THE HELMSMAN: Director's Cut Edition (10 page)

The black-uniformed
Overmann
only raised her eyebrows. “How good of you,” she sneered, then turned on her heel and walked away as if the studious-looking starfleet officer simply didn't exist. It was graphic proof to Brim that even though rank names might be the same in both Starfleet and Controller organizations, actual power was lopsidedly vested with the latter.

The man shrugged, embarrassed, then watched his counterpart disappear along the K tube in the opposite direction Brim had come. “Controllers,” he said, shaking his head. After a moment, he turned to the slim rating beside him. “Locar,” he ordered, “you and Koch'kiss follow while I lead 'em to the interrogation chamber.” Then he stopped and frowned. “Ah ... how many of 'em are there anyway?” he asked.

“I don't know,
Overmann,”
Locar said. “She didn't say.”

The officer raised an eyebrow. “I suppose we'd better know that,” he said, standing on tiptoe. “Let's see...”

Brim suddenly jumped as he heard his name growled in a whisper from directly behind his back. “Make a break for it, Wilf Ansor,” Ursis' voice urged in a fierce whisper. “Now, before they can make that count!” Immediately, he roared at the top of his voice in feigned,
deafening
, agony. Brim whirled just in time to see the Bear sink to the deck, writhing in the grip of what could only be a seizure of the deadliest kind. Stunned by the sudden outcry, the two gray-suited ratings jerked around in dumb surprise, only to be knocked into a welter of flying arms and legs by a suddenly howling and wide-eyed Barbousse. In the burgeoning confusion, Brim dropped to his knees and scuttled toward a nearby hatch, praying to every power in the Universe it was not secured. With a paroxysm of tension, he grabbed the latch. It moved! In one motion, he smashed the hatch open with his shoulder, blindly threw himself through, and slammed it closed behind him, gagging on the sudden sick-sweet foulness of TimeWeed, the mysterious,
poisonous
, narcotic many Controllers were known to smoke (indeed, some were rumored to
eat
it!). Before him, dressed only in ceremonial loincloth, the room's occupant bounded up from his bunk, slowed by the drug but surprisingly agile for all that — and clearly alerted by the commotion outside his room. Roaring in anger, the Leaguer grabbed a blast pike from a nearby rack and swung the heavy weapon toward Brim's stomach. Desperately, the Carescrian grabbed its barrel and fiercely wrenched it off to one side, jerking awkwardly. The dazed Controller howled in surprise, overbalanced, and began to tumble forward, a look of bestial rage on his face. He recovered and ripped the weapon from Brim's hands, swinging its clumsy barrel like a club. Spontaneously, Brim stepped in close, the man's breath stale in his face, grabbed his slippery armpits, and drove a knee into the loincloth with all the strength he could muster.

Eyes wide as saucers, the Controller bellowed in hoarse agony. Retching on Brim's battle suit, he dropped the pike and grabbed convulsively for his smashed testicles. Instinctively, Brim reverted to Academy training: He cocked his fist at a right angle, then smashed the heel of his hand upward into the base of the other's nose. With a brackling crunch, snapped bone and cartilage punctured the frontal lobes of the man’s brain like tiny stilettos.

The Controller's eyes — still open in mortal agony — glazed and rolled upward as he sank to his knees, blood guttering from his nostrils, then he toppled face first to the deck.

Panting desperately, Brim sank to his own wobbly knees, hands trembling convulsively. Air! Light-headed, he shook his head wildly —
the TimeWeed
! It was still burning somewhere, filling the room with deadly narcotic fumes. The whole Universe seemed to have slowed around him. He felt light-headed and introspective. His mind was expanding, growing more and more perspicacious, more conceptualizing… He was losing control!

Using his last vestiges of strength, he willed himself to the bunk. There! The man's pipe of TimeWeed lay in a bulkhead alcove, thick smoke writhing heavily from its bowl. He lifted it in weak hands, then somehow found himself at the metal washstand. He mashed open the water valve, shoved the pipe into the trickling stream. The fragile bowl hissed, shattered with a snap, but the smoke stopped. Senses reeling, Brim next pulled himself up to the basin, reached above the top of the wash fixture itself, and dialed the atmosphere controls to “ALL FILTERED.” A sudden hissing filled the room as he slithered again to his knees, gasping desperately. Why? How could anyone do such things to himself? He felt himself falling, hit his chin on the basin, almost blacked out from the pain. Then a rush of cool air hit his lungs like a runaway starship, and his head began to clear. Some cycles later — he never remembered how many — he was on the deck, grinning stupidly, huffing like some sort of animal. He'd made it!

