Mutiny in Space

by Rod Walker

  It would explain a lot of what happened.

  “I… am glad I have Mr. Rovio’s confidence, Captain,” I said. “I can’t say as to his reasons for it, sir, but I hope it is because my work has been satisfactory.”

  Williams waved a hand. “The other crewmen have spoken well of you so far. I read the reports, you know. I’m the captain of this ship, and I have access to everything on her.” His cold and inexplicable anger sharpened further. “I could have you thrown off the ship. Order you off at our next stop. Your uncle couldn’t do anything to stop me.”

  Had I somehow done something to anger the captain? I couldn’t imagine what it might have been. This had been the longest conversation I’d ever had with the man. I wanted to run, or at least ask what I had done to anger him so, but I suspected that showing weakness in front of such an unpredictable man would be a terrible mistake.

  “Has my work been unsatisfactory, Captain?” I said at last.

  “A ship’s captain does not concern himself with such minutiae,” said Williams loftily. “Though I will say neither Corbin nor any of the others have complained about you. You may recall I said that I wanted to ask you a question.”

  I nodded, still unsure of where he was going. “Yes, sir.”

  “I understand your family was heavily involved with the Social Party on New Chicago,” said Williams.

  Fear flooded through me. I wasn’t anyone important, to the ship or to the Party, and the captain had already made it clear he did not care about me. Yet Hawkins and Corbin and Murdock had that file full of Williams’s malfeasance, and perhaps the captain had become suspicious of them.

  “I’m not a member of the Social Party,” I said. “Neither is my uncle. The police confirmed that.”

  “What? I don’t care about that,” said Williams. “When you were on New Chicago, the day before your brother blew up that building…”

  “He was tricked!”

  Williams made a dismissive gesture. “Yes, he was innocent, I’m sure. I don’t care. You met him in person. What was he like?”

  “My brother?” I said. I felt like an idiot, staring at the captain, but the man’s moods and questions shifted so fast I had trouble following. For a moment I didn’t know what to say. What could possibly I tell him about Sergei?

  “Your brother?” said Williams with a scowl. “Why would I care about him? You met Ducarti. What was he like?”

  I blinked again. “Ducarti?”

  “Yes, Alesander Ducarti,” said Williams. “The Social who was behind the attack. You met him in person. You talked to him. I know you did— I saw the video. What was he like?”

  “He was a liar,” I said.

  “Okay, what else. What was he like?”

  “Um,” was all I could come up with at first, as I wished that someone would call him and get me out of this strange interrogation. “He could give a speech. He was really good. I saw him give a speech to the Party members there and they ate it up. He was like a politician, but a smooth one. Except there was something hard about him. Like a soldier or something. He was… scary.”

  Williams grunted again. I had the sense that my answer hadn’t pleased him.

  “Why do you want to know, Captain?” I said

  “That will be all, technician apprentice,” said Williams. “You may return to your work.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Williams had dismissed me, but for some reason he strode off the bridge and went through the blast doors to the main dorsal corridor. I stared after him, blinking and quite thoroughly confused.

  “What was that about?” said Hawkins, getting out of his chair and joining me.

  “I don’t know, sir,” I said. “Really, I don’t.”

  Hawkins let out a displeased noise and glared at the blast doors. “He must be in one of his moods.”

  I was about to suggest that Hawkins and Corbin add the incident to their file of Williams’s various misdeeds, but I decided not to. They wouldn’t like that I knew about it. Besides, asking bizarre questions of an apprentice wasn’t grounds for firing. But it was strange.

  “Mr. Hawkins,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” said Hawkins, still looking irritated. “You can ask me anything you want, but you might not get an answer.”

  “What is wrong with the captain?” I said.

  Hawkins shrugged. “I have no idea.” He lowered his voice. “Don’t repeat this, but if I had to guess, I’d say he’s the family screw-up. He only has this job because of his brother, and he hates his brother. So he takes it out on the rest of us.” He shrugged again. “It could be worse. At least he’s lazy. That makes it easy to work around him. God knows there’s nothing worse than a hard-working incompetent.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Hopefully I’m the first but not the second.”

