Godspeed (23 page)

"Get
where?
"

"To the access point. And I said,
no more talking
—until we're inside."

It was obvious that Mel Fury didn't believe we were in danger. He was just using that as an excuse to boss me around. His attitude would change a few minutes later, though not in a way that could give me any pleasure.

We had been heading steadily toward the equator, with Maveen higher and higher in the sky. I was itching to talk, full of a thousand questions, but I managed to hold my tongue. Until suddenly Mel Fury stopped and inclined his head to the left. "Someone. Voices. Over that way."

I couldn't hear a thing. And if I had, the last thing I would have done is head
toward
trouble. But that's what he did, snaking silently through a dense ferny growth with spiky leaves and blue flowers at the top. I had no choice but to follow.

Soon I could hear voices, too. Or at least one voice. It was Sean Wilgus, loud and high-pitched. I wanted to back away, but Mel Fury went on moving forward on his hands and knees. I slowly crawled after him, until at last he halted.

We had come to a roughly oval area where the ferny plants diminished from head-high to knee-high. Fury and I, lying flat on our bellies and out of sight, had a worm's-eye view of the whole clearing. Sean Wilgus stood at one side, a gun in his hand—the same gun, I was sure, that had killed Walter Hamilton. On the other side, arms folded and massaging his biceps, stood Danny Shaker. His knees and elbows were crusted with mud and his hair hung damp over his forehead, but he had a half-smile on his face. And now I could hear his voice, too.

"I'm accused of many things, Sean," he was saying. "And some of them are even true. But not what you've been saying."

"You're the only one as thinks so." Sean Wilgus's voice was angry, but he also sounded nervous. "You can't deny it. Drag us to the ass-end of the universe, promise us wealth, promise us a new ship, promise us women—"

"Not me, Sean. I said no such things. It was others made up all those. I told you I
hoped
that we'd find something valuable on this trip, but I said there was a good chance we'd receive no more than our pay—and very good pay, as you well know."

Wilgus didn't seem to hear him. "All this way," he went on, "for nothing, in a ship that's on her last legs. You know the
Cuchulain
's not what it was. A few more trips, the engines will be done for. And you drag us out here."

"True enough. The
Cuchulain
is creaking at the joints. But that's exactly why we gambled on a trip to the Maze. We need more money than we'd get from a dozen scrounging trips for light elements, if we're to get the
Cuchulain
in shape." Shaker had not raised his voice. He sounded relaxed, almost soothing. "But don't change the subject on me. You've never said one word to answer
my
accusation, Sean. Are you going to? You can't deny you killed Walter Hamilton, others vouched for it. Aye, and for all I know you killed young Jay Hara, too, and hid his body. You say it was all done in self-defense, but I don't accept that. You have a temper, Sean. I think you killed in anger. If you didn't, then let me hear you deny it."

"I did it to protect myself. Hamilton was going to shoot me. I never touched Jay Hara."

"So you say." Shaker finally moved, but only to shift his hands from his biceps to his trouser pockets. He took one step, to lean forward balanced on the balls of his feet. "But you're a good crewman, Sean, and one that we need. So I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. Hand over your gun now, and let me make sure you don't have another one hidden away somewhere. Then I'll let you go back to work as one of the crew. There'll be no more firearms for you, though, on this trip."

Wilgus hesitated. "And no punishment?"

"That's for all the crew to decide. I'll not make that decision alone."

"Bullshit! You control them, and you know it."

Danny Shaker sighed and took his left hand out of his trouser pocket. He held it palm up toward Wilgus. "The gun, Sean. Let me have it."

Sean Wilgus lifted the gun he was holding. But instead of offering it handle-first, he sighted it at Danny Shaker. I could not see his face, but his arm was trembling.

Shaker laughed. "A shoot-out?" he said. "Now, Sean, you know me better than that. You know I've never been one to carry firearms." He might have been saying that he didn't like artichokes, or wearing green shirts, for all the tension and worry in his voice. He took three more steps forward, so that he was no more than fifteen feet from Sean Wilgus. "The gun. Come on, man, be sensible. Hand it over."

"No."