Suddenly, a persistent buzzing overhead brought him jumping again to his feet. What now? His watering eyes searched the room. An alarm? Finally,
there,
over the door, an old-fashioned summons hooter, like the ones on ore carriers. Heart beating with fresh apprehension, he stepped over the sprawling corpse, reached above the door, and flipped the device from “MONITOR” to “RECEIVE.” Then he waited in sudden and terrifying silence. Whatever new fate awaited his eleven comrades outside in the K tube, it was evidently now decided.

In due time, the hooter answered his summons with the tinny imitation of a woman's voice:
“Officient
Zotreb?”

Brim eyed the body at his feet. So that was the name of the man he killed. He shuddered. “Yes?” he responded in Vertrucht, muffling his voice through a fist.

“Officient?”

“Yes. “

“You do not sound yourself,
Officient
Zotreb.”

Heart in his mouth for the hundredth time since he left
Truculent,
Brim searched the bare walls for an answer — deciding attack was his best defense. “And just what is it you expect?” he snapped angrily, still muffling his voice.

“N-Nothing,
Officient,”
the voice responded placatingly.

“You will concentrate on your own concerns in the future,” Brim growled. “Now, what message disturbs my contemplation of the Weed?” he demanded.

“S-Sorry,
Officient,”
the voice said. “The call
was
placed at your personal request.”

“Well, get on with it, damn your worthless hide!”

“Y-Yes sir. You are due on the bridge in twenty cycles,
Officient.
“

“And that is all?”

“Yes,
Officient.”

“Acknowledged,” Brim spat, then turned the device back to “MONITOR.” He frowned, concentrating. Twenty cycles of relative safety before they started looking for Zotreb. After that, it was just a matter of time until… He snorted. He couldn't very well just sit in the cabin. Ursis hadn't set up his escape so he could run away to hide. And now that he found himself with a few options again, it was necessary he make the most of his time and do something about the disaster their mission had become. Soon! Every cycle brought the little crew closer to an enemy spaceport and slavery or death — eventually the latter, in any case.

Brim suddenly grimaced. Of course.
That
was the answer. Whatever else he might accomplish, it was necessary first to stop the corvette. That meant getting himself to the engineer's flat in the aftmost module and somehow disabling the starship's single gravity generator. Its uneven rumble irritated him almost as much as the Controllers. But how could he get all the way back there? His answer came from the corpse.

The late
Officient
Zotreb had no further use for his uniforms now, but Wilf Brim did. In less than five cycles, the Carescrian was dressed in one of the dead man's hated black uniforms, too big overall, but a lot less noticeable than his own bright blue Imperial battle suit. He consulted his timepiece. About fifteen cycles remained, perhaps forty until they started looking and found the body. After that, Universe knew. But one step at a time.

Wiping clotted blood from Zotreb's big blast pike, he carefully opened the door, peered both ways along the empty K tube, then started aft toward the propulsion module at what he hoped was a casual rate of speed.

Footsteps echoing in the smooth-walled tube, Brim didn't get far at all before his disguise was put to the test. A gray-clad rating, arm around a bundle of logic assemblies, appeared suddenly from a companionway, turned on his heel, and passed at a fast walk. He saluted but never lifted his eyes. Brim breathed a deep sigh of relief as he entered the ship's central module, carefully memorizing everything he saw. One never knew....

Unlike similar modules built
around
a K tube, this corvette's central globe was
part
of the tube itself: A place where the long, cannular structure swelled to a spherical chamber before shrinking again at the point opposite his present position. The walkway cantilevered across twenty irals of open space to meet its counterpart on the other side.