  Hawkins blinked, and then laughed. “Finish up that console, Mr. Rovio, and then we’ll see.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, returning to my tools and the half-disassembled console.

  After dealing with whatever lunacy was dancing around inside the captain’s head, replacing the fuses in a cargo console seemed like a nice day at the park by comparison.

  After my shift was over, I went to the technicians’ lounge and wound up playing Gunno-Tatakai with Arthur Rodriguez. Thankfully he had the music on mute. Whoever had programmed the game had been fond of ancient music, and the game’s soundtrack was a nasty cacophony of flutes and drums that sounded like the inept efforts of an overly-earnest reenactment band. It didn’t save its sound settings either, so the awful music always blasted at top volume every time it started so you had to remember to mute it before you launched.

  Fun game, though, if you’re into that sort of thing. The campaigns took time, but there wasn’t much to do on the ship if you weren’t working.

  “He’s a weird one,” said Arthur, gripping his controller and scowling at the display on the wall as his horseman trampled his way through a row of infantry, banners waving. “The captain, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” I said, sending my archers to terrorize Arthur’s spearmen. “Why do you think he wants to know about Ducarti?”

  Arthur shrugged, which made his whole frame twitch. He looked like a tall, brown-skinned scarecrow, and the only time he ever stopped twitching was when playing games or repairing robots. “Dunno, man. Maybe he’s just weird. Some guys collect pictures of serial killers and war crimes, you know. Maybe he’s into that.”

  “Maybe,” I said, dubious. “But I don’t think so. He wasn’t geeking out about the guy.”

  “Or he could be a deviant,” said Arthur. “Like he has a bunch of dead babes in his cabin. Or he has a thing for terrorists.”

  “I just hope he’s not a revolutionary,” I said.

  “The captain a Social?” said Arthur, mashing at the buttons on his controller as his horsemen trampled some crossbowmen. “Nah, his family is rich.”

  “Why else would he want to talk about Ducarti?”

  “He doesn’t seem like the type to join the Socials,” said Arthur. “Back home, they were always freaks, you know? They were either ugly women who dyed their hair blue or the kind of men who take classes at the university for twenty years. And they were all kind of obsessed with blood and mayhem, although they never actually did anything about it like Ducarti did.”

  “You just killed, like, a hundred infantrymen,” I pointed out.

  “That’s different,” said Arthur with solemn dignity as he slaughtered my crossbowmen. What Gunno-Tatakai lacked in music, it more than made up for in lovingly rendered gore. “Besides, the Socials actually believe their own nonsense. The captain doesn’t seem like he believes in anything but sleeping through his shift.”

  “True,” I said. “If the captain was with the Socials, I bet we could get him fired. No one, not even his family, would trust an interstellar freighter to a Party member.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Arthur, “but I just fix robots.”

/>   We turned our full attention to the important matter of crushing the enemy army.

  After that unsettling encounter on the bridge, Captain Williams ignored me. I was fine with that. Life aboard the Rusalka settled into a routine, and I kept shadowing Corbin and the other technicians, learning everything I could. Six months after I came aboard, I was able to pass the first-tier certification, which meant I got a raise—which was nice even if it was a small one—and my uncle started trusting me with more important work.

  Then, a year and a half after I started, the Rusalka received a contract for a very big job.

  There was a new colony out in a system named New Sibersk, founded by refugees who had fled Novorossiya III during the collapse of the revolution there. That meant the colony was just about as old as I was. After seventeen years of grinding away at farms and infrastructure, the colony had finally produced a huge crop of wheat, and they were now seeking to bring their enormous surplus to market. The colony’s legislature put out a call for bids, and Starways won it, mostly because the Rusalka was one of the few freighters big enough to take the entire crop in one trip.

