The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (41 page)

“No possible way of getting in?”

“Not unless you went in from the outside.”

Snipe looked doubtful. “How many of the pellet guns still work?”

“A number have been used in target practice,” I reminded her. “And Heron’s worked well enough.”

Loon ticked off the last of his fingers. “That leaves the Captain’s armory. It has to be somewhere in his quarters.”

Once again everyone stared at me. I was the only one who had access to the Captain’s cabin, the only one who might have a reasonable excuse for going there. And the one for whom it was probably the most dangerous.

Crow said tentatively, “It’s important to know how many guns they have.”

I reviewed in my own mind the last few times I had seen the Captain and the cursory examination I had given his quarters. Unfortunately, with both the Captain and Escalus watching, I had seen very little.

“What kind of a man is Escalus ?” Snipe asked.

“A guard rat.Loyal.”

“He sleeps there as well?”

I shrugged; I didn’t know his schedule.

“He’s fond of Plover in Maintenance,” Loon said. “He spends his off-shift time with her.”

Snipe frowned. “Are you sure?”

Loon looked surprised. “I thought everybody knew.”

Snipe turned back to me.

“Where does the Captain sleep?”

“In the after compartment—the forward is used strictly for meetings, dinners, entertainment, that sort of thing. The compartment’s organized around the viewing port.”

Plots and intrigues were second nature to Snipe, probably because she had spent so much time studying the historicals . It took her only a few minutes to draw up a plan. When the Captain retired to sleep, Escalus was on his own time and usually spent it with Plover. Banquo would be on duty in the passageway but he might be decoyed away by a small disturbance on the same level. Snipe would talk to Plover and make sure she kept Escalus occupied.Which would guarantee me time alone in the compartment.

Provided Escalus left.

Provided Banquo could be decoyed.

Provided Plover would co-operate.

Provided the Captain had actually retired to sleep.

Snipe would let me know when Escalus went off duty and Quince and Loon would make arrangements for a disturbance in the corridor—two crewmen noisy on smoke, enough to lure Banquo away from his post but not enough to wake the Captain. We all agreed and they left. All but Ophelia, who stayed behind, her face gray with strain.

“We have a plan to force the Captain to go back.” I waited for her to continue but instead she shook her head and said, “I’m not sure I should tell you, Sparrow. It’s not dependent… on you.” She hesitated.

“It’s your decision.”

For a moment I was both hurt and insulted,then understood why she was withholding the information. Of all the mutineers, I was now the most important—and the most exposed. Ophelia knew as well as I did that I was hanging by a thread and the Captain could cut it at any time.

“Will it work?” I asked.

She nodded. “It has to.”

That wasn’t quite the same thing but I didn’t pursue it. I would have to trust her.

“Then don’t tell me. Not yet.”

“I wish you luck, Sparrow.”

It was Hamlet she was talking to and it was Hamlet who nodded his thanks.

****

It wasn’t difficult to lure Banquo away from the hatchway and it took only a moment for me to slip into the Captain’s quarters, two or three writing slates tucked under my arm in case the Captain was still awake. He would be annoyed but my seeing him early in his sleep period would hardly be enough reason to flatline me…

Only one glow tube was on, which left most of the compartment in shadow. I froze, waiting until my eyes had adjusted to the gloom. The Captain’s sling was empty and the only real light came from the after sleeping compartment and office. I could hear the low murmur of conversation and felt the hair on the back of my neck stiffen. The Captain was still up, talking to somebody—probably Cato. My armpits and palms were slimy with sweat and I debated leaving, though I was also tempted to edge closer so I could overhear the conversation or quickly search the cabin for any stock of weapons. I hesitated, convinced I was being foolish. If he kept pellet guns anyplace, it would be in the after compartment.

