Non-Stop (27 page)

Scoyt saved himself with the gun, warding them off as he fell back. Gregg’s two men had their throats bitten through before reinforcements could dash up with dazers and beat off the little furies. The bodies went back along the human chain, and demolition continued.

By now, the corridors of decks 24 to 13 had been completely stripped of trap-doors on all three levels. Each hole was guarded.

‘The ship is rapidly becoming uninhabitable,’ Councillor Tregonnin protested. ‘This is destroying for destroying’s sake.’

He was presiding over a meeting to which everyone of importance had been called. Councillors Billyoe, Dupont and Ruskin were present. Pagwam and other officers of the Security Team were present. Gregg and Hawl were present. So were Complain and Vyann. Even Marapper had managed to wangle his way in. Only Scoyt and Zac Deight were missing.

By the messengers which had been despatched to bring him to the meeting, Scoyt had sent back word that he was ‘too
busy’. Marapper, going down at Tregonnin’s request to fetch up Zac Deight, had returned to say simply that the councillor was not in his rooms; at that, Complain and Vyann, who now knew of Deight’s sinister part in affairs, exchanged glances but said nothing. It would have been a relief to burst out with the news that Deight was a traitor – but might there not be other traitors here, whom it would be wiser not to warn?

‘The ship must be pulled apart before the Giants pull us apart,’ Hawl shouted. ‘That’s obvious enough; why make an issue of it?’

‘You do not understand. We shall die if the ship is pulled apart!’ Councillor Dupont protested.

‘It would get rid of the rats, anyway,’ Hawl said, and cackled with laughter.

Right from the start, he and Gregg were quietly at loggerheads with the members of the Council; neither side liked the other’s manners. The meeting was disorganized for another reason: nobody could decide whether they wanted most to discuss the steps Scoyt was taking or the discovery of the strange planet.

At last, Tregonnin himself tried to integrate these two facets of the situation.

‘What it amounts to’, he said, ‘is this. Scoyt’s policy can be approved if it succeeds. To succeed, not only must the Giants be captured but, when captured, they must be able to tell us how to get the ship down on to the surface of this planet.’

There was a general murmur of agreement at this.

‘Obviously, the Giants must have such knowledge,’ Billyoe said, ‘since they built the ship in the first place.’

‘Then let’s get on with it, and go and give Scoyt some support,’ Gregg said, standing up.

‘There is just one other thing I would like to say before you go,’ Tregonnin said, ‘and that is, that our discussion has been on purely material lines. But I think we have also moral justification for our action. The ship is a sacred object for us; we may destroy it only under one condition: that the Long
Journey be done. That condition, happily, is fulfilled. I am confident that the planet some of you have seen beyond the ship is Earth.’

The pious tone of this speech brought derision from Gregg and some of the Survival Team. It brought applause and excitement from others. Marapper was heard to exclaim that Tregonnin should have been a priest.

Complain’s voice cut through the uproar.

‘The planet is not Earth!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have certain information the rest of you do not know. We must be far away from Earth – twenty-three generations have passed on this ship: Earth should have been reached in seven!’

He was besieged by voices, angry, pitiful and demanding.

He had decided that everyone ought to know and face the situation exactly as it was; they must be told everything – about the ruined controls, about Captain Gregory Complain’s journal, about Zac Deight. They must be told everything – the problem had grown far too urgent for any one man to cope with it. But before he could utter another word, the door of the council chamber was flung open. Two men stood there, faces distorted with fear.

‘The Giants are attacking!’ they shouted.

Stinking, blinding, smoke coiled through the decks of Forwards. The piled rubbish evacuated from Deck 25 on to Decks 24 and 23 had been set alight. Nobody cared; everyone was suddenly a pyromaniac. Automatic devices throughout most of the ship had a simple way of coping with outbreaks of fire: they closed off the room in which the fire began and exhausted the air from it. Unluckily, this fire was started in a room where the devices had failed, and in the open corridors.

