“You’re a decent man,” Quinn protested, “and your people don’t strike me as violent. Those knives are for show. You won’t use them.”
Without comment, Peter moved forward and slashed the nearest officer’s arm from elbow to wrist, allowing the blood to flow freely. Greg, simultaneously, grabbed Quinn and gripped him, holding a knife to his throat. “The sooner you get to the shuttle bay, the sooner we can let a medical officer treat that wound,” Jesse said. “We won’t hurt anyone else unless we have to—but we do outnumber you, after all. You don’t have much choice. A ship due for decommissioning isn’t worth the risk of your lives.”
This being true, the subdued crew proceeded to the shuttle bay, herded by more knife-bearing Group members. The wounded officer kept looking at his arm, surprised that it didn’t seem to be bleeding as much as it had at first. He showed no sign of being in great pain. But Greg’s knife remained at Quinn’s throat, and the others weren’t willing to chance what they assumed he might do with it. They boarded the designated shuttle without resisting.
Jesse and Greg—along with Captain Quinn, still at knifepoint—were the last aboard. “Okay,” Jesse said. “Get on the comm and order your watch officer down here.”
“She won’t desert the bridge—there are standing orders not to leave it unattended.”
“She will if she doesn’t want to see her Captain’s throat cut. The shuttle’s comm has video capability, doesn’t it?”
“If she sees what’s happening here, she’ll report it to Fleet—there’s a freighter still orbiting Undine. It’s armed, and it will reach you before you’re far enough out to jump.”
Jesse knew this all too well. No report would go out from Mayflower XI, however. Because there’d been no reason for the crew to expect communication before approaching Liberty, the comm room had been left unmanned during the meal, set to divert any incoming signals to the bridge. “We disabled the long-range transmitters while you were at dinner,” he said. “If you think I’m bluffing, try them and see.”
Quinn had no reason not to do so; he hoped it was indeed a bluff. He talked to the watch officer. Presently she arrived at the shuttle, white-faced, confessing as she boarded that her attempt to reach Undine’s spaceport had not been acknowledged. At the back of Jesse’s mind something nagged at him, some sense of an exchange between this woman and Quinn. But he hadn’t time to figure out what it was.
Backing toward the hatch, he announced, “You have five minutes to seal your locks. The air will then be evacuated from the bay, and the outer doors will be opened. This area will not be repressurized. I suggest that you depart before we jump—I assume you know what will happen to the shuttle if you fail to get clear.”
“We’ll leave,” Quinn agreed, “but only to report you from space. When we do, you’ll be pursued.”
“We’ve left the shuttle just enough transmission capability to send an SOS from low orbit,” Jesse informed him. “No long-range voice communication. You won’t be able to tell Fleet about us until you’re close enough to the freighter to match with it. By then, we’ll be in hyperspace.”
“No, you won’t. You won’t be able to jump. Think twice, Sanders—you may be retired, but your oath to Fleet is still in force and commandeering a ship is mutiny. Back off now and you might get by with prison. If you go through with it, you’ll be executed. Don’t be a fool—” He broke off, staring at Kira, who had just appeared at the hatch. Clearly he had not expected to see a grandmotherly hijacker.
“You were right about one thing,” Jesse said. “We never intended to harm you. Dr. Tarinov, will you do something about this officer’s arm?”
Kira stepped forward and took hold of the man’s arm, which under Peter’s control had stopped bleeding entirely. She pressed the wound closed. “Hold onto it,” she told him. “I can’t stay with you till it’s healed, but I’ve gotten it started. You will be okay in a few minutes if you don’t panic.”
Jesse and the others left the shuttle, watching with relief as behind them, its hatch closed. They hurried out of the bay and after the promised five minutes, depressurized it.
By the time Jesse reached the bridge, the shuttle was gone.
