“If you listen to Craig, you will all die,” Bella said.
Schrope fixed his attention on Svetlana, as if Bella had not spoken. “I need you to get us home,” he said. “I need you to pull your team together and start the engine. We’ll rig for two gees. It’s all or nothing, Svieta: the engine will either get us home, or we’ll go out in a blaze of glory. Both of those options are better than rotting out here.”
“Don’t do this,” Bella said, but her voice died somewhere in her throat, reaching no one. They were no longer listening to her, or to any of the other senior staff. The gathering had erupted into heated debate, a ruction that at any instant threatened to boil over into violence. “I’ve lost the ship,” she said, for the benefit of no one but herself, yet Jim Chisholm whispered, “They’ll come back to you. They’ll always come back. Deep down, they know you’re right.”
A voice boomed from the crowd, temporarily silencing them all. It was Saul Regis, his big form trembling with adrenalin. “Fine,” he said. “If it comes to this, so be it, but let’s see how we all stand. Let’s draw a line in the sand. Those with Bella, gather around me. Those who agree with Craig, gather around him.”
Bella watched her crew split into those two groupings, still a little stunned that it had actually come to this. At first it looked as if Schrope was going to win the day by a clear margin — but Bella had more loyalists than she realised. Saul Regis, supporting Bella, gathered most of his robotics team around him, with only Marcia Batista defecting to Schrope’s party. Half of the science team came to Bella, and more than half of the medical team, and a handful of Svetlana’s flight-systems party: mostly the younger, less experienced members, like Meredith Bagley and Mengcheng Yang. Bella counted heads: including Saul Regis and herself, she had around forty people. There were a lot fewer than forty people gathered around Craig Schrope. The rest of the crew formed an amorphous, jostling group between the two rival leaders. Most of Parry’s mining team, as well as Parry himself, had yet to decide. Svetlana had not declared her allegiance either.
It couldn’t have been easy for Svetlana, Bella thought: no matter how much she might have agreed with him, the idea of joining forces with Craig Schrope must have really stuck in her craw.
Bella caught her eye. Svetlana mouthed back something that might have been defiance, but might equally well have been an apology.
As if their friendship still counted.
She moved to Craig Schrope’s side. A moment later, Bella observed Parry Boyce follow her. She could not blame Parry for that.
Where Parry followed, so did most of his EVA team. Gregor Mair was the only miner who stayed loyal to Bella.
So now it was done. There were no stragglers, no undecided votes, and there was no need to count the numbers: Svetlana’s decision had been crucial. Craig Schrope could now count on more than half of the crew. His angry clique was visibly larger than Bella’s motley assembly. The difference was fewer than twenty people, but the addition of the EVA party gave Schrope’s group the cohesion of an army. With their expertise in ship systems, they had a clear technical edge over Bella’s assortment of scientists, roboticists and medical staff.
Miraculously, a kind of calm fell upon the divided gathering. Schrope’s party knew they had effective control of the ship. Bella’s group knew there was nothing they could do about it. It had been a bloodless mutiny: her crew, even as it ripped itself apart, had not disgraced itself. Bella allowed herself a tiny, waning flicker of pride. They had behaved like adults, even as they spurned her.
“I have the ship,” Schrope said. He sounded relieved more than triumphant. “We’ll do as I said: prep for two gees. Immediate burn, as soon as we’re ready. We’ll drop the mass drivers.” He looked at Svetlana. “Can you organise your team and get on this right away?”
Svetlana took a deep breath, crossing some mental Rubicon, and nodded. “It’s doable.”
Bella raised her hands. She had their instant, total attention. “All right. You’ve done what you think is right. I can’t blame any of you for that. You want to survive very badly. Believe it or not, so do I. To those of you who have joined Craig because you think that’s the best way to keep serving the company, and that to follow me would be the disloyal act… well, I understand. I don’t blame you for it. But you’re still doing the wrong thing —”
“You’ve said enough, Bella,” Schrope cut her off. “Now let me say my piece.”
