“You were never friends with Heron,” I said, “He was friends with you.”
A shrug. “I stand corrected.”
Time was running out. I had spent half an hour with Ophelia and Huldah but I could easily spend half a time period with Thrush trying to coax him to do something he saw no profit in doing, only risk.
“I can prove you plotted with Heron on the hangar deck,” I said. “There were other witnesses.” It was too simple a lie and I cursed Huldah for urging me to even try talking to Thrush.
Thrush raised his eyebrows in mock surprise.
“A threat, Sparrow? Against me?” He smiled bleakly. “What is it you want me to do? Go to the Captain and plead for their lives?” Once again there was something in the back of his eyes that I couldn’t read. “It would be more effective if you did that, Sparrow. He might believe pleading if it came from you; you’re too innocent to have ulterior motives.”
He drifted out from behind the desk. I stared at him in the light from the glow tubes and tried to hide my stare at the same time. I had been an idiot, I should have known. Why hadn’t Huldah told me?
I had eyes but I had to learn to use them—and Huldah taught by example. She was intensely interested in the fate of those stranded below, but she had also wanted me to look at Thrush in circumstances under which I could see him for what he really was.
Thrush opened the hatch and waited for me to leave.
“Do whatever you want, Sparrow, say anything you want. I can’t go to the Captain and plead for them. Nobody can. All three of them endangered the Astron and there’s no reprieve from that—nobody can be allowed to endanger the Astron, not even the Captain.”
I paused in the corridor outside, just before he flicked on the shadow screen.
“If you were Captain,” I said thoughtfully, “would you take the Astron into the Dark?”
It wasn’t my question. It had come from somewhere in the back of my mind, perhaps from Hamlet, perhaps from Aaron. It surprised me as much as it surprised Thrush.
“I might.”
“You wouldn’t make it,” I said.
He shrugged and turned back to the desk ledge and his terminal pad.
“The ship would, the crew might not. Not all of them.”
The jungle and all of its noises suddenly reappeared, to vanish a moment later as the shadow screen flowed back in place.
I had the information I needed, but I had a good deal more than that as well and all of it totally unexpected. Thrush had been as badly gashed as I during our fight on the hangar deck. But now he was completely healed. I remembered Abel’s look of surprise when he had inspected us three weeks earlier.
Ophelia had been wrong about the Captain’s sterility. The skin color was a different shade, undoubtedly due to a recessive gene. But the sense of command was the same and so was the ruthlessness and the innate ability to manipulate people. So also was the attitude of one of those who was alone in life, stranded among the mayflies.
Thrush had once bragged that the Captain had taken a special interest in him. It had surprised me then but it didn’t now.
Thrush, Thrush…
The Captain’s son.
Chapter 23
The Captain was not alone. Banquo guarded the hatchway to his cabin and I could see Escalus at his accustomed post inside, barring entrance to the Captain’s private quarters. I even caught a glimpse of the Captain himself, shouting and gesturing angrily at somebody out of sight.
There was nothing I wanted more than to return to my compartment and the comforting arms of Snipe, whom I would comfort in turn. Tybalt had “taken an interest” in her long ago and she would be mourning him for a long time to come.
I dodged past Banquo, bursting in on a startled Captain, who had been arguing with a sweating Abel. For a moment, before Banquo grabbed me from behind, everybody froze. The Captain, interrupted in mid-sentence, glared at me, not quite believing that anybody would enter without first asking permission. Abel, who looked anguished, didn’t take his eyes from the Captain’s face; I had caught him at the end of an argument he had just lost. Escalus, frowning, had buried his hand in his waistcloth. I guessed he was clutching at some weapon he had hidden there.
I had forgotten the one Senior I might have gone to who would have pleaded for the condemned three. But apparently Abel had gone of his own accord to beg for Noah’s life—and failed.
Then Banquo wrapped an arm around my waist and another around my neck, his sweaty forearm slippery against my windpipe.
“I have to see the Captain!” I squeaked. “Let me go—”
Banquo tightened his arm and my words were choked back into my throat. The Captain motioned and I was free to breathe and find my voice.
“You’re late,” he said sarcastically. He gestured at Abel. “I expected you before him.” His voice was thick with contempt.
Abel paled. I took a momentary delight in his humiliation, then felt ashamed, realizing how much courage it had taken and how much it must have cost him in influence with the Captain. Noah had been his friend and, Captain’s man or not, Abel had been willing to risk all.
The Captain nodded to Abel. “You can go. But perhaps we should talk again.” The threat was unmistakable.
Abel fled, all dignity abandoned, and the dislike I had felt for him for so long vanished in a wave of pity.
“There’s something on your mind, Sparrow?”
The Captain’s voice was without its usual cloak of friendship. Both Banquo and Escalus were staring at me with half smiles and I realized that all three were waiting for me to repeat whatever pleas Abel had made. I stalled for time, stammering with embarrassment at entering the Captain’s cabin without permission. I wondered furiously what Abel might have said.
Would he have pleaded for the return of the three to the ship and then begged for their lives? If so, what would have been the basis of his pleas? That they were innocent? That Heron was now harmless? That Noah was an old man with little influence among the crew? That the facts in Tybalt’s case had been misinterpreted?
