Mutiny in Space (8 page)

I saw the back of the commando a dozen feet away. The man stood motionless, his K7 still cradled in his arms. I couldn’t hear anything coming out of his helmet, but I had the distinct impression he was listening to something over his radio. Maybe Ducarti was giving a speech. Or maybe he was listening to his favorite ship-boarding tunes, I don’t know.

I pulled myself back into the maintenance walkway.

“There’s just the one,” I said. “He’s facing the other way. I think he’s getting orders from someone.”

Murdock nodded. “All right. Set your pistol to maximum.” He shut off the safety on his gun and turned a dial, and I followed suit. A little readout on the back on the gun informed me that at maximum power I would only get sixteen shots off before depleting the power. “Aim for his center of mass, and don’t stop shooting until he goes down. You take the ladder.” I swung back onto the ladder. “I’ll drop down.” Murdock perched on the edge of the shaft. “Ready?”

My mouth suddenly felt dry as dust.

I managed a nod.

Murdock nodded back. “On three. One. Two…”

I gripped my pistol in my right hand, my left holding a rung of the ladder.

“Three!”

I slid down the ladder and Murdock jumped. He landed into the next level about a second before I did, his boots clanging against the grillwork of the floor. The Social Party commando heard it loud and clear, and he spun, bringing up his K7 rifle to fire.

A lot of things happened in a very short time and space, and I remember all of them as clear as day.

I swung my gun towards the commando and fired. A laser-burst pistol is silent, has no recoil, and issues an invisible blast, but firing a handgun while hanging one-handed from a ladder isn’t exactly ideal accuracy. My first blast missed him, and I knew it missed him because a patch of the inner hull behind him glowed white-hot from my gun’s discharge.

Murdock had more skill, or maybe better luck. His first shot hit the commando in the right hip, and the ceramic armor there burned away with a flare of hot fire. The commando staggered, which saved our lives because it threw off his aim. The burst of full-auto gunfire that he directed at us would have cut us in half instead of splattering harmlessly against the wall behind us.

I’d dropped to the walkway and was now in a proper shooting stance, one knee down, both hands wrapped around the pistol’s grip, just the way Nelson had taught me in his endless security drills. I squeezed the trigger again, and this time the blast burned through the armor on the commando’s stomach. Murdock had recovered his balance, and he shot once more, the blast hitting the commando in the chest. I squeezed my trigger a third time, and another hole in the armor appeared next to the one Murdock had made.

One of the blasts had burned through the armor and through the commando’s heart. He staggered forward, bounced off the inner hull, and fell upon his face.

I had just killed my first man. Or helped kill him, anyway, which was the same thing.

I know you’re supposed to feel bad when you kill someone, that it’s supposed to be a shattering experience that gives you nightmares and regrets and maybe post-traumatic stress disorder, but I didn’t feel any of that. I mostly felt furious that he’d shot at us, and annoyed that my first shot had missed him. I suppose I should have felt bad that I had killed someone, but let’s be real. If he had been given the chance, he would have shot me in the head and not blinked an eye, and for all we knew, his friends were getting ready to murder the entire crew.

“Here,” said Murdock, passing me a black pistol he had taken from the dead commando. “Better firepower. We’re going to need it.” The gun was a lot heavier than my burst laser pistol, probably because it held actual projectiles instead of a capacitator. I didn’t know how many rounds a gun like that held. Twenty? However, the safety lever and the trigger were in the same place, so I figured I could use it.

“The collision alarm,” I said as Murdock helped himself to the dead man’s K7.

“Exactly,” said Murdock. “Those rounds hitting the hull will have showed up in the system just the same as debris hitting from the outside. That’s hard-wired into the system, and even Williams couldn’t lock it out.”

“Which means,” I said, “they know exactly where we are now.”

Murdock nodded. “Move. And stop pointing that thing at me! Last thing I need right now is to get shot in the back.”

We hurried down the walkway, the metal grill clanking, the gun’s grip cold and heavy against my hands. At last we came to a T-junction, and Murdock went left around the corner. The corridor terminated in another ladder. If I remembered the ship’s layout properly, we just had to climb up, make our way twenty or thirty meters to the generator room, and Murdock could do a hard reboot of the computer system.