Shaker took another couple of steps. "Don't do something you're going to regret, Sean. Give me that gun."

Wilgus nodded. But he wasn't going to obey Shaker's order. I could see his finger tightening on the trigger. I was tempted to leap up and shout a warning to Danny Shaker. No matter what I thought he had done, I couldn't see him shot down in cold blood.

It was too late. I heard two shots, and instinctively flinched. When I looked up again at Danny Shaker, he was still standing exactly where he had been.

I couldn't believe my eyes. Wilgus, incredibly, had missed.

And then I glanced over to Sean Wilgus, and saw him crumpling silently to the ground. His face turned my way, and I could see the two holes, one next to his nose and one in the middle of his forehead.

Danny Shaker removed his right hand from his trouser pocket and stared down at the white-handled pistol he was holding. He walked forward to stand by Sean Wilgus and shook his head.

"I told you I've never been one to carry firearms, Sean," he said quietly to the body at his feet. "And that's no more than simple truth. If I took Walter Hamilton's gun when I was trying to decide for myself how he died, well, some would say this was no more than justice."

I wondered if Wilgus was dead, or just pretending, because Danny Shaker was chatting to him as though the two of them were sitting down having a drink together. His next words ended that illusion.

"Rest in peace, Sean. You'll never know how sad it made me to press that trigger. A good worker, you were, maybe the best on the ship. But with one fatal flaw, the temper you never could control. What a waste of human talent." Shaker shook his head and glanced thoughtfully down at his own person. "Aye, and not only that. There's goes a perfectly good pair of trousers, too."

He ran his fingers over the bullet holes in the cloth, stuck the pistol back in his pocket, and bent to take Sean Wilgus's gun from the crewman's dead hand. As he straightened up he slowly turned, through a full circle. I had a moment of complete terror when I was sure he knew we were there and was going to come across to us. Then he gave the odd, fluting whistle that I had first heard from him on the Muldoon Port ferry site. I heard a far-off answering whistle. Shaker gave the call again, bowed his head toward Sean Wilgus, and pushed his way into the ferns.

All during the confrontation in the clearing I had taken no notice of Mel Fury, nor he I think of me. We had lain side by side, silent and frozen as statues. As Danny Shaker vanished I turned my head. Fury's face beneath its layer of dirt was an awful pale-green color, and he seemed ready to throw up. I doubt if I looked any better. In all my life I had seen only three dead men, and two of those had been murdered in my presence within the past twenty-four hours.

Mel Fury stood up, nodded vaguely at me, and stepped carefully into the clearing. He circled its boundary, keeping well away from the body of Sean Wilgus. So did I. If Wilgus had another weapon on him, as Danny Shaker had suggested, I did not have the nerve to search him for it.

Fury headed south again through the ferns. I stayed close behind. I had lost all desire to talk. There would be a time for questions—when we were somewhere safe. My appetite had vanished, too, although I felt totally hollow inside.

We were close to the equator of
Paddy's Fortune
when Fury hopped across a little ditch, no more than two feet wide. "Here we are," he said softly. "Stand still while we're sensed and we'll go inside. Whatever you do, don't move once you're on it."

I followed him, stared around, and saw that the ditch was in the form of a complete circle with the two of us standing within its boundary. The plants beneath my feet were a dwarf version of the familiar blue-flowered fern, and the earth beneath was soft and spongy.

Nothing new—except that while the thought was in my head I realized that we were sinking. Not
into
the surface, which was my immediate worry, but
with
the surface. A circle of ground within the ditch was descending, and us with it.

I crouched, ready for an instinctive jump to get clear, but Fury grabbed my arm. We rode together, down and down, until the ground was level with my eyes, and then far above me. It was suddenly darker. I was peering into shadowy gloom as Fury pulled me forward, off the soft ground and onto some rigid surface. The circle we had been standing on changed its direction of travel, rising until it blocked the light from above and left me standing in frightening darkness. I thought of flesh-crawling horror stories of my childhood, with their trolls and goblins and trogs, the creatures that lived underground among the roots of trees and drank human blood.

And then lights came on all around us, and I found myself standing in a big room whose walls, floor and furnishings looked like nothing more than the internal partitions and fixtures of the
Cuchulain.

