Godspeed (28 page)

"I never said I'd be leader." Munroe was as nervous as he was angry. "Robbie, you can vouch for that. All I said was we needed a change. And that was before we heard all this from the chief." He turned to Shaker. "You can see it from our point of view, can't you? We didn't have all the facts you had, all we knew was, we seemed to be going nowhere. Now we've heard the plan, everything's different."

"Not different from where I'm sitting." Shaker had his back to the other three. "I've heard my competence questioned—aye, and had a gun raised against me, when everyone here knows I'm a man who never carries a weapon."

"Joe didn't mean it, Chief." Pat O'Rourke moved around the cabin, so he could see Danny Shaker face to face. "He was just being hasty. You've said yourself that's his biggest fault."

"And one I admit to," said Joe Munroe. "I'd never have fired that gun, Chief, you know that. If you could find a way to forget it, and all we said about needing a change—"

"I can't. I told you, go find somebody else to do the worrying."

"There's nobody else," Robert Doonan wheezed. "An' it's worse than that, Chief. If we go back and tell the others on the
Cuchulain
what we did to you, they'll stuff us out the airlock."

Danny Shaker was leaning back in his chair, arms folded, staring up at Pat O'Rourke. "Tough. You should have thought of all that before you started. But I'm a reasonable man. I can't forget what's happened, but I'm willing to give it one more go. Only I'll tell you something: If I stay on as chief, there'll be no more threats of violence to me. And I'll not stand any talk of cutting Jay's throat, either. He's the one who gives us our best shot at something more than we've ever had, the Godspeed Drive, and he wants to come over to our side. I'm saying I've accepted him as one of ours. You three had better do the same."

There was a general murmur of agreement and relief. "I'm sorry, Jay Hara," said Joe Munroe—a more insincere apology I never heard. "Sorry about what I said. You're crew now, as good as the rest of us. If I can help you with anything, let me know."

"For a start, you fellows can show him how to pilot this beetle," Danny Shaker said. "He's been itching to have a go since first he set eyes on one. Pat, why don't you sit here and give him a bit of a runthrough on the controls. And while you're doing that, I'm going to send a message to the
Cuchulain.
We need a meeting with Doctor Xavier, and I'd rather have it up there than down here."

He grinned at me. "Time you learned to fly, Jay, if you're going to be a spacer. Ready for a lesson?"

I nodded. But it occurred to me that I had just had a lesson, and one more important than flying a cargo beetle.

CHAPTER 22

I had my spaceflight lesson while we were still on the surface of
Paddy's Fortune:
a short one, and more theory than practice, but enough to convince me that Mel and I could have been in space for days before we reached the
Cuchulain.
The cargo beetle in the hands of Danny Shaker or Pat O'Rourke seemed trivially easy to fly. It was anything but. Half the computer and navigational aids shown on the control panel were actually missing or out of action. When it had been a choice of cannibalizing equipment for the
Cuchulain
or for the beetles, the big ship had won every time.

Pat O'Rourke showed me the basics for seat-of-the-pants navigation and flight without instruments. I would like to have continued at the beetle controls, but once Danny Shaker finished his conversation with Eileen Xavier he wanted a rapid passage back to the
Cuchulain.
At the time I thought it was their talk that provided the urge for speed. Later, I decided that a stronger motive was probably Shaker's lack of confidence in Mel. He didn't know her well, but he was certain of one thing: She had to sit in the dark until the beetle was safely docked at the
Cuchulain
and we had a chance to smuggle her aboard.

I wondered what would happen to Danny Shaker if Mel were discovered by one of the crew members. Then it became obvious. Shaker would tell them that
I
had brought her aboard, unknown to him, while he was away from the ship. Whether the crew were angry or not, he would not be blamed.

I was ordered out of the pilot's chair before liftoff and left reluctantly, convinced that now I
really
knew how to fly a cargo beetle. I was desperate to prove as much to Shaker and O'Rourke, but I was not offered the chance.

