Oliver gave a nasty laugh. “Your boy Alten’s the genius. He ought to be able to figure something out.”
“What’s the hurry, Oliver?” Joorn’s voice was strained with the effort to sound reasonable. “You waited till now to make your move. It will take years to get all that gamma back. Why not give us time to explore the Sol and Centauri systems, especially since they’re joined at the hip now?”
“And give you and your cronies a chance to put us under house arrest for another twenty years? No deal. Now’s our hour, and we’re not letting it slip away from us this time.”
Alten broke in, his voice shaky. “We can talk this over. Where are you holding Nina?”
There was that unpleasant laugh again. “We’ve just finished talking it over. The clock is ticking for Nina. Don’t take too long to decide, bright boy. We’ll be in touch.” There was dead silence as the circuit was broken.
Alten turned to Joorn, his face a study in anguish. “What do we do now, Father?”
“First off, we stall Oliver till we get Chu and Martin back. The minute Oliver starts building up gamma again, we lose our ability to rendezvous with the lifeboat. Oliver’s perfectly capable of letting them die in space.”
“But what about Nina?” Alten cried hoarsely.
“They had to have abducted her somewhere between the control room and the observation gallery. That’s a finite distance. And then they would have had to take her somewhere nearby. Some uninhabited nook where they wouldn’t be seen.”
“She was worried about Martin. She would have passed the staircase leading to the dolphin level. She might have taken a detour to wish him luck before he left.”
Joorn called one of the guards over. The man’s face was white with shock.
“You heard, Talbot?” Joorn said.
Talbot nodded.
“I want you to find Ryan. Don’t use your communicator under any circumstances. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell him what happened. Tell him the war with Karn’s on again and to take a large search party to scour the area surrounding the dolphin lagoon—both levels. And tell him to post more guards outside the control room.”
“I don’t like to leave you alone, Skipper …”
“Get going. Oliver isn’t going to try anything here for the time being. He doesn’t have enough men, or he wouldn’t have tried this fool stunt with my granddaughter.”
“Yes, sir!” Talbot fell all over himself getting to the door. He exchanged a few words with the other inside guard and hurriedly left. The door clicked as it locked itself behind him.
“What now?” Alten said.
Joorn busied himself at the control board. “I’m going to talk to Chu.” At a look from Alten, he added, “Don’t worry. It won’t go through the ship’s com traffic. It’ll be direct laser. No way Oliver can intercept it. Chu should receive it in about three hours.”
“Then what?”
“Then I put on the brakes. Hard. Without making a general announcement first. That ought to throw Oliver off-balance. By that point, Chu will have finished accelerating. He’ll be motionless in relation to Time’s Beginning. He can dock with his chemical jets. We’ll all be essentially in null G.”
“And they’ll be home safe then.”
“Yes. Our stringbean visitor included.”
“Ryan will need to be told.”
“He will be.”
CHAPTER 21
“The bastard!” Martin said.
“We all knew that,” Chu said.
“I’d have believed it of Oliver,” Martin said, “but not of Professor Karn.”
“You weren’t born yet when the mutiny happened,” Chu said. “Karn deceived us all.”
Martin clenched his fists. “If they’ve hurt Nina, I’ll kill them!”
Chu shot him a warning look. “Keep it down, Martin. Our friend will think you’re talking about him.”
Martin looked over at the strange being they’d rescued. He’d been out of the dolphin pod for about an hour now. He seemed to have gotten along fine with Jonah, and Chu and Martin had come as far as exchanging names with him, though the squeaks and whistles that constituted Jonah’s dolphin name were beyond any of them. Currently he was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a worktable that he was happily taking apart. It was a spidery pose that put the knees of his long legs at approximately the same level as his shoulders. The floor was littered with things he’d dismantled. Now he was industriously unscrewing the pipestem legs of the worktable.
“Hell on the furniture, isn’t he?” Chu said.
“He’s curious,” Martin said. “He’s never seen things made of metal before, and he wants to see how they’re put together. Now he’s learning about screw threads.” He paused thoughtfully. “Though you can carve spiral threads out of wood or bone, can’t you? I wonder how they fastened their arrowheads. Didn’t the Cro-Magnons—”
Chu laughed uneasily. “Forget it, Martin. He’s not planning to massacre us. We’re his friends now, Jonah included. He’s a fast learner.”
“We can get him to the dolphin pool while the drive’s still off,” Martin said. “Then we’ll have to figure something out. We can’t keep the ship in free fall forever.”
“Your mother and her anthropology cohorts will have to get used to doing their interviews in the dolphin pool, that’s all.”
Martin was tightening his fists again. “The question is: What are we going to do about Nina?”
“We can’t do anything. That’s Ryan’s job. Maybe he’ll have it wound up by the time we get there. If not …”
“What?”
Chu became thoughtful. “Oliver will be able to tap into the feed in the observation gallery, won’t he? He’ll already have seen the transmission I sent when we picked up Mr. Longlegs and when we got him into the dolphin pod with Jonah. When I send the next installment, I can fudge our ETA by a half hour or so. Your grandfather will know the truth because he’ll be coordinating the docking. But the hoi polloi on the observation deck won’t know until the gravity goes off without warning. And neither will Oliver. Maybe he’ll do something stupid.”