  And also because it was such a long trip. New Sibersk was on the outer fringe of the Thousand Worlds, so far out that the system hadn’t even been charted until a few decades ago.

  “Fifty-two hyperjumps?” I said, standing with Corbin as he looked at the mission manifest on the display screen in the technician’s lounge. “Are you kidding me? That will take forever!”

  “Actually, we’ll be starting from the depot here,” said Corbin, tapping one of the systems, “so it’ll be fifty-nine hyperjumps in all.”

  “Man,” I said, doing the transit times in my head. “That means a round trip of, what, two and a half months?”

  “You’ll have time to finish the next certification tier,” said Corbin.

  “And then some,” I said. “That is a lot of uninhabited systems.”

  “Not all of them have been charted properly, either. We’ll probably pick up some additional revenue running full scans and selling them to the Coalition navy when we get back.”

  I frowned. “Is that legal?”

  “So long as the scans are accurate, yes,” said Corbin. “If they’re not accurate, then it’s fraud. Or you could get charged with deliberately wrecking ships. That’s an old trick of pirates. Sell screwed-up navigational charts, wait for ships to blunder into the wrong gravity well, then show up and steal their cargoes.”

  “Seems like some of those empty systems would be a perfect hiding place for pirates,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Corbin. “Or religious fanatics, or undocumented scientists working on unethical experiments in secret, or crazies trying to build the perfect society with an asteroid mine and a hydroponics bay. I’d guess that we’ll pass by two or three dozen off-the-books colonies, mines, and space stations.”

  “And pirates,” I said. “Don’t forget the pirates.”

  Corbin remained unruffled. “We’ll only see them if they’re stupid. That’s why she has all those guns.”

  The Rusalka did have a lot of guns. She was a big ship, which meant she had a big fusion reactor to power her sub-light drive and a big hypermatter reactor to catalyze the hyperdrive. Those reactors met she could generate a lot of power, enough for a dozen railgun turrets as well as the radiant and kinetic deflectors. She was well-crewed too, since Security Chief Nelson continued to insist that the crew drill every week with the weapons, and the man regarding missing a weapons-and-boarders drill as something worse than blasphemy.

  “Or if they’re really smart,” I said.

  Corbin shrugged. “Speak softly and carry a big stick. We don’t go looking for trouble, but if anyone comes looking for it, we’ll give them enough to choke on.”

  So the Rusalka left the company depot on the edge of the Thousand Worlds and began the long trip to New Sibersk. It took us just over the expected six weeks to get there. You’d think the crew would go stir-crazy during a trip that long, but God knows that Corbin and Hawkins kept us too busy to cause any trouble.

  For one, there was all the endless maintenance. Corbin made good money as a master technician, and the reason he did was that the Rusalka’s systems were locked in a never-ending war against entropy, and entropy never, ever, gave up. Simple routine maintenance filled up most of my days, interrupted by major projects when something broke or needed refitting. Studying for certifications took up most of the rest of my time, and when I had the occasional hour to relax, Arthur and I would connect to the ship’s computer, grab some controllers, and either blow away aliens or fight a quick battle in Gunno-Tatakai.

  The only downside? No girls. None whatsoever. Some companies hired female crew, but Starways wasn’t one of them. I noticed that whenever the Rusalka came into a port, most of the unmarried men (and a few of the married ones) rapidly disappeared into various discreet-looking buildings with red lights over the front doors.

  That was something I planned to investigate in more detail when I turned eighteen in a few weeks and could accompany the others. Arthur and I had tried twice to delve deeper into the mystery, but after successfully sneaking off the ship, were turned away at the door both times. When Corbin heard about our excursions, he scared us both to death with stories about what might have been our fate if we’d chosen the wrong sort of red-lit building to visit. We decided we were happy with our current employment and remained onboard after that.