Abel had failed. But without even thinking, Thrush had given me the only approach that might work. Nor would I have to deny my ties of friendship with both Noah and Tybalt.
The Captain held up his hand to interrupt my torrent of apologies for intruding. “You’re forgiven, Sparrow—in the future, follow procedure.”
He relaxed in his hammock and waved Banquo outside to resume his guard in the passageway. He let some friendship seep back into his voice but the dark eyes were bleak and calculating. I suspected I had played this scene many times before and I was merely repeating Hamlet or Aaron or God only knew who.
“You came here for some reason, Sparrow. What is it?”
I had trouble keeping my voice from shaking.
“Inventories, sir.”
He frowned. “Inventories? Ship’s business can wait—”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think so, sir.”
He knew why I was really there and had probably been wondering what approach I might take. I was sure he had assumed my pleas would be based on friendship or humanity. But I had surprised him and now he was curious.
“Explain.”
“We’re going into the Dark,” I said, and rattled off our inventories of water, basic food constituents, and, most important, the vital supplies of trace elements on board—elements we would have difficulty replacing if planetfalls were limited to one per generation or perhaps fewer. I slowed when his eyes began to glaze.
“You have a point, Sparrow?”
I took my courage in my hands and gambled.
“We can’t afford to lose their mass, sir. Or their trace elements.” Once they were back on board, I’d worry about saving their lives.
He had lost track of what I really had in mind.
“Whose mass?”
“Heron’s. And Noah’s and Tybalt’s.”
He folded his arms and leaned back in his hammock, trying to read the carefully blank
expression on my face.
“Noah was a good friend of yours,” he said, too casually. “Am I right, Sparrow?”
I shrugged. “We played chess. He usually won. He talked about the mutiny with me. I refused to join it. But you know all about that, sir.”
He knew I had been approached. He also knew I had rejected the mutiny or, at worst, had temporized.
“And Tybalt?”
“He was a good team leader,” I said cautiously. “But I… hardly respected his judgment down below.”
“And Heron?” The Captain was disbelieving. “You want to save the man who tried to kill you?”
I shrugged again.
“Eighty-five kilos of mass, standard distribution of elements.” I took a deep breath and played the last card I had. “To leave them behind might… endanger the Astron.” As Thrush had said, not even the Captain could do that.
His look terrified me but I kept my face frozen in an imbecilic expression of devotion to duty.
After a long moment, he turned and floated to the port and its view of Outside.
“Take a team below and get them,” he said harshly.
I was out the hatch before he finished the sentence.
****
My down-below team consisted of Ophelia, Crow, and Abel, along with Grebe and Mercutio from Maintenance to act as porters—either made Banquo look small.
Noah and the others had been stranded on Aquinas II in the same area where Ophelia’s team was originally based. The weather was no better than before and our Lander had to fight to make it safely to the surface. Once again we settled down by the methane river and its surrounding cliffs. Mercutio assured us that Noah and the others had been abandoned there, but when we turned on the landing lights, there were no signs of them. Any tracks they might have left were covered by huge drifts of methane snow.
After landing, it took time to prepare the sled and load the life-support supplies. Extra water, extra oxygen, plus emergency medical supplies in case Abel needed them before we got the three stranded crewmen back to the Lander. Full air tanks would last for four hours, and by my computations it had been a little more than three since I first approached Ophelia. We were running out of time.
“We’re on a fool’s errand,” Ophelia muttered.
It was my turn to say curtly, “Shut up.”
We loaded the Rover with sleds and supplies, then squeezed in after. We sat for a moment in silence, a tiny oasis of humanity on an alien world, searching for three companions condemned to death and stranded there. Only none of us had any idea where they might be.
Then I knew.
Grebe was at the controls and I tapped him lightly on the shoulder and said into my helmet microphone, “Drive to the gorge.”
I had told Noah of my little valley with its thundering methane fall and how excited I was to be the only human in the universe to see it. On Aquinas II, it was one of probably very few areas where you could see more than a meter or two in front of your face. And I was sure it was one of the few places that might qualify as scenic.
“That’ll take half an hour,” Crow said, worried.
“Then we’ll have to hurry, won’t we?”
Everybody shut up then and we drove the two kilometers in silence. We located the gully, but it was impossible to get closer with the Rover. We quickly piled the extra oxygen cylinders on the sled and hauled it over to the mouth of the small canyon; it was probably the most difficult hundred meters I’ve ever traveled. The methane snow whipped around my helmet and visibility was so bad we lashed ourselves together with tether lines so even if we lost visual contact, we would still be physically linked.
By the time we pulled the sled to the entrance, we were exhausted.
“We’ll leave it just inside the mouth of the gully,” I said. “We’ll have to carry the oxygen cylinders with us.”
I had taken charge, but to my surprise, nobody questioned that.
It was a tired Mercutio who asked, “How far?”
“A hundred meters more, maybe less. We’ll find them on a ledge overlooking a valley.”
“You’re sure of that?” Ophelia asked.