There was nothing else for me to do until we reached the
Cuchulain,
and I retreated to an out-of-the-way spot near the cabin wall. After a few minutes I reached in my pocket for the book I had taken from Walter Hamilton's body. I had been carrying it around all this time, but without much thought as to what was in it.

I was not much better informed after half an hour of leafing through the electronic pages. I had not realized that the little book had such enormous storage, and without a road map I was pretty much hunting blind. The first two thousand pages were the result of Hamilton's patient screening of every available record, on Erin or off it, for references to the Isolation. A global data search showed me that the Godspeed Drive was mentioned dozens of times, but never in solid detail. No one who made the old records had ever actually
seen
the drive. What did emerge from my rummaging, clearly and directly enough to horrify me, was the devastating effect that the Isolation had produced on Erin. Walter Hamilton in his search had visited hundreds of deserted towns and villages across the planet, looking for old records. Once each had been a thriving settlement. Now most of them were derelict ruins. The population of Erin had once been more than a billion people. Today it was one thirtieth of that, and shrinking.

I wondered about the drive that powered the
Cuchulain.
It was clearly not a Godspeed Drive, although according to Danny Shaker it dated back to before the Isolation. I did a general search on the word, "drive," and was offered a dozen different varieties. Apparently there were cargo drives, planet-to-orbit drives, ship drives rated for humans, hundred-gee drives for urgent unmanned shipment only, low-gee drives for bulk cargo, and a perplexingly named "Slowdrive." The last one was described as experimental and unique to the Maveen system, but it was hard for me to see why anyone might find a use for something that went especially
slow.
The electronic book also offered three-D images of the Slowdrive. As I rotated them they outlined a round-cornered cube, a little bit flattened, with underneath it a set of rings of different sizes, placed one above the other so that they formed a blunt cone with its thick end attached to the cube. The written description of the drive was beyond me. I tagged the whole "Slowdrive" entry with a high-level pointer, to draw my attention to it again when I had more time, and glanced over to the control panel.

We would dock at the
Cuchulain
in a few more minutes—and I would have a meeting with Doctor Eileen that I would rather not think about.

I skipped to the last part of the record. Walter Hamilton had swallowed his initial disappointment on arriving at
Paddy's Fortune,
although he had rejected it at once as a possible site for Godspeed Base. I could almost hear his disdainful sniff as he plowed through the head-high vegetation. But then the scientist had taken over, and in spite of himself he had become fascinated by the biology of the worldlet. Before he died, it was quite apparent to Dr. Hamilton that not only was the world itself an artifact, but the present ecology must be sustained by something other than a natural biological balance.

In another half day he would have been thinking in terms of access to the interior of
Paddy's Fortune
and the control mechanisms that ran the little world. If Sean Wilgus had not been such a bloodthirsty fool, Walter Hamilton might have led the crew to what they were seeking.

I closed the book. The right person to have this was not me, it was Jim Swift. He was also the logical person for the new navaid, because of the data on the Godspeed Drive that the controller had loaded onto it. The problem was that without help from Mel neither I nor Jim Swift might be able to read those data.

I hoped I wouldn't be there when Jim was told what had happened to Walter Hamilton. He had described Hamilton as pompous and conceited, but all the same the two had been friends for many years. I found myself thinking that it simplified matters that the person who had killed Walter Hamilton was himself dead. Was that how real spacers dismissed a killer's death, as natural vengeance?

We were docking at the
Cuchulain,
and the automatic procedures from the mother ship had already taken over. I felt a series of unsettling changes of direction. Danny Shaker seemed immune to them as he walked across to where I was sitting.

"I told the crew that I'd be showing you how to lock the beetle in hull storage. So we'll be the last ones off. I'll also be giving you bigger than usual quarters, until you get used to living spacer-style."

There was no wink or change of facial expression, but I knew exactly what he was saying. As soon as the others were gone he and I would smuggle Mel Fury aboard. Mel would occupy the same quarters as me, and it would be my job to make sure she was not discovered until we had a plausible reason for a passenger's presence—or until we had found a Godspeed Drive. After that, the crew of the
Cuchulain
would be so exultant they would not care if Danny Shaker had on board a hundred passengers.