He came to a stop.

I started to ask what was wrong, and then I heard the noises coming from above. Boots clanked on the deck, and I heard the sharp metallic clank as the end of a gun bounced off the wall.

Someone had noticed the collision alarm, and sent more than one Social to investigate.

Murdock spat out a furious curse, raised his K7 up the ladder shaft, and started shooting. The gun’s chattering roar sounded deafening in the enclosed space, the muzzle flash throwing stark shadows against the maze of wiring and pipes on the wall. I heard someone shout above, and then something metallic bounced off the floor near my foot. It was a cylinder of black metal about four inches long, capped on either end, and the commando we had killed had been carrying a bunch of them.

Grenade.

My first thought was that the idiots were blast open a massive hull breach.

My second thought was that the grenade was going to blast open a massive hull breach right after it had finished ripping me to bloody shreds.

I drew back my foot to kick the grenade away, hopefully further down the maintenance walkway.

There was a brilliant flash, and a noise so loud that it seemed to feel it across my entire body. Then something hard slammed into my back and the back of my head, and I realized that I had just hit the wall with considerable force.

I felt the metal grillwork of the floor pressing into my face, and then everything went black.

I was pretty hazy for a while after that.

I think I dreamed. Like, fever dreams, you know? Everything was all disjointed and out of place. For a while I thought Sergei and were working on the
Rusalka
’s maintenance drones, except that didn’t make sense because Sergei was dead and had been dead before I had ever set foot upon her.

Then I was talking to my mother. We were standing at a colony
Rusalka
had visited a few trips back, a hellish desert world only habitable near the poles. She stood in the blazing sun and was eagerly lecturing me about the future, but then, without warning, she melted in the sun, her skin and muscle and fat turning to burning slime and sliding from her bones. She stood in front of me, still talking, even though she was nothing but a blackened skeleton. Then the desert caught fire, burning the way that building in New Chicago had burned the day the bomb had gone off, and I heard her screaming for me out of the flames.

I screamed with her.

There were a half-dozen more nightmares. I don’t remember them all, which is probably just as well. For a while I had the sensation of floating. Or I was being carried. Maybe the explosion that had killed Mom and Sergei and God knows how many others had thrown me into the air and I was flying… until I crashed into ground and splattered like a package of hamburger dropped from a balcony. For a while, I was convinced that Ducarti’s bomb had also destroyed the
Rusalka
, that the ship was careening out of control into one of NR8965’s stars, which was why I felt so hot.

Then I felt something cool and hard underneath me. It felt nice.

Angry voices began to echo in my ears, which was rather less nice. It seemed someone was having a loud argument nearby, accompanied by a lot of cursing. I heard something beeping. An instrument panel? No, I recognized the sounds. They were from the various stations on the bridge. That was it. I was lying on the metal floor of the ship’s bridge.

One of the angry voices got louder. Maybe they were angry that the ship had crashed into the star and melted the crew? That didn’t make sense.

“Where is the key?” said a man’s voice. That didn’t make any sense either, but after a moment my scrambled brain recognized the voice. It belonged to Thomas Williams, the captain of the
Rusalka
… and the Social Party traitor.

“What are you talking about, you moron?” snarled another voice. It sounded like John Murdock. “What key? You locked the computer yourself. The boy doesn’t even know who he is! Look at him!”

Wait. Murdock was dead. He had gone into the maintenance walkway, and one of the commandos had had thrown a grenade down the ladder shaft. The explosion in that enclosed space would have killed him.

And me. I remembered that I had been with him. The grenade exploded right near me. That meant I should be dead, too. Only, as near as I could tell, I wasn’t.

Huh. Guess that had been a stun grenade, not a fragmentation one.

Then the memories of what had led up to the explosion rushed back into my head, and I couldn’t help groaning. Everything hurt. With some effort, I forced my eyes open.

