Upon a Sea of Stars (58 page)

Finally, all the convicts were seated at the long tables, their sluggishly steaming plastic bowls—those that were still steaming, that is; by this time, the meals of those first in the queue must have been almost cold—before them, waiting for the prison padre, standing at his lectern, to intone grace. It was on the lines of: For what we about to receive this day may the Lord make us truly thankful.

As soon as he was finished, there was a commotion near the head of one of the tables. A man jumped to his feet. It was, I saw, Wallace, the ex-spaceman.

“Thankful for this shit, you smarmy bastard?” he shouted. “This isn’t fit for pigs, and you know it!”

The guards suddenly became alert. They converged upon Wallace with their stun guns out and ready. They made the mistake of assuming that Wallace was the only troublemaker. The guards were tripped, some of them, and others blinded by the bowls of stew flung into their faces. Their pistols were snatched from their hands.

“Get out of here, John,” said Don Smith urgently. He pulled me back from the entrance to the mess hall. “Get out of here! There’s nothing you can do. Get back to your ship. Use your radio to tell Helmskirk what’s happening. . . .”

“But surely your people,” I said, “will have things under control. . . .”

“I . . . I hope so. But this has been brewing for quite some time.”

By this time we were well away from the mess hall, but the noise coming from it gave us some idea of what was happening—and what was happening wasn’t at all pleasant for the guards. And there were similar noises coming from other parts of the prison complex. And there was a clangor of alarm bells and a shrieking of sirens and an amplified voice, repeating over and over, “All prison officers report at once to the citadel! All prison officers report at once to the citadel!”

Don Smith said, “You’d better come with me.”

I said, “I have to get back to my ship.”

He said, “You’ll never find the way to the air lock.”

I said, “I’ve got a good sense of direction.”

So he went one way and I went another. My sense of direction might have served me better if I had not been obliged to make detours to avoid what sounded like small-scale battles ahead of me in that maze of tunnels. And the lights kept going out and coming on again, and when they were on kept flickering in an epilepsy-inducing rhythm. I’m not an epileptic, but I felt as though I were about to become one. During one period of darkness I tripped over something soft, and when the lights came on found that it was a body, that of one of the female prison officers. Her uniform had been stripped from the lower part of her body, and it was obvious what had been done to her before her throat had been cut. And there was nothing that I could do for her.

At last, at long, long last, more by good luck than otherwise, I stumbled into the big air lock chamber in which
Little Sister
was berthed. There were people standing by her. The guards, I thought at first, still at their posts. Then the lights temporarily flared into normal brightness, and I saw that the uniform coveralls were zebra-striped. But I kept on walking. After all, I was just an innocent bystander, wasn’t I?

Wallace—it had to be he—snarled, “You took your time getting here.”

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

“What the hell do you think? But we wouldn’t be here now if we could get your air lock door open.”

“And suppose you could, what then?”

“That, Skipper, is a remarkably stupid question.”

I looked at Wallace and his two companions. I looked at the sacks at their feet. I could guess what was in them. The lights were bright again, and I saw that the other two convicts were women—and that one of them was Evangeline. She looked at me, her face expressionless.

“What are you waiting for, Skipper?” almost shouted Wallace.

I’m playing for time, I thought, although I hadn’t a clue as to what I could do with any time I gained.

Wallace shot me with his stun gun. It wasn’t on the Stun setting but one that which gave the victim a very painful shock, one that lasted for as long as the person using the gun wished. It seemed to be a very long time in this case, although it could have been no more than seconds. When it was over, I was trembling in every limb and soaked in cold perspiration.

“Want another dose, Skipper?” Wallace demanded.

“You’d better open up, Captain,” said Evangeline in an emotionless voice. She was holding a gun, too, pointed in my direction. So was the other woman.

So what could I do? Three, armed, against one, unarmed.

There was more than one way of getting into
Little Sister
. The one that I favored, if the ship was in an atmosphere, was by voice. It always amused guests. And it worked only for me, although I suppose that a really good actor, using the right words, could have gained ingress.

“Open Sesame,” I said.

The door slid open.

And while Wallace and the woman whom I didn’t know had their attention distracted by this minor miracle, Evangeline shot them both with her stun gun.

“Hurry,” she said to me, throwing the sacks of mood opals into the air lock chamber. “Lend a hand, can’t you?”

No, I didn’t lend a hand, but I accompanied her into the ship. I used the manual air lock controls to seal the lock. I went forward to the control cab, my intention being to try to raise somebody, anybody, on my radio telephone to tell them what had been happening—and to try to find out what was still happening.

