THE HELMSMAN: Director's Cut Edition (11 page)

“Hmm,” Valentin’s modulated voice intoned. “Indeed a point. Of course, I
have
heard of your — shall we say — predilection for the slower forms of death, my dear. So I cannot grant full credit for your suggestion.” Then he laughed. “But what of the Bear? What should we do with this
most
troublesome Bear?”

“Ah, the Bear receives special treatment, my
Provost,”
the lisping voice interrupted gleefully. “Bearskin coats and carpets are in much demand among Emperor Triannic's royal court in Tarrott this season. It has been quite cold, as you might have heard.”

“The Bear’s skin is mine,
Placeman,”
the
Prefect's
voice said with an ill-concealed irritation.

“Without question, my
Praefect,” a number of voices chimed in. “Without question.”

“That’s better,” Valentin said. “Now, as to the recent trouble in the vestibule module: The next time we take prisoners, you will be extra vigilant at all times; otherwise...”

Heart pounding, Brim left the doorway and started aft again along the K tube. It was imperative that he prolong the corvette's trip in space — once it reached its destination, they all were good as dead. Especially Ursis.

Free passage along the tube ended abruptly in a solid-looking bulkhead and dogged-down hatch at the entrance to the ship's aftmost module. Illuminated warnings mounted on either side of the hatch read “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” and “SIGN IN/OUT REQUIRED BY THE PREFECT.” Below these, a tabulator board hung from a hook, complete with logic scriber, the same kind of portable writing device carried by everyone in the Universe who ever took an inventory or made a survey. It was all Brim needed.

Checking behind himself for activity, he suddenly ripped the tabulator free from its hook — only one person had signed inside. He scrolled the sign-in form from its display, then touched a glowing panel on the hatch before him and waited.

“Yes?” a voice asked from a speaker.

“Radiation-level survey,” Brim answered briskly, pointing to the blank tabulator board as if it were his own.

“Name and rank” the voice demanded.

Brim grimaced, heart pounding. “I have
already
signed that information in the tabulator board you have hanging from your hatch,
fool!”
he blustered, pointing to the empty hook as if it were visible from the other side of the hatch. “Now you open up before I have you fire-flogged. Do you hear?”

“Aye, sir.
Aye,
sir! I h-hear,” the voice stammered as a series of clanks and chatterings announced the opening of the hatch. Brim was almost knocked to the deck as it swung open toward him.

“Th- This way, please,
Overmann,
sir,” a frightened rating stammered, face white with fear. He was short, wiry, and middle-aged with narrow-set eyes and a sharp-looking chin covered by uneven gray stubble. His hands bore the blue stains of a sometime kupp'gh cleaner.

Brim pushed his way past and into an antechamber, which ended in a
second
hatch. This one looked even more secure than its outside counterpart. Keeping his nerve under control, he slammed the first hatch shut and whirled on the rating with the best imitation of haughty anger he could summon. “You will also open
this immediately,”
he demanded through tight lips.

“Oh, ah, aye,
Overmann,”
the cowed guard said, taking a key from around his neck and unlocking the inner hatch. “And will you need assistance, sir?” he asked.

“You
dare
question my ability?” Brim hissed through his teeth.

The rating shrank back away from the hatch. “S-Sorry, sir,” he whispered. “Don't have me whipped,
Overmann.
I mean no harm askin' ye.”

Brim looked down his nose at the wretched rating, hating himself and what he had to do. He knew what it was like to be on the receiving end. “Perhaps I may overlook the lapse this time,” he said. “But I shall brook no interruption of my work. Do you understand? No interruption.”

“I
understand,
sir,” the rating said, taking his seat with a wan face. “No interruptions. I'll make sure.”

“See that you do,” Brim growled, then stepped into the bright, humming module and closed the door after himself. He had just dogged it down tight from the inside when he heard alarms go off everywhere. He glanced at his watch — time was up by almost ten cycles.

“Warning!” the speakers brayed. “Warning. An Imperial murderer is loose within the ship. He is armed and dangerous. Shoot on sight and shoot to kill. Repeat: shoot on sight and shoot to kill.”