The few slates I carried with me suddenly seemed like a feeble excuse for being there. I made up my mind to go, hoping that Banquo was still occupied at the other end of the corridor. My courage had slipped away and my heart had started to race. Then I froze again. The huge port that took up one whole side of the compartment lacked its usual display and for once showedOutside as it looked from the hangar deck. It was as if the wholeside of the ship were open to outer space. I had to fight a moment of vertigo, panicked that I might float out to be lost between the light dusting of stars on the left and the ocean of blackness on the right…

Darkness and the Deep, I thought bleakly. Here we were, a group of frightened, chatteringprimates light-years away from the safety of the jungle, breeding and fighting within the steel confines of a tiny artificial world that had been launched millennia ago. Once it was gone, there might be no life left in the universe and no point at all to the vast explosions of matter and the whirling lumps of rock and bubbles of gas that filled the void and…

I swallowed my fears and started going through the compartment. If the Captain came in, I would try and bluff my way out. If Banquo interrupted me, I would do the same, though I doubted I could convince either one.

I drifted over to the Captain’s desk. The viewing globe was empty and there was nothing else on the desktop with the sole exception of the ancient paperweight that I had first seen on the bridge. I held it for a moment,then carefully put it back.

I silently slid open the drawers in the desk, making sure that none of the contents escaped into the compartment. They held nothing but a few small writing slates. I pushed them shut, then floated over to the bookcases against the opposite bulkhead. I ran my fingers across the bindings, managed to read a few of the titles and fought down an urge to steal one or two.

It was an odd morality—I could lead a mutiny against the Captain but I couldn’t steal one of his books. From somewhere there came the tiny tick of a clock and once again I was paralyzed with fear. Time was running out; they couldn’t keep Banquo away forever and the Captain could wind up his conference at any moment. I shivered and groped my way past the bookcases, then turned to stare at the compartment. I had searched everywhere. Any armory had to be in the after compartment, as I had thought all along.

I took a final look at the huge port on my left, the Captain’s desk and chair, his hammock for the occasional nap, and the row of bookcases—along with the dining table and the private food machine, the only real touch of luxury in a compartment almost as Spartan as those of the crew. I started for the hatch,then grabbed a floor ring to stop myself.The dining table.With a cloth stretched taut over the top and reaching to the deck, anchored with magnetic lines. I drifted over, broke the magnetic seals and folded back the cloth. Beneath the table was a cabinet with metal doors. I felt for the latch and quietly forced it open.

Some of the pellet guns were still in cosmoline that had hardened to a rocky feel and appearance. I did a quick count.Perhaps twenty guns, plus tins of ammunition. Ten of them had been fired and I guessed that these were the ones issued for target practice. I wondered which one Heron had used when he had tracked me on Aquinas II. It was a morbid thought, but practical—if I knew which one it was, at least I could be certain that it worked.

The ones in hardened cosmoline I knew were useless—you would have to crack them out and the barrels were probably sealed with the stuff. But the other ten presumably worked; I guessed that they were all the firing power the Captain had.

I started to gather them all up,then realized I didn’t dare. If the mutiny was to start the next time period, it would be different. But one gun might not be missed. I took what looked like the best one and a small tin of ammunition and stuffed them in my waistcloth. My possession of them wouldn’t be immediately obvious to either the Captain or Banquo , though a quick search would not only mean flatlining, it would probably send me to Reduction.

I floated back toward the hatch,then hesitated once again.

There was still a low murmur of conversation coming from the after compartment, and curiosity quickly overcame prudence. I pushed toward it, keeping to one side to avoid being outlined in the light. I flattened myself against the bulkhead and peeped in. There was little to see: an outer compartment that was largely in shadow and a smaller one beyond, which held a sleeping sling and apparently little else. The Captain wasn’t in sight but his voice was clear and I could make out specific words, though not the sense of what he was saying. He sounded as if hewere in the outer compartment but I couldn’t see him in the gloom.

Then once again the hair on the back of my neck stiffened. I had been there a good five minutes but I had never heard anybody else speak. It occurred to me that there were moments when even the Captain was alone and afraid, moments when he retreated to the after compartment and held long conversations with himself.

I was partly right and also, dreadfully, wrong.