“No,” I said.
A few moments later we were struggling between the cliffs, the wind roaring overhead. There was less snow inside the gully and the going was easier. I hesitated where the gully split into left and right legs, unable to remember whether I had mentioned the split to Noah or not, then headed into the left leg, toward the valley. If they had chosen the other leg, we would have to backtrack. I prayed we would have time to investigate both.
The wind died and we pushed through the slush with only the occasional curse to break the radio silence. At one point I untied my tether line and ran over to a group of three snow-covered boulders, each the size and shape of a crouching man, in the center of the ravine. I frantically scraped away the layers of frozen methane only to discover brown, pitted rock.
Twenty minutes into the gully, the canyon walls faded away. Directly ahead was the valley. Once again, the wind obligingly brushed aside the fog and I saw the methane river plunging over the distant rim.
I also saw three crumpled figures clustered together on the ledge, looking nothing like three boulders but very much like three space-suited crewmen who had fallen and been covered by the drifts.
Abel was in the lead and reached them first, moving remarkably fast for an exhausted fat man. He brushed away the snow that covered their suits, then sank down beside them. I expected him to report over his helmet phone but he said nothing at all.
The rest of us slogged up as fast as we could. The first body I looked at was Heron’s. His faceplate was partly fogged over, but I could make out his eyes tightly closed and his mouth half open.
He had smothered in his own vomit.
Noah and Tybalt had chosen a faster way to die. They had opened their faceplates to let in the cold and the poisonous atmosphere. Their cheeks were ice, their eyes chilled steel. I started shivering and couldn’t stop. I had never seen a dead man before—the closest I had come was Judah, when Crow and I visited Reduction.
I couldn’t focus my thoughts. I wondered if Noah had liked the view, or if the fog had even cleared so he could see it. Or if Tybalt had finally realized the monsters of his imagination couldn’t compare to the real ones back on the Astron.
I glanced at the time indicator inside my helmet. They should’ve had enough air for at least another fifteen minutes—with shallow breathing and minimum exertion, maybe a good half hour.
It was Abel who checked their gauges. His voice in my headset was bitter.
“They were sent down with half tanks. No one could have reached them in time.”
Which meant that all the while I had been talking to the Captain, he had known they were dead.
****
He was waiting for me when we came back, floating by the huge port with Outside just beyond. Banquo nodded at me but made no effort to stop me or even make sure I announced myself. Escalus managed to make himself more inconspicuous than usual, though I knew the little man heard and saw everything.
The Captain turned away from the port and stared at me. I stared back in silence, failing to find the words that would express how I felt without giving myself away. He spoke first.
“Congratulations on recovering the mass, Sparrow. You were right, we’ll need it.”
Mass.
“They were dead,” I said. “They had air for only two hours.”
I had almost forgotten that I was “Sparrow,” the young technician who once had idolized him.
He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise.
“I didn’t know that was a concern of yours. You said you were interested in saving mass and trace elements. It was a practical argument.” He shrugged. “I’ll check to see who issued the equipment; they’ll be punished. I wouldn’t have denied them two more hours of life.”
He was lying, I knew it. He had known about the tanks all along.
“They co
uld have served the ship.” My voice cracked with anger.
“Oh? You attended the trials, you know the charges, you heard the verdicts.” He was suddenly suspicious. “You didn’t think that stranding them was humane.”
“You didn’t see them,” I said.
His expression softened. It took a moment to realize I had saved myself once again. I was outraged, but he expected that “Sparrow” would be outraged. If I hadn’t been, I would have been flatlined the next time period.
“I’ve seen dead people before, Sparrow. It isn’t a question of pretty or ugly, it just is.”
“Did you really think Noah posed a threat?” I asked.
He turned back to the port, lost for a moment in the view.
“We’re going into the Dark, Sparrow. I would be a fool if I thought that everybody wanted to go. But not because they want to return home—that was Noah’s mistake. Home is here, it’s the Astron. They’re afraid to go into the Dark because it’s new, because it’s different, because they don’t think the ship will make it. But the ship will make it. And so will a crew. Nobody’s going to die because we’re going into the Dark.”
A crew. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to his choice of words.
“Tybalt was innocent,” I said bitterly.
He nodded.
“It hurt to lose him. But Ophelia isn’t innocent and neither are a number of others. Perhaps they should all have been tried. And condemned. I chose Tybalt. Not because he was guilty but because he was innocent. I couldn’t have tried all the conspirators. To have tried one who was actually guilty would have deterred a few, made them more cautious. To try and condemn a man everybody knew was innocent would deter a lot more.”
He wanted to keep everybody in line. Including me—if I ever thought of joining the mutiny.
“Sometimes a warning is more important than justice, Sparrow.”
“The crew will hate you,” I warned.
He floated back to his hammock, where he made himself comfortable.
“This crew, perhaps,” he said easily. “Maybe even a few in the next crew. But to the crew after that and all those that follow, Tybalt’s death will be history, no more important in the long run than his life. Or anybody’s life. Every three generations, God clears the stage for a new cast of actors, Sparrow.”
The Dark Beyond the Stars Page 26