Scoyt and his fellow destroyers worked on uncomplainingly in the smoke. An impartial observer, seeing these men, would have known that an inner fury possessed them; that a life-long
hatred of the ship which imprisoned them had at last found expression and was working itself out with uncheckable force.

The Giants struck cleverly.

Scoyt had just burnt round one wall of a small washroom and was resting while three of his men removed the wall, so that it shielded him momentarily from the view of the others. At that instant, the grille overhead was whipped away, and a Giant fired a gas pellet at Scoyt. It caught the Master in the face. He collapsed without a sound.

A cord ladder snaked down from the grille. One of the Giants skipped down it and seized the heat gun from Scoyt’s limp grasp. As he did so, the severed wall toppled over on top of him and stunned him: the three handlers had been careless and did not mean to let it go. They stared in utter surprise at the Giant. As they did so, three more Giants dropped down the ladder, fired at them, picked up their mate and the heat gun and attempted to get back to safety.

Despite the smoke, other people had seen this foray. One of Gregg’s ablest assassins, a fellow called Black, sprang forward. The hindmost Giant, who had just reached the grille, came crashing down again with a knife stuck in his back; the heat gun rolled from his grasp. Shouting for assistance, Black retrieved his knife and bounded up the ladder. He, too, fell back to the floor with a face full of gas. Others were behind him. Jumping him, they pressed on, swarming up the ladder and through the grille.

Then began a terrific running fight in the cramped space of the inspection ways. The Giants had cut through the actual air duct to get into the inspection way proper, but were hampered in their retreat by their injured companion. Reinforcements arrived for them on one of the low inspection trucks which had once carried Complain. Meanwhile, round pipes and stanchions, the Forwarders harried them in increasing numbers.

It was a strange world to fight in. The inspection ways ran
round every level and between each deck. They were unlit; the torches which now erratically lit them produced a weird web of shadows among the girders. For a solitary sniper, the place was ideal; for a pack of them, it was hell: friend could no longer be told from foe.

At this stage in affairs, Gregg arrived from the council room to take control. He soon produced order out of the random give and take. Even the Forwarders obeyed him now Scoyt was temporarily out of action.

‘Somebody bring me that heat gun,’ he bellowed. ‘Everyone else follow me back to Deck 20. If we get down the inspection hatches there, we can take the Giants from the rear.’

It was an excellent idea. The only drawback – and it explained how the Giants still managed to move unseen from deck to deck, despite the removal of all trap-doors – was that the inspection ways extended right round the circumference of the ship, just inside the hull, thus surrounding the rooms of all upper levels. Until this was realized, the Giants’ movements could never be blocked. The ship was more complex than Gregg had bargained for. His men, streaming wildly down the trap-doors, could not find the enemy.

Gregg did as his wild nature dictated. He blazed a way ahead with the heat gun, turning molten every obstacle in his path.

Never before had the inspection ways been open to the inhabitants of the ship; never before had a madly brandished laser played among all those delicate capillaries of the vessel.

Within three minutes of switching on power, Gregg ruptured a sewer sluice and a main water pipe. The water jetted out and knocked a crawling man flat, playing wildly over him, drowning him, streaming and cascading over everything, seething between the metal sandwich of decks.

‘Switch that thing off, you crazy loon!’ one of the Forwards men, sensing danger, yelled at Gregg.

For answer, Gregg turned the heat on him.

A power cable went next. Sizzling, rearing like a cobra, live
wire flashed across the rails the inspection trucks ran on; two men died without a chirp.

The gravity blew. Over that entire deck, free fall suddenly snapped into being. Nothing so quickly produces panic as the sensation of falling. The stampede which followed in that constricted area only made matters worse. Gregg himself, though he had had experience of zero gravity, lost his head and dropped the gun. It rebounded gently up at him. Screaming, his beard flaming, he punched away the blazing muzzle with his fist . . .