Brim shrugged as he threw the tabulator in a corner. It probably wouldn't fool anyone else now.

One eye out for his lone companion in the module, Brim jog-trotted from cabin to compartment, desperately seeking entrance to the generator chamber. No time to waste now. He soon found himself deep within the module, but unable to exit from the deck on which he entered — and from the intensity of sound and vibration corning from below, he knew the mechanism he sought was located somewhere deeper in the hull. Frowning, he had just returned to the K tube from another fruitless search of a parts storeroom when a dazzling explosion seared the wall beside his head and nearly knocked him from his feet. He whirled around, firing the pike by instinct as a second explosion ruptured the space he had occupied only clicks before. The shadow of a black-suited Controller disappeared inside a nearby hatchway only clicks before Brim’s bucking weapon blasted the hatch panel from its hinges in a wild tattoo of destruction. He rushed for the blackened, dented opening and flattened himself outside.

Panting, he readied the pike again, then blew out a whole section of overhead lights. This resulted in almost total darkness — except the bright glow streaming from the hatchway into which this new adversary had disappeared. He dropped to a crouch, the pike ready at his hip. Gathering himself, he flexed his shoulders, took a last deep breath, and leaped through the doorway, spraying the room with deadly bursts of energy and radiation. As his feet hit the floor, a figure armed with what must have been a RocketDart pistol ran screaming toward him, launching a flurry of deadly sparkling missiles. Two hit with a searing — unbelievable — agony in his left shoulder. He heard himself scream, sank to his knees, and fired the heavy weapon point-blank into the man's stomach.

With a horrible scream of anguish, the Controller doubled over, sprayed a stinking froth of blood and vomit over Brim's blouse, then collapsed nearby in a heap on the floor, his still-smoking torso blown nearly in half.

Gritting his teeth from the burning pain in his shoulder, Brim felt blood running inside his tunic and realized he had no more than a few cycles to disarm the ship's generator before he lost consciousness. He struggled awkwardly to his feet, stuffed the dart pistol in his belt, and dragged the blast pike by its scorched barrel to a large open hatch set in the deck. Light and noise streaming through from below assured him he had finally reached the generator chamber. And not a moment too soon. Far down the K tube, he could already hear thumps and clangs as the ship's crew — almost certainly alerted by the sight of their dead comrade in the crew section — attempted to force the inner hatch.

Balancing himself precariously on the narrow rungs, he found the howling bass of the machinery nearly as painful to his unprotected ears as the throbbing darts in his charred shoulder. Somehow, he managed to descend with his good hand while he doggedly clutched the heavy pike in his left, but at the bottom he couldn't remember navigating the last two rungs at all.

Mounted overhead directly to the underside of the K tube, the generator itself looked much like the rest of the antigravity generators he had seen. It was big, taking up the major volume of the round-bottomed chamber; the deck on which he presently stood was no more than a small platform mounted over the stout longerons and curved hullmetal plates that formed the underside of the module itself. Brim estimated the machinery stretched nearly twenty irals in length from its forward cooling vanes to the gleaming, pressure-regulating sphere, where it connected to the ship's primary power supply by means of two finned wave guides arching down from the flat ceiling, then up and around to a radiation-blackened collar.

Thrusting aside the torment in his shoulder, Brim considered his options. There were only two. He could blast the regulator globe; either of the weapons he carried could do that easily. Or he could shoot out the machine's all-important phase latch —
if
he could find it. The second choice was much more attractive from a personal standpoint: rupturing the regulator globe would release all the generator's output directly into the chamber. The burst of raw energy would last only a gigaclick at most before logic fuses sensed the runaway flow and choked it off at the source. But that was ample time to fry him (and any other organic compounds in the generator chamber) to fused carbon atoms. Grimly, he studied the big machine. Familiar as it looked overall, individual parts made little sense by themselves. He shook his head with frustration as he eyed the pulsing regulator. He grimaced. Death held no particular terror for him, especially after what he'd already been through. But he hated to give in. He concentrated again, trying desperately to discover some thread of functionality amid the complex network of conduits, insulators, logics, and odd-shaped housings. Then, almost by accident, his eye was caught by a big synchronous compensator, calibrated in the League's crazy ROGEN scale. No wonder he hadn’t found it the first time! Directly below was its logic shunt; to the right of that, a beam multiplier, no doubt about it! And a Fort'lier tube — they'd call it a “multigrid-A” here. He was getting close now. A good thing, too: The pain in his shoulder was almost stopped, but he had become very drowsy now — and dizzy. He steadied himself with the hot barrel of the blast pike, forcing his eyes to focus. A distant clanging and hammering commenced on the hatch above him. Not much time left now. He compelled his tired mind to function. The Fort'lier tube. It controlled a radiation modulator somewhere. Therefore...