~ 65 ~
In exultation, Jesse and Peter hugged each other. “We did it!” Peter exclaimed. “All the time I’ve believed we could, it was theory. I know you looked at it from the practical standpoint, Jess, and you thought it would work. But it never felt real—”
“It’s not real until we’ve jumped,” Jesse said. “Better save the celebration.” He pushed on the hatch to the bridge, finding that it did not slide easily. Strange, it had seemed to move with a touch when he’d visited with Quinn this morning. He pushed harder—and then stood back in dismay. “God,” he said. “It’s locked.”
“Locked?” Peter pushed too, with no more success.
“The watch officer must have set it to seal when she left,” Jesse said. “That’s why Quinn was so sure we couldn’t jump.” Such a possibility hadn’t occurred to him. Crew compartments on freighters didn’t lock. But, he now realized, on a passenger ship there would be a way to keep unauthorized people out of the bridge.
Peter, grasping the seriousness of the situation, drew breath. “There’s a keypad,” he observed. “We’ll never crack the code! Can we find a laser and cut our way in?”
“Not without risking fatal damage to the control console.”
“Jesse—are we defeated after all? By this?”
“Maybe not. There’s probably a voice lock, too, for faster access. If so, it’s computer-controlled. There might even be a direct computer override—the designers’ intent was to keep casual meddlers out, not security experts.”
Peter nodded. “I’ll get Carla.”
The computer room was separate from the bridge, and unlocked; the officer in charge had simply logged off when he went to dinner. Carla, with long hacking experience, had anticipated that finding a usable password would be time-consuming but not impossible; in advance, she had questioned Jesse at length about terms likely to be used as backdoor passwords by Fleet programmers. Again, they wouldn’t have been trying to secure against experts. There wasn’t anything worth an expert’s effort aboard a colonizer, and it had never been thought that emigrants would attempt to take it over. “Don’t worry,” she told Jesse calmly. “I’ll get in sooner or later.”
“It had better be sooner,” Jesse warned. “We have only the time it will take that shuttle to reach Undine’s orbit and send the freighter in pursuit. That’s just a matter of hours—and I need time to calculate the jump after I see the charts.”
“How can they overtake us?” Peter protested. “Surely a freighter’s not faster than a colonizer.”
“It’s faster than this one—we’re an old, obsolete ship, remember. When the hyperdrive was installed the main drive wasn’t replaced. Besides,” Jesse added grimly, “we’re not cruising at top speed, and I can’t do anything about that until I’m on the bridge.”
As Carla turned to her task, Peter took Jesse aside. “What Captain Quinn said about mutiny—was that true?”
“Yes,” Jesse admitted. “If the League didn’t have a harsh law, a lot of the small explorer ships would turn to smuggling instead of coming back to report rich finds.”
“You’ve known all along that they’d execute you if they caught you?”
“Of course. Carla knows, too—she sensed it from my mind when you first proposed hijacking. That’s why she balked initially.”
“She knows your life depends directly on her finding a password and figuring out how to override the lock within the next few hours.”
“I wish to God she didn’t. It will make it hard on her if she fails.”
“Jess . . . I’ve been—insensitive. Oblivious to everything but the vision, the ideal Ian and I had of a world that could be as we wanted it to be. That overrode everything, all the demands I made of the others, what I persuaded them to give up . . . and you, Jess, even your life
, when it’s turned out that I owe you mine—”
“You don’t owe me anything. You pulled me out of the black hole I’d sunk into, showed me what I could be. As for last night, if I hadn’t had to use psi in a crisis I might never have seen why what we’re doing is more than a matter of gaining our own freedom.” Reflectively, Jesse went on, “Kira told me long ago—she said that to become all we can be, we must risk being totally destroyed. I didn’t fully understand, then. Now I know that the vision’s more important than anything we may lose by reaching for it.”
“But vision’s not enough. We need practical good sense, like yours.”
“Which has let us down at the moment,” Jesse said grimly. “I’m the one who should have foreseen a lock on the bridge. It was pure negligence on my part not to.”
“Was it? If you had, we might not have attempted to take over,” Peter argued. “We might never have left Undine. So maybe it was fate that kept you from it—”
“Or Ian’s ghostly influence,” Jesse said, trying to smile.