“Be my guest,” she said.
“Bella is wrong about this,” he said, addressing the crowd again. “Yes, we could eke out a living around Janus — maybe. But don’t mistake optimism for certainty. We know we can slow down. That’s not in dispute. That’s physics.”
“Is this leading somewhere, Craig, or do you just want to rub my nose in it?” Bella asked.
He fixed her with a tolerant smile. “You’ve said that you understand my people. Well, I understand yours. I’m extending the hand of reconciliation to all of you: Saul, Ryan… Jim — it isn’t too late to throw your weight in with us.” He spread his arms magnanimously, as if welcoming them to the party. “We’re committed to the slowdown now. The ship is ours. But we can still behave like civilized human beings. Join us, accept that this course of action is going to take place, and we can all be friends.”
“Just like that?” Nick Thale asked. “You’re saying we just join you, and it’s let bygones be bygones?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“I do,” Thale said. “You’ve stolen this ship from Bella Lind. The captain. I wouldn’t piss on you if you were, on fire.”
A line of tension creased Schrope’s neck like a hawser. “I have — I have secured this ship. That’s all.”
“Why don’t you go play in an airlock, Craig,” Thale snapped back.
“It’s all right,” Bella said. “I appreciate the support, Nick, I truly do, but let’s keep this civil. Before very long we may all need each other again. I’d rather not stoop to personality attacks.” She turned from Thale and spoke up again. “So, Craig: how do you want to play this? There are about forty of us against about a hundred of you. One of my people is terminally ill. It’s obvious that we lack the numbers to retake the ship, but rest assured that my people will obstruct and impede your every move. We’ll do all in our power to keep this ship from falling out of the slipstream.”
“I can’t have that,” Schrope said.
“I didn’t think you would. That means we have to discuss terms and conditions.”
“There isn’t time for this,” Svetlana said. “If we’re going to do this, we have to start now.”
“Take whoever you need,” Schrope told her. “Just make sure you give us five minutes” warning before you light the engine.“
Svetlana took Robert Ungless and Naohiro Uguru with her; she needed only two trusted members of her team. Together they would have no difficulty in bringing the engine back up to power. No one made any effort to stop them leaving. It was obvious that Schrope’s party had a massive advantage, not just in numbers, but in strength, too: Parry’s EVA miners were steroid-muscled and tough as nails, and they probably counted for double their actual number.
Once Svetlana and her engineers had left, Schrope stroked his jaw and studied Bella with curatorial interest, as if wondering where in his scrapbook to pin her. “You’re right about Jim,” he mused. “The best place for him is the medical centre. You have Ryan, Jagdeep and Judy in any case.”
“I’m still the flight surgeon on this ship,” Axford said. “You’ll need my services if one of you slips and breaks something.”
“That’s why I’m proposing that you occupy the part of the ship clustered around the medical centre. It’ll be a squeeze, but I’m sure you’ll manage. Like Bella said, we can’t very well have you running around.“
“And you?” Bella asked.
“We’ll need access to the critical flight systems, of course. Navigation and propulsion, life support. That means pretty much the rest of Rockho
pper. But don’t worry. We’ll look after you.”
“You know,” Bella said, “the more I think about it, the more I like Nick’s suggestion about the airlock.”
“I thought you wanted to keep this civil,” Schrope said.
* * *
Five minutes later, Svetlana sent word that she was ready to start the engine. Schrope told her to start the burn at a quarter gee, and then to smoothly increase to half a gee over the ensuing five minutes. That would give everyone time to reach their berths for confinement during the immobilising lockdown of the two-gee burn. Then Svetlana could turn the engine up as far as she dared. Janus would fall away. In thirty or forty minutes, the ship would drop out of the slipstream — and Janus itself would look as if it was suddenly speeding away from them as its true acceleration became apparent.
