torso mounted on a cylinder like his own. She was unarmed except for the stripes of rank on her shoulders and the fierce determination in her eyes.

  “No, ma’am,” said the man she had called Hansey. “We’re going home.”

  “There’ll be no place for you to go, Hansey. You just killed your captain. There were too many witnesses. Both in this ship and on the Iwo.” She gestured toward the tri-D tank. “The admiral is watching this very minute.”

  Hansey’s eyes shot toward the tank. His face paled.

  “We’re going home!” he yelled defiantly, aimed the energy pistol at the tank and fired.

  For an instant Bracer had the sensation that he was going to feel
the blast as it struck the command console in the other ship. The tank brightened, its loudspeaker squealed, then both went dead.

  Slamming his open palm down on the panel before him, snapping a switch as he did so, Bracer yelled, “Colonel Carrighar!”

  “Marine quarters. Carrighar here, sir,” replied a voice from the console. “Colonel, spacesuit your men and take a shuttle over to the Pharsalus immediately.”

  “Yes, sir. May I ask…”

  “Mutiny, colonel. Go stop it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  My God, it’s happened now, Bracer thought. I hoped that we could avoid this.

  25

  Later, when the reports were taped and digested and filed away in the computer, Admiral Bracer was able to piece together what had happened aboard the LSS Pharsalus.

  It had all begun in the starship’s engineering department. Shifts were changing, but one man, Engineer Third Class Albert Hansey, did not seem particularly anxious to leave his duty station. He seemed far more intent on standing around and talking, continuing a line of argument that he had begun some time before.

  “I tell you,” he was saying to another crewman who was on his shift, “the whole damned bunch of them are crazy. And I know the regulations, Spiers. I’ve read them. You don’t have to take orders from crazy officers.”

  “You’d better watch that kind of talk, Hansey,” the one he had called Spiers said softly.

  “There’s no rules against that either. I can say whatever I like,” Hansey replied.

  “Knock it off, Hansey,” Engineering Officer Pessoa said. “Go on. You’re off duty now.”

  “Now, Mr. Pessoa…” Hansey began.

  “Go on, Hansey,” the engineering officer repeated.

  “Are you trying to tell me that I don’t have the right to say whatever I think?” Hansey demanded angrily.

  “There are regulations against inciting to riot,” the engineering officer said softly, obviously fighting to keep his temper.

  “I tell you, sir, the admiral is crazy. There’s…”

  “Knock it off, Hansey, or I’ll…”

  “You’ll do what, Mr. Pessoa?”

  By this time both shifts had gathered to hear the developing argument. The engineering crewmen had unconsciously gravitated into two groups, some of them standing near the engineering officer, the rest behind Hansey. And Pessoa quickly realized that it was Hansey who had the larger group.

  “I’ll call the bridge and have you placed under arrest,” the engineering officer finally answered.

  “The hell you will.”

  Pessoa turned to snap a button that would put him in touch with the starship’s bridge.

  Hansey reached out, grabbed the smaller man by the shoulders, spun him around.

  “By God, Hansey…”

  Mr. Pessoa’s words were interrupted by a balled prosthetic fist slashing against his jaw, shattering teeth, breaking bone. The engineering officer staggered backward, his mouth open in an impossible fashion, blood on his lips, chin.

  “Now you’ve done it!” Spiers cried.

  “Damn right I’ve done it! Any of the rest of you got guts? I’m going home. You want to go with me?”

  Fully half of the men in the crowded compartment, fired with Hansey’s violence and emotion, nodded, muttered agreement. The mob was coming into being.

  “You’re crazy, Hansey,” cried Speirs.

  Hansey’s open hand, metal clad in plastiskin, came up suddenly, striking Spiers’ cheek, sending him reeling backward against the bulkhead, meters from the now unconscious engineering officer.

  “Get back,” Hansey yelled, pointing to the men who had not yet agreed to join him. “Liege, there’s a weapons locker about ten meters down the corridor. Pessoa’s got a key on him. Get it and then go get us pistols.”

  The man named Liege quickly followed the big engineer’s orders, taking the key from the unconscious officer, and then leaving.

  Less than five minutes had gone by when the three returned, carrying deadly energy pistols from the locker. The mutiny had begun in earnest.

  After distributing the weapons, Hansey appointed Liege to guard the prisoners. A second engineering crewman, a man named Raymond, was told to begin disabling the ship’s internal communications system, a job that could be done from the engineering department, though it would take some time to get through the panels to the hidden conduits.