“Like what?”
“Like showing himself to Ryan.”
The elongated man had finished unscrewing the table legs and placing them carefully beside himself. Now he was holding up the transparent tabletop and inspecting the screw holes. He looked over at Chu and Martin and said something unintelligible in a questioning tone.
“Get your camera,” Martin said.
Nina landed a healthy kick on the shin of one of the men holding her and caught him by surprise. He cried out in pain and dropped her arm. She quickly pulled free of the other man, whose grip had finally grown slack, and made a run for the door.
She got about five feet before one of the awful men in the room caught her and roughly dragged her back to her captors. The man she had kicked looked her over, then unexpectedly slapped her in the face. “Little bitch!” he growled.
It was the first time in her life that anyone had hit her. People just didn’t do such things, not in her world. For the first few moments, the shock and surprise kept her from getting angry, then the hot rage she had felt when she had first been abducted came back. She got that under control quickly, telling herself that the important thing was to figure out a way to get even. No, she corrected herself, the first thing was to somehow get away. Then her father and grandfather would get even for her.
What made it worse was that she knew a dozen or more of the men in the room—or at least knew who they were. She had seen them in Professor Karn’s physics class. They were friends or sidekicks of Professor Karn’s special protégé, Miles Oliver. And that made it twice as bad. Oliver knew her well enough to call her by name. They had even exchanged a few words from time to time.
Stop i
t, she scolded herself. Concentrate on getting out of this.
Her prospects didn’t look good. She was in an enormous storeroom somewhere above the dolphin lagoon, near the huge airlocks meant for the habitat’s landing craft. The place was crammed with work benches and tool lockers. These renegade men had broken into the tool lockers, helping themselves to anything that could be used as a weapon. Looking around, she saw hammers, lengths of pipe, monkey wrenches, pry bars, and, scariest of all, things like electric drills, reciprocating saws, and nail guns. Things that could only be used to hurt people, even kill them. What kind of men would do that?
She counted them again. If she ever got free, she could at least report on their numbers. There were between fifty-five and sixty; it was hard to be sure, the way they kept moving around. She couldn’t understand how they hoped to take over the ship with so few.
Miles Oliver came over to talk to her captors. He had armed himself with a nail gun. Nina shuddered. She was familiar with the tools used by the maintenance crews that Martin worked with. The nail guns were small but powerful with a range of twenty feet or more if a workman’s hand slipped and it fired into the air.
She let him see that she wasn’t afraid. “Didn’t you see this man hit me? Aren’t you going to say something?”
He glanced at her indifferently. “That’s what you get for being a bad little girl. You’ll get worse if you misbehave again.”
“It’s you who’s going to get worse. I’m going to tell Professor Karn what you’ve done.”
He looked as if he were going to say something, then stopped. He turned to the man who was holding her. “Find some rope, will you, Pfyfe? We’d better tie her to a chair. You better gag her too.”
He turned away to talk to someone else. She fought back tears of rage as Pfyfe tied her to the chair and stuffed an oily rag into her mouth. She wasn’t going to let him think she was crying.
They were still traveling at thousands of miles an hour, but so was the lifeboat. Joorn kept his eyes on the viewscreen. They seemed to be closing the gap at a snail’s pace. The lifeboat was only a few miles away now.
“Here we go,” Joorn said.
He reached for the cord hanging overhead and yanked sharply. A klaxon blared deafeningly, a sound that was repeated throughout the ship. Joorn waited exactly ten seconds. “That should be time enough to prevent any broken bones,” he murmured, and punched the Execute Program button. He settled back in his seat. Within another ten seconds, he was totally weightless.
Ryan’s lieutenant, Grier, floated over. “That ought to flush them out, Captain. They won’t know what’s happening.”
Alten was hovering about a foot above his seat, steadying himself with one hand to keep from rising farther. “Is there any word?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Grier said. “There are all sorts of nooks and byways in that sector but no living quarters, so it’s usually pretty deserted. Of course I’m getting my information from runners, so it’s anybody’s guess what might have transpired in the last fifteen or twenty minutes.” He grimaced. “It’s awkward not being able to use my communicator. This must have been what it was like to fight a battle in the Middle Ages.”
Alten came all the way up and braced his hand against his chair to aim himself at the door.
“I’m going down to see what’s what.”
“Ryan has about a hundred men in the search party, Professor,” Grier said. “They’re searching on a grid. You’ll only get in the way.”
“I don’t care,” Alten said. He sailed in a flat trajectory to the door, nodded to the half dozen guards Ryan had sent up, and let himself out.
“I don’t like it,” Grier said to Joorn. “If he blunders into them on his own, we could have two hostages instead of one.”
“Man, I’d go too if I didn’t have to stay with the controls,” Joorn said.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Grier said. “You’re right, of course.”
