The Dark Beyond the Stars

by Frank M. Robinson

  I mumbled something noncommittal, then changed the subject. “I understand Gower and Raven have decided to partner.”

  He should have known Raven better, but out of the corner of my eye I caught his sudden look of consternation.

  “She never said—” And then he vanished back through the shadow screen, intent on finding Raven. Sex was very open on board and few gave it much thought. But partnering was respected and interfering with it was a reportable offense. Raven would laugh it off, and Corin would be relieved and no doubt linger to cement their relationship. If he ever came back to me about it, I could truthfully say it was only a rumor, that it wasn’t my fault he had overreacted.

  Once Corin was gone, I retrieved the access codes again and studied Thrush’s fingerprints scattered through the matrix. He had been tracking me with the aid of the computer and I wondered why. Then the answer was so obvious I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to me before.

  Thrush wanted to know what was buried in my memories as badly as the others did.

  ****

  Two time periods later I was once again invited to the Captain’s quarters for dinner. I had seen quite a bit of him lately, but primarily as a harassed crew member working hard on lists of information he had wanted or information I thought he ought to see. I had made sure our meetings weren’t social; I hadn’t wanted to give him time to notice my increasing nervousness when I was around him or my efforts to keep him from seeing that the “Sparrow” of six months before and the “Sparrow” of right now had become two different people.

  I was a good actor but I was no miracle worker. This time our meeting would be social and this time he would see.

  It didn’t occur to me that he might not bother to look.

  I showed up a few minutes early and was waved inside by a bored Banquo, who took only a moment to check my waist-cloth for hidden weapons—a procedure now standard.

  A few meters into the huge compartment I stopped. My heart felt as if somebody was holding it in his hands and had started to squeeze. The Captain was by the port, as I expected he would be. But he wasn’t alone. Thrush was by his side and the Captain had rested his hand lightly on Thrush’s shoulder while pointing out to him the wonders of a nebula that lay just beyond the glass.

  He felt the air currents when I came in and turned slightly, saying: “Come over here, Sparrow, I want you to see this, too.”

  The sight was beautiful, as always. This time it was a well-defined explosion of orange-colored clouds around a few central stars, then more stars and bright streamers of gas half hidden by the hazy puffs of orange.

  “NGC 2237*,” the Captain said quietly. “The Rosette nebula, as seen from Earth thousands of years ago.”

  I could understand the name. It looked like a huge interstellar flower, the petals of gas clearly defined around the stamens of stars in the center.

  “Beautiful,” Thrush breathed.

  I felt my skin crawl. I was supposed to be above it all, a dispassionate observer who saw and noted everything the Captain did or said while never forgetting that I was a young tech assistant who idolized him.

  But at the moment I was anything but dispassionate. To my dismay, I was intensely jealous of Thrush. Every other time I had been with the Captain, I was the one he took to the top of the mountain to be shown the wonders of the world below. I was the one whose shoulder he touched, the one he tried to impress with the beauty that lay just beyond the port.

  “What do you think, Sparrow?”

  I could sense him watching me, gauging my reactions and comparing them to those of Thrush. Or so I thought.

  “I think it’s gorgeous,” I said. That much, I didn’t have to pretend. The view was always gorgeous. It just wasn’t real.

  Escalus had outdone himself on the meal and the conversation swirled about me for five minutes before I gave up concentrating on the texture and spices and started to pay attention to what was being said.

  “The other side,” Thrush was saying with great conviction. “The population of older stars is denser there—naturally there has to be a greater chance of finding life.”

  The Captain’s eyes glowed.

  “I estimate we’ll find it within a dozen generations at most.” He glanced over at me. “Don’t you agree, Sparrow?” Then he shook his head in mock regret. “But I forgot. You don’t think we’ll find anything at all.”

  “I never said that,” I defended myself.

  “But you think that,” the Captain insisted. Both he and Thrush were staring at me with amusement and I remembered an image pic of two wolves stalking their prey just before the kill. I suddenly realized they had made common cause.

  “No,” I lied, “I don’t necessarily think that at all.”

