Mutiny in Space (3 page)

I didn’t see it coming. Mom slapped me, hard. Harder than I would have expected. The blow snapped my head around and I lost my footing for a second.

“How dare you,” she whispered. “How dare you do this to me, here of all places.”

“Yeah, Mom,” I said, glaring at her, wiping a drop of blood from my lip. “Because that’s what is wrong here. You being embarrassed in front of the high and mighty Mr. Ducarti, the great revolutionary.”

Ducarti looked genuinely amused for the first time that evening. “All shall be equal after the revolution.” He looked at Sergei. “However, since it is clear that you, at least, are a true son of the Social Party, Sergei Rovio, I have a task for you.”

“You do?” said Sergei, straightening up. “Really?”

Ducarti produced an envelope, an expensive-looking thing embossed with the official seal of the Social Party. “One of the Party’s projects has been to circulate a petition demanding an increase in the estate tax to seventy-five percent. We now have adequate signatures to require a referendum. It should be one hundred percent, but sometimes it is better to eat the steak in small bites than to choke on the entire thing.” He offered it formally to Sergei in both hands. “I want you, as the youngest member of the Social Party on New Chicago, to present this petition at the appropriate government office.”

“Me?” said Sergei, his eyes widening. “That’s… that’s a really big honor, sir.”

“Oh, it is,” said Ducarti, still grinning. “It most certainly is. As the face of the Social youth, as a true son of the Revolution, I think you are the perfect man to deliver our message.”

“I will go at once,” said Sergei.

“Good man. Also, as our official representative and voice, I insist you take one of the Party’s vans, emblazoned with the red hammer of the worker raised against the spiral of the galaxy. Think of what a sight it will make when the van pulls up, and every eye turns towards you, and you stride forth to present our petition to the corrupt, illegitimate authorities of New Chicago. We shall, of course, alert the media, so that the moment will be recorded.”

“Absolutely,” said Sergei proudly. “I’ll do it.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Mom. She smiled at Ducarti. “I would like to see my son take his first steps in service to the Revolution.”

“As you wish, Professor. And you, Nikolai?” said Ducarti, the cold eyes turning back towards me. “Will you accompany your brother as he assumes his birthright among the men of the Social Party?”

“No,” I said, stepping back. “I’m going home. I’ll walk. I don’t want to ride in a Party van.”

“As you wish, boy,” said Ducarti, still smiling, although it now struck me as more cruel than sardonic. “Go home. Go play with your engines. The Revolution does not require you yet.”

A gale of laughter went up from the Party members, and even Mom and Sergei joined in with the others. That hurt more than I would have thought. I whirled around so they could not see my burning eyes and I stalked from the warehouse without another word.

My defiance, combined with Ducarti’s contempt, saved my life.

I went home, but because I wasn’t watching the news, I didn’t see what happened. As soon as Sergei and Mom left in the van, Ducarti returned to his ship and immediately launched. From his ship safely in orbit, he monitored the progress of the van, watching until it reached the central planetary administration building fifteen miles from the spaceport.

Once the van reached the offices, in full view of the cameras that had been alerted, the fusion bomb hidden within the van was triggered.

Sergei and Mom were killed instantly, of course. The forensics techs finally found some of Sergei’s teeth and a piece of Mom’s femur, but nothing else. Five thousand, six hundred and ninety-two people were killed in the explosion and the resultant collapse of the nearby buildings, and over eighteen thousand were hurt or wounded. The minute the bomb went off, Ducarti left the system, escaping to hyperspace before the system defense ships could close in on him. But before he hyperjumped away, he sent out a broadcast announcing that the bomb was an act of revolutionary justice against the planetary government and people of New Chicago for failing to embrace the principles of Sociality.

The reaction was as swift as it was violent.

The next day, the planetary government of New Chicago by an executive order of the emergency commission outlawed the Social Party. A lot of people were arrested over the next month, including most of the non-science faculty of the University. Pretty much every official in the local Social Party leadership was executed without trial as a co-conspirator, whether they had actually known about it or not, and a lot of other people were charged with various crimes.