She said, from just behind me, “Get us out of here, Captain.”

I asked, “Do you expect me to ram my way out of the air lock chamber?”

She said, “Wallace’s men have taken over the air lock control room. If they hear my voice and see my face in their telescreen, they’ll open up.”

“But there’s also a screen,” I said, “that gives a picture of the air lock chamber. They must have seen what happened outside the ship, when you buzzed Wallace and the girl.”

“Very luckily,” she said, “that screen got smashed during the fight when we took over the control center.”

She’d seen me operate the NST transceiver when I was making my approach to Port Helms the voyage that she’d stowed away. She got it switched on—the controls were simple—without having to ask for instruction except for the last important one.

“What channel do I call on?”

“Hold it,” I said. I had acquired quite a dislike for Wallace but had nothing against his girlfriend. “The air’s going to be exhausted from the chamber before the outer doors open.”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. . . .”

I activated the screens that showed me what was going on outside the ship. (From the control cab our only view was forward.) I saw that Wallace was just getting groggily to his feet, assisted by the girl, who must have made a faster recovery that he had. I spoke into the microphone that allowed me to talk to anybody outside the hull.

“Wallace,” I said, “get out of the chamber, fast! It’s going to open up—and you know what that means!”

He did know. He raised his right hand and shook his fist. I saw his mouth forming words, and I could guess what sort of words they were. Then he turned from
Little Sister
and made for the door leading into the interior of Sheol at a shambling run, with the girl trailing after. No women and children first as far as he was concerned.

“Channel six,” I told Evangeline. “Evangeline here,” I heard her say. “We’re all aboard, and the stones. Open up.”

“We’re relying on you to spend the money you get for the stones where it will do the most good! I hope Wallace can find his way to the nearest Shaara world, where there’ll be a market and no questions asked!”

“We’ll persuade Grimes to do the navigating.”

“Are you taking him with you?” I was annoyed by the lack of interest and regretted, briefly, having allowed Wallace to escape from certain asphyxiation. “Stand by. Opening up. Bon voyage.”

But opening up took time. The air had to be exhausted from the chamber first. How long would it take Wallace to reach the control center? From my own controls I had a direct view overhead. At last I saw the two valves of the air lock door coming apart, could see the black sky and the occasional star in the widening gap. I had
Little Sister
’s inertial drive running in neutral and then applied gentle thrust. We lifted, until we were hovering just below the slowly opening doors.

Was there enough room?

Yes, barely.

I poured on the thrust and we scraped through, almost literally. And just in time. In the belly-view screen I saw that the doors were closing again, fast. Wallace had reached the control center just too late.

And I kept going.

“Back to Helmskirk,” said Kitty Kelly, “to hand that poor girl back to the authorities. They must really have put the boot in this time.”

“I said,” Grimes told her, “that I kept on going. Not to Port Helms. To a
Shaara world called Varoom, where we could flog those stones with no awkward questions asked. I considered that I owed far more loyalty to Evangeline than to the Helmskirk wowsers.”

“But what about those prison guards under siege in their citadel? Didn’t you owe them some loyalty?”

“One or two of them, perhaps,” he admitted. “But what could I have done? And, as a shipmaster, my main loyalty was to my ship.”

“But you could have carried reinforcements, police, from Port Helms to Sheol.”

“In
Little Sister
? She was only a
pinnace, you know. Aboard her, four was a crowd. Too, there was one of the Commission’s Epsilon-class tramps in port. She could be requisitioned as a troopship.”

“But that time charter, Commodore . . . weren’t you tied by that?”

“Oddly enough, no. The original six weeks had expired and it was being renewed week by week. At the time of the mutiny it was due for renewal.”

“And the girl. Evangeline. Did you dump her on that Shaara planet?”

“Of course not,” said Grimes virtuously. “I was rather too fond of her by that time. After we sold the jewels, I carried her to Freedonia, a colony founded by a bunch of idealists who’d take in anybody as long as he or she could claim to be a political refugee. I’d have liked to keep her with me, but there were too many legal complications. She had no papers of any kind, and the authorities on most planets demand documentation from visitors, crew as well as passengers. I got into enough trouble myself for having left Helmskirk without my Outward Clearance.”

“And during your wanderings, before you got to Freedonia, did you lose your priggish high-mindedness?”

He laughed reminiscently. “Yes. I did let her work her passage, as she put it. And I accepted, as a farewell gift, quite a substantial share of the mood opal money.”

She said, not admiringly, “You bastard. I’d just hate to owe you a favor.”

“You’ve got it wrong,” Grimes told her. “I took what she offered because I owed her one.”