  “Sparrow’s an optimist by nature,” Thrush said, smirking. When he wasn’t catering to the Captain, Thrush was studying me, and I knew he was thinking of ways to use me. I tried hard to hide my hatred of Thrush and at the same time flatter the Captain by paying as much attention to him as I could. But I suspected it was a losing game, though I couldn’t quite determine when I had lost it.

  “You’ll be a hero when we return,” the Captain said.

  He and Thrush had wandered back to the port and I hastened to join them, still feeling twinges of jealousy over Thrush’s taking of my place. Thrush, I noted, seemed to have blossomed under the Captain’s touch. Then I felt the chills start. When we return. As if the Captain knew Thrush might still be alive then.

  Before I had arrived, the Captain must have confirmed Thrush’s paternity. Now Thrush knew he was the Captain’s son and would live forever—it was the only thing that could account for his smugness.

  In return, the Captain got an ally. One without scruples, one who was capable of murder, one who would do whatever the Captain wanted.

  We talked some more and gazed in wonder at views of the Ring and Veil nebulas and finally a view of the Dark, that vast sea of nothingness that stretched before us with a faint suggestion of stars on the other side, like phosphorescent sands on a distant beach. I shivered inside, as always feeling small and insignificant in a tiny world that extended not more than five hundred meters in any direction. I was surrounded by the ship’s company but I knew each and every one of the fewer than three hundred of them, and they were no protection at all against the sudden ache of loneliness I felt.

  All the time I floated nervously around the compartment, sometimes leaving Thrush and the Captain alone by the port and returning to the table, ostensibly for another tidbit of food but in reality trying to see into the sleeping quarters just beyond. Loon had mentioned the Captain’s armory; if it was anyplace, it had to be there. But Escalus was wary and I glimpsed nothing but a huge compartment filled with row after row of what looked like filing cabinets. I had heard it was forbidden for anybody to enter, even Escalus.

  Then it was time to go. The Captain gave me a perfunctory handshake but gripped Thrush by the arm and patted him lightly on the back. It took an effort to fight my own hurt and resentment. I finally had to accept that my intellectual and emotional responses to the Captain were now vastly different. He had been responsible for the deaths of Noah and Tybalt and by extension, Abel, and he had acknowledged the paternity of my worst enemy on board.

  And yet…

  To me, he would always be The Captain. When I was fresh from sick bay he had imprinted me as thoroughly as any farmer had ever imprinted a duckling. I had become a mutineer, but I would always stand in awe of him, I would always wish for his touch on my arm, his light pat on my back, even the occasional scathing remark reminding me that I was very young and he was very concerned.

  But when I left, I knew that things had changed forever. For a long time and for reasons I didn’t understand, I had been important to the Captain. Now I was no longer important—and, I knew, I was much closer to being flatlined.

  For whatever reason, the Captain could now do without me.

  That sleep period Snipe asked no question
s but took me in her arms and murmured in my ear and stroked my head and did what she could to reassure me.

  But rejection was a small death at best. I was afraid a much larger one loomed just a few time periods away.

  Chapter 28

  Things get worse before they get better. During the next few time periods they got much worse. The first indication I had of just how much worse was when a pale Loon told me that some of the Captain’s men were holding target practice on the hangar deck.

  I drifted up and watched half a dozen crewmen practice with pellet guns under the watchful eye of Cato. I thought of Tybalt when he had tried to instruct us before the landing on Aquinas II. I wondered if any of Cato’s recruits would be reluctant to fire at the projection of an alien. Then I took another look and felt my stomach lurch. It wasn’t an alien they were firing at, it was a crude projection of a fellow crewman.

  I lingered for a few minutes and discovered there wasn’t much difference between the old crew and the new after all. All but one of Cato’s men missed the target and I was sure that the one who hit it, a young Communications tech named Robin, hit it by accident. But what interested me as much as the target practice itself was that all of them had tied a strip of red cloth around their upper arms. It was more of a uniform than anybody else wore; as a result the Captain’s men stood out from the other crew members and there was an obvious camaraderie among them.

  I kicked over to Cato, his mouth a thin line, his face shining with sweat.

  “Captain’s orders?” I asked.