As for me… I really didn’t get into too much trouble over it. I spent four days in the offices of New Chicago’s Internal Security Division, not far from the smoldering wreckage of the building my brother and mom had unintentionally destroyed, while a dozen different interrogators asked me the same questions over and over again, looking for any inconsistencies in my answers. I was too shell-shocked to try to lie or defend myself, but it didn’t matter. A dozen different people had been recording Ducarti’s speech, including my confrontation with him at the end, and it was patently obvious that I had known nothing about his plot.

Of course, neither Sergei nor Mom had known the truth, but both the media and the government officially claimed that they had been in on the plot, and that they had knowingly sacrificed themselves for the Party and for the Revolution.

But to this day, I don’t think they knew the truth.

What I sometimes wonder is if it was my fault that Ducarti chose them. If I hadn’t just said yes when he asked me if I would join them, would he have chosen some other patsy to drive the van? Would he have chosen Sergei anyway? Or maybe he would have even asked me to drive it. But every time I start blaming myself, I remind myself that I wanted to leave. I even tried to leave, but Sergei insisted on meeting Ducarti.

If anyone is to blame besides Ducarti, it’s Sergei. That’s what I tell myself, anyhow.

I was still a legal minor, so when the executions stopped and the dust finally settled, Corbin wound up with my legal guardianship for the next two years. We went to the funeral of Sergei and my mom together, and we were the only ones there. All of Mom’s friends had been executed, arrested, or were keeping a low profile, and none of them could afford to be seen at the funeral of the man and the woman most of the planet blamed for the atrocity.

None of the life insurance policies paid out, so with what was left of Mom’s savings I bought a small plot in the middle of nowhere, and that’s where we buried their pathetic remains.

Corbin and I stood alone at the grave.

“You thought about what you’re going to do next?” said Corbin.

I shrugged, staring at the cheap little marker stone. “Not really. There’s not much money left. I’ve got enough for about three months’ rent on the apartment, and that’s all of Mom’s money. I don’t think I’ll be able to get a job, and there is no way I can go to the university now.”

“No,” said Corbin. “Even before this, your family did not have a very good reputation with the authorities.” He shrugged. “You know I tried to warn Sergei. And your mother. I really tried. But they simply would not listen. They could not see Sociality for what it really is. They were seduced by the vision. Your father–”

“What about my father?”

Corbin met my eyes. “He was my brother and I loved him, but Nikko, he was not a good man. He might have been a good man once, but the Party transformed him. In the end… I am afraid that he was very much like Alesander Ducarti. Forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, but that is truly what happened. Your mom was a long way down that path, and your brother had just begun upon it. If they keep you from it, their deaths may have been as a blessing.”

I wanted to get angry at him, but I couldn’t.

“It’s not speaking ill of the dead,” I said, “if it’s the truth.”

“I suppose not,” said Corbin. “Listen, Nikolai. I’m not your father, and I might be your guardian for the next two years, but I don’t have the right to tell you what to do. By the time I was your age, I had already fled Novorossiya III to get away from the secret police there. Now I’ve got a new berth with Starways, a senior mechanic slot on a long-range freighter. What that means is that I can choose my own apprentices. The company prefers to hire experienced men, but it doesn’t mind training up new ones so long as someone sufficiently experienced is in charge.”

I blinked. “Are you asking me to join you at Starways?”

“I am,” said Corbin.

“Won’t they be pissed that everyone in my family was a terrorist?” I said. “Except you, of course.”

Corbin shrugged. “New Chicago isn’t all that big of a place. It’s a backwater, really. All the Thousand Worlds are out there, Nikolai, and New Chicago is just one of them. Even if you don’t want to stay with Starways, you can put in some time, find someplace new to live once you get your feet under you.”

I thought about it for a moment, but there really wasn’t anything to consider.

“All right,” I said. “One condition, though.”

“What’s that?” said Corbin, frowning.

“We never come back to New Chicago again.”