By that time, Bella knew, they would already be lost. Craig Schrope’s intimate knowledge of Rockhopper’s layout had served him well. The medical centre and its surrounding cluster of rooms formed a near-perfect prison, isolated from any ship-critical systems. With only two airlocked passageways accessing the entire area, it was an easy matter to seal one lock and station an informal sentry point at the other. Bella and her party were left to make their own provisions for comfort. Under two gees, walking would be nearly impossible, and even sitting would be unpleasant. While the ship was still at half a gee, Bella and Axford raided the medical centre for support cushions and pillows, and distributed these around. Jim Chisholm was helped back into bed, completely drained by the events in the gymnasium.
“I wish I could think of something we could do,” he said as Axford slipped nutrient lines back into his permanent cannulas. “But Craig has us right where he wants us.”
“Just rest,” Axford told him gently.
Belinda Pagis held up the limp form of a flexy. “We’re locked out of anything useful. I’ve tried all the obvious tricks to get around the barriers, but they look pretty watertight.”
“Let me try,” Bella said. But the result was the same: the flexy would only allow her access to the most superficial layers of ShipNet. “This is what I did to Svetlana,” she said.
“I’ll keep trying to find a hole,” Pagis said. “My guess is that Svetlana didn’t set up these barriers — she’d have been too busy with the engine. More than likely it was Bob Ungless.”
“Ungless is good,” Bella said.
“I’m better.”
“It won’t make much difference even if you do find a hole,” Carsten Fleig said. “Even if you had unrestricted access, you’d only be able to stop the engine once. Then they’d come and take the flexies away from us.”
Fleig’s calm pedantry often irritated Bella, but as usual he was absolutely correct. At best they could impede the escape effort, not block it for ever. “If we could just inflict some damage on the engine,” she said, “enough to put it out of action, but not destroy the ship…”
“Or damage the tokamak itself,” Pagis reminded her. “If you win the day, we’re still going to need that for power.”
“Whatever you might have in mind,” Mengcheng Yang said, “it might be best not to talk about it.”
“Yang’s right,” Bella said. “If Craig’s on the ball, he’ll be listening to every word we say, and watching us on the cams.”
“And monitoring our flexy activity,” Pagis said. She gave Bella a pessimistic smile. “But I’ll keep trying.”
The speaker came to life. “This is Schrope. Word is that Svetlana’s ready to push to two gees. We’ll increase smoothly through one gee, but I’d suggest you make yourselves comfortable. The ride may be a little rough until Svetlana fine-tunes the fusion parameters.”
Bella felt a tremor run through the ship as the engine pushed beyond half a gee. It was more power than they had ever generated before, operating well outside their textbook performance envelope. Bella felt her own weight increase. She tried to judge the moment when the acceleration passed through one gee. She sat on her haunches, pushing back against the padded side of a cabinet. Most of her people were in similar positions, dispersed through two rooms.
She thought about destroying the engine, and realised with bleak resignation that it was already far too late for that. Rockhopper had gained enough speed to escape the weak gravitational field of Janus. Even if the engine cut out now, the ship would continue on its drift to the edge of the slipstream.
She had lost. It was just a question of accepting it now. Her weight increased until even sitting was unpleasant. Slowly, Bella stretched out until she was lying flat, with only a pillow under her head for support. It was easier that way: breathing still felt more difficult than normal, but at least now her weight was distributed more evenly across her whole body.
Pagis was still trying to crack the ShipNet lockout. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is too difficult. And it doesn’t look as if Ungless made any silly mistakes.” She put the flexy down, groaning with overworked muscles.
“No one’s going to make any silly mistakes,” Bella said. “We’re too good a crew for that.”
Now and then the floor kicked up at them with renewed force as the thrust became momentarily unsteady, but the jolts gradually became less severe and less frequent as Svetlana adjusted the details of the fusion reaction.
“Bella,” Thom Crabtree said, his voice just loud enough to carry over the background noise, “there’s something you should know.”