We were "inside." Mel Fury, filthier than ever—I saw new streaks of mud on his backpack and clothes and skinny white arms and legs—was heading for the door of the chamber. I had no choice but to follow. But as the door slid open at our approach, I couldn't help wondering: Was I going to be any better off here than wandering the surface of
Paddy's Fortune,
pursued by Danny Shaker and his cutthroat helpers?

CHAPTER 19

The first thing I saw beyond the door was as familiar in a way as anything could be; when Mel Fury and I went into the next room I found myself facing two filthy, straggle-haired stick figures.

One of them was me.

The whole opposite wall was metal, shiny and flat enough to be a good mirror. My reflection's face was a mask of mud interrupted by red scratches and welts, and my arms and legs showed through rents in my pants and jacket. I was in worse shape than Mel.

He did not stop to stare but gestured to the right, where the wall held a matched set of doors.

"It's a real pain," he said, "but we have to do it before we'll be fed dinner. Better get it over with. Take the one next to me."

He went through a door and closed it behind him. After a moment's hesitation I went through a neighboring one. I found myself in a little cubicle without windows or furnishings. There was an exit door at the opposite end, and a hatch by my right hand with two handles set above it.

What was I supposed to do next? The door in front of me resisted my push, so after a few moments I turned one of the handles. Before I could move, jets of hot water were hitting me from all sides. I yelped in surprise and turned the handle the other way. The water jets cut off at once.

A shower; except for the controls it was not much different from the low-gravity units on the
Cuchulain.
The hatches below the controls ought to dispense clean clothes and take away dirty ones.

I emptied my pockets. Walter Hamilton's book was damp, but it was designed to work in all weathers. And if Paddy Enderton's computer had been able to survive a night of snow and slush in the bottom of the boat by Lake Sheelin, a brief wetting was unlikely to hurt it. I put them both on a shelf high above the level of the water jets, and stripped to the skin.

Three minutes later, laved in streams of hot water and then dried in the jets of warm air that followed, I felt ready to lie down on the floor of the cubicle and go to sleep. I also felt ready to cry, something I had not done since I was nine years old. It had been a terrible day. Only the conviction that cocky Mel Fury would mock me if I wept kept me dry-eyed.

I finally opened the hatch and placed my wet and filthy clothes inside it. They dropped out of sight, and I had a worrying minute until new ones rolled out of a slit in the hatch's rear. The clothes were clean, the same light-grey that Mel Fury had been wearing, and by some mystery they were exactly the same size and style as the ones that I had removed, even to being a little bit short in the legs. But there was no sign of shoes. My old, soaked ones had gone, and for the moment I would have to go barefoot.

I retrieved the book and computer from the shelf and looked unsuccessfully for some way to comb my wet hair. At last I gave up and pushed it back off my forehead with my fingers. While I was doing that, the door in front of me opened by itself.

When I went through and saw what was in the room beyond, I had one of those strange moments in life when about eighteen thoughts at once hit you so fast and chaotic you don't know which came first.

I saw Mel Fury waiting for me, clean and dry and newly dressed—and barefoot—in the middle of a big low-ceilinged room with bright yellow walls and half a dozen doors. Without the coating of mud and grime, his face was pale, as though he had never been out in the sun. I realized that he really hadn't, compared with me, because
Paddy's Fortune was
so far away from Maveen. Around Mel stood a dozen other people. They were all about the same age, all dressed the same, and every one as skinny and pale as Mel. At first glance they looked identical, though I later realized they were all very different. Every one of them was staring expectantly in my direction.

I said
people.
But then I realized it was not just people. They were
females.
And not just females.
Girls.
More girls than I had ever seen in one place in my whole life.

And—at last—I caught on. Mel Fury, now that she was cleaned up, had to be a girl, too, though her hair was close-cropped where the others wore theirs long. I had been fooled by that, but even more by the fact that when I met Mel she was dirty and wild and energetic, running uncontrolled through the jungle growth of
Paddy's Fortune.
Girls didn't do that! Girls were delicate and protected and pampered. Girls were
never
exposed to any risk of being injured.