Non-Stop (26 page)

One thing at least was clear: the outcasts, wounded though many of them were from their encounter with the rats, were prepared to fight. Every man jack of them was loaded down with dazers, knives and improvised pikes.

Gregg himself, accompanied by his weird henchman, Hawl, was conferring with Scoyt, Pagwam and Councillor Ruskin behind a closed door when Complain arrived on the scene. Without ceremony, he thrust his way into the room. He savoured an unprecedented confidence which even their shouts at his intrusion did not sap.

‘I’ve come to help you,’ he said, facing Scoyt as the natural leader there. ‘I’ve two things for you, and the first is a bit of information. We’ve discovered that there are trapdoors on every level of every deck; that is only one way the Giants and Outsiders can escape. They also have a handy exit in every single room!’

He jumped up on to the table and demonstrated to them how a grille opened. Climbing down again without comment, he enjoyed the surprised look in their faces.

‘That’s something else for you to watch, Master Scoyt,’ he said. And then the point about Fermour’s escape that had been troubling him slid into his mind without effort; instantly, a slice more of the puzzle became clear.

‘Somewhere in the ship, the Giants have a headquarters,’ he said. ‘They took me to it when they caught me, but I don’t know where it is – I was gassed. But obviously it’s in a part of a deck or level cut off from us, deliberately or by design. There are plenty such places in the ship – that’s where we have to look.’

‘We’ve already decided that,’ said Gregg, impatiently. ‘The trouble is, things are in such a muddle, on most decks we don’t know when a bit’s cut off and when it isn’t. An army could be hiding behind any bulkhead.’

‘I’ll tell you one such place near at hand,’ Complain said tensely. ‘
Above the cell Fermour was kept in
, on Deck 21.’

‘What makes you think that, Complain?’ Scoyt asked curiously.

‘Deduction. The Giants, as we have realized, went to an enormous amount of trouble to lure everyone away from the corridors so that they could get to Fermour and rescue him via the trap-doors. They could have spared themselves all that bother if they had simply pulled him up through the grille in his cell. It would not have taken them a minute, and they could have remained unseen. Why didn’t they? My guess is, because they couldn’t. Because something on the level above has collapsed, blocking that grille. In other words, there may be chambers up there we have no access to. We ought to see what’s in them.’

‘I tell you there are a hundred such places –’ Gregg began.

‘It certainly sounds worth investigating –’ Councillor Ruskin said.

‘Suppose you’re right, Complain,’ Scoyt interrupted. ‘If the grille’s blocked, how do we get through?’

‘Like this!’ Complain levelled the heat gun at the nearest wall, fanning it horizontally. The wall began to drip away. He switched off power when a ragged archway had formed, and looked challengingly at them. For a moment all were silent.

‘Gawd’s blood!’ Gregg croaked. ‘That’s the thing I gave you.’

‘Yes. And that’s how you use it. It’s not a real weapon, as you thought – it’s a flame projector.’

Scoyt stood up. His face was flushed.

‘Let’s get down to Deck 21,’ he said. ‘Pagwam, keep your men pulling up trap-doors as fast as you can circulate that ring. Complain, you’ve done well. We’ll try that gadget out at once.’

They moved out in a body, Scoyt leading. He gripped Complain’s arm gratefully.

‘Given time, we can pull the damn ship apart with that weapon,’ he said. It was a remark which did not fully register on Complain until much later.

Chaos reigned on the middle level of Deck 21, where Fermour’s cell was. All the manholes were exposed, each being now guarded by a sentry; their covers were flung aside in untidy piles. The few people who lived here – mostly men of the barriers and their families – were evacuating before further trouble came, straggling among the sentries, getting in everyone’s way. Scoyt elbowed his way roughly through them, pushing squeaking children to right and left.

As they flung open Fermour’s cell door, Complain felt a hand on his arm. He turned, and there was Vyann, fresh and bright of eye.

‘I thought you were asleep!’ he exclaimed, smiling with the delight of seeing her again.

‘Do you realize it’s within a watch of waking?’ she said. ‘Besides, I’m told things are about to happen. I had to come and see that you didn’t get into trouble.’