“Don’t make light of it,” urged Peter. “I know you don’t share my confidence in fate, but Ian knew something. When he was dying, he knew something he wouldn’t tell me. I’ve felt since then that he may have planted it deep in my mind—”
“Well, I hope the password’s somehow been planted in Carla’s mind,” Jesse said, “because I guess I do trust fate when it comes down to the wire.” It was believable that he would be executed, but not that the whole Group would spend the rest of their lives in a penal colony. Oh God, Jesse thought, that just can’t happen. . . .
It took them several hours of trial and error to come up with the backdoor password, which proved to be derived from a common phrase any Fleet officer would know. After that, it took more time to discover how to program voices into the command system and add Jesse’s as the new Captain. Before then, they’d found that the star charts could be accessed directly from the computer room on a monitor separate from the one Carla was using. So, by the time the bridge hatch yielded to him, he had already located Maclairn’s star and gotten a head start on calculation of the jump.
Peter returned to passenger quarters to brief the others, and reluctantly, Carla went with him, knowing the Captain must focus totally on the job at hand. Jesse settled himself before the bridge control console, finding it virtually identical to those of freighters—it had, of course, been modernized when the ship was retrofitted with the new drive. The first priority was to increase their speed. That done, he brought up the appropriate chart on the big video screen. They were by now at a safe distance from Undine to go into hyperdrive. He had only to triple-check the data, run the figures through in pre-command mode rather than as the mere simulation they’d been considered when entered from a programmer’s console. It was important not to rush into a virgin jump, one that unlike jumps between settled worlds, had never before been made.
“Jesse!” Erik, who had been stationed in the comm room to listen for incoming traffic, spoke urgently through the intercom. “They’re hailing us.”
Already? The shuttle was relatively slow compared to Mayflower XI; he had expected a bit more leeway. The freighter must have begun pursuit at full speed almost instantly after being alerted. “Put it on speakers,” he ordered.
“Mayflower XI, we have matched with you,” announced a commanding voice. “We are armed; you cannot break away. Prepare for boarding.”
“Fleet freighter, we read you,” said Jesse. “Don’t attempt to board. We won’t open our inner hatch.”
“I repeat, we are armed. Our shuttle crew is suited and will enter your airlock. They’ll blast the inner hatch if necessary. We’ll give you five minutes to get your personnel into sealed compartments.”
Jesse focused frantically on the calculations in front of him. If he jumped too close to Maclairn’s star, they might collide with it; too far, and the normal-space journey required to reach their planet would be too long. He was not ready! They had lost too many hours. There wasn’t enough time left to be sure. . . .
“Mayflower XI, acknowledge please. In four minutes we will blast your hatch if you fail to open it.”
If the ship was boarded, it would mean a prison planet; they would never again set foot on any other. “Get your shuttle clear, Fleet freighter!” he warned. “We are about to jump. You don’t want it matched with us when we jump.”
“You’re bluffing. You can’t jump; we know you’re locked out of the bridge.”
Jesse switched the pickup to visual mode. “I’m in command of the bridge, as you can see if you’re close enough to be using short-range comm. I will jump in three minutes. Get clear.”
To treat this as a bluff would be suicidal—no shuttle pilot would be fool enough to stay in position to be sucked into hyperspace. Jesse was confident that the pursuers hadn’t done so. But if he didn’t jump at the time he’d stated, they would be back. There was no choice. He must go with the figures he had, even though he was not wholly sure of them.
His fingers found the switches to press, familiar as if he’d last flown a starship yesterday instead of in what seemed like a former life. Committing the ship to the care of providence, he jumped.
The stars on the viewscreen above the console blinked out, replaced by blackness. The ship was, in this instant, nowhere—literally nowhere in relation to stars or worlds. The moment of truth, Jesse thought. It had always been an exhilarating moment for him, the high point in the tedium of his Fleet captaincy. He knew now, for the first time, that it was like an altered state of consciousness. A mind-pattern in which all the reference points of ordinary life were irrelevant, swept away, so that there was only a formless void from which you would emerge into a clean new beginning.