I was right. I was lying on the deck, and I really was on the Rusalka’s bridge. I saw four Social commandos standing guard, as motionless as statues in their combat armor, their black facemasks reflecting the blinking lights from the bridge consoles. Hawkins and the other bridge crewers were on their knees, their hands held behind their heads. They were all lined up in a row; one long burst from a K7 could kill them all, one after the other. Murdock was kneeling away from the others, and Captain Williams stood over him, a projectile pistol in his right hand and a look of livid fury on his face.

“Tell me,” snapped Williams, “where it is!”

Murdock gave him a scornful look. “You’re the one who locked the ship’s systems. You want access to something, go unlock it yourself.”

Williams snarled and hit Murdock across the face with his free hand. Murdock’s head snapped around, some blood flying from his mouth. He blinked a few times and looked up at the captain.

“Is that the hardest you can hit?” he said. “You should have spent more time in the gym.”

Williams’s face went red behind his graying beard, and he leveled his gun at Murdock’s forehead. “I’m not playing around. Where is it?”

“For God’s sake,” said Murdock. “I can’t believe I’m going to die because you’re too stupid to understand basic computer concepts. You locked the systems. If anyone has the key to unlock it, you do.”

“Not that key,” said Williams. “I want the key to the grain!”

Murdock blinked. “You mean the cargo bay? It’s not hard. You can probably even force the bay with the computer locked.”

Williams let out an aggravated sound. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. What is the key to the grain? I know you and Rovio were part of a reactionary anti-Party cell. So tell me the key to the grain?”

“It’s just grain, you idiot!” said Murdock. “You plant it. Or you grind it up into flour and turn it into bread and stuff. I have no idea what you’re babbling about!” He glared at the captain. “How drunk did you get before you sold us all out anyway?”

Williams stepped back, his fingers tightening against the gun, and he might have shot Murdock then and there, but then he saw me looking at him.

“He’s awake!” he shouted. “Alesander, the young one woke up! Maybe he’ll know!”

I jerked upright to a sitting position, my head swimming, and braced my hands against the deck to keep from falling over. Williams shifted his pistol to point at me, as did one of the commandos.

“Um, hi,” I said uncertainly. “Don’t shoot.”

“That will rather depend,” said a familiar voice with a rolling accent, “on what you say in the next five minutes.”

I turned my aching head, and Alesander Ducarti swaggered into my line of sight.

He was dressed better than anyone else on the bridge, but more for movie combat than the real thing. He was wearing combat boots, cargo pants, tactical vest, and a leather jacket, but they all looked brand new. He was carrying a lot of weapons too, with pistols on both hips, grenades on his harness, and a K7 slung over his shoulder. His head was tilted to the side, as if in speculation, and his dark eyes looked amused as they stared at me.

“He’s Corbin’s brat,” said Williams, walking to Ducarti’s side. Despite his paunch, Williams was a tall and imposing man. Nevertheless, he sort of hovered at Ducarti’s elbow, almost like a teenage girl meeting her favorite rock star for the first time. “He’s Corbin’s little pet.”

“Nephew,” said Ducarti absently.

“What?” said Williams, blinking.

“The correct term is nephew,” said Ducarti. “A sibling’s child. In this case, a brother’s.”

“That’s my point,” said Williams, puffing up as if he had done something useful. “He’s family. Corbin will have told him everything.”

“Indeed?” said Ducarti. “Well, then. Do tell us everything, Nikolai.”

I took a deep breath. “My name is Nikolai Rovio, and I am an apprentice crewer aboard Starways Hauling Company freighter
Rusalka
, registry number…”

“Yes, yes,” said Ducarti with a smile. “I am quite familiar with the formalities, thank you. But we are old acquaintances, are we not, Nikolai? Surely we can speak candidly.”

“All right.” I glared at him. “Fine. You’re a murderer. You killed my mother and my brother.”

“Nonsense,” said Ducarti. “They killed themselves. No one forced them to do anything.”

“You killed them,” I spat. “You murdered them and a lot of other people all for your stupid Revolution!”

Williams bristled. “Watch your mouth, boy!”

“Now, now, Captain,” said Ducarti with perfect calm. “We already know that young Nikolai and his uncle are reactionaries. Which means that it is possible that Nikolai knows everything that we need to know.”