****

By the next time period, the Captain knew that he had lost a weapon. When I went to see him on ship’s business, he was in a thin-lipped fury, though he never indicated he suspected me. Banquo was the chief object of his anger and I was a silent witness to his brief interrogation. I had drifted in with some writing slates of supply statistics at the moment the Captain was facing a white-faced Banquo across his desk.

“You were on duty and a commotion started and you left your post. That’s simple enough. It never occurred to you that it was a diversion?”

To my surprise, Banquo defended himself.

“It was my duty to investigate—you would have ordered me to if you had been awake. And the crewmen checked out.”

“They wanted you to investigate because they knew I wasn’t awake—wasn’t that obvious?”

“I said I checked them out. I did my duty—”

It happened so fast I couldn’t believe it. The Captain backhanded Banquo across the face, leaving a white welt that quickly turned red. Banquo fingered his cheek; he was livid with anger. He stood there a moment, trembling, a huge hulk of a man who had been loyal to the Captain all of his life and now, in an instant, had seen his loyalty shattered. Even though he was old crew, he had a built-in aversion to violence, and that had been stripped away as well. I had no idea what he would do; I don’t think he himself knew.

There was an ominous silence, then the Captain said in a low voice, “I give you permission, Banquo

—go ahead, strike.”

The Captain was out of control, I thought with amazement. The veins in his forehead and neck pulsed withanger, his eyes were narrow with rage. Banquo stared for a moment; then his flush faded and he turned away without a word and pushed outside to the corridor to take up his post. I thought at first the Captain had faced him down,then realized the same thing Banquo had—if he had struck, the Captain would have killed him.

The Captain glared at me and snarled, “He probably took the gun himself,” then nodded at the slates in my hand. “Leave them. And I don’t want to see any more statistics for the next dozen time periods—or you, either.”

I had been hovering there, quaking with guilt, and left as quickly as I could. It was a side of the Captain I had never seen before and hoped I never saw again. Sweating with rage, out of control, capable of murder… He was more than a match for all of us and I began to think we would never be prepared to deal with him.

Our final plan was simple, too simple. We would pick a specific time,then cripple the ship. We had a lot of work to do beforehand, from a final effort to subvert as many of the Captain’s men as we could to a systems analysis of the ship’s functioning so we could disable it with precise strikes. The end result would be to force the Captain to return to Earth. It had become an article of faith that he could not run the ship himself and that once we had convinced him of that, he would have to turn back. In retrospect, it was all wishful thinking. I would wake in the middle of a sleep period realizing how flimsy our plan was and yet fail to find any fault with the logic. The Captain
had
to go back…

But we had no textbooks on mutinies and ours was flawed from the very beginning. It lurched to a start long before we were ready, and whatever it was, it was no body blow to the operation of the ship. Everybody had their pet idea on how to cripple the
Astron
, tried that idea out first, and
then
told me about it. The mutiny never spun out of control because it was never in control. The first blow was at Hydroponics, a blockage in a nutrient valve that wasn’t discovered until three rows of soybeans had turned brown and useless.

Nobody raised an alarm; the withering could have happened in the natural course of events. And then a proud Ibis told me what she had done. I was harsh and probably frightened her but I desperately didn’t want to warn the Captain of what we were planning.

The next assault came the following breakfast period and was a good deal more serious than turning off a spigot in Hydroponics. Halfway through the meal Snipe wrinkled her nose. At first I thought the food machine had malfunctioned or that one of the children in the compartment hadn’t made it to a waste chute in time. Somebody, I never discovered who, had linked the waste-processing units with air support. We had long been used to foul air but we weren’t used to the new odors and I doubted that anyone ever could be.

The last attempt was against the water system. Without warning, the drinking water began to taste like bile.

The three events in less than a dozen time periods convinced everybody it was no coincidence. More important, they alerted the Captain. His move was immediate and drastic. All the birth mothers were sequestered in an off-limits corridor with armed guards at both ends and no chance for anybody to see them without a permit.