Complain pressed her hand.

‘I’ve been in and out of it while you were sleeping,’ he said cheerfully.

Gregg was already in the middle of the cell, standing on the battered crate which served here as a chair, peering up at the grille above his head.

‘Roy’s right!’ he announced. ‘There’s an obstruction on the other side of this thing. I can see some crumpled metal up there. Hand me up that heat gun and let’s try our luck.’

‘Stand from under!’ Complain warned him. ‘Or you’ll shower yourself with melted metal.’

Nodding, Gregg aimed the weapon as Scoyt handed it up, and depressed the button. The glassy arc of heat bit into the ceiling, drawing a red weal on it. The weal broadened, the ceiling sagged, metal came gooing down like shreds of pulverized flesh. Through the livid hole, other metal showed; it too, began to glow lividly. Noise filled the room, smoke cascaded
about them and out into the corridor, bitter smoke which rasped their eyeballs. Above the uproar came a crackling explosion, and just for a second the lights flashed on with unexpected brilliance then died away to nothing.

‘That should do it!’ Gregg exclaimed with immense satisfaction, climbing down from his perch and eyeing the gaping ruin above him. His beard twitched in excitement.

‘I really think we ought to hold a full Council meeting before we do anything as drastic as this, Master Scoyt!’ Councillor Ruskin said plaintively, surveying the ruin of the cell.

‘We’ve done nothing but hold Council meetings for years,’ Scoyt said. ‘Now we’re going to act.’

He ran into the corridor and bellowed furiously, producing in very short time a dozen armed men and a ladder.

Complain, who felt he had more experience of this kind of thing than the others, went to fetch a bucket of water from the nearby guards’ quarters, flinging it up over the tortured metal to cool it. In the ensuing cloud of steam, Scoyt thrust the ladder into place and climbed up with his dazer ready. One by one, as quickly as possible, the others followed, Vyann keeping close to Complain. Soon the whole party stood in the strange room above the cell.

It was overwhelmingly hot; the air was hard to breathe. Their torches soon picked out the reason for the blocked grille and the collapsed inspection way below their feet: the floor of this chamber had undergone a terrific denting in some long-past explosion. A machine – perhaps left untended in the time of the Nine Day Ague, Complain thought – had blown up, ruining every article and wall in the place. A staggering quantity of splintered glass and silicone was scattered all over the floor. The walls were pitted with shrapnel. But there was not a trace of a Giant.

‘Come on!’ Scoyt said, trampling ankle deep through the wreckage towards one of two doors. ‘Let’s not waste time here.’

The explosion had wedged the door tightly. They melted it with the laser and passed through. Night loomed menacingly at the end of their torch beam. The silence sang like a thrown knife.

‘No sign of life . . .’ Scoyt said. His voice held an echo of unease.

They stood in a side corridor, sealed off from the rest of the ship, entombed, scattering their torchlight about convulsively. It was so achingly hot they could hardly see over their cheek bones.

One end of the brief corridor finished in double doors on which a notice was stencilled. Crowding together, they shuffled to read what it said:

DUTYMEN ONLY CARGO HATCH – AIR LOCK
DANGER!

A locking wheel stood on either door with a notice printed beside it: ‘
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN UNTIL YOU GET THE SIGNAL
’. They all stood there staring stupidly at the notices.

‘What are you doing – waiting to get a signal?’ Hawl grated at them. ‘Melt the door down, Captain!’

‘Wait!’ Scoyt said. ‘We ought to be careful here. What’s an air lock, I’d like to know? We know magnetic locks and octagonal ring locks, but what’s an air lock?’

‘Never mind what it is. Melt it down!’ Hawl repeated, waggling his grotesque head. ‘It’s your lousy ship, Captain – make yourself at home!’

Gregg turned the heat on. The metal blushed a sad, dull rose, but did not run. Nor did an amount of cursing make any difference, and in the end Gregg put the weapon bewilderedly away.

‘Must be special metal,’ he said.

One of the armed men pushed forward and spun the wheel on one of the doors, whereupon the door slid easily back into a slot in the wall. Someone laughed sharply at the slackening
of tension; Gregg had the grace to look abashed. They were free to move into the cargo air lock.