During this pandemonium, Complain and Vyann stood by Master Scoyt, who had just been brought up on a stretcher to his own room. Having had a taste of the gas himself, Complain could sympathize with the still unconscious Master.

He could smell the gas lingering in Scoyt’s hair: he could also smell burning. A glance upwards showed him a tendril of smoke probing through the overhead grilles.

‘That fire the fools started two decks down – the air duct system is going to carry the smoke everywhere!’ he exclaimed to Vyann. ‘It ought to be stopped.’

‘If we could only close the inter-deck doors . . .’ she said. ‘Ought we to get Roger out of here?’

Even as she spoke, Scoyt stirred and groaned. Plunging water over his face, massaging his arms, they were too busy to notice the shouts in the corridor; there had been so much shouting that a little more went unremarked until, the door suddenly crashing open, Councillor Tregonnin entered.

‘Mutiny!’ he said. ‘Mutiny! I feared as much. Oh hem, what will happen to us all? I said from the start that that Deadways gang should never be allowed in here. Can’t you rouse Scoyt? He’d know what to do! I’m not
supposed
to be a man of action.’

Complain fixed him with a surly eye. The little librarian was almost dancing on his toes, his face gawky with excitement.

‘What seems to be the trouble?’ he asked.

With a visible effort, Tregonnin pulled himself up before that contemptuous stare.

‘The ship is being wrecked,’ he said, more steadily. ‘That madman Hawl – the fellow with the little head – has the heat gun. Your brother was injured. Now most of his gang – and many of our men – are simply pulling everywhere to bits. I ordered them to stop and surrender the gun, but they just laughed at me.’

‘They’ll obey Scoyt,’ Complain said grimly. He began shaking Scoyt insistently.

‘I’m afraid, Roy. I can’t help feeling something terrible is going to happen,’ Vyann said.

One glance at her face told Complain how worried she was. He stood up beside her, stroking her upper arm.

‘Keep working on Master Scoyt, Councillor,’ he told Tregonnin. ‘He’ll soon be lively enough to solve all your problems for you. We’ll be back.’

He hustled a surprised Vyann out into the corridor. A thin dribble of water crept along the deck, dripping into the manholes.

‘Now what?’ she asked him.

‘I was a fool not to think of this before,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to risk pulling the place down about our heads to get to the Giants – unless there is another way. And there is another way. Zac Deight has an instrument in his room by which he spoke to Curtis, the Giants’ leader.’

‘Don’t you remember, Roy, Marapper said Zac Deight had gone?’ she said.

‘We may be able to find the way to work the instrument without him,’ Complain replied. ‘Or we may find something else there that will be useful to us. We are doing no good here, that’s sure.’

He spoke ironically, as six Forwards men, pelting silently along, brushed past him. Everyone seemed to be on the run, splashing down the corridors; no doubt the spiked stench of burning hustled them on. Taking Vyann’s soft hand, Complain
led her rapidly along to Deck 17 and down to the lower level. The trap-door covers lay about like discarded gravestones, but already the guards over them had deserted their posts to seek excitement elsewhere.

Halting before the room in which he had left the dazed councillor, Complain levelled his torch and flung open the door.

Zac Deight was there, sitting on a metal stool. So was Marapper, his bulky body eased into a chair; he had a dazer clamped in his hand.

‘Expansions to your egos, children,’ he said. ‘Come in, Roy, come in. And you too, Inspector Vyann, my dear!’

‘What the hull do you think you’re doing here, Marapper, you oily old villain?’ Complain asked in surprise.

The priest, ignoring this unpleasant form of address, which Complain would never have employed in the old days, was as usual only too ready to explain. He was here, he said, with the express purpose of torturing the last secret of the ship out of Zac Deight, but had hardly begun to do so since, although he had been here some while, he had only just managed to pull the councillor back to consciousness.

‘But you told the council meeting he was not here when you came to look for him,’ Vyann said.