  We reached New Sibersk without incident. The colonists had three old AstroSpace HT-9 cargo shuttles. Between all three shuttles and Arthur’s cargo drones, we managed to get the entirely of the wheat crop loaded in three and a half days. Arthur worked around the clock for those three days, and I helped him manage the robotic arms and drone systems that unloaded the cargo containers of wheat and secured them in the Rusalka’s cavernous cargo bays. I learned a lot about automatic cargo handling during those four days, along with more than I ever really wanted to know about robot programming.

  Turns out programming the cargo robots properly is really, really important, otherwise they start putting containers in the wrong places and the whole thing becomes a hideous and ruinously expensive mess. Fortunately, Arthur, Corbin, and the other techs knew what they were doing, and we got the ship loaded with no major incidents and only two or three equipment breakdowns.

  We left New Sibersk and headed back towards the Thousand Worlds, and life settled back into the previous routine, though we saw even less of Captain Williams. Hawkins had more or less become the de facto captain by this point, which was fine with everyone. I kept working, and studying, and I thought I would soon be ready to take the next certification test. Then I could become a junior technician in my own right.

  We were on our twenty-fifth hyperjump home when we found ourselves with unexpected company.

  The empty system didn’t have a name, just a designation—NR8965. Likely some astronomer’s bored research assistant had slapped the designation on a list a thousand years ago, and it had stuck ever since. It was a binary star system—NR8965A was a red giant—and NR8695B was a smaller, hotter blue star paired with it. I thought the combination made them look like the galaxy’s biggest pair of Christmas lights. The system had nineteen planets—twelve rocky, airless inner ones, and seven gas giants, each with their own moon system—three asteroid belts, an Oort cloud, and the usual Kupier belt. A bunch of the rocky planets had valuable mineral deposits, but no one had gotten around to mining them, at least not officially, most likely because the radiation from the blue star drove up the overhead costs. A few of the gas giants had moons in the habitable zone, so a colony would likely wind up here someday.

  I was working with Arthur that day. We had a day and a half of sublight transit until we reached our next hyperjump point, and Corbin had decided to use that time to fix a longstanding network error between the automated cargo robotics and the central computer. Arthur blamed the problem on the central computer’s process handling, while Murdock blamed
it on Arthur’s programming. They had both complained to Corbin about it at length, and in exasperation he finally ordered them to lock themselves in the computer room and not come out until they had figured out what was going on.

  And, lucky me, it was my day to shadow Arthur.

  So at 0600 I staggered into the computer room, still trying to wake up. It was a small room located midway along the dorsal corridor, with one wall covered entirely with sixteen screens showing various computer functions—running processes, storage usage, CPU utilization, network balancing, and so forth. Arthur was already there, tapping away at a console.

  As for Murdock, think of what a typical computer programmer looks like, then imagine the opposite. He looked like a middle-aged weightlifter who had just started going to fat, but was still capable of cracking some heads if he got irritated.

  At the moment, he looked very irritated.

  “The problem,” he said, “is your programming logic. It has too many subroutines and dependent loops. Too much information comes through, and the interface–”

  “No,” said Arthur. “The problem is your outmoded network interface.” Murdock’s eyes narrowed, but Arthur didn’t back down. “It doesn’t have enough capacity. It can only process sixteen sets of instructions at a time. That’s like taking a fire hose and trying to spray it through a straw.”

  Murdock folded his arms. “If your programming logic wasn’t so inefficient, it wouldn’t clog my interface.”

  Arthur scoffed. “There are thirty-six different cargo drones all running at the same time. Every single one of them has an independent programming set. Of course a lot of data is going to go through the interface. What, you want to run less than half of them at a time? We’d still be loading up at New Sibersk.”

  “You,” said Murdock, pointing at me. “You’ve been quiet. What do you think?”

  I hesitated. Actually, I thought they were both right. Arthur’s programming did tend towards the heavy side, covering contingencies that hardly ever happened. That said, Murdock had locked down access to the main computer to the point that the drones had trouble communicating with it.