Instead of moving, they stood pixilated by a stream of light which beat remorselessly upon them. The air lock, although only a medium-sized chamber, had, set in its opposite wall, something none of them had ever seen before, something which to their awed eyes extended the length of the lock to infinity: a window: a window looking into space.

This was not the meagre pinch of space Vyann and Complain had seen in the Control Room; this was a broad square. But their previous experience had prepared them for this in some measure. They were the first to be drawn across the deep dust floor to the glory itself; the others of the party remained rooted in the entrance.

Beyond the window, with stars tossed prodigiously into it like jewels into an emperor’s sack, roared the unending stillness of space. It was something beyond the comprehension to gaze upon, the mightiest paradox of all, for although it gave an impression of unyielding blackness, every last pocket of it glistened with multi-coloured pangs of light.

Nobody spoke, swallowing the spectacle as if dumb.

Though all of them were fit to weep before the serenity of space, it was what floated in space that commanded their eyes, that ultimately held them: a sweet crescent of a planet, as bright blind blue as a new-born kitten’s eyes, looking larger than a sickle held at arm’s length. It scintillated into dazzling white at its centre, where a sun seemed to rise out of it. And the sun, wreathed in its terrible corona, eclipsed everything else in grandeur.

Still nobody spoke. They were silent as the crescent crept wider and the splendid sun broke free from behind it. They could not speak one word for the miracle of it. They were struck dumb, deaf and dizzy by its sublimity.

At last it was Vyann who spoke.

‘Oh, Roy darling,’ she whispered. ‘We have arrived somewhere,
after all! There’s still a hope for us, there’s still some sort of a hope.’

Complain turned to look at her then, to force his choked throat to answer. And then he could not answer. He suddenly knew what the big something was he had wanted all his life.

It was nothing big at all. It was a small thing. It was just to see Laur’s face – by sunlight.

Within a watch, distorted versions of the great news had circulated to every man, woman and child in Forwards. Everyone wanted to discuss it with everyone else; everyone, that is, except Master Scoyt. For him, the incident was a mere irrelevance, almost a set-back in the priority task of hunting down the Giants and their allies, the Outsiders. He had found no Giants; now he returned full of a new scheme which, after snatching a cat-nap and some food, he proceeded to put into action.

The scheme was simple; that it involved a terrifying amount of damage to the ship did not deter Scoyt in the least. He was going entirely to dismantle Deck 25.

Deck 25 was the first deck of Deadways beyond Forwards. Remove it, and you would have a perfect no-man’s-land nothing could cross unseen. Once this giant equivalent of a ditch had been created, and a strong guard set over it, a hunt could be started down all the inspection ways and the Giants would be unable to escape.

Work on the job commenced at once. Volunteers flocked to Scoyt’s aid, willing to do anything they could to help. Human chains worked feverishly, passing back every movable item on the doomed deck to others who smashed it or, if smashing were not possible, flung it into other vacant rooms. Ahead of the chain, sweating warriors, many of them Gregg’s men, who had experience of such tasks, attacked the ponics, hacking them down, rooting them up; just behind them came the clearance men, looting, gutting and filleting the place.

And so as soon as a room was cleared, Master Scoyt himself came with the heat gun, blazing round the sides of the walls
till the walls came tumbling down; they were carted off directly they were cool enough to touch. The laser did not melt the plastic which actually divided deck from deck – that metal was the same, evidently, as the metal of which the air lock doors were built, something extra tough – but everything else fell away before it.

Soon after the work began, a rat hideout was discovered in a big room marked ‘Laundry’. Splitting open a boiler, two of Gregg’s men revealed a crazy little maze of rat buildings, a rodent village. Different levels and flights of a bewildering complexity of design had been constructed inside the boiler from bones and rubble and cans and filth. There were tiny cages here containing starving creatures, mice, hamsters, rabbits, even a bird; there were moths living here, rising up in a storm; and there were the rats, in nurseries and studs and armouries and slaughter houses. As Scoyt thrust the heat gun into the miniature city and it crackled up in flames, the rodents poured out savagely, leaping to the attack.