Corbin looked relieved. “Deal.”

That afternoon we drove to the local Starways office, and I signed all the necessary papers. The next morning, I spent the remainder of Mom’s money on the tools I would need and gathered together everything I wanted to keep in a pair of footlockers.

Three days after that, Corbin and I left New Chicago on board the Rusalka, a long-distance freighter, and I began my new life.

My first year with Starways and the
Rusalka
was uneventful, but it was busy, busy, busy.

Let me tell you about my first love, the
Rusalka
. She was a big, ugly ship, and she looked like a fat gray trash can with a sublight engine bolted to the end, but she was old and tough and she was good at what she did. She could move five hundred thousand tons, so Starways used her for the heaviest jobs, such as moving comet ice to colonies, or transporting an entire wheat crop, or hauling immense quantities of ore from asteroid belts and heavy metal planets. She was a true starship, so she couldn’t put down in an atmosphere, which meant cargo shuttles had to carry her loads down to planetary surfaces in relays. She could dock easily enough with orbital stations or deep-space platforms, though.

Keeping her spacing was a lot of work. And a big chunk of that work fell upon Corbin and me.

The
Rusalka
was nearly a kilometer long, but for such a massive ship, she didn’t carry much crew. The crew complement was only one hundred and thirty, and Corbin’s official rank was Master Technician. Beneath him he had a dozen technicians and one overwhelmed apprentice.

Each technician had a different area of expertise and focus—life support, ion thrusters, mechanical systems, cargo handling robotics, weaponry, gravitics, and so forth—but we all worked together as a team on the bigger jobs, both for the sake of efficiency and for cross-training in case of accident and illness. I spent a lot of time with Corbin, but he regularly rotated me out to each of the specialized techs to learn their systems. Starways Hauling Company did not hire from any of the major universities, since so many of them were infested by Social Party members and their curricula reduced most of their graduates to uselessness, so the company maintained its own certification program.

That was to my advantage, because once I finished four years of apprenticeship, I could take the tests and get my own technician’s certificate without ever having to set foot on a university campus.

I liked life aboard the
Rusalka
. The work was hard, but it was never boring, and I learned something new every day. Alas, there wasn’t much opportunity for mischief. Nothing could kill a man faster than the hard vacuum of space, and if a crew member slacked off during a hyperdrive overhaul or an airlock refitting, his carelessness could doom everyone on board the ship. That awareness of constant danger hung over everything we did, and the crew knew it had to work together to survive. Mom used to say nothing united people quite like a common enemy, and aboard the
Rusalka
we all had a common foe—the airless vacuum, the hard radiation, the possibility of hyperspace navigation errors, space debris, and a thousand other hazards.

To summarize, everything in space wanted to kill us, and we were always aware of that.

We spent a lot of time in space because the
Rusalka
took unusually long trips, and we would spend three or four weeks in transit at a time. Everyone called human-inhabited space the Thousand Worlds, but only something like one to five percent of stars had planets capable of supporting human life. So human-inhabited space really ought to have been called the Hundred Thousand Worlds, but I suppose that was too much of a mouthful. To get from one colony planet to another, the
Rusalka
had to hyperjump through ten or twenty or even thirty barren systems first, like a kid jumping over a stream using stepping stones.

However, just because a system was barren didn’t mean it was uninhabited. Sometimes enterprising merchants set up refueling platforms, or the sort of space stations where they offered goods and services that were illegal on most of the Thousand Worlds. Miners dug out rare ore from asteroids, and a few enterprising colonists carved out tunnels on barren moons and built elaborate hydroponic setups. There were a lot of little colonies out there like that, usually founded by religious fundamentalists or political extremists of one kind or another.

There were also a lot of dead little colonies like that, because, as I mentioned, space is dangerous.

In addition to the natural hazards, pirates also liked to set up shop in deserted systems, along with slave traders based on one of the Prophet worlds. Sometimes the pirates worked for themselves, sometimes they were government-sponsored privateers, and sometimes they were Social Party revolutionaries.