Like everything that Danny Shaker did, the docking and crew disembarkation went without a hitch. As soon as Pat O'Rourke, the last to leave, had gone, Shaker glanced across to me. "Time to get Mel out, and safe into quarters. I'll go and bring her. By the way, I hope she has no special food requirements?"

"No, she eats whatever we—" I stopped in horror. "How did you know?" Danny Shaker frowned down at the deck. "You should ask,
when
did I know. That's a harder question to answer. The first hint was when you had been outside on the surface, and I kept Mel in the beetle with me. I asked you when you came back what you had learned inside
Paddy's Fortune.
You didn't know what Mel had said, and you were so keen to avoid that question, you pulled out the navigation aid right away and told me all about the Net and the hardware reservoir. That struck me as a desperate act. You had something to hide. Mel had admitted that there were females inside
Paddy's Fortune.
Yet when I told you I was going to discuss later what
Paddy's Fortune
contained, you never once asked me to do it. I could tell from your face that you didn't want to hear about it. I started thinking, female, and after that there were a dozen clues."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to bring Mel Fury out of her hiding place. And then you are going to take her to your new quarters, while I make sure the crew are busy elsewhere."

"You're not going to tell them?"

"That Mel is a girl? Jay, you have a good brain. Use it. Why do you think I wanted to leave
Paddy's Fortune
so quickly?"

"In case Mel became impatient, and wouldn't stay hidden."

"That could have happened, but it wasn't my big worry. I was afraid something might change, and young women would start popping out onto the surface of
Paddy's Fortune
like summer locusts."

"They wouldn't. Mel's an exception."

"How was I to know that? And what sort of control do you think I'd have had over the crew if girls—even one girl—appeared on that world? They would have torn the place apart. They're good spacers, all of them, but they can't hold the big picture in their heads. Women are important, and rare, and they could bring riches. They know that, I know that. But the Godspeed Drive is the key to the whole
universe.
"

"Then why did you bring Mel with us at all? Why not leave her back there?"

"That's good, Jay. You're asking better questions, and I'll give honest answers. If the crew learns that she's a girl, we both know what will happen. I won't be able to stop it. So bringing Mel is no real risk to me, but it is a risk to you, and most of all to
her.
You realize that as well as anyone—and that's why I wanted her along.

"You see, Jay, the one person on this ship who can really help or hinder me isn't Joe Munroe, or Robbie Doonan, or Pat O'Rourke. No, and it's not Eileen Xavier either. It's Jay Hara. You know how to work that gadget you brought along, and I don't. Nor does anyone else, except Mel. Now, maybe I could squeeze it out of either one of you. But isn't it a whole lot better if a person cooperates because he has a mind to? If you and Mel work with me, you have my solemn word: Not a man on board this ship will learn from me that Mel Fury is a girl. Of course, I can't guarantee that one of
you
won't give the game away—as you did to me just now. And I'm going to rely on you to explain to Mel Fury just why she needs to stay hidden, because I don't know if she would believe me. Maybe she won't even believe you. But you have Dan Shaker's word for my end of it, my mouth stays shut as long as you play straight.

"Is it a deal then, Jay?" He held out his hand. "You help me, best you know how, and Mel stays our little secret."

After a moment I took his hand and shook it. Of course, I had no choice. For what Danny Shaker didn't need to say was the other side of his promise: If I didn't help him, "best I knew how," he would certainly make sure that the crew of the
Cuchulain
learned that a young female was on board. After that, nothing he said or did would be able to protect her.

* * *

Danny Shaker probably realized what we were getting into when we decided to keep Mel Fury smuggled away on board the
Cuchulain
until we reached the Net and the hardware reservoir. I know for sure that I didn't, although I suppose I should have, because I already knew that back on
Paddy's Fortune
she had been in the habit of disobeying the controller.

The sort of problems I might face became clear even before we reached my new quarters. I knew the layout of the ship, and I knew just where we were going. Shaker had told us to wait fifteen minutes after he left, and then he promised us another clear quarter hour during which the interior passageways would be deserted.