It never worked out that way, of course. You came back to the same troubles or boredom you’d left behind, to fellow-voyagers who hadn’t been aware that they were in hyperspace at all. There was no way to detect it within the ship except through instrument readings. People who were used to it did not even feel awe at the knowledge that they’d crossed hundreds of light years within a span of time that was scarcely measurable. The long part of the trip was yet to come, the days or weeks it might take to approach the new star in normal space and orbit the chosen planet. . . .
“Is the freighter still pursuing us?” came Erik’s voice.
“No. We’re now in a different part of the galaxy,” Jesse replied. He turned to the instruments and began checking to make sure that it was the right part.
Two hours later, when Peter came looking for him, he was still checking.
“Isn’t it time for me to take the watch, Jess?” Peter asked. “You’re long overdue for a break. I assume we’re back in normal space and proceeding as planned—”
“I’m afraid not,” Jesse admitted, wondering how he was going to say what had to be said. “I had to jump in a hurry. We’re a lot farther out than we should be.”
“Not at Maclairn’s star?” Peter exclaimed in dismay.
“We didn’t aim to be at it,” Jesse said. “We wouldn’t want to fall into the star itself. Since I couldn’t recheck the figures I leaned toward caution in my estimate of the approximation. Our position when we emerged into normal space wasn’t quite what I expected.”
“You can correct the course, can’t you?”
“Oh, yes—I’ve done that. We’re on course.”
“Well, then, we’ll get there eventually,” Peter said with relief. “For a moment you had me worried, Jess.”
“We’ll get there,” Jesse agreed with pain. “But our life support will run out before we do.”
~ 66 ~
He went over the figures with Peter, who though ignorant of astrogation and starship provisioning, had enough flying experience to know that computations don’t lie. Nevertheless, it took awhile to bring him to the realization that the outcome was already determined. At the rate their life support was being consumed, they would not live to reach Maclairn—or any world.
Jesse himself found it hard to grasp. Despite awareness of the risk, he had not really believed that he would miscalculate. They had all trusted him . . . Ian had trusted him. And he had failed them. He’d been Captain for only a few hours, and he had condemned them to an ordeal far worse than any of them could have anticipated. How could he break it to them, command them, when it was his fault?
“There’s no point in telling you not to blame yourself,” Peter said, “because you’re the sort of man who will. But the rest of us won’t blame you, Jess. You did what you had to do. It was just bad luck that you were forced to act too fast.”
“It’s going to be hell telling people what has to happen,” Jesse said, head bent in anguish. “It’s the Captain’s job, and I’ll do it if you think that’s wise. But they’ll take the news better from you.”
“The news that we’re going to die? I can handle that,” Peter assured him. “It may seem worse to us than it would to outsiders, since we in the Group have expected lengthened lives. But we’re not idiots. Everyone has known underneath that we might not make it.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Jesse, realizing with shock that the alternative had not occurred to Peter. “We don’t necessarily have to die. There’s a chance we can come through this.”
Peter stared at him. “I thought you said all worlds are out of range.”
“Of our normal life support, yes. But there’s the option we didn’t tell the others about.”
“Option?” Peter seemed genuinely puzzled.
“This ship still has stasis facilities,” Jesse reminded him.
“Oh, my God.”
“Had you forgotten?”
“I hadn’t forgotten they are here—but Jess, you don’t seriously think we could use them.”
“Of course. They haven’t been used for a very long time, but the AI system hasn’t been tampered with. It diverts life support from the passenger quarters onto the stasis deck. Quinn told me it has been maintained, and I’ve checked it out with the computer; quite possibly it’s functional. I’m not saying there’s any guarantee we’ll survive stasis, but the odds are a damn sight better than our chance of staying alive if we don’t try it—which is zero.”
Stewards of the Flame Page 48