Bella smiled reassuringly at the taphead. “I’m glad you sided with me, Thom. It counts for a lot. You don’t have to explain yourself.”
“I’m siding with the rightful authority on this ship,” Crabtree said, his nervous, feral eyes still not meeting hers. “But that isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What, then?” she asked.
“I can do something. Something that might make them stop and take us back to Janus. But I’ll need your permission first.”
She kept her expression fixed, her voice level. “What do you think you can do, Thom?”
“I can destroy the ship. There’s a robot — Nick’s free-flier, the one he sent out to look at the forward face of Janus.”
He had her full attention now, but she could not show it. Microphones probably wouldn’t pick up their conversation above the noise of the ship, but the webcams would reveal the slightest hint of conspiracy.
“You can control it?”
“Yes.”
“From here?”
“I’m in contact with it all the time.”
“But Saul Regis locked you out of control,” Bella said. “That was why you came to see me — to complain about not having enough to do. All you had were the virtuals.”
“I did something about it,” Crabtree said, with an easy shrug. “Saul wasn’t really very thorough. I found a way around his blocks. I’ve been doing it for days now, looking through robots, making them move — not enough to be noticed, but enough to remember how it feels to do something.”
Bella looked around, but Regis was in the next room. “But we’re locked out of ShipNet.”
“I don’t need ShipNet. The only way they can lock me out would be with a skull saw — or a hammer to the head.” Crabtree had the glazed and absent look that told her he was only partly present in the room. Much of his sensory world was already focused on a point of view beyond the hull.
“Are you keeping up with us?”
“Yes. I’m burning fuel pretty quickly, but I should be able to shadow Rockhopper for another ten minutes.”
“What can you do?”
“Nothing subtle,” Crabtree said, closing his eyes tightly.
Bella called Svetlana to medical.
* * *
Engine down. Full reverse thrust on steering rockets, followed by a slew that must nearly have snapped the ship’s spine.
“Take us back to the initial study position,” Crabtree said. “Take us back to Janus.”
By then they had no choice but to obey. At that point, the superior numbe
rs of the other faction counted for nothing. They couldn’t block Crabtree’s link to the free-flier because it bypassed ShipNet completely. Given hours — or days — Bella was sure that they could have found a way to lock him out, even if it consisted of nothing cleverer than disabling the antenna that was talking to the free-flier, but they didn’t have hours, or even minutes.
Crabtree had demonstrated his complete control of the free-flier by nearly ramming the ship, showing how easy it would have been to achieve a killing impact. He maintained a stand-off for as long as the free-flier’s fuel situation allowed. An hour passed, then another hour. By that time, even the most optimistic flight-dynamics scenarios said that they had no hope of ever making it back home.
Gradually, even the most determined of Schrope’s faction realised that the battle was lost. They were still the stronger party, and many of them probably toyed with taking out their revenge on Bella’s entire faction, but on some level they must have known that there would come a time when the other party’s services would prove useful. They could have taken Bella — she was of no practical use to them, had no skills that she alone possessed — but she was the captain and something made them pass her by, as if to touch her would violate some unspoken taboo.
So they took Thom Crabtree instead. They did it by stealth, when thoughts of revenge were beginning to recede. They waited for a moment when Crabtree was isolated, late in the ship’s night, and grabbed him. It was done soundlessly, and no one was around to stop them.
They took him deeper into the ship, then secured themselves behind airlock bulkheads.
There were two men: Connor Herrick and John Chanticler, both members of Parry’s EVA squad. They had always struck Bella as dependable crewmen, proficient at what they did. She had never imagined that they might be capable of murder.
They’d found an old spacesuit: an ancient Orlan fifteen, forty years old if it was a day, hopelessly beyond repair but kept aboard so that it could be cannibalised for spare parts. They inserted Thom Crabtree into it. They found a panel in the wall and wrenched it free. Behind the panel lay a gristle of coloured flexible pipes, one of which carried superheated steam.