Things had become
terribly
foggy. He traced a thick wave guide from the oblong device through … Yes.
That
was the modulator, and beside it the phase latch he was looking for. He could tell by the big rectifier mounted on its side. All so easy once he knew where to look!

He sniffed the air anxiously, looked up. The hatch was glowing cherry red. Bastards were burning through. Desperately, he raised his pike toward the generator — Universe, how he was shaking. The hammering commenced again. He blurred, squeezed his eyes clear. The latch was in his sights. He fired .. and missed.

With a sharp ripping noise, a bolt of energy cut through the hatch and sent sparks all over a nearby bulkhead. Gritting his teeth, Brim wrestled the weapon to his shoulder again, aimed. This was his last chance. If he missed, he'd go for the regulator and a quick, painless death. He willed himself to steady the sights, counted backward. Three... two … one. Then he fired. This time, he was rewarded with a satisfying flash of light as the phase latch shattered in a wobbling ball of violet radiance. Immediately, the noise of the generator began to fade with a great, almost-human sigh.

Presently, his eyes began to fog over again. By now, Brim had no strength to counter it. He felt himself falling. The last thing he heard was the hatch grating open on its ruined hinges … Guttural shouts he no longer understood. Then he heard nothing.

* * * *

He noticed the glare forcing itself through his closed eyelids at about the same time his cheek told him he was lying face-down on something cold and very hard. Groggily, he caught himself before he opened his eyes, voices on every side, all speaking Vertrucht. Where was he? So hard to remember.... But with all the Vertrucht being spoken, it couldn't be very healthy for him, wherever it was.

“Try it again,” a gruff voice commanded, clearly under some sort of strain.

“I already did,” a nasal voice answered. “And I'm telling you, the whole damned thing's dead. What's the big rush anyway? They've already sent a ship out to help.”

“You know the
Prefect
as well as I do,” the gruff voice said. “And he's not going to be happy taking anybody's help. So
try
it.”

“Yes, sir. Shunt's in place. Inverters on. Grav housing closed.”

Other voices stopped, listening.

“Hit it!” the gruff voice commanded. “Now.”

Silence. Brim's shoulder throbbed painfully. He was cold, shivered in spite of himself.

“That's all?”

“That's all,” the nasal voice confirmed. “Bastard really cocked up the phase latch, didn't he?”

The gruff voice swore an unintelligible oath. “Whole damned generator's dead as an xchort, then,” it said.

The generator! It all came back to Brim in a rush. But where had they taken him? Was he still in the chamber? Somehow he didn't think so. This sounded more like the bridge.

“How long before you can get us going again?” a new, deeper voice demanded.

“None will say as yet,
Placeman,”
the gruff voice answered. “When
that
one on the deck over there murdered
Overmann
Zotreb, he did more damage then he knew.”

“Well?”

“Zotreb's assistants are a good deal slower, it seems.”

“Curse all of them — especially
him,”
the deep voice growled. Brim's side exploded with a blow that knocked the wind from his lungs and opened both eyes wide with pain. It took only a moment to determine he was indeed on the corvette's bridge.

“Look out! He's awake,” someone yelled. This was followed by a second vicious kick. Brim shut his eyes and clenched his teeth, waiting for the next one.

“Placeman
Zimmermann
!”
another voice squealed. “Would you kill him before we search his mind?”

“Putrid spawn of Greyffin's scum!” the deep voice growled. “You can be sure I
shall
kill him — but not before we extract certain information, fool.