  Leaving about half the mutineers in the engineering department to assist Liege and Raymond, Hansey took the remainder and began a slow, cautious approach to the starship’s bridge, there to capture the senior officers and the controls, and to force those who commanded the starship to take them to earth. Hansey and his raiders had been gone for perhaps ten minutes when the battered, broken-jawed engineering officer returned to agonizing consciousness. Through the pain, realization came to him that he had, in fact, seen the beginning of a real mutiny, though he had been unable to prevent it. Mr. Pessoa also soon realized that his captors were paying little attention to him, being far more concerned, at the moment, with disabling the ship’s internal communications system.

  Struggling to his feet, Pessoa staggered to the nearest hatch, thumbed it open, and managed to escape his preoccupied captors.

  In the corridor outside engineering, fighting pain and unconsciousness, the engineering officer made his way to the nearest communications station, some dozen meters away, punched the button that would put him in touch with the bridge.

  “Bridge,” said the voice of the Pharsalus’ duty communications man even before the tank had cleared.

  Pessoa, unable to speak, waited until an image had appeared in the tank, pointed to his shattered, bloody face, and then gestured frantically.

  “Mr.‌—‌Mr. Pessoa,” stammered the astonished communications man. He turned from the tank, yelled “Captain!”

  From behind him Pessoa heard the enraged voice of Liege. “There he is! Get him!”

  By the time the mutineers reached him, Pessoa was not very concerned. He had done his duty. He had warned the captain. Then he lost consciousness again.

  As for Captain Davins, one brief look at Pessoa’s face had been enough. That had been no accident. That man’s face had been shattered on purpose‌—‌and the purpose could be nothing but mutiny!

  He alerted his marines, ordered them to engineering on the double, and then turned to call the admiral for reinforcements‌—‌and that is when Hansey and his party, armed with energy pistols, made their dramatic entrance‌—‌and Captain Charles Davins died for the second time.

  When the rasping of the energy pistol on the bridge died away and the command console was smoldering slag, shorting out much of the ship’s external communications circuits, Hansey turned back to First Officer Bugioli, leveling his weapon at her, though the prosthetic hand that held it quivered with human emotion.

  “No, Miss Bugioli,” Hansey said, “stay back.”

  “You heard what I said, Hansey,” she told him. “You have too many witnesses. You don’t have any place to go now.”

  “Earth’s not the only planet where men can live,” Hansey said.

  “It’s the only place where you can get what you want.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Hansey said loudly and swung the energy pistol around as if in warning to the other bridge officers not to move. “They’ll fix us up on Rombeck.”

  “Rombeck’s in the league now, Hansey,” Commander Bugioli said. “They won’t help you when they learn what you’ve done.”

  “Maybe they won’t learn,” said the engineer. “Not if the Jillies come back and kill everybody here.”

  “Don’t you think the admiral will tell Breakaway?” Bugioli asked. “And don’t you think Breakaway will tell Earth and Earth will tell Rombeck? You’ve got no place to go now. Your only hope is to surrender.”

  “I can’t do that,” Hansey said. “You’re going to take us home, back to Earth.”

  “You’re out of your mind,”
Lena Bugioli said and glanced at the chronometer in her console and hoped that the marines that the captain had sent to engineering had gotten things straight there by now.

  “I’m not going to fool around any longer,” the engineer said. “You get ready to take this ship out of orbit.”

  “I won’t do it,” Commander Bugioli said, not moving.

  “Then I’ll kill you and get somebody else to do it,” he said.

  “Nobody on this bridge will lift a finger to take you to Earth,” Commander Bugioli said. “You can either kill us all right now or put those weapons down.”

  Hansey looked at the other bridge officers, saw something in their eyes that matched what he had seen in First Officer Bugioli’s and said, “You’re all crazy. You want to die out here? You want the Jillies to come and kill us all? I don’t. I just want to go home.”

  “Your only hope of ever going home is to lay that pistol down now,” Commander Bugioli said. “That’s an order, Hansey!”

  “You can’t order me,” Hansey said frantically. “I’m giving the orders now. Take us home!”

  Hansey and the men behind him did not see the bridge hatches slowly, carefully sliding open, did not see the squad of marines with stunners that slipped through.

  “Drop your weapons!” yelled the young lieutenant of marines who led the detail.

  Fear exploded in Hansey’s eyes, his hand‌—‌an energy blast burst from the pistol before he turned, splattering against Lena Bugioli’s body cylinder, throwing her backward to the deck. Yet even as Hansey spun and fired again into the marine detail, stunners buzzed. The big engineer staggered forward, cutting a marine in half with his energy blast, and then lost consciousness.

  And as Hansey and his companions blacked out, the mutiny virtually ended. The possibility of anything further happening, the chance of the mutiny spreading to the rest of the ship, was thwarted by the arrival of Colonel Carrighar and his party of marines from the Iwo Jima. Carrighar helped the Pharsalus’ battered marines wipe out the last pocket of resistance in engineering, and then went to the bridge, but the bridge was quiet by then.