Centered in the chamber, a glowing vertical tube divided the catwalk and extended through wide, circular openings at the top and bottom of the room, beyond which would be control rooms located just inboard of the ship's 99—mmi disruptor turrets. Brim easily picked out the firing consoles (triggering gear all looked pretty much the same everywhere) in the harsh light that streamed from the rooms and provided most of the illumination around him. Elsewhere in the chamber, great power conduits sprang from the aft opening to the K tube and disappeared within the brilliance of the rooms. Numerous ledges jutting from the curved inner walls contained consoles — some manned, most not — many of which Brim could not identify. These oddly placed displays cast random, moving patterns of colored lights throughout the strange spherical chamber and everything it contained. Clearly, a great deal of the activity that took place on the bridge of an Imperial warship was decentralized throughout this ship. A nice point of design, he allowed, for a warship. It would make her much harder to knock out with one well-placed hit. But it also denied the close team atmosphere that resulted from concentrating decision-making power. He filed it away in his mind as he strode (more confident looking, he hoped, then he felt) across the catwalk, gripping Zotreb's blast pike and trying to act as if he belonged where he was. If he ever got back to his own side of the war, the information he memorized could prove handy in many ways. He snorted to himself.
If
he ever got back.

As he moved into the aft continuation of the K tube, more and more gray-clad crew members passed, all avoiding his eyes — most, in fact, cringed while they hurried by as if they were relieved to be out of his way. He smiled to himself: No more relieved than he! Then, passing an open door in the next-to-last module, he heard voices, glanced inside, and was rewarded with a view of five Controllers seated at a circular table, clearly pursuing serious matters among themselves. Putting his haste aside for the moment, he stepped to a position outside the door where he could hear what was gong on but still remain unseen by the conferees. He rested the butt of his blast pike on the deck beside his right boot, then assumed the Universal position of a bored guard. So far as he could remember, he himself seldom questioned armed guards — especially
commissioned
armed guards — and guessed it was a pretty typical reaction. This was verified only moments later when he was passed by three gray-suited ratings (who saluted) and two Controllers (who did not). Not one of them so much as met his eyes.

“The Bear incident is now under control?” a smooth, perfectly modulated voice demanded in Vertrucht from inside.

“It is,
Praefect
Valentin
,”
a younger voice declared, fear just below its surface.

Brim felt his eyebrows raise.
Praefects
were the equivalent of Imperial lieutenant commanders. The corvette was too small for more than one of these, so it was a good bet this Valentin was the ship's commanding officer.

“And the count of prisoners,
Placeman
Naddock — how many prisoners were there?” Valentin’s mellifluous voice demanded.

“Ah,” Naddock’s younger voice began. “Ah, I…” A chair scraped the deck.

“Well,
Placeman
?

“We have all eleven of them locked up,
Prefect,”
a self-assured female voice interrupted impatiently. Brim recognized it as belonging to the scarred
Overmann
Controller from the K tube. “Gray
Overmann
Mocht counted the prisoners just after the Bear experienced his fit.”

Brim smiled:
Eleven, eh
? Ursis' distraction had come just in time. They didn’t know he was loose — yet.

“You had better hope the Gray fool's count is accurate, my scarred beauty,” Valentin said with an audible sneer. “Or I shall make certain you both spend the remainder of the war on the ground — armed only with blast pike and sword. I am certain you will enjoy brawling with the Wild Ones on the Sodeskayan front!”

This was followed by a sharp intake of breath and then silence.

In the hall, Brim returned the melancholic salute of a fat, gray-suited rating with a painful-looking, very swollen, black eye, who limped slowly along the corridor. Souvenir of Ursis' free-for-all in the K tube, he guessed, hard put to stifle a smile.

“Well, what then have you planned for our visitors from the Empire,
Placeman
Zodekk?” the
Prefect's
voice demanded from inside. “I haven't all day. We dock in only a few metacycles.”

“Oh, we are keeping the prisoners busy, sir,” another female voice answered, this one with just the hint of a lisp. “They are being questioned one-by-one, even as we speak.”

“Well, go on, pretty fool. What follows that?”

“Wh-When we finish, we shall s-simply shoot them, I suppose… push them out into space.”

“You’ll
what
,” the scarred woman’s voice interrupted. “Use your head, fool. Sentient laborers are scarce on Altnag'gin. Our captives might well serve there as slaves. All appear to be well fed and could survive a long time on next to nothing; am I not correct, Praefect?
”