CHAPTER 22
Chu watched through the lifeboat’s main viewport as Time’s Beginning flashed by and came to a dead stop less than a mile away. Of course they both were traveling at tens of thousands of miles an hour, but they were almost motionless in respect to each other.
“Nice,” he said. “Your grandfather lined us up with the boat lock adjacent to the dolphin lagoon.”
All four of them, if you counted Jonah, were standing in front of the viewport. Actually, Jonah was floating in water. He’d moved his travel pod forward on its little powered wheels and was watching through its side port. He’d shut the big transparent lid to prevent spillage. There was just enough microgravity to allow the wheels sporadic contact, though there was a lot of unintended bouncing.
Torris—they knew his name now—was standing with his mouth agape, staring at the long, complicated shape that had taken so many minutes to pass by with its distal end still not in sight.
“It’s the biggest thing he’s ever seen,” young Martin said. “I wonder what he thinks it is.”
“It’s a world to him,” Chu said. “Bigger than his own comet and not made of ice. I don’t think he can grasp that it’s an artifact.”
“And home to a quarter-million humans,” came Jonah’s computer-adjusted voice. “He’ll adapt to it. We dolphins did.”
A rectangle had yawned open in a bulge in the hull opposite, and Chu nudged the lifeboat sideways toward it with his attitude jets. “Your grandfather has us in his sights,” Chu said. “There’s not supposed to be any talk between us. Oliver’s tapped into the ship’s com.”
“He’ll feel the bump.”
“There won’t be a bump.”
“There’ll be something. You can always tell when a boat docks.”
“It’ll be too late for him to do anything about it.”
The boat floated into its berth, and the airlock closed behind it. A groan of contracting metal came through the hull as the airlock filled with warm air.
“Okay everybody,” Chu said. “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick!”
Torris couldn’t have understood what he was saying, but he must have understood the urgent tone of voice and their body language as they turned toward the lock. He hastily pulled his helmet down and sealed his faceplate in place. He wasn’t taking any chances. As far as he knew there was nothing in the boat’s airlock except the vacuum of space.
“You don’t have to—” Chu began, then gave up. “Oh, the hell with it!”
Martin was laughing. Torris was making frantic signs to the two of them to put their own helmets on. He must have thought they were stupid or crazy.
“It’s all right,” Martin told their beanpole passenger, and something in his own gestures must have gotten through, because Torris desisted. But he still kept his helmet on, just in case.
They headed for the airlock, with Jonah’s rolling travel pod in the lead. On the way, Torris stopped to pick up his little bundle of table legs.
“He’s not going to leave his souvenirs behind,” Chu said.
There was no crew in the ship’s lock to receive them as there ordinarily would have been. The empty chamber echoed with their shuffling passage and the rattle of Jonah’s caster-like wheels on the metal floor. They waited until they were sure the pressure was equalized, then stepped through into an empty corridor.
Torris halted in his tracks, quite obviously amazed at the warmth and what to him must have been the thickness of the ship’s air. He turned to Chu and Martin and made questioning noises in his own language.
“Yes, I know. It’s a strange new world,” Chu said. “And it’s going to get even stranger to you.”
They proceeded down the passageway in their low-gravity shuffle, with Torris continually getting ahead of them; he’d had a lifetime of practice in an environment where a misstep might mean death.
“There’s a junction with the main corridor just ahe
ad,” Chu said to Martin. “According to your grandfather, this is the route Nina would have taken if she were taking a detour to see you.”
Jonah’s travel pod bumped the door open for them, and they followed it into the corridor just in time to see a door about a hundred feet ahead burst open and a noisy rabble of men pour through. They were armed with knives, sledgehammers, metal pipes, wrenches—anything you could think of.
“Oh Christ, is our timing good or isn’t it?” Chu said. “Where the hell is Ryan?”
The men stopped as they saw Chu’s party. They milled about uncertainly, not knowing what to make of the spindly twelve-foot figure in the primitive spacesuit. One of them pushed forward, shoving a small figure with her hands bound behind her in front of him. He was holding something with a pistol grip to her head. It looked like an automatic nail gun.
“It’s Oliver! He’s got Nina!” Martin cried, and started to run toward them. He forgot his absence of weight and bounced off the ceiling, flailing helplessly.
“Stay where you are, Martin boy, if you know what’s good for your little sister!” Oliver said. “That goes for you too, Chu, and the fish tank. We’re all going up to the control room.”
“You’re crazy, Oliver,” Chu said. “You’ll never get away with it. By now the captain will have the bridge guarded by half the security force.”
“They won’t do a thing, Mr. First Officer. Not when they see what we’ve got.” Oliver prodded Nina in the head with the nail gun, and she gasped. Oliver laughed nastily. “And the captain will give the orders himself to keep hands off.”
Torris was standing frozen, obviously bewildered, a frail towering figure holding a toy bow. Oliver glanced at him dismissively. “I don’t know what you’ve got there, but we’ll take it with us.”
At that moment, Nina stomped on Oliver’s instep, hard. He gave a cry of surprise and pain, and Nina dropped to the floor before he could regain his grip on her.
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