We All Died at Breakaway Station (18 page)

“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.

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.

Men had died, some of them permanently, but the mutiny was over.

Outside, through what she liked to call a window, she could see the enormous ball of Earth, white with clouds, blue with water, brown with a touch of green in her continents, a huge, unimaginable thing from this distance, barely more than outside the atmosphere. But still beautiful for all that, beautiful and awe-inspiring, yet such a fragile thing should Jillie warships ever reach her, should they ever break through Earth’s defenses and bombard her with thermonuclear weapons.

Dr. Denise Lesson slowly turned away from the port, catching at a great distance a glimpse of reflected sunlight from the armada of warships that grew in orbit around her homeworld, and for an instant she felt gratitude and hope‌—‌those ships would save her and Earth and everything that mattered in this cold, ugly universe.

Then she looked at the hideous being who sat in an ungainly-looking chair across her desk, and she thought that she had not always felt that this was such a cold and ugly universe. She had once believed that it was a place of order and logic and beauty. Had this being and its kind made her think differently? And which view was right? Maybe both, she told herself, depending on how you’re seeing it.

Denise sat back down behind her desk, rustled papers and stacked tape reels for a few moments, then turned back again to the alien who occupied the chair especially constructed for it. Its leathery skin appeared almost oily in the room’s light, and its large, independently roving eyes sparkled back at her with something she could never hope to read. Its stomach sack was now in place, and it seemed relaxed as it fed nourishment into its body. Now it was dressed in a long, flowing, multicolored robe of its own devising.

“D’ra H’bib,” she said, matching the sound of the Jillie expression as nearly as she could, “would you like to continue our conversation now?”

“Not D’ra H’bib this instant,” the Jillie wheezed, fixing one eye on her, while the other gazed into space. “Now Sabal R’han.”

“Is there nothing I can call you that will always remain constant?” Denise asked almost in exasperation.

“Nothing is always,” the Jillie said, its face contorting into an expression that remotely resembled a human smile, but which Denise knew meant nothing of the sort. It was not even an expression of pleasure, but what it meant she could not even guess.

“Nothing is always,” she repeated. “Well, Sabal R’han, do you want to talk?”

“What is talking?” the Jillie asked, perhaps philosophically, gesturing with its six-fingered hand. “Talking is for no good.”

“What is good?”

“You
shibeeesh
,” the word, if it could be called a word, was more of a wheeze than anything else, “are having no expression for it.”

“Can you help me to understand?” Denise asked.

“There is no understanding,
shibeeesh’ant,”
the Jillie said slowly.

“You won’t even try?”

“Trying is foolishness!” the Jillie said suddenly.