  He nodded but didn’t want to talk and seemed more unfriendly than usual. It was obvious that I was now one of the enemy. He drilled his men for another half hour, with mixed results. If the mutineers were amateurish, I consoled myself, then so were the Captain’s men.

  “Do you think they’ll actually fire on a fellow crewman?” I asked Cato when the drill was over.

  He glared at me and growled, “They’ll do what the Captain orders.”

  The next practice session, the Captain was on hand to watch and give a brief speech about protecting the integrity of the mission and the ship. The marksmanship improved dramatically. Would they willingly take the life of a fellow crewman? I had my doubts. Would they do their best to carry out the Captain’s orders? Sometime soon there would be a conflict and they would have to choose between the two.

  I still had no overall plan of my own, though somewhere in the back of my head I knew it would involve a confrontation with the Captain. Huldah’s long-term scheme had been to deprive the Captain of his crew, to make it impossible for him to maintain the Astron. It still struck me as a good idea, though only now was I beginning to see what it might involve.

  I was still thinking about it when I dropped by the nursery to see K2. As soon as I entered, he squealed and kicked off against the bulkhead, shooting straight for my midsection. I braced myself but he grabbed a floor ring just before he reached me and hit my stomach with only a slight bump.

  “I’m practicin’,” he said proudly.

  “I’ll bet you are.” I glanced around for Pipit.

  “She’s visitin’ Snipe,” K2 offered.

  He was reading me, and doing a better job than Snipe did. Then, a few minutes later when we were wrestling on the deck: “She’s comin’ back now.”

  I stared at him.

  “How do you know that?”

  He made an O with his mouth and his eyes widened. It was a secret and I wasn’t supposed to know, though I had a feeling that nobody was supposed to know—certainly not members of the old crew. Was it just the children? Or was it all the members of the new crew? Huldah hadn’t told me, but perhaps she had worried that somehow the Captain would wheedle it out of me.

  Huldah and I would have to have another talk, but right then Corin was on shift and Ophelia had called a meeting of the cell. I ran my hand through K2’s hair, kissed him lightly on top of the head, and then pushed out into the corridor.

  We met in Malachi’s compartment this time. Malachi turned off the falsie just as we were drifting in, but not before I raised an eyebrow and the others smiled. If Malachi wanted to live in a harem, who could fault him?

  Ophelia waited until we had all arrived, then said without preamble, “Kusaka’s announced the receipt of signals from the far side of the Dark.”

  I wasn’t the only one who could drop a bombshell. There was a moment of consternation, and I asked, “Any confirmation?”

  She shook her head. “Wren in Communications says it’s not true.”

  Loon looked puzzled. “Why would the Captain lie?”

  “He’s not lying to our people,” I said, “he’s lying to his. He knows they’ll believe him even though we won’t.”

  Events were coming to a head faster than anybody, even the Captain, had thought. Each side would try their absurd, half-baked schemes first. Eventually things would spin out of control and somebody would stumble past the point of no return.

  “So what do we do?” Ophelia was looking at me.

  I was “Sparrow,” but only to myself. To the others, I was the one who had been with the ship from the very beginning; like it or not, I was their de facto leader.

  I shrugged. “Look skeptical and ask for proof.”

  “The Captain will invent some,” Crow said.

  “It’s too late now if nobody in Communications will confirm it.”

  Crow looked unhappy. “Cato will.”

  “Then we’ll have to remind crew members that Cato is one of the Captain’s men. What about armories, Loon?”

  He started ticking the points off on his fingers, afraid he might forget something important.

  “There’s only one that we know of and that’s the one the Captain controls. We haven’t found any others.”

  “You searched Section Two?”

  He nodded. “Malachi and Eagle got together a team and we went through it thoroughly.” He hesitated. “I think it’s haunted.”

  By gray buildings populated with gray people, I thought, and wondered who had played fingerman with the terminal pad.

  “What about Section Three?”

  “It’s sealed,” Crow answered. “No air leaks at all. It was the first section to be abandoned, and afterward they pumped out the air and welded the hatch shut.”

  “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 h
istoricals. 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…